Aid focuses on children

2005-01-04 17:37

Jakarta - International tsunami aid efforts have reached many of the children caught up in the disaster, but improving sanitation to prevent disease and reuniting lost children with their families remained urgent priorities, Unicef head Carol Bellamy said on Tuesday.

Generally high rates of immunisation in the southern Asian nations that were battered by the giant December 26 waves have helped prevent epidemics, but Indonesia's devastated Aceh province has one of that nation's lowest rates, Bellamy said in an interview.

Unicef is helping lead a measles inoculation effort in the north of Indonesia's Sumatra island starting on Wednesday, she said.

Clean drinking water is now available to those in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, but not necessarily beyond, she said. Sanitation is still poor even in the city, meaning the risk of disease remains high.

While she said assistance to children around southern Asia was "actually not bad", Bellamy voiced concerns about water and sanitation in Indonesia.

"We have supplies coming," she said. "I hope by the end of the week we'll have more water purification and latrine materials, but ... there's still a long way to go."

Unicef and the humanitarian groups it is working with hope to have special centres focused on children's needs set up within five Aceh refugee camps by the end of the week, and 15 more soon after, she said.

Among their top priorities will be registering all the youngsters who survived the massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunamis.

Bid to reunite kids with families

That's the first step toward reuniting children with their families - parents if they survived or other relatives if they didn't, Bellamy said.

She said Indonesia poses the biggest challenge to humanitarian efforts of any nation hit by the disaster, which the United Nations says has probably taken more than 150 000 lives - some as far away as east Africa.

Nearly all victims in India's mainland have received aid, but agencies know less about what's happened in the country's remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, where the Indian government bars aid agencies but has now asked the United Nations for help, Bellamy said. Most, but not all affected zones in Sri Lanka have been reached, she said.

"I actually feel pretty good generally about aid getting through at this point, but we know it's not getting everywhere," said Bellamy, who arrived in Jakarta from Sri Lanka on Tuesday and plans to visit Sumatra on Wednesday. "It's not because people aren't trying."

The United Nations was flying over much of Sumatra's west coast on Tuesday to get a rough sense of where people not yet reached by aid might be, she said.

Bellamy said it was far to early to say how many children were orphaned by the disaster. She said Unicef could not confirm Indonesia's estimate that 35 000 Acehnese youngsters lost one or both parents.

- AP