COLOMBO, Jan 3 (AFP) - The death and devastation wrought by the tsunamis in Sri Lanka are "overwhelming", UNICEF chief Carol Bellamy said Monday, adding that the most haunting sight of her two-day tour of ravaged area was of parents watching for the sea to bring back the bodies of their children.
"The hardest work is yet ahead," Bellamy, executive director of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), warned at a media conference in the Sri Lankan capital.
"I am aware that there are parts of the country that have not yet been reached (by relief workers) and that the suffering among the survivors there is severe," she said.
"The death and devastation are truly overwhelming," added Bellamy, who has headed UNICEF since 1995.
"In my 10 years as executive director I have not seen anything of this scale," she said, clarifying that she was referring to the number of people killed combined with the total number of countries affected.
According to latest figures, the December 26 tsunamis, triggered by a seabed earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, has killed over 145,000 people across Asia, more than 30,000 of them in Sri Lanka.
Bellamy, who met government officials, Tamil Tiger leaders and heads of non-governmental organisations during her sweep through the island, said she expected UNICEF would spend some 40 million dollars in Sri Lanka "to help to keep children alive, to get them back to school, to give them hope for the future".
UNICEF was focusing its efforts on offering clean water, basic sanitation and adequate nutrition to children and on getting them back to school as quickly as possible.
"Nothing will signal hope more clearly than rebuilding and reopening schools," she said.
The UN body was also revising its initial estimates that about one-third of the tsunami victims in Sri Lanka had been children.
"We now believe this percentage was too low -- that in fact children turned out to be disproportionate victims of the floods. In the camps I visited throughout the country, children were simply too small a proportion of the survivors," Bellamy said.
"One of the most haunting sights I witnessed was in the southeast of the country, where I met adults who were standing vigil on the beach in the narrow hope that the bodies of their children might wash ashore," she added.
Bellamy was due to meet President Chandrika Kumaratunga late Monday before heading off to Indonesia, "where I know the situation is even more desperate."
01/03/2005 14:47 GMT - AFP