Haiti aid uncoordinated, president warns

MADRID/GENEVA - Aid relief for Haiti is suffering from a “general lack of coordination”, the country’s president warned in an interview published in Spain Friday.

Haitian President Rene Preval told El-Pais that aid is starting to reach the victims and the country is beginning to function again.

“We have already buried more than 70,000 victims,” he told the Spanish daily from Port-au-Prince.

“Petrol stations already have more petrol than on previous days. Some banks have already opened,” Preval said.

A UN spokeswoman in Geneva said the coordination system was improving, noting it was a “huge process” to arrange logistics in the poor country.

“It may seem slow to some, but lessons have been learned. We are trying to get the most efficient and timely response. Things are improving daily and moving in the right direction,” said Elizabeth Byrs of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

The situation in Haiti was a “complex emergency”, she told reporters.

The Jan 12 earthquake caused “the vast majority of official buildings” to collapse “with documents inside”, Preval explained to the Spanish daily.

Asked whether the US intervention in Haiti amounted to a kind of colonisation, Preval said his country was receiving “help from many countries, not only from the United States”.

The president dismissed criticism that he had cut an absent figure in the aftermath of the disaster, saying he went out to see the damage every day.

“We are working very closely with government, which was very badly hit by this earthquake,” said UN World Food Programme official Emilia Casella.

Similarly, the UN’s Byrs said the government was taking a larger role in the relief effort.

“The government is, step by step and more and more, in charge,” the spokeswoman said.