Moontown

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AFP) —  Anger built Saturday at Haiti’s US-controlled main airport, where aid flights were still being turned away and poor coordination continued to hamper the relief effort four days on.

“Let’s take over the runway,” shouted one voice. “We need to send a message to (US President Barack) Obama,” cried another.

A French citizen pleads with a soldier as she waits to find out if she can board a French air force plane (AFP photo)

Control remained in the hands of US forces, who face criticism for the continued disarray at the overwhelmed airfield.

Dozens of French citizens and dual Haitian-French nationals crowded the airport Saturday seeking to be evacuated after Tuesday’s massive 7.0 earthquake, which leveled much of the capital Port-au-Prince.

But at the last minute, a plane due to take them to the French island of Guadeloupe was prevented from landing, leaving them to sleep on the tarmac, waiting for a way out.

“They’re repatriating the Americans and not anyone else,” said Charles Misteder, 50. “The American monopoly has to end. They are dominating us and not allowing us to return home.”

The crowd accused American forces, who were handed control of the airport by Haitian authorities, of monopolizing the airfield’s single runway to evacuate their own citizens.

The US embassy denied it was putting the evacuation of the approximately 40,000 to 45,000 American citizens in the country first.

Others waiting for a way out were taken aback by the chaotic scenes confronted them when they arrived at the Toussaint L’Ouverture airport.

“I haven’t been able to tell my family that I’m alive. The coordination is a joke,” said Wilfried Brevil, a 33-year-old housekeeper.

“I was at the Christopher Hotel,” said Daniele Saada, referring to the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping force in Haiti, MINUSTAH.

“I was extremely shaken up. I was pulled out, the others weren’t,” added Saada, 65, a MINUSTAH employee.

“I decided to return to France. I have nothing and now I am stuck,” she said, caught between fury at the chaos and sheer exhaustion.

The disorder even appeared to cause diplomatic ripples, with French Secretary of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet telling reporters he had lodged a complaint with the United States over its handling of the Port-au-Prince airport.

“I have made an official protest to the Americans through the US embassy,” he said at the Haitian airport after a French plane carrying a field hospital was turned away.

A spokesman for the French foreign ministry later denied France had registered protest, saying “Franco-US coordination in emergency aid for Haiti is being handled in the best way possible given the serious difficulties.”

The US ambassador to Haiti defended American efforts at the small airport, which was up-and-running 24 hours after the massive quake, even though the air traffic control tower was damaged.

“We’re working in coordination with the United Nations and the Haitians,” said Ambassador Kenneth Merten, though he acknowledged some difficulties.

“Clearly it’s necessary to prioritize the planes. It’s clear that there’s a problem.”

Despite the chaos, a group of French citizens was eventually able to take off on Saturday, and the French plane carrying a field hospital landed safely around noon.

Still, with aid continuing to flood into the quake-stricken country, concern remains about the lack of coordination at the airport, and across devastated Port-au-Prince.

“The Haitians haven’t been notified about the arrival of planes. And when they do land, there’s no one to take charge and a large amount of goods are arriving without coordination,” said Haitian government official Michel Chancy.

On Port-au-Prince’s streets, the consequences of the coordination breakdown are clear, as traumatized and starving quake survivors approached passing foreigner and begged them for food. (Caribnet)

CHICAGO, USA (AFP) – Haiti and its neighbors must prepare themselves for more massive quakes after the devastating tremors this week increased pressure along a lengthy fault line, scientists warned Friday.

Paul Mann, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, warned that just because the rebuilding process had started people shouldn’t assume the risk was over.

Haitians carry the coffin of a relative in Port au Prince - AFP photo

“This relief of stress along this area near Port-au-Prince may have actually increased stress in the adjacent segments on the fault,” he told AFP.

Researchers have already begun to work on models to try to predict how the stress changes resulting from the 7.0-magnitude quake which struck Tuesday is affecting the adjacent segments of the fault.

“This fault system is hundreds of kilometers long and the segment that ruptured to form this ear quake is only 80 kilometers long,” Mann said in a telephone interview.

