Three weeks after a massive earthquake crippled Haiti, authorities on Tuesday indefinitely postponed upcoming legislative elections amid lingering chaos and rising security concerns.
The move underlined the impotence of the Haitian government in the wake of the 7.0-magnitude Jan. 12 quake that killed an estimated 170,000 people and left many official buildings, including the presidential palace, in ruins.
“The electoral council has decided to postpone the legislative elections of February 28 and March 3, 2010, to a later unspecified date,” the authorities said, giving no further details.
The polls in the Caribbean nation had been set to decide the fate of all 99 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house and one third of those in the Senate.
VIOLENCE
As the political insecurity grew, fears of violence also rose, with the UN revealing that armed men had attempted to hijack a food convoy on a road near Jeremie airport at the weekend.
The UN Bureau for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Geneva said “warning shots were fired” during Saturday’s incident and assessed the situation in Haiti as “stable but potentially volatile.”
Security is one of the main concerns of international relief teams and desperate residents of the capital Port-au-Prince, the scene of widespread looting in the immediate aftermath of the disaster.
An abduction controversy also overshadowed the ongoing effort to feed, house and care for an estimated 1 million homeless Haitians, many of whom were still gasping for food, water, shelter and medical help.
Ten US missionaries, five women and five men, were arrested late on Friday as they tried to cross into the Dominican Republic with a bus full of 33 Haitian children with no passports or permission to leave the country.
An investigating judge interviewed five of the Baptist group on Tuesday and was to quiz the remaining five yesterday before passing on his findings to a tribunal that must decide whether to bring charges.
PARENTS
Georg Willeit, spokesman of SOS Children’s Villages, the US aid group now caring for the children, said that between 15 and 20 of them still had at least one parent.
“Some parents are now showing up to be reunited with their children, some of them met yesterday with social workers ... but we cannot allow any reunion until we make clear why they were on that bus,” Willeit said.
The aid group and the Haitian authorities have said they want to make sure the children were not taken with the consent of the parents.
The Americans, from an Idaho-based Baptist group called New Life Children’s Refuge, are being detained at the judicial police headquarters in Port-au-Prince and face possible charges of criminal conspiracy, kidnapping minors and child-trafficking.
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