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
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