The UN said on Tuesday that aid for Pakistan’s flood victims would focus on the survival needs of six million people, as it prepared to ramp up the relief effort with an international appeal for funds.

“We are focusing for now on six million people who are in need of direct humanitarian assistance, meaning that they need it to survive,” said Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Byrs said the figure of 14 million affected was a broader measure given by Pakistani authorities that included the direct and indirect impact of the country’s worst flooding for 80 years, extending from the homeless to longer term damage such as crop losses or loss of earnings.

UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes will launch the international appeal for funds in New York on Wednesday, along with Pakistani officials, Byrs said.

She told AFP that the number of victims targeted by the appeal had yet to be finalised.

But it is likely to be among one of the biggest relief efforts in the UN’s history in terms of the number of people in need.

OCHA officials have said the disaster eclipsed the scale of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti put together.

Byrs said about five million people were targeted by aid in the Indian Ocean tsunami, while the estimated 280,000 homes destroyed in Pakistan rivalled the numbers seen in Haiti’s devastating quake.

About 1.5 million people have been evacuated in the south and 1.5 million hectares of valuable farmland destroyed in central Punjab province while the worst hit has been the northwest, already struggling with Taliban violence.

“We will soon issue an… appeal for several hundred million dollars to respond to immediate needs,” UN chief Ban Ki-moon announced.

The Pakistani government and UN officials have appealed for more urgent relief efforts to cope with the catastrophe, saying that billions of dollars will be needed to restore livelihoods and rebuild infrastructure.

Parts of the northwestern Swat valley, where Pakistan fought a major campaign to flush out Taliban insurgents last year, were still cut off Tuesday by road as were parts of the country’s breadbasket in Punjab and Sindh.

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The “smart” rebuilding of Haiti after January’s earthquake will require some $11.5 billion of spending over the next 10 years, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today ahead of Wednesday’s international donor meeting on the way ahead for the Caribbean country.

“That is our challenge in New York – not to rebuild but to ‘build back better,’ to create a new Haiti,” the Secretary-General said.

More than 100 countries will take part in the International Donors Conference Towards a New Future for Haiti to be held at the UN Headquarters in New York. The meeting will be led by Haitian President René Préval, with the Secretary-General and Hillary Clinton, United States Secretary of State, as co-hosts, and UN Special Envoy for Haiti, former President Bill Clinton.

The conference will be co-chaired by Brazil, Canada, the European Union, France and Spain, as the leading donors to Haiti.

Under the yet to be detailed plan, an Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission would channel nearly $4 billion into specific projects and programmes during the next 18 months, with the remaining funds spread over the next decade.

“This assistance must be well-spent and well-coordinated,” Mr. Ban said, noting that emergency relief, such as food and sanitation, must continue.

The UN and its partners have provided tents and tarpaulins to 1 million people so far, roughly 75 per cent of those in need, and will distribute some 300,000 more in the coming weeks.

The Haitian Government is now finalizing plans to relocate people from camp sites vulnerable to flooding to more secure ground, hopefully ahead of the full thrust of the rainy season.

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Many women at the Jean-Marie Vincent site for displaced people (IDPs) in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince wash themselves inside their makeshift tents because the only alternative is to do so out in the open. Given the overcrowding and meagre security, this exposes them to the risk of attack or rape.

Going to the site’s latrines is also risky, especially at night, for there is no lighting and some toilets are isolated.

“We have not yet reached a standard of organization that respects women’s rights,” Smith Maximé of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in Haiti told IRIN.

“We have registered rape cases that occurred when women were in the latrines. When toilets are not secured – as in many of the camps – women are often attacked there,” he added.

“We are not safe here,” one woman in the Jean-Marie Vincent camp told IRIN, holding her two-month-old baby. “Three men attacked me as I walked to a latrine. They covered my face and my mouth and raped me.” Initially she said nothing but her pain was so intense, after three days she told some relatives.

The failure to meet established minimum disaster relief standards is “creating serious security, privacy and dignity concerns”, according to the Gender in Humanitarian Response Working Group*.

