News-starved Burmese snap up grim cyclone videos

YANGON (Reuters) - With state TV only showing footage of generals handing out food at model tented villages, people in Myanmar are snapping up bootleg video discs of bloated corpses, desperate refugees and villages ravaged by Cyclone Nargis.

"Myanmar television is useless," said one Yangon businessman who bought the underground VCDs because he wanted to see the raw, uncensored version of the storm that killed his brother in Labutta, one of the hardest-hit towns in the Irrawaddy delta.

"I want to see what really happened," the man, who asked not to be named, said.

Two weeks after Nargis struck, the former Burma's military rulers have admitted that nearly 78,000 people were killed and another 56,000 are missing after one of the most devastating cyclones ever to hit Asia.

Yet still they refuse to accept large-scale foreign relief operations, and insist the army is well on top of the distribution of supplies in an area of delta the size of Austria.

State media, rigidly controlled by the junta, is reporting nothing of the concerns of international aid agencies for the 2.5 million people left clinging to survival, or the columns of beggars lining mud-clogged roads coming out of the delta.

Instead, it has been pumping out sound bites from Prime Minister Thein Sein saying the situation is under control.

"We have already finished our first phase of emergency relief. We are going into the second phase, the rebuilding stage," he said.

BLOATED CORPSES