starving di haitian

[blugiant]

mii memba katrina wey dem sed dem starve de blakk peeps soo dat woo bee more willinn fii leave dem home ann evacuate

now mii ear bout sum haitians even up to now gitt noo food ann water ann mii tart tinkinn fool mii wance.........fool mii twice

soo y oonoo tink 15 days after de earthquake oyinbo still starvinn de haitians

[blugiant]

Re: starving di haitian

Troops Fire on Starving Crowds in Haiti

by Patrick Martin


Global Research, January 28, 2010
World Socialist Web Site

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Troops under United Nations command have opened fire on crowds of hungry Haitians seeking food, an ominous sign of impending confrontation between the people of the earthquake-wracked country and the armed forces dispatched there under the auspices of the imperialist powers.



On Monday, Uruguayan troops, part of the UN peacekeeping force deployed here since 2004, fired rubber bullets at people who crowded around food trucks, eventually pulling out and leaving sacks of rice to be fought over.



The next day, Brazilian troops proceeded more aggressively, using pepper spray and tear gas to hold off a crowd seeking food at a tent camp on the grounds of the devastated presidential palace. People ran from the spray coughing and with their eyes streaming.



Two tanks were brought up to menace the crowds when they began to reform, although Fernando Soares, a Brazilian army colonel, told the press: “They’re not violent, just desperate. They just want to eat.”



One soldier loaded a shotgun as the crowd watched, but did not fire. “They treat us like animals, they beat us, but we are hungry people,” one Haitian, Muller Bellegarde, told an American reporter.



The World Food Program (WFP) was delivering 107 cubic tons of rice, oil and beans to the palace camp, enough to feed 20,000 people for two weeks. As the trucks rolled up, thousands came out of their tents and began lining up, but the queues soon became disorderly as it became clear that there was not enough food for all who needed it. Another man told Reuters, “We are too many. Two trucks are not enough for us. They will fight, and the soldiers will shoot and fire gas.”



Violence also broke out in the seaside town of Jacmel, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, after initially peaceful protests over the scarcity of tents for earthquake survivors.



Force was used as well by Haitian police at a food-distribution site in Cite Soleil, the largest and most impoverished section of the capital city. Police swung sticks and clubs to drive back the crowd.



While Haitians seeking food and scavenging in the rubble have been portrayed as “looters” by the media, and targeted for repression by both foreign troops and Haitian police, it was so-called looters who found a man buried in the rubble of a building on Rue de Miracle in downtown Port-au-Prince Tuesday. They brought US soldiers with the necessary equipment to pull the man, Rico Dibrivell, 35, out alive. He had a broken leg and severe dehydration, but said he had been trapped for 12 days rather than 14, falling victim to an aftershock rather than the original 7.0 quake.



On Wednesday, a teenage girl was pulled alive and apparently unhurt, though severely dehydrated, from beneath another smashed building. Coming 15 days after the main tremor, this marks the longest known survival of an earthquake victim in modern history. US and other rescue efforts were called off at the weekend.



The total number of American military personnel in Haiti, including those on ships just offshore, rose to 15,400 by Tuesday. One third of these are soldiers on the ground in and around Port-au-Prince, with the bulk of them from the 82nd Airborne Division, an elite unit that specializes in combat, not logistical support.



The heavy-handed US military presence has generated considerable criticism. Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia boycotted a donors’ conference in Montreal to protest the US occupation of the country.



Former Cuban President Fidel Castro wrote in Granma, the country’s official newspaper, that the focus on US military deployment had blocked entry of doctors and medical supplies. “Send doctors, not soldiers,” he wrote. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared, “The U.S. government is taking advantage of a humanitarian tragedy to militarily take over Haiti.”



These sentiments were expressed, not just by regimes long at odds with Washington, but by officials of longtime US allies France and Italy. A French cabinet official, Alain Joyandet, said in a radio interview January 19 that the role of the U.S. in Haiti should be clarified. “It’s about helping Haiti, not occupying Haiti.”



