Women protest insecurity and living conditions at a tent camp in central Port-au-Prince, January 2011. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

Haiti is poised to enact major reforms to its penal code to make it easier for victims of rape to prosecute their attackers.

The amendments to the penal code would precisely define sexual assault in accordance with international law, legalise certain types of post-rape abortions, and criminalise marital rape.

The changes also mandate state-funded legal aid to victims who cannot pay for counsel. Discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation” would be banned in limited circumstances, in a first for Haitian law.When someone beats you, rapes you, and it's all over - you just keep it inside you? That would make me crazy.

“I think it’s an exciting time,” Rashida Manjoo, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, said in February at a conference on the reforms. “It’s a small start with the penal code, but it’s a good start.”

Lawyers and activists at the conference pored over a three-page draft of the reforms. They’re optimistic that Haiti’s parliament will approve them within the year. Haiti’s prime minister and the ministry of justice have indicated they support the amendments.

But Manjoo warned that the law won’t be fully implemented or enforced without adequate funding from donors and participation by the public.

In the three years since the 2010 earthquake, the issue of sexual violence has gained an increasingly high profile. Foreign media reports referred to a “rape epidemic” in the tent camps scattered throughout Port-au-Prince.

A January 2012 study by a coalition of legal and women’s groups found that at least one member of 14 percent of all households displaced by the quake had been sexually assaulted.

Some experts, notably anthropologist and author Timothy Schwartz, cite a lack of independent data and question whether the prevalence of rape has been exaggerated by some of the advocacy organisations mentioned in this report.

But even Schwartz applauds the effort to reform the penal code by these same groups. He said it represents a welcome departure from the usual approach to structural problems in Haiti, where non-governmental organisations stage piecemeal interventions instead of bolstering the state.

Improvements at the grassroots

In the meantime, Haitian citizens, the police, and lawyers have attempted to address the violence at the grassroots.

In some tent camps, internally displaced Haitians formed brigades to safeguard against criminal threats, including rapists. A report by Poto Fanm+Fi found that these brigades, because of their strong community bonds, were usually more effective than patrols by United Nations peacekeeping troops at stopping sexual violence.

At police stations throughout the capital city, there are now officers trained to receive and assist female victims, Marie Gauthier, the Haitian National Police’s Coordinator for Women’s Affairs, told IPS.

“Carrefour, Fort National, Kenscoff, Port-au-Prince, Cite Soleil, Delmas, Croix de Bouquet. . .” Gauthier listed off the different stations in city districts. Still, “now we need vehicles,” she said, “to go quickly and arrest the perpetrator.”

Survivors of sexual violence often turn to KOFAVIV, a Haitian women’s group, for moral and humanitarian support. The quake destroyed the group’s headquarters, displacing its founders into a tent camp.

But the group secured funding from international donors, including the U.S. government, allowing it to move from the camp into a two-storey office and expand its programmes. Women come from every corner of Port-au-Prince for bi-weekly gatherings where survivors can bond and share information with one another.

In the courts, significantly more rape cases are going to trial, according to lawyers for Bureaus des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), a prominent Haitian law firm. Nearly a third of criminal trials during last summer’s court session in Port-au-Prince were for rape charges.

Thirteen convicted rapists were sentenced – a majority of those to maximum jail time. More prosecutions followed in the fall.

“It’s extremely significant, considering that a mere 10 years ago, barely any cases were being prosecuted,” Nicole Phillips, an attorney with the BAI, told IPS. She called the prosecutions and reforms to the penal code “a massive step forward.”

In the past, judges would demand victims present medical certificates obtained within 48 to 72 hours demonstrating they were raped. But it was difficult or impossible to get them, due to stigma, trauma, and prohibitive costs.

“The trials are getting more sophisticated,” Phillips said. The courts now rely more on expert witness testimony from medical professionals. She praised judges and the police in Port-au-Prince for taking rape accusations more seriously.

More work to be done

But Haiti’s progress in combating violence against women faced a high-profile test at the beginning of the year, and arguably failed.

When Marie-Danielle Bernadin first told her close friends she was sexually assaulted by her boss, the president of Haiti’s electoral council, their advice was simple: Leave Haiti.

“Where are you going to find justice here? Don’t file a complaint,” she remembers them saying. “Just go.”

After all, “normally one wouldn’t waste time” pressing charges against a high-ranking official, she said.

“But for me, I can’t keep something like this inside,” she told IPS in an exclusive interview. “When someone beats you, rapes you, and it’s all over – you just keep it inside you? That would make me crazy.”

Bernadin went to the police in November, shortly after the incident. She alleged that the official, Josue Pierre-Louis, had violently raped her after she confronted him about pictures of naked women on his cell phone.

She had been his assistant for two months. Pierre-Louis strenuously denied the charges and accused her of “espionage”, but the case went to trial.

At a pretrial hearing in January, supporters of Pierre-Louis – one of the most powerful men in the country – muscled their way into the hallway outside the courtroom, brandishing signs and chanting in his support. It took 15 minutes for police to arrive before they removed the protesters.

Five days later, Bernadin asked her lawyers to withdraw the charges. She issued a written statement to the press, saying: “I’ve decided to abandon the charges… but I reaffirm that I was beaten and raped by Josue Pierre-Louis.”

She described the previous months as some of the most difficult in her life. Supporters of Pierre-Louis attempted to shut her up using various methods, she said: her father was offered a job overseas, violent threats were phoned in to her family members in New Jersey, and a fake image of her was circulated online.

Her lawyers asked reporters not to take her photo, but they tried anyway every time she left the courthouse. She tried in vain to cover her head with a lawyer’s vest. The reporters ripped it before she could get to the car.

In her written statement, Bernadin denounced the threats made against her, judicial corruption, and described the tumult at the courthouse as “a horrible scene”.

Prior to the experience, she didn’t know that groups supporting victims of sexual violence existed in Haiti. She told IPS the justice system should prosecute Pierre-Louis of its own volition and “shine a light on the issue.”

“This way, if someone is raped, she could feel proud,” she said. “She could feel courageous enough to press charges. And rapists would be more afraid to commit these acts.”

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 27 2011 (IPS)

Workers in Haiti’s apparel manufacturing sector charge that factory owners are repressing attempts to organise workers in the capital, after the dismissals of six of seven leading members of a new union within just two weeks of its formation.

A demonstrator on Oct. 7 supporting Batay Ouvriye's unionisation campaign holds a sign that says, "Respect the rights of working people." Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

Judeline Pierre, a rail-thin 44-year-old mother who works at the Sonapi Industrial Park near Port-au-Prince’s airport, said she has been secretly attending union meetings organised by Batay Ouvriye for months.

In her bag, she carries a wrinkled, folded-up flyer calling for better conditions in the factories. She said she had to hide her involvement in the union, “because as soon as you start to assert your rights, they fire you. They’ve fired many operators for that.”

Textile factories in Port-au-Prince employ about 29,000 people, in a country of nine million with an estimated unemployment rate of 80 percent, according to the U.S. Embassy. The minimum wage is about five dollars per day, though some workers earn more by exceeding production quotas.

“These incidents, they have nothing to do with people trying to form a union,” Sassine told IPS. “Now suddenly, the whole international community is on my back telling me I’m against people organising.”

Sassine said he believes Batay Ouvriye aims to completely shut down factories, rather than merely organise workers.

Stepping out of his air-conditioned office onto a buzzing, 1,640- worker-strong factory floor, Baker gestured around, “If they want to unionise, they can unionise. But they need to do it in the right way.” He said he fired a man handing out flyers during work hours and interrupting production.

Between the workers and the factory owners is Better Work Haiti, a nine-person team funded by the U.S. Department of Labour charged with monitoring labour conditions in Haiti’s textile factories. The group will issue a fact-finding report on the alleged firings of SOTA members next month.

Better Work Haiti’s third biannual report on compliance with International Labour Organisation standards was released two weeks ago. It found violations of some occupational health and safety and minimum wage regulations in over 80 percent of the factories, but in the four “core” labour standards, compliance rates are near perfect.

Richard Lavallée, Better Work Haiti’s director, said the factory owners “are fully engaged in the programme” and praised the steady improvements in compliance with core standards over the last two years.

The fourth core standard is the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining. The latest report identifies just two instances of non-compliance, including a 12-day-long strike in May which resulted in the firings of 140 workers.

But the low non-compliance rate is potentially misleading. “Although no non-compliance findings are cited in the current report under Union Operations,” the report notes, there are “very significant challenges related to the rights of workers to freely form, join and participate in independent trade unions”.

“If you look at the reports, in Haiti there is only one unionised factory (in Ouanaminthe) out of 23 operating factories. In the factories in Port-au-Prince, there are no unions. We don’t have any evidence,” Lavallée said.

He explained that if a factory owner fires a person for trying to organise workers, it won’t be noted in the employee records reviewed by his team.

Asked if Better Work Haiti isn’t really measuring anything when it comes to conditions for labour organising, because there are almost no unions, Lavallée responded, “Exactly.”

Haitian union activists have continually complained of attempts to stifle union activity by factory owners, Lavallée said, but he hadn’t seen evidence and the activists had not provided names of dismissed workers until last month’s round of firings.

The expansion of the textile industry in Haiti has long been enshrined as a key plank of the country’s reconstruction and development plan. A U.S. Embassy spokesperson told IPS the industry has the potential to more than double in the next four years.

Officials say 20,000 jobs will be created by Korean garment manufacturing giant Sae-A, which inked a deal with the Haitian government last year to build an industrial park in northern Haiti.

The project’s funding by international donors, including 50 million dollars from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and 120 million dollars from the United States, was “not conditional on allowing unions to organise that space”, according to Canadian political scientist Yasmine Shamsie, who has studied Haiti’s textile industry.

“I’m very disappointed in the industry’s reaction to the new union,” Shamsie told IPS by email, referring to SOTA.

Her 2010 report for the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum called for a “high-road approach” to the Haitian apparel industry’s expansion, including unionising workers and providing welfare programmes to raise their living standards.

She said she didn’t understand the “lack of interest” in that strategy from international donors. “To be frank, it’s a no-brainer,” Shamsie said. “You say you want to create employment and reduce poverty – then give workers the tools to advocate for better than poverty wages.”

A study published last March by the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center found wages needed to be nine times higher for apparel industry workers to pay for basic living expenses. Senator Steven Benoit, who spearhead the last minimum wage increase in Haiti’s parliament, said wages need to raised again.

Sassine, the industry association president, told IPS a higher minimum wage would force factories to lay off workers and close down. Secret diplomatic cables made public by WikiLeaks show that Sassine and the U.S. Embassy worked together to oppose Benoit’s last attempt to raise the wages.

“President Martelly is talking about having a bunch of new textile factories coming to Haiti that will pay four dollars per day for 12 hours. This is slavery!” Benoit said, raising his voice during an interview in his Port-au-Prince office. “Nobody can live on five dollars per day on Earth in any country in the world. So this should be addressed, and I will address it again, before the year is over.”

Having worked there for two years, Judeline Pierre plans to quit her factory job and return to selling goods in street markets next year. Her family is worried about her health and she said she hasn’t earned enough to pay for her two children to attend school this year.

The long hours and intense, repetitive labour on sewing machines leaves her fatigued, she said, and her doctor recommended she find other work. Asked whether she can make more as a street merchant, she gave a wry smile and said, “It depends. But I’ll manage.”

In the late 1980s, Claudy Fevois, like Pierre, worked for three years at an apparel manufacturing factory near the Port-au-Prince airport. At the time, the industry employed about150,000 people, before the sector was devastated by political instability.

Now she sells breads from her neighbourhood’s local bakery. “(That work) can’t do anything for you,” she said, as she washed her children’s clothes by hand. “If I had been advancing in that job, I wouldn’t have quit after three years.”

*Ansel Herz is a freelance reporter who blogs at http://mediahacker.org.

(*The story moved Oct. 27, 2011 contained an error in the 16th paragraph. It is the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, not the Workers Consortium.)

Excerpt:

Seventeen-year-old Rose Mina Joseph says she is nine months pregnant. Her belly is swollen and she moves slowly, placing each step, as she walks around her family’s dusty yard.

Nerlande Nazaire says she has a child with a U.N. peacekeeper, who sends money regularly. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

The father, she says, is a Uruguayan soldier from the local U.N. peacekeeping battalion named Julio. She holds up a photo of him smiling and embracing her at her seventeenth birthday party, on Jan. 8 this year. IPS verified her birth date by looking at her birth certificate.

Joseph says that five days after her birthday, she became pregnant with the soldier’s child. “Nowadays, sometimes I feel anemic,” she told IPS. “I’m afraid I won’t have the money to pay the hospital when I give birth.”

