Establishing basic order, and preventing looting by desparate crowds, criminal gangs and armed rebels, is placing enormous strains on the UN peacekeepers. The Haitian police appear to be demoralized at best.
For an interesting site that keeps up to date on the events in Haiti, as well as focuses on longer-term development issues from a grassroots labor organization perspective, there's a UK group called the Haiti Support Group.
The Miami Herald (reg'd req'd) has a section devoted to Haiti. The best news is the Bush Admin's proposal to Congress:
The Bush administration has proposed a $50 million aid package for Caribbean nations devastated by this season's one-two-three punch from hurricanes.
The money for ''vital humanitarian relief and emergency resources, such as water, food and shelter,'' would go to Haiti, Grenada, Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic ''and other nations affected by recent hurricanes,'' the White House announced Monday.
The $50 million is part of a $7.1 billion aid and recovery package President Bush will propose to Congress to help Florida and other states struck by hurricanes Ivan and Jeanne. Through the U.S. Agency for International Development's office of foreign disaster assistance, the United States has previously given $3.8 million to Caribbean nations for hurricane relief.
But physically getting assistance to people, even those not directly affected by the flooding, is a nightmare. Food and water are not the only things lacking. Many have been injured, and basic medical assistance is also sorely lacking.
Gen. Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira, the Brazilian army commander in charge of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Haiti, criticized the slow pace of relief reaching residents, many of whom aid officials say have not eaten in five days or more.Many residents of Gonaives are trying to leave the city, fearful of disease and insecurity. But there's no where to go where food is available.
''The situation remains critical,'' Pereira said in an interview with the official Agencia Brasil. ``Even those who were not directly affected are going hungry without enough water and are suffering from a shortage of medicine and medical assistance, because the government infrastructure was already weak and, after this tragedy, is virtually nonexistent.''
Pereira said that many people were suffering from diarrhea and that others, many of them children, were contracting gangrene.
Amputations were being performed under horrendous conditions, he said.
The floods from Jeanne destroyed all of the rice and fruit harvest in the Artibonite region, Haiti's breadbasket, ''so now the country can't even feed itself without outside help,'' Gavreau said.Avoiding the roads is critical not only because they are virtually impassable in many areas. The relief aid is also the target of gangs and looters.
Planeloads of aid have arrived in Port-au-Prince, the capital, but getting it to Gonaives is a nine-hour nightmare drive, with the final leg of the route covered by a four-foot-deep lake of mud littered with mired aid trucks.
South Florida is naturally one of the most important areas that provides private donations for emergency assistance when catastrophes occur in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, Florida itself is under great strain in recovering from its own disasters. So the level of assistance for the Caribbean appears to be down from "normal" levels.
The security chief for the U.N. stabilization mission in Haiti, John Harrison of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was touring Cassolet Tuesday to find a safe place to distribute food.
Earlier, only about 40 people had lined up for food at a center where U.N. peacekeepers from Brazil on Monday had fired into the air to control hundreds of people who rioted. ''It's very difficult to get food. We come every day . . . People are getting very frustrated,'' said Manette Jean, waiting in line.
Harrison had hoped to use Gonaives' port, but when he arrived he found it in the hands of armed men. ''There's a big problem with gangs,'' he said. ``I think things could get worse.''
Jouthe Joseph of the international humanitarian group CARE said Tuesday that 10 tons of food had been lost to looting in Gonaives -- out off 175 tons delivered in the past week -- and that they had fed about 98,000 people.
His figures did not include private aid trucks that have been looted, nor a government convoy held up by armed men at the entrance to the city. That area was being secured Tuesday by Uruguayan peacekeepers.
The reports on Haiti from Red Cross Red Crescent include a fairly extensive preliminary needs assessment and report on the people and assets being provided by various agencies trying to coordinate their assistance (pdf). For those of you who are interested in getting an idea of how disaster assistance agencies work to get help to inaccessible and insecure areas, the report's a pretty good primer.
cross-posted @ Tacitus
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