Sawt Falasteen - Indonesia suffers food, medical shortages as Asia flood tolls rise

Tropical storms and monsoon rains have pummelled Southeast and South Asia this month, triggering landslides and flash floods from the rainforests of Indonesia's western Sumatra island to highland plantations in Sri Lanka.

"Everything is lacking, especially medical personnel. We are short on doctors," Muzakir Manaf, the governor of Indonesia's Aceh province, told reporters late Sunday.

Indonesia's national disaster mitigation agency (BNPB) said 961 people in Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra had been killed, while 293 were missing. More than a million people were displaced, the agency said.

In Pidie Jaya, a district in Aceh badly affected by the floods, four elephants from a nearby training centre picked up large pieces of rubble with their trunks and helped shift stuck vehicles.

"We brought four elephants to clear the debris from the houses of the communities that were swept away by the flood," Hadi Sofyan, the head of a local conservation agency, told AFP.

"Our target is to clean the debris near the residents' houses so they can access their homes," he said, adding the elephants would be used for the rest of the week.

The downpours and subsequent landslides throughout western Indonesia have injured at least 5,000 people and devastated infrastructure, including schools and hospitals.

In the city of Banda Aceh, long queues formed for drinking water and fuel, and prices of basic commodities such as eggs were skyrocketing, an AFP correspondent said.

Costs to rebuild after the disaster could run up to 51.82 trillion rupiah ($3.1 billion), the BNPB said late Sunday.

- Extra troops -

In Sri Lanka, the military deployed thousands of extra troops to aid recovery efforts on Monday after a devastating cyclone caused a wave of destruction and killed 627 people.

More than two million people -- nearly 10 percent of the population -- have been affected by Cyclone Ditwah, the worst on the island this century.

Sri Lanka is expecting further heavy monsoon rains this week, topping five centimetres in many places, the Disaster Management Centre (DMC) said. It issued warnings of further landslides.

Army chief Lasantha Rodrigo said 38,500 security personnel had been deployed to boost recovery and clean-up operations in flood-affected and landslide-hit areas, nearly doubling the initial deployment.

"Since the disaster, security forces have been able to rescue 31,116 people who were in distress," Rodrigo said in a statement.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake unveiled a recovery package, offering 10 million rupees ($33,000) for victims to buy land in safer areas and rebuild.

The government will also offer livelihood support and cash assistance to replace kitchen utensils and bedding and to buy food.

It is not clear how much the relief package will cost the government, which is still emerging from an economic meltdown in 2022 when it ran out of foreign exchange reserves to finance even essential imports.

Dissanayake has said the government cannot fund reconstruction alone and has appealed for foreign assistance, including from the International Monetary Fund.

Seasonal monsoon rains are a feature of life in South Asia and Southeast Asia, flooding rice fields and nourishing the growth of other key crops.

However, climate change is making the phenomenon more erratic, unpredictable, and deadly throughout the regions.

X.Habash--SF-PST