PATHEIN (Myanmar), May 10: Myanmar’s junta held a referendum on a new constitution on Saturday, despite warnings more people would die unless it focussed on delivering emergency aid for survivors of last week’s cyclone.

In surreal scenes, voting booths were erected close to makeshift camps for the homeless, and the country’s military regime continued to hold up tonnes of urgent relief supplies at the airport.

The junta, deeply suspicious of the outside world, has refused to let in foreign experts who specialise in getting aid to disaster victims, and said that only the government would be allowed to distribute emergency supplies.

The UN food agency said the junta had released a planeload of cyclone aid into its custody on Saturday. “The supplies are in our hands, they’ve been handed over to us,” said Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the World Food Programme (WFP), about the shipment which came on a flight from Cambodia.

He said there had been a “misunderstanding” regarding earlier comments about the status of goods on that flight as well as another from the UN refugee agency which landed in Myanmar’s main city of Yangon on Saturday.

The spokesman, based in neighbouring Thailand, said he did not know about the second plane — but that two shipments seized by the regime on Friday were still in government hands. “They were impounded and we are hopeful... they will be released,” he told AFP.

As the junta pressed ahead with a vote which critics say will only cement its hold on power, the United Nations said that a week after Cyclone Nargis hit, only one-quarter of the victims have received any help at all.

“It’s a race against time,” said Richard Horsey, a spokesman for the emergency relief arm of the United Nations. “We’re dealing with lots of bureaucracy, we’re dealing with a lot of red tape, and possibly we’re dealing with an environment where the authorities aren’t fully open to a relief effort of this kind,” he said.

“That’s very frustrating.”

The cyclone, which slammed into the rice-growing Irrawaddy Delta region in the country’s south, left 60,000 people dead or missing and as many as two million more short of food, water and supplies.—AFP