UN archive captures horrors and heroism of Haitian quake


UNITED NATIONS, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Amelia Shaw lost colleagues and friends in an instant on Jan. 12 when an earthquake toppled the headquarters of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti. Now she and other UN staffers are completing an ambitious project that they hope will go some way to memorializing the event -- both the calamity itself, and the heroic efforts in the days and nights that followed.

Thousands of photographs, film clips, audio files and other documents taken in the aftermath of the disaster have been compiled and indexed by the United Nations on a digital archive that is now available to the public through a website, UN officials said here.

The Haiti Oral History and Visual Archive, as it is officially known, is the result of a decision by the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) to record for posterity what Shaw notes sadly was a "historic event for the Organization -- definitely by far its largest loss of life."

It includes interviews with rescue workers, images from the disaster zone and raw footage of UN staff trying to help Haiti get back on its feet.

"The archive aims to take advantage of all the digital media ... We have and bring them together in one collection [so as] to capture and preserve the efforts of the UN and its staff," Shaw explains.



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