U.N. to hire tsunami survivors for massive cleanup

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - Tens of thousands of Indonesian tsunami survivors will be given $4-a-day jobs cleaning up the disaster's debris, the United Nations said Friday, offering a temporary income to people whose livelihoods were swept away along with their homes.

The relief operation struck a snag on the other side of the tsunami zone, however, where the Sri Lankan government suspended three village officials in charge of aid deliveries for abusing their positions, and said it was investigating 10 other cases of possible misappropriation.

Governments and international and private aid groups were reassessing their operations to help more than 1 million people left in need by the Dec. 26 earthquake and tsunami as the U.S. military began scaling down its emergency relief effort, and other nations' forces prepared to follow suit.

The confirmed death toll across 11 tsunami-struck countries edged higher - to between 159,976 and 178,115 - after Indonesia's National Disaster Relief Coordinating Board said its workers had found and buried 1,108 more bodies in Aceh province on Sumatra island.

The toll is expected to climb further, with estimates of the missing ranging from 26,404 to 142,107 and most presumed dead. The varying tallies partly reflect discrepancies in counting methods by different government agencies.

The U.N. Development Program said it will hire up to 30,000 tsunami survivors to help clean up Aceh, starting with a pilot program of about 100 people in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh and expanding to all affected towns.

Where possible, scrap iron and steel and slabs of concrete will be recycled, and vegetation will be used as compost, said UNDP spokeswoman Mieke Kooistra.

"It will inject money into the economy almost immediately," Kooistra said. "People will receive a daily wage. The process of collecting waste in a structured way ... will speed up the recovery in damaged areas."

The workers will be paid about $4 a day, a good wage for unskilled labor in the province.

In Sri Lanka, two village officials were suspended for allegedly channeling tsunami aid to friends who were not affected by the disaster, while a third was suspended for being drunk on duty, said W. Weerakoon, a government administrator in the southern district of Galle.