Jonathan M. Katz
Anxious wait in Haiti for survivors of capsizing
CAP HAITIEN, Haiti — Dozens of anxious Haitians waited at an airport Thursday to learn whether family members were among the survivors of a sailboat packed with migrants that struck a coral reef and broke apart, killing at least 15 people and leaving dozens missing.
Relatives of the migrants and a few repatriated survivors stood for hours in the tropical sun at the airport in Cap Haitien, including one woman who carried a photo of her 18-year-old son. She said he was among some 200 people on the overloaded vessel when it ran aground near the Turks and Caicos Islands Sunday night.
“They stole my child,” Gentila Lormile said of the smugglers who organized the ill-fated voyage to Providenciales, the most populated island in Turks and Caicos, where many Haitians have gone to seek work in recent years.
Officials have not yet compiled a full list of the 119 survivors or the nearly 70 who are missing, in part because of the large size of the group and a shortage of Haitian Creole translators, said Sgt. Calvin Chase, a spokesman for the Royal Turks and Caicos Police Force.
It is common for officials to struggle to identify survivors because they usually are reluctant to give their real names, said Harold Joseph, Haitian ambassador to the Bahamas.
“They hope to have another trip,” he said. “That’s why they don’t want to provide information.”
With no published list of survivors, relatives had to wait for those flown back to Haiti after being processed by immigration authorities in Turks. People in the crowd gathered under palm trees or fanned themselves as they watched the small airport’s runway. One man tried to console Lormile, telling her, “You don’t know if he is dead.”
The crowd dispersed when word spread that an expected flight would not arrive until Friday at the earliest.
So far, about 70 survivors have been sent back from Turks and Caicos. The sailboat — which passengers said was called Se Lavi, or “That’s life” in Haitian Creole — took off from northern Haiti on Saturday and was in sight of Providenciales when it slammed into the reef. Everyone on board was plunged into the sea as the boat broke apart, with some surviving by clinging to the reef for up to 17 hours.
Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis expressed her sorrow over the incident and called for improvements in the way Haitian authorities regulate sea travel.
“It’s hard to see (your) countrymen perish on the high seas aboard risky boats,” she told Radio Metropole.
Pierre-Louis also took the opportunity to repeat calls for the United States to temporarily halt deportations of Haitians illegally there, because the country cannot handle them after the destruction wrought by last year’s tropical storms and hurricanes.
Turks and Caicos police were conducting a criminal investigation into the incident and still searching off the Atlantic archipelago Thursday for possible survivors, Chase said.
Hubert Hughes, the deputy commissioner of police in the Turks and Caicos Islands, said authorities decided to keep up their search in part because a survivor was found Wednesday afternoon on West Caicos. The young man was the last of the 119 survivors to be found and the first in more than a day.
The U.S. Coast Guard ended its search Wednesday after a 52-hour operation that covered more than 1,500 square miles (3,800 square kilometers) of ocean.
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