Immediate urgent action and increased aid, especially financial support, from the international community are necessary to improve the humanitarian situation in Haiti which is at a “crossroads in its history,” a United Nations envoy to the country said today in New York.
The United Nations refugee agency is distributing emergency items and food rations to more than 300 people who fled into Ecuador from Colombia in the latest spasm of over four decades of conflict between Government forces, leftist guerrillas, rightist paramilitaries and criminal gangs that has driven 3 million Colombians from their homes.
United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti have arrested 59 suspected gangsters since they launched a crack-down on armed gangs at the beginning of the month in one of the violence-ridden country’s most dangerous areas, the Cité Soleil quarter of Port-au-Prince, the capital.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is feeding an additional 4,000 families in Bolivia, which has been in a state of emergency for a month due to weeks of heavy rains affecting hundreds of thousands of people.
The United Nations refugee agency today launched a $14-million appeal to aid hundreds of thousands of people this year in Colombia where the more than four decades of fighting between the Government, leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries have uprooted some 3 million people, killing over 40,000 people in the last 16 years alone.
United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti have arrested a gang leader blamed for several murders as part of their ongoing operations to clean up the notoriously crime-ridden Cité Soleil quarter of Port-au-Prince, the capital.
Just days after launching a large-scale security operation to clean up one of Haiti’s most notorious hotbeds of criminal gangs, the United Nations peacekeeping mission has transformed the former crime boss’s headquarters into a free medical clinic, with clowns to cheer up sick children.
Extending the mandate of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) by another eight months, the Security Council today endorsed its recently stepped-up campaign against armed criminal gangs and called for the operations to continue.
In the wake of an appeal by the President of Bolivia for international assistance, United Nations agencies are stepping up aid to people in the country devastated by flooding, hail and freeze which have affected 200,000 and killed more than 20.
The historic pact of Latin America and the Caribbean States to maintain a nuclear-weapon-free zone, the first-ever of its kind, has withstood the test of time and should spur greater efforts to rid the world of these arms, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in honouring the 40th anniversary of the landmark agreement.