A copy of a wire transfer receipt shows that Julio Cesar Posse Juncal sent her 150 dollars from Montevideo, Uruguay on Jul. 15. Joseph complained that he hadn’t sent more money for her in August.

“Sexual relations with minors (under 18 years old), whether consensual or not, are deemed to be sexual abuse and, therefore, prohibited,” acting Deputy Spokesperson for the United Nations Secretary-General Eduardo del Buey said in a briefing Wednesday following a question by IPS about the allegations.

Under Haitian law, an individual must be 18 years old to give sexual consent.

“If she needs something, the blan should help her,” said Antonia Zamor, Rose Mina’s mother, using the Haitian word for foreigner.

“It’s not legal… But he made her pregnant already. It’s not my fault – it’s the blan’s fault,” Zamor said. “He sent a small amount of money, but it’s not a lot. She told him she’s going to give birth, and he told her he didn’t know if he would send money.”

There are other women in Port Salut who have had children with the Uruguayan soldiers, despite a 2003 directive from the U.N. secretary- general to peacekeepers saying that, “Sexual relationships between United Nations staff and beneficiaries of assistance, since they are based on inherently unequal power dynamics, undermine the credibility and integrity of the work of the United Nations and are strongly discouraged.”

Del Buey reiterated Wednesday that “consensual sexual relations are strongly discouraged”.

“‘Discouraged’ is not banning,” said James Paul, executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, an independent policy watchdog that monitors the United Nations.

“When you talk about consent or consensual, it is somewhat ambiguous,” he told IPS, adding that the peacekeeper is in a position of power and money, so a relationship between a male peacekeeper and a local woman will almost always be imbalanced.

Light-skinned and bright-eyed, two-year-old Sasha Francesca Barrios coughs repeatedly as she sits on Roseleine Duperval’s lap at their home closer to downtown Port Salut. Duperval, her 32-year-old mother, said she has a fever.

The baby is named after the father, a former U.N. peacekeeper who once brought Duperval to Uruguay with him. She showed IPS her passport, which was stamped by the Uruguayan government. When Duperval returned to Haiti with him, she became pregnant. She is unsure if he was still serving as a peacekeeper at that time.

But he left after three months, she said, and she’s never heard from him again. The girl’s birth certificate identifies the father as Santiago Barrios. “We had a relationship and loved each other. I was working here, he was working here,” she said.

After he left for Uruguay, “He’s never taken responsibility,” Duperval told IPS. “He said when he left he would send money for the child, but he’s never sent anything. He’s never called.”

“We have too many MINUSTAH [troops] here,” she continued, referring to the peacekeeping mission by its acronym. “That’s all they do – make girls pregnant and then they leave. This is the worst thing they do… Now the child is going to reach the age where she needs to attend school, but I don’t know how I’ll pay for it.”

Duperval and her sister both attended a protest Monday held by about 300 people against the United Nations peacekeeping mission outside the base. The crowd held aloft a banner reading, “Justice for Johnny Jean”, the 18-year-old man allegedly raped by U.N. soldiers in Port Salut in a cell phone video that emerged last week.

One held a sign saying, “No to sex with 16-year-olds. No no no.”

IPS spoke to a third woman, 22-year-old Nerlande Nazaire, who lives near one of the Uruguayan U.N. bases. She laughs as six-month-old, light-skinned straight-haired Robert Outhele bobs excitedly up and down her lap. The baby’s arms are dotted with mosquito bites that have formed reddish bumps.

Nazaire said she struck up a relationship with a soldier when he passed by her house one day. She said she had spoken with him as recently as last Saturday and she’s happy that he sends money regularly for the baby.

Residents of Port Salut interviewed during the past week gave varying estimates of the number of children with Uruguayan fathers in the city, ranging from five to more than 10.

Joseph, the 17-year-old girl, said a doctor told her she would give birth to a baby boy on Sep. 20.

Mario Joseph (no relation), a prominent Haitian lawyer, told IPS, “In Haiti, one is a minor until age 18. That means that if a foreign soldier has sex with a minor, he is breaking Haitian law and the Haitian judicial system should judge him.”

Joseph and a human rights jurist told IPS that under Haitian law, if found guilty, the perpetrator would be sentenced to roughly 10-15 years of forced labour.

But under an agreement between MINUSTAH and the Haitian government, U.N. troops have immunity from the Haitian justice system and are supposed to be tried for transgressions in their home countries.

Five Uruguayan soldiers allegedly involved in the abuse of Jean, caught on video, have reportedly been repatriated. El Pais reports that Uruguayan President Jose Mujica has sent a letter to the Haitian government apologising for the abuse and pledging reparations to the victim’s family.

Standing outside her home, Dorothy Lebon, a schoolteacher at L’Ecole National de Point Sab, said that 17-year-old Rose Mina Joseph is her student.

“It’s a sexual abuse that they need to correct in the justice system. The woman who’s pregnant is a student, who’s less than 18,” she said. “If they want to change their programme – build schools, provide healthcare, create roads – we wouldn’t have a problem. But they don’t do anything positive.”

Many residents of Port Salut told IPS that minors have regularly engaged in sex with MINUSTAH troops. Several families in a poor neighbourhood adjacent to a Uruguayan U.N. base, insisting they remain anonymous, gave IPS the same story: young girls, including 16- and 17- year-olds, enter the base at midnight or later and have sex with the soldiers.

IPS could not confirm the allegations as of press time.

“We are taking these allegations with the utmost seriousness, as seriously as we have been,” Eliane Nabaa, a MINUSTAH spokeswoman, told IPS. She said she could neither confirm nor deny that troops in Port Salut have been having sex with juveniles.

*Ansel Herz is a freelance reporter who blogs at http://mediahacker.org.

With additional reporting by Elizabeth Whitman at the United Nations.

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 17 2011 (IPS)

Tensions are running high in Haiti as dueling campaigns for the presidency enter overdrive in their final days, and Jean- Bertrand Aristide, a popular former president, returns from a seven-year exile in South Africa.

Fanmi Lavalas march for Aristide's return descends from Bel-air. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

“Aristide is a president who was elected, but had to suffer through coup d’etats,” said Hari, a professional in downtown Port-au-Prince who gave just his first name. “His return will be good for the country. It will help Haitians put their heads together, to help us resolve the crisis we’re in.”

“There were people who conspired to send him away, and if there is tension it will be because of them,” he said.

Aristide was flown out of Haiti in 2004 on a U.S. plane in what he called a modern-day coup d’etat. The George W. Bush administration and critics say his rule was marked by corruption and human rights abuses until he voluntarily fled into exile amidst a rebellion.

Diplomatic communications released by Wikileaks show that the administration pressured other countries to limit Aristide’s political influence from abroad. But last month he was given a renewed passport by the Haitian government and this week South Africa rebuffed pressure from Washington to prevent his return.

Fanmi Lavalas, Aristide’s party, was banned from participating in the electoral process by Haiti’s electoral council. “They are not planning to have free and fair democratic elections. They are planning to have a selection,” Aristide told an interviewer last fall, a talking point echoed regularly by his supporters at demonstrations.

Asked recently about prospects for stability post-election, U.N. Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti Paul Farmer told IPS, “Of course I’m worried, because if you have scant participation or you exclude anyone from engagement… that’s a formula for instability and political instability breeds health problems just like poverty does.”

In a Thursday press release, the U.N. peacekeeping force said “there is no doubt” Haitians will go to the polls to determine the future of their country, and urged them to exercise their vote en masse.

Privately, a U.N. security advisor sent out a “hibernation checklist” to foreign aid workers to prepare for possible riots.

Mirlande Manigat and Michel Martelly, two right-wing candidates at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Aristide, are vying for the presidency in Sunday’s runoff election. The victor will manage Haiti’s reconstruction, including billions in funds promised by international donors.

“The elections are costly and the Haitian people need to make a choice without any major disruption. [Aristide’s return] would certainly be a distraction, on the eve of the election,” Alice Blanchet, an advisor to Haiti’s prime minister, told IPS.

“The rest is not in our control and it’s up to him,” Blanchet said.

Both presidential candidates softened their stance towards the former leader this week, saying he has the right to return before the vote takes place.

Some are still calling for the vote to be annulled and re- started. Ginette Cherubin, a member of Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), revealed that she and three other members, out of eight, never agreed to the announced results pitting the two candidates against each other. A majority of the council is required to take a decision.

The changed results conformed to the recommendations of a report by the Organization of American States and intense pressure from the United States. The ruling party candidate was thrown out due to alleged fraud and Martelly moved into second place.

Richardson Dumel, a CEP spokesman, refused to confirm that a majority of the body’s members signed the results, saying repeatedly he could not comment on it or Haiti’s electoral law.

Presidential candidate Jean Henry Ceant, who came in fourth in the initial results, demanded the CEP provide a copy of the results to a Haitian court. The document, delivered by Dumel, bears a CEP stamp but no signatures. Ceant maintains the election is illegal.

The candidates have starkly different public personas. Manigat is an elderly, soft-spoken professor; Martelly a boisterous konpas singer. But they have remarkably similar political platforms, including a key promise to reconstitute the Haitian Army.

Martelly especially is seen as having had close ties to the military. He ran a lounge that was a hangout for Army leaders who violently opposed Aristide during his first term and was good friends with Michel Francois, a notorious coup leader who was indicted for drug-trafficking.

A video posted on YouTube last month appears to show Martelly strutting around a nightclub, threatening Aristide and calling his supporters “faggots”.

Gerardo Ducos, a Haiti researcher for Amnesty International, said the human rights group has “great concern” about reinstating the Haitian army.

“The question that needs to be asked is, why? Why does Haiti need an army?” Ducos said, pointing to the existence of the Haitian National Police.

“Bringing the spectre of the Haitian Army back to life is yet another blow to the memory of victims and survivors of crimes and grave human rights abuses committed by this institution until it was disbanded in 1995 by President Aristide, and again in 2004 during the rebellion led by former [Army] officials,” he said.

Many of Haiti’s legion of unemployed youth are excited about Martelly’s proposed reformation of the Army, while others have enjoyed receiving automated calls from the candidate. Martelly’s rich voice bounces musically, promising everything from free schooling to better healthcare, before announcing, “I’m going!”

A media specialist for Mirlande Manigat admitted privately that Martelly had captured the support of the southern and western sections of Haiti, but maintained Manigat is highly popular in the rest of the country.

In some areas of the crowded capital city, there is palpable enthusiasm on the streets for Martelly. Adults and children salute each other with an upbeat “Tet Kale!” the humorous play-on-words slogan for the campaign. New banners have been strung up hailing Aristide’s return, amidst Martelly’s beaming grin on ubiquitous bright pink posters lining the streets.

“It killed the stereotype that he only has crowds behind him and that we’re not educated, we’re not intellectuals,” music star Wyclef Jean told IPS after a recent debate between the presidential candidates. A pro-Manigat demonstration outside the debate dissipated after exchanging verbal barbs with Martelly supporters.

Jean will perform Thursday evening in a pro-Martelly concert near the shattered national palace. He publicly supported the rebels who sought to overthrow Aristide in 2004, but said he welcomed the former president’s return.

“[Jean-Claude] Duvalier came back to the country. Why can’t Aristide, you know? As a Haitian, I feel every Haitian should be in the country. But my focus is on Mar. 20.”

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 7 2011 (IPS)

When diplomat Ricardo Seitenfus spoke out in interviews last month condemning the international community, he was dismissed from his post within days by the Organisation of American States.

Dieula Rosemond moments before her husband says she was pepper-sprayed by the U.N. soldier seen in the left foreground. Credit: Joseph Rosemond

But Seitenfus reserved his harshest words for United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti, known by its acronym MINUSTAH, which his own country leads with 3,000 troops.

“I had hoped that with the anguish of Jan. 12 the world would understand that it had taken the wrong path with Haiti. Unfortunately, the same policy was reinforced,” he told Folha, a Brazilian newspaper.

“Instead of making an assessment, they sent in more soldiers. One should build roads, put up dams, take part in the organisation of the state, of the judiciary system. The U.N. says that is not its mandate. Its mandate in Haiti is to keep the peace of the graveyard,” he said.

Seitenfus said with new governments taking power in Brazil and Haiti, MINUSTAH should consider withdrawal. A U.N. spokesperson told IPS the peacekeeping mission declined to comment on Seintefus’s remarks.

Brazil’s Ambassador to Haiti Igor Kipman was resolute in his defence of Brazil’s leadership of the peacekeeping mission in an interview with IPS last month. He called its military branch “extremely successful” in creating stability and security.

Discussions are already underway about an exit strategy from Haiti, Kipman told IPS, but 2014 is a “good estimate” of when the withdrawal will happen.

