NOTHING summed up the Burmese military dictatorship’s neglect of its people as hauntingly as the scenes of desperation last week in Bogale, a southern town in the Irrawaddy delta.

Two weeks after Cyclone Nargis devastated much of the region, killing tens of thousands, people in dire need of food, drinking water and medicine were huddled in schools, temples and makeshift shelters barely clinging to survival amid heavy tropical downpours.

Bodies rotted in the rice fields, ignored and unclaimed. After weeks in which it had dismissed the estimates of the aid agencies, the government revised its toll of the dead and missing on Friday night to more than 133,000, in line with the agencies’ estimates. But experts warn that it has not reached its peak and could go as high as 200,000.

As many as 2.5m famine and disease-threatened people are at risk, their crops and livestock ruined. According to the latest United Nations figures, more than 1m victims have received no humanitarian assistance.

When a solitary truck arrived from the former capital of Rangoon on Thursday carrying food supplies organised by The Sunday Times, hundreds of people crowded around, some with hands outstretched pleading for help, some hammering with their fists on the sides driven nearly mad by hunger and thirst.

The military regime that has ruled Burma for more than four decades is deeply suspicious of western interference. It has cordoned off the delta and rejected requests from foreign and multi-national aid teams to deliver relief supplies. It has ignored fierce condemnation of its neglect by the UN and Britain, and by America and France, which both have naval ships offshore ready to deliver aid.

As the situation continued to deteriorate last week the regime was being put to shame by its own people desperate to help: students, taxi drivers, factory workers, some of whom had also lost their homes, were making the arduous road journey into the delta, donating food, clothes and water to the cyclone victims.

“They are true humanitarian heroes,” said Bridget Gardner of the International Red Cross.

In an attempt to test the severity of the blockade, this newspaper dispatched a lorry of food-stuffs from Rangoon to Bogale. It was allowed to pass through roadblocks but the western journalist accompanying it - in other words, me - was not.

It fell to three brave Burmese citizens to distribute the food. They took photographs of the appalling scenes that they witnessed in Bogale: wretched survivors with broken limbs that had yet to be treated by doctors; babies sleeping on banana leaves in the mud.

“As we drove out of the villages, people were crying, weeping, ‘Please, please, give us rice, anything’,” said one of the team members who, for his own safety, can be identified only as Win. During their two-day journey in and out of the devastated region, several government helicopters passed overhead. None landed to help people marooned without food.

“My heart is crying,” said Chi, another team member. “The Myanmar [Burma] government has given nothing. We saw no government aid.”

The aid distributors recruited by The Sunday Times were themselves victims of the cyclone. Half of Win’s home had been destroyed and when we met he was sleeping with his family in Rangoon under a tarpaulin.

Chi had an infected gash in his shoulder caused by a branch that had fallen on him during the cyclone. With them was Tun, a jovial retired army major whose presence on the expedition was considered essential for clearing a path through military roadblocks.

The truck seemed to be held together by bits of wire and had to halt when the radiator boiled over. The broken tarmac flashed by through great holes in the floor but it had ample space for our cargo of rice and chicken noodle soup. The road soon left the city and passed across wide rice paddies, still flooded, with broken homes and villages and flattened palm trees on either side. We were waved through two checkpoints and within three hours were rattling towards the large town of Kun-yangon. Here, too, we were allowed to pass. Suddenly, it seemed, we were within striking distance of Bogale.

A man in an army uniform on a motorcycle pulled us over. Tun’s smile faded. The soldier inspected my passport. I was told to stay in the van while the others were questioned. They were told that “the foreigner” had to go back to Rangoon.

I suggested hiding with the rice under the tarpaulin. “No, very, very dangerous,” said Win. “They shoot you, maybe.”

It was decided that Win and Chi would go on with the truck to Bogale. Win took my camera and tape recorder, which he rammed into his trousers.

The major and I went back to Rangoon. When we were reunited on Friday, my friends looked distraught. “Bogale is totally broken, broken, broken,” Win said. “Every home is broken. There are 130,000 dead. The villages have no electricity, no lights, no lunch, no dinner, no hope. The people are broken.”

He explained how they had parked the van in the centre of town, where they divided up the food into small bags and handed it out. It was obviously just a drop in the ocean and tears appeared in Win’s eyes as he recalled the hundreds who came asking for food, the scale of the suffering. “Bogale is just one place,” he said. “But there are people in need everywhere.” Today Sir John Holmes, the UN’s chief humanitarian officer, was due to fly into Burma on a mission to push the generals to lift their restrictions. He will hear grim news: Save the Children estimates that more than a third of children under five in the affected areas are already chronically malnourished. Weakened and vulnerable, many are likely to die within two or three weeks unless they receive food.

Unicef says it fears a dysentery epidemic as people drink water directly from rivers polluted by the bodies of people and livestock. “The water in the whole area is contaminated,” said one official.

On past performance, the generals will be impervious to Holmes’s pressure. It knows that China, its close ally, will block any moves in the UN security council to authorise relief in the face of their objections.

Yesterday Gordon Brown called the regime “unnatural”, accusing it of “inhuman action”. France is leading calls to invoke a UN clause to force aid through to the victims even if the generals refuse to open the door.

Jean-Maurice Ripert, the French ambassador, warned at a meeting of the security council that the tragedy was turning “slowly from a situation of not helping people in danger to a real risk of crimes against humanity”.

Some help was trickling through. By Friday, Unicef had sent 100,000 packs of oral rehydration salts, many more essential drugs, tarpaulins and bleaching powder to purify water in wells. Several dozen doctors from neighbouring countries have also finally been admitted. But international aid experts say a much greater and faster relief effort is essential to save lives, particularly with the first cases of cholera being reported.

To help the 300,000 most in need would involve 10 times the current relief effort, said one foreign aid official: “Without that extra help, tens of thousands will die in the next few weeks. The death toll may double.”

Having stopped experienced foreign aid workers from getting involved, the junta has delegated responsibility for distributing foreign aid to business tycoons such as Te Zay, an arms dealer who heads the local airline, and Steve Law, son of a drugs baron and owner of a construction company. Some were branding packets of foreign aid with their own corporate logos and filming themselves handing them out. Other sacks of food intended for the desperate south were turning up for sale in the markets of Rangoon.

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