The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gang violence has left at least 360,000 homeless
The situation could get worse, as hurricane season begins June 1.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti are on the run from rampant gang violence and have abandoned their homes, a worsening humanitarian crisis that the United Nations describes as “cataclysmic.”
Masses of homeless families dodging gang members who burned down their houses and killed their neighbors have taken over dozens of schools, churches, even government buildings. Many places have no running water, flushing toilets or garbage pickup.
The lucky ones are sleeping on a friend’s sofa.
“There are kids at my camp who have no parents,” said Agenithe Jean, 39, who left her home in the Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, in August for an improvised camp in an empty lot about six miles away. “We need latrines. We need somewhere to go.”
At least 360,000 people — more than half in the capital or surrounding neighborhoods — have fled their homes in Haiti over the past year, and that number of internally displaced people is expected in the coming months to surpass 400,000, said the U.N.’s International Office for Migration.
Hundreds are unaccompanied children, including orphans and others separated from their parents in the chaos.
Now, as hurricane season nears, humanitarian groups and Haiti’s disaster response office are racing to figure out how to address the swelling crowds living in improvised shelters in a capital with a barely functioning national government and overrun by gangs.
About 90,000 people are living in those sites, and roughly the same number deserted Port-auPrince in March, said the United Nations and aid groups, many for other parts of Haiti, an exodus straining safer cities ill-prepared for an increased demand on water, food and schools.
A U.N. drive to raise $674 million to address the growing list of basic needs in Haiti has raised just 16% of the goal. The United States provided $69.5 million of the $107 million raised so far.
The competition for attention and resources can be eclipsed by crises around the world, including in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, aid groups said. The response has paled in comparison to the massive international effort following Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, when countries and aid organizations sent billions in aid. The earthquake killed up to 300,000 people.
“All of us are going pretty much after the same donors,” said Abdoulaye Sawadogo, head of the U.N. office in charge of humanitarian assistance in Haiti.
The Haitian government agency whose job it is to help refugees normally focuses on natural disasters, not a disaster caused by widespread gang violence.
“You can track the cyclone. After an earthquake, you can find shelter,” said Emmanuel Pierre, the operations director for the Directorate for Civil Protection, Haiti’s emergency management agency. “Now the problem is a social hazard.”
In the three years since the assassination of the Haitian president Jovenel Moïse, Haiti’s gangs have expanded their territory and increased their violence. Gang leaders achieved a main goal — the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry — and now claim
they want to end poverty as well as a corrupt system run by elites. But they also want amnesty for their crimes and to prevent an international security force led by Kenya from deploying.
In the first three months of this year, about 2,500 people were killed or injured as a result of gang violence — a 53% increase compared to the previous three months, the United Nations said.
Things took a dire turn in late February, when, in a quest to oust the prime minister, rival gangs joined forces to attack police stations, jails and the airport. Entire Port-au-Prince neighborhoods emptied out as gangs took over. People who found safe spaces repeatedly were driven out.
In some ways, Jean got lucky that August day when a gang took over her Carrefour-Feuilles neighborhood
amid a reign of gunfire. When she raced toward her rented house in search of her family, running past bodies on the ground and injured people covered in blood, she stumbled into her four children. All five got out with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Since that August day, Jean has lived in an improvised tent camp, which she shares with a few dozen others, in the Croix Desprez neighborhood. Unable to work because conditions are too dangerous, but with her children safe with relatives in the countryside, she showers at friends’ houses and has received cash and food from humanitarian groups.
“I don’t think I can ever go back,” she said. “In Port-auPrince, nowhere is safe.”