Feral Jundi

   So this is what I found out after a little bit of hunting for stories.  I wanted to know what the impact of all of those escaped prisoners in Haiti had, and from what I have found out, it ain’t pretty.  These guys are trying to organize gangs in the slums, they are raping women in the relief camps, they are getting back to the business of selling drugs and organizing, and the Haitian police and security forces are still overwhelmed.

   Worse yet, the UN is doing a terrible job of coordinating the relief and security efforts, and all those US and International military teams are leaving in the near future. These criminals are still loose and just counting the days until the good guys leave so they can really ‘go to town’ with their criminal ventures.  The Haitian authorities have tried to get the local populations to turn in these criminals, but because there are so many, it is still a huge issue. Even the Dominican Republic is getting worried about all these folks, and beefing up security efforts to stop them at the borders.

   My thoughts on the whole deal is that private security coupled with the local national security they will hire, could totally help in securing the populations as these military units leave.  They can also help buy some time as law enforcement continues the hunt for these criminals.  And we are not talking about a couple criminals here and there. We are talking about 5,000 to 7,000 escaped criminals, with a good percentage who are violent criminals.  These guys are free, and they will do all they can to take advantage of a country that is in disarray.  And guess what, they are!

   Here is another issue that really irks me.  These reporters who keep ignoring these facts, and continue to slam my industry as being disaster capitalists, are only helping out these criminals.  I have a news flash for you folks, criminals like the idea of ‘less security’ and not ‘more security’.   They also like ‘unorganized security’, as opposed to ‘organized security’.  My industry will provide that organized security, because that is what we do for a profession.  There is nothing dishonorable or unethical about what we do, and in my view that service has value. If these folks don’t want to recognize that value, then they will continue to see a population at risk in Haiti. There will continue to be more rapes, more murders, and more gang/drug related problems during the rebuild of that country.

   My industry is also more adept at working with local national security and getting the job done based on the contract than the UN.  I would suggest that companies like ITG/Steele Foundation, could do a better job of organizing the security effort there than the UN, any day.  Just look at what the UN has done in places like the Congo, and tell me they are the best organization for the job in Haiti? Or better yet, how do you fire the UN if they do a poor job in Haiti?  At least with private industry, you can actually fire poor performing companies.

   One more thing.  It looks like escaped prisoners are one of the main culprits of looting and crime after that earthquake in Chile.  Anyone else seeing a pattern here?  After these quakes, disaster response should include security forces tasked specifically to contain the prisons and recapture these criminals.  Especially if the criminals are violent and criminally insane (which is the case with Haiti).  They are a threat to crippled society and to the relief effort, and to not respond to that during the initial attack and extended attack is pure negligence in my opinion.  We must call upon every resource we can to stop that, to include using private industry, and to not do that is just stupid and irresponsible in my book. But don’t take my word for it, just read all the reports that I have collected for your reading pleasure below. –Matt

P.S. – I posted five stories below, if you are interested in reading the entire update.

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U.N. Is Faulted as Lacking Coordination of Aid and Security in Haiti

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

March 2, 2010

UNITED NATIONS — Humanitarian efforts by the United Nations in Haiti have lacked sufficient coordination with local organizations in delivering aid and establishing security, according to an independent assessment released on Tuesday.

One consequence was a surge in the sexual abuse of women and girls living in camps for the displaced, with some young girls trading sex for shelter, said Emilie Parry, an aid consultant who helped write the evaluation of the United Nations’ effort for Refugees International, a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of refugees.

“Women reported to us that there has been a lot of violence and sexual abuse at nighttime,” Ms. Parry said, noting that there is no system of nighttime patrols in the makeshift camps where many displaced people have been living.

“By all accounts, the leadership of the humanitarian country team is ineffectual,” said the report, based on 10 days of evaluations in February. The report, titled “Haiti: From the Ground Up,” also acknowledged that the scale of the disaster made the response a singular challenge.

Closer work with Haitian organizations, as well as better knowledge about conditions, would also enhance the ability of local groups to deal with problems long after the international groups left, Ms. Parry said.

