19730: (Chamberlain) Aid flights to Haiti cautiously resume (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 3 (Reuters) - The first planeload of
emergency food and medicine arrived in Haiti on Wednesday, three days after
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled into exile and U.S. Marines landed to
restore calm after a monthlong revolt.
     The U.N. children's fund, UNICEF, said a DC-8 carrying 30 tonnes of
medicines, water and sanitation equipment arrived in the decrepit capital.
Workers were unloading cargo that included obstetric and infant supplies
for 30,000 women and children, the group said.
     "The thing we most urgently need is access to the people. We need
everyone to work to improve security," said Francoise Gruloos Ackerman, a
UNICEF worker.
     As aid agencies warned that already dire humanitarian needs in the
poorest country of the Americas now verged on a crisis, missionaries and
aid workers who had fled to escape fighting prepared to ramp up relief
efforts.
     "It's not an exaggeration to say (the humanitarian situation) has to
be horrendous," said Ken Boodhoo, an international relations expert at
Florida International University, who also runs an aid agency, Whole Man
Ministries.
     Warehouses that stored emergency food for the U.N.'s World Food
Programme before the rebels took over a swath of Haiti's north were looted
in the mayhem as ill-equipped police were driven out by armed gangs,
demobilized soldiers and former militia leaders.
     That food would have fed hundreds of thousands in a country where a
third of the 8 million people suffer from chronic malnutrition and incomes
average just a dollar a day.
     International charity Oxfam said conditions were particularly grave in
Port de Paix, in the remote northwest where at least 80,000 people were
threatened by disease because they had no clean water.
     Boodhoo said residents of the desert terrain around Port de Paix were
so desperate they had to eat mangoes while they were still green, suffering
deadly diarrhea as a result.
     Dick Snook, president of Missionary Flights International, a
Florida-based organization that has been flying missionaries and supplies
to Haiti for 37 years, said one of its four DC-8s would head to the capital
on Wednesday as well.
     The organization had wanted to resume flights to Haiti's second city,
Cap-Haitien, in the north.
     But the airport buildings were torched when rebels took the city
during the revolt and there were no customs and immigration facilities to
accommodate international flights.
     The group's first flight into the capital, where the airport is being
guarded by U.S. Marines, would carry food and medicines, Snook said.
     No aid workers were planning to return yet, however.
     "We brought out about 70 last week and they're all anxious to go back,
but it's going to have to quieten down just a little bit there before they
do," Snook said.
     The first aid deliveries were unlikely to be widely distributed in the
provinces.
     British-based relief agency ActionAid International said a prime
concern was to help Haitian farmers plant seed for the next crop. The
plantings were disrupted by the revolt.
     "It's very day to day at the moment and we're really just assessing
the situation as it develops," said spokeswoman Alice Wynne Willson.