While countries and relief agencies showered aid on Haiti, only a small part of it was reaching increasingly desperate Haitians without food, water or shelter. “We see all the commotion, but we still have nothing to drink,” said Joel Querette, 23, a college student camped out in a park. “The trucks are going by.”
Hunger drove many to swarm places where food was being given out. Reports of isolated looting and violence intensified as night approached, and there were reports of Haitians streaming out of the capital.
Still, recovery and aid efforts were widening. And even the distribution problems in the country stemmed in part from good intentions, aid officials said: Countries around the world were responding to Haiti’s call for help as never before. And they are flooding the country with supplies and relief workers that its collapsed infrastructure and nonfunctioning government are in no position to handle.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Port-au-Prince, met with President René Préval for an hour and assured Haitians that the United States “will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead.” And in Washington, President Obama stood with former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who will lead a national drive to raise money to help the survivors.
But with Haitian officials relying so heavily on the United States, the United Nations and many different aid groups, coordination was posing a critical challenge. An airport hobbled by only one runway, a ruined port whose main pier splintered into the ocean, roads blocked by rubble, widespread fuel shortages and a lack of drivers to move the aid into the city are compounding the problems.
About 1,700 people camped on the grass in front of the prime minister’s office compound in the Pétionville neighborhood, pleading for biscuits and water-purification tablets distributed by aid groups. A sign on one fallen building in Nazon, one of many hillside communities destroyed by the quake, read: “Welcome U.S. Marines. We need help. Dead Bodies Inside!”
Haitian officials said the bodies of tens of thousands of victims had already been recovered and that hundreds of thousands of people were living on the streets. A preliminary Red Cross estimate put the total number of affected people at 3.5 million.
The United Nations also confirmed the death of three of its most senior officials in the quake: the secretary general’s special representative for Haiti, Hédi Annabi; his deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa; and the acting police commissioner for the peacekeeping force, Doug Coates of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They were meeting with eight members of a Chinese police delegation in the agency’s headquarters, the Christopher Hotel, when it collapsed on Tuesday.
Even as the United States took a leading role in aid efforts, some aid officials were describing misplaced priorities, accusing United States officials of focusing their efforts on getting their people and troops installed and lifting their citizens out. Under agreement with Haiti, the United States is now managing air traffic control at the airport, helicopters are flying relief missions from warships off the coast and 9,000 to 10,000 troops are expected to arrive by Monday to help with the relief effort.
The World Food Program finally was able to land flights of food, medicine and water on Saturday, after failing on Thursday and Friday, an official with the agency said. Those flights had been diverted so that the United States could land troops and equipment, and lift Americans and other foreigners to safety.
“There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti,” said Jarry Emmanuel, the air logistics officer for the agency’s Haiti effort. “But most of those flights are for the United States military.
He added: “Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync.”
American officials said they were making substantial progress. Mrs. Clinton said the military was beginning to use a container port in Cap Haitien, in northern Haiti, which should increase the flow of aid.
The United States Agency for International Development was helping choose sites and clear roads for 14 centers for the distribution of food and water. Rajiv Shah, the agency’s administrator, said the United States had moved $48 million of food supplies from Texas since the quake and distributed 600,000 packaged meals. It has also installed three water-purification systems capable of purifying 100,000 liters a day.
Yet problems remain. American officials said that 180 tons of relief supplies had been delivered to the airport, but much was still waiting for delivery. While the military has cleared other landing sites for helicopters around the capital, they are thronged by people looking for help, making landings hazardous.
Fuel shortages were mounting. At several gas stations around Port-au-Prince, attendants or customers said that even though the stations had fuel left in their tanks, there was no electricity to work the pumps.
