Eight days on, ailing tsunami survivors wait for aid 

Indonesia - Eight days after a giant tsunami struck Asia, relief workers faced "absolute chaos" in Indonesia's Aceh province on Monday as a $2 billion operation to help disaster victims fought to get off the ground.

Aid workers struggled to help thousands huddled in makeshift camps in the province in northern Sumatra where two thirds of the 144,000 killed across the region died, and to reach remote areas after roads and airstrips were washed away.

Logjams began to ease at Asian airports bursting with hundreds of tons 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.

The same bleak picture of infrastructure destruction faced aid workers in Sri Lanka, the second worst-hit nation with nearly 30,000 dead, said Margareta Wahlstrom, the United Nations special envoy responsible for tsunami relief.

The U.N. said 1.8 million survivors needed food across the region but the world's response in money and resources gave grounds for hope as dehydration, disease and hunger threatened to add to the already huge death toll.

World Bank president James Wolfensohn said his agency could double or triple the $250 million it has promised for regional reconstruction, and would also be looking at debt relief for the poor nations worst affected by the disaster.

"The world is really coming together here in a way that we probably have never seen before," U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said in New York.

"The international system is working."

Hundreds of fresh foreign troops were pouring into Aceh in a race to stop the outbreak of killer diseases as disturbing reports surfaced of trafficking in orphans from the disaster, triggered by a huge earthquake off Sumatra on Dec. 26.

UNICEF said it had reports of children dying of pneumonia in Aceh. Many in refugee camps were sick from a variety of ailments, as well as terrible wounds sustained when the tsunami hit.

In Banda Aceh and other towns, thousands of rotten corpses still lay in the streets. A Health Ministry official said he had no reports of a cholera outbreak, but the risk was very high.

However, affected nations, working with international aid agencies, private relief groups and donor governments, were easing some early bottlenecks and improving their capacity to get in goods on a daily basis to serve the estimated 5 million people requiring some form of aid.

Logistics centers were operating in Rome, Jakarta and Sumatra, the U.N.'s Egeland said, and a command-and-control center at Thailand's U-Tapao military air base was coordinating all the civil and military flights involved in the relief effort.

The U.S. military said sorties by helicopters from the carrier Abraham Lincoln, anchored off the Aceh coast, would be raised to 32 on Monday, against 26 on Sunday. They began dropping boxes of food and bottled water around Banda Aceh on Sunday. Wild scenes in some places meant the deliveries had to be aborted.

Singapore said a landing craft with 400 military personnel and heavy equipment had landed at Meulaboh, a city on Aceh's west coast where it is feared one third of the population, as many as 40,000 people, may have perished.

Germany army colonel Jurgen Canders arrived in Banda Aceh on Monday with a nine-member medical unit. He said the team included tropical disease and public health specialists, and its mobile capability would allow them to conduct surgery in remote areas.

Topping needs on a regional level was water and sanitation equipment to head off expected outbreaks of water-borne infections, spread through tainted community water supplies. U.N. health officials say disease could kill maybe 50,000.

More than 100,000 people are living in temporary shelters and camps in Indonesia alone, many suffering from diarrhea, fever, respiratory infections, headaches and stomach problems.-- Reuters

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