U.S. starts military withdrawal from Aceh

U.S. starts military withdrawal from Aceh

Ian Timberlake, Agence France-Presse/Banda Aceh

The United States is pulling out the warship at the center of its aid mission to tsunami-hit Indonesia, in the clearest signal yet that emergency efforts to help survivors are winding down.

The USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier which was the first military vessel to arrive off the coast of Aceh province after the Dec. 26 disaster, was expected to depart on Friday, officials said on Thursday.

A "mission accomplished" ceremony attended by Indonesian and U.S. officials was held on board the vessel, whose helicopters proved crucial to bringing food and medical supplies to isolated stretches of Aceh's coast.

"The time has come to move on to the next stage of rebuilding and reconstruction and to pass the torch on to other organizations," U.S. ambassador to Indonesia B. Lynn Pascoe told 1,000 crewmen gathered on the Lincoln's deck.

The disaster left almost 240,000 people dead or missing in Indonesia. It wiped out many coastal villages and severed road access to the surviving communities. Some 400,000 people have been left homeless.

"I am pleased that the government of Indonesia no longer needs the full complement of forces that were originally deployed," Indonesia's Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare Alwi Shihab told the Lincoln's crew.

Abraham Lincoln's air wing, Capt. Larry Burt, earlier told AFP the navy was reducing its "footprint" in Indonesia, however the marine-carrying USS Essex would remain alongside the newly arrived USNS Mercy hospital ship.

The USNS Mercy, which is as long as three football fields and carries 1,000 beds, will have a huge impact on reviving the damaged local health system, a senior United Nations official said.

Meanwhile, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard said, a day after visiting Aceh, that up to 1,000 of his troops operating in the province would wrap up relief efforts "fairly soon", giving a time scale of "weeks not months".

The United Nations has said it was confident the gap left by the withdrawal could be filled, with a newly-arrived Japanese airborne contingent filling the gap in the short-term and the UN's own helicopters and boats moving in.

The presence of foreign troops in Aceh has been a prickly issue in fiercely nationalist Indonesia, particularly while it continues to clamp down on an armed separatist struggle in the region.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla last month caused friction when he said foreign troops working in Aceh should leave the region the "sooner the better", setting a three month deadline for their departure.

The government later backtracked, saying troops should scale down their operations as the emergency phase of the relief efforts came to an end. U.S. authorities said they would abide by Indonesia's wishes.

The United Nations, meanwhile, used the easing up of relief operations as a chance to review its performance in the five weeks since the disaster, offering its harshest assessment yet of poor coordination and slow responses.

David Nabarro, the World Health Organization's director of health action in crises, said the UN needed to examine ways to improve in future emergencies.

"Obviously we would like to see better coordination in this kind of relief effort, particularly in the early stages when you've got so many international groups trying to provide help," he said.

"The chaos that some people have referred (to) occurring after three weeks perhaps could be addressed if we had stronger coordination capacity in day zero or day one, and that's the question I'm gonna look at," Nabarro said. More stories on Pages 11,19