Indonesia on Tuesday moved to dispel charges that corrupt officials are siphoning off aid earmarked for tsunami-battered Aceh province, as south-east Asian nations seek to lure back foreign tourists scared off by the disaster.
Indonesia’s health ministry, meanwhile, has significantly changed the way it tallies victims from last month’s tsunami, saying it will only concretely identify as dead those who have been buried and that the rest will be listed as missing for a full year.
The ministry’s death toll went down from about 170 000 to just more than 96 000 under the new rules, but at the same time it added substantially to the missing, bringing the combined total of dead and missing from about 180 000 to 220 000. Most of the missing are presumed dead.
The new procedure also means that two of the three Indonesian agencies tallying the dead now agree on a death toll after having huge discrepancies.
”The minister ordered us to do this to avoid confusion,” said Dr Doti Indrasanto, the health ministry official in charge of the death count. ”People have been complaining.”
The social affairs ministry, which has been maintaining a separate count, raised its death toll Tuesday by about 9 000 to 123 198 dead, with 12 046 missing.
Both Indonesia and Sri Lanka, the two worst-hit nations, have reported conflicting death-toll figures — reflecting both the disaster’s enormity and the difficulty of the task.
Sri Lankan officials are still unable to reconcile a discrepancy of more than 7 000 dead, with one ministry saying it has counted 38 195 bodies while another ministry puts the death toll at 30 957. President Chandrika Kumaratunga has been asked to intervene to sort out the problem.
The latest figures put the overall death toll — excluding those considered missing — across the 11-nation disaster zone at between 143 784 and 178 081.
Indonesia, one of the world’s most graft-ridden nations, said it will publish a monthly list of aid donated for relief operations in Aceh province.
”We will announce every month, on the 26th, the money we receive,” said Minister of Welfare Alwi Shihab. ”We will list down all contributions and where it is going to avoid any suspicion [of graft].”
Small-scale graft has already been reported, with some soldiers and government officials charging relief agencies ”administrative fees” to escort convoys of trucks in Aceh or to process tents and other equipment arriving at Jakarta’s airport, aid workers say.
Luring back the tourists
One month after the killer waves ravaged coastlines across Asia, scaring away foreigners at the height of the tourist season, affected nations are trying to find ways to bring them back.
After the tsunami, many European governments, such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden, issued advisories to their citizens not to travel to devastated areas in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Maldives. Some of the advisories have since been lifted.
Such warnings might lead to ”the perception that the whole region cannot be visited”, Malaysian Minister of Tourism Leo Michael Toyad said at a two-day conference attended by tourism ministers from the 10-member Association of South-East Asian Nations.
The ministers, who wrap up the meeting in Malaysia later on Tuesday, are expected to agree on a wide range of cooperation in tourism, including easing visa restrictions to boost travel by citizens within south-east Asian countries to offset the loss of foreign visitors.
Another economic sector hard hit by the catastrophe has been the fishing industry.
European Union nations said overnight that they plan to send boats and fishing experts to tsunami-devastated areas to help hundreds of thousands of families struggling to rebuild their livelihoods.
”The needs are enormous,” EU fisheries commissioner Joe Borg said, speaking of thousands of vessels destroyed by the tidal waves and many more needing urgent repairs and more gear.
In Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, a fire that started on Monday night was still raging across a debris-strewn area spanning at least 1km on Tuesday. Gas cylinders among the ruins of homes were exploding as they caught fire.
No one was known to be living in the area that was burning, as much of it was flattened by the tsunami. Firefighters said they were running out of water, and the debris made it hard for fire trucks to get closer to the blaze.
Meanwhile, experts gathered in Beijing said a tsunami warning system needs to be installed in the Indian Ocean as soon as possible, copying a similar network already in place in the Pacific since 1965 that now protects 26 nations.
”This is an imperative, considering the scientific fact that our part of the world is so vulnerable to earthquake-generated tsunami waves,” said Foster Gultom, an Indonesian foreign ministry official.
An ocean-wide system would include wave-sensing buoys, earthquake detectors and a communications network to alert communities to potential threats. — Sapa-AP
Sean Yoong in Langkawi, Malaysia, Alexa Olesen in Beijing, Shimali Senanayake in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Raf Casert in Brussels, Belgium, contributed to this report