L’offerta delle truppe dominicane genera confusione – L’Onu chiede ad altri paesi di fornire un nuovo dispiegamento di peacekeeper; una lunga storia di tensioni tra i due paesi confinanti
– Haiti accetta, dopo un primo rifiuto, 130 militari (dei forse 800 soldati) offerti da San Domingo per la missione ONU (approvato l’invio di altri 2000 soldati e di 1500 poliziotti). Storia di forti tensioni tra i due paesi.
o Le tensioni razziali tra i coloni spagnoli e gli schiavi africani nella parte occidentale di Hispaniola si acuirono dopo l’indipendenza dalla Francia conquistata con la rivolta degli schiavi nel 1804. Nel 1822 Haiti occupò San Domingo, fino al 1844, quando si formò la repubblica dominicana.
o Nel 1937 17 000 immigrati haitiani furono massacrati dal dittatore dominicano Rafael L. Trujillo; le tensioni continuarono anche dopo la sua morte nel 1961.
o Negoziati ONU con Brasile per l’invio di altri due battaglioni e la UE per l’invio di forze di polizia.
o In totale i soldati e i poliziotti ONU saranno oltre 12 5000, il Brasile ha già il maggior contingente.
– Circa 10 000 i militari USA sotto comando USA; i militari gli USA hanno partecipato solo raramente ai contingenti ONU: ad Haiti e in Macedonia negli anni 1990.
– Le truppe ONU controllano 5 corridoi umanitari che vanno da San Domingo e dai porti settentrionali di Haiti alla capitale Port-au-Prince;
o I soldati dominicani controlleranno il corridoio da San Domingo a Port-au-Prince.
Insufficiente l’assistenza sanitaria per gli haitiani, avverte un gruppo
IANTHE JEANNE DUGAN e COREY DADE
– L’organizzazione Partners in Health denuncia che quotidianamente ad Haiti potrebbero morire circa 20mila persone per infezioni (come cancrena o sepsi) per mancanza di farmaci ed assistenza medica,
– un numero di vittime del dopo-terremoto simile a quelle durante il terremoto stesso (si calcola 100-200mila – il 25.1.2010 i giornali parlano di 150mila).
– Medici senza Frontiere, che ha circa 700 volontari presso vari ospedali di Haiti: uno dei maggiori problemi è l’incapacità a trattare pazienti con la “sindrome di schiacciamento”, in cui i tessuti muscolari danneggiati rilasciano tossine nella circolazione sanguigna intossicando i reni fino alla morte. E questo per la mancanza di macchine per dialisi; per ben tre volte si è impedito di sbarcare due di queste macchine all’aeroporto di Port-au-Prince.
– I quantitativi di aiuti sono insufficienti; Il programma alimentare ONU (World Food Program): dovrebbero essere distribuite 100milioni di razioni alimentari pronte per i prossimi 30 giorni, ma ne dispone solo 16 milioni.
– I governi si sono impegnati a fornire quasi $1MD di aiuti, e migliaia di tonnellate di cibo e rifornimenti medici; ma buona parte rimane bloccata nei magazzini o deviata verso San Domingo.
Dominican Troop Offer Sparks Confusion – U.N. Will Ask Other Countries to Provide Peacekeepers in New Deployment; Neighbors Have a Long, Tense History
– An offer of troops from the Dominican Republic to help peacekeeping operations in Haiti was thrown into confusion Wednesday, as senior Western diplomats initially said Haiti rejected the overture.
– Later Wednesday, diplomats said Haiti had reversed its decision, and would accept a small contingent of Dominican troops as part of a broader U.N. buildup in Haiti to protect aid supplies and provide security following the earthquake. At the same time, U.N. officials said Haiti had never rejected the offer.
– Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola, have had a long history of tense relations.
Earlier Wednesday, Leo Merores, the Haitian ambassador to the U.N., said in a telephone interview that he couldn’t comment because he hadn’t been officially informed of a decision to reject the offer. A Western diplomat said Haitian President René Préval had made the decision on his own, given that Parliament isn’t functioning, and had informed the U.N. in Port-au-Prince.
The press office at the Dominican mission said they were unauthorized to comment. Several calls to the presidential press office in Santo Domingo went unanswered.
