Tsunami aid faces chaos and possibly pirates

Tsunami aid faces chaos and possibly pirates

Michael Perry, Reuters/Bangkok

The massive Asian tsunami relief operation faces absolute chaos and "a wall of devastation" in Indonesia as well as the threat of pirates plundering aid, relief groups struggling to help thousands in camps said on Monday.

As aid logjams began to ease at Asian airports, bursting with hundreds of tonnes of emergency supplies, it was the destruction left by nature that was proving the biggest obstacle to the US$2 billion relief operation, the biggest since World War II.

"It's absolute chaos," said Titon Mitra of CARE International, which is running 14 survivor camps in Indonesia's Aceh province. About two thirds of the 144,000 people killed by the Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami died there.

Washed-out roads, broken bridges and widespread flooding meant swathes of Sri Lanka's eastern seaboard and Aceh's west coast remained inaccessible eight days after the tsunami hit.

Aid workers fear some isolated survivors may not be reached for weeks, despite a fleet of military helicopters dropping aid.

"The emergency teams are arriving to be blocked by a wall of devastation. Everything is destroyed," Aly-Khan Rajani, CARE Canada's program manager for Southeast Asia, said in Jakarta.

The tsunami relief operation has seen an outpouring of aid. The World Bank said it could double or triple the $250 million it has already promised.

"The world is really coming together here in a way that we probably have never seen before," U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said in New York.

Military forces have swung into rescue mode, with ships, aircraft, and thousands of troops, especially medical specialists, deployed from the United States, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, India, Pakistan, China and Japan.

The United States alone has sent 12,000 personnel, mainly in a 12-ship naval fleet, but the United Nations said it expects to call for more military aid.

The UN Joint Logistics Center, setting up operations in Jakarta, said the request was likely to include a call for helicopter carriers for Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

It would also need 5 air traffic control units, fixed wing aircraft capable of short take-off and landing, 100 boats or landing craft and large cargo aircraft, and fuel storage units.

Australia was sending small Iroquois helicopters for landing in the worst-hit areas.

Some 1,500 U.S. marines were due to land in Sri Lanka.

Singapore said a landing craft with 400 military personnel and heavy equipment had landed at Meulaboh, a city on the devastated west coast of Aceh where it is feared one third of the population, as many as 40,000 people, may have perished.

An Australian field hospital was being flown to Aceh and an amphibious ship with 100 engineers was steaming there to help in reconstruction.

The UN says 1.8 million tsunami victims need food. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. Clean water is vital to prevent diseases which could kill tens of thousands of survivors.

The UN children's agency UNICEF said it had begun a measles and vitamin A immunization program for up to 100,000 children in India's hard-hit Tamil Nadu and Kerala regions.

"Measles is a deadly threat to children living in crowded camps," said Dr. Marzio Babille, UNICEF's chief of health in India. "It spreads quickly, killing children, or severely weakens their immune systems."

"Those children are then too weak to fight off other diseases, leading to more deaths. It's a vicious circle."

Aid agencies said there was an urgent need to supply people with the means to rebuild their own lives.

"If we just feed them today, what happens to them tomorrow?", asked CARE's Rajani. "The immediate needs are food, water and shelter, but in the weeks and months to come, we are going to have to help the survivors rebuild their communities."

UNICEF said it sought to raise $81 million to help an estimated 1.5 million children affected by the tsunami in Asia, many now orphans.

One third of the dead are believed to be children, too small or weak to survive the giant walls of water, it said.

UNICEF said there was an urgent need to normalize the lives of children who had seen so much death and destruction and it was trying to reunite them with families and to re-open schools.

"The simple process of attending school is a key step in returning a sense of normalcy to the lives of children affected by emergencies," it said.