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Banda Aceh survivors in ‘Town of tears’
Chaos hampers relief operations
Tsunami toll crosses 1.44 lakh
India to install warning system
Lankans scared of seafood
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Looters making most of tragedy
Philippines declares day of mourning
2 car bomb attacks kill six in Iraq
Kent Prince’s daughter to marry Indian beau
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Banda Aceh survivors in ‘Town of tears’
MATA’IE means “tears” in Indonesian and, in the town in Aceh that bears that and grief.
When an earthquake and tidal waves destroyed vast swaths of the Indonesian province on Boxing Day survivors from coastal areas near Banda Aceh, the capital, fled to higher ground and found themselves in Mata’ie, in the shadow of Aceh’s hills. Now 3,000 homeless and destitute people are living in a crowded refugee camp on the outskirts of the town, where they spend their days reliving the nightmare unleashed by the tsunami and searching fruitlessly for relatives and friends. The camp’s front fence has become a wall of despair, where hundreds of messages scrawled on fragments of cardboard beg for information on people missing. Many of them are children, washed to oblivion by the giant walls of water that swept away their flimsy homes. “Pocut, six-and-a-half years old,” reads one poster, accompanied by a photocopied picture of a little girl smiling self-consciously at the camera, wearing her best dress. “Blonde hair, 118 cm tall, red T-shirt and ring with a red stone. Last seen in Lampolo Boro.” Among the throng of tearful people scanning the handwritten notices yesterday was 25-year-old Lindayanti, who had not seen her husband or two children, aged 2 years and five months, for a week. Pointing to the ugly wounds that cover her body, the legacy of her struggle to survive, she said: “I don’t feel the pain from them anymore. But I feel so much pain in my heart.” Dreadful though Lindayanti’s plight is, it is standard fare in post-tsunami Aceh, where at least 80,000 persons were annihilated in one fell swoop when disaster struck. In Banda Aceh, half the population was wiped out. There is barely a person who has not lost a spouse, child or parent, often all three. With communications severely affected, no one is sure who is dead or alive. “Thank God, you survived,” is the greeting commonly heard when friends bump into each other on the capital’s ravaged streets. But many Acehnese will never know for certain what happened to loved ones who are missing. Thousands of victims are still buried under rubble, and the corpses that have been recovered are now unrecognisable. The authorities say a large proportion will never be identified. So the bereaved must accept that they will never be able to mourn over a body, or give their closest family members a proper burial. Sitting in a tent that she shares with 70 refugees in Mata’ie, Lindayanti recounted the events that reduced the province to ruins. Pulling at chunks of hair and weeping frequently, she said: “When the earthquake came, we all ran out of the house. Suddenly people were screaming that water was coming from the sea. “My husband grabbed our children and took me by the hand, and we ran. But after only 10 paces, the wave came. I couldn’t hold on to my husband’s hand anymore, and we were swept away in different directions. The water threw me up and down, again and again. I kept sinking, and I was being crashed against broken buildings. When I looked around, I realised I was in Punge, 2 km from my home in Blango. “I tried to grab on to a floating mangrove tree, but I got trapped behind it. I couldn’t see clearly because I had lost my glasses. A man lifted me out and I got on his shoulders. Someone took me into their house. “The next day I tried to find my family. I was confused and suddenly saw my neighbour’s children on their own. I took them in and looked after them, but then their mother came to find them. I was very sad, because she has still got her children. “I have searched all the refugee camps and I can’t find my family. I am sure my children are not still alive, particularly my boy, because he was just a baby. But I still hope my husband is alive. I believe he is alive, because he is a very good swimmer and he can stay under the water for a long time. In Mata’ie, there are many parents who have lost children, and many orphans crying pitifully for their parents.
— By arrangement with The Independent |
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Chaos hampers relief operations
Banda Aceh, Indonesia, January 3 Aid workers struggled to help thousands huddled in makeshift camps in the province in northern Sumatra where two-third of the 1,44,000 killed across the region died, and to reach remote areas after roads and airstrips were washed away. U S helicopters began shuttling injured refugees, many of them children, out of some of the worst-hit parts of Aceh. The pilots skimmed low over flattened villages and jungle looking for signs of life, touching down briefly to collect the badly injured and fling out packages of food and water. “They were ecstatic as we flew in. They were blowing us kisses,” Sea Hawk pilot Lieut Commander Joel Moss from the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln told Reuters. “All villagers started coming out of the woods, telling us they needed help. They said there were a lot more wounded people further inland up in the mountains,” he said. Pilots described columns of refugees trudging up the coast towards the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, while others were camped out above the high-water line. Across southern Asia logjams began to ease at airports bursting with hundreds of tonnes 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 faced aid workers in Sri Lanka, the second worst-hit nation with nearly 30,000 dead, said Margareta Wahlstrom, UN special envoy for tsunami relief. The UN said 1.8 million survivors needed food in tsunami-hit areas. 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 international system is working,” U N emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland said in New York. Hundreds of fresh foreign troops poured into Aceh in a race to stop the outbreak of killer diseases among survivors of the tsunami.