“Increased lighting surrounding those latrines should be an immediate priority to ensure the safety of women and girls using sanitation facilities at night,” the Group said in a statement issued in late February.

“Increased attention must be paid to the provision of dedicated and private bathing facilities to reduce women’s current vulnerability to sexual violence. Though many women and girls bathed outdoors prior to the earthquake, the nature of many IDP sites (crowded living conditions, living near strangers) is creating new vulnerabilities to violence and exploitation, in particular at night, that did not necessarily exist before,” it said.

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Thirteen dead. Submerged houses. Fields and banana plantations waterlogged. Drowned livestock. Impassable roads. Fresh trauma for quake-displaced thousands. This is the plight of Les Cayes, a city on Haiti’s south coast, after an unseasonal deluge. And hurricane season is not far off.

Trucks loaded with 4,030 meals left Port-au-Prince on 2 March for emergency distribution in and around Les Cayes. Food has also been sent to Nippes region, north of Les Cayes, which has experienced bad flooding.

The UN World Food Programme, with local authorities and NGOs, plans to supply 10-day rations to affected populations, including some 3,000 people evacuated from their homes.

“The poor state of the sewers caused flooding in every [district] of the city,” said the regional president of the Haitian National Red Cross Society, Jean-Yves Placide.

“In some places the waters rose to ceiling level in people’s houses,” he said. “The situation will be really worrying if it continues to rain. The sun is out now, but the storm clouds come and go.”

“People are used to dealing with floods, just not this early,” one aid worker in Les Cayes told IRIN.

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What went through your mind the moment the earthquake struck?

‘Nothing. I tried to save myself. That’s all.’

The story of survival in Haiti is always the same. In those 37 interminable seconds of destruction, there was no time to think. But the real emergency in what was once called the Pearl of the Caribbean is only now beginning as emotion gives way to realization. And, however generous the global community’s aid efforts are, they are now confronted with the worst natural disaster to hit the Americas since the time of Columbus.

With 230,000 dead, 300,000 injured, and 12 percent of a population of 8.3 million left homeless, the Haiti disaster has taken on a tragic toll, proportionally similar to the amount of casualties suffered by Germany, the UK, France or Italy in World War II.

The Haiti tragedy, however, was not an unforeseeable calamity. It was the result of chaotic development, poor building, unregulated growth, and the suffocation of its tropical vegetation under endless flows of cement. Today, Port-au-Prince is a city of 4 million inhabitants surrounded by pancaked shopping centers and shameful slums. Shrouded by dust rising up from its ruins and its permanent traffic jams, it literally risks death by suffocation.

“Il y avait l’embouteillage.” Bottleneck traffic. The most common explanation for why it takes two hours to travel 5 kilometers in this Third World country.

And yet the geologists had issued ample warnings. The 10 km-deep fault line located near Port-au-Prince sooner or later would have unleashed a devastating earthquake. They just didn’t know when.

Thus, the only solutions for avoiding a catastrophe would have been either to move the Haitian capital elsewhere or rebuild it according to antiseismic criteria. In other words, due to Haiti’s economic plight, averting the disaster would have been a utopian impossibility.

Port-au-Prince now resembles a torn-up anthill. Arrogant edifices, government buildings and apartment blocks, built quickly and poorly, now lie in frantic ruins along with churches and hovels, trapping tens of thousands of people beneath them.

Since the days of ‘Papa Doc’, little has changed. According to a recent UN inquiry, Haiti ranks 149^th out of 182 countries in terms of quality of life. The devastating earthquake has now delivered Haiti’s coup de grace. The brutal tremors that brought Port-au-Prince to ruin has reduced 30 percent of its buildings to rubble and left one million people homeless. Areas outside the capital, though sparsely populated, suffered even greater levels of devastation. 60 percent of the coastal city of Pétit Gouave, for example, crumbled. The hospital is severely damaged, the dead still line the streets, and there is no electricity.

So, how are the rescue efforts taking place?

