The installation of the members of the Transitional Presidential Council will be held on Thursday, April 25, 2024, at the Welcome Villa, at 10 a.m. Sources close to Loop confirmed this information to Loop.
One of our sources indicated that the members of the Council decided not to carry out the installation at the national palace as planned, given the security situation in downtown Port-au-Prince, particularly around the presidential palace. , where bandits continue to blackmail powder on a daily basis.
As for the number of guests at the ceremony, we learned that instead of the 400 people planned, the ceremony could accommodate around a hundred people.
The public will be able to follow the event live, we learned. The media through which the ceremony will be broadcast are not yet known, but national television is at the top of the list, according to a reliable source.
Note also that the election to designate the president of the Presidential Council could not take place this Tuesday as announced. According to our sources, representatives within the nine-member entity prefer that the installation take place before the choice of the body’s president.
Without a president or parliament, Haiti has not had an election since 2016.
The poorest country in the Caribbean has suffered from chronic political instability for decades. However, at the end of February, the gangs, whose violence was already ravaging entire sections of the territory, launched coordinated attacks against strategic sites, saying they wanted to overthrow Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
The latter, appointed a few days before the assassination, in 2021, of President Jovenel Moïse, was strongly contested. He was unable to return to his country after a trip to Kenya.
On March 11, the same day as a meeting between Haitians and several organizations and countries such as the United States, he announced that he would resign to make way for a transitional presidential council.
The body was able to see the light of day after weeks of difficult negotiations.
Mass flight from Port-au-Prince
The capital, Port-au-Prince, is 80% in the hands of criminal gangs, accused of numerous abuses, in particular murders, rapes, looting and kidnappings for ransom.
Nearly 100,000 people have fled the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince in one month to seek shelter from escalating gang attacks, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) announced on Friday.
Thanks to the implementation of data collection at the most used bus stations, IOM observed, between March 8 and April 9, the departure of 94,821 people from the capital to join mainly the departments of Great South which already welcomed 116,000 displaced people who had fled in recent months, the IOM said in a press release.
Previous IOM data showed 53,000 people fled in three weeks, between March 8 and 27.
The agency notes that these figures do not necessarily reflect the entire flow, as some displaced people do not pass through the data collection points or pass there when the data cannot be collected.
Destination provinces do not have sufficient infrastructure and host communities do not have sufficient resources that can enable them to cope with these massive displacement flows from the capital, IOM commented.
According to this data, the majority (63%) of these nearly 100,000 people who fled the capital were already internally displaced, often having first taken refuge with relatives within the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince. . Some had even already been moved twice, three times, or even more.
A new type of displaced person
However, the IOM has observed a new phenomenon.
While, at the beginning of March, those already displaced were the first to leave the capital, over time, those who had not previously been displaced also decided to leave.
This further describes the deterioration of the situation in the capital since leaving the capital could be a relatively quicker decision to make for a person who was already displaced than for someone who was still in their residence and decides to leave it. to seek refuge in the provinces, commented the UN agency.
The vast majority (78%) of people interviewed by IOM during this data collection indicated that they were leaving the capital because of the violence and 66% assured that they would stay outside as long as necessary.
With AFP