– The size of the Dominican force is unclear. Alain Le Roy, the U.N. undersecretary general for peacekeeping operations, said on Tuesday that the Dominican Republic had offered 800 troops as part of 2,000 more peacekeepers approved by the Security Council. Late Wednesday one U.N. official said that Haiti had agreed to only 130 Dominican troops.
– The U.S. military is sending about 10,000 troops under U.S. command to assist in the recovery effort after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake on Jan. 12, which has killed as many as 200,000 people. The U.S. has rarely operated as peacekeepers under the U.N. flag. The U.S. had a number of soldiers in the U.N.’s mission in Haiti and in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in the 1990s.
– The Security Council authorized the deployment of the additional blue helmets and 1,500 new U.N. police to guard humanitarian aid corridors and food distribution points in Haiti. The new U.N. troops will guard five humanitarian aid corridors that the U.N. is establishing from Santo Domingo and northern Haitian ports to Port-au-Prince, Mr. Le Roy said. The police will help keep order at food distribution points.
– Mr. Le Roy said Tuesday that the Dominican troops would guard the corridor from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince. Sir John Holmes, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said the Santo Domingo-Port-au-Prince corridor, guarded by already-deployed U.N. peacekeepers, was being "intensively" used by aid convoys. The Dominican troops would free the blue helmets to go to Port-au-Prince to provide additional security there.
– Mr. Le Roy said talks had begun with Brazil for two more battalions and the European Union[e] is discussing sending police. The new deployments will raise the total number of U.N. troops and police in the country to more than 12,500. Brazil already has the largest contingent.
– Early racial problems between Spanish colonists and African slaves on the western part of the island worsened after Haiti became an independent republic in 1804 after a slave revolt against France. In 1822, Haiti occupied Santo Domingo, the Dominican capital, until the 1844 formation of the Dominican Republic.
– Resentment over the occupation and racial and religious tensions marred relations for many decades even after Haiti ceased trying to reoccupy the country. A massacre of Haitian migrants—some reports put the number at 17,000 dead—by Dominican dictator Rafael L. Trujillo in 1937 and the use of anti-Haitian policies to prop up his regime hurt relations further and to some extent lingered after Trujillo’s death in 1961.
Dominican citizens have donated to the relief effort over the past week, and the Dominican government has delivered fuel to Haiti. But some Dominican intellectuals have been quoted in the national press as warning that a Dominican contingent in the U.N. force would be seen as an intervention.
Medical Care for Haitians Falls Short, Group Warns
By IANTHE JEANNE DUGAN And COREY DADE
– Unknown numbers of people are dying every day in Haiti due to a lack of medicines and assistance, compounding the tragedy from last week’s earthquake, aid workers said Wednesday.
Nerves were rattled again early Wednesday, when a powerful aftershock measuring 5.9 sent Haitians screaming into the streets, adding to the physical damage in parts of the country but causing no reported deaths.
A 20-year-old patient is wheeled into the receiving area aboard the hospital ship Comfort on Wednesday.
– Aid such as food and water began to be more widely distributed and a U.S. medical ship arrived and began taking on patients. But the need for essentials such as medicines was overwhelming—and claiming lives by the day. At any given moment, thousands of injured, some grievously, wait outside virtually any hospital or clinic, pleading for treatment.
Outside the capital’s main hospital on Wednesday, armed guards in tanks kept out mobs. Inside the hospital’s gates, dozens of patients recovering from surgery lay outdoors on beds under makeshift tents. Many had amputations. Two newborn babies cried. The smell of infection hung in the air, and visitors wore masks to keep out the smell and dust.
– At any time, more than 1,000 people are waiting for surgery at the hospital, said Andrew Marx, spokesman for Partners in Health, a U.S.-based aid group that has been providing health care in Haiti for two decades.
A powerful aftershock struck Haiti around 6:30 a.m on Wednesday morning, sending panicked people running into the streets, Jonathan Hunt reports.
– Partners in Health warned on its Web site Tuesday that as many as 20,000 people in Haiti might be dying every day from infections such as gangrene and sepsis, raising the possibility that as many people could die in the days and weeks after the quake as died in the actual 7.0 temblor.
