PORT-AU-PRINCE, July 15 (Prensa Latina) The Office for the Protection of Citizens (OPC) in Haiti today denounced the inhuman and degrading conditions in which nearly 17,000 people are living, who have been forced from their homes due to gang clashes were expelled.
The agency visited some shelters housing 95 children, 11 pregnant women, eight nursing mothers, four people with disabilities and seven elderly people with special needs and concluded that the spaces do not guarantee access to basic needs.
Specifically, in Kay Castor, one of the sites in Tabarre in the north of the capital, the rights to food, water and health are not respected while women and men live in an unhealthy space that only threatens their dignity and two health services for 303 people, they lamented .
They also denounced the fact that girls and women are at risk of sexual violence but do not seek medical or psychosocial care.
Most of these displaced people were forced to leave their homes in late April when war broke out between the 400 Mawozo and Chen Mechan gangs, leaving at least 92 civilian dead, in addition to 113 wounded, 12 missing and 49 kidnapped, according to official figures.
The OPC fears that current hostilities between other gang members in Cité Soleil, the country’s largest slum, will increase the number of people seeking refuge and encouraged authorities to define and implement public safety policies aimed at adapted to the current social context.
According to a tally by the National Network in Defense of Human Rights, the recent clashes left 89 dead, 16 disappeared and 74 wounded.
ode/ane