|
Kofi Annan's Brain Fart: "Where Are All the People?"
Geez, Kofi, I donno, could they like be dead? U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan flew over the tsunami-ravaged landscape of Indonesia's Aceh province on Friday and asked "Where are the people?" as Jakarta raised its death toll by thousands. Secretary of State Colin Powell also expressed shock at the scale of the disaster as he toured another devastated Indian Ocean country, Sri Lanka. As aid workers strove to reach hundreds of thousands of people thought to be stranded in isolated parts of Indonesia's Sumatra island, Jakarta added more than 7,000 deaths to its tsunami toll. It now stands at 101,318, out of a total of more than 153,000 for the 13 nations affected. "I have never seen such utter destruction, mile after mile. You wonder, where are the people?," Annan told reporters after a helicopter tour with World Bank chief James Wolfensohn over Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra. A day after a crisis aid summit in Jakarta, Powell toured Sri Lanka's south, where the giant waves that crashed ashore on Dec. 26 killed more than 30,000 and reduced coastal towns to piles of rubble. "The destruction that we saw was significant," he said as he wrapped up his lightning visit. "It was more than just walls that have been knocked down or buildings that have been crushed, but lives that were crushed and snuffed out." Posted by: Captain America 2005-01-07 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=53128 |