Sombre New Year mood as death toll continues to rise

BANDA ACEH, INDONESIA - Asia's tsunami death toll soared above 125,000 today and aid agencies warned many more people -- particularly children -- could die in epidemics, ushering in a sombre New Year's Eve for the world.

While authorities rushed to identify and bury the dead, many reduced to rotting corpses after days in tropical heat, a United Nations masterminded relief operation rapidly focused more on Thursday on getting food and clean water to millions of survivors.

"This is an unprecedented, global catastrophe and it requires an unprecedented, global response," UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told reporters on Thursday local time as UN officials said up to five million people were without basic services.

Annan, overseeing what could be the UN's largest natural disaster relief effort, held talks with a four-country coalition announced by United States President George W Bush to take a lead role. Washington has linked up with Australia, India and Japan.

UN emergency relief co-ordinator Jan Egeland said the World Health Organisation had informed him that diarrhoea and respiratory diseases were on the rise after Sunday's disaster.

"We could be in a situation that more children could die from diarrhoea in the next weeks than those who were killed by the tsunami," said Egeland.

The Asian disaster cast a long shadow over the world's New Year celebrations, especially as about 5000 foreign tourists -- mostly Europeans -- were still missing.

Sweden, Norway and Finland, hard hit by the disaster as many Scandinavians like to escape their cold winters for the Asian sunshine, plan to fly flags at half mast to start the New Year.

The death toll shot up more than 50 per cent on Thursday with still no clear picture of conditions in some remote villages as well as islands around India and Indonesia.

Rescue workers pressed on into isolated villages devastated by a disaster that could yet eclipse a cyclone that struck Bangladesh in 1991, killing 138,000 people.

Indonesia's Health Ministry said just under 80,000 people -- some 28,000 more than previously announced -- had died in the northern Aceh province that was close to a 9.0 magnitude undersea quake that triggered the tsunami.

The airport of the main city, Banda Aceh, was busy with aid flights but residents said little was getting through to them. Hungry crowds jostling for aid biscuits besieged people delivering them in the city. Some drivers dared not stop.

"Some cars come by and throw food like that. The fastest get the food, the strong one wins. The elderly and the injured don't get anything. We feel like dogs," Usman, 43, said.

City residents fled their homes when two aftershocks revived fresh memories of the worst earthquake in 40 years.

"This isn't just a situation of giving out food and water. Entire towns and villages need to be rebuilt from the ground up," Rod Volway of CARE Canada, whose emergency team was one of the first into Aceh, said.

Many villages and resorts from Indonesia to Sri Lanka are now mud-covered rubble, blanketed with the stench of corpses.

- REUTERS