More US troops, UN peacekeepers expected for Haiti

By MICHELLE FAUL and ALFRED de MONTESQUIOU Associated Press Writers

Jan 18, 2010, 9:47 AM EST

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) --

Troops, doctors and aid workers flowed into Haiti on Monday even while hundreds of thousands of quake victims struggled to find a cup or water or a handful of food.

European nations pledged more than a half-billion dollars, with euro330 million ($474 million) in emergency and long-term aid coming from the European Union alone and euro92 million ($132 million) promised by member states.

But help was still not reaching many victims of Tuesday's quake - choked back by transportation bottlenecks, bureaucratic confusion, fear of attacks on aid convoys, the collapse of local authority and the sheer scale of the need.

"We don't need military aid. What we need is food and shelter," one young man yelled at U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon during his visit to the city Sunday. "We are dying," a woman told him.

Haitian riot police meanwhile fired tear gas to disperse crowds of looters in the city's downtown as several nearby shops burned.

"We've been ordered not to shoot at people unless completely necessary," said Pierre Roger, a Haitian police officer who spoke as yet another crowd of looters ran by. "We're too little, and these people are too desperate."

The U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Merten, acknowledged that "the security situation is obviously not perfect," but told NBC television on Monday that new troops scheduled to arrive during the day are meant to back up Haitian police and U.N. personnel, not replace them.

While aid workers tried to make their way into Haiti, many people tried to leave. Hundreds of U.S. citizens, or people claiming to be, waved IDs as they formed a long line outside the U.S. Embassy in hopes of arranging a flight out of the country.

The Pan American Health Organization estimates 50,000 to 100,000 died in Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude quake and Haitian officials believe the number is higher. Many survivors have lost their homes and many live outside for fear unstable buildings could collapse in aftershocks.

So many people have lost homes that the World Food Program is planning a tent camp for 100,000 people - an instant city the size of Burbank, California - on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, according to the agency's country director, Myrta Kaulard.

On the streets, people were still dying, pregnant women were giving birth and the injured were showing up in wheelbarrows and on people's backs at hurriedly erected field hospitals.

Water began to reach more people around the capital and while fights broke out elsewhere, people formed lines to get supplies handed out by soldiers at a golf course. Still, with a blocked city port and relief groups claiming the U.S.-run airport is being poorly managed, food and medicine are scarce. Anger mounted hourly over the slow pace of the assistance.

"White guys, get the hell out!" some survivors shouted in the city's Bel-Air slum, apparently frustrated at the sight of foreigners who were not delivering help.

At a destroyed nursing home, 71-year-old Jacqueline Thermiti said she could hold on for another day. "Then if the foreigners don't come (with aid), "it will be up to baby Jesus."

Five days after the magnitude-7.0 quake struck, more survivors were freed from under piles of concrete and debris.

Rescuers pulled a 30-year-old man and a 40-year-old woman from what had been the fourth floor of a now-collapsed supermarket on Sunday. Officials said they had survived for so long by eating food trapped along with them.

"She's responding, she's with it. So she's in very good shape for somebody who's been basically trapped for five days," said Capt. Joseph Zahralban, a South Florida rescue team leader.

Emergency teams said they were still hopeful of finding more survivors in the damaged store.

U.S. crews with search dogs also rescued a 16-year-old Dominican girl trapped for five days in a three-story hotel that crumbled in downtown Port-au-Prince.

At the U.N. headquarters destroyed in the quake, rescuers lifted a Danish staff member alive from the ruins, just 15 minutes after Secretary-General Ban visited the site where U.N. mission chief Hedi Annabi and at least 39 other staff members were killed.

U.N. spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs said it was possible people could survive until Monday, adding to the 70 lives saved by 1,700 rescue workers since Tuesday's quake,

"There are still people living" in collapsed buildings, she told The Associated Press. "Hope continues."

On top of the European Union's pledge, Britain announced it would triple its commitment to 20 million pounds ($32.7 million) and France said it was willing for forgive Haiti's euro40 million ($55.7 million) debt, as well as promising euro10 million ($14.4 million) to the U.N. fund for Haiti.

"The impact of this earthquake is magnified because it has hit a country that was already desperately poor and historically volatile," said British Development Secretary Douglas Alexander.

Norway, a country of only 4.8 million, said it would increase aid to Haiti to 100 million kroner ($17.7 million).

The U.N. World Food Program expected to reach more than 60,000 people Sunday, up from 40,000 on Saturday, spokesman David Orr said - but U.N. officials said they need to reach about 2 million daily deliveries.

The Geneva-based Doctors Without Borders said bluntly: "There is little sign of significant aid distribution."

The aid group complained of skewed priorities and a supply bottleneck at the U.S.-controlled airport. Doctors Without Borders spokesman Jason Cone said the U.S. military needed "to be clear on its prioritization of medical supplies and equipment."