The report suggests a number of ways to improve the delivery of aid, including allowing more participation by Haitian organizations whose leaders are now living among as many as several million displaced earthquake victims.

While the United Nations does not actively discriminate against such groups, it effectively bars them through a lack of advertising and the system of passes that are needed to attend meetings, Ms. Parry said. Appointing liaison officers dedicated to such groups would help, the report suggests.

It also recommended that the United Nations appoint one person responsible for leading the team distributing humanitarian aid in the country, rather than have the responsibility be among many tasks taken on by senior management.

Finally, it suggested that the United Nations’ assessments had not delved adequately into the heart of all the temporary camps, where hundreds of thousands of people still lack shelter and other basic needs. The report recommends that the United States government beef up its budget for disaster assistance and that it, too, should coordinate more with local groups.

“There is too much of a gap, too many people are being left out of the response,” Ms. Parry said.

Human Rights Watch issued a similar report two weeks ago, noting the lack of adequate shelter and saying that it had documented three rapes connected to poor security. Asked about the reports then, Anthony Banbury, a senior United Nations official in Haiti, was criticized for saying that the number of rapes “almost elates me.”

Mr. Banbury issued a statement later saying that he had not meant to minimize the seriousness of the three rapes, but to suggest that efforts to maintain some security were working because the number was relatively low.

The United Nations has given shelter materials to more than 523,000 people, or 40 percent of those in need, said Martin Nesirky, the spokesman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, with 232,000 additional tarpaulins and 22,000 tents en route. The World Food Program and partner organizations have delivered food assistance to 4.3 million people, Mr. Nesirky said.

Catherine Bragg, the deputy humanitarian coordinator, said the scale of the destruction in Haiti, as well as the death of 100 United Nations staff members, including the most senior officials, had initially hampered relief efforts.

“It is the most complex humanitarian response we have ever had to deal with,” said Ms. Bragg, adding that the United Nations had brought some order to utter chaos. “It would be very easy to make negative comments about how things are coordinated.”

John Holmes, the departing United Nations humanitarian coordinator, has said publicly that the organization’s response was uneven. He demanded that United Nations staff members do a better job of coordinating relief efforts.

The United Nations has tried not to discriminate between Haitian and international organizations, with local groups accounting for about 15 percent of the groups participating in the effort in Haiti, said Stephanie Bunker, the spokeswoman for the humanitarian aid office. “We would like to increase the balance,” she said.

Story here.

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Haitian women become crime targets after quake

By PAISLEY DODDS (AP) – Feb 6, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Bernice Chamblain keeps a machete under her frayed mattress to ward off sexual predators and one leg wrapped around a bag of rice to stop nighttime thieves from stealing her daughters’ food.

She’s barely slept since Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake Jan. 12 forced her and other homeless women and children into tent camps, where they are easy targets for gangs of men.

Women have always had it bad in Haiti. Now things are worse.

“I try not to sleep,” says Chamblain, 22, who lost her father and now lives in a squalid camp with her mother and aunts near the Port-au-Prince airport. “Some of the men who escaped from prison are coming around to the camps and causing problems for the women. We’re all scared but what can we do? Many of our husbands, boyfriends and fathers are dead.”

Reports of attacks are increasing: Women are robbed of coupons needed to obtain food at distribution points. Others relay rumors of rape and sexual intimidation at the outdoor camps, now home to more than a half million earthquake victims.

A curtain of darkness drops on most of the encampments at night. Only flickering candles or the glow of cell phones provide light. Families huddle under plastic tarps because there aren’t enough tents. With no showers and scant sanitation, men often lurk around places where women or young girls bathe out of buckets. Clusters of teenage girls sleep in the open streets while others wander the camps alone.

The government’s communications minister, Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue, recently acknowledged the vulnerability of women and children but said the government was pressed to prioritize food, shelter and debris removal.

