Gray storm clouds gathered again over Haiti's flood-ravaged mountains on Saturday as tens of thousands of homeless survivors huddled for shelter. Estimates of the dead and missing stood near 2,000.
International aid workers said that people fleeing the flood had walked for hours or days seeking safety in the mountains of the Massif de la Salle, whose summits rise up to 2,680m, and that some had walked over the mountains down to the sea.
PHOTO: EPA
The aid workers, assisted by US, Canadian and Chilean soldiers, are still burying the dead and searching for the missing, while trying to keep the living alive. They say they confront a crisis far worse than they imagined in a country ill-equipped to manage daily life, much less a disaster on this scale.
The treasury of the provisional government that replaced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted three months ago, contains only a few million dollars. The government's ministries barely function. The Health Department was all but destroyed by the rebels who helped overthrow Aristide.
"The government is doing the best it can," Henri Bazin, Haiti's finance minister since March, said in an interview. "It is obvious that we do not have sufficient means to face this crisis."
He said the government could provide US$250,000 to cope with the flood. UN agencies have about US$380,000 available, officials said.
The French foreign minister, Michel Barnier, met with Haiti's interim president, Boniface Alexandre, and pledged help.
"We are providing food and water, but that is not enough," Barnier said.
Promised aid from foreign governments remains mostly undelivered.
"I don't think it's anything but promises yet," said Sheyla Biamby of Catholic Relief Services, one of Haiti's leading aid agencies.
The US said it was providing US$50,000 for flood relief in Haiti; the Organization of American States, US$25,000. That comes to about US$1 apiece for the roughly 75,000 people believed to have been affected by the flood, according to UN workers still trying to reach small villages cut off by mudslides.
A 4.4-magnitude earthquake was reported on Saturday afternoon in the Haitian flood zone by Dominican government seismologists. Its immediate effects were unknown.
While foreign countries and aid agencies are also sending relief to the Dominican Republic -- where hundreds, many of them Haitians, were killed in the border town of Jimani -- the problems are far graver in Haiti.
Alexandre said survivors from flooded villages -- like Mapou, where 1,000 are feared dead -- might have to be forcibly relocated. "We need to find a better place for them, and if the appropriate land is privately owned, the government must expropriate it," he said.
Biamby, boarding a helicopter for Mapou, agreed.
"I don't think anyone knows how many people are affected by this disaster," she said. "There are many localities that have not been reached yet. Because of the magnitude of the disaster in places like Mapou, people are not mentioning them. But what the government is going to have to do is relocate these people altogether. Nature simply doesn't allow people to live there."
In Mapou on Saturday, the US-led international force ferried supplies by helicopter as aid workers, including two Cuban doctors, tried to help thousands. Mapou is uninhabitable.
Its floodwaters, now receding from a height of 7.6m, are graveyards breeding the threat of malaria, dengue fever and hepatitis.
Mapou's survivors may have to be relocated to Thiotte, a three-hour walk away, Biamby said. Where they would live once they arrived remains unanswered.
Every road between the capital, Port-au-Prince, and the flooded villages has been erased. Food, water, medicine and the basics of life -- cooking pots, cups and spoons -- cannot reach the survivors without helicopters.
Most of the 14 helicopters in Haiti capable of lifting tons of supplies belong to the US military. The soldiers of the US-led force, which occupied Haiti after Aristide fell, are to leave on June 30.
The road to Mapou cannot be fixed by then, said Jean-Paul Toussaint, Haiti's public works minister.
"Even if the Americans go, helicopters have to stay. I'm sure that the government and our friends in the international community will have to come up with an answer to that question," Biamby said.
There is little level ground on which to build shelter in southeast Haiti, and no dry ground anywhere at the moment. The spring rains have been far heavier than usual, Bazin said. Rain is forecast through the weekend. The hurricane season starts in June.
Both Haiti's deep poverty and international politics complicate the country's ability to recover.
The government is almost bankrupt, in part because Ari-stide's government was at best inefficient and at worst corrupt over the past three years, foreign officials here say.
Aristide's administration had six months' worth of foreign reserves in the treasury when he regained office in 2000. Foreign reserves are the hard currency a government holds in its central bank to ensure solvency.
When Aristide fell, there were three days' worth of foreign reserves, a senior Haitian official said.
In addition, many nations cut off direct foreign aid to Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected president, and the George W. Bush administration increased diplomatic and political pressure against him, perceiving him as hostile and unstable.
But the way in which Aristide was overthrown -- with tacit US support -- meant that Haiti's new interim government remains unrecognized by Caricom, the economic community of Caribbean nations. So Haiti's neighbors, including Jamaica, have been wary of providing assistance.
Haiti suspended diplomatic ties with Jamaica, which holds the leadership of Caricom, after Aristide took refuge there in March. He was scheduled to leave yesterday for a permanent exile in South Africa. That may smooth the way for Caricom to help ease Haiti's latest troubles.
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