“The success of a peacekeeping mission is inversely proportional to its duration. If you stay 20 years, it’s because you are not doing a good job,” he said.

The Brazilian Embassy declined to comment on U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks which described Brazil in 2009 as a reluctant partner in the peacekeeping mission, frustrated with a “lack of exit strategy”.

Another cable describes a Brazilian general offering to “occupy and maintain control” of Rio de Janeiro’s crime- ridden shantytowns, arguing that his troops were “specifically trained and prepared” for the job because of their experience in Haiti with MINUSTAH.

The mission’s budget is soaring this year to an all-time high of 2.3 million dollars every day, totaling 860 million dollars.

In Cite Soleil, tensions have simmered since the mission began in 2004. MINUSTAH was accused of indiscriminately shelling slum-dwellers and harming civilians during its first two years in the country.

“We Must Kill the Bandits”, a new documentary by filmmaker Kevin Pina, documents several graphic deaths that occurred during the assaults. “We are under extreme pressure from the international community to use violence,” a Brazilian commanding general said in 2005 testimony.

The mission says its operations resulted in a dramatic decrease in gang activity.

The peacekeeping troops are omnipresent in slum alleyways. Catcalls of “goat-stealer!” and “tourists!” directed at the troops are common.

Soap distribution ends in pepper spray assault

On Dec. 6, U.N. troops escorted aid workers from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), a leading U.N.-affiliated relief agency, on a distribution of humanitarian aid to Camp Imakile on the outskirts of Cite Soleil.

Imakile’s residents say IOM’s Luc Ondele, the agency’s Cite Soleil camps manager, had already threatened to cut off humanitarian aid if the camp continued denouncing IOM and other NGOs on the radio and in protests. He also offered to begin a cash-for-work programme for a limited number of people if they agreed to leave the camp, they say.

“We have a big problem in Cite Soleil. It’s a problem with the NGOs. They are discriminating against the people of Cite Soleil,” Imakile committee member Gerard Delme told IPS at a protest in October.

“We don’t accept Luc, the manager of IOM, at all, who has destructive politics. They’re offering cash-for-work to camps in an effort to destroy those camps and demoralise the people,” he said.

Ondele told IPS he was misunderstood. He says he told the camp committee that when they chant “Down with IOM” or “Down with MINUSTAH” it makes his job more difficult and dangerous.

IOM workers arrived offering three-packs of hand-washing soap in early December. It seemed like an insult, camp residents told IPS, but Camp Imakile formed a line. Brazilian soldiers paced around the area.

Camp resident Dieula Rosemond was soon rushed to the Doctors Without Borders hospital.

It wasn’t cholera. Her eyes burned with intense pain. A U.N. peacekeeper pepper-sprayed her directly in the face during a distribution.

Her husband Joseph took photos of the distribution with his cell phone (see full series of photos at http://mediahacker.org). One shows a soldier standing next to a long line.

“They told us we had to stay in line and be quiet since the morning. If someone called to us, we couldn’t call back. If we sat down, they yelled at us to stand up,” said resident Allen Charles. She said a soldier suddenly called out to Dieula Rosemond and approached her.

Joseph Rosemond’s next photo is a close-up of blue-helmeted Brazilian soldier in fatigues. He’s holding up a white spray can across from Dieula’s face. She is standing in front of the camp’s water container with her arms crossed, looking down.

Joseph says that’s just before the moment his wife was sprayed in the face. In the next photo she is on the ground face-down with the camp residents crowded around her. She fainted, regaining consciousness in the hospital.

When IPS visited her in a hospital bed that day, she whispered weakly, “They sprayed me right in my eyes. I don’t know why. They really hurt.” A nurse said she was going flush her eyes out.

Rosemond maintains she did nothing but raise her voice against IOM. Camp residents said they didn’t throw rocks or act violently.

A U.N. spokesperson said she saw no incident report and had no further comment. IOM’s Ondele told IPS he would invite Joseph to a meeting with the U.N. peacekeepers to discuss what happened.

“There’s no war here. I didn’t threaten MINUSTAH,” Rosemond told IPS the following week. “Is it because I’m a woman or is it because I’m in Cite Soleil? I’m sending a message to the chief of MINUSTAH: am I going to take to the streets after I’ve become a victim or are you going to come talk with me?”

“IOM has said nothing to me. Because it’s their agent, Luc, who sent MINUSTAH here,” she continued. “I’m asking the international community, also Préval and the prime minister, the people responsible for MINUSTAH, I’m asking what are they going to come say to me.”

*Ansel Herz blogs at http://mediahacker.org. This is the second of a two-part series on the political and human rights struggles of Haitians one year after the country’s devastating earthquake.

Excerpt:

Dieula Rosemond is tired. A lone swaying palm tree yields a little shade over her plastic chair. Her hands are folded in the lap of her white dress. Little girls play with a ragged, pale-faced doll behind her.

Dieula Rosemond (right) leads a protest outside the prime minister's office on the nine-month anniversary of the earthquake. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

Another day in Camp Imakile Deplase.

“I want to see change in 2011 in Haiti. And I want to see change from those who say they are helping Haiti too. Because we, the people under tarps, have suffered a horrible year. I feel like…” She stops and takes a long breath, looking up. “I can’t live this any longer.”

Almost a year after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, Dieula is one of over a million people living in scattered makeshift camps ‘anba pwela’ – under tarps, or tents – in Haiti’s bustling capital city.

She and her husband Joseph lost their livelihoods with the collapse of their tiny house in Cite Soleil, which doubled as an electronics repair shop and store.

Until last July, they and at least 50 other families lived in Plas Imakile, a public square. They endured nighttime attacks for weeks by a gang trying to force them off the property.

Joseph went to a nearby joint U.N. peacekeeper and Haitian police base to ask for help. But the few jeep patrols that came by never stopped. The gang simply waited until they were gone to enter the camp and terrorise the people, slashing tarps with machetes.

At the U.N. base, Brazilian Lieutenant Edison Campista told IPS he was aware of the reality but could effectively do nothing about it except to increase the frequency of patrols. He admitted the gang could elude authorities if they communicated by cell phone.

The attacks continued. One man’s phone was stolen and he was struck in the head. The International Organisation for Migration, a U.N.-affiliated relief agency, told them to wait until a new piece of land could be found.

Finally, Dieula and the others left, moving a half-mile down the road to a clearing next to a foul-smelling canal. Goats bleat as they clamber over small mounds of trash.

The camp is called Imakile Deplase to remind visitors of how the people there were displaced against their will.

Deaths from a raging cholera epidemic have surged in recent days to nearly 3,500.

In early November, a young man in Dieula’s camp contracted the virulent disease and was rushed to a Doctors Without Borders hospital. By the time he came back, his wife and children were infected. His family was the first of several to fall ill.

Doctors Without Borders says it has treated about 63 percent of all cholera patients since the outbreak began in October. The head of the organisation recently slammed the U.N. and other aid groups for the rash of preventable deaths, calling their response “the latest failure of the humanitarian relief system”.

Autumn polls deepen popular anger

Dieula did not vote in the election weeks later. Since the summer, she has led protests outside the prime minister’s office and at her camp as families banged pots and pans, yelling, “We won’t vote until they give us houses!”

“The NGOs and the government are continuing to give minimal levels of aid. But that’s not what we need. We need houses, as it says in the Haitian Constitution,” said Sanon Renel, an activist with a newly-formed committee to stop forced expulsions.

“The prime minister is not here,” staff politely told Joseph, when he and other camp leaders delivered a letter outlining their needs to the office of Jean-Max Bellerive.

Joseph received assurances the prime minister would read it and furnish a response, but none ever came. An expo to showcase designs of houses to be built for earthquake victims was scheduled for October 2010. It was delayed to this month, and then again to March.

The November election launched the country into yet another crisis, with leading candidates calling for the vote to be annulled or disputing preliminary results. Thousands were unable to vote.

“I voted for [René] Préval in 2006. I thought he would change things. I thought his mind was with the mass pep [the masses]. I thought he would return Aristide,” Dieula said.

“It’s the blan who are holding him in place. He works for them!” she said, using the Kreyol word for foreigners.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former president, was whisked out of the country in February 2004 on a U.S. jet in what his supporters say was a modern-day coup d’etat. The United States says he asked to be taken into exile.

An OAS official speaks out – and gets fired

In an explosive interview last week, a Brazilian diplomat representing the Organisation of American States in Haiti said the “core group” of the international community met on Nov. 28, 2010, the day of the chaotic election.

They discussed removing Préval from the country by plane. “I heard that and I was horrified,” Ricardo Seitenfus told Folha, a Brazilian newspaper.

Prime Minister Bellerive arrived at the meeting, which included the OAS, U.N. and donor countries.

“He asked if President Préval’s mandate was being negotiated. And there was silence in the room,” Seitenfus said, adding that OAS Assistant Secretary-General Albert Ramdin did not say anything.

“But faced with his silence and that of the others, I asked to be able to speak and reminded them of the existence of the Inter-American Democratic Charter [of the OAS] and that I thought any discussion of President Préval’s mandate would be a coup.”

The U.S. Embassy told IPS it supported free, fair and transparent elections in Haiti and “we have no comment to make on Ambassador Seitenfus’s descriptions of what he heard at such a meeting.”

Haiti’s electoral council announced Tuesday that the second runoff round cannot take place until late February. According to the Constitution, Préval’s mandate should end on Feb. 7 to make way for his successor.

OAS observers arrived in-country after the holidays to recount ballots, a process endorsed by the Haitian government and international community. The OAS observer mission said there were only isolated “irregularities” on election day.

However, a new study of more than 11,000 voter tally sheets by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, found fraud and inconsistencies rising far beyond levels acknowledged by the OAS.

“If the Organisation of American States certifies this election, this would be a political decision, having nothing to do with election monitoring,” said the group’s co- director Mark Weisbrot in a statement.

An OAS spokesperson did not return calls or email messages seeking comment.

The Brazilian newspaper Estadão reported Monday that Seitenfus says he was dismissed by the OAS on Christmas Day, shortly after he first spoke out in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Le Temps.

“There was an immense repercussion and it surpassed everything I was thinking or imagining,” Seitenfus said. He condemned the international community’s engagement in Haiti, saying the country had suffered for its proximity to the United States.

“Haiti has to be at the centre of its history. These are generous reflections made from the heart,” he added, “but that depict the perception of many people who do not have a voice. I was a spokesman for those who do not have a voice.”

*Ansel Herz blogs at http://mediahacker.org. This is the first of a two-part series on the political and human rights struggles of Haitians one year after the country’s devastating earthquake.

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Dec 2 2010 (IPS)

Furious demonstrations continued across Haiti on Wednesday following the Nov. 28 highly contested election in which thousands found themselves unable to vote.

A ballot box floats in garbage-filled puddles next to the polling station at Building 2004 in the neighbourhood of Delmas. Credit: Wadner Pierre/IPS

Twelve of 19 presidential candidates called on Sunday for cancellation of the election results. They allege widespread fraud by the government in favour of the ruling party’s candidate, Jude Celestin.

Konpa singer Michel Martelly and another leading candidate have since backed away from the allegations.

“He saw all the fraud happening on election day,” motorcycle taxi driver Weed Charlot told IPS. “But now he sees he has some votes and power. So he’ll accept the election.”

Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) and the primary international observer mission said despite “irregularities”, there is not sufficient reason to invalidate the election.

“If it is requested, I am sure the international community stands ready to assist in the investigation of irregularities reported, said Assistant Secretary General of the Organisation of American States Albert R. Ramdin on Wednesday.

The U.S. Embassy supports the recommendations of the OAS, a spokesperson told IPS.

IPS witnessed several polling stations in the capital city that opened hours late on election day. Hundreds of Haitian citizens unable to find their names on electoral lists were turned away.

At Building 2004 in central Port-au-Prince, chaos reigned.

“We come to vote this morning and we can’t find ballots to vote. A group of Jude Celestin partisans came with their weapons and troubled the poll station. Nobody stopped them,” voter Celito Cesard told IPS.

In the afternoon, crowds chanted, “If they prevent us from voting we will set a fire.” Some ran into the building, grabbed ballot boxes and threw them into pools of water in the street.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported brazen ballot stuffing at another polling station.

Outside the capital city there were only 39 registered voters at Camp Corail, a planned settlement for at least 6,000 victims of January’s earthquake. Camp residents whose registrations had not been updated were so enraged they attacked the polling station with rocks, forcing its closure. U.N. police were overwhelmed and forced to evacuate the camp.

Sources in Hinche, a medium-size city in the Haiti’s central countryside, told IPS most people stayed home from the polls.

