BANGKOK — The death toll in Myanmar's cyclone disaster could be as high as 216,000 or more, making it as deadly as the tsunamis that devastated much of Asia in 2004, according to new unofficial estimates from United Nations sources.
The latest estimates, dramatically higher than the official toll of about 28,000, suggest that Myanmar's military regime has been deliberately underestimating the number of victims of the catastrophe that hit the country a week ago.
Relief operations suffered a setback yesterday when a boat sank after hitting a submerged tree trunk as it carried a Red Cross shipment of rice and water for more than 1,000 people. It was the first Red Cross shipment to the Irrawaddy River delta, where the cyclone struck hardest. The crew was rescued, but the supplies were lost.
Relief workers warned that 1.5 million homeless survivors are at risk of dying if assistance is not urgently provided. But relief shipments are still relatively slow because of restrictions imposed by the military regime. At the same time, government resources were diverted away from relief efforts on Saturday to carry out a referendum to legitimize the new pro-junta constitution.
Homeless villagers stay inside a temporary shelter on the outskirts of Bogalay in southern Myanmar on Sunday. (AP)
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At a meeting in Rangoon yesterday, a Myanmar cabinet minister told relief agencies that foreign aid workers are prohibited from entering the disaster zone and must give all of their supplies to the government for distribution.
A few relief agencies have managed to evade those rules, but the minister's statement was a sign that the military regime is determined to maintain a tight grip on the entire relief operation, even though its restrictions have hampered the aid distribution.
The regime increased the official death toll to 28,458 yesterday, a rise of about 5,000 from the number it had used for most of last week. But it also announced a corresponding decrease in the number of missing people, leaving the total official number of dead and missing almost unchanged at about 62,000.
The United Nations reached a far higher estimate of 216,000 dead or missing.
"That number was collated very carefully by the UN, based on independent estimates," said Andrew Kirkwood, a Canadian aid worker who heads the Myanmar operations of Save the Children.
Other sources confirmed that the likely number of dead and homeless in Myanmar has exceeded the global toll from the tsunamis that devastated several Asian countries in 2004.
The military junta has been minimizing the death toll by denying that any survivors have died since the start of the relief operation, sources say. At the meeting yesterday, for example, the Myanmar cabinet minister insisted that not a single person has died of thirst, hunger or disease in the aftermath of the cyclone. Nobody believed the statement, according to a relief worker who attended the meeting.
The British aid group Oxfam warned that 1.5 million cyclone survivors are in danger of dying from a "massive public-health catastrophe" because of the high risk of disease if they don't get clean water, sanitation and other urgent assistance.
Flooded areas in the disaster zone are contaminated with human and animal waste, making them "an effective breeding ground" for diseases such as cholera and typhoid, Oxfam said yesterday.
"Aid into Myanmar needs to be massively scaled up and it needs to happen now," said Sarah Ireland, regional director for Oxfam. "The only way this can happen is if Myanmar lifts visa restrictions and allows international agencies access to the most vulnerable people."
Myanmar's visa restrictions have hobbled the relief effort for the past week. Even an agency such as World Vision - one of just three agencies that the regime specifically invited to help Myanmar after the cyclone - has had trouble getting visas for its foreign experts. So far, only two of its 20 visa requests have been granted.
The emergency airlift has been equally hobbled. At this point in the post-tsunamis relief operation, the hard-hit region of Aceh was receiving one aid flight every hour. In Myanmar, in sharp contrast, only three or four flights a day have been permitted.
In some of the temporary shelters for cyclone survivors, the conditions are "desperate" and "appalling," according to a Unicef report.
"In one camp there are only five latrines for 3,500 people," the agency said. "People in this area are suffering a severe shortage of food, insufficient shelters and they are drinking water from ponds contaminated with the decaying corpses of humans and animals."
Hospitals are overcrowded, receiving up to 6,000 patients a day, and thousands of children have been orphaned or separated from their parents, Unicef said.
In a township near Rangoon, more than 3,800 homeless people have taken shelter in a Buddhist monastery. The monastery is overcrowded, people are sleeping on cement floors and two children have died of pneumonia, Unicef said.
A health expert at Save the Children reported thousands of cases of diarrhea and pneumonia among the survivors in three townships near Rangoon.
"With each passing day, we come closer to a massive health disaster and a second wave of deaths that is potentially larger than the first," said Gordon Bacon, emergency co-ordinator at another aid agency, the International Rescue Committee.
Methodology
To reach its unofficial estimate of 216,000 dead in Myanmar, the United Nations added up the assessments in various regions by foreign and domestic relief agencies that had travelled to those areas.
An assessment by Unicef, for example, found that the death toll in a single township was 10 times greater than the official toll of about 1,000 dead. Some villages with 400 households had only about 20 survivors, the agency said.
Another estimate, by the United Nations Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, suggested that the death toll could be as high as 100,000 and the number of missing could be a further 220,000.
Geoffrey York
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