BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - Relief workers are finding fewer children in camps for tsunami refugees than they had hoped and fear that children make up an even greater percentage of the dead than was estimated earlier.
"You just don't see the little kids in the camps: babies, infants and toddlers," said Christine Knudsen, a senior officer for Save the Children, a nonprofit worldwide advocacy and relief group. "Let's hope we're wrong. But that's the trend right now."
And security fears again threatened to hamper tsunami relief efforts Monday, with U.N. officials banning aid workers from traveling in parts of devastated Aceh province after reports that fighting had broken out between Indonesian government forces and insurgents.
Hard numbers on the number of child victims are difficult to come by. Relief workers originally estimated that children made up three of every 10 people killed when an earthquake triggered a tsunami that swept the coasts of 12 countries Dec. 26, killing at least 162,000.
But as relief workers canvass camps in Indonesia - the hardest-hit country - to tally the number of children, they're beginning to reassess their first estimates.
"In all the camps, the number of children is low," said Frederic Sizaret, a child-protection officer with the United Nations Children's Fund, better known as UNICEF.
Experts originally calculated that children constituted about 30 percent of victims because that's their relative proportion in the general population, Knudsen said. When relief officials first arrived in Indonesia, they thought they would find thousands of children either orphaned or missing one of their parents, and many lost children being cared for by other adults.
So far, however, UNICEF and other agencies that are working with minors have found only 400 cases of "separated" children, a term for anyone younger than 18 who's separated from both parents or from customary caregivers, Sizaret said.
"The number of separated and unaccompanied children is not as high as we feared," said Shantha Bloemen, a spokeswoman for UNICEF. "One speculation is that it is because so many children were killed."
Workers in Aceh province have collected 84,637 bodies, with as many as 132,000 more people missing, most of whom, three weeks after the tsunami, aren't expected to be found alive.
Monday's travel ban for relief workers came after Denmark warned its aid workers to beware of an imminent terror attack - a caution that prompted U.N. officials to launch an investigation and declare a state of "heightened awareness" in Aceh, where separatists have been fighting for an independent state for decades.
Niels-Erik Andersen of the Danish Foreign Ministry's security section declined to say what prompted the warning or what kind of threat was made against aid workers in the region.
Insisting that aid workers had nothing to fear, rebel leader Tengku Mucksalmina dismissed Indonesian government claims that insurgents might attack relief convoys in hopes of stealing food for their fighters.
"Our mothers, our wives, our children are victims from this tragedy. We would never ambush any convoy with aid for them," Mucksalmina told the Associated Press from his jungle hideout outside Banda Aceh. "We want them (aid groups) to stay. We ask them not to leave the Acehnese people who are suffering."
The militants have been fighting for three decades to gain independence for Aceh.
The travel ban between the provincial capital of Banda Aceh and the east Sumatran city of Medan came "strictly because of the fighting going on down there," said Mans Nyberg, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The ban was to be in effect from Monday night until this morning between the two cities, a 280-mile stretch of road.
Japan meeting to focus on natural disasters
KOBE, Japan - The world's nations, generous with their aid since the Asian tsunami catastrophe, must take action to be prepared for and prevent such natural events from becoming mass killers, the U.N. emergency relief chief said Monday.
"After the tsunami, I believe everybody expects concrete results coming out of Kobe," Jan Egeland said on the eve of the five-day World Conference on Disaster Reduction.
The gathering is expected to attract 3,000 government officials, nongovernmental experts and other specialists from around the world to discuss ways to reverse the growth in numbers of people affected by natural disasters.
The earthquake and tsunami have focused new attention on the long-planned U.N. conference, where delegates are expected to work on plans for a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean similar to one in the Pacific.
--Information from Knight Ridder Newspapers and the Associated Press was used in this report.
