Food convoy attacked by armed group in Haiti; UN warns of volatile security situation

Haiti food convoy attacked; UN warns of volatility

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A generous world has flooded Haiti with donations, but anger and desperation are mounting as the aid stacks up inside this broken country.

Bottlenecks at key transportation points and scattered violence, including an armed group’s attack on a food convoy, have slowed the distribution of food and medicine from the port, airport and a warehouse in the Cite-Soleil slum. U.S. air traffic controllers have lined up 2,550 incoming flights through March 1, but some 25 flights a day aren’t taking their slots. Communication breakdowns between Haitians and their foreign counterparts are also endemic.

“Aid is bottlenecking at the Port-au-Prince airport. It’s not getting into the field,” said Mike O’Keefe, who runs Bayan Air Service in Fort Lauderdale.

Foreign aid workers and Haitians are fed up with waiting for help. One Haitian father paid a group of men more than $200 on Tuesday to retrieve his daughter’s body from his collapsed house, rather than wait for demolition crews.

“No one is in charge,” said Dr. Rob Maddox of Start, Louisiana, tending to dozens of patients in the capital’s sprawling general hospital. “There’s no topdown leadership. The Swiss don’t want to cooperate with us. And since the Haitian government took control of our supplies, we have to wait for things even though they’re stacked up in the warehouse. The situation is just madness.”

Donors say the key logistical challenges are dealing with a backlog of supply flights at the airport, repairing and increasing the capacity of the city’s piers and dealing with clogged overland routes from outlying airports and Dominican Republic. Most roads are just two lanes with many pot holes.

Some are also worried that isolated routes are vulnerable to ambush. Haiti is plagued with crime, violence and gangs.

Twenty armed men blocked a road and tried to hijack a convoy of food for earthquake victims Saturday, but were driven off by police gunfire, U.N. spokesman Vicenzo Pugliese said Tuesday.

The attack on the convoy as it carried supplies from an airport in the southern town of Jeremie underscored what the United Nations calls a “potentially volatile” security situation.

Mobs have also stolen food and looted goods from their neighbors in the camps, prompting many to band together or stay awake at night to prevent raids.

Small groups of state employees and lawyers held protests across the city Tuesday, denouncing President Rene Preval’s leadership. Prime Minister Max Bellerive defended the government’s performance before a quorum of 20 Haitian senators.

“Even the most advanced countries could not respond to this crisis,” he said.

Bellerive’s speech drew an angry response from senators.

“The government has not been able to even prove symbolically that it exists,” said Sen. Endrisse Riche, noting that he heard about Tuesday’s meeting from a friend and hadn’t been contacted by anyone in government since the quake.

The Jan. 12 earthquake killed at least 150,000 and demolished virtually every government building in the capital. Some 1 million people are homeless, many huddling in crude tents made of sticks and bed sheets.

The Haitian government recently asked private aid organizations to send e-mails detailing what they’re doing and where. The goal is to coordinate food being distributed by non-governmental organizations, though not U.N efforts. Officials complain some areas are receiving multiple rations while others have nothing.

“It is true we are in need,” said Sen. Jean Joel Joseph. “But don’t treat us like dogs … as if we are animals.”

Air Force spokeswoman Capt. Candace Park about 120 to 140 flights a day are landing at Port-au-Prince airport, which pre-earthquake was handling about 25 planes a day.

American Red Cross officials in Washington say there is still a list of 1,000 flights waiting to land at Haiti’s airport. And taking supplies overland from the Dominican Republic to the capital now takes 18 hours, where it used to take only six, said David Meltzer, the charity’s senior vice president for international services.

In an attempt to avoid long lines at the Port, Meltzer said his agency, which has received some $203 million in donations for earthquake relief, has created a “boat bridge” to unload relief supplies from a Colombian Red Cross ship off shore.

Another way to avoid further aid backup on the tarmac is to buy it in Haiti, said Edward Rees, whose nonprofit Peace Dividend Trust in Haiti is pressing donors to purchase local goods and hire local workers whenever possible.

Rees said he met Tuesday with a rice supplier “who is aghast at all the rice being flown and shipped in, when his warehouses are still half full.”

World Food Program spokesman Marcus Priory, whose group was coordinating logistics among relief groups, said despite ongoing problems, distribution is slowly improving.

He said that in addition to opening up new routes from other cities and the Dominican Republic, the fleet of trucks delivering goods has been significantly expanded.

“We have been facing the most complex operation we have ever had to launch because we have massive needs (and) a densely populated urban context, which is not a traditional operating area for a humanitarian mission,” Priory said.

Port-au-Prince, near the quake’s epicenter, had crippling traffic jams and limited supply routes even before the disaster.

U.S. soldiers took charge of a traffic jam on Tuesday by stepping in and getting vehicles to move.

“It’s like this everyday!” shouted a soldier from 82nd Airborne Division near a slum in the city.

O’Keeffe, of Banyan Air, said flights schedules were being complicated by people missing slots. He said that’s because the phone reservation line gets so backed up people who get through book landing times even if they are unsure they will need them.

He is advising pilots to use smaller outlying airports.

O’Keeffe recently flew 9,000 meals, baby formula, baby food and diapers into the Jacmel airport, which is being run by the Canadian Air Force and watched the supplies being loaded onto a United Nations truck.

“By the time I was back in Florida, I had photos of babies in diapers being fed the formula I flew in,” he said. “Pretty satisfying.”