Aid workers don't only provide relief goods, we have a duty to fight for the protection of the people we serve. All too often we are kept from speaking out against oppressive and corrupt governments in case we endanger ourselves, the project or the people we are assisting. I have just left Rangoon and can now talk openly of the worrying things I saw. I am an eyewitness to a terrible violation of human rights directed at victims of Cyclone Nargis by their own military government.

When I first arrived in Burma we were able to quickly organise a team of local volunteers and begin emergency food distributions. The first day we managed to get into the Irrawady Delta region, the area worst hit by the cyclone, and reach cut off communities using canoes to deliver rice, plastic containers and water purification tablets. This was a 'drop in the bucket' compared to what is needed but we were able to access victims nonetheless.

The communities were devastated. Many of the children were already sick with diarrhoea and needed medicine. We told them we would be back with more supplies. But as we headed back the next day we were stopped at a military checkpoint and told to turn around. No foreign aid workers were allowed to pass through and our local team was not allowed to go in alone. We were told we could give the supplies to the military and they would distribute them for us. After hearing stories of where military aid was going this was not an option.

You don't have to go far outside Rangoon to find cyclone victims and we were able to distribute to a community closer to the city that day. But it was terrible to think of the village we had brought medicine for, especially the children. All that day we ran into other aid groups who had experienced the same thing. Foreign medical agencies with trucks full of medicine and volunteer doctors had been banned from reaching victims and truckloads of food bound for hungry mouths had been turned away. By closing access to the Delta region that day the military rulers committed a horrific violation of human rights that has been ongoing every day since. In my opinion, the formation of that roadblock was a crime against humanity.

With the Delta region closed to foreigners, international agencies have had to be creative. Some are hiring local teams to get relief to the hardest hit areas. Helping people in need is not rocket science but it does require some training or it could be dangerous and ineffective. Unfortunately this training takes time, not a lot of time but time we don't have. Every hour that passes may be an hour closer to death for those not receiving help.

Since the introduction of the checkpoints Rangoon has been filling steadily with foreign workers who went through the frustration of trying to get a visa and are now having to sit in the city waiting for the doors to open. But they might be waiting in vain. Reports say the junta leaders are afraid of the negative influence that foreign workers might have. After years of suppressing the Burmese people, the generals now fear a revolt. Of course the generals don't want the victims to receive aid from "evil foreigners", it would contradict the propaganda. But I suspect that the Delta region is closed for more sinister reasons and I have heard reports that confirm my fears.

Aid has been trickling into the Delta region, but where that aid is going is the worrying thing. A Burmese worker with one of our medical teams returned from the Bogale area with some horrific stories. He said one village they had worked in was "like being in hell". He had had difficulty sleeping because the villagers were screaming in terror all through the night. "People are finding dead bodies even at night and having nightmares," he told me. He also said the government was being "selective" in who they give aid to.

The military has oppressed Burma's ethnic Karen people and other minorities for years and these groups make up a huge part of the population in the Delta region. Our worker told me he had spoken to several Karen communities who had been bypassed by military trucks packed with relief goods despite pleading to soldiers for help. He thinks the military are denying aid to minority or separatist groups in the hope of exterminating them. "Aid is reaching the victims, if they support the government," said the worker. If this is true, the junta are knowingly killing their citizens. Unfortunately that would not come as a surprise, just a few months ago the military was murdering pro-democracy supporters in the streets of Rangoon.

Whether it is true or not, we know that people have died unnecessarily since the cyclone struck two weeks ago. No matter how hard the junta tries to fool the world that they are in control with their facade of staged distributions, our teams have seen people who have died because aid was prevented from reaching them.

One local team I spoke to drove through a village where their truck was mobbed by desperate survivors in search of food then 30 minutes up the road they came across a huge group of soldiers leaning against their trucks eating high energy biscuits from an aid package. One Rangoon resident told me he heard that many aid packages coming into the airport were ending up in the capital Naypyidaw, where they were being used to feed military personnel.

Just the way in which the junta is prioritising their alleged response is a crime in itself. While teams of soldiers are sweeping leaves from the streets of Rangoon in anticipation of foreign delegates arriving, there are still thousands of bodies strewn throughout the Delta. And yet the state television channel is reporting that everything is under control. The reality is that they have little handle on a disaster that is needlessly spiralling out of control. Every day that aid is blocked the people are growing weaker.

I salute the world leaders that have begun to announce that the junta has committed crimes against humanity. But that sentiment should be unanimous among Western leaders. France has said that Burma's government is "on the verge of committing crimes against humanity". This reminds me of the famous exchange between journalist Alan Elsner and U.S. State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly during the Rwanda crisis where Elsner asked: "How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?"

As an aid worker who has seen the junta military deny aid to victims I must ask: "How many crimes against humanity does it take to call it a crime against humanity?" How many days of closed checkpoints will the victims have to endure? How many days will foreign disaster experts have to watch children dying on the TV in their Rangoon hotel rooms?

Leaving Burma this morning was a sad experience for me. I have worked on disasters in the past where governments have been too proud or afraid to allow in aid, but I've never seen anything of this scale. Most aid workers on the ground are in agreement that without immediate intervention the death toll could easily overtake that of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

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