LONDON: A senior British minister said a breakthrough was within reach on Sunday in the stand-off between the international community and the Myanmar regime over allowing foreign aid for cyclone survivors into the country.

Lord Malloch-Brown, a UK foreign minister with responsibility for Asia, said after talks with Myanmar ministers in Yangon that there had been a turning point that would shortly enable the delivery of more aid, with Asian countries taking the lead.

The glimmer of hope two weeks after Cyclone Nargis killing an estimated 128,000 came as the UN’s head of humanitarian affairs, Sir John Holmes, arrived in Yangon last night for three-days of talks on speeding up the dismally slow aid effort hamstrung by Myanmar generals.

Holmes is due to tour the worst hit areas in the Irrawaddy delta ahead of the arrival of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Myanmar later this week to coincide with a donor pledging conference in Bangkok slated for Saturday.

Already the British-based charity Save the Children says that some children under five may have died from starvation as they await relief, and thousands more could be at risk in the coming weeks.

The latest UN assessment of the situation in the Irrawaddy delta estimates that just 20 per cent of as many as 2.5 million gravely affected by the disaster have so far been reached with aid.

The official toll of dead and missing has risen to 133,653, while the number of injured has leapt from 1,403 to 19,359. Myanmar leader, General Than Shwe, made his first visit to cyclone survivors in camps on the outskirts of Yangon.

Relief supplies are only trickling into the country. The UN World Food Programme said it had distributed enough rice, beans and high energy biscuits for 212,000 people, about a third of those thought to be in the most desperate need.

The UN and aid agencies reiterated their alarm that the amounts of aid were insufficient and too slow in arriving even as the diplomatic dance with the generals goes on and the warnings of a second man-made catastrophe grow more urgent.

Amid concern about a “second wave” of death brought about by hunger and disease, Save the Children warned that thousands of the most vulnerable children under five could starve to death in the coming weeks. It identified 30,000 malnourished youngsters in the Irrawaddy delta even before the cyclone.

“With hundreds of thousands of people still not receiving aid many of these children will not survive much longer,” said Save the Children. “Children may already be dying as a result of a lack of food.”

Myanmar charities supported by Christian Aid have already discovered children and the elderly dying in villages in the Irrawaddy delta that have received no aid, or help to provide clean water, 15 days into the tragedy.

“The Myanmar authorities are allowing our partner organisation to distribute water and water purification tablets,” said a Christian Aid worker in Yangon. “The villagers have dysentery and are dying. In one, some young children and a 70-year-old man died.”

Malloch-Brown offered some hope that help might be at hand after meeting four Burmese ministers.

The minister passed on a letter from the prime minister, Gordon Brown, who had warned that the natural disaster was in danger of becoming a man-made catastrophe because of the regime’s “inhuman” foot-dragging.

“I delivered to them a letter for the senior leader Than Shwe from Gordon Brown insisting that this was a humanitarian enterprise and that we put politics aside to help the victims of the cyclone,” said Malloch-Brown. “I think they are responding in kind to this on the terms we are offering it.”

He said he was “confident” that the Myanmarians had agreed to a diplomatic compromise that could resolve the impasse to get substantial amounts of relief into the country under the supervision of Asian countries, rather than the western countries that the regime views with suspicion.

“We found a middle ground,” he said. “Through the leadership of Asian neighbours, India and China and Asean (the Association of South-east Asian Nations) countries like Thailand and Indonesia, in partnership with the UN, there is now a leadership which the Burmese can accept and we can work through to deliver aid.”

Despite his cautious optimism, Malloch-Brown acknowledged it was coming “incredibly late in the day” and accepted that Myanmar’s suspicion would ensure that far fewer foreign aid workers would be involved than had been seen in comparable disasters in Asia.

Foreign ministers from the 10 Asean countries, including Myanmar, were due to hold an emergency meeting on Monday in Singapore to discuss their response to the disaster.

But there are already signs of things to come with 32 Thai doctors and nurses shortly to leave for the disaster zone. A 50-strong Indian medical team some already operating in the delta is in Myanmar after New Delhi dispatched six aircraft and two naval ships packed with relief within days of the disaster.—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service