ASEAN Ministers Discuss Burma Crisis

CHAN:
ASEAN foreign ministers are meeting this week to discuss Burma's humanitarian crisis. Cyclone Nargis left thousands dead and millions in need of urgent aid.

STORY:
On May 13th Foreign Ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) said they would send an emergency rapid-assessment team to Burma, but critics say the group is moving too slowly. Cyclone Nargis struck the country on May 2nd, nearly three weeks ago.

ASEAN has a long-standing policy of not interfering with the internal affairs of member states. The Burma junta has refused to open its doors to a large-scale aid operation two weeks after Cyclone Nargis hit, killing almost 80,000 people and about 56,000 still missing.

So far, two ASEAN member countries have agreed to give assistance. They are ready to give food, medicine and rescue teams, but a coordinated regional response has not happened.

To demonstrate they are handling the crisis properly, the Burmese junta took diplomats on a tour of the Burma's Irrawaddy delta last Saturday, where 2.5 million people are now struggling to survive in an area of inundated swamp the size of Austria.

Thousands of refugees are crammed into monasteries and schools. Volunteers are giving them food and water. Private donors have sent in clothes, biscuits, dried noodles and rice.

In the last 50 years, only two Asian cyclones have exceeded Nargis in terms of human cost -- a 1970 storm that killed 500,000 people in neighboring Bangladesh, and another that killed 143,000 in 1991, also in Bangladesh.

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