Food protests end in Haiti
(CNN) — Food protests in Haiti ended Thursday as police cleared the streets of roadblocks and demonstrators abandoned their barricades.
It was really calm today, said Felix Kurt Hildebrand, an American working at a nongovernmental organization on human rights in the capital, Port-Au-Prince.
Still, he said, banks and most businesses remained shut.
Unrest began late last week in the southwestern town of Les Cayes — where demonstrations over the rising cost of living led to an attack on the local U.N. office. At least four people died there.
In recent months, prices for food and other items have skyrocketed in Haiti.
A report last month by the secretary-general on the United Nations stabilization mission in Haiti noted that Haitians’ hardship had been exacerbated by recent price hikes and said, The political situation remains fragile.
Marylynn Steckley, a Canadian volunteer with a Mennonite group, said her house in the capital is located at the forefront of the action.
Though she said she witnessed police beating peaceful demonstrators Tuesday from her front window, she did not hesitate Thursday night to walk to a neighborhood store to buy chicken and plantains. I feel comfortable on the streets, she said.
Sheer exhaustion may explain the return to peace, said Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network, a non-governmental organization known by its French initials RNDDH.
People have been demonstrating since Monday, he said. I think they are very tired.
He said RNDDH determined by monitoring each police station that police arrested 200 people between Monday and Wednesday.
Citing police and hospital sources, he said three men were found shot dead in Belair, about two minutes from the National Palace, but it was not clear whether they were related to the demonstrations.
Esperance said 16 of Haiti’s 27 senators sent a letter Thursday to Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis calling on him to resign.
If he doesn’t resign, they will ask him to come to the parliament on Saturday and they will fire him, Esperance predicted.
He accused Alexis of having offered no short-term plan to better the plight of Haiti, the western hemisphere’s poorest country.
Alexis is second in command to President Rene Preval.
The president appealed for restraint Wednesday, announcing a short-term plan to create jobs and increase the flow of aid. Watch as the food riots intensify
In a statement Wednesday, Esperance said his organization considers the protest movement a legitimate attempt by Haitians to reclaim their right to eat and their right to access to the basic goods used every day.
The right to eat is a fundamental right that any respectable government must guarantee for its citizens, he said.
At the same time, RNDDH deplores that this protest movement is accompanied by numerous acts of violence, of theft, of pillage. These violent acts are not acceptable in a democratic society.
He called for change in the country’s economy policy, for the creation of jobs and for an end to government corruption.
The average Haitian diet contains 1,640 calories, 460 calories short of the typical daily requirement of 2,100, according to the United Nations World Food Program.
Eighty percent of the 8.7 million Haitians live in poverty and 54 percent live in abject poverty, according to the CIA’s World Factbook.
Protests over the cost of food and fuel also have occurred in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal, according to the World Food Program.
A call to Haiti’s embassy in Washington was not immediately returned.
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