— Reuters |
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Tsunami toll crosses 1.44 lakh
Jakarta, January 3 Indonesia has borne the brunt of the catastrophe, with a Health Ministry official putting the country’s toll at 94,081 with entire coastal villages disappearing under the wall of water. The figure could rise substantially. The ministry has cautioned that there could be 1,00,000 deaths in Aceh and North Sumatra alone. In Sri Lanka, 29,729 were confirmed killed by the tidal waves, while more than 16,000 persons were injured, the President’s office said. A further 5,240 are listed missing. Thailand Interior Ministry figures on Sunday put the death toll at 4,993 — 2,461 foreigners, 2,232 Thais and 300 whose race could not be determined. The number listed as missing had fallen sharply to 3,810 compared with 6,424 previously. In Myanmar at least 90 persons were killed, according to the UN. At least 75 persons were killed and another 42 were confirmed missing in Maldives, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom said. Sixty-eight persons were dead in Malaysia, most of them in Penang, the police said. In Bangladesh, a father and child were killed after a tourist boat capsized in large waves, officials said. Fatalities also occurred on the east coast of Africa where 176 persons were declared dead in Somalia, 10 in Tanzania and one in Kenya.
— AFP |
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India to install warning system
London, January 3 “The system is called DART-meaning Deep Ocean Assessment and Report System and this complete system, giving a true and accurate prediction of tsunami — as in the Pacific Ocean — will take two to two-and-a-half years to be fully functional,” Mr Sibal told a BBC Hindi Programme last night. He said “if we are able to install 10-12 DARTS in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, connect them to DATA Boise, get information from the satellite, and if we are able to successfully do software modelling, we should be able to get information about the tsunamis.”
— PTI |
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Lankans scared of seafood
Colombo, January 3 Fish markets were virtually closed in Colombo while supermarkets sold only canned tuna, salmon and mackerel imported from South America. The main fish wholesale market was deserted although stocks were on offer. “There is fish coming into the market from trawlers that are returning, some after spending three weeks at sea,”
W.S. Dharmawardene, supervisor at the main St John’s Fish Market here, said. “But there are no takers. People have stopped eating fish. There are large stocks of fish in cold storage. Nothing is selling. There is a fear among consumers that big fish must have been feeding on the corpses that were washed into the sea.”
— AFP |
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Looters making most of tragedy
Colombo, January 3 “Villagers are plundering whatever they can get hold of,” said M.K. Sugadadasa, a senior police officer in the devastated south. Four men were taken into custody after driving off with household appliances as well as cameras and mobile phones from a hotel at Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park - flattened in the disaster, said Mr Sugadadasa. The tsunami roared into the park on December 26, killing 200 persons, including 40 foreigners. Another six persons were arrested with loot, including a shotgun from the government’s wildlife department, he said. Nearly 1 lakh homes were completely destroyed in the earthquake-driven tsunami, forcing about 10 lakh persons into temporary shelters. Sri Lankan authorities say the human death toll is likely to top 35,000. One woman and five men were also taken into custody after cupboards, tables and chairs stolen from coastal homes were found in inland houses, Mr Sugadadasa said. “We have asked survivors at refugee centres to return to their destroyed homes during the day time to guard whatever remains and report losses,” said D.W. Prathapasinghe, a police chief in the south. “This looting has become an added problem for us.”
— AP |
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Philippines declares day of mourning
Manila, January 3 “We’re going to have a national day of prayer and mourning for those who perished in the tsunami on Friday,” Arroyo told a news conference. More than half the known fatalities of the December 26 disaster were from Sumatra island in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim state. Arroyo also said she would attend a summit in Indonesia on Thursday where regional leaders are to discuss the coordination of the tsunami relief effort.
— AFP |
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2 car bomb attacks kill six in Iraq
Baghdad, January 3 The first blast by an explosive-laden car near Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s party headquarters killed two police officers and one civilian and injured 25 others. The secular Shiite leader was not inside the building in Baghdad’s western district of Harithiya when the blast occurred, his aides said. The second attack took place in Balad, about 80 km north of the capital, killing four Iraqi National Guard Soldiers and wounding 14, US military spokesman Neal E. O’Brien said. The driver of the car bomb died in the blast. “Anti-Iraqi forces continue to target the Iraqi National Guard’’.
— AP |
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Kent Prince’s daughter to marry Indian beau
London, January 3 Ella (23), the 30th in line to the throne, was studying Spanish and English literature at Brown University, Rhode Island, in the USA when she met 24-year-old Aatish, a Mumbai-born Sikh. “Prince and Princess Michael of Kent will announce that their elegant daughter is to marry Aatish early this year,” The Sunday Telegraph reported. The couple are likely to live in India. “I will be heading back to India to pursue my career,” says Aatish, who is working as a trainee reporter for Time magazine.
— PTI |
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In video: Torrential rain hampers Sri Lankan relief effort.
