Agencies
 
YANGON, May 6: Myanmar's military junta believes at least 13,000 people may have died in a cyclone that ripped through the Irrawaddy delta, triggering a massive international aid response for the pariah southeast Asian nation.

"The basic message was that they believe the provisional death toll was about 10,000 with 3,000 missing," a Yangon-based diplomat said in Bangkok, summarising a briefing from foreign minister Nyan Win. "It's a very serious toll."

The scale of the disaster from Saturday's devastating cyclone drew a rare acceptance of outside help from the diplomatically isolated generals, who spurned such approaches in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The secretive military, which has ruled the former Burma for 46 years, has moved even further into the shadows in the last six months due to the widespread outrage at its bloody crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in September. The official toll on state media stands at 3,934 dead and 2,879 missing, although those figures only cover two of the five declared disaster zones, where UN officials say hundreds of thousands are without shelter or drinking water.

The casualty count has been rising quickly as authorities reach hard-hit islands and villages in the Irrawaddy delta, the former "rice bowl of Asia" which bore the brunt of Cyclone Nargis's 190 km per hour winds.

After getting a "careful green light" from the government, the UN said it was pulling out all the stops to send in emergency aid such as food, clean water, blankets and plastic sheeting. "The UN will begin preparing assistance now to be delivered and transported to Myanmar as quickly as possible," World Food Programme (WFP) spokesman Paul Risley said.

The US, which has imposed sanctions on the junta, said it had provided funds through the WFP and other aid groups. "It doesn't necessarily go directly to the government," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said. "But we're in the process of assessing what more we can do."

Thailand responded to the disaster, sending a C-130 transport plane loaded with food and medicine to Yangon after the airport reopened on Monday, foreign minister Noppadon Pattama said. The UN office in Yangon said there was an urgent need for plastic sheets, water purification tablets, cooking equipment, mosquito nets, health kits and food. It said the situation outside Yangon was "critical, with shelter and safe water being the principal immediate needs".

The junta leaders, bunkered in their remote new capital of Naypyidaw, 400 km north of Yangon, said they would go ahead with a May 10 referendum on a new army-drafted constitution that critics say will entrench the military.

The last major storm to ravage Asia was Cyclone Sidr which killed 3,300 people in Bangladesh last November.

In the former capital Yangon, food and fuel prices soared as aid agencies scrambled to deliver emergency supplies and assess the damage in the five declared disaster zones.