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| Sunday, 2 January 2005 |
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Aid arrives in tsunami disaster zones Flights packed with ready-made meals, medicines and doctors were on Wednesday arriving in countries ravaged by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean which has left almost 70 000 people, half of them children, dead.Governments worldwide have pledged tens of millions of dollars to help victims of the disaster, which struck on Sunday. Tens of thousands were killed and millions left homeless in almost 11 countries from south-east Asia to Africa.
Millions of individuals have responded to the tsunami disaster, making donations of cash and other items. "The response has been overwhelming," Avinash Singh Gill, the first secretary at the Indian high commission in Singapore, said. The high commission has been accepting cheques and bank drafts to fund India's aid and reconstruction effort. Aid agencies stressed that cash was the most appropriate gift, because it afforded the most flexibility to meet changing needs on the ground. In Hong Kong, the actor Jackie Chan donated $64 282 to Unicef for relief work in the countries pummelled by the earthquake and resulting tidal waves, a fund statement said. The city's leading businessman, Li Ka-shing - Asia's richest man - contributed $3,1-million. Governments have pledged almost $100-million to the relief effort, with Japan, the EU and US leading the way. Tons of food and medical supplies are also being shipped by UN agencies, the Red Cross and non-government agencies. The British government pledged o15-million to the international aid effort, and the secretary of state for international development, Hilary Benn, said the money was "the first phase" of the UK's commitment to helping the afflicted countries. Robert Holden, the operations manager at the World Health Organisation HQ in Geneva, warned that relief agencies faced "a huge task of prioritisation and co-ordination". Holden told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the search and rescue phase was "coming to an end" and that the risk of disease outbreak was high. "There is a lot of potential for waterborne diseases, diarrhoeal diseases breaking out," he said. "We are working with the authorities on the ground to try and put in place, very quickly, the ability and the provisions to be able to make safe their drinking water through the provision of chlorine tablets and so on. "It's an astronomical logistical problem. We've never been faced with anything like this previously. We've got a huge geographical area, a number of countries affected." Some government officials and NGOs expressed concern that aid was piling up at distribution points because of impassable roads in Aceh, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, one of the areas hardest hit by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake. Vaitai Usman, a woman in her mid-30s, gestured angrily at her filthy sarong, saying it was the last of her possessions, as the first relief teams arrived in Banda Aceh city, Aceh's provincial capital. "There is no food here whatsoever. We need rice. We need petrol. We need medicine. I haven't eaten in two days," she said. Survivors there said they were running short of food, and aid officials also warned that the extensive relief effort was open to corruption in a province in which the governor is on trial for allegedly stealing from the state budget. "Most problematic ... is the food, medicine and the clothes that may be taken either by private hospitals, military users or by traders who will resell it," said David Macdonald, the country programme manager for Oxfam Great Britain. Indonesia Aceh bore the brunt of the quake and the tsunami that followed. Supplies - including 175 tons of rice and at least 100 doctors - have reached Banda Aceh.Four hospitals across Aceh were being set up, and the navy was sending ships loaded with tons of food and medicine to the island's west coast, which is impossible to reach overland. "This is first time we are able to send help there," a military spokesman, Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, said. "We have very sketchy information about how many died there and the extent of the devastation. We're having extraordinary problems communicating there." The disaster has left more than 32 000 dead in Indonesia. Emergency workers who reached the northern tip of Sumatra, closest to the quake epicentre, found 3 400 bodies in a single town, Meulaboh. Sri Lanka On the south coast of Sri Lanka, which has reported 22 000 dead and around 1,5-million homeless, observers said there was still no sign of government aid where whole fishing villages had been wiped out. "There is frighteningly little [aid] here," Chris Weeks, a director with the private Disaster Resource Network (DRN), in the capital, Colombo, said. "There seems to be a lot of people who have turned up, but not much in the way of tents and blankets and medical equipment." Israel cancelled plans to send a 150-member team to aid in recovery efforts due to opposition from the Asian country, Israeli officials said. The medical delegation - including 60 soldiers - had been set to leave yesterday, but Sri Lanka protested at the military composition of the relief team, Israeli security officials said.Meanwhile, the Tamil Tiger rebels complained that aid was not reaching areas under their control, and have appealed separately for international assistance. The government insists that aid is being distributed fairly. Thailand While the official death toll stood at 1 657, police said that more than 1 500 bodies had been found in one district alone - the home to the hardest-hit Khao Lak resort area - and that the total death toll there could reach 3 000. The government said 4 086 Thais and foreigners were missing. This included around 1 500 Swedes, 200 Finns, 200 Danes and hundreds of Norwegians, according to reports from Scandinavian capitals. India An estimated 7 000 people have been confirmed or presumed killed in the Andaman and Nicobar islands. (Courtesy Guardian Newspapers) |
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