23335: (Chamberlain) Clashes delay aid distribution (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

   By STEVENSON JACOBS

   GONAIVES, Oct 6 (AP) -- Deadly clashes kept customs agents and dock
workers from showing up for work in Haiti's capital, delaying the delivery
of nearly 2,500 tons of food to the flood-stricken north.
   Nearly half the 250,000 people in the devastated northwestern city of
Gonaives remain hungry nearly three weeks after Tropical Storm Jeanne
thundered through.
   Anne Poulsen of the U.N. World Food Program called the situation
extremely serious: "No one can afford to leave people in Gonaives without
food even for a day or two."
   On Tuesday, children tossed bread from the back of a truck to Gonaives
storm survivors who negotiated slippery, mud-mired roads to grab the
plastic-wrapped loaves.
   Hundreds lined up for aid at U.N. food centers, but thousands of people
are too weak, sick or frail to get to food. Some food is looted before it
gets to distribution points, and some people are robbed of their rations by
the street gangsters for which Gonaives is infamous.
   On Tuesday morning, a group of young men armed with rocks and metal bars
blocked the road and jumped on four trucks leaving a warehouse with the
largest food stocks in Gonaives. The attackers let the trucks go after
discovering they were empty.
   Saint Amise Dorcelue said she has tried four times to get food for
herself and her five boys. Six months pregnant, Dorcelue was left penniless
after her husband died when his fishing boat was thrown out to sea during
the storm.
   "On Monday, I went out (to a distribution point) for the fourth time,
and I couldn't get anything," said the barefoot 30-year-old. "There are too
many people there and they are always pushing and fighting.
   "I'm hungry, too, but I can't fight or my baby might get hurt," she
added, patting her stomach.
   Dorcelue and two of her boys sat on the dock in Gonaives' shipping port,
trying to fish with some old fishing line wrapped around a used shampoo
bottle. If she catches enough tiny shad fish, she can sell them in the
market to buy rice and corn.
   "Sometimes we have food, sometimes we don't," she shrugged, resigned to
the misery that has become commonplace in Haiti, a nation of 8 million
where political turmoil and greed turns natural disasters into catastrophe.
   Jeanne, whose system was laden with rain, pounded Gonaives for 30 hours
beginning Sept. 17. More than 98 percent of Haiti is deforested -- because
people chop trees for fuel -- leaving no soil to hold Jeanne's rains. It
burst river banks and overflowed entire valleys, brewing walls of mudslides
and debris-filled torrents.
   The death toll stood at 1,870 bodies recovered with another 884 people
reported missing and most presumed dead.
   Gonaives had never recovered from a February rebellion that began when a
street gang torched government buildings, released jailed criminals and
forced police to flee. Dozens of people, many police officers, were killed
here before President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled the country Feb. 27.
   The interim government, led by Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, has
proved ineffectual in Haiti's latest crises in Gonaives and Port-au-Prince,
where at least 18 people have been killed in the past week as slum dwellers
have stepped up protests to demand the return of Aristide, who is in exile
in South Africa.
   At least seven of the 18 killed are police officers, three of whom were
beheaded in a new campaign imitating insurgents in Iraq.
   The violence has scared away workers from the capital's port, where
Poulsen said 135 containers with 2,430 tons of food were stuck.
   Deadly clashes continued Tuesday between street gangs in Cite Soleil, a
shantytown teeming with Aristide supporters, and between police and the
gangs, residents said.
   At one point Tuesday, at least eight people were being for gunshot
wounds at the emergency room of Port-au-Prince General Hospital.
   Wiggins Osieux, 24, said a stream of bullets that tore into his home on
Monday stuck his 48-year-old mother in the chest and killed her. He was
wounded in the shoulder.
   That firefight was between police and armed civilians, according to
Osieux's neighbors, one of whom was visiting an 11-year-old son shot in the
in the arm and eye.
   "There is so much violence now," said the boy's mother, Raymond Amazon.
"And they were still shooting this morning."