Violence stymies Haiti aid

GONAIVES, Haiti – Political violence erupting in Haiti’s capital threatened urgently needed food delivery Tuesday, and aid officials warned that more than half the 250,000 people in the flood-devastated city of Gonaives remain hungry nearly three weeks after Tropical Storm Jeanne thundered through.

Nearly 2,500 tons of food is blocked in port because customs agents and dock loaders cannot report to work in the capital, Port-au-Prince, relief workers said.

“This threatens to paralyze all the humanitarian efforts we have in Gonaives. It’s extremely serious,” Anne Poulsen of the U.N. World Food Program said. “No one can afford to leave people in Gonaives without food even for a day or two.”

On Tuesday, children tossed bread from the back of a truck to Gonaives storm survivors who negotiated slippery, mud-mired roads to grab the plastic-wrapped loaves.

Hundreds lined up for aid at U.N. food centers, but thousands of people – too weak, sick or frail from age – can’t get to food. The International Federation of Red Crescent and Red Cross Societies warned that well over 100,000 remain hungry.

Some food is looted before it gets to distribution points, and some people are robbed of their rations by the street gangsters for which Gonaives is infamous.

On Tuesday morning, a group of young men armed with rocks and metal bars blocked the road and jumped on four trucks leaving a warehouse with the largest food stocks in Gonaives. The attackers let the trucks go after discovering they were empty.

Saint Amise Dorcelue said she has tried four times to get food for herself and her five boys. Six-months pregnant, Dorcelue was left penniless after her husband died when his fishing boat was thrown out to sea during the storm.

“On Monday, I went out (to a distribution point) for the fourth time, and I couldn’t get anything,” said the barefoot 30-year-old. “There are too many people there and they are always pushing and fighting.

“I’m hungry, too, but I can’t fight or my baby might get hurt,” she added, patting her stomach.

Dorcelue and two of her boys sat on the dock in Gonaives’ shipping port, trying to fish with some old fishing line wrapped around a used shampoo bottle. If she catches enough tiny shad fish, she can sell them in the market to buy rice and corn.

“Sometimes we have food, sometimes we don’t,” she shrugged, resigned to the misery that has become commonplace in Haiti, a nation of 8 million where political turmoil and greed turns natural disasters into catastrophe.

Jeanne, whose system was laden with rain, pounded Gonaives for 30 hours beginning Sept. 17. More than 98 percent of Haiti is deforested – because people chop trees for fuel – leaving no soil to hold Jeanne’s rains. It burst river banks and overflowed entire valleys, brewing walls of mudslides and debris-filled torrents.

The death toll stood at 1,870 bodies recovered with another 884 people reported missing and most presumed dead.

Gonaives had never recovered from a February rebellion that began when a street gang torched government buildings, released jailed criminals and forced police to flee. Dozens of people, many police officers, were killed here before President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled the country Feb. 27.

The interim government, led by Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, has proved ineffectual in Haiti’s crises in Gonaives and Port-au-Prince, where at least 18 people have been killed in the past week as slum dwellers have stepped up protests demanding Aristide’s return, who is in exile in South Africa.

At least seven of the 18 killed are police officers, three of whom were beheaded.

The violence has scared away workers from the capital’s port, where Poulsen said 135 containers with 2,430 tons of food were stuck.

Deadly clashes continued Tuesday between street gangs in Cite Soleil, a shantytown teeming with Aristide supporters, and between police and the gangs, residents said.