There are glimmers of hope in disaster-stricken Burma, Britain’s Asia minister said from the country today.

Lord Malloch-Brown said mounting international pressure on the military government to open up the country to foreign aid workers had resulted in a potential UN and Asian-led relief operation.

“I think we’re potentially at a turning point, but like all turning points in Burma, the corner will have a few S bends in it,” he said from the capital Rangoon.

“I’m confident we’ve got movement here in the sense we’ve diplomatically found an answer to the stand-off.”

The UN estimates that so far help has reached less than 25 per cent of the 2.5 million people left destitute by the cyclone which ripped through the country 15 days ago, Lord Malloch-Brown said.

“It’s incredibly late in the day. I’d have liked to be where we are today two weeks ago,” he said. “You’ve got a Burmese government that’s deeply suspicious, engrained over years, of outsiders.”

Lord Malloch-Brown said initial efforts began with Asian nations Burma considers friendly sending aid teams into the country, and an ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) assessment team already on the ground.

That team is due to report to a meeting of foreign ministers from ASEAN, of which Burma is a member, in Singapore tomorrow.

UN chief humanitarian officer John Holmes was due in Rangoon today to meet junta officials. Their presence indicates the possibility of an Asian-UN led operation into which other countries can channel their efforts.

“We can be relieved today, two weeks after the cyclone, that there’s finally emerging a model of cooperation that could work,” Lord Malloch-Brown said.

But he warned that aid was still not reaching the most in need. “Not enough aid is getting in and not enough aid workers are able to get out in the region, particularly international workers with long experience of disaster relief. That’s a real problem.”

His visit to the country came as Prime Minister Gordon Brown accused Burma’s ruling junta of “inhuman” treatment of the cyclone’s survivors.

Mr Brown said the natural disaster, which struck the country on May 2, was becoming a “man-made catastrophe” because of the government’s failings.

Burmese authorities put the death toll from the cyclone at 78,000 with a further 56,000 people missing.

Millions of survivors remain in dire need of food, water and shelter. Save the Children says up to 2,000 children are unable to find their parents and although other aid agencies said assistance was getting to hundreds of thousands of victims, they have warned that the relief effort has to be scaled up rapidly to avoid many more deaths from disease and starvation.

Lord Malloch-Brown saw two flights of UK aid being unloaded and visited an area affected by the cyclone on the outskirts of Rangoon.

“(The) encouraging news is that organisations like Save the Children have been exploiting their long presence in the country and have been doing much more than noticed. Amongst all the bad news there are these glimmers of hope,” he said.

The Prime Minister said yesterday that forced air-drops of aid were being considered but noted that charities have warned they could be “counter-productive”.

“We rule nothing out and the reason we rule nothing out is that we want to get the aid directly to the people,” he told the BBC’s World Service.

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