Bush Boosts U.S. Aid Tenfold

President Bush announced a tenfold increase Friday in U.S. aid to victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami, pledging $350 million to address an “epic disaster” that he said could require still greater sums.

The leap in assistance marked the fourth consecutive day in which the Bush administration has widened its response to the Asian catastrophe amid criticism that the U.S. reacted to the burgeoning humanitarian crisis with too little and too late.

Bush’s announcement came as the United Nations estimated that the number of deaths in Sunday’s disaster was approaching 150,000 and as promises of aid climbed to nearly $1.2 billion. Untold thousands of people have been injured, and an estimated 1 million were left homeless in the 11 stricken countries.

U.S. military helicopters with a Navy task force off Indonesia began ferrying relief supplies to the region late Friday as up to 20,000 U.S. service members began arriving. A Marine strike group is headed for Sri Lanka, and U.S. Pacific Command officers worked to set up a joint U.S. military task force base at Utapao, Thailand. More than 40 helicopters will be in the region within days, said Lt. Col. Bill Bigelow of the Pacific Command.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who Sunday will leave with the president’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, on a tour to inspect some of the 3,000 miles of shattered coastlines, met Friday with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in New York. The two agreed that the amount of money available would be less an issue than the daunting task of reaching far-flung millions in desperate need.

In the disaster region, stunned survivors along the west coast of the island of Sumatra in Indonesia trickled back to population centers Friday. They reported that miles of coastline appeared to be devoid of living people. In isolated northeast Sri Lanka, groups of young men searched for bodies and quickly burned them for fear of spreading disease.

Thousands of relief workers, equipment, food and water were being raced toward the region, but fears were growing that bottlenecks in the supply chain would slow the delivery of aid.

Powell and Gov. Bush will stop in Aceh, an Indonesian province in northwest Sumatra badly battered by the earthquake and tsunami, along with other ravaged areas in Indonesia and Thailand, U.S. officials said. Indonesia, which has the world’s largest population of Muslims, accounts for more than half of the deaths reported so far. The death toll in Indonesia alone is at least 80,000, and officials said Friday that it could reach 100,000.

The trip by Powell and Gov. Bush was announced during a week in which administration officials increased their pledges of aid and support on successive days.

On Tuesday, officials upped their cash pledge from $15 million to $35 million after a U.N. aid official termed the initial offers by Western countries “stingy.”

President Bush made his first personal comments on the disaster Wednesday. On Thursday, he announced the trip by Powell and Gov. Bush, and on Friday he unveiled the tenfold jump in U.S. aid.

The daily scramble to offer new assistance came amid criticism that the administration had missed an opportunity to swiftly help large populations of Muslims and other impoverished residents of the battered region.

The criticism continued to reverberate Friday as U.S. Muslim groups weighed whether the Bush administration had bungled a chance to alleviate anger in the Muslim world over the Iraq war.

“Had this happened in a place like Europe, the American reaction would have been extraordinarily different,” said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East affairs expert at the University of Maryland and a board member of Human Rights Watch. Although the administration can still recover, he said, “it’s much harder to make a second impression.”

The administration’s tenfold funding increase was announced by a White House spokesman in a telephone conference call with reporters. Bush has been on vacation at his ranch near Crawford since Sunday. He is scheduled to return to Washington this Sunday morning.

“Initial findings of American assessment teams on the ground indicate that the need for financial and other assistance will steadily increase in the days and weeks ahead,” Bush said in a statement. “Our contributions will continue to be revised as the full effects of this terrible tragedy become clearer.”

Bush made the decision after conferring with Powell and Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The source of the additional money announced Friday was not immediately specified. But White House spokesman Trent Duffy said that none of it would come from an $18-billion fund earmarked for rebuilding Iraq.

Appearing at the United Nations with Annan, Powell said that the Bush administration wanted to base its contribution on a solid assessment of needs. He said U.S. officials wanted to avoid a situation in which “each day, everybody was trying to play, ‘Can you top this?’ ”

Annan said that relief workers were in “a race against time” to reach people in isolated areas that had not had access to fresh water or medical help for six days. Bottlenecks remain in delivering aid, especially in Aceh, which is closest to the epicenter of the undersea earthquake that created the tsunami. The U.S. has set up a regional support center in Thailand and a distribution center in Aceh to keep the supplies flowing to where they are needed most.

