Burma drops new operating guidelines

By WAI MOE
Relief Web

The United Nations agencies and international nongovernmental organizations will return to the old operating guidelines in effect before Burma issued new regulations on June 10, in agreement with the Burmese authorities, a UN agency said on Monday.

According to a report by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Burmese military junta issued new operating guidelines on June 10 for UN agencies and international nongovernmental organizations.

But following a meeting of the Tripartite Core Group (TCG) made up of the Burmese regime, Asean and the UN, it was agreed to revert to the regulations in effect before June 10.

Under the policy currently in place, all visa requests from UN agencies and NGOs will be handled by the TCG and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Requests by UN agencies and NGOs for travel authorization will again be handled by the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement.

Meanwhile, Burma’s Deputy Foreign Minister Kyaw Thu informed a meeting of government and foreign aid workers that that the official death toll now stood at 84,537 dead, with 53,836 still missing.

As of June 19, more than 230 visas had been granted to UN international staff in response to Cyclone Nargis, and more than 200 operational UN staff had traveled to the affected areas, the report noted.

The report said the Asean roundtable group was scheduled to meet on Tuesday in Rangoon to hear a Post-Nargis Joint Assessment (PONJA) team report based on data collected in 30 affected townships in the Irrawaddy delta.

More than 1,000 schools are still in need of construction or repair, although 256 primary schools in the Irrawaddy delta and 166 primary schools in Rangoon had been repaired, the UN said in its report.

The report said 310,000 plastic sheets had been distributed to some of the 2.4 million people affected by Nargis.

‘Accounting for distributions continues to be challenging with distributions difficult to track in all areas,’ the report said. ‘Obtaining pipeline data from cluster agencies and keeping it up-to-date remains critical.’

The embargo placed on local procurement of rice has required agencies to obtain rice from outside of the country and is now a priority, the report noted. Frequent population movements make the targeting of food assistance challenging, although 9,197 metric tons of food aid had been distributed to 729,000 beneficiaries.

The international sector had contributed US $30 million, including US $10 million from UNICEF; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, $3 million; and Total Oil, $2 million.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) contributed an additional $3 million to the World Food Program.

About 66 percent of the UN’s funding appeal for $201 million had been received as of June 23, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the use of US military aircraft to airlift cyclone relief supplies from Thailand to Burma ended on June 22, after 40 days of operation. A military press release said the estimated cost of the operation and the supplies was more than $13 million.