Aid groups offer special shelters for women and provide women-only food distribution points to deter men from bullying them. But challenges are rife more than three weeks after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed an estimated 200,000 people and left as many as 3 million in need of food, shelter and medicine.

Women who lined up for food before dawn Saturday said they were attacked by knife-wielding men who stole their coupons.

“At 4 a.m. we were coming and a group of men came out from an alley,” said Paquet Marly, 28, who was waiting for rice to feed her two daughters, mother and extended family. “They came out with knives and said, ‘Give me your coupons.’ We were obliged to give them. Now we have nothing — no coupons and no food.”

Aid organizations set up women-only distribution schemes because they trust the primary caregivers to get that food to extended family, not resell it.

“We’ve targeted the women because we think it’s the best way to get to families,” said Jacques Montouroy, a Catholic Relief Services worker helping out Saturday. “In other distributions when we’ve opened it up to men, we found that only half of the men would do what they were supposed to with the food.”

Soldiers from the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, guard many of the streets around the distribution points, but they can’t be everywhere all the time.

Aid workers say they’ve been staging elaborate decoy operations to draw men to one area while food coupons are given to women in another. Each of the 16 daily distributions throughout Port-au-Prince presents its own security challenges, Montouroy said.

“The coupon distribution has been hellish,” he said, explaining how crowds of men swarm around the women.

Even if the women successfully make it back to the camps with their 55-pound (25-kilogram) bags of rice, that doesn’t mean their worries are over. Some camps are even providing special protection for women, with tents where they can receive trauma counseling or be alone to breast-feed and care for young children.

“My sister died in the earthquake, so now I have to take care of my three daughters and my sister’s two,” said Magda Cayo, 42. “I try to keep them close but I see lots of hoodlums looking at them. We’re all nervous. It’s no good.”

Women have long been second-class citizens in Haiti.

According to the United Nations, the Haitian Constitution does not specifically prohibit sexual discrimination. Under Haitian law, the minimum legal age for marriage is 15 years for women and 18 years for men, and early marriage is common. A 2004 U.N. report estimated 19 percent of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 were married, divorced or widowed.

Rape was only made a criminal offense in Haiti in 2005.

In the months after a violent uprising ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, thousands of women were raped or sexually abused, the British medical journal Lancet reported. The coup set off a bloody wave of clashes among Haiti’s national police, pro- and anti-Aristide gangs, U.N. peacekeepers and rebels.

Because so many police stations and government offices were destroyed in the earthquake, some women may have no place to go to report assaults, according to Melanie Brooks of CARE, which is working to protect women while providing disaster relief.

She said women recovering from quake-related injuries are even more vulnerable because many are not mobile. An additional threat is HIV; Haiti has the highest infection rate in the Caribbean.

“The women whom we’ve talked to tell stories of rape, assaults or men following them around when they’re bathing,” Brooks said. “These stories are becoming the new bogeymen now. Everyone is looking over their shoulder.”

Before the earthquake, the government set up a panel to look at ways of empowering Haitian women. But the Women’s Ministry was among the government buildings destroyed.

Three Haitian women working on important judiciary reforms to protect women against sexual violence — Myriam Merlet, Anne Marie Coriolan and Magalie Marcelin — died in the earthquake. Many view their deaths as setbacks for all Haitian women.

As women lined up for food at the National Palace on Saturday, U.S. soldiers kept the men behind a cordon.

“It’s discrimination!” said Thomas Louis, 40. “We’ve all lost mothers, sisters, wives. Without women we can’t get coupons. They’re treating men like we are animals.”

Story here.

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Haiti drug trafficking likely to rise in quake aftermath

 2/9/2010

By William B. Plowman

Rescue workers pick through the rubble of a police station Jan. 14 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The 5,000 convicts who escaped the National Penitentiary after the Jan. 12 earthquake threaten to boost drug activity.

By Chris Hawley

Chaos, a lack of jobs and thousands of escaped prisoners could cause drug trafficking to jump in Haiti, where cocaine already flows through and into the United States, law enforcement officials say.

