INDONESIA: The emergency relief phase is nearly over in Indonesia's tsunami-ravaged Aceh province and foreign militaries should scale back operations, the government said yesterday as it raised its death toll by 7,000.
But four weeks after giant waves killed as many as 234,000 people across the Indian Ocean region, workers are still pulling hundreds of bodies from the mud and rubble each day and aid organisations say they are struggling to reach isolated areas.
Indonesia's Health Ministry said yesterday that 173,981 people died on Sumatra island, up from 166,320. Most of the deaths occurred in Aceh province, where Indonesia's chief social welfare minister, Mr Alwi Shihab, said civilian relief workers will now be more useful than foreign troops.
"I think that is only logical [ that they scale down], not only the Americans but the Singaporeans as well.
"The Singaporeans are bringing in more engineers and civilians and withdrawing military," he told reporters as he inspected preparations for a refugee relocation camp in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh.
UN officials say helicopters operated by US and other militaries remain key to reaching isolated pockets of people.
Relief workers in Aceh said their work was far from over and they were preparing to take on more of the burden.
"We are feeding close to 400,000 people now. But that does not equate with mission accomplished," Mr Patrick Webb, global chief of nutrition for the World Food Programme (WFP), told reporters.
Some Indonesians said they fear becoming dependent on aid and worry about when international efforts wind down.
The World Food Programme said it was positioning a floating warehouse off Indonesia's ravaged west coast.
A 3,000-tonne ship with its own landing craft, loading facilities and enough supplies of rice, noodles and biscuits to feed survivors for a month was due to arrive on Monday.
In Helsinki, the office of former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari said he would mediate talks between the Indonesian government and the rebel Free Aceh Movement (GAM) next week.
Indonesia's Foreign Ministry said it could neither confirm nor deny the report.
A spokesman for the rebel group's exiled leadership in Sweden said he had no information on any contacts between the two sides.
In India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a lone survivor was rescued from a remote island after surviving for four weeks on coconuts.
The man, Mr Michael Mangal, told rescuers the first giant wave sucked him out to sea before subsequent waves flung him back onto the tiny island of Pillow Panja, where he discovered everyone else from his village was gone.
The rescue was one of the few pieces of good news on the devastated Indian Ocean coasts.
In Sri Lanka, where more than 38,000 were killed, donors say they fear aid may not reach displaced Sri Lankans because government had created a risk of corruption and mismanagement.
"The way the government is handling this could lead to large-scale corruption," Mr J.C. Weliamuna, executive director of the Sri Lankan arm of anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International, said yesterday.