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.