The U.S. Justice Department says Haiti and the Dominican Republic are way stations for drugs coming to the USA from Latin America. The department says the number of drug planes landing in Haiti has been on the rise in recent years and may get worse in the earthquake’s wake.

Capt. Peter Brown, who commands U.S. Coast Guard efforts in the Caribbean, said the smugglers are back at work after a brief break after the Jan. 12 quake.

On Jan. 26, a Coast Guard cutter sent to help with relief found 360 pounds of cocaine and 46 pounds of marijuana on board a Haitian freighter.

Brown says the 5,000 convicts who escaped the National Penitentiary in Haiti threaten to boost drug activity. About 1,000 of the escapees are members of gangs with drug ties, said Mark Schneider, vice president of the International Crisis Group, a Belgium-based research foundation.

“We’re prepared and alert to the possibility that as Haiti is reconstructed, criminals might try to use it as a transit point,” Brown said.

That could be a major setback for Haiti, where President René Préval has called drug trafficking a major threat to the country’s stability.

“The chaos and desperation that have set in provide an opening that trafficking organizations will undoubtedly seek to exploit,” said Cindy Arnson of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank that studies national and world affairs.

At least 12 Haitian officials, including the former national police chief, the former head of presidential security and the ex-president of the Senate, have been convicted in U.S. courts since 2004 on charges of aiding drug smugglers.

The leader of the 2004 uprising against former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Guy Philippe, is wanted by the Drug Enforcement Agency on cocaine-smuggling charges.

Drug traffickers were also behind riots in April 2008 in the city of Les Cayes, according to a report by the International Crisis Group.

Haiti is a “major transit country” for drugs: There are more than 1,100 miles of mostly unpatrolled coastline and at least 29 clandestine airstrips, the U.S. State Department said in a 2009 report.

The Haitian coast guard has only two patrol boats.

Drug planes and speedboats deliver shipments of cocaine from Venezuela and Colombia, according to the report. The drugs are then taken to Port-au-Prince or the north coast, where freighters transport them to Europe or through the Bahamas and on to Florida, the report said.

Some cocaine is taken to the Dominican Republic, which shares a 220-mile border with Haiti. There, drug couriers smuggle it aboard flights to France, Germany or Spain.

In 2008, the U.S. military detected 23 suspected drug flights to Haiti and 91 to the Dominican Republic, and the numbers have been rising since 2006, according to the State Department.

Haitian roads are so bad that even when flights are detected, Haiti police can rarely get to the landing sites in time to catch the shipments.

“Haiti has always been a weak link against drug trafficking,” said Ivelaw Griffith, an expert on crime in the Caribbean at the City University of New York.

“It’s a grave situation, and it’s going to get graver, because people are now going to be even more susceptible to whatever corrupting forces are out there,” Griffith said.

The United States has pledged $7.9 million to improve Haiti’s coast guard and anti-drug agency as part of the Mérida Initiative, a multinational anti-drug aid package.

Some say that is not enough given the earthquake.

“There wasn’t much law enforcement to begin with, and now there’s even less,” said Robert Perito, director of the Haiti program at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Washington think tank that promotes conflict resolution.

“Right now we’ve got (foreign) military crawling all over the island,” Perito said. “But they won’t be there forever.”

Hawley is Latin America correspondent for USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic

Story here.

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Dominican border on alert for 2,000 convicts fled jails in Haiti quake

26 February 2010

SANTO DOMINGO.- The Dominican Government heightened security along its border with Haiti, to prevent the entry of a group of more than 2,000 convicts of Haitian and other nationalities, who fled Port-au-Prince jails in the wake of the January 12 quake.

Yesterday Immigration director Sigfrido Pared said the Haiti Government provided the list of names and photos of the inmates who escaped Haiti’s penitentiary, which collapsed during the quake, among them Colombians, Pakistanis, Indians and others, in addition to Haitians.

Perez said the information has prompted bolstered controls in all border crossings, to keep the escapees from entering the country, in coordination with the military and the Border Security Corp (Cesfront). “We already have the photos of all the people who fled the jails in Port-au-Prince, naturally we have no information so far that they’ve crossed into Dominican Republic, at least not officially.”

