Rescuers found 345 more bodies on the tsunami-hit Andamans as India's military continued yesterday to evacuate entire islands which have been declared unfit for human inhabitation.
The official death toll on the Indian islands now stands at 1,837, but with more than 5,600 still listed as missing a minister warned yesterday that the grieving was not over.
"Even today some bodies were found," said India's Tribal Affairs Minister P.R. Kyndiah, who is conducting an in-depth assessment of the massive destruction on the tropical archipelago.
"But it is difficult to declare the thousands who are missing as dead because miracles still do happen."
Scheduled events and local celebrations have been cancelled on the Andaman and Nicobar islands since the tsunami struck on Dec. 26.
The number of those officially declared missing also went up by 83 to 5,625, an official government spokesman said in the capital Port Blair.
Some 4,400 of the missing disappeared on Katchal island, close to the epicenter of the Dec. 26 undersea earthquake off nearby Indonesia.
Survivors sheltering in tsunami relief camps are leaving for mainland India. Some 1,302 people sailed out overnight from Port Blair for Calcutta or Madras to escape the hardships, officials said.
"People are also returning to their homes [on the islands] to rebuild their lives and as of today we have 35,962 affected people living in camps," said Ram Kapse, governor of the 500-plus chain of islands.
The Indian military, spearheading its largest peacetime operation, is evacuating entire islands which have been declared unfit for human inhabitation.
Andaman's chief secretary V.V. Bhat said the populations of a total of six islands in the Indian Ocean would be rehabilitated elsewhere because of the scale of devastation.
"We have evacuated the entire [surviving] population of 1,230 people from Chowra to the island of Teressa and are moving out another 422 inhabitants from islands like Pilomillo and Little Nicobar to Campbell Bay," he said.
After a tour of islands inhabited by Andaman's five ancient aboriginal groups, Kyndiah warned that a similar exercise may have to be undertaken on other islands as well.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last week pledged two billion rupees (US$43.5 million) for the ravaged Andamans. Material and funds are also pouring in from across India for the archipelago where 356,000 lived before the tsunamis.
In related news, Indian authorities working to help tsunami victims yesterday rounded up reporters and demanded photographers surrender illegal pictures of protected tribal Aborigines.
Ram Kapse, the chief administrator of Andaman and Nicobar group of islands, said he was fed up with the media's intrusive obsession with tribal groups who survived the devastation with minimal loss.
"There is a complaint that some journalists have taken photographs of the Jarawa tribal people and there are others doing other things in prohibited areas," Kapse said.
"These Jarawas are not showpieces and since there is a law we are going to be very strict and anyone who has photographed them must surrender the films before leaving this island," Kapse said in the Andamanese capital Port Blair.
A 1957 Indian law prohibits photography of the Stone Age Aborigines on the isolated archipelago, which is administered directly by New Delhi. Unsupervised contact with the tribals is also banned.
Local conservationalists are up in arms over intrusions into secluded islands by journalists who converged here after the towering waves struck on Dec. 26.
"In an island inhabited by the Sentinelese, journalists were taken in a military helicopter and the Aboriginals were provoked to shoot arrows," the Society of Andaman and Nicobar Ecology (SANE) said in a complaint to Kapse.
"That makes great TV footage but reveals the insensitivity with which both the media and the military handle the Aboriginals," it said.
SANE called for a federal probe into other instances of intrusions into restricted habitats.
In other developments, Red Cross officials on the Andaman islands accused the government yesterday of "hijacking" their relief materials, as squabbles over aid continued in the archipelago.
In the weeks since the tsunami battered the Andaman and Nicobar islands, Indian and international relief agencies have complained that the territory's government doesn't appear to want them to travel to the faraway islands, where survivors say relief has come very late.
Yesterday, the Indian Red Cross Society said relief supplies it had in Port Blair, the federal territory's capital, had disappeared from the docks and were later found to have been taken by government workers.
"They hijacked our relief material. They robbed it," said Basudev Dass, joint secretary of the Indian Cross Society. "They want to take all the relief material and distribute it. We are very clear that we will go and distribute it to the real beneficiaries."
Ram Kapse, the territory's head of government and head of the Andaman Red Cross Society, declined to comment on the complaint.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in