Prayers for dead, but many not laid to rest

Three weeks after the Asian tsunami, people near and far paused to remember the dead but hundreds of bodies rotting by the sea showed how much still has to be done to make life bearable for survivors.

Australia, holding a day of mourning, paused yesterday with New Zealand for a minute's silence at 0059 GMT, exactly 21 days after an undersea earthquake triggered the deadliest waves on record, killing a known 168,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

In a more personal tribute, a fisherman in the Indian village of Seruthur poured a pot of water around a coconut sapling near the sea that carries the name of his dead wife, Thangaponnu.

It is one of dozens of saplings planted on the beach in the last week, each bearing someone's name, in a "Garden of the Tsunami Dead" meant to provide a shield if the sea erupts again.

The World Food Programme found a thin silver lining to the disaster, saying aid flowing in might actually cut longer-term malnutrition in countries like Sri Lanka, where 30,000 people died and where one in three children gets too little to eat.

The WFP is feeding 1.2 million survivors from Sumatra to Somalia, the bulk of recipients in Sri Lanka. Executive Director James Morris said he was confident food was reaching most people who may have gone hungry in the early days.

US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also saw a slither of hope amid the suffering.

"This is a terrible disaster but the only good thing in it is that the response of the world to want to help is proportionate to the challenge," he said after talks with Indonesian leaders. Indonesian Defence Minister Juwono Sudarsono played down a March date announced last week for foreign forces to leave.

Twenty Japanese soldiers flew into Banda Aceh, launching Tokyo's biggest post-war military deployment for disaster assistance - a sensitive step in a country which, like much of Asia, was occupied by Japanese forces in World War II.