BANGKOK, Thailand | The military leaders of Myanmar have promised to allow the first air shipment of relief aid for victims of a devastating cyclone from the Pentagon on Monday.</p><p>This is a significant concession, because the U.S. has been Myanmar&#8217;s leading critic, imposing sanctions and lobbying for a U.N. resolution condemning the nation&#8217;s generals for human rights violations.</p><p>The ruling junta seized a shipment of U.N. food aid earlier Friday intended for the victims.</p><p>The leaders declared that they would accept donations of food and medicine but not the foreign aid workers international groups say are in equally short supply there.</p><p>The refusal to allow doctors and disaster relief experts to enter in large numbers contributed to the growing concern that starvation and epidemic diseases could end up killing people on the same scale as the winds, waves and flooding that destroyed villages across a wide swath of coastal Myanmar nearly a week ago.</p><p>The International Red Cross estimated Friday that the combined efforts of relief agencies and the Myanmar government have distributed aid to only 220,000 of up to 1.9 million people left homeless, injured or subject to disease and hunger after the storm.</p><p>Heavy rain that is forecast in the next week is certain to worsen the plight of almost 2 million people awaiting food, clean water, shelter and medicine.</p><p>Diplomats and aid groups warned that the number of dead could exceed 100,000.</p><p>The generals who run Myanmar continued to focus on a separate priority: a constitutional referendum scheduled today that was formulated to keep power in the hands of military officers. It would guarantee the military 25 percent of the seats in Parliament and control of crucial Cabinet posts, and the right to suspend democratic freedoms at any time.</p><p>But while the state-run newspaper urged people on Friday to approve the Constitution, little help was reaching them. To date, Myanmar has allowed 11 airborne deliveries of aid, which experts say is a fraction of the relief needed if the scale of the disaster is even close to what the government has claimed. Much of that has come from the U.N. World Food Programme, which said Friday that the aid it intended to distribute to hard-hit coastal regions had been seized.</p><p><hr class="infobox-hr-separator" /> <div class="infobox"> <strong><span class="infobox-head">VOTING BEGINS </span></strong><br /> YANGON, Myanmar | Voting began today across most of this cyclone-ravaged nation on a referendum for a constitution. Balloting was delayed two weeks in the hardest hit areas.</p><p> Some 27 million of the country&#8217;s 57 million people are eligible to vote, although it is unclear how many will to cast ballots May 24.</p><p></div>