A UN vehicle keeps watch in the Carrefour neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, 26 January, 2010. Photo by Georgia Popplewell, posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license. More than two weeks after the 12 January earthquake in Haiti, official estimates suggest over 100,000 people were killed, 200,000 injured, and 1 million left homeless. (The Haiti Vox blog has posted a partial translation of a government bulletin containing these and other statistics.) Despite an outpouring of aid from many countries around the world, and the presence in Haiti of thousands of relief workers, United Nations peacekeepers, and US troops, media reports suggest that a substantial percentage of affected Haitians in and around Port-au-Prince have still received little or no relief assistance. The sheer scale of the disaster is one reason, compounded by severely damaged infrastructure and the earthquake's impact on Haitian government agencies, many of which have lost key staff. But some Haitians online, and others on the ground, are suggesting that exaggerated concerns about security and violence may be hindering relief efforts. One outspoken commentator is the musician Richard Morse, who is also the proprietor of the Hotel Oloffson, where many foreign media personnel have been based. Within hours of the earthquake, Morse began posting news and commentary on Twitter (as @RAMhaiti), and the stream of information has continued. On 18 January, he angrily suggested that UN personnel were avoiding certain areas of Port-au-Prince: A journalist receiving a ride from a UN vehicle was dropped off at Canape Vert.”We are prohibited from taking to the Oloffson”!!! The Oloffson is “RED ZONE” How can the UN help the people of Carrefour Feuille if they are prohibited from coming to the neighborhood!! I went to the so called Red Zone on foot with the CBS crew so they could get a close up look at the destruction; smell the bodies If the UN can't go to where THE PEOPLE need their help then what are they doing here? He added: The fact that I haven't seen an international presence in this area tell me that others are following the lead of the UN He refers to a system pre-dating the earthquake by several years, in which Port-au-Prince is divided into “red” and “green” zones depending on levels of perceived risk to UN staff and others. Many parts of downtown Port-au-Prince are designated “red” zones, while the more affluent Petionville area to the southeast, for example, is a “green” zone. UN staff are required to have a military escort to enter a “red” zone for any reason, including aid distribution (according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). Even before the earthquake, some residents of the city believed the zoning system disadvantaged certain neighbourhoods, as a September 2009 CIDA report on the Bel Air area made clear. In the subsequent days, Morse has continued to comment on the “red/green” zoning system, alleging it has more to do with politics than security, and is affecting relief efforts: RED ZONE either means “poor” or “we don't want our people spending money there” or “we don't like you” RED ZONE/GREEN ZONE still seems to be an issue when getting aid to different neighborhoods. Eventually GREEN ZONE/RED ZONE in Haiti will becom an embarrassment.It's part of the Haitian politics of MONOPOLIES.Everything goes 2 a few. On 22 January, the US-based Democracy Now media organisation posted a video report on their blog, making similar claims. The report quoted Sasha Kramer of the NGO Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods: What I’ve been witnessing here is that the aid actually arrived fairly quickly…. As I understand, there’s thousands of tons of food that are available. But the problem that they’re having is distribution of the aid. And one of the issues with that is that large aid organizations working in Haiti, because it’s an area that has a State Department warning, there’s a lot of regions in Port-au-Prince that are considered red zones that they’re not able to go into without very high security restrictions. So when the large aid groups circulate around Port-au-Prince, they’re often in sealed vehicles with their windows up…. British photographer Leah Gordon, working with the NGO HelpAge International, posted several photos of elderly Haitians in “red zone” areas of Port-au-Prince in a HelpAge Flickr set. Janine, 73, and Lemoine, 68, live off Grand Rue, in Port-au-Prince's "red zone". Photographed on 23 January, 2010, by Leah Gordon, and posted at Flickr. Used by permission of the photographer. Other accounts suggested that security concerns are also in play in areas outside Port-au-Prince.