Updated on
Summary
Thousands of people in Haiti have gathered in the capital Port-au-Prince to mark the moment a massive earthquake struck a year ago, killing an estimated 316,000 people, according to revised figures quoted by the country's prime minister. Memorial services were being held in various venues on Wednesday, including one at the ruins of the National Cathedral attended by a papal envoy to Haiti, other religious leaders, government officials and foreign dignitaries. Women and men were dressed in white in mourning as they clambered over the ruins for a better view of a Catholic Mass being held to remember the dead. Incense wafted over the crowds, as they chorused softly Hallelujah. From early morning, national television replayed footage of the disaster's aftermath, the shocking images of mangled corpses and screaming survivors triggering painful memories. The magnitude 7.0 quake hit the Caribbean island state at 4.53pm (21:53 GMT) on January 12, 2010 and left an estimated 1.3 million people homeless, as well as the hundreds of thousands that were killed. The Haitian president, was notably missing from the event despite being scheduled to deliver a speech at the ceremony.Maybe he was trying to keep a low profile to prevent public disturbances from going on.Jean-Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister, revised the death toll upwards on Wednesday from previous estimates of around 250,000 to over 316,000 people killed, saying it was due to the recovery of additional bodies over the year. In one of the poorest countries in the world ... we made a major step backwards, Bellerive said at a news conference in Port-au-Prince.Al Jazeera's Teymoor Nabili reporting from Port-au-Prince said there was a lot of anti-Preval sentiment on the streets but it was not all directed at him but also against the non-government organisation (NGO) community. People hear and see of so much money coming into the country to the NGOs and yet they don't see the immediate benefits of it, so they tend to think that the NGO community is not managing things very well. An estimated 10,000 NGOs are operating in the country but some say the actual figures are much higher. Despite an outpouring of global solidarity for Haiti, billions of dollars of aid pledges and a huge ongoing humanitarian operation, survivors say they are still waiting to see a positive impact from all the aid. In remarks at a memorial ceremony in New York, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, said that despite a slow start, recovery is finally beginning now in earnest.To be frank, reconstruction has been slow, he said. International aid and investment has not come as quickly as needed, or as promised. The cholera epidemic shows no sign of abating. Yet, we are making progress.
