The Denver Post

Haitian gangs raid aid convoys
By Paisley Dodds
The Associated Press

Wednesday, September 29, 2004 - Gonaives, Haiti - They mob aid convoys, break into homes to steal food and shoot anyone who gets in their way.

Street gangsters have put aid workers squarely in their sights and are subjecting weary storm survivors to life-threatening delays in getting food and water.

The failure of Haiti's U.S.- backed government to disarm gangs, including the Cannibal Army that started the revolution that ousted President Jean- Bertrand Aristide, has created a climate of insecurity that jeopardizes lives after the calamity visited on Gonaives by Tropical Storm Jeanne.

"Things are very bad here. People are insecure, and we have to fight for everything," said Rony Coq, 30, a member of a gang called the Bottle Army because its members fling bottles at enemies.

Coq's gang operates in Cassolet, a maze of concrete slum homes that was mired in up to 5 feet of mud Tuesday - 10 days after Jeanne.

Nearby, a human vertebra stuck out of a pile of sludge topped by a tire, one of the unclaimed flood victims that residents buried because so many were rotting before officials ordered mass burials.

Officials say more than 1,500 people died in the storm and some 900 are missing, many of whom are presumed among the dead. Most of the victims were in Gonaives, Haiti's third-largest city, where four-fifths of the 250,000 residents were left homeless.

The security chief for the U.N. stabilization mission in Haiti, John Harrison of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, visited Cassolet on Tuesday to scout for a safe place to distribute food.

Earlier, only about 40 people lined up for food at an aid center in another neighborhood where U.N. peacekeepers from Brazil had to shoot into the air Monday to control hundreds of people who rioted when they were prevented from looting the food.

"It's very difficult to get food. We come every day ... People are getting very frustrated," said Manette Jean, 31, one of the few people to show up Tuesday.

She said a piece of metal stuck in her foot when she was shoved and nearly trampled during a previous visit to a food distribution center, but that she had to come so she can feed her five children.

Harrison had hoped to use Gonaives' port, but his group found the dock in the hands of armed men. "There's a big problem with gangs," he told The Associated Press. "I think things could get worse."

That was bad news for the World Food Program, which was chartering a ship to bring food to Gonaives.

Jouthe Joseph of the humanitarian group CARE said Tuesday that about 10 tons of food had been lost to looters in Gonaives, out of 175 tons sent in by international aid groups over the past week, which allowed them to feed about 98,000 people.