The death toll from Myanmar’s devastating earthquake climbed to 3,354, with 4,850 injured and 220 missing, regime media reported on Saturday, as the visiting U.N. aid chief praised humanitarian and community groups for leading the aid response.
Regime leader Min Aung Hlaing was back in the capital Naypyidaw after a rare foreign trip to attend a summit in Bangkok of South and Southeast Asian nations, where he also met separately with the leaders of Thailand, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and India.
Min Aung Hlaing reaffirmed to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi the regime’s plans to hold “free and fair” elections by January, regime media reported.
Modi called for a post-earthquake ceasefire in Myanmar’s civil war to be made permanent, and said the elections needed to be “inclusive and credible”, an Indian foreign affairs spokesperson said on Friday.
Critics have derided the planned election as a sham to keep the generals in power through proxies.
Since overthrowing the elected civilian government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, the regime has struggled to run Myanmar, leaving the economy and basic services, including healthcare, in tatters, a situation exacerbated by the March 28 earthquake.
The civil war that followed the 2021 coup has displaced more than three million people, with widespread food insecurity and more than a third of the population in need of humanitarian assistance, the U.N. says.
U.N. aid chief Tom Fletcher spent Friday night in Myanmar’s second-biggest city Mandalay, near the epicentre of the earthquake, posting on social media that humanitarian and community groups had led the response to the quake with “courage, skill and determination”.
“Many themselves lost everything, and yet kept heading out to support survivors,” he said.
The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Friday the regime in Naypyidaw was restricting aid supplies to quake-hit areas where communities did not back its rule.
The U.N. office said it was investigating 53 reported attacks by regime forces against opponents, including airstrikes, of which 16 were after the ceasefire was declared on Wednesday.
The regime spokesperson did not respond to calls seeking comment.
REUTERS
