US helicopters stepped up aid flights in tsunami-hit Indonesia today as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged rich nations to spend more on preventing natural disasters before the next one hits.
Aid workers said supplies were making it to isolated areas of Indonesia's northern Aceh province, where some 115,000 people died in the December 26th tsunami that ravaged Indian Ocean nations.
Mr Annan, in a video address to an international conference in the Japanese city of Kobe where a killer earthquake struck ten years ago, said the world should prepare now for future catastrophes.
"It's not enough to pick up the pieces," Mr nnan said after a minute of silence for the tsunami's victims. "We must draw on every lesson we can to avoid such catastrophes in the future."
UN Secretary General, Mr Annan
UN officials suggested rich nations spend ten per cent of their emergency aid budget on cutting disaster risk through measures such as tsunami early warning systems - which experts say might have saved some of the more than 175,000 lives taken by last month's giant waves.
International pledges of emergency relief for tsunami victims now stand at more than $7 billion.
Monsoon rains pounded tsunami-hit areas of Aceh, flooding streets and worsening the plight of many of the estimated 600,000 Indonesians left homeless by the disaster.
Relief workers in Indonesia reported bodies were still being recovered more than three weeks after the catastrophe, and mass graves were still being filled.
Thai officials said a cooperative forensic effort to identify more than 3,000 victims had confirmed the identities of up to 15 people in its first week, bringing closure for at least a few families involved in the disaster.
The bodies were identified as Dutch, Canadian, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Australian and Japanese. Many of the bodies are badly decomposed and identification is being accepted only on dental records, fingerprints or DNA. Some bodies will never be identified, while countless others will never even be found, officials say.
Officials remain concerned about security in the hardest-hit region of Aceh and in Sri Lanka - both rent by insurgencies.
UN officials today lifted a travel ban imposed earlier in parts of Aceh due to fears of possible attacks on aid convoys, but also urged continued vigilance.
Denmark said on Monday it had information that aid workers faced possible terror attacks in Aceh, where more than 12,000 people have been killed in thirty years of sporadic revolt by the Free Aceh Movement. The rebels have repeatedly promised not to attack aid convoys.