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Annan Horrified at Tsunami Destruction
By Dan Eaton and Achmad Sukarsono
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan flew over the tsunami-ravaged landscape of Indonesia's Aceh province on Friday and asked "Where are the people?" as Jakarta raised its death toll by thousands.
Secretary of State Colin Powell also expressed shock at the scale of the disaster as he toured another devastated Indian Ocean country, Sri Lanka.
As aid workers strove to reach hundreds of thousands of people thought to be stranded in isolated parts of Indonesia's Sumatra island, Jakarta added more than 7,000 deaths to its tsunami toll. It now stands at 101,318, out of a total of more than 153,000 for the 13 nations affected.
"I have never seen such utter destruction, mile after mile. You wonder, where are the people?," Annan told reporters after a helicopter tour with World Bank chief James Wolfensohn over Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra.
A day after a crisis aid summit in Jakarta, Powell toured Sri Lanka's south, where the giant waves that crashed ashore on Dec. 26 killed more than 30,000 and reduced coastal towns to piles of rubble.
"The destruction that we saw was significant," he said as he wrapped up his lightning visit. "It was more than just walls that have been knocked down or buildings that have been crushed, but lives that were crushed and snuffed out."
DEATH TOLL WARNING
The United Nations warned that the fate of tens of thousands was unknown and that death the toll could climb sharply if survivors scrabbling for food and clean water succumbed to dysentery and cholera.
Up to a million people may have lived in Aceh's isolated coastal areas before they were struck by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and its killer waves, U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland said.
"I do not think we are even close to having any figures as to how many people have died, how many are missing, how many have been severely affected," he said.
Nearly $6 billion has been pledged by governments, individuals and corporations in an unprecedented global response to the widest-ranging natural calamity in living memory.
Finance ministers from the world's Group of Seven leading industrialized countries said they had struck an agreement to suspend tsunami-hit nations' debt repayments.
Annan has called on world leaders to honor pledges of aid, citing failures to deliver fully on promised help after previous disasters, such as the earthquake which hit the Iranian city of Bam in December 2003.
His helicopter took him over the town of Meulaboh on Sumatra's west coast, just 150 km (90 miles) from the epicenter of the undersea earthquake that unleashed the tsunami.
The United Nations estimates one third of Meulaboh's 120,000 people were killed when the giant waves ripped through.
The area south of the city remains a black hole.
"We have no information at all below Meulaboh. It is a big worry," said Michael Elmquist, U.N. relief chief in the provincial capital Banda Aceh, adding that satellite photographs showed an "area that used to be land is now sea."
"VILLAGES EXTINCT"
"The only way to describe some of the villages is extinct," said U.S. helicopter pilot Scott Cohick after an airdrop to the area. "We drop off food where we are told and we save some to drop off to stragglers."
Hundreds of aid groups from round the world are setting up operations in Banda Aceh, and are providing much of the visible economic activity in the battered city.
The shattered infrastructure has made distributing aid outside the city a huge problem, while a shortage of air traffic controllers and space to park planes is holding up supplies.
Hospitals in Banda Aceh are overflowing with sick and injured and not everyone gets a bed. Many are in danger of dying from infected wounds.
Amputations are increasingly the only option; even then patients die, having sacrificed a leg or an arm, due to the massive loss of blood or continued infection.
"It's a life or limb decision," said anaesthetist Paul Luckin, an Australian navy lieutenant who has operated on 25 patients in the past six days.
The United Nations said it believed it was meeting the immediate needs of the people of Banda Aceh, once a thriving city of more than 300,000 people but now largely flattened and strewn with debris and rotting corpses.
Thousands attended Friday prayers in the Muslim city and the main mosque was filled with tsunami survivors.
"This is a test from Allah so that people are aware that they're making a mistake. A handful of people did bad deeds and all of us suffer," said restaurant owner Muhammad Saman.
A week ago the Grand Mosque Baiturrahman was a makeshift morgue. Then it became a refuge for the sick, injured and scared. On Friday, it stood like a beacon of hope when soldiers gave the building a fresh coat of white paint.
In Thailand, where more than 8,000 foreign tourists have been confirmed dead, missing or unaccounted for, forensic teams battled to identify unrecognizable bodies through DNA testing.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said up to 440 Britons -- more than double the previous estimate -- may have died in the disaster, mostly in Thailand.
Reuters
