United Nations Radio

After many days of evading direct contacts with the UN, Myanmar leader Senior General Than Shwe welcomed Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to the capital Nay Pyi Taw.

A breakthrough was announced by the Secretary-General after the two met on Friday. UN Radio correspondent Maoqi Li is traveling with the Secretary General on this ground-breaking trip.

Emerging from a two-hour-and-ten minute talk with Myanmar leader General Than Shwe, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the press that the senior leader had agreed to allow all the necessary international aid workers into the country and to the cyclone hardest-hit Ayeyarwady Delta where it used to be a forbidden territory for foreign aid workers.

"He has agreed to allow all the aid workers, whoever, regardless of nationalities. He has taken quite a flexible position on this matter...

I urged him that it would be crucially important for him to allow aid workers as swiftly as possible and all this aid relief items also be delivered to the needy people as quickly as possible."

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon landed in Nay Pyi Taw after he was transported from Yangon on a government plane. It was Secretary General's first-ever meeting with Senior General Than Shwe, who in the past three weeks has been unwilling to have direct communications after the cyclone disaster took thousands of lives in Myanmar's Delta region even though the Secretary-General had made several insistent attempts to get hold of him.

The Secretary-General concluded his two-day visit to Myanmar when he returns to Bangkok on Friday. During his stay in Myanmar, he took half a day to inspect the cyclone hit disaster areas in the Delta and took time to visit two camps where hundreds of uprooted homeless families are sheltered.

Maoqi Li, for UN Radio from Yangon, Myanmar.

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