The on-the-ground U.S. commander in Haiti, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, acknowledged the bottleneck at the airport with a single runway and little space for parked planes. "We're working aggressively to open up other ways to get in here," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Part of that will be fixing Port-au-Prince's harbor, rendered useless for incoming aid because of quake damage. The White House said Sunday that the U.S. Coast Guard ship Oak would use heavy cranes and other equipment to make the port functional.

France was among the countries irritated that one of its aid planes had been turned back, but Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner urged governments not to squabble over the problem, telling France-Info radio that "people always want it to be their plane ... that lands."

Keen said some 2,000 Marines were set to join 1,000 U.S. troops on the ground and U.N. peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy said he planned to ask the Security Council to temporarily increase his force of about 7,000 military peacekeepers and 2,100 international police in Haiti.

Former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy for Haiti, was scheduled to visit the country and meet with President Rene Preval.

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Associated Press writers contributing to this story included Jennifer Kay, Mike Melia, Tamara Lush, Jonathan M. Katz, Gregory Bull and Edith M. Lederer in Port-au-Prince; Raf Cassert in Brussels; Alexander G. Higgins in Geneva, and Jill Lawless in London.

UN chief arrives in quake-hit Port-au-Prince

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, right, and Edmond Mulet, the acting chief of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti, visit the collapsed U.N. headquarters in Port-au-Prince, Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan. 17, 2010 (Xinhua) --

The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon arrived on Sunday in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Caribbean nation Haiti, which was destroyed by a Tuesday quake that registered 7.3 on the Richter scale.

Ban came to see first hand the effects of the catastrophe, to show solidarity to Haiti's citizens and to the UN's workers, as well as to help boost the speed of aid distribution in the nation.

He began with an inspection of the UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince, which collapsed in the quake killing both Hedi Annabi, the UN's special representative in Haiti, and his deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa alongside dozens of UN staff.

Annabi, a Tunisian who led the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (Minustah), was found dead on Saturday by Chinese rescue workers in the ruins of the building.

Ban also met quake survivors, telling them that rescue teams and international aid are being accelerated.

"I am here with a message of hope, that aid is already on the way," said Ban, a South Korean, during a press conference at the National Palace, the presidential seat.

During the same conference, Haiti's Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive estimated that around 100,000 people had died due to the quake and that more than 90 percent of the nation's buildings are damaged, adding that these were estimates and not final figures.

At a separate Sunday meeting with Spain's Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, Ban proposed a special UN-backed European Union mission to Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola with former Spanish colony the Dominican Republic. Spain is the current holder of the rotating, six-month EU presidency.

The UN is evaluating the opening of a so-called humanitarian corridor linking the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in order to boost the number of sources of aid, given that Port-au-Prince airport has been overwhelmed by the large number of planes arriving from across the world.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon visits the collapsed U.N. headquarters in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)

Editor: Lu Hui

Haiti quake aftermath: Invisible government

Ria Novosti, 18/01/2010

By Sunday, frustration was mounting in Haiti's shattered capital as hundreds of people gathered at a quake-damaged business, scavenging items.

Not far from the cathedral, about 300 people gathered before a quake-damaged line of shops as men on the roof, one with a rifle, tossed items down to them: cartons of toothpaste, gift sets of stationary, plastic baby seats.
Some men fought over a parcel of toddlers' clothes as smoke from burning trash filled the street.

In the first escalation of its kind since the earthquake, two men - suspected of being looters - lay dead on the street in the Delmas neighbourhood, both beaten and with their hands bound together.

Some in the angry crowd that gathered around them said they had been attacked by angry residents, others that police had caused their wounds.

AP Television cannot independently verify this information.

Meanwhile, in downtown Haiti near a street markets near the presidential palace, Haitian riot police attempted to quell one-thousand people looting.

The police fired tear gas and witnesses said several of the looters appeared to be gang members from a shanty town.
At least some suspected looters were beaten and shot.

Haitians seemed increasingly frustrated by a seemingly invisible government - some setting bonfires in a downtown street to burn the bodies authorities have been unable to remove, leaving passers-by to cover their faces against the smell of burning flesh.

However, there were also occasions of hope: Virginia firefighters pulled UN civil affairs officer Jens Christensen of Denmark - alive and conscious - from the rubble of the ruined UN building.

And other teams rescued a woman from a collapsed university building, three survivors were pulled from deep in the collapsed ruins of a supermarket and Montana Hotel co-owner Nadine Cardoso was saved from that wrecked building.

But just as basic aid was trickling in to survivors in to people in Port-au-Prince but in the southern Haitian resort town of Jacmel residents said food, water and medicine were very still incredibly scarce on Sunday.

According to the United Nation's On-Site Operations Coordination Centre (OSOCC) 50 to 60 percent of buildings in Jacmel have been destroyed.

The road leading to Jacmel has been virtually blocked by rubble, making it impossible for aid to reach the devastated town via the ground.

International rescue teams were hard at work trying to dig out bodies of people believed to still be under the rubble of their collapsed homes.