So did Joel St. Jerome Jacques, still living with his family under a tarp in Petionville. He sat glumly on a concrete step on the outskirts of a makeshift camp on Sunday across from a polling station. A raucous demonstration of outraged voters waving Martelly posters drew closer.

“The election is an element of development, it’s a civic right that we’re told we should exercise since we’re children. But for me this election didn’t really happen,” St. Jerome Jacques told IPS.

He lost his national identification card and tried, in vain, to get a new one from a nearby government office before election day.

“Many people couldn’t find their cards – they lost them and that’s a reason they’ve taken to the streets,” he said. “I’ve been here since Jan. 12! They said they would help us get out of here. But nothing’s happened, they don’t do anything serious.”

Votes are now being counted in tabulation centres and the final results are to be announced on Dec. 20. There will be a short period for candidates to officially contest the outcomes, before a runoff between the top two vote-getters on Jan. 16.

U.S. Senator Richard Lugar blamed Sunday’s disorder on outgoing President Rene Préval. Préval’s government had dismissed the senator’s recommendations in a mid-summer report for the appointment of a new CEP and inclusion of parties like Fanmi Lavalas, barred from the ballot, in the election.

“As a result, the elections have been fraught with numerous reports of irregularities and fraud,” Lugar said in a Wednesday hearing of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Six Haitian civil society groups also issued a statement condemning Préval and the CEP for organising a highly flawed election.

Préval is painted as a passive and aloof head of state in two secret State Department cables recently released by Wikileaks. He tolerates little dissent from his cabinet and doesn’t read the news, but is prone to micro-management, they say.

The cables constitute an exhaustive profile of Préval, analysing his major relationships and mentioning “special intelligence” on his medical habits. He takes two- to three- hour naps every afternoon and is rumoured to be drinking heavily.

His nationalism and independence are seen as added difficulties. The cables speak of “finding creative ways to work with him, influence him” and “manage” him.

“He remains skeptical about the international community’s commitment to his government’s goals, for instance telling me that he is suspicious of how the Collier report will be used,” says a June 2009 cable by the George W. Bush administration’s U.S. ambassador to Haiti.

British economist Paul Collier authored a U.N.-commissioned report on Haiti in January last year. It called for major private investments in the garment-making sector and in agricultural exports to create jobs. Since then, the document has been touted by the international community and Haitian government as a foundation for its long-term development strategy.

There are a further 1,212 cables from the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince still unreleased to the public as of this writing. An embassy spokesperson condemned the leak in a statement to IPS.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Nov 15 2010 (IPS)

“People are going to take the body to MINUSTAH to show them what they did,” Jean-Luc Surfin told IPS by phone as riots erupted against Haiti’s U.N. peacekeeping force on Monday in the northern city of Cap-Haitien.

A demonstrator holds up an anti-U.N. poster during an October protest outside a MINUSTAH base in Port-au-Prince. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

At least two protesters have been reported killed, one shot in the back, a local official told the media. U.N. troops say they acted in self-defence.

“I think the people are frustrated right now. That’s why they’re all over the street. They say they’re going to fight to the death,” Surfin told IPS.

He said demonstrators erected barricades in the street and pelted troops with stones and bottles. Two police stations were set on fire.

Protests were reported in the cities of Hinche and Gonaives in Haiti’s cholera-ravaged central region as well. Radio Levekanpe in Hinche reported that protesters tried to leave the coffin of a man who died of cholera in front of the city’s U.N. peacekeeping base.

Demonstrators blame foreign peacekeepers for introducing the infectious disease into the country. The U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention says the strain of cholera bacteria spreading in Haiti matches the one endemic in South Asia. An estimated 200,000 people could be sickened before the epidemic is brought under control, an effort that could take up to six months.

Authorities are struggling to contain an outbreak that has killed over 900 people, just two weeks before scheduled elections.

“It’s a tradition in Haiti to have violence before the elections,” MINUSTAH spokesman Vincenzo Pugliese told IPS. “People are confused, scared, and I think at this time people can be manipulated in one direction or another.”

“Basically MINUSTAH and cholera are in politics now, it’s being exploited,” he said, but declined to name any individual or group responsible.

“Someone is behind it. The population doesn’t have the means to communicate with each other and set up something this way. There’s someone behind this to motivate people to do this. Clearly, it’s part of a plan,” Pugliese said.

Anger at U.N. troops has simmered and boiled over into protests several times since the body of teenaged Gerard Jean Gilles was found hanging from a tree inside a Cap-Haitien peacekeeping base in late August.

Days later, a peacekeeping patrol responded to stone- throwing protesters with tear gas. One soldier was injured, according to an internal U.N. report.

Seventeen civil society organisations authored an open letter to the head of MINUSTAH requesting an independent inquiry and condemning what they called “your decision to obstruct Haitian justice in this case”.

MINUSTAH spokesperson Pugliese told IPS the peacekeeping force’s internal investigation found that Gilles committed suicide.

In the middle of a street in Champs de Mars, a plaza in the capital Port-au-Prince, the faint smell of burnt rubber wafted from the charred remains of two tires. Students at the Faculty of Ethnology said they burned the tires and threw rocks at MINUSTAH vehicles in a solidarity protest.

IPS reported in May that MINUSTAH troops responded with warning shots, rubber bullets, and over 30 canisters of tear gas that caused injuries in the tent camps in the plaza. But this time, according to students, the peacekeeping patrol “took off”. Pugliese could not confirm or deny.

Students said more protests against UN peacekeepers are being planned for the near future.

“We protested for the same reason that people in Cap [Haitien] and Hinche are protesting. They say MINUSTAH are the ones who gave us cholera. It’s the government that’s irresponsible,” Lucien Joseph told IPS.

“Until now so many people have died. There’s been no serious response… All of them, the whole country, is going to stand up and demand MINUSTAH leave,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
LEOGANE, Nov 7 2010 (IPS)

Standing on a raised piece of pavement across from the makeshift home where she has lived for the past 10 months, Violet Nicola threw up her hands.

A boy receives treatment for cholera at the hospital in L'Estere, Haiti, as his family watches over him. Credit: UN Photo/Sophia Paris

“Our houses are broken again. I’ve lost my things. They don’t do anything for us. We never see them,” she said, referring to aid groups. “Since the water has come in here, we’re mired in more problems.”

Below her feet, thigh-high muddy brown water extended in every direction along the downtown’s main street on Friday. The floodwaters seeped inside Nicola’s tarp-covered shelter, washing away her belongings.

Hurricane Tomas left Haiti’s capital city of Port-au-Prince relatively unscathed. Leogane, some 29 kilometres west and at the epicentre of January’s earthquake, was drenched in rain.

The humanitarian group Save the Children says at least 35,000 people in Leogane may have been affected by flooding. Sewage and trash carried by moving water “will make conditions even more conducive to deadly cholera bacteria,” the group said in a press release.

The death toll from a three-week-old cholera epidemic has risen to at least 501, according to the Haitian Ministry of Health.

The Haiti Epidemic Advisory System, an independent biosurveillance network, reported new suspected outbreaks of cholera in towns across Haiti’s central region on Saturday.

The peak of the cholera epidemic will come “earlier and faster” because of Hurricane Tomas, Christian Lindmeier, a World Health Organisation press officer, told IPS.

A report from the Ministry of Health says nearly half of the victims died in their communities, not in hospitals. “The challenge is getting to them in time for the mortality rate not to rise too much,” Lindmeier said.

Reached by IPS on Saturday evening, many humanitarian organisations said they spent the day conducting surveys of the destruction wrought by Tomas, not distributing relief to those displaced from their dwellings.

The USS Iwo Jima, a warship turned floating hospital touted as a centrepiece of the U.S. response to the storm, is anchored near Haiti.

The ship’s only response so far, at the request of the Haitian government, has been to conduct aerial damage assessments, according to its public information officer. “I don’t have any of the feedback yet,” officer Jacqui Barker said. “There is no intel right now.”

In Grand Goave to Port-au-Prince’s west, 189 shelters in seven different camps were damaged. Pinchinat camp in Jacmel, to the south, was torn apart by torrential rains, according to an internal summary of damage assessments by the shelter-oriented cluster of aid groups.

“There is currently no humanitarian response planned for this camp,” the document says.

“Tents were down all over the place. It was pouring down rain and everyone was drenched. Shelters had been set up, but there was no one providing transportation to these shelters,” local resident Gwenn Mangine wrote in a post on Facebook.

Aid workers told IPS that in Cite Soleil, an oceanside slum on Port-au-Prince’s northern edge, trash-filled canals overflowed into at least one camp. No one has received aid yet, they said.

Across Haiti, “Almost no shelter materials have been distributed. IOM is still conducting assessments,” Leonard Doyle, press officer for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), told IPS.

The day before Tomas passed Haiti, aid workers planned for some earthquake victims in low-lying areas like Cite Soleil to be evacuated from their camps.

Mackendy Laguerre, a member of IOM’s Cite Soleil camp management team, said two Cite Soleil camp communities would be moved into a church, if they consented.

As ominous dark clouds swirled overhead, Laguerre pointed to the church across the street. The ramshackle structure appeared to be constructed of tacked-together metal sheets. It was marked with red paint by an engineering team after the earthquake, marking it as structurally unsound and prone to collapse.

The residents of the two nearby camps, Cozbami and Immaculee, refused to evacuate. Rosemond Joseph said people in his camp were afraid their belongings would be stolen if they left.

One woman told IPS, “We’re going to die.” Fortunately, Cite Soleil was not as hard hit as feared.

After a one-day storm blasted through Port-au-Prince on Sep. 24, aid workers did not commence distributions of tents and tarps to over 10,000 families whose shelters were destroyed until an additional day had passed. Those families spent two nights in a row under the stars or huddled with friends and family.

The shelter cluster of humanitarian groups – charged with keeping solid cover over the heads of 1.3 million people still living in makeshift camps – circulated a document entitled “Lessons learnt”.

It called for a “system in place to ensure there are sufficient replacement and contingency stocks of shelter materials available in country.” At that point, miraculously, Haiti had been spared another crisis despite a highly active hurricane season.

Over one month later, as Hurricane Tomas approached, the United Nations made a desperate appeal for shelter materials, citing a shortage of 150,000 tarpaulins. “We need emergency shelter. We need water and sanitation supplies. And we need as much of it as possible in place before Hurricane Tomas hits,” said Nigel Fisher, the top U.N. official in Haiti.

“We were depleted by the storm on the 24th and it takes a while to build the stocks,” U.N. spokesperson Imogen Wall told IPS.

She pointed to the need to constantly re-supply camps with new shelter material, adding, “If you have tarpaulins, it doesn’t make sense to leave tarps in warehouses.”

Wall said hurricane shelter capacity is “very limited”. She referred to some hurricane shelters in Leogane, but shelter cluster documents say they were empty during and after Tomas.

“It doesn’t make sense in a country this poor to put up single-purpose structures,” she said.

A Nov. 5 shelter cluster document outlining its response to Tomas says 100,000 families were potentially affected by the storm, with current stocks estimated to cover just 64 percent of them. It notes that 20,000 additional tarps are stuck in Haitian customs.

Officials say neither the cholera outbreak nor flooding from Tomas will have any impact on planning for the upcoming Nov. 28 election.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 28 2010 (IPS)

The man arrived from Arcahaie, near St. Marc in central Haiti where a cholera outbreak exploded last week, initially overwhelming the local medical grid. It was an hour’s journey to a hospital in Lafiteau, near the capital, where he died on Sunday.

In the small village of Jurve, Haiti, children wash in the Artibonite River, the contaminated source of a recent outbreak of cholera. Credit: UN Photo/Sophia Paris

“We tried to give him some liquids but it was too late,” Dr. Pierre Duval told IPS. He said it was the second cholera death in three days. Five other patients who arrived from the epidemic zone showed the same symptoms: profuse liquid diarrhea and vomiting.

They looked gaunt and sickly on beds inside the tiny hospital’s dimly lit patient ward, taking up one of its three rooms. Family members said they had bathed and eaten, then fallen gravely ill.

The two patients who died in Lafiteau are not counted among the 303 officially-recognised cholera deaths in Haiti. A United Nations spokesperson said they were not “confirmed” cases of cholera because they occurred outside the epidemic zone and lab tests had not confirmed the presence of cholera bacteria.

Dr. Duval said no officials or medical teams had visited his hospital since the outbreak began.

“The mission is preparing for a nationwide cholera outbreak,” the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs spokesperson Jessica DuPlessis told IPS, before adding, “I’m sure there are gaps in the response at this point in time.”

Haitian and U.N. officials are citing a dwindling number of new fatalities each day as an indication that the cholera outbreak is “leveling off” and “stabilised” in central Haiti, while saying the peak of the epidemic is still to come.

