|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
|
6 minutes ago
|
|
By Michael Perry
WASHINGTON/JAKARTA (Reuters) - U.S. presidents past and present appealed to all Americans Monday to aid victims of the Asian tsunami, as rescuers struggled to get food and water to those clinging to life on shattered coastlines.
|
||||||||||||||||
"The devastation in the region defies comprehension," Bush said in Washington, eight days after an earthquake drove huge waves across the Indian Ocean, killing 144,000 and leaving millions homeless, hungry or threatened by deadly diseases.
"I ask every American to contribute as they are able to do so," said President Bush (news - web sites), in a joint appeal with his ex-president father George and ex-president Bill Clinton (news - web sites).
The United States was criticized for offering little aid in the immediate aftermath of the Dec. 26 cataclysm. It has since announced it is providing $350 million.
Aid logjams began to ease at Asian airports, bursting with hundreds of tons of emergency supplies. But the destruction left by nature was proving the biggest obstacle to the $2 billion relief operation, the biggest since World War II.
"It's absolute chaos," said Titon Mitra of CARE International, which is running 14 survivor camps in Indonesia's Aceh province. About two thirds of the 144,000 people killed by the tsunami died there.
Washed-out roads, broken bridges and flooding meant swathes of Sri Lanka's eastern seaboard and Aceh's west coast remained inaccessible eight days after the sea swept in.
Aid workers fear some isolated survivors may not be reached for weeks, despite a fleet of military helicopters dropping aid.
"The emergency teams are arriving to be blocked by a wall of devastation. Everything is destroyed," Aly-Khan Rajani, CARE Canada's program manager for Southeast Asia, said in Jakarta.
The World Bank (news - web sites) said it could double or triple the $250 million it has already promised.
MILITARY AID
Warships, aircraft, and thousands of troops, especially medical specialists, have been deployed to the Indian Ocean region from the United States, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, India, Pakistan, China and Japan.
The United States alone has sent 12,000 personnel, mainly in a 12-ship fleet.
The U.N. Joint Logistics Center, setting up operations in Jakarta, said it was likely to call for helicopter carriers for Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
It would also need air traffic control units, fixed wing aircraft capable of short take-off and landing, 100 boats or landing craft and large cargo aircraft, and fuel storage units.
The arrival of a fleet of U.S. warships headed by the carrier Abraham Lincoln has stepped up aid operations significantly in Aceh. Some helicopters dared not land because of the pressure of hungry crowds below and instead dropped supplies from the air.
"Just seeing their faces after we arrived and delivered what we could -- they were friendly, they were waving at us, saying hello," said U.S. navy flyer Vito Grieco after an airdrop.
Australia was sending small Iroquois helicopters, a field hospital and a ship carrying 100 engineers.
Some 1,500 U.S. marines were due to land in Sri Lanka.
Singapore said a landing craft with 400 military personnel and heavy equipment had landed at Meulaboh, a city on the devastated west coast of Aceh where it is feared one third of the population, as many as 40,000 people, may have perished.
PIRATES
With much of the west coast of Indonesia's Sumatra island impassable by road, aid was being ferried up the coast to the port of Padang before heading by road to Medan and then Aceh.
"Boats are used to deliver relief goods, but pirates are a real concern off the west coast," the U.N. Joint Logistics Center said.
A lack of communications in Aceh was hampering aid efforts. The International Red Cross said telecommunications firm Sony Ericsson (news - web sites) was donating 1,300 mobile phones and sending teams to Sri Lanka and Indonesia to restore communications.
The U.N. says 1.8 million tsunami survivors need food aid. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. Clean water is vital to prevent diseases which could kill tens of thousands.
Indonesian survivors had salvaged what they could from the debris of what once were homes and now are graveyards, and set up more than 175 camps around Banda Aceh, CARE said.
Many of the camps have no food and little clean water.
The U.N. children's agency UNICEF (news - web sites) said it had begun a measles and vitamin A immunization program for up to 100,000 children in India's hard-hit Tamil Nadu and Kerala regions. "Measles is a deadly threat to children living in crowded camps," said Dr. Marzio Babille, UNICEF's chief of health in India. "It spreads quickly, killing children, or severely weakens their immune systems.
"Those children are then too weak to fight off other diseases, leading to more deaths. It's a vicious circle."
Aid agencies said there was an urgent need to supply people with the means to rebuild their lives themselves.
"If we just feed them today, what happens to them tomorrow?" asked CARE's Rajani. "The immediate needs are food, water and shelter, but in the weeks and months to come, we are going to have to help the survivors rebuild their communities."
UNICEF said it aimed to raise $81 million to help an estimated 1.5 million children affected by the tsunami, many now orphans.
One third of the dead are believed to be children, too small or weak to survive the giant walls of water, it said.
