Haitians must proceed with their presidential election this year despite the burden of earthquake damage, the top UN official in the country said on Thursday.
Acting UN mission chief Edmond Mulet said Haiti cannot afford constitutional “slippage” as it rebuilds from the Jan. 12 disaster.
Two elections had been scheduled this year before the quake ravaged the capital. Legislative elections planned for last month were canceled, but no decision has been announced about the presidential contest slated for the fall.
Haitian President Rene Preval has pledged to step down at the end of his five-year term next February. The Constitution bars Preval from seeking re-election.
There is a constitutional reform effort under way that could change the limit, but Mulet said, “I can assure you he doesn’t want to stay” in office.
Meanwhile, the coming tropical storm season will brutally lash most of the 1.3 million people left homeless from the quake despite the best efforts of aid groups, relief workers said on Thursday.
That grim assessment came as international efforts coalesced towards a joint strategy to rebuild Haiti, with a series of upcoming meetings culminating with a March 31 conference in New York.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), overseeing aid efforts on the ground, says the emergency phase of relief operations is over, with food, water, health services and makeshift shelters having been distributed.
But those advances are now threatened by the Caribbean rainy season. By the end of next month, daily prolonged storms will turn roads into fast-flowing rivers, trigger mudslides and contaminate clean water sources with sewage and the remains of the thousands of unrecovered corpses decomposing in the rubble of buildings. Mounting concerns have forced aid groups and the government to change tack and advocate the voluntary resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people from the crowded tent camps, most of which will turn into expanses of mud.
OCHA spokeswoman Kristen Knutson said moves were being made to clear rubble and set up sanitation facilities in five locations outside the capital for the new settlements.
“This is just one of a multitude of solutions for people to consider,” Knutson said, explaining that residents who were able to return to their shattered neighborhoods were also being encouraged to do so.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing