The United Nations humanitarian chief on Thursday urged the Indonesian government to reconsider its March deadline for the use of foreign military in the massive aid operation following the tsunami disaster.
UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland made the appeal at a press conference in New York in response to a question about Indonesia's deadline for all foreign military relief operations to leave by March 26.
"I hope that our Indonesian friends and colleagues will accept it is the needs of the population that will decide when military assets should be phased out completely," he said.
"There will be many more weeks for a very substantive military presence," he added, noting that military assets at the moment focused on helicopters, transport planes and the production of millions of liters of clean water.
"All of these things can be taken over by civilians and we will need less of that but I would foresee that we may need the military people to give us fuel, to give special kinds of hardware very quickly to certain areas beyond March and I hope really we can have an agreement on that," he said.
On Wednesday, Indonesian Vice President Yusuf Kalla said he wanted all foreign military to leave his country by the end of March or "the sooner the better," saying the emergency would be over by then.
Egeland also said he believed the relief effort could now avoid the feared "second wave of death" from the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, the toll taken by epidemic diseases.
"The second wave is being averted in most places as we speak," he said of diarrhoea, measles, malaria and pneumonia that are the biggest threat in the aftermath of such a disaster, with clean drinking water in short supply and tens of thousands living in crowded emergency camps.
"I do not think it's a right prediction any more that as many people can die from the second wave of destroyed infrastructure as we then feared in the beginning," he noted.
The Dec. 26 tsunami has so far claimed 160,000 lives, half of them children according to revised figures of the toll which originally put the percentage at only a third.
But it is "still an uphill battle" in Aceh, Indonesia, the worst-hit region, which now accounts for 118,000 of the overall death toll in the dozen counties ravaged by the destructive waves, with 2,000 to 3,000 more bodies being retrieved every day and a " phenomenal" number of those unaccounted for, he added.
The UN General Assembly will hold a special session next Tuesday, expected to be addressed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to consider strengthening coordination of humanitarian and disaster relief assistance with a special focus on the tsunami. The session was requested by members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).