Lynch Mobs Turn On Looters
Jan 18, 2010 8 Comments ›› Pat Dollard
Six days after the Port-au-Prince earthquake large areas of the city remain untouched by the global aid effort as bottlenecks continue to clog the airport and looting threatens to descend into wholesale violence.
Convoys of lorries headed for the city’s worst-hit areas last night but there were signs they had come too late to prevent another tragedy, with Haitians turning on each other.
Mobile water stations were mobbed by crowds who have lived without basic sanitation for nearly a week. By text message and word of mouth, reports spread of a woman decapitated for whatever she had been carrying near one of the few functioning markets. Police shot and killed a man suspected of looting. Where police failed to intervene, crowds resorted to lynching, leaving fresh bodies on streets just cleared of those left by the earthquake.
Some 70,000 bodies have been buried in mass graves and a state of emergency has been declared until the end of January, a Haitian government minister said.
President Préval said 3,500 US troops, confined until yesterday to the airport, would fan out to help Haitian and UN police to keep order. Yet there was little sign of them in the vast refugee camp near the ruins of the Presidential Palace. Security improved at the camp yesterday, but only briefly, as troops cordoned off a sector for a visit by Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General.
“We have 2,000 police in Port-au-Prince and 3,000 bandits who have escaped from prison,†Mr Préval said before the visit. “That gives an idea of how bad the situation is.â€
It is not being helped by the UN’s move to defer decision-making on aid distribution and rescue teams to a government that scarcely exists. “We allocate resources as the Haitian Government requires,†Romerez Galvez, a UN spokesman said. Every main Haitian ministry building was destroyed along with the Presidential Palace.
Rebecca Gustavson, of USAID, said: “The UN is the lead distributor of food aid; we are one of the donors.†But at a press conference UN officials insisted Mr Préval’s administration remained in charge, with 5,000 US troops assigned to help to distribute rations. The result is a power vacuum into which the UN, the US military and aid agencies have been sucked with no consensus on who is in charge.
A growing tide of refugees jammed the main eastbound road to the Dominican Republic and pleaded for seats on outgoing flights. Others continued their search for victims.
Their stories are already numbingly familiar, but some have to be told.
Christel Legrosviau, last heard of at 4.30pm on Tuesday, was a student at the Université Caraïbe. The building had been full: 40 students per classroom. On Thursday evening bystanders could still hear cries from inside. Christel’s sister persuaded a UN official to come and look. He said nothing could be done.
At 7am on Saturday a Spanish rescue team finally arrived with sniffer dogs and established in five minutes, “with 99 per cent certaintyâ€, that there were no longer any survivors. They had done some digging, but not much. Their first job, after the intervention of a Western diplomat, was to search for a close friend of Haiti’s President. They found him dead, in a secure neighbourhood not badly hit.
“Apart from that we have been kept waiting for two days,†said Pere Perez, a firefighter from Benidorm. “They have sent us only to unimportant places while time slips by.†Behind him the excavator began removing rubble and bodies started to appear. Haitians carried them in blankets to a street corner, where they lay ignored by passers-by and a UN pick-up truck.
In search and rescue, as in the distribution of food and medicine, there is a tragic disconnect — between good intentions and resources piled high at the airport, and a city of three million, most of them aware of the global drive to help but still untouched by it.
When survivors are pulled from the rubble it is usually because relatives have chanced on a rescue team and implored it to help. Where the homeless find food aid, most of it has so far been dropped by US helicopters. There are still no field kitchens or water stations for the tens of thousands of the city’s poorest. The port is almost unusable.
“I’m just here to help,†said an officer from the Pentagon’s Southern Command. He did not know how. Nor did any of his subordinates, dozing in the shadow of a hangar where Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State, met UN officials and her own ambassador on Saturday. The long-term impact of that visit remains to be seen. Its immediate effect was to delay the arrival of equipment needed by Croatian medics, forced to wait in their hotel while Mrs Clinton changed planes.
Bill Clinton is due to arrive today. “As UN Special Envoy for Haiti, I feel a deep obligation to the Haitian people to visit the country . . . to ensure our response continues to be co-ordinated and effective,†he said.
President Obama said yesterday that the US would lead the world in responding to the earthquake. “We act for a very simple reason: in times of tragedy, the United States of America steps forward and helps. That is who we are. That is what we do,†he wrote in Newsweek magazine.
