UN SECRETARY general Ban Ki-moon has asked the UN Security Council to send another 3,500 personnel to join its peacekeeping mission in Haiti following last week’s earthquake.
With the scale of devastation wrought on the Caribbean country becoming clearer, the US was also sending more troops to help the relief effort and maintain security.
Mr Ban, who paid a brief visit to Haiti on Sunday, requested that the UN’s 9,000-strong force be augmented by 1,500 police and 2,000 troops.
The UN’s headquarters in Port-au-Prince collapsed during last Tuesday’s quake and at least 46 of its staff, including the head of the mission, have been confirmed dead. “The heartbreaking scenes I saw . . . compel us to act swiftly and generously today and over the longer term,” Mr Ban said.
Soldiers and supplies continued to arrive in the Haitian capital yesterday, including some 2,200 US marines with heavy earth-moving equipment, medical aid and helicopters. They were dispatched by the US southern command, which aims to have 10,000 US troops in the area for the rescue operation.
Nearly a week into the crisis, international aid was only just starting to get through to those in need after being delayed by logistical problems and security concerns.
Aid groups reported that their workers struggled to get food and medical assistance to survivors, many of them injured, hungry, thirsty and living in makeshift camps on streets strewn with debris and decomposing bodies.
“The situation is very tough on the ground, including for agencies and countries rushing to help. Minimal survival even for staff there is an issue,” the head of the World Health Organisation, Margaret Chan, said in Geneva.
The World Food Programme said it had supplied 60,000 people with ready-to-eat rations in one day and aimed to feed about two million people when its emergency programme was operating.
Amid concern over looting and violence, Haitian president René Préval said US troops would help UN peacekeepers keep order.
The commander of the US military operation in Haiti, Lieut Gen Ken Keen, said: “We are here principally for a humanitarian assistance operation, but security is a critical component . . . We are going to have to address the situation, the security.”
The US military said it was doing its best to get as many aircraft as possible into Port-au-Prince, after aid agencies complained shipments of supplies had not been allowed to land at the small US-controlled airport. More than 30 countries have rushed rescue teams, doctors, field hospitals, food, medicine and supplies to Haiti, causing congestion at the airport.
Although as many as 27 international rescue teams, involving more than 1,500 people, continued to search for survivors in the ruins of collapsed buildings yesterday, discussions were already taking place to secure funding for Haiti’s long-term reconstruction.
Mr Préval appealed to international donors to focus not just on immediate aid but on the further development of the poorest country in the Americas.
“We cannot just cure the wounds of the earthquake. We must develop the economy, agriculture, education, health, and reinforce the democratic institutions,” the president told representatives of foreign governments and international financial institutions at a preliminary donors’ conference in neighbouring Dominican Republic.
In Paris, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner said an international conference on Haiti’s reconstruction would be held in Canada on January 25th.
Estimates of the death toll from the earthquake ranged from 50,000 to 200,000 yesterday, with Gen Keen suggesting the latter figure could be a “reasonable assumption”.