UNITED NATIONS — With debate intensifying over whether the need to provide aid to Burma can be completely divorced from the country’s political problems, the question of who will control the distribution of humanitarian goods is emerging as a bone of contention between the United Nations and the Burmese junta.

The issue has arisen in negotiations between U.N. representatives in Rangoon and the Burmese authorities, U.N. officials said. Critics of the junta fear that if the country’s military rulers gain control over the distribution of aid — food, clean water, and plastic sheeting for shelter — they will use it to punish and reward people in dire need on the eve of a national referendum.

Yesterday, even as the highest-ranking American diplomat in Rangoon, Shari Villarosa, said the death toll in the aftermath of Saturday’s Cyclone Nargis could rise to more than 100,000, members of the U.N. Security Council argued over whether the United Nations’s most prominent body should intervene on behalf of victims in one of Asia’s worst natural disasters in recent years.

U.N. officials sought to steer clear of political issues yesterday, but the largest opposition party in Burma, led by a jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, accused the junta of focusing more on the upcoming referendum on a proposed constitution than on the storm recovery. The referendum is still scheduled to take place Saturday, though some hard-hit districts will vote on May 24. Ms. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy is calling for the vote to be put off.

“Victims of the storm need immediate international aid,” the central executive committee of the NLD said in a statement issued in Rangoon and obtained by The New York Sun. “On behalf of the people, the NLD denounces the authorities’ attempt to hold a referendum instead of accepting disaster relief aid for the suffering victims of this disaster.”

More than $30 million in cash and goods has been pledged, the U.N. undersecretary-general for emergency relief coordination, John Holmes, told reporters yesterday. A handful of U.N. humanitarian workers could soon be able to go to the country to assess the needs on the ground, he said, adding that while entry visas have not been denied, the Burmese authorities have made entry difficult, with high-ranking officials saying visa approval needed to be deferred to “higher authorities.”

“I think we are making progress. I hope we are making progress. I don’t want to sound too optimistic,” Mr. Holmes said, urging Burma’s government to temporarily waive visa requirements for humanitarian workers. Asked about reports that the junta is demanding complete control over the distribution of goods, he said: “It will be very difficult for us to accept” such an arrangement.

Still, Mr. Holmes discouraged a “confrontational” approach with the Burmese government, telling reporters that the United Nations has no plans to “invade” Burma. Taking a different tack, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said yesterday that “it must be checked” whether the junta “could be forced to let the necessary aid into the country,” the Associated Press reported.

Asked about Mr. Kouchner’s statement during a closed-door Security Council consultation, the French ambassador, Jean-Maurice Ripert, said Mr. Holmes should brief the council on the extent of the access Burma’s government has provided to foreign humanitarian workers. “We need to listen to him,” Mr. Ripert said.

But a Chinese diplomat told Mr. Ripert that the council, which is charged with international peace and security, should not discuss humanitarian issues. The Chinese official pointed out that the council never discussed the Paris heat wave of 2003, in which 14,000 people died.

Mr. Ripert said he did not think such “sarcastic” comparisons were helpful. “I thanked him for reminding me the difference between a democracy and dictatorship,” he said later.