A team of aid experts from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the UN will have full access to parts of cyclone-devastated Myanmar, ASEAN’s secretary general said Thursday.

“Now we have 250-plus of our, what we call our post-Nargis assessment teams, in the Delta, in the Yangon division, in the south and they will be doing the full assessment and they will have full access to the affected region,” Surin Pitsuwan told reporters in Singapore.

“I think if we look at that, it’s already a great achievement and we will try to maintain that momentum”, he said.

Cyclone Nargis pounded the southwest Irrawaddy Delta and the main city of Yangon on May 2-3 leaving more than 133,000 people dead or missing.

ASEAN said one week ago that the Emergency Rapid Assessment Team had begun to deploy in the delta region to start a long-awaited examination of the needs of millions of people affected by the storm.

It said then that its advance teams, ferried by UN World Food Programme helicopter, would compile a first-hand “progress report” for an ASEAN Roundtable meeting in Yangon on June 24.

Surin said there were no doubts that the team would be able to do its job adequately and with credibility, “coming up with a report that would be taken up by all parties in order to be the basis of rehabilitation and reconstruction later on.”

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