“Affected zones are increasing. More capacities for implementation and coordination are needed” in central Haiti, according to a situation report by the St. Marc sanitation cluster of humanitarian groups. A video report by Al Jazeera English showed human waste from toilets at a Nepalese U.N. peacekeeping base running off into the river in Mirebalais, where there are over 50 confirmed cholera cases.

On Wednesday, a medical clinic operated by the charity group Samaritan’s Purse in Cite Soleil reported treating a patient for “rice water diarrhea” and vomiting. The clinic’s physician believes it to be cholera, according to an alert on the Haiti Epidemic Advisory System, an independent biosurveillance network.

The patient did not come from Haiti’s central region, where the epidemic broke out, unlike the five cholera cases in the capital already confirmed by authorities. Cite Soleil is an impoverished slum on Port-au-Prince’s northern tip, a 30- minute drive from Lafiteau. There are 20 cases in the capital under investigation, a Tuesday U.N. logistics cluster report says.

Humanitarian groups say they are promoting hygiene and educating the capital’s populace about cholera, which can spread easily through contaminated water and food. Some groups distributed soap in tent camps where 1.3 million people still live exposed to the elements nine months after the January earthquake.

“Some of them do nothing because of lack of funding,” according to an internal overview of humanitarian activities by the water and sanitation cluster.

Charpon Davidson, 22, received soap from Catholic Relief Services (CRS) at Camp Carradeux, where at least 20,000 people live in tents and makeshift tarps. “They can’t just give us soap as a solution. There are a lot of people already carrying the disease,” he said.

“If we can’t drink treated water, then we’ll never have a solution to this sickness,” Davidson told IPS. “Because where the problem started, in Artibonite, it’s water – water that people take, they drink, they eat – where the disease started.” Another woman asked the reporter if cholera was a natural disease or a poison from outside the country.

Camp Carradeux was battered weeks ago by a fierce storm that destroyed an estimated 10,000 tents. A walk-through of the lower camp showed that most families who lost tents, but not all, had received new ones. A few were given tiny backpacking tents that stand barely three feet off the ground.

A chain-link fence was recently erected around an area in the camp where CRS plans to build 650 one-room structures called transitional shelters.

Down the road from Carradeux, a gate with a white Catholic Relief Services sticker faces the street. Inside is a sloped area crammed with about 300 families living under fraying tents and tarps, with a driveway in the middle running up to a second CRS-stickered barrier.

The camp is on the property of Catholic Relief Services just outside its materials depot. Humanitarian goods pass by the camp every day, but its residents have no water supply because their plastic water tanks are empty – just like a camp in Cite Soleil that IPS described in a previous report.

“We’re inside the depot of CRS. Now, we’re told to wash our hands before eating. The epidemic is present. CRS said they’d help us. They said that,” said Jacques Pierre, the camp’s committee leader.

In August, the camp’s three pit toilets were full of human waste. At the time, Jacques told IPS his request for a functioning set of toilets was met with threats from CRS personnel to force them off the property. But after another aid group put pressure on CRS, construction began. They now have four working toilets.

“They started to do some small things, but actually what’s necessary for us is water,” Pierre said. “That’s what is most important for us and for kids with diarrhea. The epidemic is becoming grave now, it may be just starting. So we need potable water to drink as well as food – these are most important for us.”

Asked if any organisation had come to educate them about cholera, Pierre replied, “No, we haven’t seen any group come here and say anything to us. We’ve been ignored here in this space.”

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported in July that Catholic Relief Services had spent $30 million out of $140 million raised for earthquake relief in Haiti. Some $21 million came from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), designated specifically for shelter, water and sanitation services in Port-au-Prince’s displacement camps.

A senior member of another relief group, who requested anonymity, told IPS that CRS does not intend to install water purification systems in the camps until next year.

“That seems like a long time for someone living in the camps,” the aid worker said. “The situation on the ground has been a ticking bomb waiting to go off.”

The water and sanitation coordinator for CRS confirmed it has no plans to install water purification systems in camps at this time, but is delivering extra-chlorinated water to some camps by truck. A joint report in September by the City University of New York’s Haiti Initiative and Haiti’s Faculty of Ethnology found that 40 percent of camps don’t have access to water and 30 percent have no toilets.

But it’s not just Port-au-Prince’s makeshift camps that urgently need water. The percentage of the population without access to safe drinking water increased by seven percent from 1990 to 2005, according to a 2008 report by Partners In Health, a medical organisation currently responding to the cholera outbreak in Haiti’s central region.

“Combined with unsanitary conditions, the lack of water is a major factor in exacerbating Haiti’s health crises,” the report notes.

The Interim Reconstruction Commission of Haiti has approved only one water and sanitation project, designed to expand the public water supply in Port-au-Prince. It would cost $200 million over five years, but is only 57 percent funded by international donors at this time.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 24 2010 (IPS)

Days after an outbreak of cholera began in Haiti’s rural Artibonite region, killing at least 200 people, there are now five confirmed cases of cholera in the busy capital city.

The cases “do not represent spread of the epidemic” because they were infected in central Haiti, according to a bulletin circulated by Haiti’s U.N. peacekeeping mission with the heading “Key Messaging”, obtained by IPS.

“The fact that these cases were picked up and responded to so fast demonstrates that the reporting systems for epidemic management we have put in place are functioning,” it concludes.

Residents of the capital city are not so confident.

“It’s killing people – of course, I’m scared. We’re in the mouth of death,” 25-year-old Boudou Lunis, one of 1.3 million people made homeless by the January earthquake and still living in temporary settlements, told the Miami Herald.

Radio Boukman lies at the heart of Cite Soleil, an impoverished slum crisscrossed by foul trash-filled canals where cholera could be devastating.

The station has received no public health messages for broadcast from authorities, producer Edwine Adrien told IPS on Saturday, four days after reports of cholera-related deaths first emerged.

At a small, desolate camp of ripped tents nearby, a gleaming water tank is propped up on bricks.

Camp-dwellers said it was installed by the International Organisation for Migration last week, more than nine months after the January earthquake damaged their homes.

But it’s empty because no organisation has filled it with water.

“We need treated water to drink,” a young man named Charlot told IPS matter-of-factly.

Cholera, transmissible by contaminated water and food, could be reaching far beyond the capital city.

There are suspected cases of the disease in Haiti’s North and South departments, according to the Pan-American Health Organisation. Altogether, at least 2,600 people have contracted the illness.

In Lafiteau, a 30-minute drive from Port-au-Prince, Dr. Pierre Duval said he had stabilised two cholera-infected men in the town’s single hospital, but could not handle more than six more patients. One died Saturday.

All of them came from St. Marc, near the epicentre of the epidemic.

The main hospital in St. Marc is crowded with the infected.

Supplies of oral rehydration salts were spotty when he arrived Friday after rushing from Port-au-Prince, U.S. medic Riaan Roberts told IPS.

“We first talked to some lady from the U.N. who told us, ‘Oh I have to go to a meeting, I’ll mention your names, but just come back tomorrow,'” he said. “These microcosms of operational logistics are just beyond them.”

Roberts said a Doctors Without Borders team quickly put his skills to use, adding, “[The U.N.] is so top-heavy with bureaucracy that they can’t effectively react to these small outbreaks which quickly snowball and spread across an area.”

On the dusty highway connecting Haiti’s stricken central region to Port-au-Prince, buses and tap-taps filled with people sped in both directions.

There were no signs of checkpoints or travel restrictions near the city.

At a Friday meeting convened by the Haitian government’s Ministry of Water and Sanitation, “There were conversations around shutting down schools and transportation routes,” said Nick Preneta, deputy director of SOIL, a group that installs composting toilets in displacement camps.

“But if that’s the conversation now, however many hours after the first confirmed case, it’s already too late,” he continued.

“One of the recommendations was to concentrate public health education at traffic centres… there were a lot of no- brainers at the meeting,” Preneta said.

Cholera bacteria can cause fatal diarrhea and vomiting after incubating for up to five days, allowing people who appear healthy to travel and infect others.

The medical organisation Partners in Health calls it “a disease of poverty” caused by lack of access to clean water.

The Artibonite River, running through an area of central Haiti known as “the breadbasket” for its rice farmers, is considered the likely source of the epidemic after recent heavy rains and flooding.

Analysts say the regional agrarian economy has been devastated by years of cheap U.S. imports of rice to Haiti.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 22 2010 (IPS)

Some 1.3 million people have lived in makeshift camps throughout Port-au-Prince since the January earthquake devastated the city. Living conditions are “appalling”, according a recent report by Refugees International.

Spread through the ingestion of contaminated water, cholera is widely known as a disease of poverty. Credit: UN Photo

Until now.

At least 160 people have died this week from an outbreak of cholera in the central Artibonite region, according to Zanmi Lasante, the Haitian arm of renowned health organisation Partners in Health.

The fear now is that the disease will reach Port-au-Prince and wreak havoc in the crowded camps by contaminating the water.

There are already six suspected cases of the illness in the capital city, Monica Ferreira, a Portuguese medic, told IPS on Friday. Her team has operated a health clinic for quake victims since January.

“All defensive countermeasures should immediately focus on Cite Soleil and Lafiteau if they want to save Port-au- Prince,” said Dr. James Wilson of the Haiti Epidemic Advisory System (HEAS).

A HEAS partner reported that a market woman and child died from cholera in the small town of Lafiteau, just 25 kilometres from the capital.

Melinda Miles, director of the Haitian organisation KONPAY, told IPS she witnessed a man die of cholera Friday afternoon at the Hospital Centre of the Haitian Academy in Lafiteau. Doctors at the hospital could not be reached for comment before publication.

“We went into the room and he died right in front of us,” she said. “He came from St. Marc. The doctor said there are a lot more patients on their way with cholera.”

“If a case from St. Marc has had time to arrive in Lafiteau, then it’s had time to arrive in Port-au-Prince. So I’m really scared,” she added.

The Haitian government says the disease is cholera, a waterborne bacterium that can incubate in bodies for days and suddenly cause death by dehydration. Officials from the Pan American Health Organisation, the regional arm of the Geneva-based World Health Organisation, said Friday that laboratory tests had confirmed the outbreak.

Authorities have rushed medical resources to St. Marc, about 70 kilometres north of Port-au-Prince, where a single hospital is overcrowded with patients. Villagers who traveled from far away are lying on the floors, hooked up to IV drips, while lines amass outside the gate.

Attempting to cope with the overwhelming patient load, a Doctors Without Borders team has moved from the hospital to construct their own treatment centre, spokesperson Petra Becker told IPS.

Other medical teams are gathering information from rural villages to isolate areas where the illness is concentrated and discourage people from moving, she said.

In a blog post on Partners in Health’s website, Chief Medical Officer Joia Mukherjee called cholera “a disease of poverty”. She wrote that loans from the Inter-American Development Bank meant for the development of a public water supply in the Artibonite region were blocked on political grounds during the tenure of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

“The international community’s failure to assist the government of Haiti in developing a safe water supply has been violation of this basic right,” Muhkerjee continued.

If the disease reaches Port-au-Prince, the number of victims is likely to skyrocket.

The New York Times reported Friday that cholera cases are surfacing on the island of La Gonave, as well as the areas of Arcahaie and Croix-des Bouquets closer to the capital.

The United Nations and Haitian government are holding emergency meetings in Port-au-Prince to counter the cholera outbreak. Daily truckloads of water delivered by relief group Pure Water for the World to the seaside slum of Cite Soleil have received double the usual chlorination, said Noelle Thabault, the group’s deputy director.

Nesly Louissaint, who lives in Camp Carradeux, an officially recognised camp for thousands of quake victims, received a short text message on his cell phone alerting him to the outbreak of the disease. But no authorities have visited the camp with further information, he said.

It’s not clear what prevention measures have been taken in the capital city. Traffic, schools, businesses and markets were open Friday and the streets appeared to be bustling as usual.

“I have not seen any general information distributed in the streets or camps at this time. I don’t see relief groups out here,” Mark Snyder, a development worker with International Action Ties, told IPS.

“I do see U.N. peacekeeping trucks full of troops, but they are not being utilised to spread information,” he continued. “They’re doing security patrols, which seems like a waste of resources.”

Earlier this week, at least 12 people died when heavy rains flooded some of Port-au-Prince’s displacement camps. Dr. Wilson warns that October is the peak of Haiti’s rainy season, making any further outbreak of the disease more difficult to contain.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jun 9 2010 (IPS)

Thousands of victims of the January earthquake in Haiti are at risk of being displaced for a second time as private landowners throughout the nation’s capital city grow impatient with makeshift tent camps on their properties.

