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| Tuesday, 04 January 2005 |
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Elephants pressganged into tsunami relief effort BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, Monday (Reuters) Relief workers used everything from helicopters to elephants to reach survivors and shift the rubble of wrecked towns eight days after giant waves struck Asia, triggering one of the biggest aid efforts in history. Aid workers struggled to help thousands huddled in makeshift camps in Indonesia's northern Sumatra where two thirds of the 145,000 killed across the region died, and to reach remote areas after roads and airstrips were washed away. U.S. helicopters began shuttling injured refugees, many of them children, out of some of the worst hit parts of Aceh province, where many towns and villages were wiped from the map after the Dec. 26 quake and the tsunami waves it spawned. "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," Seahawk pilot Lieutenant-Commander Joel Moss said from the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Pilots described columns of refugees trudging up the coast towards the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, while others were camped out above the high-water line. In India's remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, where thousands were killed by the waves, the reception for helicopter pilots was less welcoming. One tribe, fiercely hostile to outsiders, fired arrows at a military helicopter that flew over their island reserve to check on their welfare and drop relief supplies. "That means, I guess, they are okay," said one local police officer. Across southern Asia logjams began to ease at airports bursting with hundreds of tonnes of emergency supplies but relief workers faced a logistical nightmare in distributing them. "It's absolute chaos," said Titon Mitra of CARE International, which is running 14 survivor camps in Aceh. In Aceh, reports also surfaced of trafficking in orphans. Officials said they had launched an investigation. UNICEF said it had reports of children dying of pneumonia in Aceh. Many in refugee camps were sick from a variety of ailments and deep wounds. The U.N. agency estimates about 50,000 children died across the region - a third of the total death toll of 145,000. Tens of thousands more were orphaned. Education, the only hope of a better life for many of Asia's poorest children, has been badly hit, with schools and teachers wiped out and many survivors struggling just to survive. "Our children are now busy looking for food," says Effendi, a 37-year-old father in Indonesia. "I don't know when the schools are going to open." Affected nations, working with aid agencies, private relief groups and donor governments, have eased some transport bottlenecks, improving capacity to get in goods on a daily basis to serve the estimated 5 million requiring some form of aid. Logistics centres were operating in Rome, Jakarta and Sumatra, U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said. A command-and-control centre at Thailand's U-Tapao military air base was coordinating all the civil and military flights. Dealing with trauma was also crucial, doctors and aid workers say. After losing loved ones, homes and livelihoods, survivors were so deeply traumatised it would take years for them to heal, if ever, they said. Many were likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, which would could take weeks or longer to surface, said Tsang Fan-kwong, a specialist in psychiatry at Hong Kong's Castle Peak Hospital. Counselling and other help would be needed to prevent depression. With the relief operation growing by the hour, an aid conference called for Thursday in Jakarta was starting to draw leaders from around the world, including Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Jeb Bush, the American president's brother, headed to the region to help assess reconstruction needs. One U.S. senator said Washington may eventually spend billions of dollars helping Asia recover. In southern Thailand, where the known death toll is close to 5,000, forensic experts were trying to identify recovered bodies. Nearly 4,000 people are still missing in Thailand, including more than 1,600 foreigners, many of them Scandinavians. |
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