The death toll in the Haiti quake has swelled to 200,000, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said on Wednesday as angry protests over the slow arrival of aid flared on the rubble-strewn streets.
More than three weeks after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake, Bellerive said his tiny Caribbean nation had been ravaged by “a disaster on a planetary scale” and detailed the tragic toll suffered by his people.
“There are more than 200,000 people who have been clearly identified as people who are dead,” he said in an interview, adding that another 300,000 injured had been treated, 250,000 homes had been destroyed and 30,000 businesses lost.
PHOTO: REUTERS
At least 4,000 amputations have also been carried out because of horrific crush injuries — a shocking figure which is likely to strain the impoverished nation’s already meager resources for years to come.
Bellerive said he has proposed the formation of an “emergency government” in Haiti to focus on the crisis, but insisted that the authorities, devastated as their ranks have been by the disaster, remained “in control of the situation.”
Despite a large aid operation, a lack of coordination and the sheer extent of the damage have hampered the distribution of food and water leading to mounting tensions among a million people left homeless.
“The Haitian government has done nothing for us, it has not given us any work. It has not given us the food we need,” Sandrac Baptiste said bitterly as she left her makeshift tent to join angry demonstrations on Wednesday.
With tensions running high in the ruined capital Port-au-Prince, about 300 people gathered outside the mayor’s office in the once upscale Petionville neighborhood.
“If the police fire on us, we are going to set things ablaze,” one of the protesters shouted, raising a cement block above his head.
Another 200 protesters marched toward the US embassy, crying out for food and aid.
The US has taken the lead in the huge relief effort, with about 20,000 troops, but on Wednesday a senior official at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) faced tough questioning about Haitians livid over the pace of aid.
“It is natural that they feel like that after a catastrophe of this magnitude,” USAID deputy director Anthony Chan told reporters. “We are doing the best that can be expected.”
But aid agencies have sounded the alarm that donations for Haiti relief have been desperately low compared with after the 2004 Asian tsunami, which had a death toll of about 220,000.
The head of the French Red Cross, Jean-Francois Mattei, said on a mission here that the organization has received 11.5 million euros (US$16 million) for Haiti, one-tenth the amount it received for tsunami relief.
And while the international Red Cross raised US$3 billion in relief in the tsunami’s aftermath, the figure for Haiti stands at just US$555 million in the aftermath of the worst natural disaster on record in the Americas.
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