In front of the Presidential Palace, flattened like a layer cake, an extreme free-for-all is underway. At the Place des Heroes de l’Independence, where all the ministerial buildings collapsed, documents flutter about the square carried by the slightest breeze. One of them, signed by Health Minister Hénri-Claude Voltaire, confirms the receipt of a donation of 14 million condoms from the UN. In the city’s park, thousands of people have camped out under trees with plastic sheets. A naked woman washes herself, then reuses the water to wash a young boy as an elderly woman waits her turn nearby. At the cemetery, a sign written in Creole reads “Tou o plen, nou pakà pran ankò.” The cemetery is full; we can’t take any more bodies. But someone has knocked down a wall in order to dump the naked, swollen corpse of a woman by a small mound of earth and refuse. Not far away, the decomposed bodies of two children are covered by a swarm of flies.

One can feel indignation for the treatment of the dead, abandoned like trash on the streets. But the real problem remains the thousands of sick and injured who desperately await urgent treatment. In the chaos of the General Hospital, where US Marines do everything from keeping order to improvising as nurses, doctors operate in open-air surgeries, swatting flies away with their free hands.

“We came here from all over the world as volunteers, full of enthusiasm and the desire to help. We brought the best teams, the best medicines and the best equipment,” says a young doctor from New York University. “But there is little coordination. This is a Noah’s Ark where everyone makes tremendous efforts but each group works separately: French, Norwegians, Swiss, Americans, Cubans, Chinese, Russians, Italians, even the Sisters of Mother Theresa and the Church of Scientology. More often than not, our equipment is rendered useless because it’s not compatible or the generators don’t work. When we amputate, we frequently use morphine as an anesthetic, as was done in the 1800s.”

It is obvious to all that Haiti will never be able to recover without foreign assistance. To understand this, one need only go to Port-au-Prince’s port, closed to sea traffic, except for the flotilla of military ships arriving from around the world. There is the US aircraft carrier Vinson and the Italian aircraft carrier Cavour with their fleet of helicopters, water purification systems, and field hospitals.

But this is not enough to solve Haiti’s historic ills.

Matieu Derisse, the author of a comment posted the day of the earthquake on Haitian President René Preval’s blog, appears to concur. “For 206 years,” he writes, “the mulatres [the mulatto caste] have dedicated themselves to the sacking the country, and through Haiti’s Chamber of Commerce, otherwise know as the Chambre des Grands Dons Mulatres, they have managed to seize all the political and administrative power in the country. It’s our slave mentality that is the sole culprit for our social ills.”

Renzo Cianfanelli is a journalist and international contributor who has worked for Corriere della Sera, Il Secolo XIX, and the BBC.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi on Tuesday praised the United States’ leadership of the relief effort in quake-hit Haiti in an attempt to soothe anger over riticism levelled by the Italian special envoy this weekend.

”In critical situations like the one in Haiti, organizational difficulties are inevitable,” Berlusconi warranted.

”But without the US’s intervention, managing the situation would have been much more difficult”.

”Everyone is doing their best in Haiti and right now, we need to stop being critical and focus our energies on the enormous task at hand,” he said.

Regarding remarks by Civil Protection Chief Guido Bertolaso who, during a Sunday telecast direct from Haiti, bemoaned a lack of central coordination, Berlusconi said that ”at times like these, it’s best to avoid making statements that could lead to misunderstandings”.

He added that Foreign Minister Franco Frattini had clarified the government’s position on Monday during talks in Washington with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Despite playing down criticism as ”armchair quarterbacking” during a joint press conference with Frattini, Clinton said Tuesday that she ”deeply resented” insinuations that the US had done less than it could.

”We have scrambled as quick as we could to do everything needed in the past two weeks,” she said.

While Clinton did not single out any detractors in particular, she did point out that the troops sent to Haiti were there to distribute food and medicine, a possible response to a remark by Bertolaso who accused the US of sending ”too many soldiers and not enough aid personnel”.

