PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon flew to Haiti today to support earthquake relief efforts and to visit his staff’s devastated headquarters in what the agency is calling the most challenging disaster it has ever faced.
Ban’s charter Boeing 737 was met by the acting chief of the U.N. peacekeeping mission, Edmond Mulet, who was sent in immediately after the quake to replace mission chief Hedi Annabi.
Annabi was buried in the rubble along with many others when the five-story U.N. headquarters collapsed in Tuesday’s magnitude-7.0 quake. His body was found Saturday. Hundreds of others are missing.
Shortly after landing, Ban had an emotional reunion with his former spokeswoman, Michele Montas, a Haitian woman who was visiting her mother at the time of the earthquake.
Ban’s first stop in Haiti was to be the U.N. headquarters, after which he planned to take an aerial tour of the country’s most-damaged areas.
Ban said he has three priorities in Haiti: saving as many lives as possible, stepping up humanitarian assistance and ensuring the coordination of the huge amount of aid coming into the country.
“We should not waste even a single item, a dollar,” he said.
Ban said the U.N. is feeding 40,000 people, and expects that figure to rise to 2 million within a month.
The secretary-general also said he was “very touched and grateful” for the outpouring of aid from other countries around the world.
U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs in Geneva has declared the quake the worst disaster the international organization has ever faced, since so much government and U.N. capacity in the country was demolished. In that way, she said, it’s worse than the cataclysmic Asian tsunami of 2004: “Everything is damaged.”
Ban called the quake “one of the most serious humanitarian crises in decades.”
“The damage, destruction and loss of life are just overwhelming,” he said.