The top Italian official dispatched to Haiti, Guido Bertolaso, the civil protection minister, said Monday that the US intervention had been “pathetic…. It’s a truly powerful show of force, but it’s completely out of touch with reality. They don’t have close rapport with the territory and they certainly don’t have a rapport with international organizations and aid groups.”



Clearly referring to the photo-op appearance by former US President Bill Clinton, who passed through the island and briefly unloaded water bottles at the airport, he said, “Unfortunately there’s this need to make a bella figura in front of the television cameras rather than focusing on underneath the debris…. Some individuals were putting on a vanity show for the television cameras instead of rolling up their sleeves.”



Such comments clearly stung, as shown by the comments by Clinton’s wife, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Speaking to a group of State Department employees, she declared, “I deeply resent those who attack our country, the generosity of our people and the leadership of our president in trying to respond to historically disastrous conditions after the earthquake. Some of the international press either misunderstood or deliberately misconstrued what was a civilian and military response, both of them necessary in order to be able to deliver aid to the Haitians who desperately needed it.”



Haitian President Réné Preval, who has been virtually invisible to the people of his country for the past two weeks, emerged to denounce suggestions that the occupation of his country by foreign troops was a threat to its sovereignty. At a press conference with Jose Miguel Insulza, secretary-general of the Organization of American States, he rebuffed a question about the occupation, saying, “We are talking about people suffering and you are talking about ideology.”



A French reporter asked why US troops were controlling flights into the Port-au-Prince airport. Preval replied: “You need to run the airport, you need technical help and they offered it to us. I really can’t understand why the need for that is so difficult to accept.”



Preval also announced that Haitian legislative elections, previously scheduled for February 28, would be postponed indefinitely.



The major initiative of Preval’s government is a program to relocate 500,000 people from Port-au-Prince to villages outside the capital region, but there have been few takers among those living in the rubble. A reporter for the French news agency AFP visited Croix des Bouquets, one of the relocation sites, and described it as “a vast, gravel wasteland with just a few people hanging about hoping for work.”



Meanwhile an extraordinary denunciation of the Obama administration’s conduct in Haiti was published in the Wall Street Journal, issued by three New York City doctors, Soumitra R. Eachempati, incoming president of the New York State Chapter of the American College of Surgeons, and Dean Lorich and David Helfet, orthopedic surgeons and colleagues of Dr. Eachempati at the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City.



Their statement appeared under the headline, “Haiti: Obama’s Katrina, Many post-quake deaths could have been prevented.” The three doctors, who were among the first to reach Haiti after the quake, wrote that the delays imposed by the US military on relief groups entering the county “proved tragic. Upon our arrival at the Haiti Community Hospital we found scores of patients with pus dripping out of open fractures and crush injuries. Some wounds were already infested with maggots. Approximately one-third of the victims were children. Most of the patients already had life-threatening infections, and all were dehydrated. Many had been waiting in the hospital compound for days without water, antibiotics or even pain medicine. The hospital smelled of infected, rotting limbs.”



They continued: “The U.S. response to the earthquake should be considered an embarrassment. Our operation received virtually no support from any branch of the US government, including the State Department. As we ran out of various supplies we had no means to acquire more…. Later, as we were leaving Haiti, we were appalled to see warehouse-size quantities of unused medicines, food and other supplies at the airport, surrounded by hundreds of US and international soldiers standing around aimlessly.”





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[blugiant]

Re: delibarately starving haitians

Relief groups say better ways to feed Haiti


Criticised over chaotic food handouts in Haiti, UN and US officials say they are doing their best to feed the multitudes of earthquake victims, but smaller relief groups insist there are better ways to distribute food and ensure it reaches the neediest.

Many food distributions since the January 12 quake have been uneventful, but UN troops at some of Haiti's largest refugee camps have fired warning shots and sprayed tear gas to try to control desperate crowds.

