UN to send 3,500 more peacekeepers, police to Haiti

The United Nations agreed Tuesday to send 3,500 more peacekeepers and police to Haiti -- a decision that came amid rising tension between relief workers and increasingly desperate earthquake survivors.

About 2,000 UN soldiers will join 7,000 already on the ground. An international police force of approximately 2,100 will receive about 1,500 additional members, in an effort to maintain security and support earthquake relief efforts.

The latest casualty report from the European Commission, which cited Haitian government figures, doubled previous estimates of the dead, to approximately 200,000. Some 70,000 bodies have now been recovered from the rubble and trucked off to mass graves.

European Commission analysts estimate another 250,000 have been injured and a staggering 1.5 million are now homeless. Most are sleeping in the streets of the capital or trying to find transportation to the countryside, where some hope food is easier to find.

For those who stay, accessing the aid that is being brought in is a huge challenge.

There have been reports of sometimes violent looting in parts of Port-au-Prince. However, it's not clear how much of that activity is due to local residents scavenging for supplies in an effort to stave off hunger and dehydration, and how much is being undertaken by organized criminal groups.

About 2,000 Haitian police officers are reportedly patrolling the city, down from 4,500 before the earthquake, the city's police chief said. The officers are not trained to deal with such a situation, he added.

CTV's Tom Clark, reporting from Port-au-Prince, said the problem isn't a lack of aid, as it was in the early days of the quake aftermath -- now it's a matter of distribution.

About 180 aircraft a day, loaded with food, water and supplies, are now being allowed to land at the capital's only airport. They include huge Hercules C-130 and C-17 transport planes that are coming in around the clock, 24 hours a day.

The U.S. military says it will begin using two additional airports to bring in aid in the coming days: one in the town of Jacmel, where Canada's DART team has based its efforts; and another airfield in neighbouring Dominican Republic.

Six U.S. Navy helicopters landed on the lawn of Haiti's destroyed presidential palace Tuesday, while quake victims along the fenced-in property cheered them on.

"We are happy that they are coming, because we have so many problems," Fede Felissaint, a hairdresser, told The Associated Press.

He said he did not mind foreign troops choosing to land at the president's former residence.

"If they want, they can stay longer than in 1915," Feilssant said, referring to a 19-year American military presence in the country last century.

Distribution troubles

For the time being, emergency supplies can only come through the city's lone airport, as the city's seaport is blocked and badly damaged.

Getting it into the hands of residents is proving a further challenge. Most of the region's infrastructure has been destroyed, and many roads are blocked and impassable, Clark said.

"Even if you get into the neighbourhoods, you have the problem of how do you distribute aid without causing a riot. That has already happened a few times here," he said.

The U.S. military tried to do an air drop of relief supplies from C-17 transport planes Monday, parachuting pallets of ready-to-eat meals to a secured area outside the city, rather than landing and unloading at the crowded airport.

"But that created a riot on the ground," Clark said. "Then they tried passing it out through iron gates. When they finally ran out, the mobs just broke down the gates and took the last of the stores."

"So there's a clash between the desperation, the need for help and the need for order."

United Nations relief agency officials maintain that the security situation was largely under control and had not hampered the distribution of food rations.

"The situation is tense but calm. Of course there are lootings because the population is on edge," Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman of the UN Office for the Coordination of humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told Reuters in Geneva.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said the World Food Program has already been able to distribute rations for nearly 250,000 people. But that is just a fraction of the 3 million or so who have been affected.

Ban said the UN's goal is to increase the number of people receiving food to 1 million this week and at least 2 million in the following two weeks.

"The situation is overwhelming," Ban told reporters.

But he said the bottlenecks in delivering supplies are being overcome, and relief operations "are gearing up quickly."

Nighttime dangers

Still, outbreaks of violence continue. In the huge Cite Soleil slum, gangsters who escaped from the city's notorious main penitentiary are reportedly reassuming control. Police were urging citizens in at least one neighbourhood to take justice into their own hands, Clark said.

Nighttime is especially dangerous, prompting some locals to carry machetes and travel in groups to fight bandits.

Medical relief workers say they are treating gunshot wounds in addition to broken bones, with many of those bullets coming from the same police forces charged with protecting citizens.

Clark reported that in some areas, citizens have set up blockades at the ends of their streets, in an effort to prevent bandits from coming in.

United Nations Chief Ban Ki-moon says he had recommended to the Security Council that 1,500 police and 2,000 troops be added to the 9,000-member UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, to provide further security.

Alain Le Roy, the UN peacekeeping chief, told reporters that the reason for more troops is three-fold: securing the humanitarian convoys; creating a "humanitarian corridor," and building a reserve force in case the situation "unravels" further, he said.

Clark says the key to keeping the lid on the violence is to get the food, water and supplies out to the people quickly.

"Everybody knows the consequences of not getting the food out and that's that you could reach a tipping point where desperation simply overwhelms the relief effort," he said.

With files from The Associated Press