Residents gather together after the owner of the Palais de L'Art centre locked the gate, forcing them to climb over the partially collapsed wall. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

The centre’s owner locked a metal gate shut Monday, forcing at least 150 camp-dwellers to climb over a partially- collapsed five-foot-high wall to access their shelters and belongings.

“If we had another place to go, we wouldn’t stay here suffering like this,” said Reynold Louis-Jean, who heads the camp organising committee. “We have elders, handicapped people, people who lost limbs. Now we have to carry them for them to get in and out.”

“He’s trying to force us out now. We can’t accept this,” he said as families carried buckets of water over the wall. The Red Cross stopped delivering water to the camp.

Joseph Saint-Fort, the owner of the club, is vowing to repair the collapsed wall, cutting off access to the camp entirely. A stack of concrete blocks sits in his yard at the ready.

In letters and meetings for over two months, the Haitian government and officials from non-governmental organisations told Saint-Fort to wait until land can be found to relocate the camp.

His patience has run out. He warned for weeks that if nobody paid him for the use of the land or moved out, he would shut the gate.

“No one has proposed anything to me. They’re going to have to force me to just let those people stay in the compound like this,” Saint-Fort said. “I have contracts with a lot of people from before the earthquake. It’s not that I’m greedy for money, it’s just this is the place I was using to make a living!”

The Haitian government and U.N. agreed in April to a temporary moratorium on forced evictions of camps. They say no landowner should push people from land unless there is an alternative space that meets minimum humanitarian standards.

“We made the decision together. But applying it was another story,” Interior Minister Paul Antoine Ben-Aimie told IPS in an interview. “We haven’t communicated anything to the population so far.”

It is not clear if a moratorium is still in effect. It doesn’t seem to matter because nothing is enforced.

“We’re very much in a gray zone in terms of what’s actually being enforced and what isn’t,” said Ben Majekodunmi, deputy chief for the human rights section of Haiti’s U.N. peacekeeping force, known as MINUSTAH.

He said peacekeepers cannot enforce a moratorium on evictions and that local Haitian authorities appear unaware of the measure.

“This is a massive problem that cannot be addressed on a case-by-case basis. We have to have a policy,” Majekodunmi told IPS.

An April letter from the Haitian government to Saint-Fort, the owner of Palais de L’Art, said land would be made available in northern Port-au-Prince to move the camp. He says the Ministry of Interior has not contacted him since then.

On the campus of a private Methodist school in Petionville, 200 families are camped around the basketball court. Women who work as street vendors say the gated entrance to the camp is often closed when they need to leave early in the morning.

The relief organisation World Vision distributed tents but “faced problems” installing latrines and supplying water to the camp, according to one aid worker.

“World Vision is creating disorder by providing them with help,” Pastor Thelesier Elysee told IPS over the phone.

“We have too many people occupying the space, they’re creating insecurity. We need them to be moved out,” he said before abruptly hanging up. Other pastors who run the school refused to comment.

Haiti’s capital is often called “teeming” and “overcrowded.” But Tabarre, the north section of the city, is dotted with grassy plots of vacant land. There is an airy feel to the flat landscape, with stretches of open space alongside busy roads. Further north, there are acres of open terrain.

In bustling downtown Port-au-Prince, the government and U.N. are forging ahead with plans to relocate thousands from camps around the crumbling national palace to Fort National, one of the hardest-hit urban zones of the city.

The Canadian Red Cross was “about to begin building transitional shelters on a less than watertight legal basis and had to stop the project at the last minute” in Fort National, according to an internal document.

Transitional shelters are tiny homes that offer more stability and protection from extreme weather than tarps and tents.

Experts are predicting a highly active hurricane season, which officially began last week.

At Palais de L’Art, the displaced families already have to contend with heavy afternoon rains on top of the pressure to leave from the landowner. Months-old tarps and tents are leaking and standing water seeps in from below.

Michel Odinor, standing shirtless in a typical afternoon downpour, told IPS, “It’s miserable. We need them to give us another place, but there’s nowhere else we can go.”

*Ansel Herz blogs at http://mediahacker.org.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, May 25 2010 (IPS)

United Nations peacekeeping troops responded to a rock-throwing demonstration by university students Monday evening with a barrage of tear gas and rubber bullets in the area around Haiti’s National Palace, sending masses of displaced Haitians running out of tent camps into the streets, according to witnesses.

“That child was gravely injured in the face! It was miserable, they were throwing gas everywhere,” said Junior Joel, a young man hanging with friends at night outside the palace – still partially collapsed from the January earthquake.

Three volunteer doctors from the NGO Partners in Health who were working in the emergency room of the General Hospital said they treated at least six individuals with wounds from rubber bullets.

“They were bleeding,” Sarah McMillan, a doctor from New Hampshire, told IPS. “There was a little girl with a big laceration on her face. It needed about 10 stitches. She’ll probably have a scar.”

The girl was discharged from the hospital and could not be found in the tent camp as of publication time.

Thousands of families are crowded into the public squares in the Champs du Mars zone around the palace, after the earthquake killed at least 200,000 people and drove nearly two million from destroyed neighbourhoods.

A coalition of political organisations called Tet Kole, Haitian Creole for “Heads Together”, has staged protests in the area for the past month, demanding the resignation of President René Préval over his handling of the post-earthquake crisis.

The walls of the Faculty of Ethnology school are dotted with graffiti denouncing Préval and the United Nations. Students said they gave Brazilian peacekeeping troops stationed in jeeps outside the campus the middle finger sign late Monday afternoon.

When the troops tried to enter the campus, angrily calling students thieves and vagabonds, the students showered them with rocks. As the soldiers fled, they fired three bullet rounds in the air and one of them struck the front-facing wall of the school, students said.

When the troops returned in bigger vehicles, Frantz Mathieu Junior said he ran to hide in a bathroom, but the soldiers kicked the thin wooden door open. Junior said he was forced to the ground and kicked repeatedly, then taken away. He says he was force-fed while in detention.

The students showed IPS on Tuesday the cracks in the wooden door and the bullet hole next to a second-storey window. After Junior was taken on Monday, they took to the streets in an angry protest, throwing more rocks.

Edmond Mulet, the head of the peacekeeping mission – known by the acronym MINUSTAH – issued a statement blaming an unnamed student for “the provocation” of throwing stones at a patrol, but apologising for the troops’ intrusion on university grounds to seize him.

U.N. troops never fired any bullets or tear gas on Monday, said MINUSTAH spokesperson David Wimhurst. He said only pepper spray and rubber bullets were used to quell an out-of-control protest.

CNN crews heard gunshots, smelled tear gas and saw gas canisters littering the area surrounding the palace. According to witnesses from the surrounding tent camps, U.N. troops blanketed the area with tear gas and fired rubber bullets at 6 p.m. on Monday.

“Everyone ran because nobody wants to be around when there’s so much gas,” Joseph Marie-ange, a 24-year-old mother of four, told IPS. “They’re abusive. They shot the gas in here and the children and elders were falling, everyone was feeling the effects.”

Hours after the protests and swirling gas dissipated, Levita Mondesir trudged with her three-month-old baby towards the General Hospital’s exit.

“We live in Place Petion, across from the Ethnology school,” she told IPS. “The students came, then MINUSTAH released the gas. When I got back to the camp, everyone was running, so I ran too.”

“I tried to cover my child and told the other children to lay down under the bed,” she continued. “There was smoke and the kids and people were falling. My baby wasn’t responding, I was worried he died. I was crying and others helped me take him to the hospital.”

She caught a motorcycle taxi to the hospital and received a reserve ticket for her baby to be x-rayed the next day. Tines Clerge, her husband, said he can’t continue living there now. “I can’t stay at Chanmas anymore,” he told IPS.

The opposition protests continued Tuesday afternoon in Chanmas. Scores of U.N. troops and Haitian police ringed the national palace with barricades. The demonstrators accuse President Préval of seeking to grab power by extending his mandate past the original end date. Parliament approved the extension.

Some are also upset with the Haiti Interim Recovery Commission, which directs the spending of nearly 10 billion dollars in aid money. A majority of the commission members are foreigners, though Préval has a final veto on all decisions.

“If they want to suppress the protest, why didn’t they shoot the gas at the school where the students are?” asked Malia Villa, an organiser with the Haitian women’s group KOFAVIV, who fled the Chanmas area Monday night. “How can they shoot it in the middle of the camp, where we have children and families? They say they’re here for security in the country, but how can the government work with them now when they do this?”

“We can’t continue to tolerate this anymore. It’s revolting to us,” she told IPS, throwing up her hands.

U.N. troops have been dogged by persistent accusations of abuse since their mission was established in 2004 after the ouster of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Incidents occurred in 2008 and 2009 in which Haitian witnesses said troops recklessly fired their weapons, killing or injuring civilians, while MINUSTAH internal investigations cleared their troops of wrongdoing.

Further political demonstrations are scheduled for Thursday, according to opposition groups.

*Ansel Herz blogs at http://www.mediahacker.org.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Apr 8 2010 (IPS)

For decades, the Saint Louis de Gonzague school has groomed some of Haiti’s most elite political players. Francois Duvalier, the iron-fisted dictator who ruled Haiti for 14 years, sent his son to the school. About 1,500 children of Haiti’s wealthiest class attend each year.

Within days of the January earthquake, the sparse concrete grounds of the Gonazague secondary school became home to nearly 11,000 Haitians, driven out of destroyed neighbourhoods in central Port-Au-Prince.

Now the school’s director wants to reopen the school. The government encouraged schools to resume classes on Monday, calling it another small step towards normalcy.

The potential reopening of the school has inspired anything but calm among internally displaced people at Saint Louis de Gonzague. They have been threatened with expulsion by force.

“Everyone is nervous right now. If they force us to leave it will be second catastrophe,” said Elivre Constant, smoking a cigarette in the middle of the crowded camp. “A lot of people here don’t have anywhere to go. They have kids. They won’t be safe.”

Constant, a member of the camp’s organising committee, said she heard police would come within days to move people out. “The headmaster threatened us with tear gas,” she said.

The Huffington Post reports that Father Patrick Belanger, the director of the school, has destroyed latrines built by the camp’s committee and prevented aid agencies from distributing food inside the camp for the past month.

But life has settled in here.

At night, vendors sell candies, drinks and meats in a market near the camp’s entrance. A few men wait beside a big white tent to have their hair cut by a barber inside. Motorcycle taxis ferry people in and out of the camp’s inner areas.

Dcotors Without Borders operates a huge field hospital and warehouse situated near the rear of the camp. Orderly lines queue outside the gate each morning for medical care.

“We agree that a country without education is unacceptable, but if they push us out they need to move us to a place where the conditions exist to live, a normal place,” Bernard Saint-Fleur told IPS. His family came to Gonzague the day after the quake destroyed their nearby home.

Father Belanger and Mayor Wilson Jeudy of Port-au-Prince’s Delmas district have reportedly offered new land for the camp’s residents. But camp-dwellers say the area only has enough space for 500 people.

A volunteer-run school for children inside the camp has formed. A statement circulated by International Action Ties, a small U.S.-based NGO operating in the Delmas area, asked, “Why shut down one school serving many for free, to reopen one that is private, and only services far fewer students?”

In March, IPS reported on the forcible removal of a smaller camp by a Catholic priest from the garden of Villa Manrese. The garden, once crowded with makeshift shelters, is now empty but for three grey UNICEF tents. A free school serving dozens of students has been erected.

Former occupants of the camp moved their makeshift shelters into the surrounding hillside amidst the rubble. They said that food distributions were being well-coordinated by the priest and local organisers. But they fear the heavy rains ahead.

Haiti’s constitution recognises rights for every citizen to “decent housing, education, food and social security”.

And the United Nations guiding principles on the rights of internally displaced people include “the right to be protected against forcible return to or resettlement in any place where their life, safety, liberty and/or health would be at risk.”

But there are further unconfirmed reports emerging each week from the disaster zone of IDP camps being torn down by private landholders.

A U.N. donors’ conference last week pledged some 10 billion dollar in aid to Haiti, but many NGOs and activists are now questioning both the reconstruction plan and the likelihood that nations will follow through on their financial commitments.

*Ansel Herz blogs at http://mediahacker.org.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 30 2010 (IPS)

On an empty road in Cite Militaire, an industrial zone across from the slums of Cite Soleil, a group of women are gathered around a single white sack of U.S. rice. The rice was handed out Monday morning at a food distribution by the Christian relief group World Vision.