The UN World Food Programme, which has been coordinating many of the handouts, acknowledges problems, but says its main priority is to reach as many people as possible.

The WFP could wait until better systems are in place, agency spokesmen David Orr and Marcus Prior said in a written response about the chaotic distributions.

"But we - along with the Haitian authorities and our humanitarian partners - think it essential to get the food out quickly to those who need it most, while at the same time putting in place a more robust distribution system," they said.

At the food handouts, young people quickly claim their places in line, laughing and joking as they know they will be the first to be served. But as the crowd presses, people start to push and shove, forming scrums that have repeatedly turned ugly and dangerous.

The old, the sick and mothers carrying small children are often left empty-handed.

"You have to be strong to fight for food," said Olivia Alexi, 70, who waited near the back of a line of thousands of people, hungry and despairing, at a camp in downtown Port-au-Prince, while groups of young men walked away with bags of food. "It is not easy for an old woman."

More than two weeks after the quake that killed as many as 200,000 Haitians and left up to 1 million homeless, the US-led relief operation is struggling with how to supply food to everyone who needs it and keep hungry people's anger from erupting into violence.

Water, an even more immediate need, has largely been taken care of - an achievement aid groups point to with relief. But hard-pressed aid workers acknowledge that food is a persistent problem.

"I think there is sufficient food," said Lewis Lucke, a retired US ambassador serving as the American coordinator for relief and recovery in Haiti. "The issue there is distribution and security, and security is part of distribution."

Keeping crowds calm

Smaller relief organisations say there is a better way.

Sarah Gillam of ActionAid said her group was keeping its distributions small and calm by making use of camp residents and local police for security.

So far, ActionAid has distributed flour, rice, sugar and corn flour, cans of mackerel and cooking oil to 4,000 people in Port-au-Prince, and plans to supply another 4,000 in the next four days.

Aid agency CARE feeds the hungry by giving ration cards to women, which ensures the food will get to families because men are more likely to sell it, CARE's director in Haiti, Sophie Perez, said. The system has been orderly.

One of the biggest - and calmest - camps in the capital is in an upscale section of town, on what was once Haiti's only golf course.

The camp at the former country club is overseen by, at any time, by 200 to 400 US soldiers who, with Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam and other aid groups, are protecting, housing and providing food and water to 40,000 to 50,000 Haitians.

"We've got a function that works," said Army Captain Jon Hartsock.

He said the soldiers had developed a program for feeding the quake survivors since they arrived on January 16, making ample use of Haitian volunteers and community leaders, and techniques from sitting down and refusing to hand out more food if anyone became unruly, to sending anyone who acted up to the back of the line.

"It's kind of tough love," Hartsock said.

This week, Catholic Relief Services began handling the camp food distributions. They distribute multicoloured cards that entitle each woman head of household to a large bag containing a two-week supply of food - bulgur, rice, cooking oil and other products.

"When we first got here, they were starving, hungry and needed food," Hartsock said.

Now the camp is largely calm and orderly, with medical services, a few vendors offering cell phone recharging or bottled drinks, and talk of more permanent sanitation facilities.

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[WiseJamaican]

Re: delibarately starving haitians

Well the disaster is so much and the road is rough. I believe by this things are going on well where this is concern.

[blugiant]

Re: delibarately starving haitians

Marnity Buisson stands, arms akimbo, on pebbled dirt between stacks of bedsheets and a ravine that's become an open sewer and fly-infested garbage pit.

This is her turf. The house she grew up in is reduced to bits of stone and concrete; her neighbourhood is in smithereens.

In an attempt to take control of the area where she has spent all her life, the 22-year-old joined a seven-member committee struck to oversee the welfare of 75 families living under tarps and sleeping on the ground in this Martissant alley.

In tent cities, refugee camps, mattress-filled streets and courtyards-turned-living rooms across Port-au-Prince, survivors are forming their own organizing committees to provide advocacy, security and co-ordination. Some of them have issued sporadic press releases, following their federal government's lead in holding news conferences.

