PUNK singers, pianists and music students are among thousands of ordinary Burmese who have put aside everyday life to make up for the shortage of foreign aid teams to help the survivors of Cyclone Nargis.

Their private initiatives stand as an unspoken rebuke to the ruling junta, which has decreed that the military is in full command of the crisis.

There is hope this weekend that more international specialists will be allowed into the country after a promise by General Than Shwe, Burma’s ruler, to Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations secretary-general. It may prove too little too late.

In the meantime it has been left to unlikely figures such as Ying Ying Who Kham, a 26-year-old punk singer, and her friends to step into the breach.

Ying Ying, who is also a doctor, joined 100 staff and students from the Gitameit music school in Rangoon on the muddy roads to the south of the devastated Irrawaddy Delta. The school, like many civilian organisations, has turned itself into an aid agency and raised £50,000 in the wake of the disaster, which killed more than 150,000 people and left more than 2m in urgent need of aid and shelter.

Ying Ying and her team went to Labutta, one of the worst hit towns, where 25,000 people are confirmed dead and 34,000 live in makeshift refugee camps.

“Our greatest fear is the spread of cholera because there are not enough resources to deal with an epidemic,” she said.

Moe Naing, head of the music school’s choir, returned from Labutta with a grim eyewitness account. It was very different from the picture presented to the UN secretary-general on a brief helicopter tour restricted to dropping in on showpiece Burmese “Potemkin Villages”. They were filled with aid and featured neat, dry tents erected to impress foreign dignitaries. Some of the tents were empty.

Nothing prepared Moe for the hellish conditions he found in Labutta. “There were just 26 doctors there for 34,000 people,” he said. None of the 500 villages around the town survived the cyclone.

Of the 8,000 inhabitants of Pyinsalu, the worst hit village, “only six people and a dog are alive”, he said. “There are a lot of dead bodies. The army has sealed off piles of corpses which are being buried in a mass grave.”

One of Moe’s friends in Labutta survived by floating ona petrol drum for 18 hours. “When the storm died down and the waters receded he saw thousands of dead bodies. One corpse was hanging from a branch by her hair,” he said.

Survivors hung on to the topmost branches or rooftops. In the darkness Myo Lin, a young father, clung to a tree with his wife and two children for eight hours. When dawn broke his wife and nine-year-old daughter had been swept away.

Half the 700 people who lived in Myo’s village have died or disappeared.

“There is only one child with us who has not lost one or both parents,” he said. “In some cases they saw their parents swept away in front of their eyes.”

The survivors collected small amounts of rice that had not been ruined by the flood waters and drank juice from coconuts floating in the water. After a few days they ran out of food. When nobody came to rescue them, they decided to seek help in a small boat.

Those who reached safety are too horrified to return. “They are afraid to go back,” said a worker for Christian Aid in Labutta. “The whole place is flattened.” The charity’s Burmese staff have given them clothes, shelter, clean water and food but they face a bleak future.

Despite such misery, the junta was still pressing ahead with a political gesture that appeared as surreal as it was cruel. Villagers struggling to rebuild their lives were forced to leave the wreckage of their homes yesterday and vote in the second round of a national referendum on Burma’s new constitution, drawn up on the orders of the generals.

There were signs of potential unrest in Rangoon, the former capital, as the official media, which had failed to warn of the cyclone’s approach, proclaimed their support for the referendum. Some 7,000 students were seen congregating on a university campus on Thursday in a rare sign of defiance reminiscent of the pro-democracy gatherings last September.

On Friday night foreign residents reported seeing six lorry-loads of armed riot police moving through the centre of Rangoon in an apparent deployment to deter further protests.

“There is a simmering atmosphere of anger and anything could happen,” said a foreign observer.

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