Skip to main content

Haiti: UN peacekeepers turn former gang chief ’s headquarters into health clinic

Just days after launching a large-scale security operation to clean up one of Haiti's most notorious hotbeds of criminal gangs, the United Nations peacekeeping mission has transformed the former crime boss's headquarters into a free medical clinic, with clowns to cheer up sick children. We are here to help the Haitian people," the commander of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) Brazilian contingent Claudio Barroso Magno Filho said. "And this aid cannot be achieved if there is not first security and peace. That is why our security operations are immediately followed by our humanitarian assistance."

Until last Friday, when the UN launched a 700-troop-strong operation in the Boston area of Cité Soleil, one of Haiti's most crime-ridden neighbourhoods in Port-au-Prince, the capital, Jamaica Base was the headquarters of the gang chief named Evans, who used it to coordinate his activities in a country that has seen a surge in extortion, kidnappings and the recruitment of children into gangs.

Now, doctors and dentists from MINUSTAH's Brazilian contingent tend to local residents at what is today a new community centre. At its inauguration yesterday, Raymond Jean-Baptiste turned up with his seven-month-old daughter, happy for the free consultation. Clowns came too, dancing with the children, and the Brazilian peacekeepers handed out free footballs.

They also brought soup and clean drinking water for Boston's residents. "It's above all the lack of drinking water," Brazilian doctor Mario Cesar Furtado Joris said. "Most of the patients have allergies, skin disease or intestinal infections. They are suffering from diarrhoea and malnutrition. All these illnesses are due to a lack of food and drinking water. Moreover the garbage causes allergies."

A woman, about 40 years old, holding some cans joined the line for water. "The situation is already much better, but small time thieves are still here," she said. "At night there are still security problems."

The Boston operation follows a similar strategy that the Brazilians used when they cleaned up another notorious neighbourhood, Bel Air. "The security operations were designed to restore calm and peace in order to allow the return of social activities," Major Barroso said. "At present the Boston area is completely under MINUSTAH's control."

MINUSTAH, set up in 2004 to help re-establish peace in the impoverished Caribbean country after an insurgency forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to go into exile, has reported that armed criminal gangs are forcing children to take part in their operations, often under threat of killing them, and using them as human shields in confrontations with the police.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Aid in Cash, Not Goods, Averted A Famine In Somalia

“ Increasingly, it became clear that a new flow of international aid, cash, and not goods, worked to mitigate the risks of an immediate famine. For now, in spite of acute risks in some parts of the country, Somalia has successfully averted a food crisis,” How Aid in Cash, Not Goods, Averted A Famine In Somalia 08 September - Source: IPS News - 594 Words In February, when the government of Somalia sounded an alarm to the UN about risks of a famine in the country, the UN’s Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), besides quickly shuffling a response team, was acting from a steep sense of history. The Office, instead of sending out massive aid packages, distributed cash vouchers to families who could spend it to buy goods according to their needs. The famine between the years 2010 and 2012, which killed more than a quarter of a million people in the country, offered important lessons to the aid community. This spring, when poor rainfall led to large scale crop failure...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Guardian: UN 'utterly horrified' by video appearing to show murder of two experts in Congo

The United Nations has said it was horrified by a grisly video screened by the government of Democratic Republic of Congo that appeared to show the murder of two UN investigators. To read the full article from the Guardian, please click on this link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/24/un-experts-killed-congo-video-michael-sharp-zaida-catalan
Post a Comment
Read more

Haiti: UN restores provincial library to give children alternative to delinquency

A provincial library in north-eastern Haiti has been resurrected thanks to funding by the United Nations peacekeeping mission, just one of the many so-called Quick Impact Projects (QIPs) that it is carrying out to improve community life in the impoverished Caribbean country. "The goal of this project is to encourage young people of the town to undertake cultural projects in this space, joining the useful with the pleasant," Principal Deputy Special Representative Luiz Carlos da Costa said at the recent inauguration of the library in Fort-Liberté, the main town in the north-east. The library, which once had only seven books, now has more than 1,000 thanks to $3,500 donated by the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). "To open the doors to a library is to close the doors to juvenile delinquency," library director Mesmin Cape said at the ceremony in the town, which has some 20,000 primary and secondary schoolchildren. "We had tried several wa...
Post a Comment
Read more