CMC – The head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Catherine Russell, has warned that “the world is failing the Haitian people,” and has called for immediate action by the international community to address conditions in the French-speaking Caribbean Community (CARICOM) country.
Russell, briefing reporters at UN Headquarters in New York, a few days after visiting Haiti, is also warning that it would be “hard to imagine a decent future” for the country.
She said “the current situation of insecurity is unacceptable” and that women and children are dying.
The UN said an estimated 5.2 million, close to half the population, need humanitarian support, including three million children.
The UNICEF executive director said institutions and services children rely on “are barely functional”, while violent armed groups control more than 60 per cent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and parts of the country’s most fertile agricultural areas.
“An 11-year-old girl told me in the softest of voices that five men had grabbed her off the street. Three of them raped her. She was eight months pregnant when we spoke and gave birth just a few days later.
The UNICEF chief said she had heard many similar stories, “part of a new strategy” by armed groups.
“They rape girls and women, and they burn their homes to make them more vulnerable and more easily controlled. Because if they break the women, they’ve broken the foundation of the communities.”
But amid the horror, Russell said there had been “some hope” in the form of extraordinary teachers, health workers, paediatricians, and young people themselves.
Russell said a bare minimum of US$720 million is needed for humanitarian support, but added that less than a quarter of that had been received.
She outlined urgent steps that need to be taken, including providing immediate extra funding and a better response, a long-term and sustained humanitarian effort, preparedness and resilience-building for natural disasters to come and improved protection for humanitarians.
Russell’s briefing followed a statement on Wednesday from the recently-appointed independent UN human rights expert on Haiti, William O’Neill, who has just concluded a 10-day fact-finding mission.
The Human Rights Council-appointed expert, who has long experience in the country, having helped set up the National Police in 1995, said beyond the gang violence and displacement, land grabs by oligarchs in the northeast had made conditions worse for thousands already living on the edge.
He said the deployment of a “specialized international force”, alongside national police, was “essential to restore the freedom of movement of populations.”
O’Neill said that an embargo on arms coming mainly from the United States, established by the UN Security Council, must be immediately implemented.
“It is urgent to take action. The survival of an entire nation is at stake,” he said. “The country has the choice to recover, to demonstrate its will to overcome the crisis to move towards a better future or to resign itself and sink further into chaos.
The UN said special rapporteurs and independent experts, such as O’Neill, serve in their individual capacity and are independent of any government or organization. They are not UN staff and do not receive payment for their work, the UN said.
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