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All corpses still not found
22/01/2005 10:33 - (SA)
Jim Gomez
Lam Peuneurut - Carrying a reeking cargo of 17 rotten bodies, Red Cross volunteer Hambali struggled to steer an overheated ambulance fizzling with steam across Indonesia's tsunami-devastated city of Banda Aceh.
After his white van rolled up to a mass grave in this nearby village this week, crews slid the corpses into the hole, burying a tiny fraction of the staggering number of dead killed by the December 26 earthquake and tsunami.
Hambali - who only uses one name - lit up a cigarette and reflected on his work: 47 bodies collected in six trips.
"It's a productive day," he said.
The grisly job of finding the badly decomposed corpses is being done by 2 000 Indonesian troops, police and volunteers like Hambali. They're struggling with monsoons, power outages, dangerous debris and inadequate equipment.
Thousands still missing
Nearly a month after the disaster, thousands of bodies are still missing and the search for the dead is not over yet - slowed by the disarray that accompanied the unprecedented disaster.
One basic problem has been the confusion in the number of dead and missing that killed about 158 000 to 221 000 people in Asia and Africa.
Officials have given conflicting death tolls, making many volunteers wonder when their work will end in Aceh, a province on the northern tip of Sumatra island that was hardest-hit by the disaster.
In recent days, volunteers were still pulling out more than 1 000 bodies a day from the rubble, and the stench of death still hung in some places in the city.
The work has become more difficult and slower after the workers began delving deeper into mounds of debris choking wrecked houses. They've had to dodge rusty nails and mud-covered water wells that could swallow up volunteers. Hambali, who lost nine distant relatives to the tsunami, pledged to help until the last body was hauled to the grave.
"They should not be out there," he said. "Every body needs a decent burial."
The 17 corpses his group collected were found in Kaju, a coastal village in the city's outskirts that looked like it was smashed by a bomb, leaving only a few brick houses standing amid a sprawling field of debris. His team first stumbled on two body bags, containing a child and an adult, who were already collecting maggots on a roadside where other searchers left them.
Of the more than 90 000 bodies so far found in Banda Aceh, less than 1 000 were identified, Eka said, explaining that search teams were under orders to rapidly bury the decomposing bodies if there were no readily visible signs of identification like driver's licenses.
Most victims had no identification because the tsunami struck when people were at home early on Sunday, he said.
Haniff Asmara, a provincial government official, said the mass graves scattered across the city - including a large one containing more than 20 000 bodies - would become permanent memorial sites. - AP
- SAPA
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