• TIN TỨC
• VIDEO

Amid increasing security concerns in Haiti, UN Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon asked the Security Council on Monday to send an additional 1,500 police and 2,000 military troops to help keep law and order in the quake-hit island country.

The security reinforcements are expected to bolster ground support for relief efforts led by the UN Mission in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH, which currently has about 7,000 troops and 2,000 international police around Haiti, including 3,000 in the nation's capital, Port-au-Prince.

"The heartbreaking scenes I saw yesterday compels us to act swiftly and generously today and over the longer term," Ban said. "The Haitian people need to see that today is better than yesterday. They need to believe that the future will be better than the past."

Ban traveled to Haiti on Sunday to asses the aftermath of the devastating magnitude-7.3 earthquake that hit the Caribbean nation on Tuesday, an event the UN chief has called "one of the most serious crises in decades."

Ban Kimoon on Monday requested the Security Council to raise the number of UN police officers and troops in the Haiti mission by 1,500 and 2000 respectively.

Damage to critical infrastructure and a jammed airport have slowed aid distribution, causing thousands of Haitians to struggle on their own for food and water.

Over the weekend, horrific reports of vigilante justice from the streets of the capital seeped out to the world. In one incident, a looter was beaten, dragged through the streets and set on fire, left to burn to death, according to local media reports.

Speaking to reporters, the UN humanitarian chief, John Holmes, said incidents of violence were not as widespread as reported in the media.

"The general security situation is calm and that was very much the impression we had ourselves when we were there yesterday," he said. "The tendency is to take an incident and assume that's happening all around the capital or that's the general situation. That is not the impression we have."

Six days after the earthquake, aid distribution is finally starting to ramp up, but not without tensions flaring up between individual countries and relief efforts. Over the weekend, the United States reportedly turned away French cargo planes, leading many to question whether the United Nations was in charge of operations.

Ban said he welcomed American support, especially in taking charge of the airport control tower, which was damaged in the earthquake. But the United Nations, he said, was undoubtedly the lead coordinator.

"There is no question about that," he said.

Holmes later acknowledged that there were problems in how flights were being prioritized but said that the United Nations created "a slot system" with clear priorities between all the different kinds of aid arriving.

"Lots of flights which wanted to land in Port-au-Prince at different times in the last few days have had to divert to Santa Domingo, including some humanitarian flights from the World Food Program and Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors without Borders), but usually they have been able to get in there a few hours later because the slots have been organized," he said.

The UN-led relief effort has been criticized as sluggish despite the sad fact that the world body suffered heavy losses itself -- the most in any single day -- with 46 staff confirmed dead, according to UN spokesperson Martin Nesirky, who noted that more than 500 were still missing.

Xinhua