Gangs starving Haiti’s citizens
More than a million suffer as lawless groups take control
Acrowd of about 100 people tried to shove through a metal gate in Haiti’s capital as a guard with a baton pushed them back, threatening to hit them. Undeterred, children and adults alike, some of them carrying babies, kept elbowing each other trying to enter.
“Let us in! We’re hungry!” they shouted.
They were trying to get into a makeshift shelter in an abandoned school. Inside, workers dipped ladles into buckets filled with soup that they poured into Styrofoam containers stuffed with rice to distribute to Haitians who have lost homes to gang violence.
About 1.4 million Haitians are on the verge of famine, and more than 4 million require food aid, sometimes eating only once a day or nothing at all, aid groups say.
“Haiti is facing a protracted and mass hunger,” Jean-martin Bauer, Haiti director for the United Nations’ World Food Programme, told The Associated Press. He noted that Croixdes-bouquets, in the eastern part of Haiti’s capital, “has malnutrition rates comparable with any war zone in the world”.
Officials are trying to rush food, water and medical supplies to makeshift shelters and other places as gang violence suffocates lives across Portau-prince and beyond, with many trapped in their homes.
Only a few aid organisations have been able to restart since February 29, when gangs began attacking key institutions, burning police stations, shutting down the main international airport with gunfire and storming two prisons, releasing more than 4000 inmates.
The violence forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to announce last week that he would resign once a transitional council is created, but gangs demanding his ousting have continued their attacks in several communities.
Bauer and other officials said that the gangs are blocking distribution routes and paralysing the main port, and that WFP’S warehouse is running out of grains, beans and vegetable oil as it continues to deliver meals.
“We have supplies for weeks. I’m saying weeks, not months,” Bauer said. “That has me terrified.”
Erigeunes Jeffrand, 54, said that he used to make a living selling up to four wheelbarrow-loads of sugar cane a day, but that gangs recently chased him and his four children out of their neighbourhood.
“My home was completely destroyed and robbed,” he said. “They took everything I have. And now, they’re not even letting me work.
“Can you believe I had a home?” he said. “I was making ends meet. But now, I’m just depending on what people provide me to eat. This is not a life.”
More than 200 gangs are believed to operate in Haiti, with nearly two dozen concentrated in Port-au-prince and surrounding areas.
They now control 80 per cent of the capital and are vying for more territory.
Scores of people have died in the most recent attacks, and more than 15,000 have been left homeless.
The situation has prevented aid groups like Food for the Hungry from operating at a time when their help is needed the most.
“Since February 29, we have not been able to do anything at all,” said Boby Sander, the organisation’s Haiti director.
On a recent morning, the fragrance of cooking rice drew a group of adults and teenage boys to a sidewalk near a building where aid workers prepared meals to distribute to shelters elsewhere in the city.
“Can you help me get a plate of food? We haven’t had anything to eat today yet,” they asked people going in and out of the building. But their pleas went unanswered.
The food was destined for the shelter at the school.
“We know it’s not a lot,” said volunteer Jean Emmanuel Joseph. “It’s too bad we don’t have the possibility to give them more.”
At the shelter, some adults and children tried to get back in line for a second serving.
“You already had a plate,” they were told. “Let others get one.”
Shelter resident Jethro Antoine, 55, said the food is meant only for residents, but there’s little that can be done about outsiders who squeeze in.
“If you go and complain about it, you’re going to become the enemy, you might even be killed for that,” he said.
The US Agency for International Development said that around 5.5 million people in Haiti — nearly half the population — need humanitarian aid.
The WFP’S Bauer said the humanitarian appeal for Haiti this year is less than 3 per cent funded.
“Conflict and hunger in Haiti are moving hand-in-hand,” he said.
“I’m frightened about where we’re going.” —AP