DAY OF MOURNING: Haitians mark one month since quake

CMC

Friday, February 12, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The people of this Caribbean Community (Caricom) country are today observing a national day of mourning, one month after a catastrophic earthquake caused widespread destruction and killed more than 200,000 people in the region’s worst natural disaster on record.

Masses are being held across the country and a special mass is to be held at the ruined National Palace in the capital, with Haitians being urged to wear black or white clothing to show their support for the victims of the magnitude 7.0 quake that left a further 300,000 injured and a million homeless.

At 4:35 pm local time, Haitians at home and abroad will be asked to kneel and pray to mark the time that the ground shook violently for at least 40 seconds on January 12, crumbling buildings into piles of rubble.

A massive international aid effort is underway here with various agencies, led by the United Nations, providing food, water, clothing, medicines and other items to those desperately in need.

Agencies say though that most of the three million people in most need have yet to get their basic needs met. Many of those rendered homeless have set up tent communities where they are struggling to provide some semblance of normalcy to their lives.

The main priority in Haiti continues to be humanitarian. The first major rains of the year fell early Thursday, triggering landslides and destroying some buildings weakened by the quake.

Meantime, senior UN officials said the security situation in this French-speaking nation has recovered to being nearly the same as it was before the disaster and that the thousands of additional troops and police officers requested by the Security Council are on the way.

“The international answer to the request has been tremendous,” Le Roy said of last month’s Security Council decision to send 3,500 additional military and police as reinforcements for the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) troops and the Haitian local police, which he praised for being back on the streets just days after the earthquake.

Edmond Mulet, the UN Secretary-General’s Acting Special Representative in Haiti, added that the security is under control but that are concerns about the 5,000 prison inmates who escaped from the national penitentiary during the quake, believed to be responsible for an increase in rapes at camps for internally displaced persons and battles over control of neighbourhoods. So far, some 200 have been captured.

“We are working closely with local police and the government to go after them. The population is working with us and is denouncing them and telling us where they are hiding,” Mulet said.

In addition, he praised the coordination between the various countries involved, the Haitian government, UN agencies and programmes, and non-governmental organisations, and noted that “life was coming back to the city”.