May 22 (Bloomberg) -- United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is visiting Myanmar to press the junta to speed up relief for 2.4 million people needing aid after Cyclone Nargis devastated the country's rice-growing delta.

``This is a critical moment for Myanmar,'' Ban said. ``The government itself acknowledges that there has never been a disaster on this scale in the history of their country.''

International aid workers must be allowed to move freely and the delivery of supplies must be coordinated, Ban told reporters late yesterday in Thailand before flying to the country formerly known as Burma today.

More than 130,000 people are dead or missing after the cyclone struck May 2-3, destroying villages and decimating crops in the southern Irrawaddy River delta. The Bush administration is leading criticism of the junta, which has barred international aid workers from traveling to the delta and rejected aid from U.S. warships in the region.

The UN says that only a quarter of the people in need of emergency aid have been reached.

The military, which has ruled the nation of 48 million people since 1962, this week agreed to let fellow members of the Association of Southeast Asian nations funnel aid into the delta region and deploy workers to distribute supplies.

Emergency Relief

There is no guarantee the junta will allow greater access, said John Holmes, the UN's emergency relief coordinator who met with regime leaders in Myanmar earlier this week.

``I don't want to raise expectations that won't necessarily be met,'' the UN's news service IRIN cited Holmes as saying yesterday. ``We need to see that happening on the ground before we can be absolutely certain about it.''

Louis Michel, the European Union's humanitarian aid commissioner who held talks with Myanmar officials in Yangon this week, said the regime has a ``total distrust of the international community.''

The visit was ``extremely frustrating,'' Agence France- Presse cited him as telling the European Parliament in Strasbourg yesterday. Talking with regime leaders was like ``being in a dialogue of the deaf.''

Junta Leader

Ban said he will meet with Senior General Than Shwe during his visit. He has tried several times to no avail to speak by telephone with the junta leader since the cyclone.

Some cyclone survivors don't want Ban to visit their camps for fear the regime will tighten security and intimidate people, according to the Irrawaddy, a magazine published by Myanmar dissidents in neighboring Thailand.

``The regime will clear roads and the surrounding areas when Ban is scheduled to visit,'' the magazine cited Thailand- based analyst Aung Naing Oo as saying. ``People who are begging from dawn to dusk will not get food or money to survive during his visit.''

Ban is scheduled to return to Thailand late tomorrow and will go back to Myanmar May 25 for an aid pledging conference in the former capital, Yangon. The event will help ``reinforce a partnership between Myanmar and the international community,'' he said.

The conference is being held on the same day that the junta's legal right to detain opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi expires, according to Freedom Now, a U.S.-based advocacy group that campaigns to free prisoners of conscience worldwide.

Suu Kyi, 62, whose National League for Democracy won elections in 1990 that were rejected by the junta, has spent 12 of the past 18 years in detention.

Her most recent spell of house arrest began in May 2003 and she can only be held under the State Protection Law for five years, Jared Genser, president of Freedom Now and a lawyer for Suu Kyi, said by telephone today. Genser said he expected the junta to find some other legal mechanism to detain Suu Kyi.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ed Johnson in Sydney at ejohnson28@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: May 21, 2008 23:40 EDT