With livelihoods washed away, cleanup pay to help

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia – Tens of thousands of Indonesian tsunami survivors will be given $4-a-day jobs cleaning up the disaster’s debris, the United Nations said Friday, offering a temporary income to people whose livelihoods were swept away along with their homes.

The relief operation struck a snag on the other side of the tsunami zone, however, where the Sri Lankan government suspended three village officials in charge of aid deliveries for abusing their positions, and said it was investigating 10 other cases of possible misappropriation.

Governments and international and private aid groups were reassessing their operations to help more than 1 million people left in need by the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami as the U.S. military began scaling down its emergency relief effort, and other nations’ forces prepared to follow suit.

The confirmed death toll across 11 tsunami-struck countries edged higher – to between 159,976 and 178,115 – after Indonesia’s National Disaster Relief Coordinating Board said its workers had found and buried 1,108 more bodies in Aceh province on Sumatra island.

The toll is expected to climb further, with estimates of the missing ranging from 26,404 to 142,107 and most presumed dead. The varying tallies partly reflect discrepancies in counting methods by different government agencies.

In another reminder of the disaster’s global scope, Spain confirmed its first tsunami death overnight Saturday. The Foreign Ministry said the body of a Spanish man who went missing in the Thai island resort of Phuket had been identified by forensic doctors.

The U.N. Development Program said it will hire up to 30,000 tsunami survivors to help clean up Aceh, starting with a pilot program of about 100 people in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh and expanding to all affected towns.

The earthquake and tsunami killed at least 110,000 people in Aceh, wiping out some villages and leaving behind acres of debris from destroyed fishing boats, wrecked houses and crushed cars.