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The delivery of aid to victims of Haiti's earthquake is still being slowed by bottlenecks, aid workers say.

UN and Oxfam staff are finally bringing food and water to some parts of the capital Port-au-Prince, but the airport remains clogged with loaded planes.

Many survivors of Tuesday's quake have become desperate as they wait for aid, and many are trying to leave the city.

Leaving for Haiti, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the quake was the worst humanitarian crisis for decades.

The UN has launched an appeal for $562m (£346m) intended to help three million people for six months, while some two million people are thought to need emergency relief.


AT THE SCENE
Nick Davis
Nick Davis, BBC News, Haiti

Relief is finally getting through to some in Port-au-Prince but it's a trickle - not a flood - of the aid needed by the people here.

The US navy is using helicopters to drop supplies of bottled water using soldiers on the ground to keep control. The UN also has distribution points handing out high-energy bars to the hungry.

But demand is outstripping supply - with food and water being taken faster than they can pass it out.

Meanwhile first reports from the epicentre of the earthquake suggest the damage is even more dramatic than in the capital.

The BBC's Mark Doyle in Leogane, west of Port-au-Prince, described the scene as "apocalyptic", with thousands left homeless and almost every building destroyed.

But in a sign of hope, rescuers pulled a woman alive from rubble on Sunday. Twelve others were rescued on Saturday, the UN said.

There are also security concerns amid reports of looting.

The US Southern Command's Lt-Gen Ken Keen said that while streets were largely calm there had been an increase in violence.

"We are going to have to address the situation of security," he said, quoted by the Associated Press.

"We've had incidents of violence that impede our ability to support the government of Haiti and answer the challenges that this country faces."

AFP news agency quoted one of its photographers as saying police had opened fire on looters in a Port-au-Prince market, killing at least one of them.

Airport 'overwhelmed'

Correspondents say although the amount of supplies getting through is still small, there is a sense of movement at last.

The UN World Food Programme has been handing out aid packages containing food, while UK charity Oxfam has been distributing water.

US troops said they had set up their first foothold outside the airport to deliver aid carried in by helicopters.

But many victims are still not receiving any aid, as the airport remains a bottleneck. UN Humanitarian Coordinator Kim Bolduc says getting supplies out to them from the planes is still a major hurdle.



"The Haitian airport now is overwhelmed," said UN Assistant Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, Edmond Mulet.

The port is badly damaged, and many roads still blocked by corpses and debris.

David Wimhurst, a spokesman for the UN peacekeeping force in Haiti, said aid was being delivered as quickly as possible.

"Aid is going out but it's simply impossible in 24 hours to bring in enough aid to instantly feed all these people, many of whom are in places that are inaccessible," he said.

The Haitian and Dominican Republic governments are planning an alternative 130km (80 miles) humanitarian road corridor to deliver relief supplies from the southern Dominican town of Barahona, the UN reports.

The UN has warned about fuel shortages, which it says could affect humanitarian operations.

"Fuel is the key issue," Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told the BBC. "We need fuel to bring in supplies and carry the wounded."

'No help'

The UN says up to 80-90% of buildings in Leogane, about 19km west of Port-au-Prince, have been destroyed.


map

Satellite and close-up images of Port-au-Prince devastation

One survivor in the town said he had come to Haiti from America for his mother's funeral, only for his wife to be killed in the earthquake. He said that so far people in the area had received no help of any kind.

"We don't have any aid, nothing at all," he said. "No food, no water, no medical, no doctors."

Estimates of how many people died following the 7.0 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday have varied.

The Pan American Health Organization put the death toll at 50,000-100,000, while Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said 100,000 "would seem a minimum".

A UN official has said aid workers are dealing with a disaster "like no other" in UN memory because the country had been "decapitated".

Three ministers and several senators are reported to have been killed.

The US has launched what President Barack Obama called "one of the largest relief efforts in its history" following the quake.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the first senior Western official to arrive in Haiti, on Saturday.

She told Haitians that the US would be "here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead", asserting that "Haiti can come back even better and stronger in the future".

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COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka on Friday rejected the findings of a trio of United Nations-appointed investigators who said they doubted a video showing apparent executions by Sri Lankan soldiers was fake.
The reaction came after Philip Alston, U.N. special reporter on extrajudicial executions, on Thursday urged an independent inquiry after a forensic pathologist, a forensic video analyst and a firearms expert concluded the video was likely real.
Britain's Channel 4 television aired a video last year that it said shows government troops killing unarmed, naked, bound and blindfolded men during the army's final assault to smash the Tamil Tiger rebels.
The government immediately rejected it as a fraud perpetrated by Tamil Tiger supporters angry the separatist group had been defeated, and said its own investigation, using Sri Lankan civilian and military experts, had found it was doctored.
"We reject these allegations," Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama said. "In light of those continued contradictory findings, we can't accept it."
He was referring to some details Alston said the experts were unable to explain, like the movement of certain victims, 17 frames at the end of the video and the fact that the date encoded in the video -- July 17, 2009 -- is a month after war ended.
Nonetheless, all three concluded the footage was probably genuine, Alston said.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay called on Sri Lanka on Friday to allow an independent investigation into the allegations that executions had taken place.
"Obviously if the Sri Lankan armed forces and Sri Lankan government have done nothing wrong, it will have nothing to fear from an international investigation," her spokesman Rupert Colville told a news briefing in Geneva.
"We believe a full and impartial investigation is critical if we're going to confront all the very big question marks that hang over this war," he said.
IN COUNTRY'S "BEST INTERESTS"
A credible independent inquiry would be in the "best interests" of Sri Lanka, Colville said.
Pillay, a former U.N. war crimes judge, called last May for an international investigation to assess whether Sri Lankan government forces and Tamil rebels committed war crimes in the last burst of their conflict.
Bogollagama said that the government was still probing the video and other allegations of war crimes through a presidential panel of Sri Lankan experts. Alston has voiced doubts that a Sri Lankan probe will be impartial.
"We are not instantly dismissing anything. That cannot be done by a government," Bogollagama said. "The government is examining their allegations."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's spokesman Martin Nesirky said on Thursday that an investigation should be done but would best be handled by Pillay's office. However, he added that Ban was considering appointing his own expert panel to advise him and assist the Sri Lankan government in following up on any war crimes that may have been committed.
Colville told Reuters: "We would help in any way we could or were asked to do."
In the past year, Pillay's office has played a role in major investigations into alleged war crimes by Israeli forces in Gaza and into a massacre in the West African nation Guinea.
Sri Lanka's government has repeatedly denied that its forces were guilty of war crimes or human rights breaches in the last months of its 25-year war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The government declared total victory in May.
source-http://www.nytimes.com