World Urged to Make Good on Asia Aid Promises

By Jerry Norton

JAKARTA (Reuters) - World leaders vowed on Thursday to help the victims of the most wide-reaching natural disaster in living memory and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan ( news - web sites) declared they were in a "race against time."

Amid warnings from health officials that disease could significantly increase the 150,000 death toll, Annan urged countries that have pledged more than $4 billion in aid to come forward immediately with nearly a billion dollars in cash.

Annan's appeal, delivered at an emergency international aid summit in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, followed an assessment by the World Health Organization

(news - web sites) (WHO) that survivors could succumb to cholera and dysentery unless they received clean water and other basic services by the end of the week.

At the one-day summit, world leaders welcomed debt relief for countries hit by the Dec. 26 disaster and backed the creation of an Indian Ocean tsunami early warning system.

Annan appealed at the summit for $977 million to cover basic needs for an estimated 5 million people in the next six months.

"What happened on 26 December, 2004, was an unprecedented global catastrophe. It requires an unprecedented global response ... It is a race against time," he said.

Governments around the world have pledged more than $4 billion in aid so far and private groups, corporations and individuals another $660 million.

The aid pledges came as both the U.N. and WHO warned that there may yet be more casualties from the strongest earthquake in 40 years and the tsunami it unleashed.

"If basic needs ... are not urgently restored to all populations by the end of this week, 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," WHO said in a statement on Wednesday.

U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland also cautioned that the number of dead was yet far from clear in the isolated provinces of Aceh and Sumatra, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, which was close to the epicenter of the earthquake.

As many as a million people may have lived in the area before it was struck by the tsunami, but it was difficult to say how many remained because many survivors had fled to the hilly and heavily forested interiors, Egeland said.

"I do not think we are even close to having any figures as to how many people have died, how many are missing, how many have been severely affected," he told reporters.

SURVIVORS TRY TO REBUILD LIVES

In a declaration at the end of the Jakarta summit, the delegates of 26 nations and groups called for stronger coordination of relief efforts.

They also asked the United Nations (news - web sites) "to convene an international pledging conference for the sustainability of humanitarian relief efforts."

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Japan, with its "countless experiences" with earthquakes and tsunamis, was willing to freeze debt payments for affected countries and called on others to do the same.

In Edinburgh, British finance minister Gordon Brown said the Group of Seven rich industrial countries and the Paris Club of creditor nations must stand ready to consider all options.

Far from the Jakarta conference, survivors of the tsunami were struggling to come to terms with the devastation of their villages, though a few began returning to their wrecked homes.

"I am scared. I am scared the tsunami will come again and kill us," said Dana Lakshmi after returning to her destroyed home in a village in south India.

"But we have to get on with our lives. Sometimes, I am lost. I wonder if we will live like this forever, if we will ever rebuild our home."

In Aceh's devastated capital Banda Aceh, shopkeepers and restaurant owners reopened for business on Thursday, despite fresh aftershocks that interrupted the daily hunt by survivors for clean water and food.

"We have to open, if not, many people will starve," said Muhammad Saman, whose small restaurant is sandwiched between a refugee tent city and the destroyed homes that litter the coast.

Indian authorities said they had evacuated dozens of the world's most primitive people for their homelands in the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

In one case, eight members of the tiny hunter-gatherer Shompen tribe were flown out by helicopter after their settlement on Great Nicobar island was submerged.

Officials said the Shompens, who almost never leave their island, had been kept in a special area on a nearby island to protect them from unwelcome outside influences.

(For more news on emergency relief from Reuters AlertNet visit http://www.alertnet.org email: alertnet@reuters.com; +44 20 7542 2432) (Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammad, Michelle Nichols, Muklis ali, George Nishuyama, Dan Eaton, Harry Suhartono, Gde Anugrah Arka and Telly Nathalia)