The United Nations said on Friday international aid was flowing smoothly to tsunami-hit areas of Aceh, denying reports of large numbers of containers languishing on Indonesian wharfs.

Michael Whiting of the UN Joint Logistics Center in Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra island, said early blockages were largely due to the inexperience of many non-government aid groups that flocked to the region after the Dec. 26 disaster.

"It's well within manageable proportions now," Whiting said. "Everyone has been extremely cooperative and we are all focused on the same thing. Get the stuff to the people who need it as quickly as we can," he told Reuters.

The international community has pledged billions of dollars in aid to tsunami-hit regions around the Indian Ocean, with the lion's share going to Indonesia. Some media reports in recent weeks have pointed to hold ups in aid delivery.

The elimination of red tape and the prevention of corruption has been a major concern for donors in the world's fourth most populous nation.

Whiting, responsible for aid logistics in Sumatra, said that in April a backlog of some 1,500 containers had built up on the docks at Medan's main Belawan port, but that as of July 12 there were only 300 containers of aid, half of which had been there for only a week.

"Everyone was pointing the finger at the Indonesian government," Whiting said of the earlier backlog. "In fact, when I looked into it, they'd done everything they could to make it work and it pointed more to the lack of logistic capacity in the NGO community. They didn't know what a bill of lading was and so on."

At the height of the emergency relief effort, there were more than 180 non-government aid groups operating in the isolated Indonesian province.

In Aceh's provincial capital Banda Aceh, the man who leads the reconstruction of tsunami-hit areas told reporters the government should also take the blame for aid distribution glitches.

"The bureaucracy is too complicated and the central government's sense of emergency or sense of crisis is little. We have received many reports on fundings, but it hasn't arrived here yet," said Kuntoro Mangkusubroto.

On Friday, he received a list of reconstruction projects approved by parliament worth almost 4 trillion rupiah ($430 million).

The approved government budget for rehabilitation of tsunami-hit areas is at 8.4 trillion rupiah ($900 million) for 2005. The remaining 4.4 trillion rupiah for 2005 will be funneled through government ministries, the reconstruction body said.