UN/ASIA: Butchers, shopkeepers and restaurant owners in the devastated city of Banda Aceh opened for business yesterday, while a traditional marketplace bustled as tsunami survivors defiantly began to rebuild their lives.
"We have to open, if not, many people will starve," said Muhammad Saman, whose small restaurant is sandwiched between a refugee tent city and the destroyed homes that litter the coast.
"Our restaurant is opened voluntarily because many refugees come here for food," Mr Saman said.
Nearly 100,000 people died in Indonesia's northern province of Aceh, two-thirds of those killed by the December 26th tsunami which swept across the Indian Ocean.
Its provincial capital, once home to more than 300,000 people, was flattened.
"The only thing I have ever seen like it is in photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," said British International Development Minister Hilary Benn after inspecting the city.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the head of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, will visit Banda Aceh today to inspect the devastation and the relief effort.
But as Mr Annan and world leaders met in Jakarta on Thursday to tackle the tsunami crisis, with the global aid pledge now standing at $3.7 billion, the people of Banda Aceh were defiant they would survive.
"The quake can happen anywhere. I'm from here, I feel comfortable here and I intend to stay," said Cut Yusri, 50, as she queued for rice, noodles and cooking oil at an aid station.
But fear lies close to the surface. Fresh tremors in the morning sent the hungry and homeless running for their lives as the skeleton of the city shook.
With much of Banda Aceh looted, people are forced to scavenge in the rubble, littered with dozens of boats tossed from the sea, as Indonesian troops patrol the streets.
Even a soldier involved in the clean-up is armed as he drives a bulldozer - a reminder that Aceh is a troubled province wracked by a secessionist conflict.
Some residents said they had heard gunshots near the airport on Thursday. There was no confirmation, but the Indonesian military said that violent clashes had erupted in the past two days in the area.
For three decades the province on the northern tip of Sumatra has been the site of a simmering separatist rebellion that has left at least 12,000 dead, most of them civilians.
UN emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland has called on governments and rebels in tsunami-hit Sumatra, Sri Lanka and Somalia.
"We need that ceasefire, that peace, to hold because if new conflict breaks out we cannot help the people," he said.
Banda Aceh's airport has been inundated with giant military transport aircraft delivering tonnes of aid. Military helicopters buzzed all day in aid sorties to people still isolated since the giant walls of water crashed ashore.
But congestion on the runway yesterday forced a Russian Il-76 transport aircraft carrying 20 tonnes of tents, blankets, generators and water purification equipment to abort its landing and fly to Malaysia, Russia's Emergencies Ministry said.
The UN said it believed it was meeting the immediate needs of the people of Banda Aceh and hoped next week to have the first relocation camps up and running, where people could live for up to six months. But it fears for tens of thousands of survivors it has yet to reach on the west coast.
The World Health Organisation has warned the tsunami death toll could double unless action is taken this week to prevent diseases such as cholera and dysentery.
Down at Banda Aceh's destroyed port there was no fear when the sporadic tremors struck as the only residents there are bloated, decaying corpses. Along the waterfront dozens of bodies still lie in the street, some wrapped in black plastic.
Some have ID tags pinned to the outside of the plastic, others cardboard signs with a few rudimentary details about the person.
One simply read in Indonesian: "Idris, male, soldier".
"Many unburied victims still remain in the mud and rubble," said Indonesia's welfare minister, Alwi Shihab. Another 100 bodies were found on Thursday along the coast from the port.
A truckload of soldiers began repainting the town's main mosque on Thursday ahead of Friday prayer.
"I'm confused about what to do. But what I know is we must be able to endure these difficulties, we must go on," said Sudirman, a butcher who reopened his off-street meat stall.
"This is more than a curse ... Allah is very angry. And we must be resolute," he said, dressed in a green apron and light brown Muslim cap.