Indonesia now has enough food and clothes to meet the needs of tsunami survivors but donations of money and medicines are still vital, its embassy in London said on Wednesday.
The embassy, which has set up a task force to process donations and deal with enquiries about missing people, said gifts of food have been ”more than sufficient”.
Deluged with offers of help, the affected countries face a battle to get the right kind of aid to the right places.
In Medan, on the island of Sumatra, United States marine helicopters worked on Wednesday to remove a glut of supplies that had been dumped near a warehouse at the airport.
The supplies were loaded on to the USS Bonhomme Richard, a multipurpose assault ship, which will take them to the inaccessible west coast. There, they will be delivered to survivors by what General Christian Crowley, the head of the US military’s relief mission in Indonesia, described as an ”amphibious strike force”.
Indonesia on Wednesday turned down Britain’s offer of support from 120 Gurkha troops but may accept two Bell helicopters that would have accompanied the soldiers from their base in Brunei.
”They have accepted the idea of the two helicopters but, given the number of infantry soldiers already in the region, they felt further ground troops weren’t required,” a British spokesperson said.
In response to complaints that the huge flow of aid is not yet reaching the parts where it is most needed, the Indonesian government and United Nations are setting up a joint coordination centre, said Bo Asplund, the UN representative in Indonesia.
A spokesperson at the Indonesian embassy in London said the appeal for medicines is aimed mainly at preventing outbreaks of diarrhoea among the refugees — a fear that has been echoed by the World Health Organisation (WHO).
”If basic needs, particularly access to safe drinking water, are not urgently restored to all populations by the end of this week, [the] WHO fears that outbreaks of infectious disease could result in a similar number of fatalities as occurred due to the direct impact of the tsunami,” the UN health agency said in a statement.
Many of the affected people in Indonesia’s Aceh province and on Sri Lanka’s eastern coast still lack safe drinking water, and the WHO estimates that 150 000 are ”at extreme risk” if a major disease outbreak occurs.
A lack of lighters and matches has caused illness in one village, Médécins sans Frontières said, because people are unable to light fires to cook meat properly.
Camps for up to 500 000 people will be built on Sumatra, Michael Elmquist, the UN official heading the relief effort in Aceh, said on Wednesday. Conditions at existing camps that have sprung up in the region will also be improved to meet international standards, he added.
The Indonesian government, anticipating a long reconstruction process, has begun to break ground on four camps around Banda Aceh, the devastated city in northern Sumatra.
In eastern Sri Lanka, however, military officers have been visiting some of the makeshift camps and urging people to return to their villages.
”How long can they stay here?” said a brigadier who had just spoken to the leaders of the camp housing the 438 people from Nasuvantivu and four other Tamil villages. ”They have to start from somewhere.”
The officer, who did not give his name, said the refugees should go home and assess their losses to prepare claims for reconstruction.
”This is the government’s strategy,” he said.
Aid agencies say accommodating refugees in camps can make relief efforts more organised, provided they are set up in the right places with the right conditions, but the wishes of people who choose to return home also have to be respected.
”If they return, there is a need to make sure the places are safe and have adequate facilities, rather than just going back to chaos,” said Sam Barratt of Oxfam. — Guardian Unlimited Â