‘Haiti can be rebuilt,' UN humanitarian coordinator says as she departs for Libya
Ulrika Richardson, who has spent the past three years guiding the U.N.'s response amid escalating gang violence, harrowing kidnappings and rapes, called on the international community to prioritize the crisis in the Caribbean nation as she gave her final press conference on Haiti before moving on to Libya next month.
'Sometimes it's going too far in the 'wait and see; we need to 'wait and see how the situation evolves before we reinvest,'' Richardson said from U.N. headquarters about the responses she often got from the foreign community when seeking support for the crisis in Haiti. ' And I say, 'Well, I think time is running out.''
Last week, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres announced Richardson as his new deputy special representative of the U.N. Support Mission in Libya and resident coordinator there. Originally from Sweden, she arrived in Port-au-Prince in 2022 from Kosovo.
'The situation on the ground is enormously acute' in Haiti, she said, before rattling off the statistics. 'I often feel that I can't even find words any longer to describe the situation. Is it alarming? Is it acute? Is it urgent? It's all of that and even more.
'We say that we have 1.3 million people displaced as a result of the gang violence... and half of them are children; we have 3,000 people having been killed in gang-related incidents since the beginning of the year, we have two million people living in …emergency levels of food insecurity,' she added. 'But all of that is figures, in a way, and behind every figure there is a woman, a mother, a child, a father a young person.'
Richardson's departure comes amid changing financial times at the U.N.. The global entity faces having to reduce its presence in Haiti as it is undergoing escalating gang violence and a worsening humanitarian crisis, and U.S. funds dry up. Equally uncertain is the level of international support the country will be able to count on to help its beleaguered security forces taken on criminal gangs that are fast expanding to other regions.
Six months after Guterres proposed for the U.N. to assume some of the financial burden for the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission in Haiti, Washington has not said what its level of support will be, or even if it supports the proposal. Guterres offered to have U.N. members' assessed contributions partly fund the mission.
This needs 'to be acted upon, responded to and deliberated on. This is what we are waiting for because that will also determine, of course, what is the future of the multinational security support to Haiti,' Richardson said about the proposal. 'We hope that the seriousness on the ground, the gravity, the severity is really pushing the Security Council to look at this proposal and make a decision on the way forward.'
In the meantime, the situation continues to worsen.
'The response from the international community is just not on par with the gravity on the ground,' Richardson said. 'It does not respond to the severity and the gravity of the situation.'
As much as Haiti has spiraled into chaos, the country 'can quickly spiral up again,' she stated. 'But the violence needs to end. This brutal violence, hitting women, children, young people in particular, needs to end.'
In particular, the arms trafficking into the country has to cease, she said. 'There are ways of stopping arms coming into Haiti,' said Richardson. 'If you strangle that... there will be a decrease of violence.'
She also warned that while Port-au-Prince is being overwhelmed by gangs, the rest of Haiti cannot be overlooked. Failing to respond could risk plunging the rest of the country into violence and instability.
So far, onlu 9% of the U.N.'s $900 million request for Haiti has been funded, the lowest level for any response plan in the world, Richardson said.
'It is a fairly small territory, very rich country and the population is a very agile population with human resources available in the diaspora,' Richardson added. 'I think the country can be rebuilt, but it needs political stability. It needs to get rid of the gang violence.'
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