"Tens of thousands of earthquake victims need emergency surgical care now!!!," the group said in its online statement. "The death toll and the incidence of gangrene and other deadly infections will continue to rise unless a massive effort is made to open and staff more operating rooms and to deliver essential equipment and supplies."
The Haitian government’s minister of communications, Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassègue, disputed the notion that large numbers of Haitians were still dying every day. "There are seven medical centers functioning. The general hospital is open. We have foreign doctors, we have medicines coming in," she said. Asked about the estimate of 20,000 a day, she said: "No, that’s way too high."
Others also said the aid group’s fatalities figure was likely way too high. "I’ve seen that figure, and it seems too high," said Sir John Holmes, a United Nations Under-Secretary-General and its emergency relief coordinator. Haitian government officials also disputed the figure.
– The dire medical situation is being helped somewhat by Wednesday’s arrival—a day ahead of schedule—of the U.S.N.S. Comfort, a hospital ship carrying 550 medical staff and 1,000 beds. A U.S. military helicopter delivered the first two patients, a six-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man, to the Comfort in the early hours of the day, according to the U.S. military.
The lack of supplies could turn even the shreds of good news over the past week into tragedy. For instance, about 121 people have been pulled from the rubble in the past week by international rescue teams, not to mention many others pulled out by locals. Late Tuesday, there were several dramatic rescues, including that of a 15-day-old baby who survived for a week with no food and water in the coastal city of Jacmel.
– Some of those survivors, however, could die in coming days if they don’t receive medical treatment for their injuries.
– Aid group Doctors Without Borders, which has more than 700 workers at several Haiti hospitals, said one of the greatest problems is an inability to treat patients with "crush syndrome," in which damaged muscle tissue releases toxins to the bloodstream that can cause kidney failure and then death. The condition is treated with dialysis machines; two such machines were on one of the organization’s cargo planes that was blocked three times on Sunday from landing at Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint Louverture International Airport.
Doctors Without Borders says that five of its planes carrying a total of 85 tons of supplies have diverted from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic since Jan. 14.
"We have had five patients in Martissant health center die for lack of the medical supplies that this plane was carrying" on Sunday, said Loris de Filippi, emergency coordinator for the organization’s Choscal Hospital in Cité Soleil, in a statement.
– Despite a huge increase in the flow of aid—daily flights at Port-au-Prince’s one-runway airport have surged from 30 to 180—the amount of relief supplies remains inadequate to the need. The World Food Program, for example, said more than a quarter-million ready-to-eat food rations had been distributed in Haiti by Tuesday, but that was enough for only a fraction of the three million people thought to be in desperate need.
– The WFP said it needs to deliver 100 million ready-to-eat rations in the next 30 days, but it only had 16 million meals in the pipeline.
– The lack of medicines is only one of many factors that could raise the death toll in coming days and weeks, including fatalities from disease, contaminated water, downed electricity lines, and hazardous debris. Longer-term, people with chronic underlying health issues such as diabetes and hypertension will also be vulnerable, according to Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
– Estimates of overall deaths from the earthquake vary widely, with the Haitian government saying anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 people have died. Dr. Redlener said he estimated the total casualties from the disaster would top a quarter of a million people.
"The thing about Haiti that makes it different even to the big disasters we’ve seen in recent years like the tsunami and earthquake in China is that this disaster took a country that was already fragile, and destroyed the political and economic center, which was the capital. I fear this will create a level of imbalance and disorientation that will make this particular tragedy unique," he said.
Hundreds of thousands of newly homeless residents of Haiti’s capital have set up makeshift homes everywhere from public squares to gasoline stations. Some Haitian government officials say between one to three million people may have been displaced by the quake in the nation of some 10 million.
– Governments have pledged nearly $1 billion in aid, and thousands of tons of food and medical supplies have been shipped. But much remains trapped in warehouses, or diverted to the neighboring Dominican Republic.
The obstacles are myriad and massive: Port-au-Prince’s seaport was wrecked in the temblor; many of Haiti’s roads, terrible in the best of times, are now impassable; communications were stricken; the government was knocked out and now is barely functioning; fears of violence made some donors reluctant to deliver relief without security forces; hard hit towns outside in the rural countryside are hard to reach; and the country’s crushing poverty left no cushion for anything: no large stocks of medicine, food, or other supplies.