Tsunami toll hits 150,000
[one of those things that was in the cards all the time .. pb]
reuters.co.uk
By Tomi Soetjipto and Dean Yates
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (Reuters) - Some 150,000 people are now known to have been killed by Asia's tsunami, U.N. officials say, as helicopters and elephants are used to find and feed survivors and shift the rubble of razed towns.
Aid workers on Monday struggled to help thousands huddled in makeshift camps on Indonesia's northern Sumatra island, where the tsunami claimed two-thirds of its victims eight days ago, and to reach remote areas after roads and airstrips were washed away.
Half a world away from the changed map of South Asia, U.S. President George W. Bush and two predecessors, his father George and Bill Clinton, urged Americans to give money to ward off hunger and disease in the 13 countries hit by the killer waves.
"The current death toll ... what we operate with are the confirmed people who are identified as dead ... is around 150,000," said U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland.
"There are many, many more who have disappeared or who are missing or who are for us nameless as of this stage. And it is particularly in the Sumatra coast."
U.S. helicopters began shuttling injured refugees, many of them children, out of some of the worst hit parts of Indonesia's Aceh province, where many towns and villages were wiped out.
Pilots described columns of refugees trudging up the coast towards the provincial capital Banda Aceh. Some charged the helicopters to fight each other for the food.
"All the villagers started coming out of the woodwork, telling us they needed help. They said there were a lot more wounded people further inland up in the mountains," Lieutenant-Commander Joel Moss said from the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln.
Amid the struggle to stay alive, few survivors of the December 26 disaster forgot their appalling grief and losses.
"I thought that my two sons were my future. With them I could build this family," said 22-year-old Shiva Shankari, choking back tears at a refugee camp on India's east coast.
While her daughter survived the tsunami, the sons aged three and five that she and her sister struggled to save both died.
"What can I do? I am lost," she said. "My husband said, 'Why are you alive and my sons are dead?'"
LOGISTICAL NIGHTMARE
Affected nations, working with aid agencies, private relief groups and donor governments, have eased some transport bottlenecks to get supplies to the estimated five million people requiring some form of help.
Many airports are now bursting with emergency supplies. But a logistical nightmare looms over distributing them through vast regions where roads and bridges have been washed away, and uncontaminated water is scarce.
"The emergency teams are arriving to be blocked by a wall of devastation. Everything is destroyed," Aly-Khan Rajani, CARE Canada's programme manager for Southeast Asia, said in Jakarta.
In Sri Lanka, the second-worst hit nation with more than 30,000 dead and 850,000 homeless, there was little sign of an organised government relief effort, but food distribution looked smoother.
"It's still very chaotic," Save the Children's Irene Fraser said in Akkaraipattu. "But the situation is changing, coordination is happening."
Many in refugee camps were sick with various ailments or deep wounds, and the U.N. said it had reports of children dying of pneumonia in Aceh.
The U.N International Children's Emergency Fund estimates about 50,000 children died across the region -- a third of the total death toll. Tens of thousands have been orphaned.
"The biggest challenge is to make sure the children stay alive -- to avoid the outbreak of disease. One of the biggest problems now is that the still water may be as dangerous as the rushing water that killed," said UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy, visiting rebel-run northern Sri Lanka.
As dehydration, disease and hunger threaten to add to the death toll, the world's response has gathered pace.
More than $2 billion has been pledged by governments and the World Bank, while private donations have been unprecedented.
"I ask every American to contribute as they are able to do so," said Bush, joined in his appeal by his two predecessors.
Bush, whose early reaction to the disaster was criticised in some quarters as sluggish, called his government's pledge of $350 million "an initial commitment".
"We offer our sustained compassion and our generosity and our assurance that America will be there to help," he said.
Vast resources, from foreign troops to military field hospitals, were on their way or already on the ground, but residents in some areas used more traditional methods.
ELEPHANTS HELP RESCUERS
In Aceh and southern Thailand, relief workers used elephants to shift debris from shattered buildings and hunt for survivors.
As the world poured out its heart for the victims, a women's collective in Sri Lanka said rapists were preying on survivors at refuge centres. The U.N. Joint Logistics Centre said pirates were a threat to aid supplies along Sumatra's west coast.
In Aceh, officials said they were investigating reports of trafficking in orphans.
Sweden sent police to Thailand to investigate the reported kidnap of a Swedish boy of 12 whose parents were washed away, and said it was keeping the names of some victims secret after thieves burgled some homes in Sweden.
With the relief operation growing hourly, an aid conference in Jakarta on Thursday was starting to draw leaders including Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Egeland said donors would be asked for a "few hundred million dollars" for immediate needs, and another pledging conference would be held on January 11 in Geneva as longer-term requirements became clear.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Jeb Bush, the U.S. president's brother, who has experience cleaning up Florida after a number of hurricanes, headed to the region to help assess reconstruction needs.
In southern Thailand, where the known death toll is close to 5,000, forensic experts were trying to identify bodies. Nearly 4,000 people were still missing in Thailand, including more than 1,600 foreigners, many of them Scandinavian.
In Malaysia, the crew of a fishing boat brought in an Indonesian woman they had rescued four or five days after she was sucked out to sea. The woman, from Aceh, had clung to a floating sago palm and survived on its fruit.
"She said she had felt cold, but her will to survive was very strong," a local official said.
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