The United States also has formed a core group with India, Japan, Canada and Australia to help coordinate relief efforts with the U.N.

“We created the core group earlier in the week because we saw the need for a coordination mechanism that could be created rather quickly,” Powell said. “This is not the time for squabbles. This is the time to work together in a time of need.”

The U.S. military is flying six C-130 transport planes out of Utapao, a Thai air base used by American forces during the Vietnam War. They are carrying medicine and medical personnel to the Thai towns of Phuket and Krabi and flying out injured people.

“Everything that’s movable is moving,” said Col. Scott Page, military attache at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. “We’re flying. We’re moving stuff, but getting stuff into the right places, that’s the challenge.”

An estimated 150 Americans have been treated in Thailand for severe injures, U.S. Embassy spokesman Mark Larsen said.

The embassy is asking all Americans in Thailand to check in with family and friends at home “in order to cut down the number of people who have been registered as missing but who are not,” Larsen said.

The airport in the Sumatran city of Medan was one of the centers of the relief effort, but appeared too small to handle large volumes of people or cargo. Some flights were being sent directly to the single-runway airport in the Aceh provincial capital of Banda Aceh, where aid was being stored in an area of the tarmac that was covered but otherwise out in the open.

Activity at Banda Aceh has risen dramatically in the last several days. Numerous helicopters could be seen in the area at the same time, and trucks were arriving to pick up aid shipments.

At the United Nations, Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland said the final death toll could climb beyond 150,000.

“We will never, ever have the absolute definite figure because there are many nameless fishermen and villagers that have just gone, and we have no chance of finding out how many they were,” Egeland said.

In spite of Bush administration efforts to convey a deep involvement in the crisis, Muslim community leaders said that the White House’s early inaction would be remembered, especially by those who see U.S. war outlays as an indicator of Bush’s priorities.

“If we can afford to spend hundreds of billions of dollars waging war, I’m sure we can do more to help alleviate the suffering of millions of people in that part of the world,” said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which represents a community of 600,000.

Ayloush called Friday’s commitment of $350 million “a good start,” but added, “I have no doubt in my mind that the American people will give more in private donations.”

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, said Bush needed to continue trying to make up for a slow start.

“I think even the president’s advisors recognize now that he was a little late about speaking out about the dimensions of the disaster, and the United States was a bit tardy in real material assistance,” Hooper said. “I’m hoping they’re going to make up for initial perception and aid those in need, whoever they are.”

Arif Shaikh, spokesman for Islamic Relief USA, an international organization that has committed $10 million in assistance for India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, said that many Muslims would forgive the administration’s initial steps. “Even if they were unhappy at first, I’m sure this new news of $350 million will make them forget about it,” Shaikh said.

The decision to send Powell and Gov. Bush to the region was similarly late, and left both men much to do to convince those in the region and the world at large of U.S. sincerity, said James L. Lindsay, a former National Security Council official during the Clinton administration who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“In sending his brother, the president is trying to provide a tangible symbol about his concern about the issues. It would have been much more effective if he had made this announcement the day of the tsunami or the day after,” Lindsay said. “Now, unfortunately, the administration has put itself in a position in which it appears to be reacting because it’s been criticized, rather than acting because it’s concerned about the calamity.”

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Tsunami aid

Here is a partial list of aid pledged for tsunami victims, based on U.N. data published Friday:

*--* United States $350 million Britain $95 million Sweden $75.5 million Spain $68 million China $60 million France $57 million Australia $46.7 million Canada $33 million Japan $30 million Germany $27 million Switzerland $21.9 million Denmark $18.1 million Norway $16.6 million Portugal $11 million Qatar $10 million Saudi Arabia $10 million Singapore $3.6 million New Zealand $3.5 million Finland $3.3 million Kuwait $2 million United Arab Emirates $2 million Ireland $1.4 million Italy $1.3 million Turkey $1.25 million Czech Republic $750,000 Iran $627,000 South Korea $600,000 Hungary $411,000 Greece $397,000 Luxembourg $265,000 Monaco $133,000 Mexico $100,000 Nepal $100,000 Estonia $42,000

*--*

Source: Associated Press

Chen reported from Crawford, Farley from New York and Shogren from Washington. Times staff writers Paul Richter in Washington, Bruce Wallace in Phuket and Richard C. Paddock in Banda Aceh contributed to this report.