Myanmar seizes U.N. food deliveries Soldiers unload relief goods sent by India at a port in Yangon By Aung Hla Tun, Reuters 2 hours ago

YANGON — Myanmar's junta impounded two U.N. food aid shipments at Yangon airport on Friday, officials said, triggering more outrage at the military government's refusal to accept a major international relief operation.

"We're going to have to shut down our very small airlift operation until we get guarantees from the authorities," a furious World Food Programme regional director Tony Banbury told

CNN.

The two shipments, 38 tonnes of high-energy biscuits, were enough to feed 95,000 people -- a tiny fraction of the estimated 1.5 million destitute survivors of Cyclone Nargis, which ripped into the southeast Asian nation six days ago.

"It should be on trucks headed to the victims. You've seen the conditions they are in. That food is now sitting on a tarmac doing no good," Banbury said.

Despite the desperate needs of the survivors, the generals are adamant that only they will distribute the emergency aid that is going in after the worst cyclone to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people were killed in Bangladesh.

Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej had to cancel a planned trip to Myanmar this weekend to ask the junta to open their doors just hours after he said he would go.

"After they said today they would not welcome foreign staff, there is no point of me going there," Samak said.

In a statement in the official media after Myanmar turned back a team of Qatari rescue workers coming in on an aid flight this week, the foreign ministry said Myanmar would accept "relief in cash and kind" but not foreign aid workers.

"Myanmar is not in a position to receive rescue and information teams fromàforeign countries at the moment," the statement said. "But at present Myanmar is giving priority to receiving relief aid and distributing them to the storm-hit regions with its own resources."

The Qatar plane was one of 12 international relief flights that landed in the former capital on Thursday, it said, the first to arrive since Saturday's cyclone.

Western aid experts in Bangkok will have to wait at least four more days to get into Myanmar to help cyclone victims because the Myanmar embassy in the Thai capital took a local holiday on Friday.

"This is a four-day wait which just should not happen," said Paul Risley, spokesman for WFP in Bangkok. "This is too long to wait for people whose lives are at such a precarious balance."

CHILDREN SWEPT AWAY

The official death toll remains at nearly 23,000, with 42,119 people missing. Experts fear it could be as high as 100,000.

With saltwater ruining wells, grain stores and rice fields, the relief task ahead will be enormous. The United Nations estimates at least 1.5 million people out of a population of 53 million are "severely affected" -- needing food and shelter.

Survivors have been mostly fending for themselves in the swampy delta after Cyclone Nargis packing winds of up to 190 kph (120 mph) whipped up a massive wall of sea-water that hurtled through the low-lying Irrawaddy Delta.

Bloated corpses bobbing in canals or spreadeagled on riverbanks littered the delta. Reuters witnesses saw seven along a 5-km (3-mile) stretch from the delta town of Labutta, which is 120 km (75 miles) southwest of Myanmar's biggest city of Yangon.

Farmer Tei Lin said he had seen hundreds of bodies in the past week. "It's so difficult. Many of them are badly decomposed," he said through an interpreter. He was looking for his missing wife and three daughters.

No soldiers or government agencies have turned up to help.

"There are no NGO's here. No U.N. Only me," he said.

Children were the most vulnerable when the storm struck the delta, known as "Asia's rice bowl" in British colonial times.

"They are gone. They are gone," U Thein, who lost her 8-year-old son and 3-month-old daughter in the cyclone, whispered in her village near hard-hit Labutta town in the delta.

Besides the cawing of crows and gentle weeping of the destitute, the only sound was the hammering of nails as villagers tried to rebuild their homes in the malaria-infested swamplands.

PATRIOTIC REFERENDUM

The junta urged citizens on Friday to do their patriotic duty and vote for an army-drafted constitution in a televised message that made mo mention of the millions living in cyclone- affected areas where the balloting had been postponed.

Its opponents have suggested the reason for the delays in letting aid workers come in could be that the generals did not want an influx of foreigners before Saturday's referendum.

The vote in the devastated south would be held in two weeks. The last time Myanmar had an election, in 1990, the generals lost in a landslide to Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy.

In the storm-ravaged former capital of Yangon, a city of five million, people were stunned that the referendum was going ahead.

"It shows how unreasonable and crazy they can be. They just want to celebrate victory even though the people are suffering," one shop owner told Reuters.