Brazilian U.N. peacekeepers patrol Cité Soleil in February. Credit: UN Photo/Pasqual Gorriz

“Haitians know that’s the way they act with us. They treat us like animals,” said Lourette Elris, as she divided the rice amongst the women. “They gave us the food, we were on our way home, then the troops threw tear gas at us. We finished receiving the food, we weren’t disorderly. ”

Some 9,000 U.N. peacekeepers, known by the acronym MINUSTAH, have occupied Haiti since 2004, including 7,000 soldiers of which the majority are Brazilian. The mission has been dogged by accusations of human rights violations.

“It’s time to begin thinking about changing the nature of MINUSTAH’s mission,” Brazilian Defence Minister Nelson Jobim told the Brazilian newspaper O Estado after the January earthquake struck Haiti.

“MINUSTAH’s mandate is to maintain the peace, that is, security, but the U.N. needs to realise that its mission is no longer solely to strengthen security but also to build the infrastructure,” he said.

So far, there’s no evidence of a shift in policy.

“Red zones are no-go zones, you’re not supposed to be there whatsoever,” said Regine Zamor, a Haitian-American who arrived days after the earthquake to find her family. She’s been coordinating among NGOs to distribute aid in Carrefour Feille, one of the hardest- hit areas of the city.

“We only found out for folks in our community that it was a red zone because we weren’t getting any help,” she said. “That green, yellow, and red zoning actually comes from maps when there’s war, but there’s no war here in Haiti.”

Even the famous Oloffson Hotel in downtown Port-Au-Prince is part of the red zone, according to Zamor and the hotel’s outspoken owner, Richard Morse.

U.N. spokesperson George Ola-Davies provided IPS with a copy of a security zoning map, showing red zones only over the slum areas of Cite Soleil and Bel Air.

“Security measures start with oneself, so everyone’s been advised to be cautious,” he said. “Kidnapping is not a new phenomenon in Haiti. It was at a peak at one time, then it went down. Now it’s starting again.”

Two Doctors Without Borders staff were kidnapped this month in Petionville, an upscale district zoned as green on the security map – then released for a ransom.

Meanwhile at the U.N. headquarters near the airport, Haitians looking to coordinate relief efforts with aid agencies are routinely turned away at the gate, if they don’t possess U.N. passes.

The mayor of Cite Soleil and a camp committee member from Leogane were nearly blocked from entering the base, according to Emilie Parry, co-author of a Refugees International report blasting the U.N. for not involving Haitian community-based organisations in the relief effort.

“We were concerned they would be kicked out,” Parry said. “So we walked with them to try and identify agencies and people working in their communities – there weren’t many. Like most others, they were turned away and went home empty-handed.”

U.N. spokesperson Ola-Davies said any Haitian who has an appointment can enter the base. Dozens of shining white Toyota and Nissan sport utility vehicles shuttling aid workers around the city enter and exit the base each day.

“The U.N. is a big, huge, heavy bureaucracy. And bureaucracies do not work well in places that need flexibility and adaptation. Haiti is one of those places,” said Jean Luc “Djaloki” Dessables, co- coordinator of the Haiti Response Coalition, a group that includes small Haitian organisations.

The Haiti donors’ conference begins Wednesday at U.N. headquarters in New York City. The Haitian government estimates 11.5 billion dollars are required to recover from the quake.

The U.N. peacekeeping mission spends 700 million dollars annually. A new Brazilian force commander was appointed this month, while the number of U.S. soldiers on the island dwindles further.

In Potay, a neighbourhood near downtown Port-Au-Prince, a dozen U.S. soldiers toting automatic weapons walked past men drinking beer on a stoop.

Wearing jeans and a black vest, Brital, one of Haiti’s most well- known rappers with the Barikad Crew, watched them go past his collapsed home.

“I don’t think we need soldiers with guns. We need engineers the most,” he said. “I’d prefer to see soldiers who could educate instead of those with guns. Soldiers that can come and build roads, bridges, universities and hospitals.”

U.S. Senator Chris Dodd proposed Monday placing Haiti under a trusteeship system and broadening the U.N. mission in the country. He wrote in the Miami Herald that Haiti should not be occupied by foreign powers, but that the country is incapable of leading its own reconstruction.

*Ansel Herz blogs at http://mediahacker.org.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 9 2010 (IPS)

Perched near the top of a steep hill, the fractured pink walls of Villa Manrese overlook the rest of the capital city. Both ends of the three-story compound have collapsed, spilling into mounds of rubble. The first floor was pulverised into a layer of dust. There are still bodies inside.

The field behind Villa Manrese where displaced area residents had been camped now stands virtually empty. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

Some 250 families, comprising 1,500 people from the surrounding area of Haut-Turgeau, crowded together in the small field. Father Paul André Garraud, a Haitian priest based in the villa, helped procure tents, food, and medicine from relief agencies.

“We were doing well because they organised us. We weren’t hungry,” said Lubin Pierre-Louis, 52, leaning on a cane in the middle of the empty field. Three boys play soccer with a dirty plastic bottle on the wet ground behind him.

The camp vanished overnight on Mar. 2.

“It’s wrong. They told us to leave in the middle of the night,” Pierre-Louis said. “Just staying here now is a resistance. If they ask me to leave, I’ll be forced out.”

Residents who formed the informal committee running the tent camp swept through at 11 p.m., according to witnesses, telling everyone they had to leave immediately.

Families were told that bulldozers would come onto the field early in the morning to demolish Villa Manrese. No demolition crew arrived and the villa is still standing.

“They told us the bulldozer was coming to intimidate us,” said Johnny Cherezard, a 23-year-old student. “The government said nobody has a right to push people out unless they have a place to go. We had people who were sick and injured.”

“The Father gave the signal to the committee to force people out,” he said. By 3 a.m., most people had left the camp.

Father Garraud is living in a neighbour’s gated home 40 yards away from the camp. In an extended interview next to the pool, he blamed the removal of the people from the area on the camp’s committee members.

“The committee was organising so badly. I told them one month in advance to prepare places because they’re going to have to move for the demolition,” he said. “They didn’t do anything.”

Garraud said he slept through the night and was surprised Wednesday morning to see the empty field. He claims the committee acted on its own.

Four of the committee members, sitting on the steps of a nearby building together, insist the priest told them that night to move everyone out because the villa would be leveled in the morning.

“The priest has to protect himself, that’s why he blames it on us,” said Damis Duviose, a heavy-set young man. “We lived in the camp too, now we’re just down the road. We didn’t make the decision, we can’t do anything without the priest saying so.”

Jane Elizabeth Avenell-Guardigli is a British woman living in the Dominican Republic. With some friends, she brought supplies over the border after the earthquake and wound up staying at the same house as Father Garraud.

“We were awoken in the night,” she said in an interview. “There was lots of screaming and people calling for Pѐre Garraud. He was up and listening, but he did not go to see them.”

“We stayed up all night listening to the screaming. They all had to go back to their streets, by the ruins of their homes,” Avenell-Guardigli said.

“There’s no way I can imagine justifying their actions,” she added.

At least one Canadian body, along with the body of a French national, still lie beneath the rubble. Haitians call the area around Villa Manrese “Impasse Canada” because so many Canadians came to stay there.

Five staff from the Canadian embassy came to the site to talk with Father Garraud. The embassy asked the Haitian construction company Vorbe Et Fils for an estimate on removing the body, but gave the contract to the state construction company CNE.

The priest said CNE told him several times last week they were coming to begin the operation, but they never came. The French embassy asked the Canadians to pull out the French body as well in the operation.

The camp committee members believe Father Garraud was pressured into moving ahead with demolition by construction companies and the Canadian embassy. Garraud denied being pressured by anyone.

The Canadian embassy did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

Around a dozen men, women, and children still occupy the field.

Leonardo Delzor, 11, lost his aunt, uncle, and father in the earthquake. “I came to sleep here sometimes,” he said Saturday. “But last night when it was raining, I slept standing up. I had to hide my body in a little corner. ”

“I want somebody to help me, even if he only gave me a tarp, because I could spread it out to sleep on it,” he said. His blue shirt is smudged with brown mud.

“They moved people out that night, but I stayed here because I have nowhere to go,” Delzor said.

*Ansel Herz is a freelance journalist based in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. He blogs at http://mediahacker.org.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 23 2010 (IPS)

A cacophony of murmurs and cries echoed through the neighbourhoods of Haiti’s capital city Monday night as a violent aftershock shook people awake. Ten minutes later, another tremor rocked the ground, this time more smoothly back and forth.

An estimated 50,000 Haitians have pitched makeshift tents on the grounds of the Petionville Club, a golf and tennis resort. Credit: UN Photo/Sophia Paris

Shelter is now the top priority for relief groups, ahead of food and water distribution. They are rushing to supply thick plastic tarps, rather than tents, to over 500,000 internally displaced people in Port-Au-Prince – many still living under bedsheets tied over sticks in crowded settlements.

At a shelter distribution by CARE International at a camp in a Petionville public square, the tarps were received with a mixture of confusion and disappointment.

“It’s not clear for us. We can’t set them up because they don’t send anyone to give an explanation,” said Joseph Jean-Ones, whose family lives in the camp, as he tried to fit one metal pole on top of another.

His wife was given a gray tarp, a set of gleaming metal poles, and a single piece of paper with pictoral diagrams showing how to tie the materials together. The tarps do not come with text instructions, in Haitian Creole or any language.

“They should teach people how to set them up before distributing them,” said another man, setting the supplies down on the ground. “Now we don’t know what to do with it. It’s like they’re distributing problems to us.”

An aid worker with CARE International, who asked not to be identified by name, said non-Haitian staff with her organisation are not supposed to walk into any camps alone. Seeing this reporter walk in and out several times, she asked to tag along.

“Maybe we should have tried doing this ourselves first,” she said quietly, while attempting to show a confused family how to construct the tarp shelter.

At least 330,000 people throughout Port-Au-Prince have received tarps so far, according to the U.N.

The dark gray tarps are widely visible in camps throughout the city, tied at varying angles over wood and metal objects that make up the walls of makeshift shelters.

“No one is pretending that this offers anything but very partial protection from the rains,” Alex Wynter, spokesman for the International Federation of the Red Cross, told reporters in a press briefing.

“I would say that the tents and tarpaulins, in addition to giving people a modicum of privacy, give people a tool with which they can stay dry overnight,” he said. “But there’s no doubt that we face a very grave crisis here, when the rains come.”

Wynter said the peculiarities of Haiti’s climate make the rainy season “especially violent, even by tropical standards worldwide.”

There are also concerns over poor sanitation and the possibility of water-borne diseases spreading quickly in the camps. Haitians are being encouraged to dig shallow trenches for drainage.

Plastic tarps are far more prevalent than tents in the city’s camps. Large white domed tents, called Shelterboxes, from the UK-based charity of the same name, are scattered by the dozens in a few camps.

“What we’re about is shelter, warmth and dignity – it’s difficult to get that with tarps,” said John Leach, Shelterbox’s Head of Operations, in an interview. He said the plastic tarps will prove inadequate under heavy rains.

“If tarps are that great, why are all the U.N. people living in tents?” he asked.

NGOs working to provide shelter for the population are coordinating through a “shelter cluster” team based at a U.N. base.

Asked about the balance of tarps versus tents being distributed, Gregg McDonald, a lead member of the shelter cluster staff, said, “There are 142 agencies in the cluster that agree with this strategy [of tarp distribution], a couple of irresponsible agencies still doing tents.”

“Tents are inappropriate now. The extra floor space is not available,” he said. Tarps “can move, have a lot more versatility, strength, and are longer-lasting.”

Luckner Thervius, one of two dozen committee members organising the camp in Petionville, said he understood why tarps were necessary. “It would be better if everyone had a small one,” pointing to a rectangular green tent shared by several families. “That one is too big. There’s not enough space if everyone had one like this.”

CARE International contacted IPS after the tarp distribution to say that their staff would set up a tarp shelter as an example in each camp from now on.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
GRAND GOAVE, Jan 28 2010 (IPS)

Two gray 23-million-dollar hovercrafts sitting in the middle of a sandy tropical beach look like they are from another world. A pair of 15-foot-wide propeller fans sticks out from the back of each behemoth.

Brazilian peacekeepers and U.S. soldiers distribute food and water in Haiti's capital. Credit: UN Photo/Sophia Paris

A tent city occupies the town’s main square, surrounded by crumbling buildings. Joseph Jean-Pierre Salam, the mayor of Grand Goave, about 15 kilometres west of Port-au-Prince, estimated that some 70 percent of the city’s important structures fell during the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12.

“They have made many promises, but we don’t see the action yet,” Salam said, referring to the international community. “We have a lot of people suffering. There is an expectation that help will come.”

Little food and water has been distributed by the dozens U.S. troops milling about the beach since the earthquake, according to local leaders.

