Indonesia: International aid began to arrive in Aceh in earnest yesterday, almost four days after the biggest earthquake in 40 years and the tsunami which followed devastated the Indonesian province.
Officials in Jakarta said the death toll from Sunday's disaster had reached more than 45,000 in Indonesia. That number is expected to continue to rise, with a senior UN official saying yesterday that the eventual toll could be 55,000 to 80,000 in Aceh alone.
That news came amid the emergence of serious bottlenecks in the delivery of aid, now being distributed by the Indonesian military. As a result, it appears likely to be days before many Acehnese receive the food, medicine and clothing they so badly need.
Aid workers said delivery of supplies from Medan in north Sumatra, the nearest main airport, were being delayed by heavy air traffic and slow loading and unloading of cargo aircraft flying out of the Indonesian military base there.
In Banda Aceh, hundreds of boxes of instant noodles and water shipped in from north Sumatra sat in a pavilion at one end of the airport. These were brought in by aid relief flights which had landed before lunchtime. An officer said that aid was slow to move beyond the hangar and trucks were arriving only rarely to load up.
In camps set up around the provincial capital, refugees complained about the lack of food, water and medical attention.
Refugees in a camp, just a 30- minute drive from the airport, complained that survivors from villages destroyed by Sunday's disaster were forced to split a single 15 kg bag of rice. "How can anyone survive with that?" asked Mr Abu Bakar, who had brought his family to the camp. "Can you imagine? What we get is only like this," he said, cupping a hand.
In the same camp the only sign of medical help was a group of six student volunteers handing out antibiotics, painkillers and vitamins, using only the instructions printed on the box to determine who should receive what.
Mr Michael Elmquist, the head in Indonesia of UNOCHA, the UN agency co-ordinating international relief effort, defended the speed at which aid was being delivered. The fact the province had been effectively shut from the outside world until Sunday's earthquake because of a long-running separatist conflict had caused "not even a day" of delay.
But other aid workers, who asked not to be named, said the government in Jakarta appeared to remain suspicious of international aid. Moreover, a lack of co- ordination between the civilian government of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and the military, which is delivering the bulk of the aid on the ground, was slowing the process, they said.
Evidence of the slow pace of the clean-up and the delivery of aid remained easy to find in Aceh yesterday. Bloated corpses still littered the streets of Banda Aceh, and near the city's port more than 100 decomposing bodies were floating in the water.
Financial Times service