The Secretary of State added that she had nothing against ”constructive criticism”, but that the US had been judged unfairly by many voices abroad.

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Italian Civil Protection chief Guido Bertolaso

The Italian government on Monday distanced itself from remarks by its special envoy to Haiti, Civil Protection chief Guido Bertolaso, who described the international earthquake relief effort there as ”pathetic”.

On a state visit to Washington to meet with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini underlined that ”the Italian government does not stand by that assessment”.

Frattini granted that ”Bertolaso has made some important recommendations to the Haitian government regarding sheltering orphans and conducting evacuations”. But he stressed that Bertolaso was not speaking for the Italian government when he slammed the international aid machine at work in Haiti, which is largely being directed by the United States.

During an Italian TV broadcast from Port-au-Prince on Sunday, Bertolaso was asked to describe the situation there two weeks after the Caribbean nation was devastated by an earthquake estimated to have claimed as many as 350,000 lives.

The civil protection chief, who headed up the relief effort after the April 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila, responded with a broadside against the lack of central coordination among the various relief agencies present.

”A lot of them are more interested in parading in front of the cameras than rolling up their sleeves and going to work to find survivors,” he said.

”It’s like the bonfire of the vanities”. Bertolaso also said the US had done a poor job of spearheading the relief effort, sending too many troops and not enough people trained in disaster management.

”What’s really needed here is a person like (President Barack) Obama to come and take charge of the emergency”. ”Instead, they sent in a bunch of starlets,” he said in an apparent reference to a handful of celebrities, such as actor Sean Penn, who have made their way to the island over the past week.

Read more here.

US soldiers stand guard at a Port-au-Prince hospital (Picture: AFP/GETTY)

The temporary yet indefinite re-colonization of Haiti began last Wednesday morning when the first CNN crews landed in Port-au-Prince, led by their ‘general’ Anderson Cooper and the ubiquitous medical reporter Sanjay Gupta.

After only a few hours, the network that made the 24-hour news cycle possible began beaming a stream of pain and misery back to the United States. An infinite series of images, painful and shocking, left CNN’s viewers with the urge to express their solidarity… at all costs.

From that moment on, Haiti became a ‘real’ event within the American imaginary. It had metamorphosed into a ‘cause celebre,’ persuading Barack Obama, a president already consumed with healthcare reform, the war in Afghanistan, terrorism in Yemen, etc., to publicly address the Haiti disaster three times in one day, promising $100 million in aid and the arrival of the US Army to coordinate the relief efforts.

US Ambassador to Haiti Ken Marten began coordinating the logistics for the US military’s arrival. Meanwhile, Google’s detailed satellite images were updated, showing the access routes from Port-au-Prince’s port and airport to the most afflicted disaster areas completely obstructed by rubble.

In Washington, D.C., Obama assembled a task force 250-strong of men and women representing all facets of the relief effort, from the Marines to the Red Cross.

Yet, the relief and rescue operations were delayed a half-day while Obama sought to reach Haitian President Rene Preval, whose residence and office were also ‘pancaked’ by the 7.0 tremors. Then, on Friday, upon finally reaching President Preval, Obama asked him to sign a document which conferred total control of Port-au-Prince’s airport to the US military and conceded permission for America’s relief efforts to get underway.

This, at least, is what the public was told. But the document exchanged between Presidents Obama and Preval must have contained several more details that have been withheld from public view; clauses regarding the rules of engagement of the Marines, sent in by the hundreds, to protect the engineers who are, to this moment, busy clearing roads and digging through the rubble.

The Marines, once called upon, shoot. This is their only task. During their 2004 intervention in Haiti, after the fall of the populist priest President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Marines set up and manned roadblocks throughout the country. Upon approaching the checkpoints, the Haitians attempted to back up and search for another, less obtrusive access point to their destination. And the Marines, unused to the local predilection for anarchy, duly shot at them. After the first 4 casualties, the Haitians learned their lesson and waited patiently in line at each checkpoint.

