Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla has given international troops until March 26 to leave Aceh province, where they are helping provide relief after last month's earthquake and tsunami, a military spokesman said.

Australia and the U.S. are among the nations helping to ferry supplies to survivors in the province in northern Sumatra. Kalla said overseas forces should hand over the operation to Indonesia three months after the Dec. 26 disaster, the spokesman, Ahmad Yani Basuki, said in a telephone interview today in Jakarta.

Aceh province was nearest the epicenter of the magnitude-9 earthquake that caused the tsunami to strike coastlines in South Asia and East Africa. More than 170,000 people were killed or are missing. Indonesia has the highest toll, with 106,523 deaths recorded by the Social Ministry.

``We have had no formal request for troops to leave,'' Mark Williams, a spokesman for Australian Defense Minister Robert Hill, said today in Canberra. ``We will stay there as long as Indonesia wants us to, in cooperation with Indonesia, to get the job done.''

The Indonesian army has been fighting the Free Aceh Movement, which began an armed struggle for independence in 1976. The group wants cease-fire talks with the government, to help the aid effort, Agence France-Presse said today, citing a statement from rebel leader Malik Mahmud.

Bodies Found

Of the dead, 21,141 were from Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, the Social Ministry said. Another 28,251 bodies were found in the coastal town of Meulaboh, which took the twin hits from the quake and the tsunami, the ministry said on its Web site. The town had a population of 60,000 before the disaster, the government said.

Thousands of bodies are still being found amid the rubble in Aceh each day, AFP reported, citing the government. There were 3,809 bodies found yesterday and buried, AFP said.

Australia has 1,016 soldiers, military doctors, nurses and engineers in the region. There are about 13,000 U.S. soldiers involved in the relief effort for the province, supported by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of Aceh. France has five Super Puma military transport helicopters delivering aid. Singapore, Britain and Japan also have forces helping in the area.

Indonesia's military called on aid workers to register with the government's coordinating agency in Banda Aceh, citing security concerns and to avoid problems with the relief effort.

Moving Freely

``We were the people with the transportation resources,'' U.S. envoy B. Lynn Pascoe told reporters in Jakarta. He said any speculation the U.S. had ulterior motives in its aid relief amounted to ``conspiracy theories.''

World Food Program convoys and staff are moving freely around the province, the agency said in a statement updating the status of tsunami relief efforts.

Indonesia's military has been checking with aid workers in the field to learn whether they have encountered rebels, said Jose Rizal, a doctor with the Jakarta-based aid organization Medical Emergency Rescue Committee, or Mer-C, in a telephone interview in Jakarta.

``The military there has been helpful and, in fact, we probably need more personnel to help with rehabilitation efforts,'' he said. ``What we need from the Indonesian government now is: Let us do our job, helping the survivors in Aceh. Please don't make things complicated.''

Reports on Travel

Foreign aid workers and foreign journalists are required to report to the government to travel to areas outside Banda Aceh, Aceh Besar district and Meulaboh in the western part of the province, Budi Atmadi Adiputro, chief of operations for the National Aceh Disaster Relief Team, the government aid coordination team, said in a faxed statement today.

All foreigners will need to fill in a form detailing their current and planned activities as well as the exact locations of their activities, according to the statement.

Contributions available from aid organizations totaled $18.9 billion at the end of yesterday, the United Nations said. Donor nations have pledged $3 billion in humanitarian assistance, led by Germany and Japan, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on its Web site today.

The UN's World Food Program said it had delivered 9,744 tons of food aid as of yesterday for 1.07 million people in the 12 countries affected by the disaster. The WFP is providing food for more than 300,000 people in Aceh and may increase food aid to 500,000 people in the next two weeks, it said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Claire Leow in Jakarta at cleow@bloomberg.net Soraya Permatasari in Jakarta at soraya@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: January 13, 2005 05:50 EST