BANGKOK, THAILAND — A top U.S. admiral met the senior Myanmar naval officer on an airport tarmac in Yangon on Monday, urging him to open the country to an expanded international humanitarian mission that could reach hundreds of thousands of hungry and homeless cyclone victims.
Adm. Timothy J. Keating, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, accompanied supplies of water, blankets and mosquito nets to Myanmar's main city on the first Air Force relief flight allowed to land in the country since the May 4 disaster. He said later that he had pressed the case for greater access to Vice Adm. Soe Thein, commander in chief of Myanmar's navy, in the highest-level meeting between the militaries in many years.
But Myanmar's long-ruling military government gave no indication that it was prepared to loosen restrictions on foreign aid workers. U.S. officials described the meeting as "cordial," and state-run TV Myanmar gave high prominence to coverage of the extraordinary visit. A 10-minute segment showed the two admirals and other officials examining maps of the battered Irrawaddy River delta, and smiling in front of boxes of aid prominently marked as American.
During the roughly two hours on the ground, Keating told his counterpart that the U.S. could make available 4,000 Marines, six C-130 transport planes and several helicopters to help distribute aid. The regime has said it will accept foreign supplies, but it told the visiting Americans that its own armed forces would handle almost all the distribution.
Many villages in the low-lying south were unreachable by road even before last week's storm left huge stretches of the delta under water, making any full-scale relief operation heavily dependent on airlifts. Aid workers say the regime has devoted just seven of its own helicopters to the relief operation.
TV Myanmar also showed the nation's soldiers carrying temporary housing materials and bags of food aid off planes from India and Malaysia, as well as officers dropping bottles of water out of light aircraft. It showed boxes of aid from China, and neat rows of blue tents on dry ground.
There were no pictures of the thousands of Cyclone Nargis survivors reported by aid agencies to be on the move in search of shelter, nor of decomposing bodies widely spotted floating in flooded estuaries.
