Burma's junta leader has agreed to allow access to all foreign aid workers to help with the relief operation after Cyclone Nargis, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has said.

Mr Ban made the announcement after more than two hours of talks with Senior General Than Shwe, the reclusive leader of the country’s military regime, whose refusal to let them in earlier set off international outrage.

The decision should help to ease a three-week standoff since the cyclone tore into the country on May 2-3, leaving at least 133,000 people dead or missing and around 2.5 million more in dire need of immediate aid.

“He has agreed to allow all aid workers,” Mr Ban told reporters in the remote new capital Naypyidaw following closed-door talks with the 75-year-old general who heads one of the poorest and most isolated nations in the world.

Asked if this was a breakthrough, Mr Ban said:“Yes, I think so. He has agreed to allow all aid workers regardless of nationalities."

International relief organisations have repeatedly insisted that more people will die unless they get immediate food, water, shelter and medical care.

While welcoming thousands of tonnes of donated supplies, the regime has been blocking visas for most foreign disaster management experts and insisted reports of survivors not getting enough aid were the work of “traitors”.

It was not immediately clear if the announcement meant that the regime, which has often spurned the demands of the international community, would allow aid from US naval ships nearby which it said before would be rejected.

The breakthrough came on day two of Mr Ban’s visit - the first by a UN secretary general here in more than four decades.

Mr Ban said on arriving yesterday that he was coming with a “message of hope” for the beleaguered victims of the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history, which devastated much of the southern Irrawaddy Delta. He was taken by helicopter to two locations in the southern delta - a region that has been sealed off by the junta before the new announcement on access.

France had queried whether the regime was guilty of crimes against humanity, and said it would push for a meeting of the UN Security Council if Mr Ban’s visit did not yield results and get aid to those in need.

Many villagers say they have not received any government aid, and reporters claim they have seen people jumping into dirty river waters to retrieve packages of noodles thrown there by volunteers working in remote areas.

The junta has meanwhile pressed ahead with plans to hold a second round of a referendum on Saturday in areas hit hard by the storm. The vote to approve a new constitution is the first in Burma since a general election in 1990, when opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won in a landslide but was placed under house arrest.

The first round was held one week after the storm hit. The regime said 92 per cent then voted in favour of the charter, which would ban Aung San Suu Kyi from ever holding office.

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