“There are many more segments which are building up strain where there haven’t been earthquakes for hundreds of years.

“Potentially any one of these segments could cause an earthquake similar to that which happened in Haiti.”

There are, thankfully, only two major population centers along the fault: Port-au-Prince and Kingston, Jamaica.

But as demonstrated in the chaos which followed Tuesday’s tremor, the impact of a quake of that magnitude can be “paralyzing,” Mann said.

Adding to the danger is the fact that the segment which broke was not among those closest to Port-au-Prince.

And there is a second fault system in the north of Haiti which extends to the Dominican Republic which has not ruptured in 800 years and has built up sufficient pressure for a 7.5 magnitude quake.

“The question is when are those going to rupture,” Mann said, adding that it is very difficult to predict “whether or not that’s going to happen next week or 100 years.”

Eric Calais, a French geophysicist who works at Purdue University in Indiana, is among those trying to assess the danger.

He had warned Haitian officials years ago of dangerous pressure in the fault which caused this week’s devastating quake, but little could be done to reinforce the desperately poor nation’s weak buildings.

“The Haitian government is not to blame in this,” Calais told AFP.

“They listened to us carefully and they knew what the hazard was. They were very concerned about it and they were taking steps. But it just happened too early.”

Calais began researching the fault line in 2003 and soon took his initial findings to the Haitian government, even meeting with the prime minister.

In March 2008 he and Mann presented a paper showing that the fault had built up sufficient pressure to cause a 7.2 magnitude quake.

But they could not pinpoint when the quake might strike and the government was occupied with recovering from a series of four hurricanes which struck that year.

While the government had begun work on an emergency response plan, little could be done to retrofit and strengthen key buildings such as hospitals, schools and government buildings from which rescue operations could be organized.

“It’s a poor country,” Calais said. “Strengthening a building to resist a large earthquake can be as costly as replacing the building.”

The devastation will allow Haiti to rebuild stronger than before, Calais said, noting that there are relatively cheap engineering solutions that can be applied to ensure that new buildings will not collapse in the next quake.

“It’s very important for Port-au-Prince to rebuild properly,” he added. “There are other segments of that fault that could rupture in the future.”

“I read that 3,000 soldiers are arriving, Marines armed as if they were going to war. There is not a shortage of guns there, my God. Doctors, medicine, fuel, field hospitals, that’s what the United States should send,” Chavez said on his weekly television show. “They are occupying Haiti undercover.”

President Hugo Chavez

“On top of that, you don’t see them in the streets. Are they picking up bodies? … Are they looking for the injured? You don’t see them. I haven’t seen them. Where are they?”

Chavez promised to send as much gasoline as Haiti needs for electricity generation and transport.

A perennial foe of US “imperialism,” Chavez said he did not wish to diminish the humanitarian effort made by the United States and was only questioning the need for so many troops.

The United States is sending more than 5,000 Marines and soldiers to Haiti, and a hospital ship is due to arrive later this week.

The country’s president said US troops would help keep order on Haiti’s increasingly lawless streets.

Venezuela has sent several planes to Haiti with doctors, aid and some soldiers. A Russia-Venezuela mission was set to leave Venezuela on Monday carrying aid on Russian planes.

Chavez said Venezuela’s planes were the first to land in Haiti after Tuesday’s 7.0 magnitude earthquake, which wrecked the capital Port-Au-Prince and killed as many as 200,000 people. (Caribnet)

CITE SOLEIL, Haiti (Reuters) — Heavily armed gang members who once ran Haiti’s largest slum like warlords have returned with a vengeance since Tuesday’s earthquake damaged the National Penitentiary allowing 3,000 inmates to break out.

The pacification of Cite Soleil had been one of President Rene Prevail’s few undisputed achievements since taking office in 2006, until the quake devastated Port-au-Prince.

“It’s only natural that they would come back here. This has always been their stronghold,” said a Haitian police officer in the teeming warren of shacks, alleys and open sewers that is home to more than 300,000 people.

