20419: (Chamberlain) U.N. gets first food convoy to north Haiti city (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, March 15 (Reuters) - The first U.N. food convoy
since Haiti's armed revolt began on Feb. 5 has reached the northern city of
Cap Haitien and will distribute emergency supplies to schools on Monday.
     Alejandro Chicheri of the U.N.'s World Food Program said a truck with
20 tons of food to feed 3,700 children managed to get from Port-au-Prince
to Cap Haitien on Sunday, passing through several roadblocks in rebel-held
areas.
     "We haven't spoken to any of the authorities here but we expect they
will respect the humanitarian work on the ground," Chicheri said in a
telephone interview from Cap Haitien.
     The city, Haiti's second-largest with 500,000 people, has been cut off
from the capital since the armed revolt against President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide broke out in Gonaives, a town straddling the main road to the
north. Aristide fled abroad on Feb. 29.
     Aid agencies say conditions in the barren north of the poorest country
of the Americas are desperate and thousands of people are threatened by
hunger and disease.
     As the revolt spread through the north, Cap Haitien was overrun by
former soldiers who returned from exile in the neighboring Dominican
Republic to join the rebels.
     The city has remained under their control despite the appointment last
week of a new interim prime minister in Port-au-Prince.
     The arrival of the U.N. food convoy was the first delivery of food to
Cap Haitien in more than a month.
    The U.N. agency's warehouse in the city was looted during the revolt.
Tens of thousands of people, scraping subsistence living from arid and
eroded soils, are dependent on food handouts in Haiti's north.