Baffling. Absolutely baffling. The military government of Myanmar turned back an aid flight from, of all places, Qatar.

Myanmar’s junta turned back a disaster rescue team that arrived in Yangon from Qatar because the flight only had permission to deliver aid supplies, an official paper said on Friday.

“Myanmar is not in a position to receive rescue and information teams from foreign countries at the moment,” the government-run Myanma Ahlin newspaper said in a report on the aid operation slowly building up for survivors Cyclone Nargis.

“But at present Myanmar is giving priority to receiving relief aid and distributing them to the storm hit regions with its own resources,” it said.

The Qatar plane was one of 12 international relief flights that landed in the former capital on Thursday, the paper said.

I wasn’t aware that Qatari rescue teams represented a threat to the security of Myanmar. Wow. Just wow.

But, in other news, the story also reports that USS Essex is on the move with her group.

The Pentagon has ordered four U.S. Navy ships now in Thailand on exercises to start steaming towards the former Burma’s cyclone-striken Irrawaddy delta in the hope that the green light will eventually come.

It appears as though America, and the rest of the world, are wasting their time, though.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 and is filed under Maritime Strategy News, Myanmar, Navy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.