UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 12 (UPI) -- The United Nations Wednesday sought clarification from Indonesia on whether new security restrictions would hamper tsunami relief operations in the strife-torn Aceh province of hard-hit Sumatra.
Indonesian authorities said aid workers needed permission to move outside the Banda Aceh and Meulobah areas and had to be accompanied by military escort on the western side of Sumatra.
The director of the Coordination and Response Division of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Kevin Kennedy, said Indonesia's restrictions must not hamper relief in the region where more than two-thirds of the tsunami's 160,000 deaths occurred.
"We certainly well understand that there has been a conflict in Aceh for the last quarter of a century," he said. "However, we are concerned that any requirements that would create any additional bottlenecks or delays or otherwise adversely affect our operations need to be viewed very carefully."
Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Margareta Wahlstrom, in Banda Aceh, was meeting with authorities to assess "what exactly it means and what impact it may have on our operations" in a province torn by decades of war with separatists, Kennedy said.
"The United Nations does have a policy on military escorts, which is we will accept them, but that would be an exception as opposed to normal policy," he said, noting the world body had used them for years in Burundi, and without them would not have been able to deliver assistance due to security situation.
"But that would be an exception," Kennedy told reporters at U.N. World Headquarters in New York in a daily update on the largest U.N. relief operation ever mounted for a natural disaster. "We would obviously prefer not to operate with military escorts. If our security threat assessment indicates that it is not required, we would not use them. But we remain flexible as required".
He pointed out that many U.N. partners have policies of not using military escorts under any circumstances.
Kennedy said operations in Sumatra and Aceh continued to accelerate in response to the disaster, which beyond its death toll left more than 500,000 people injured and up to 5 million without basic services throughout the Indian Ocean basin.
But, the relief coordinator added, "we continue to wrestle with a couple of problems" in a remote area made even more inaccessible by the destruction of roads and bridges, and he stressed the need to speed up relief at the overburdened airports at Banda Aceh and Medan in Sumatra.
He said Denmark had offered additional ground handlers to supplement work already being done by teams from Australia and Singapore and that the U.N. World Food Program was contracting for a "fast ship" to deliver supplies from Malaysia to Sumatra to reduce airport bottlenecks.
"Survival is still a critical issue and there is a continuing urgent need to find and help people who have been injured," the U.N. World Health Organization said in a report on the Aceh area.
"Treating wounds and other injuries continues to be a major need and an issue of pressing importance. That task has been made more difficult by problems of access and security around Aceh. As a result, it is hard to locate injured people who need urgent help," it added.
Just as urgent, if not more so, was the need to rush in clean drinking water to prevent diarrhea diseases such as cholera and typhoid.
However, Kennedy told reporters there have been no reports of disease outbreaks, so far.
He had nothing but praise for the "signal success" of Tuesday's meeting in Geneva that funded more than three-quarters of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's $977 million flash appeal last Thursday for five of the worst-hit nations in the Indian Ocean catastrophe.
"The bottom line is, I think, that it was a very successful event and extraordinary generosity," said the relief coordinator. "I don't believe that we have ever received this type of commitment so fast in response to any other emergency, whether it be a natural disaster or a complex emergency."
The secretary-general hailed "the generous pledges and, more importantly, the firm commitments" of the Geneva session, covering $756 million of the $977 million appeal. But in a statement issued by his spokesman, Annan also stressed the need to follow through and stay the course.
"Given the unprecedented needs, the secretary-general appeals to the international community to rapidly deliver on their pledges and urges all donors to sustain their support throughout the rehabilitation and reconstruction phase," the statement said. In past emergencies, money actually received fell far below the billions pledged.
In his statement, Annan urged the international community to establish a regional tsunami warning system which would have given coastal populations enough time to reach higher ground before the gigantic waves struck -- hours after the initial earthquake in many of the devastated countries.
The U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific promised to press ahead with such a system.
"If the disaster surveillance system that already covers the Pacific region had existed in the Indian Ocean, let me assure you that the tone of this international meeting would have been considerably different," ESCAP Executive Secretary Kim Hak-Su told a meeting in Mauritius of small-island developing states, noting that his organization was committed to establishing a task force for tsunami management.
