Myanmar raises death toll, warns profiteers

With professional aid workers in short supply, ordinary citizens — including businessmen, housewives, monks, Christian priests and students — have rushed in to provide help.

But even Myanmar citizens are being restricted by the security forces, said Zaw Htin, a 21-year-old medical student who visited hard-hit Bogaley town on Wednesday.

“They (military) don’t want us to stay and talk to people. They want us to leave the supplies with them for distribution. But how can I treat them if I can’t talk to them? How do we administer medical care if we can’t touch them, feel their pulse or give them advice?” she said.

“It was overwhelming even for us who have seen a lot of suffering and death,” Zaw Htin said.

Britain’s prime minister said Thursday that an emergency U.N. summit to coordinate efforts to rush aid to cyclone victims in Myanmar will be held in Asia.

Gordon Brown told a news conference the summit was being organized by the U.N. and Asian countries and would be held in the region. He said the meeting represented “great progress” but gave no details of when it would take place.

Constitution controversy
Also Thursday, Myanmar state radio said the draft constitution was approved by 92.4 percent of the 22 million eligible voters. It put voter turnout Saturday at more than 99 percent of eligible voters in areas that went to the polls.

Human rights organizations and dissident groups bitterly accused the junta of neglecting disaster victims in going ahead with the vote, and have criticized the proposed constitution as designed to perpetuate military rule.

Voting was postponed until May 24 in the Irrawaddy delta and Yangon areas, which were worst hit by Cyclone Nargis. But state radio said the results of the late balloting could not mathematically reverse the constitution’s approval.

“People are dying and they are talking about the referendum?” said Kyaw Muang, a small food store owner in Yangon. “They (the generals) don’t even care about dying people, you think they care about democracy for living people?” he said.

“I don’t care about the referendum. It doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

Human Rights Watch also slammed the timing of the constitution announcement and questioned the accuracy of the results.

David Mathieson, a spokesman in Bangkok, Thailand, said the junta hopes that by announcing the results now it would divert attention away from its handling of the disaster and its refusal to cooperate with the international community.

“It seems strategically timed because you would have thought with how busy they were in cleaning up the cyclone that they never would have had time to count this properly,” he said.

The junta says the new constitution will lead to a general election in 2010. But it guarantees 25 percent of parliamentary seats to the military and allows the president to hand over all power to the military in a state of emergency — elements critics say contradict the junta's professed commitment to democracy.

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