Asian Tsunami: US forces prepared to start winding down their huge tsunami relief effort while donors pledged $1.7 billion to help badly hit Indonesia recover from a calamity which cost 226,000 lives across south-east Asia.
Aid workers in Indonesia's shattered Aceh province, where more than 160,000 died in the December 26th disaster, said some survivors were still not getting food almost four weeks after the tsunami.
In a horrifying sign of the tsunami's power, relief workers on a child vaccination project in coastal Aceh were finding few children under the age of seven turning up. They said they suspected that many, if not most, toddlers in villages hit by the wave were killed by it.
US Pacific Command chief Admiral Thomas Fargo said relief work was shifting to reconstruction and it was time to cut the US military deployment, which has seen some 16,500 personnel and the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln form the biggest single force helping tsunami survivors.
"We will start right now transferring functions to the appropriate host nation and international organisations," Admiral Fargo told reporters in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
Indonesia increased its official death count by a staggering 50,000 on Wednesday as people formerly listed as missing were counted as casualties. The new data raised Indonesia's toll to 166,000 and put global deaths at more than 225,000 - making the tsunami one of the eight deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. Over 38,000 were killed in Sri Lanka, 16,000 in India and 5,300 in Thailand.
Indonesia's main donors pledged $1.7 billion in aid to help rebuild Aceh, part of a larger-than-expected $5.1 billion total aid package this year.
While US military commanders said they hoped to shift the bulk of the relief work to other groups by the end of February, key operations such as ferrying aid supplies by helicopter were expected to be the last to go.
Aid officials said the need for air deliveries was still acute, and some local Acehnese said they hoped that the foreign troops would stay on. "I think it's safe to say there are small pockets of communities that have not received international assistance as of yet," said Mr Langdon Greenhaugh of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.
Mr Tony Banbury, Asia director at the UN World Food Programme, said he was confident that no one would starve despite the challenging logistics in Aceh. "Everyone who needs food aid is going to get it. I'm very confident of that," he told a news conference.
American volunteer nurse Ms Linley York in the Acehnese city of Meulaboh said she had heard reports that people in a camp in the village of Beurawang to the north were eating leaves.
Indonesia has asked foreign troops to aim to leave within three months, saying it should be able to take over relief work. This has sparked concern among some Acehnese who remain distrustful of Indonesia's own military following a 30-year conflict with local separatists. Indonesia's army chief of staff said that more than 120 rebels had been killed in the past two weeks, despite a post-tsunami ceasefire, and that those who continued to resist would be hunted down.
Reuters