UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon requested 3,500 more troops and police to boost his battered mission that had been trying to bring stability to the dysfunctional Caribbean state even before disaster struck.

Six days after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake brought devastation on an unprecedented scale, the massive international relief effort spearheaded by the US military was still failing to bring security to a despairing populace.

In the stinking capital Port-au-Prince, where corpses lay unpicked under the rubble and palace gardens had become putrid slums, groups of survivors roamed the streets to scrounge supplies largely unchallenged by the authorities.

Troops in combat gear fired off rounds and hauled some people to the ground to try and stop the worst of the looting but the paltry numbers of security personnel in the city made this a futile task.

The Red Cross warned that violence by desperate Haitians was growing, although Lieutenant-General Ken Keen, the top US officer on the ground, insisted: "The level of violence we see now is below pre-earthquake levels."

Officials have expressed fears the final death toll may top 200,000 if it is ever known at all, while a government minister said Sunday that 70,000 bodies had already been buried.

UN agencies said field hospitals and food distribution had multiplied in and around the capital, where the quake wrought huge destruction.

"Prices for food and transport have skyrocketed since last Tuesday and incidents of violence and looting are on the rise as the desperation grows," the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement.

Many residents of Port-au-Prince felt they were in "a catastrophic situation," it added.

US paratroopers deployed out of the main Haitian airport in waves of navy Seahawk helicopters to set up bases from which to begin humanitarian operations, while more than 2,000 Marines rushed to the disaster zone.

"We have seen a dramatic improvement in the efficiency and coordination of the flow of goods coming in," World Food Programme executive director Josette Sheeran told reporters in Rome.

But she was far from the scenes of utter desperation in the capital where conditions appeared to have barely improved for hundreds of thousands of wretched people sleeping rough in the streets.

Homeless, injured and traumatized survivors trawled the streets desperate for food, water and medicine. All around was the stench of rotting bodies.

International aid was trickling in but supplies remained scarce amid the enormity of a crisis the United Nations estimates affected three million people and left 300,000 homeless.

Former US president Bill Clinton, a special UN envoy to Haiti, defended the relief effort as he arrived in Port-au-Prince to meet with Haitian leaders and survivors to get a first-hand account of conditions.

"No, I don't think they were slow coming in," Clinton told AFP as he walked down hospital hallways cluttered with injured survivors. "The infrastructure broke down, and that's what we're building up."

President Barack Obama has mobilized his military reserves and the overall US deployment on the island or in ships off Haiti was due to swell from 7,000 personnel by the end of Monday to more than 10,000 in the coming weeks.

"Time is still of the essence. We're getting better, but there is still a lot of misery in Haiti," said Rear Admiral Ted Branch, who commands the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson strike group.

Amidst the death and desperation were life-affirming tales of survival against all the odds, but the rescue teams in Haiti fear these may be among the last.

A text message to the United Nations set in motion a relief operation that led to the rescue two days later of Maria, Ariel and Lamy after being buried for more than 100 hours under a collapsed supermarket.

"I'm seven," Ariel shouted to rescuers seeking signs of life, adding that she was stuck next to a dead man but covered with supermarket food.

Emergency workers were expanding to battered communities outside of Port-au-Prince, including Gressier, Petit Goave, and Leogane, which were all flattened by the quake.

Aid group Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) said their doctors and surgeons had been working around the clock, amputating limbs and performing caesarian sections on pregnant women.

"Patients arrived on handcarts or on men's backs," said MSF emergency coordinator Hans van Dillen.

European Union nations on Monday promised more than 400 million euros (616 million dollars) in emergency aid and reconstruction funds for Haiti.

earlier related report
UN chief seeks 3,500 reinforcements for UN mission in Haiti
United Nations (AFP) Jan 18, 2010 - UN chief Ban Ki-moon requested Monday 3,500 extra troops and police to boost his battered mission in quake-hit Haiti as the world body's death toll from the disaster rose to 46, with hundreds still unaccounted for.

Speaking to reporters after briefing the Security Council on his six-hour visit to the devastated Haitian capital Sunday, Ban said he had requested that the UN mission, known as MINUSTAH, be considerably beefed up.

"I recommended that the Security Council boost the number of troops by 2,000, nearly 33 percent increase for six months," and that the number of UN police officers should rise by 1,500, or 67 percent, he said.

France's UN Ambassador Gerard Araud said a draft resolution to that effect should be adopted by the 15-member council "in the coming hours."

A copy of the text obtained by AFP endorsed Ban's reinforcement request and said, "MINUSTAH will consist of a military component of up to 8,940 troops of all ranks and of a police component of up to 3,711."

Araud said the Security Council would also have to examine MINUSTAH's mandate, "to see what is necessary to adjust it to the new situation."

He noted that Paris had proposed an international conference on rebuilding the Haitian economy, and said the talks should ideally be held in March after a preparatory meeting in Montreal scheduled for next Monday.

The UN mission in Haiti known in MINUSTAH currently has roughly 7,000 troops, 2,000 police and about 2,000 civilian personnel.

It has been deployed since mid-2004 to help stabilize the impoverished Caribbean island-nation of nine million people, where officials fear the final death toll for Haitians could top 200,000.

A quarter of a million more were injured and 1.5 million left homeless in the wake of Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude quake.

The disaster was also the worst ever in terms of fatalities for the UN and Ban's spokesman Martin Nesirky said 46 UN personnel were now confirmed dead and more than 500 are missing or unaccounted for.

"The heartbreaking things I saw yesterday compel us to act swiftly and generously," Ban said.

The UN chief said he got a clear message from his encounter with Haitians who told him: "We need the United Nations. We need jobs. We need food and water.

He said the priority was to improve the coordination of the massive international relief effort and unclog the bottlenecks to make sure that the aid was reaching the people who needed it most.

Ban late Sunday flew back from Port-au-Prince with the remains of his special envoy to Haiti Hedi Annabi and his Brazilian deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa, both killed in the quake.

The UN boss made the morale-boosting visit to the Haitian capital to show solidarity with Haitian quake victims and shell-shocked local UN staff. He visited the flattened MINUSTAH headquarters to praise the work of some 1,500 rescue workers battling to save as many lives as possible and to offer comfort to the staff.

In what Ban called "a small miracle" a Danish UN civil affairs official was pulled out from the ruins of the MINUSTAH's main building by US rescue workers just after he toured the site.

Jens Kristensen emerged from debris of the UN's six-story building, where the walls have become a sarcophagus for so many, without a scratch on him.

Ban said he had a good meeting with Preval focusing on the need to save as many lives as possible, bring in emergency relief aid in the form of food, water, shelter and medical supplies, and better coordinate aid delivery.

"For a small country like Haiti, this is a tsunami-like disaster," Ban told reporters.

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