He and other policemen, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak about the volatile situation in Cite Soleil, said notorious armed gangs had been making their presence felt here since the quake.

If large-scale violence erupts here amid the chaos and looting that has grown by the hour in Port-au-Prince since the temblor, it could pose a major challenge to efforts to reestablish law and order throughout the Haitian capital.

Cite Sole’s gang leaders are larger-than-life criminals. The stuff of urban legend and popular Haitian rap songs, they are now seen as a breed apart from other Haitians in that they alone benefited from the Tuesday’s disaster.

Mounted on motorcycles, and brandishing assault rifles and guns thought to have been stripped from prison guards during the quake, the gang members include one stone-cold killer known only by the street name “Blade.”

Word on the street is that they swept down on the rubble of Haiti’s collapsed Justice Ministry on Saturday morning and set it ablaze to destroy any records of their incarceration or criminal history.

When Reuters reporters clambered through broken bars to tour the cavernous National Penitentiary on Friday, there were few if any remaining records of inmates housed there. Many may have been burned in a small and windowless cell. It was still brick-oven hot days after the temblor.

Whatever actually happened inside the prison, it did not appear to have been seriously damaged by the quake. There were no bodies inside and the only sign of life came from two lame dogs holed up in a cell packed with old mattresses.

Of the 3,000 inmates who escaped on Tuesday, overpowering an unknown number of guards, many were violent criminals with past links to Cite Soleil, a seaside slum that has long been a potent social symbol of the poorest country in the Americas.

“They got out of prison and now they’re going around trying to rob people,” said Cite Soleil resident Elgin St Louis, 34. “Last night they spent the whole night shooting,” she added.

“We dread their return,” said another resident, a younger man who gave his name as Forrestal Champlain. “They’re armed, they have no morals and they could do anything.”

Despite such vocal opposition to the gangs, resentment against the government still runs high in Cite Soleil, which was a bastion of support for former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist champion of the poor.

The mostly cinder-block homes are still pockmarked from pitched battles between gangs and UN peacekeepers, who have been in Haiti since June 2004 and were used by Preval to establish control over Cite Soleil after he took office.

But as one resident put it on Saturday: “Preval’s not in charge here. No one’s in charge except the (gang) bosses.”

Haiti’s National Police Chief Mario Andresol had a different opinion, even as he acknowledged the escaped gang members posed a serious security risk.

“My message to all those armed bandits that are trying to take advantage of this situation is that we will arrest them just as we did in the past,” Andresol told Reuters.

“We are in the process of taking appropriate measures to hunt down these criminals,” he said. (Caribnet)

Anna Ramdass aramdass@trinidadexpress.com

Opposition Leader Basdeo Panday is the biggest political loser, Siparia MP Kamla Persad-Bissessar said at a public meeting in El Dorado on Saturday night.

Persad-Bissessar came armed with statistics to use against the man she called a ’wounded lion’.

She said under Panday’s leadership, the UNC had lost elections four times - 2001, 2002, 2003, 2007 and won only once in 2000. The general election in 1995, she said, was not a victory because the result was a 17-17 tie and a deal was made with the NAR. She said Panday’s leadership was lacking because of his inability to get along with people.

’In all his years of politics since 1966, for 44 years he has been fighting elections and only for six years he was in Government. So I am saying if you check the facts, the present leader is the biggest political loser,’ Persad-Bissessar said.

She said she kept holding on hoping by a miracle things would change, but it never did.

Not sparing her colleagues in Panday’s camp who have been highly critical of her, she said, ’They want it (UNC) for themselves so that they could stay in Opposition and warm their seats in Parliament without any responsibility and accountability to you.’

She said she has been accused on plotting to destroy the UNC, but she assured ’we will not destroy the UNC but protect it and take it out of intensive care, heal it and make it strong enough to fight for you and rid the nation of Manning’.

Panday has been reiterating that if he has a disciplined team he would lead the UNC into Government. But Persad-Bissessar said this was nonsense and pointed out that the same team he has now was the one he had in 2007 and still lost. (T/dad Express)