Politics, bureaucracy and fatigue hit tsunami aid effort

Thousands more bloated corpses pulled from the rubble took the death toll from the December 26 catastrophe to more than 168,000, while the upcoming Iraqi elections and President George W. Bush's inauguration inexorably took over the top spots in world news.

Indonesia backtracked on a demand that foreign soldiers involved in humanitarian work get out of the country within three months and in Thailand the leaders of Canada, Sweden, Norway and Finland were discussing reconstruction and efforts to identify the dead.

But survivors battled new difficulties, such as the impenetrable Indonesian bureaucracy that bars access to a huge outpouring of aid from a world shocked by the suffering of families around the Indian Ocean.

"We are like persons who do not exist. We have been hit hard by the disaster, lost everything and are famished," said Busriadi, a fishermen from the Tenggiri hamlet in what was the village of Ule Lhee near Aceh's capital, Banda Aceh, on Indonesia's Sumatra island.

"Where is the food, the clothes and other relief we can see on television flowing into Aceh?"

Busriadi, like thousands of others, lost his identity cards and other official documents to the sea, making his quest for aid a Kafkaesque nightmare.