The Haitian people are suffering gravely at the hands of powerful criminal gangs, while an international security force and local police are badly lacking resources to protect them, a top UN expert said Friday.
William O’Neill, briefing reporters in Port-au-Prince at the end of a 12-day visit to the impoverished Caribbean island, described dire conditions that have left the population in an extreme state of insecurity and spreading starvation.
He visited areas in southern Haiti that, untouched by gang violence a year ago, are now struggling with “galloping inflation, lack of basic goods and flows of internally displaced people,” particularly affecting women and children. Only 28 percent of health services are functioning normally, O’Neill said, “and almost five million people are suffering from acute food insecurity.” In one refugee camp he met an “anemic little girl” who had not eaten in two days and not been in school in over a year. More than half the island’s 700,000 internally displaced people are children.
The gangs are increasingly using sexual violence as a weapon to control the population, O’Neill said.
They have “trafficked children, forcibly recruited them into gangs, and often used them to carry out attacks” on police and public facilities.