Smash hit

World leaders indicated that they would ratchet up pressure on the military leaders to accept more help.

Samak Sundaravej, Thailand’s Prime Minister, announced he would fly to Burma this weekend after British and American envoys urged him to ask the ruling generals to open the door to Western aid.

Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister, said he wanted Southeast Asian nations and China to apply more pressure on Burma.“The Burmese regime is behaving appallingly,” he said.

The Pentagon has moved many of the 23 helicopters on board the USS Essex, which has been participating in a multinational humanitarian exercise in the region, to a staging area in Thailand where they are waiting permission to enter Burma.

Three giant C-130 cargo planes and a C-17 loaded with relief supplies are also waiting there, and Washington is prepared to send four Navy ships laden with desperately needed provisions.

Washington, however, was waiting for approval to start shipping in aid on military planes. “We’re outraged by the slowness of the response of the government of Burma to welcome and accept assistance,” Zalmay Khalilzad, US Ambassador to the United Nations, said.

“We are on the cusp of a second wave of tragedy . . . It’s a race against time,” Tim Costello, chief executive of the charity World Vision, said from Rangoon. “The urgency is great. The level of suffering is enormous.” Aid was arriving “in a trickle but it needs to be a flood because lives are hanging in the balance”.

Mr Costello said helicopters were the only way to get the supplies needed to avert an epidemic of malaria, dysentery and cholera but the Burmese military did not have enough.

A week after the cyclone the first international aid flights were allowed into Burma yesterday. Four UN planes carrying 40 tons of high-energy food and other supplies landed in Rangoon, and a Red Cross plane arrived from Kuala Lumpa carrying shelter kits for 2,000 people.

But other relief flights were still awaiting permission to fly in, scores of disaster experts were struggling to get visas and two of a four-strong UN disaster assessment team were turned back at Rangoon. “This is an unacceptable situation,” Sir John Holmes, the UN Humanitarian co-ordinator, said.

The regime is letting in planes and ships from countries such as Thailand, Singapore and Bangladesh that it trusts, but remains deeply suspicious of aid from western nations.

It is allowing free access to the disaster areas to nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) already in Burma, Mr Costello said. The problem, he added, was that the NGOs already working in Burma were focused primarily on development, not disaster relief.

China, the closest thing Burma has to an ally, urged patience in dealing with the junta. “(The international community) should take Myanmar’s willingness and ability to receive (the aid) into full account, and have patient and close communication with Myanmar,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

The British Disaster Emergency Committee, representing 13 NGOs, launched an appeal for donations yesterday.

While the regime delays access to foreign aid workers, it remains preoccupied with a referendum tomorrow on a new constitution that is intended to strengthen its grip on power.

While the poll has been postponed in some of the worst-hit areas, generals have rejected calls from human rights groups and Aung San Suu Kyi’s pro-democracy party to reschedule it entirely.

Amnesty International said the determination to press ahead with the referendum was “another sign of the government’s disregard for the well-being of its own people,” while the New York-based Human Rights Watch urged the junta to focus instead on relieving the “horrendous human suffering.”

Burma has banned vehicles from crossing into border with Thailand during the referendum, according to Thai police stationed at a border post in Mae Sai, opposite the Burmese town of Tachilek.

Unicef cyclone children's appeal | Disasters Emergency Committee

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