Ms. Buisson's committee has a roll call of each household and its members. Those on the committee meet three times weekly and have taken it upon themselves, as residents of their self-declared “zone,” to decide how to distribute aid among some 375 people.

Except there hasn't been any. Aid, that is.

“We've seen nothing, no one. They don't come here,” said Ms. Buisson. She counts on once-manicured nails the items on her community's wish list: food, tents, water, medicine, insect repellent.

The United Nations' World Food Programme dramatically revamped its aid distribution on the weekend, after weeks of chaos in which food and water were doled out to crowds that often turned into shoving, shouting mobs. The scale of urban devastation after the 7.0 earthquake that shattered Haiti on Jan. 12 has been an unprecedented challenge for the international agency at the forefront of aid co-ordination.

“It's the most complex situation we've ever faced,” said Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the World Food Programme. “[At first] we had to do everything we could, to put as much food out to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. … But instead of using mobile, quick-and-dirty methods, we need a more organized response.”

The new system replaces those quick-and-dirty convoys with 16 fixed sites across Port-au-Prince, each meant to provide rice for 10,000 people a day. With more than a million people fed each week, the UN would come much closer to a target it has yet to reach. Although Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had pledged to provide food for one million people by last Friday, only 600,000 had been fed by then.

The food agency reported it served more than 100,000 people yesterday, with nine of the 16 new sites in operation.

The international community's monetary response to the emergency recovery has been significant: As of Friday, the UN and its affiliated organizations had received more than $470 million, with U.S. government contributions leading at more than $114-million, and the Canadian government second at more than $57-million.

But delivering the aid has been another story altogether: The devastation of Port-au-Prince's dense urban landscape has presented problems that aid agencies aren't used to dealing with. Humanitarian workers are accustomed to providing aid in more sparsely populated, rural spaces.

“We need to have more stable and robust distribution methods in place,” Mr. Prior said.

And the World Food Programme is using people like Ms. Buisson to achieve this goal. These self-appointed community leaders have established ties to the people that aid agencies are trying so desperately to reach, and they tend to know which needs are greatest, say aid workers.

UN convoys rolled out at dawn yesterday, flanked by black-and-white trucks carrying armed, blue-helmeted troops. The usual stampede immediately followed the rice-filled trucks. But by 7 a.m., there was an orderly line snaking down the hill from one site near Place Jérémie. The hundreds of people were all female, all brandishing the plain paper coupons that had been handed out the day before.

The hulking white trucks at yesterday's pilot sites were emptied of their cargo by mid-morning as lines wound around streets and public squares. Women left bent under the weight of 25-kilogram sacks of food.

Ms. Buisson's neighbourhood was not one of the lucky ones, though. And by last night, she had still heard nothing about forthcoming aid.“But I'm meeting with my committee,” she said. “We'll work something out.”


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[blugiant]

Re: delibarately starving haitians

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: WiseJamaican</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Well the disaster is so much and the road is rough. I believe by this things are going on well where this is concern. </div></div>

mii ear wan incident wey mzungu hellikkkapter land ann de peeps wass waitinn fii da supply butt de oyinbo inn da helicopter took aff inn da air ann throw da supply too da haitians like dem wass doggs

even da red cross wass cumplainn bout food distreebution butt itt seem like dem finallee doinn a bettar jab feedinn da haitians

[blugiant]

Re: starving di haitian

Blocks from where U.S. and U.N. soldiers distribute sacks of rice to Haitian women in earthquake-shattered Port-au-Prince, street vendors are openly selling rice by the cup from bags stamped with U.S. flags.

In the early days after the January 12 earthquake that killed up to 200,000 people and left more than a million homeless, food handouts were often chaotic in the capital. On a couple of occasions, U.N. soldiers fired tear gas into hungry crowds jostling for a limited amount of goods.

