A diplomat's sobering trip
Indonesia is also desperately short of spare parts for its military cargo planes, needed to ferry aid supplies. Only seven of its 24 planes are in working order, but U.S. policy precludes selling military supplies because of human-rights concerns. Powell decided to make an exception in order to get five more planes in service, saying, "It seemed to me that the humanitarian need you saw yesterday trumps, right now, the reservations we have."
Powell ended up digging quite deeply into the mechanics of what has become the most complex relief effort in history. In Thailand, he was asked by local officials for help with forensic expertise as they try to identify the bodies of hundreds of foreign tourists, most of them Europeans. In Banda Aceh, Powell was alarmed to learn that air traffic control snafus were slowing crucial deliveries of food and clean water. He pushed Indonesian officials to boost the number of flights and called for many more helicopters to reach the miles and miles of remote coastline. Sadly, a shocking number of the locals who would normally be on the front lines of the aid effort are missing too--only a third of Aceh's civil servants survived the killer wave.
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