Yangon: Myanmar's military regime on Saturday distributed international aid but plastered the boxes with names of top generals in an apparent effort to turn the relief effort for last week's devastating cyclone into a propaganda exercise.
The United Nations sent in three more planes and several trucks loaded with aid even though the junta took over its first two shipments. The government agreed to let a US cargo plane bring in supplies on Monday, but foreign disaster experts were still being barred entry.
In what a spokesman for the UN World Food Program described as "basically good news," aid flown in on Saturday on two flights was released to agencies that brought it in.
A day earlier, two planeloads of supplies flown in by WFP was impounded in what appeared to be a procedural wrangle. State-run television continuously ran images of top generals — including the junta leader, Senior General Than Shwe
— handing out boxes of aid to survivors at elaborate ceremonies.
One box bore the name of Lt. Gen. Myint Swe, a rising star in the government hierarchy, in bold letters that overshadowed a smaller label reading: "Aid from the Kingdom of Thailand."
"We have already seen regional commanders putting their names on the side of aid shipments from Asia, saying this was gift from them and then distributing it in their region," said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, which campaigns for human rights and democracy in the country.
"It is not going to areas where it is most in need," he said in London.
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