My Life and Times

January 5, 2005
Powell, in Indonesia, Describes Scenes of DevastationBy SCOTT SHANE
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, Jan. 5 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida got their first look at the epicenter of the tsunami's destruction today, flying low in Navy Seahawk helicopters over miles of flattened coastal villages where tens of thousands of people died.
"I cannot begin to imagine the horror that went through the families and all of the people who heard this noise coming and then had their lives snuffed out by this wave," Mr. Powell said after the half-hour flight.
"The power of the wave to destroy bridges, to destroy factories, to destroy homes, to destroy crops, to destroy everything in its path is amazing. And to consider that we only did a brief tour around Banda Aceh, but to know that you will see the same thing if you flew 100 miles along the coastline going south, or if you went to the east side and flew along the coastline you would see the same things.
"I have never seen anything like it in my experience."
For the secretary and Governor Bush, who has come as the personal representative of his brother, the president, the Aceh visit was the second day touring the disaster area.
Governor Bush will head home Thursday as Mr. Powell attends a conference in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, of nations affected by the tsunami and those that have pledged more then $2 billion in aid.
Today, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany confirmed reports that his country would pledge $674 million in long-term aid.
"We know about the importance of immediate aid but it's not enough," Mr. Schroder said at a news conference in Berlin after a cabinet meeting.
Germany was later surpassed by Australia as the biggest single contributor to relief funds, when Prime Minister John Howard announced at a news conference that his country had pledged $765 million in loans and grants over five years to relief efforts.
"This is a historic step in Indonesian-Australian relations in the wake of this terrible natural disaster," Mr. Howard said during a visit to Jakarta.
Mr. Powell, who visited the island of Phuket in Thailand with Governor Bush on Tuesday and will visit Sri Lanka on Friday, seemed moved by his first-hand view of the scale of the destruction in the remote Indonesian region of Aceh.
"In more than 40 years in the military and as a high-level government official, I've been in war and I've been through a number of hurricanes, tornadoes and other relief operations, but I have never seen anything like this," he said.
"Flying over Banda Aceh and seeing how the wave came ashore, pushing everything in its path, cars, ships, freighters overturned, all the way up to the foothills, and then starting up the foothills until finally the waves came to a stop."
Mr. Powell said he and the top Indonesian official in charge of the recovery, Alwi Shihab, agreed on the need to increase the number of landings by American C-130 transport planes delivering water, food, shelter and medicine. The number of flights has been limited by flight-control operations, said Andrew Natsios, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, but should be increased over the next day or so.
Mr. Natsios said his agency has rented 80 trucks to move supplies overland to Banda Aceh. But the trip takes three days because of damaged roads and the threat of violence in a continuing conflict between Aceh separatists and Indonesian government troops. A firefight two days ago halted the relief trips for eight hours.
Today's announcements by Mr. Schröder and Mr. Howard came as fresh infusions of aid on Tuesday gave yet more push to the global relief effort for Asia as it confronted monsoon rains, logistical breakdowns and the urgent need for everything from earthmoving equipment to trucks in the struggle to reach the survivors in the most remote areas.
Jan Egeland, the United Nations' emergency coordinator, acknowledged the many obstacles but called the global response "phenomenal." He spoke on a day when expectations rose that pledges could far exceed $2 billion.
With television broadcasts showing American servicemen delivering aid to victims of the last week's tsunami, Mr. Powell candidly acknowledged on Tuesday the hope that the United States' military help and its $350 million contribution might improve America's image in the Islamic world. Indonesia, home of two-thirds of the estimated 150,000 people who have died, is the world's most populous Muslim country.
"We'd be doing it regardless of religion," Mr. Powell said in Jakarta on the second day of his tour through the region with Mr. Bush. "But I think it does give the Muslim world and the rest of the world an opportunity to see American generosity, American values in action."
"America is not an anti-Islam, anti-Muslim nation," Mr. Powell added in his remarks to reporters alongside the Indonesian foreign minister, Hassan Wirajuda. "America is a diverse society where we respect all religions. And I hope that as a result of our efforts, as a result of our helicopter pilots being seen by the citizens of Indonesia helping them, that value system of ours will be reinforced."
For his part, Mr. Wirajuda, a Harvard Law School graduate, went out of his way to praise the performance of the American military in the aid effort. "We particularly appreciate the crucial role that the United States armed forces play in providing helicopters for relief assistance for victims and survivors at the remote and isolated areas," he said.
The American forces sent so far, which include a crew of nearly 6,000 on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, proved essential in launching rescue helicopters on Tuesday after a cargo plane reportedly struck a water buffalo at the airport in Banda Aceh.
The accident closed the runway for much of the day and exposed the vulnerable logistics of what relief and military officials have called the largest aid operation ever.
"We are making extraordinary progress in reaching the majority of people affected in the majority of the areas," said Mr. Egeland, the United Nations coordinator. "We are also experiencing extraordinary obstacles in many, many areas."
Even as contributions mounted, the United Nations office overseeing relief from Geneva appealed for generators, water purification equipment, some 250 trucks and cargo planes able to land on short runways, which it said only the United States and Britain could provide, according to Reuters.
With each day, the relief efforts amounted to a race against time for perhaps tens of thousands among the estimated 400,000 people left injured or without shelter since the earthquake erupted on Dec. 26 and sent wave after wave crashing into Sumatra's western shore.
The World Health Organization warned that pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria and many infections, including gangrenous wounds left untended in the tropical heat, were taking an increasing toll in Aceh, Sumatra's most afflicted province. The region around the coastal town of Meulaboh, still inaccessible except by air, remained a particular concern.
"The casualty rates in Meulaboh defy imagination," Aitor Lacomba, the Indonesia director of the International Rescue Committee, an aid group, told Reuters. "Tens of thousands need immediate assistance there."
Rescue workers were reportedly preparing to use small boats and motorbikes in the hunt for more survivors and to deliver assistance, as helicopters shuttled workers from the international aid group Doctors Without Borders into isolated areas. They reported casualty rates of 70 to 80 percent in some places.
"The people who survive have done that under very difficult circumstances, often surviving on coconuts alone," an official of the group, Erwin Vantland, told BBC World TV. "The picture becomes grimmer and grimmer the more we learn."
The full scale of the devastation came into sharper focus in other regions as well. Indian officials raised the number of those believed missing on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to more than 6,000. They also came under increasing pressure from international aid groups to allow outside relief workers to tend to more than 21,000 people now sheltered in camps on the islands, which have been closed to protect endangered aboriginal tribes.
In Sri Lanka, health officials warned that relentless seasonal rains were slowing the delivery of aid and threatening to spread water-borne disease.
Mr. Powell said Myanmar, also known as Burma, the region's most politically isolated nation, did not appear to have suffered severely, according to satellite photographs of the closed country's coastline. Another government official said visitors from the Red Cross and other organizations had confirmed that impression.
The Myanmar authorities and aid agencies had announced fewer than 100 deaths, but other authorities believed that the actual toll might be far higher.
For the United States, the aid effort that is focused on Indonesia unfolds at a time when America's standing among Muslims is at an all-time low.
Since the 9/11 attacks, the State Department has begun a number of public diplomacy campaigns aimed at improving the image of America and emphasizing that it is not hostile to Islam. But with the war in Iraq filling television screens worldwide with images of American soldiers battling in a Muslim land, those messages have often been muted.
In Indonesia, which has also suffered terror attacks from extremists in recent years, Mr. Powell said America supported democracy and economic progress globally in part because such change "dries up those pools of dissatisfaction which might give rise to terrorist activity."
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