Tsunami survivor who cheated death is found

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia -- A lone tsunami survivor has been rescued from a remote Indian island, officials said yesterday, a rare moment of hope in the Indian Ocean as nations pledged to try to stop such a disaster from happening again.

In the Andaman and Nicobar islands, an archipelago 750 miles from the Indian mainland, a military officer said a tribal man, Michael Mangal, had been rescued after surviving alone for more than three weeks eating only coconuts.

Mangal told rescuers the first giant wave sucked him out to sea before subsequent waves flung him back onto the tiny island of Pillow Panja, where he discovered everyone else from his village was gone.

It was one of the few pieces of good news in the Indian Ocean where as many as 225,000 died after a magnitude 9 earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered the tsunami on Dec. 26.

At a United Nations-sponsored conference in Kobe, international officials pledged to try to prevent such a disaster happening again by getting a tsunami warning system running within 18 months.

With so many missing after the waves slammed into nations around the Indian Ocean, conflicting figures put the total death toll from Indonesia to Somalia at between 158,000 and 225,000.

Although the grim task of finding bodies continues, relief workers said it was time to focus on rebuilding. Governments and private groups around the world have pledged more than $7 billion for tsunami-hit countries.

Chris Lom, spokesman for the Geneva-based International Organisation for Migration, said it was imperative for Indonesia and international aid workers to repair roads so that truck convoys could get food and supplies to hundreds of thousands of people in Aceh.

Relief work has been complicated by wrangles between Indonesia's military and rebels in Aceh.

Despite an informal cease-fire between the rebel Free Aceh Movement and Indonesian forces since the tsunami, Indonesian commanders say soldiers have killed 120 rebels for allegedly interfering in relief work over the past two weeks. A spokesman for the rebels said the army attacks had killed mostly civilians.

But in Sri Lanka, Tamil Tiger rebels said the disaster opened up possibilities for a solution to ethnic conflict there.

Chief rebel negotiator Anton Balasingham said after talks with Norwegian peace envoys that the government must do more to get aid to Tamil-held areas and build trust. But he said the Tamil Tigers had put politics aside after the tsunami.