53,000 People Flee Port-au-Prince In Three Weeks Of Gang Violence: UN

Umer Jamshaid Published April 02, 2024 | 06:50 PM

United Nations, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 2nd Apr, 2024) More than 50,000 people were displaced from Port-au-Prince within three weeks last month, fleeing an explosion of gang violence in the Haitian capital, the United Nations said Tuesday.

Between March 8 and March 27, 53,125 people left the city, according to a report from the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM), joining the Caribbean nation's 116,000 people already displaced in recent months.

Most of those who fled Port-au-Prince in March headed south, the IOM said, with the vast majority reporting they were leaving "because of violence and insecurity."

"It should be emphasized that (the other) provinces do not have sufficient infrastructures and host communities do not have sufficient resources that can enable them to cope with these massive displacement flows coming from the capital," the IOM report said.

Since late February, Haiti's powerful gangs have teamed up as they attacked police stations, prisons, the airport and the seaport in a bid to oust Prime Minister Ariel Henry, with the uptick in violence coming after months of spiralling insecurity.

The fighting has sparked a severe humanitarian crisis, with food shortages and a near-collapse of the health care infrastructure in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

In the first three months of 2024 alone, up to March 22, 1,554 people were killed and 826 injured, the UN said in a separate report last week.

Unelected and unpopular, Henry announced March 11 he would step down to make way for a so-called transitional council.

But weeks later the council has yet to be formed and installed amid disagreement among the political parties and other stakeholders due to name the next prime minister, and because of doubts over the very legality of such a council.

Kenya, which agreed to lead a long-awaited, UN-approved mission to Haiti, has put its plans on hold until the transitional council is in place.

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