Avellon Williams
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Dozens of people sought refuge at a high school in Haiti’s capital Saturday after fleeing gunfire in the neighborhood where two rival gangs have fought for weeks, claiming dozens of lives.
In the Delmas district near the violence-hit Cite Soleil neighborhood, Francisco Seriphin, general coordinator of the religious community group Kizito, said 315 people have taken refuge in the school Saint-Louis de Gonzague.
There are no classes at the high school during the summer, so classrooms have been converted into dormitories where teenagers, children, and toddlers sleep on small mattresses provided by the nonprofit. Others are forced to sleep on the ground without mattresses.
Several teenagers jumped rope and played soccer in the schoolyard on Saturday. Some chit-chatted, while others played basketball and soccer.
Seriphin said most of the children who were sheltering at the school did not have their parents with them. There was a line of youngsters waiting to give information about their missing fathers and mothers and those who were prevented from leaving Cite Soleil by the gangs.
“We need a lot of help,” said Jean Michelet, a 16-year-old who said he was wounded on the day that the gang battles erupted in early July.
“I was home on the day the war started. It was a lot of shooting. A bullet went through the roof and it hit me in the head,” he said.
As a result of the injury, he was taken to a hospital by a nun.
According to Michelet, many people were killed in the gunbattles. “The situation is really bad,” he said.
A year after President Jovenel Moise’s unsolved assassination, gang violence has worsened in Haiti, and many people have attempted to flee an economically and socially dying country. Attempts to form a coalition government have faltered, and efforts to hold general elections have stalled.
As of a week ago, 99 people had been reported killed in Cite Soleil fighting by the U.N. humanitarian affairs office.
The U.N. humanitarian agencies report that getting help to the trapped residents is too dangerous.
A spokesperson for the U.N. Human Rights Council, Jeremy Laurence said, most of the victims “were not directly involved in gangs” but were targeted by them.
The U.N agency reported that some gangs deny people access to drinking water and food to control their populations, causing malnutrition to worsen.
