Parents impoverished by the 2004 tsunami are still being forced to put their children into orphanages because they cannot afford to care for them, according to a British charity.

Thousands of children in the Indonesian province of Aceh have been institutionalised, even though more than 85 per cent have at least one living parent and 42 per cent have both parents alive.

Save the Children cautioned that it had found disturbing evidence that some of the 17 orphanages set up after the Boxing Day disaster had been “recruiting” children to get extra aid money.

The plight of tsunami victims in Aceh province, where 170,000 died, is echoed in an Oxfam report into rehousing. A third of the 128,000 houses needed have been built as part of a $10 billion (£5 billion) programme that has made the province the largest building project in the developing world.

Even so, more than 70,000 poor families are still languishing in cramped wooden “barracks” that were intended to house them for only a few months while they waited for new land and homes.

Problems with land rights have slowed progress: up to 15 per cent of Aceh’s agricultural land could be lost permanently, most land titles were destroyed and most people lost their identity papers. This year there have also been complaints of corruption.

Aceh’s economy was devastated by the disaster, with thousands of fishing boats smashed, businesses wrecked and infrastructure ruined. Save the Children said that many parents had been forced to turn to orphanages because they could not afford to feed, clothe and educate their children, who often spent more than 12 months in institutions.

The report also found that orphanages had an incentive to find as many children as possible to look after because they were paid on a per-head basis. Instead of spending on institutions, it called for money to be spent on supporting families and communities where possible, including helping families to pay full education costs.

Kevin Byrne, director of Save the Children UK in Indonesia, said: “These children lost a great deal in the tsunami but are now missing out on the care and protection of their parents. Indonesia is at a crossroads in terms of how it responds to the challenge of caring for its most vulnerable children — support must be given to benefit families rather than the institutions that keep them apart.”

Although blighted by decades of insurgency, Aceh was one of the wealthier parts of Indonesia before the tsunami, with fertile soil and proximity to Malaysia and Singapore, where many Achenese worked and sent back remittances. Its people hope that their fortunes will be transformed by exploitation of offshore oil and gas resources and a successful post-tsunami peace process, which takes a big step forward next month with local elections.

Poverty still dogs the province, however, and many people who lost everything to the giant waves have found it difficult to recover. Fadlullah Wilmot, of the British charity Muslim Aid, who has worked in Aceh for more than 20 years, said: “We saw a big increase in poverty levels after the tsunami. Livelihood training programmes are getting under way but more needs to be done, especially for the poorest and most marginalised.”

The lost

Thai authorities began burying 110 unidentified victims of the 2004 tsunami in Phang Nga province yesterday (AP)

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