Haitians losing patience as fights erupt over aid
Limited supplies reach quake zone
LES CAYES, Haiti — Desperate residents who lost their homes and livelihoods nearly a week ago in Haiti’s earthquake are fighting over what little aid has been delivered, angered by the slow trickle of relief and the lack of government help.
By Friday, aid was flowing bit by bit to Les Cayes, one of the cities on Haiti’s southern peninsula worst hit by the quake, but the limited supplies only raised tensions among increasingly desperate residents.
Fights erupted in Les Cayes after a former president, Michel Martelly, visited a hospital with relief supplies Friday. Supporters scrambled to grab cash donations from Mr. Martelly’s bodyguards as he departed in a car. At least one person in the crowd picked up a large stone and tried to attack others, while the crowd chanted, “Kill him, kill him.”
Earlier Friday, gunshots rang out when an angry crowd surrounded a brokendown truck outside of Les Cayes, thinking it carried aid.
And a convoy of four trucks bearing aid was looted on its way to the westernmost part of the stricken southern peninsula, two of them in front of a police station, the aid organization Food for the Poor said in a statement.
The group asked that authorities establish security measures to ensure the safe passage of assistance. “What happened brought frustration and sadness,” it said.
Earlier in the week, two surgeons were kidnapped in Port-au-Prince, the capital 80 miles to the west, where they were providing muchneeded medical relief to quake victims airlifted there.
The abductions effectively shattered a shaky truce that Haiti’s organized gangs had announced shortly after the 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck
Saturday. The kidnappings of the doctors, including one of Haiti’s few orthopedic surgeons, prompted one hospital to close down Thursday for two days in protest, according to The Associated Press.
In the absence of support from the central government in Port- au- Prince, which has been in a state of partial paralysis since the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, some prominent Haitian politicians have been visiting the affected area before expected presidential elections later this year.
Mr. Martelly was the latest, arriving Friday from abroad in a plane stocked with aid supplies, promising to help the victims as best he could. “We are here to bring support, to bring hope,” he told reporters on arrival.
On Thursday at the police headquarters of Les Cayes, local authorities were distributing donations from a half-dozen countries, a panoply of emergency supplies ranging from Tibetan glacial water received from China to Japanese inflatable mattresses.
Despite the slow pace of international donations, much of the aid effort seen in central Les Cayes remained a private initiative. The city’s better-off residents and Haitian diaspora groups set up soup kitchens and brought drinking water for the displaced. But when the food arrived, it sometimes set off scuffles among the camp’s hungry recipients.
“When you have 75 meals for hundreds of people, it creates a sensitive situation,” said the Rev. Roosevelt Milfort, an evangelical pastor who has helped organize a camp for displaced people at the soccer field in Les Cayes. “People get angry.”
A man with a megaphone Thursday urged the camp’s residents to have forbearance and allow community leaders to organize donations to ensure equal distribution. “If we didn’t die from the earthquake, we won’t die of hunger,” the voice on the megaphone intoned.
Haiti’s civil protection officials have said that at least 2,189 people were killed in the quake, with hundreds still missing, and that more than 12,000 suffered injuries.
Despite the relatively short distance from the capital — a four-hour drive in normal times — aid deliveries to the affected areas continued to be severely constrained by logistics.
Gang violence has plagued the crucial artery from the capital to the south, derailing some supplies. Angry residents along the way have stopped and commandeered some aid trucks on the way to the affected zone. And some sections of the road have been damaged by landslides caused by the earthquake.