Some aid workers were critical of the United Nations, as well, arguing that the agency
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BOSTON - When Mr. Obama was inaugurated one year ago this week, he and his party had big majorities in the Senate and House, enjoyed the backing of much of the country and were confidently preparing to enact an ambitious legislative agenda. Republicans seemed directionless and the conservative movement exhausted. This weekend, Democrats are struggling to hang on to a seat held by Mr. Kennedy for 46 years in one of the most enthusiastically Democratic states in the country. Conservatives are enjoying a grass-roots resurgence, and Republicans are talking about taking back the House in November. As Mr. Obama prepares to come here on Sunday to campaign for the party’s beleaguered Senate candidate, Martha Coakley, Democrats across the country are starting to wonder aloud if they misjudged the electorate over the last year, with profound ramifications for the midterm elections this year and, potentially, for Mr. Obama’s presidency. Win or lose in Massachusetts, that a contest between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat could appear so close is evidence of what even Democrats say is animosity directed at the administration and Congress. It has been fanned by Republicans who have portrayed Democrats as overreaching and out of touch with ordinary Americans. “It comes from the fact that Obama as president has had to deal with all these major crises he inherited: the banks, fiscal stimulus,” said Senator Paul G. Kirk Jr., the Democrat who holds the Massachusetts seat on an interim basis pending the special election. “But for many people it was like, ‘Jeez, how much government are we getting here?’ That might have given them pause.” Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, said the atmosphere was a serious threat to Democrats. “I do think there’s a chance that Congressional elites mistook their mandate,” Mr. Bayh said. “I don’t think the American people last year voted for higher taxes, higher deficits and a more intrusive government. But there’s a perception that that is what they are getting.” Ms. Coakley, the state attorney general, could still defeat her Republican opponent, State Senator Scott Brown. Polls show the race as very close, and measuring public opinion in special elections is always difficult. Support for the health care overhaul could grow if it is enacted into law and Americans decide that it has left them better off, as Mr. Obama says will happen. The economy could take a turn for the better by this summer, validating Mr. Obama’s policies in time to influence the midterm elections. And for all the national forces at play here, Ms. Coakley has, in the view of most Democrats, made things worse with a slow-starting and low-energy campaign marked by several high-profile errors. Still, Mr. Obama’s decision to tear up his weekend schedule to come here reflects concern in the White House that a defeat of Ms. Coakley would be seen as a repudiation of the president’s first year. It would also raise the question of whether Mr. Obama squandered political capital by focusing so much on health care at a time of rising unemployment. “If it works well, it was a good thing to do for the country here,” Mr. Bayh said. “But there’s definitely an opportunity cost. You could only spend political capital once; it now can’t be spent on other things.” The Massachusetts campaign has neatly encapsulated the major themes that have come to deplete Mr. Obama’s popularity, themes that have fueled the rise of the Tea Party movement on the right and created an atmosphere where growing numbers of Democrats in conservative-leaning districts and states have decided not to run again. Mr. Brown is running directly against the health care plan, and Ms. Coakley is standing by it. Should Mr. Brown win, it would undercut assurances Mr. Obama has been offering nervous Democrats that health care will ultimately lift them at the polls. “This is Ted Kennedy’s state — why can any Republican be competitive here?” asked Dick Armey, a former congressman who leads a conservative grass-roots organization that has been active on behalf of Mr. Brown. “The reason is health care.” Of course, Republicans holding statewide office are not unheard of. Though Massachusetts last had a Republican senator in 1979, Republicans held the governor’s office from 1991 to 2007. Former Gov. Mitt Romney, a moderate on issues like abortion and gay rights, went on to an unsuccessful bid for the presidency by moving to the right on some issues. Mr. Brown has portrayed Ms. Coakley as an advocate of big government, big spending and big deficits; Obama advisers and other Democrats have worried that the expanding deficit, now at a level not seen since World War II, was hurting Mr. Obama with independents who lifted him to victory in 2008. Polls suggest that those voters have flocked to Mr. Brown, as they did to Republican candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey last year. “I don’t know what else it would take to wake up the Democratic leadership about the unpopularity of their agenda across the country than losing a Senate race in Massachusetts,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the chairman of the Senate Republican campaign committee. Mr. Brown has also portrayed Ms. Coakley — and by inference, her party — as acting as if she were entitled to the Kennedy seat, a perception Ms. Coakley reinforced by at first running an extremely lackadaisical campaign. With populist anger running strong, anything that smacks of establishment entitlement is politically dangerous. The risks to the White House are both immediate and long-term. A victory by Mr. Brown would mean losing the 60th vote Democrats need to stave off a filibuster in the Senate. “If he’s running against 60 votes and wins, that is not good,” said Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska. But most ominously for Democrats contemplating the midterm elections, the battle here suggests an emerging dangerous dynamic: that Mr. Obama has energized Republican activists who think he has overstepped with health care and the economic stimulus, while demoralizing Democrats who think he has not lived up to his promise. “When Brown avails himself to the Tea Partiers and the Club for Growth members and all of that wing of the party, yes, they have a lot of intensity on their side,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who leads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. But, Mr. Menendez said, Democrats would match that enthusiasm now that the party has made a greater effort to draw distinctions between the two candidates. Mr. Obama may have had no less treacherous road to take, given the tangle of political problems and divisions within the Democratic Party that confronted him last year. Still, some Democrats are wondering if Mr. Obama would be in a better position now if he had embraced a less ambitious health care proposal, as some aides urged, permitting him to pivot more quickly on the economy. Depending on what happens Tuesday, that is a debate that might be reverberating in the White House for a long time to come. | | |
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Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2009. The son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, he is the first African-American to ascend to the highest office in the land.
