Four weeks on, tsunami survivor rescued

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - Four weeks after killer waves destroyed communities around the Indian Ocean, a lone tsunami survivor was rescued from a remote island, a rare moment of hope among countless tales of grief and loss.

In India's Andaman and Nicobar islands, an archipelago close to the epicentre of the huge Dec. 26 earthquake that triggered the tsunami, a military officer said on Saturday a man had been rescued after surviving for nearly four weeks on coconuts.

The survivor, Michael Mangal, told rescuers the first giant wave sucked him out to sea before subsequent waves flung him back onto the tiny island of Pillow Panja where he discovered everyone else from his village was gone.

It was one of the few pieces of good news in the Indian Ocean where as many as 225,000 were killed after the magnitude 9 earthquake off the Indonesia's Sumatra island triggered the killer waves.

A month on, the military element of a massive international relief effort was starting to scale back.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said on Sunday it was preparing for the eventual departure of foreign military teams from Sumatra, and was positioning a ship carrying food supplies off the worst-hit west coast of north Sumatra's Aceh province.

The 3000 tonne ship with its own landing craft, loading facilities and enough supplies of rice, noodles and biscuits to feed needy survivors for a month was due to arrive on Monday.

"It will make a significant difference to food distribution on the west coast. Obviously, we are at the stage where we have to make our own arrangements, with the anticipated departure of the assisting militaries," WFP spokesman Gerald Bourke said in the provincial capital Banda Aceh.

The US military, along with several others, has been providing the backbone of aid distribution operations on the west coast using helicopters off two aircraft carriers.

Some refugees in Banda Aceh fear they are becoming dependent on aid and worry about when international relief efforts wind down.

"I don't want to stay here forever, but I'm not sure how to get out," said Yunus, a tailor who lost his shop and house, and is now living in a refugee camp.

Amin, a civil servant from the ruined west coast city of Calang, said he was fearful.

"Where else can I go? Our relatives here have also lost their homes. They are also not sure what to do in the future," said Amin, whose wife had been pregnant when the tsunami struck and gave birth last week.

Children traumatised by the disaster that killed their families and destroyed their homes drew pictures expressing their feelings of loss.

One youngster, Zulmiadi, drew a picture of a boy holding onto a dog, with a fallen coconut tree, a house, someone on a road, and at the top, a coloured-in section that he says is the tsunami that hit his city Meulaboh, killing up to one third of its 120,000 people.

"I grabbed the dog when the water took me. It swam until it was safe," said Zulmiadi, 15, whose mother was killed.

Aid workers in Aceh still pull hundreds of bodies every day from the rubble of destroyed buildings and the mud left by receding waters.

Bodies are usually dumped unceremoniously in mass graves, but when Indonesian soldiers spotted the corpse of Andri Ary floating on a pond in Banda Aceh, they found a cellular phone in the clenched fist of his bloated hand.

They took the card out of the phone and used it to dial the number of a relative who was able to alert the 23-year-old student's uncle in Banda Aceh who said Ary would get a proper burial in the family's cemetery.

With so many missing after the waves slammed into nations around the Indian Ocean, conflicting figures put the total death toll from Indonesia to Somalia at between 158,000 and 225,000.

The tsunami claimed victims in a dozen countries: more than 30,000 in Sri Lanka, 16,000 in India and 5300 in Thailand.

At a United Nations-sponsored conference in Kobe, Japan, international officials pledged to try to prevent such a huge loss of life happening again by getting a tsunami warning system running within 18 months.

"All disaster-prone people deserve to have early warning systems," Jan Egeland, the UN's director of emergency relief, told a news conference on Saturday. "The tsunami was the wake-up call for all of us."

Governments and private groups around the world have pledged more than $7 billion for tsunami-hit countries.

In some places, such as Sri Lanka, relief work is already starting to give way to reconstruction efforts.

In remote areas, the relief operation has been slow often because infrastructure has been destroyed. In the Andaman and Nicobar islands, for example, where about 7,500 people were killed, many jetties were washed away.

In Britain, top stars of rock, pop and classical music packed a Welsh stadium to raise money for tsunami victims at Britain's biggest charity concert in 20 years. Performers included Eric Clapton and the band Manic Street Preachers.

- REUTERS