President Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique said yesterday that dislodged mines could be the next killer his people face, but he played down estimates of thousands killed in devastating floods.
Heavy rain and a fuel shortage forced the suspension of some helicopter aid flights from Maputo as Mr Chissano held his first news conference since the floods hit on February 11th.
A spokesman for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday that the floods and their aftermath of disease and hunger could push the death toll into the thousands, but the President said rescuers had so far recovered only 212 bodies.
"As the waters are still covering vast areas of the country, we cannot say this is the final figure," he said, adding that only 15 people had officially been reported missing.
Mr Chissano said the next big killer could be mines left over from the 16-year civil war that have been dislodged by the floods.
A United Nations Development Programme official, Mr Omar Bakhet, told BBC television in Maputo: "The difficulty is that many of those mines have been shifted because of the movement of the soil, so we don't know where those mines are."
Mr Bakhet said Mozambique needed an emergency programme to find and disable the mines, which could maim people returning to their fields to replant crops destroyed in the flood.
The disaster has forced an estimated 241,000 people into 64 refugee camps. Another 750,000 are in need of aid.
The row about whether major nations reacted too late was rekindled by Mr Nelson Mandela's wife, Ms Graca Machel, widow of former President Samora Machel. "There'll always be a question why people took so long," she told the South African Broadcasting Corporation in Maputo.
Major nations are already on the defensive, admitting that in the early days they underestimated how Mozambique's rivers would be swollen by rain in neighbouring countries.
But Mr Chissano said he was grateful for the response:
"It is true that international aid came late, but we have also understood that although we made the appeal, it was not until the television images were received across the world that people understood the scope of the tragedy.
"We are happy that people have been sympathetic and that help is finally coming. We still have a huge workload ahead."
Helicopters have plucked more than 13,000 people from trees and rooftops during the flood. But fears that whole communities may have been left helpless were reinforced by reports from a missionary who arrived in Maputo after a 10-day trip. Maj Douglas Duncan of the South African air force said a plane would quickly check out the French Catholic missionary's report that 20,000 people in his community were still stranded. "The priest says there were people dying of cholera and malaria when he left," he added.
Pope John Paul is sending a special envoy with financial aid to help victims of the flooding in Mozambique and to express Church solidarity, the Vatican said yesterday. It said Archbishop Paul Joseph Cordes, head of the Vatican's charity co-ordinating arm Cor Unum, would visit Maputo as well as areas hit by the flooding.
A statement said he would hand over two contributions to help victims, one from the Pope personally and one from the Vatican's committee organising the Church's Holy Year celebrations for 2000.
The Vatican did not disclose the amounts of the gifts. The statement said Catholics around the world thus far had contributed $1.65 million for Mozambique through their national church charities.
Meanwhile, the UN World Food Programme is preparing a second appeal to help flood victims and is launching its first airlift operation to deliver food to displaced people in Madagascar.
A spokesman said the Rome-based WFP could launch an appeal for $27 million for food aid and food-related transport costs before the end of the week.
WFP was also likely to appeal for a further $3 million to extend the use of South African helicopters for 15 days until the end of the month and for $4 million to pay for the repair of roads wrecked by the flooding, he said.
WFP said in a statement it was launching its first airlift operation tomorrow to deliver urgently needed emergency food rations to tens of thousands of people left destitute by floods in nearby Madagascar.
A United States aid plane yesterday spotted a group of 20,000 Mozambicans left stranded by flooding in the north-east of the country, a senior official of the UN Humanitarian Office said.