UN frees funds for Haiti gang violence victims

The United Nations said Friday it had released emergency funds to help meet desperate humanitarian needs caused by gang violence in Haiti. 

UN aid chief Martin Griffiths has released $5 million from the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund to help boost the humanitarian response on the violence-torn island nation, his spokesman said.

Jens Laerke told reporters in Geneva that money would help aid agencies provide urgently needed food, drinking water, health care, education and mental health support for more than 100,000 people.

“The high level of insecurity is compromising humanitarian actors’ access to affected people,” he said.

Since July, hundreds of people have been killed in clashes between gangs in Haiti’s Cite Soleil, while many others have been injured or gone missing.

There have also been reports of gangs recruiting children, and Laerke said “sexual violence has been endemic” amid the violence.

The UN estimates nearly 280,000 people are directly affected, he said.

Meanwhile as many as 1.5 million people were “trapped in gang-controlled neighbourhoods in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area”, complicating the distribution of food, cash and the provision of basic services.

“They are trapped. Because of this violence, they can’t venture out,” he said.

Gangs operating with widespread impunity have extended their reach beyond the slums of the Haitian capital, carrying out a wave of kidnappings.

At least 155 kidnappings took place in June, compared to 118 in May, according to a report released by the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights.

Haiti is mired in a political crisis stemming from the 2016 elections, which was aggravated by the assassination of president Jovenel Moise at his home on July 7, 2021.

Laerke acknowledged that $5 million was not enough to address the towering needs of impoverished Haiti, where an estimated 4.9 million people, or about 43 percent of the population, need humanitarian assistance.

But he said the funds could go into “critical life-saving operations here and now, because that money is released immediately”.

The UN, he pointed out, had appealed for $373 million for Haiti this year, but so far only 14 percent of that was pledged.