Source : Perth Now news
UN Secretary-General António Guterres has visited Haiti, where surging gang violence has left more than one-in-10 people homeless.
New statistics released by the UN reveal that 2300 people have been killed across Haiti this year, with another 100 kidnapped, while 1.5 million have been displaced.
Among those abducted is James Boyard, cabinet director of the Defence Ministry, who was kidnapped last week in one of the few relatively safe areas of the capital.
Guterres’ visit to Port-au-Prince on Tuesday comes after more than 30 people were killed, injured or missing last weekend in Cité Soleil, a seaside slum, according to Co-operative for Peace and Development, a local human rights organisation.
His convoy sped past a neighbourhood once fully controlled by gangs that left in their wake decimated car dealerships, abandoned homes and dozens of concrete buildings pockmarked with bullet holes.
Graffiti scrawled on a crumbling concrete wall read: “Down with Viv Ansanm, long live the police”.
Viv Ansanm is a powerful gang federation that the US government designated a foreign terrorist organisation. It is estimated to control 70 per cent of Port-au-Prince.
More than 300,000 people have been displaced by gang violence across Port-au-Prince.
Guterres’s first stop was the headquarters of the new gang-suppression force, which the UN Security Council approved in September.
It replaces a UN-backed mission led by Kenyan police that aimed to help Haiti’s National Police fight gangs but remained underfunded and understaffed.
So far, Jamaica, Chad, El Salvador and Guatemala have deployed troops that number less than 1000 to form part of the growing force, which is due to start operations in the coming weeks.
They are expected to work with Haiti’s National Police and its growing Armed Forces, with hundreds of Haitian men and a couple of women lining up on a dusty road hoping to interview to join.
Guterres then met behind closed doors with Prime Minister Alix Didier-Fils-Aimé, who is under pressure to hold elections in the country of nearly 12 million people that hasn’t had a president since Jovenel Moïse was killed at his private residence in July 2021.
Guterres also stopped by a makeshift shelter in a former school where dozens of the people living there crowded around him.
Forced to flee their homes after gangs shot up their community and set fire to it, some had been living there for up to four years.
Guterres met privately with a group of six women who decried the lack of privacy at their shelter, which houses more than 1200 people who sleep side by side, and only one meal a day is guaranteed.
“We’re going to do our best,” Guterres told the women.
A day before Guterres’s visit, Human Rights Watch published a letter urging him to protect the population and target the root causes of violence and human rights abuses. Guterres said he was deeply impacted by what he saw.
“What I saw will not leave me,” he said.
“Each day is a fight to survive. … The women and the children pay the highest price.”
