It will be years before the Irrawaddy delta recovers from Cyclone Nargis - but the visitor to the Sinkan refugee camp could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about. Its 39 blue tents are neat and evenly spaced and their occupants look clean and contented. A team of white-uniformed doctors and nurses tends to their medical needs, white Toyota Land Cruisers of the United Nations stand in attendance and a group of Japanese diplomats inspects the camp, snapping photographs as they go.

This is the version of Cyclone Nargis that the Burmese Government presents to the world - a tragic misfortune, now well on the way to being overcome with discipline, good organisation and a bit of international help. It is a grotesque lie, which is exposed by continuing just ten minutes down the road. There, on the riverbank of the town of Kyauktan, are the true victims - struck down first by the cyclone and then by the neglect and stubbornness of their own Government.

Strung out along the riverbank are hundreds of people in living conditions scarcely superior to those of animals. Monsoon rain gushes through the walls and roofs of their hastily repaired huts and churns the paths between them into grey mud. The rain is their drinking water - without it, they have only the murky contents of a riverside pond. A week ago they sheltered in the local monastery until they were forced out by the authorities. In the 24 days since the cyclone struck, these people have only twice been given anything by their Government - a bag of ten potatoes for each family and a few cups of rice.

The 180 inhabitants of the Sinkan camp get the medical expertise, the international aid and the attention of their Government. The 1,200 dwellers on the riverside eat only if the trucks of private aid provided by monasteries, commercial companies and generous individuals make it down this far from Rangoon.

“The people from the foreign embassies go to see the people in the blue tents, who are the families of people in the Government,” Sayadaw Otamma, a monk at the Kanna Pariyati Monastery, says. “The officials there tell them how to answer the questions: ‘We like it here. We have enough to eat.' The Government does not bring the foreigners here because they know that if they spoke to us we would tell them the truth.” Despite the damage it suffered from winds and rising water, Kyauktan is just outside the boundaries of the delta; perhaps because of its marginal position, it has been even more neglected than central towns such as Labutta and Bogalay. Fewer people were drowned or crushed by falling trees here, and there are fewer corpses floating down the river, but the desperation is nonetheless coupled with a keen anger at the Government's indifference.

The junta announced yesterday the results of its constitutional referendum in the areas ravaged by the cyclone - a triumphant 92.48 per cent in favour, on a 98 per cent turnout. The result is all the more impressive given that many tens of thousands of the registered electorate are dead.

“If you give aid, make sure it is put into the hands of the people themselves, never through the Government,” another monk at the monastery says. “They are cheats - they will keep it for themselves.” The monks provide the only institutional help available to the refugees and, until last week, hundreds of them sheltered in the monastery's prayer hall.

Then local government officials came and ordered them to leave the next day. “The people cried because our homes are broken,” Thein Thein Oo, a grandmother, says. “But we do not dare argue.” Similar evictions have taken place across the disaster zone. The reasoning is hard to understand but it seems to be a kind of embarrassment, coupled with the sense that a problem displaced is a problem solved. Except in the Sintan camp, the Government is virtually invisible on the road to Kyauktan; the only representatives I saw all afternoon were a handful of soldiers asleep in the back of their truck.

Less than 20 miles away, in a five-star hotel in Rangoon, Cabinet ministers from around the world were promised by the Burmese junta last weekend that foreign aid workers would be allowed into Burma to help the people of the Irrawaddy delta. The question is which victims they be invited to provide for: the muddy wretches of Kyauktan or the model refugees of the Sinkan camp.

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