In his campaign, Mr. Obama called himself "a skinny kid with a funny name" and made "change" the theme. He arrived at the White House with a résumé that appeared short by presidential standards: eight years in the Illinois State Senate, four years as a senator in Washington. He had managed to wrest the Democratic nomination from a field of far more experienced competitors, most notably Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, whom he outlasted in what became an epic primary battle. And he defeated Senator John McCain, the Republican of Arizona, by an electoral margin of 365 to 173, while outpolling him by more than eight million votes.
Mr. Obama's first year in office has been remarkably crowded, with major decisions on conflicts winding down in Iraq, and stepping up in Afghanistan with the addition of thousands of new troops. At home, the Obama administration's early months in office were dominated by a single issue: the economy. In fact, the economy's seemingly relentless slide in late 2008 began reshaping the Obama team's plans long before Inauguration Day, as first the candidate and then the president-elect was pulled in to discussions over whether to bail out the financial system, and then into the raging debate over whether and how to keep General Motors and Chrysler from going under. The General Motors and Chrysler efforts succeeded, and as the economy seemed to begin to improve later in the year, Mr. Obama's efforts appeared to be bearing fruit. Nonetheless, his approval ratings continued to fall from their post-inauguration highs, amid criticism from the right that he was an ultra-liberal and from the left that he wasn't liberal enough.
Mr. Obama's first major initiative was a gigantic stimulus package to pump money into an economy in something close to free fall. He introduced the outlines of a plan before taking office, and spent much of his first weeks engaged in negotiations with Congress that led to the passage of a $787 billion bill. Republicans derided the bill as unaffordable and wasteful. Not a single Republican in the House voted for the package, and only three Republican senators did -- just enough for Mr. Obama to avert a filibuster.
The vote seemed to presage the reception of the health care reform efforts Mr. Obama put at the top of his agenda. As bills made their way through Congress over the summer and fall, there was practically no bipartisan support. Conservative anger boiled over during Congress's August recess, and it took a televised address to a joint session of the House and Senate by Mr. Obama in September to stop the slide of his own popularity and that of the health plans. As the House and Senate passed their own versions of bills, the lack of bipartisan agreement continued, with not one Republican voting for the Senate bill. The votes of all 60 Democratic and independent senators were required to avoid a Republican filibuster. The refusal of one senator, the independent Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, to support a public option led to its abandonment in the Senate bill.
The unsuccessful terrorist attempt on Christmas Day 2009 to blow up an airliner as it was readying to land in Detroit led to severe criticism of United States security efforts - a criticism led by Republican efforts to portray Mr. Obama as "soft" on terrorism - and to the administration's vow to tighten security, and increased efforts to do so. But the administration also pointed out that the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, and their methods and bureaucracy, had been put in place by the Bush administration. Nonetheless, the administration acknowledged that the system had failed.
In a stunning surprise on Oct. 9, 2009, Mr. Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
As he begins his second year, and as a House-Senate conference prepares to iron out the differences in the two health care bills and frame a compromise, Mr. Obama stands on the brink of achieving a major success, fulfilling his prime campaign pledge. But a big question looms: at what cost?
Julie Remy A screen shot from the Web site of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières shows the charity’s staff performing surgery on the grounds of La Trinité trauma hospital in Port-au-Prince.Here is the photograph he uploaded on Saturday of rescue workers at the Caribbean Market:
ICE-SAR Icelandic search and rescue team members pulled two earthquake victims from the rubble of the Caribbean Market in Port-au-Prince on Thursday.