To ensure a more orderly distribution where food gets to families who need it, international donors last weekend began a system where soldiers hand out 55-pound (25-kg) bags of rice to women only in exchange for ration cards.

Food handouts have become calmer, but the new policy has not stopped badly needed food aid from falling into the hands of black-market sellers.

In one Port-au-Prince neighborhood where 12,000 people live in tents made of bedsheets in a valley below their collapsed hillside slum, vendors at makeshift stands sell cups of rice from food-aid bags for about 22 gourdes (55 cents) each.

Marcus Prior, a spokesman for the World Food Program, said it was inevitable some of the aid would end up being sold.

&quot;It is too early to say how much ends up on the black market. We never like to see it happen. The object of this scale-up is far-reaching to help stabilize the food situation in the city,&quot; Prior told Reuters.

SELLING RATION CARDS

But some seeking food from the new distribution system do not know how to get it.

&quot;No food has come here. We know they are using the cards but we don't know how to find the cards,&quot; said Losin Fritz, a community leader for about 4,500 people living in threadbare tents made from sticks and ripped, clear plastic.

&quot;We will have to make the cards ourselves and take them over there,&quot; Fritz said, pointing down the street where a military convoy had just handed out rice to hundreds of people with coupons.

For two weeks, the World Food Program will give out only rice, deciding later whether to add other staples like beans, cooking oil and salt.

International aid groups say they are learning from mistakes made in earlier food handouts when stronger men could push aside women and the elderly to grab the goods first.

Now the coupons are given only to women, and community leaders decide who will have priority. But some are taking advantage of cracks in the system.

A protest erupted on Wednesday after people complained some groups were selling the coupons for 50 gourdes each ($1.24).

&quot;Only (the leaders') friends get the cards and we don't have any money to buy the rice at the market,&quot; said Peter Princius, an old man living in a sparse camp on the outskirts of the Cite Soleil slum, largely controlled by gangs before the earthquake. &quot;And we are hungry.&quot;

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[Dr.Dudd]

Re: starving di haitian

Which idiot set that policy to give only the women? I mean if they had a brain, how difficult would it be to establish separate distribution centers for men and women?
Who are going to secure the rations given to the women??
I any other situation, the principles would have been to give to the strong and let 'em distribute it.

Since can't protect the weak,and either way the strong will get it. way in an ordorly way, and the present way, through violence. talk about ......
They carry the fear of black man whever they go.
They simply can't be so close to the men.
They can't treat them as they would treat men of other race.

[blugiant]

Re: starving di haitian

Haiti: Three weeks after earthquake, angry protests over aid delays
By Bill Van Auken
4 February 2010

Three weeks after the January 12 earthquake leveled most of Port-au-Prince and claimed the lives of over 200,000 people, anger in Haiti over the slow pace of relief and the impotence of President Rene Preval’s government has erupted into protests.

The protests came as the government provided fresh figures that once again exposed an even higher death toll. Speaking before the first session of the Haitian parliament since the disaster, Prime Minister Max Bellerive reported that 200,000 people had been “clearly identified” as having died in the earthquake. The figure, he warned, does not include those buried by family members or neighbors or the bodies that have yet to be recovered from demolished buildings.

In addition, Bellerive said that nearly 300,000 Haitians had been injured in the quake, 4,000 of them having undergone amputations. He also reported that 250,000 houses had been destroyed, with more than 1 million people now homeless.

Government workers, lawyers and crowds of hungry people staged demonstrations and protests in various parts of the devastated capital Wednesday as frustration over the failure of the anarchic relief effort to reach the majority of those affected by the quake boiled over.

Hundreds of people ran through the streets of the Port-au-Prince suburb of Petionville waving tree branches and shouting, “They stole the rice! They stole the rice,” the Associated Press reported Wednesday.

The protesters said that local officials were charging earthquake victims for coupons entitling them to food aid that has been donated by the United Nations World Food Program.

“For us to get the coupon, we must give 50 Haitian dollars (US$7) so we can get the rice,” Danka Tanzil, 17, told the AP.

There are mounting charges of official corruption in the food relief program, even as nearly two thirds of those affected by the earthquake have yet to receive any aid at all. At street markets set up amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince, sacks of rice clearly marked as donated are being sold at elevated prices.

The coupon distribution, targeted to Haitian women, was initiated over the weekend after weeks in which aid had been distributed in the most haphazard and degrading manner. Convoys under military escort arrived without notice near camps of the homeless that are spread throughout Port-au-Prince, throwing food and bottles of water into jostling crowds of Haitian men. Most ended up going away with nothing.

“They are treating people like dogs, just tossing things at them,” Séjour Jean Rodrigue, a community leader in a neighborhood near downtown Port-au-Prince, told the New York Times. “We don’t want anything to do with it.”

“I just avoid them altogether,” Kellely Casimir, 23, a pregnant mother of three in Port-au-Prince, told the United Nations news agency IRIN. “I have to fight to get food... Parents with children are the ones who are not getting food. People without children are getting the food because they have the energy to fight for it.”

The distributions remain chaotic, with US and other troops deployed for crowd control as thousands of people, many of whom have not eaten for days, push towards the food supplies.

Meanwhile, Haiti’s Radio Metropole reported Wednesday that “several hundred people marched in the streets of Port-au-Prince this morning” demanding “food and work.”

“The Haitian government has done nothing for us,” protester Sandrac Baptiste told the radio station. “We can’t find work. It does not give us food.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of former employees of state-owned enterprises that were shut down under pressure from Washington, the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions protested outside the temporary seat of the Haitian government in the judicial police headquarters.

Most of the workers lost their jobs after the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. They have demanded 36 months pay as compensation. The demonstrators chanted slogans denouncing President Rene Preval. Some in the crowd called for Aristide’s return.

The powerlessness of the Preval government was underscored by Prime Minister Bellerive’s announcement Tuesday that parliamentary elections scheduled for the end of this month will be postponed indefinitely. He claimed that the vote would be impossible because of the crisis in the country and the damage suffered by Haiti’s elections office. The country’s Electoral Council, acting at the behest of Washington, had previously banned from participation Fanmi Lavalas, the party loyal to ousted President Aristide.

In another indication of the tensions building up in Haiti, it was reported that a group of up to 20 armed men set up a roadblock last Saturday and attempted to seize control of a UN convoy carrying food. They were driven off by police gunfire. UN spokesman Vicenzo Pugliese said Tuesday that the attack pointed to a “potentially volatile'” situation.

Increasingly, both the Haitian population and aid workers have expressed intense frustration over the delay in getting relief supplies to those who need them. Many have pointed to the fact that supplies are piling up at the Port-au-Prince airport, but not being distributed.

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

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[blugiant]

Re: starving di haitian

oyinbo ting

da real qwestian iss dat deer iss enuff food inn da warehouseses inn haiti dat tree weeks aftah da earthquake peeps shood natt bee starvinn. itt bout da failure fii properlee distreebute. iff yu read upp pon da subjekk de haitians ar usuallee well behave at distreebution pints butt deer iss natt enuff food at de distreebution centers even dough da warehouse ar loaded

wan aff de reason y haiti iss still soo peacefull iss dat de haitian men ave been protectinn da peeps inn dem communitee



<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Dr.Dudd</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Which idiot set that policy to give only the women? I mean if they had a brain, how difficult would it be to establish separate distribution centers for men and women?
Who are going to secure the rations given to the women??
I any other situation, the principles would have been to give to the strong and let 'em distribute it.

Since can't protect the weak,and either way the strong will get it. way in an ordorly way, and the present way, through violence. talk about ......
They carry the fear of black man whever they go.
They simply can't be so close to the men.
They can't treat them as they would treat men of other race. </div></div>