UN pledges more troops to protect aid convoys

The United Nations will hold an urgent vote today to send 2,000 more troops and 1,500 extra police to protect Haiti’s aid convoys from lawless gangs roaming the quake-hit streets.

The military escorts would ensure desperately-needed food and water was distributed to victims of the humanitarian tragedy without any violence, the world body said.

Secretary general Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council the UN needed to strengthen its current Haiti force, which has 7,000 military peacekeepers and 2,100 international police, to deal with the increasing demands following last week’s earthquake.

The security council must lift the current ceiling for the force and US deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff said he expected a draft resolution to be unanimously approved today.

UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy said the extra soldiers were essential because of the “tremendous” number of requests to escort humanitarian convoys.

“We are stretched,” he said, saying the UN World Food Programme alone was bringing in 60,000 tons of food quickly which must reach more than 200 distribution points.

Mr Le Roy said the UN also needed extra troops to secure the routes the convoys used and for “a reserve force” in case the security situation deteriorated further.

The neighbouring Dominican Republic has already offered an 800-strong battalion which will deploy later this week to secure the road from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican border, the only land bridge outside the battered country, he said.

And France’s UN ambassador Gerard Araud said European Union foreign ministers agreed yesterday to send an unspecified number of police.

“We have to act very quickly and very strongly,” Mr Araud said.

Mr Le Roy spoke of the often unruly crowds at points where food and water was being distributed and said the extra UN police officers would also help the Haitian police returning to the streets in “limited numbers”.

As part of the police request, Mr Le Roy said, the UN would also be seeking forensic experts and about 100 additional prison officers to set up detention centres once Haitian police arrested some of the 4,000 prisoners who escaped from the main prison in Port-au-Prince when it collapsed during the January 12 quake.

Mr Ban said the UN faced two main challenges, “to unplug the bottlenecks” and co-ordinate international aid.

He said “the international community supports the United Nations to take the leading role as a co-ordinator” of humanitarian aid.

UN peacekeepers are in charge of “general security of the country” while the US military is supporting the huge US humanitarian operation and operating the airport.

US engineers are also working to reopen a private port in the capital, which was less seriously damaged than the main port,

The UN food agency said it had reached an agreement yesterday with the US to give aid flights priority in landing – a deal that came after the US military was criticised for giving top billing to military and rescue aircraft.

The UN has estimated that three million Haitians – one-third of the country’s population – were affected by the quake. Mr Ban said the WFP would be providing food to one million people in two weeks and to two million people in a month.

Meanwhile the staggering scope of Haiti’s nightmare came into sharper focus as authorities estimated 200,000 dead and 1.5 million homeless in the quake-ravaged heart of the tragic country, where injured survivors still died in the streets, doctors pleaded for help and looters slashed at one another in the rubble.

Six days after the earthquake struck, search teams still pulled buried survivors from the ruins. But hour by hour, the un-met needs of hundreds of thousands grew.

Overwhelmed surgeons appealed for anaesthetics, scalpels and saws for amputating crushed limbs. Hundreds of survivors tried to cram on to buses heading out of town and in city streets, others begged for basics.

Looting and violence flared again yesterday, as hundreds clambered over the broken walls of shops to grab anything they could – including toothpaste, now valuable for lining nostrils against the stench of Port-au-Prince’s dead.

Police fired into the air as young men fought each other over rum and beer with broken bottles and machetes.

Hard-pressed medical teams sometimes had to take time away from quake victims to deal with gunshot wounds, said Loris de Filippi of Doctors Without Borders.

In the Montrissant neighbourhood, Red Cross doctors working in shipping containers and saying they “cannot cope” lost 50 patients over two days, said international Red Cross spokesman Simon Schorno.

Amid the debris and the smoke of bodies being burned, dozens of international rescue teams dug on in search of buried survivors.

The latest casualty report, from the European Commission citing Haitian government figures, doubled previous estimates of the dead from the magnitude-7.0 quake to about 200,000, with some 70,000 bodies recovered and transported to mass graves.

If accurate, that would make Haiti’s catastrophe about as deadly as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed an estimated 230,000 people in a dozen countries.

European Commission analysts estimate 250,000 were injured and 1.5 million were made homeless. Masses are living under plastic sheets in makeshift camps and in dust-covered vehicles, or had taken to the road seeking out relatives in the safer countryside.

Desperately-poor Haiti will need years or decades of expanded aid to rebuild. After meeting Haitian president Rene Preval and other international representatives in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, Dominican president Leonel Fernandez said Haiti would need more than £6bn (€6.84bn) over five years.

For the moment, however, frontline relief workers want simply to get food and water to the hungry and thirsty.

The priorities are clearing roads, ensuring security at UN distribution points, getting the city’s sea port working again and bringing in more trucks and helicopters, WFP executive director Josette Sheeran said in Rome.