Myanmar accepts ASEAN aid, announces 3 days of mourning

Meanwhile, the ruling junta has announced a three-day mourning period for victims of the cyclone beginning Tuesday morning, The Associated Press reported Monday.

State television announced that the national flag would be flown at half-mast, AP said.

ASEAN and the U.N. jointly announced an ASEAN-UN International Pledging Conference to seek some of the needed funding, to be held this Sunday in Yangon.

"The Conference will focus on the needs of those affected by the cyclone, and seek international support and financial assistance for the international humanitarian response to meet the most urgent challenges, as well as longer term recovery efforts," said their announcement.

British Secretary of State for International Development Douglas Alexander welcomed ASEAN's initiative but add that his government is "continuing to press the Burmese government to accept direct assistance in the affected areas from the UK and other major donors."

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will arrive in Yangon on Thursday and stay until Friday night, when he will fly to Bangkok. He will return to Yangon on Sunday to co-chair the pledging conference, U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas said in New York. He will tour the battered delta during his visit, but it is not yet known which officials he will meet.

Earlier, junta leader Senior Gen. Than Shwe refused to take telephone calls from Ban and had not responded to letters from him, Montas said.

John Holmes, the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, flew Monday by helicopter to the delta before returning to Myanmar's largest city, Yangon, to meet with international aid agencies, said a U.N. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media.

But the United Nations said the rest of its foreign staff were still barred from the delta and it described conditions there as "terrible," with hundreds of thousands of cyclone victims suffering from hunger, disease
and lack of shelter.

Myanmar has agreed to let its South Asian neighbors send medical personnel and an assessment team to the cyclone-ravaged country, more than two weeks after a storm that killed tens of thousands of people.

Monday's decision came after an emergency meeting in Singapore of the 10 countries that make up ASEAN -- the Association of Southeast Asian Nations -- Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda said. var CNN_ArticleChanger = new CNN_imageChanger('cnnImgChngr','/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/05/19/myanmar.aid/imgChng/p1-0.init.exclude.html',2,1);//CNN.imageChanger.load('cnnImgChngr','imgChng/p1-0.exclude.html');

The military junta that rules Myanmar -- formerly known as Burma -- has been strongly criticized by the United Nations and United States, among others, for its reluctance to let foreign aid workers into the country.

People in the worst-affected areas say they have received no help at all from their government, a CNN correspondent in the country has discovered.

"I have been trying to contact our government representative for two weeks," the village chief in Don Le said. "But so far I have received no reply." A quarter of the village's population was killed by the cyclone.