A few days ago, the first US Coast Guard ship reached Haiti from the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba. An aircraft carrier is also expected, along with 6,000 Navy personnel, and 50 helicopters, and, of course, a hospital ship. Everything that we are used to seeing since D-Day and beyond is expected from the formidable logistical machine that is the US military.

The history of relations between the US and Haiti dates back to the American Revolution, when Haiti was a French colony and was thus an ally of the American revolutionaries. But when Haiti eventually declared its independence on January 1^st, 1804, Thomas Jefferson, fearing that the Haitian uprising would inspire American slaves, issued an embargo on the country that lasted until 1867.

In 1915, during the throes of the Great War, in which the European powers slaughtered each other while racking up enormous debts with the USA, Washington, D.C. took advantage of its role as nascent power and expanded its sphere of influence in the Caribbean by occupying Haiti. With the excuse that German submarines would find refuge in Haiti’s ports and would be assisted by Haiti’s merchant class (which was largely of German origin), the American government established a military government ruled by the US Marines that lasted 17 years.

But the United States militaristic obsession with Haiti did not stop there. In 1994, a second US ‘invasion’ of the island took place under then-President Bill Clinton’s watch. Clinton’s intervention was to ostensibly return the democratically elected President Aristide back to power after he was ousted in a coup.

Now, the United States is once again brought into the Haitian ‘theater of tragedy’ whereby it can directly appeal to the Haitian people without involving the impotent, corrupt, and disarrayed Preval government.  In the past 10 years we have seen over $3 billion in international aid reach Haiti without one job being created, without the country’s infrastructure being reinforced, without any coherent development plan being established. Everything remained as it was before and the earthquake served only to expose the failure of Haiti’s 206 years of independence. Following the Haiti’s impressive revolt, its liberation from the chains of European domination, its newfound leaders cast the population into a system of income inequality that pervades up until today. While Europe fumes at America’s logistical ‘invasion’ of the island, declares America’s relief effort an attack on Haiti’s sovereignty, the European’s have ultimately demonstrated the total inefficiency of their political correctness. With its institutional infrastructure in tatters and the Presidential Palace in ruins, Haiti finally has a chance to change course. And it can only be with America’s help.

Piero Longo is a former journalist and editor of AmericaOggi. He lives in Haiti.

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Within one week of the earthquake that drove tens of thousands of Haitians out of their homes, its island neighbour, the Dominican Republic, is being transformed into a base for humanitarian efforts, from border soup kitchens to road convoys, warehouses, and visa waivers for humanitarian workers.

Dominican government disaster workers are responding guardedly to the expected influx of Haitian migrants – the two countries share a 78,000 sq km island and a 380km border that demarcates their bloody past and politically sensitive present, speckled with persistent allegations of racial discrimination against Haitians.

“We will be criticized if people see us as throwing out Haitians, but how can we absorb so many? There are thousands now in border hospitals. Will they want to leave? … We cannot provide for all of them,” the disaster relief director, Edwin Luciano, told IRIN in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, three days after the earthquake in Haiti.

“We are judged by our past actions and cannot get around that,” said Luciano, who is also head of the government centre for emergency operations. He told IRIN that in his two decades of disaster relief work, the earthquake on 12 January was one of the most complex because of the socio-political sensitivities.

In 1937 President Rafael Trujillo ordered the massacre of more than 15,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic, in a move to reinforce his rule.

In 2005 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that the Dominican Republic’s system of registration for citizenship was unconstitutional and violated the rights of two children who had been denied birth certificates. Without citizenship papers, the children were not allowed to go to school, as is the case for many Dominican children of Haitian descent, according to rights groups in both countries.

Persons of Haitian descent without residency papers in the Dominican Republic have periodically been repatriated en masse and by force, according to the Support Group for Refugees and Repatriated Persons (GARR), an umbrella body for Haitian NGOs and rights groups. An estimated 800,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent are living in the Dominican Republic.

Yet, today the Dominican Republic is the primary logistics base for humanitarian operations in Haiti.

Read more here.