Accusations flying between the Indonesian military and rebels in tsunami-ravaged Aceh province clouded prospects for recovery as aid workers on Saturday began to switch their focus from relief to rebuilding.
Nearly a month after the December 26th earthquake and the unprecedented tsunami it spawned, aid workers in worst-hit Aceh pull hundreds more bodies every day from the rubble of destroyed buildings and from the mud from receding flood waters.
No one knows how many more bodies remain to be found or, indeed, how many have died. "The real number, nobody knows but God," Indonesia's chief social welfare minister, Mr Alwi Shihab, told a news conference in Aceh's provincial capital, Banda Aceh.
As of yesterday, 93,482 bodies had been recovered and buried, he said. Another 100,000 people were still missing, some may be living in refugee camps or may have fled the province.
With so many missing after the waves slammed into nations around the Indian Ocean, conflicting figures put the total death toll from Indonesia to Somalia at between 158,000 and 225,000.
Despite an informal ceasefire between the rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and Indonesian forces since the tsunami, Indonesian commanders say soldiers have killed 120 rebels for allegedly interfering in relief work over the past two weeks.
A spokesman for the rebels, who have fought since 1976 for independence for Aceh, said the army attacks had killed mostly civilians.
Any peace deal with the military could not be trusted, they said -- a worrying sign for relief workers in the province. With an end to the grim task of finding bodies nowhere in sight and hundreds of thousands of survivors still traumatised from the monstrous waves that wrenched their world away, officials said it was nevertheless time to rebuild.
"You know, without saying it, you can see by yourself that the emergency is almost behind us," Mr Budi Atmadi, chief of relief operations in Aceh, told reporters today.
Meanwhile the UN agreed today to work together to better guard against natural disasters, with steps ranging from stronger building codes to expanded monitoring of nature's upheavals.
In a first concrete step the World Conference on Disaster Reduction, meeting in Kobe, Japan, laid groundwork for the Indian Ocean's first tsunami early warning system, expected to be in place next year.
The five-day, 168-nation UN conference concluded - after dozens of workshops and a final night of closed-door negotiations - by adopting a "framework for action" to reduce disaster losses in the next 10 years.
This is "one of the most critical challenges" facing the world, a final declaration said, because cyclones, floods, earthquakes and other events set back human progress, especially in poor nations.
Some were disappointed that conference documents were non-binding, committed no new money to risk reduction, and set no hard targets for assessing progress.