He said regardless of how dangerous the prisoners who escaped are, nor how many have managed to deceive the Haitian authorities, it’s a topic of concern for the Dominican Government to protect its borders. “We remain alert to prevent being surprised by the entry of the escapees from Haitian jails.”

Story here.

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Haiti earthquake unleashes gang turf wars among escaped prisoners

UN troops warn convicts ‘trying to establish a kind of kingdom’ inside slums

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Andrew Beatty

PORT-AU-PRINCE: In Haiti’s slums, gang leaders who escaped from prison in January’s earthquake are trying to wrest back control of their turf, sparking a bloody power struggle that the UN fears could destabilize the country.

UN troops are beefing up operations in Port-au-Prince after 5,000 prisoners escaped from jail on January 12, as fears grow that the convicts are swelling the ranks of the country’s once-powerful gangs and seeking top positions.

“My understanding is that they are trying to reorganize themselves, trying to establish a kind of kingdom for themselves inside the slums,” UN force commander Floriano Peixoto said.

“To establish that, they need to fight with each other. This is what we don’t want,” he said.

Already, there are UN reports that in the city’s worst slums, former prisoners have caused a surge in violence and upset the status quo. The chaos wrought by the quake has also made access to weapons easier.

Some gang leaders have gone into hiding, others have been shot or hacked to death.

Just five years ago, Haiti’s gangs, some politically-linked, controlled swathes of the capital, were responsible for innumerable murders and made kidnapping endemic.

Robert Perito of the US Institute of Peace warned in a recent report that the gangs could best the Haitian police and UN forces when the United States withdraws its 10,000-plus troops from the country, if reinforcements are not brought in.

Before the quake, the gangs had been all but wiped out thanks to a UN offensive that took effect by 2007. Peixoto wants to make sure that progress is not rolled-back.

He will soon get 900 more Brazilian troops to work road blocks, increase patrols and be a visible deterrent to the gangs. “The strategy is to deter, to tell them ‘do not show up, because if I see you, I catch you’.”

One place that gang members do show up is Port-au-Prince’s most notorious slum, Cite Soleil.

In the heart of the sprawling mass of corrugated iron and breeze blocks is Strong Point 16, a heavily fortified UN military compound that is home to around 120 troops.

Inside, under floodlights, a dozen heavily-armed Brazilian soldiers mounted their vehicles for one of the night patrols that take place every two hours in this sector. The soldiers are from second company of BRABAT, a Brazilian battalion that makes up the bulk the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti.

They eased out into the darkness, which is punctuated only by a handful of candles and a paraffin lamp here and there.

As they edge forward, each vehicle has one soldier training his weapon on the road in front, while two monitor the sides and one soldier with a pump-action shotgun guards the rear.

In an area from which gangs have been largely cleared, they dismounted from the vehicle and began a short walk in the back streets of the slum.

Back in the vehicle, the Brazilians began to circle the outskirts of an area of Cite Soleil known as Boston.

The joking and laughing disappeared and the soldiers strained to see into the darkness of the slum.

The area’s gang, also called Boston, has been increasingly active since the quake, and is blamed for murders, thefts, drug-running, rapes and protection rackets.

A couple of days ago, according to the UN patrol commander, shots were fired near his troops, causing backup to be called in and security procedures to be stepped up.

For the UN, the area is now terrain for armored tanks.

Much of the recent violence is thought to be linked to a power struggle between rival leaders Toutouba and adversaries Gro Pouchon, Ti Blan and Bazou. The three members of the latter alliance have been seen armed in broad daylight and locals believe a hit is being planned.

Although Peixoto admits he does not know what these gang leaders and others who escaped from prison are up to exactly, he said the general aim is clear.

“I don’t know what they want to do, the only thing that I know is that they try to establish areas, impose their presence, to establish controls.”

“My intent is not to give them any kind of freedom to act,” he said.

Story here.