United Nations-led teams in Haiti on Friday switched their focus away from searching for people trapped in collapsed buildings to providing aid to hundreds of thousands of increasingly desperate survivors.
More than nine days after the devastating 7-magnitude quake, which killed at least 75 000 people and left a million homeless, the UN said some rescue teams were “exhausted” and “starting to go home”.
“The rescue teams are concentrating more and more on humanitarian aid for those who need it,” said Elisabeth Byrs, a spokesperson for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Those that remained were equipped with heavy equipment and would continue “to pull out corpses”, she added.
Meanwhile, the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) said it believed children had gone missing from hospitals, raising fears of trafficking for adoption abroad.
“We have documented, let’s say, around 15 cases of children disappearing from hospitals and not with their own family at the time,” saidUnicef adviser Jean Luc Legrand.
“Unicef has been working in Haiti for many years and we knew the problem with the trade of children in Haiti which existed before, and unfortunately many of these trade networks have links with international adoption ‘market’,” he said.
The Haiti government was on Friday working to move an estimated 500 000 people out of the devastated capital, Port-au-Prince, where they are living in squalid conditions, to temporary accommodation outside the city.
“The government has made available to people free transportation. A large operation is taking place: we’re in the process of relocating homeless people,” said Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime.
The government had hired buses to take quake victims to the south and north of the Caribbean nation to hastily set-up villages designed to hold 10 000 people each.
Alongside the Haitian plan, French and US rescue workers had also begun to clear debris and human waste from around the city’s ceremonial square, the Champ de Mars, which has become a giant refugee camp.
“We want to stop living like animals,” said Carole Deslouis, who finally received the promise of food and shelter in the square on Thursday after days of washing her children with filthy water and begging for rice.
US forces hoped to begin reopening the main port from Friday, following repairs, in order to receive international aid shipments and relieve pressure on the international airport.
But hopes had faded that any more survivors would be found alive beneath the rubble after no new survivors were found on Thursday. On Wednesday two children were rescued.
International search-and-rescue teams coordinated by the UN have managed to find 121 people alive since the January 12 quake, a record number in such a disaster.
Desperate fight
Survivors, however, still faced a desperate fight for life and medics said gangrene had begun to set in.
Tens of thousands of seriously injured Haitians remained in makeshift field hospitals set up in tents amid the ruins of the ravaged capital.
International doctors, working in miserable conditions and without supplies and modern equipment, have carried out scores of amputations to save victims with serious crush wounds or to repair internal injuries.
A 1 000-bed capacity US naval hospital ship was moored off the coast with about 800 medical personnel and had begun taking some of the most seriously injured.
Elsewhere, US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano urged Haitains to remain at home to help rebuild their shattered country.
Haitians who entered US territory illegally would be repatriated, she told a news conference during a visit to Spain.
“Haitians need to be there to rebuild the country. This is not an opportunity to immigrate to the United States,” she added. — AFP