“I went there to talk to them,” said Jean-Jacob Renee, an English teacher. “They said they are there to set up some tents for themselves, but they did not come with food or water – anything for the people.”

He said the only aid the military brought to Grand Goave was distributed by Catholic Relief Services, an international NGO. “When they are in the town, we don’t know. We don’t have their phone number,” he said. “Nobody has helped us.”

U.S. military personnel on the beach were busy unloading construction material and heavy equipment from cargo boats. Senior Chief Petty Officer Steve Krutky told IPS his disaster recovery team cleared a rockslide out of the road and worked to repair local orphanages run by evangelical missions.

The U.S. military did not respond to IPS requests for further clarification of the Navy’s role in Grand Goave.

An analysis by the Associated Press on Wednesday found that 33 cents of every dollar towards emergency aid in Haiti goes to military aid, more than three times the nine cents spent on food.

Residents of Grand Goave said there is a network of seven neighbourhood leaders for each section of the city that has not been tapped in the relief effort. Friends are pooling resources to purchase rice when possible, but family after family living outside the rubble of their homes told IPS they have received no assistance.

The roof of Rinvil Jean Weldy’s modest one-story brick house is broken off, resting at an angle on top of a kitchen table covered in dust. The rear wall crumbled, spilling onto the cracked ground. His wife remains at a nearby hospital nursing an injury from the quake.

“We need a tent, we need food and water, all the normal things,” Weldy said, pointing at his sons, who were hammering together scraps of wood to build the frame of a tent. “To the U.N., I say, I need help now.”

Weldy has been expecting compensation from the U.N. since Nov. 10, when he and numerous witnesses say part of a bullet fired by U.N. peacekeeping troops hit his shoulder. Four days before the earthquake, the U.N. said an internal investigation into the incident cleared the soldiers of any wrongdoing.

Witnesses told IPS the troops fired into the ground in an attempt to control a curious crowd, not into the air, as the U.N. maintains.

The U.N. peacekeepers are roundly dismissed by many Haitians as a source for relief in the country. “We have been living with the U.N. for many years, but now we see them very little,” Mayor Salam said matter-of-factly.

In Leogane, on the route back from Grand Goave to Port-Au-Prince, 500 families from a tent city in a field lined up in an orderly queue to receive food packages, in contrast to chaotic aid dispersals seen in Port-Au-Prince. Individuals walked into a clearing to grab a box each time a young Haitian man called out numbers through a megaphone.

“For us, it was very important to do this without military,” said Dolores Rescheleit, an aid worker with a German NGO called Arche Nova that provided the food. “Because the people in the camp are very strong. When you give the responsibility to the people in the camp, they will do it better than we will with the military.”

A committee of Haitians, with sub-committees to handle security, hygiene, and aid distribution, is governing the camp without problems, Rescheleit said. Women smiled as they walked back to their tents, balancing boxes of food on their heads.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 25 2010 (IPS)

Throughout the earthquake’s aftermath, the voices of many Port-Au-Prince radio stations have been loud and clear.

The radio hooked up outside the reporter's moto driver's house. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

“We have tried to say to the population to be strong, we appreciate their courage,” said Radio Solidarite Director Georges Venel Remarais. “The international press was talking about violence but we didn’t see any. The help is very slow at times, and people get angry. Our work is to say, let’s be calm.”

Gas to generate electricity is still difficult to find, but the Radio Solidarite staff are able to use their undamaged studio.

Radio Metropole, one of Haiti’s biggest stations, also began broadcasting as soon as the staff found gas. Other than hundreds of records scattered on the floor of its music room, the facility was not affected. Still, the staff don’t feel safe broadcasting from inside their one-storey compound.

“We put our studio outside,” said Jerome Richard, a veteran reporter for the station, “and we let it be free to the population that can come and say anything they want to say and information about their lives they want to provide us. And to let them tell the whole world what’s happening in Haiti.”

The large staff of Radio Teleginen lost their three-storey building to the earthquake. The roof collapsed and one of its walls crumbled, leaving a gaping hole. Volunteers and journalists acting as rescue workers were unable to retrieve the body of a young cameraman – the station’s only casualty.

“We’re helping radio Teleginen because we love Radio Teleginen, we love all its programming and it also serves us,” said Edner Jean as he emerged from the building wearing a hard-hat. “We’re doing our best to pull the person out. We’re on our own. Since the disaster happened, nobody’s come to help us.”

A crane belonging to a Haitian construction company sits yards away from the rubble, across from people camped out in hundreds of tents. Jean Borge, the station’s owner, says no one there knows how to operate it. But he’s confident that they’ll begin broadcasting within days.

“We got a new generator, we’re getting our satellite fixed and will be up and running as soon as possible,” he said. “Our reporters already have started working, we’ll have a small studio here.”

In the heart of Cite Soleil, Radio Boukman is on the air. The station is named after the Voodoo priest who helped ignite Haiti’s slave revolt. The remains of a police station are piled next to their building, but the station itself only lost some equipment that fell off the shelves.

Authorities say they are concerned with security for aid distributions inside the oceanside shantytown. Edwin Adrien, a producer for the station, said nobody from the U.N. or United States contacted them to coordinate aid.

“I don’t know until now why they don’t contact any entity and especially Radio Boukman, broadcasting inside Cite Soleil,” he said. “I don’t know the reason but they didn’t contact us yet. I think the information that we broadcasting are helping everybody including MINUSTAH and the population. We have to keep the population informed.”

Signal FM is reportedly the only Port-Au-Prince station to remain on the air throughout the earthquake itself. Mario Viau, the station’s director, told the Committee to Protect Journalists that the station’s 12 staff journalists worked extended shifts to continue broadcasting.

Underlining the importance of Haitian radio, the BBC announced Saturday it is making its broadcasts available for free, in Haiti’s native Creole, for Haitian radio stations.

Port-Au-Prince suffered a 4.7 magnitude aftershock Sunday evening, but parts of the city are gaining some semblance of normality. The sound of creole songs, hip hop, and the latest news helps to ease the tension in the city’s air.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 17 2010 (IPS)

Millions of dollars in aid are pouring into Haiti. Another head of state visits each day. The misery in Port-Au-Prince dominates the news nearly a week after the 7.0 earthquake struck the heart of this island country.

Children in Cité Soleil, Haiti, play with a kite made from a plastic bag among the shanty town's rubble. Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

More tents have been erected in the roads where Haitians gathered, away from crumbling structures. In the public squares across from the collapsed national palace Saturday, a young couple explained that the yellow tent overhead was given to them by a wealthy Haitian.

That area, called Chanmas, seems an ideal place to distribute aid to the thousands of people sitting and sharing food and shelter in orderly fashion. But people said no aid workers had stopped by to give them anything the whole day.

Two U.S. Navy helicopters flew overhead in opposite directions while they talked with this reporter. Earlier in the day, hundreds of U.S. soldiers could be seen walking back and forth inside the airport.

As of Sunday, the United Nations reported that humanitarian relief is still being bottlenecked at the main airport and roads remain blocked with debris. Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) said that one of its planes carrying essential medical supplies was not permitted to land at the airport.

“Despite guarantees, given by the United Nations and the US Defense Department, an MSF cargo plane carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was blocked from landing in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, and was re-routed to Samana, in Dominican Republic,” the group said in a statement Sunday. “All material from the cargo is now being sent by truck from Samana, but this has added a 24-hour delay for the arrival of the hospital.”

The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is also working with Haitian authorities to set up a land corridor to bring in relief from the Dominican town of Barahona 130 kilometres away.

With the dead still being counted, and thousands missing, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has said that 100,000 deaths “would seem a minimum”. The country’s interior minister reported that some 50,000 bodies have already been recovered.

European Union ministers called an emergency meeting for Monday to determine the costs of the massive reconstruction that will needed in coming months. The United Nations has already issued an appeal for 562 million to aid Haiti – even before the earthquake, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.

The 562 million would target the estimated three million Haitians affected for a period of six months, with half of the funds being earmarked for emergency food aid, and the rest for health, water, sanitation, nutrition, early recovery, emergency education and other key needs.

But in many parts of the devastated capital, there was little evidence of outside assistance.

In the suburb of Santo, dozens of Haitian men organised a digging and rescue operation on a pile of rubble. A huge orange Caterpillar bulldozer sat nearby, stationary. Heavy equipment from the Haitian construction company CNE is all over the city.

At the collapsed parliament building in downtown Port-Au-Prince, a bulldozer retrieved the bodies of politicians lying in the street.

Supporters of Haiti’s most popular political party, Fanmi Lavalas, dragged the stiff and dripping body of a high-profile party organiser named Bob Moliere into a wheelbarrow. They followed the bulldozer 200 yards to a grassy area by the sea and dumped his body into a four-foot-deep grave they had dug minutes earlier.

Marianne Moliere, now a widow, looked out at the dipping sun with tears streaming down her face. “There is no life for me because Bob was everything to me. I lost everything. Everything is destroyed,” she said.

“I’m sleeping in the street now because I’m homeless. But when I get some water, I share with others. Or if someone gives some spaghetti, I share with my family and others.”

She clutched a manila folder with photos of her dead husband. One of them showed him shaking hands with former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The men had no idea that Aristide, pushed out by a coup in 2004, had issued a statement from exile in South Africa asking that he be allowed to return to Haiti immediately.

Told the news, they started smiling and talking excitedly with one another.

Moliere won his freedom from the post-coup regime in Haiti only three years ago after a full year in detention. The nearby grave remained open for the moment, a small mound of loose brown soil waiting to cover up Moliere’s stiff right arm pointing at the sky.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 15 2010 (IPS)

The roof of Haiti’s national penitentiary is missing. The four walls of the prison rise up and break off, leaving only the empty sky overhead.

A view of the Haitian National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince following the powerful Jan. 12 earthquake. Credit: UN Photo/Logan Abassi

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday afternoon broke it to pieces.

“I don’t know if he’s alive or not alive,” said Margaret Barnett, whose son was a prisoner. “My house is crushed down. I’m just out in the street looking for family members.”

“Where is the help?” she asked. The former government employee spits the question again and again, hands on her hips. “Where is the help? Is the U.N. really here? Does America really help Haiti?”

In the absence of any visible relief effort in the city, the help came from small groups of Haitians working together. Citizens turned into aid workers and rescuers. Lone doctors roamed the streets, offering assistance.

The Red Cross estimates that 45,000 to 50,000 people were killed in Tuesday’s earthquake, with some three million others left homeless and in need of food and water.

At the crumbling national cathedral, a dozen men and women crowded around a man swinging a pickaxe to pry open the space for a dusty, near-dead looking woman to squeeze through and escape.

The night of the quake, a group of friends pulled bricks out from under a collapsed home, clearing a narrow zig-zagging path towards the sound of a child crying out beneath the rubble.

Two buildings over, Joseph Matherenne cried as he directed the faint light of his cell phone’s screen over the bloody corpse of his 23-year-old brother. His body was draped over the rubble of the office where he worked as a video technician. Unlike most of the bodies in the street, there was no blanket to cover his face.

Central Port-Au-Prince resembles a war zone. Some buildings are standing, unharmed. Those that were damaged tended to collapse completely, spilling into the street on top of cars and telephone poles.

In the day following the quake, there was no widespread violence. Guns, knives and theft weren’t seen on the streets, lined only with family after family carrying their belongings. They voiced their anger and frustration with sad songs that echoed throughout the night, not their fists.

“Only in the movies have I seen this,” said 33-year-old Jacques Nicholas, who jumped over a wall as the house where he was playing dominoes tumbled. “When Americans send missiles to Iraq, that’s what I see. When Israel do that to Gaza, that’s what I see here.”

Late at night, Nicholas heard false rumours that a tsunami was coming and he joined a torrent of people walking away from the water.

Nobody knows what to expect. Some people said Haiti needs a strong international intervention – a coordinated aid effort from all the big countries. But there was no evidence on the streets of any immediate cavalry of rescue workers from the United States and other nations.

“My situation is not that bad,” said Nicholas, “but overall the other people’s situation is worse than mine. So it affects me. Everybody wants to help out, but we can’t do nothing.”

Haitians are doing only what they can. Helping each other with their hands and the few tools they can find, they lack the resources to coordinate a multi-faceted reconstruction effort.

U.N. agencies and humanitarian organisations on the ground are struggling to help survivors of the quake, but many are hindered by large-scale damage to their own facilities, as well as lack of heavy equipment to clear rubble.

Logistics remained the main obstacle on Friday, according to news reports, with damage to the main airport, impassable roads and problems at the docks continuing to bottleneck the outpouring of international relief workers and basic supplies.

The United Nations is issuing a flash appeal Friday for more aid as part of a coordinated immediate response and long-term reconstruction plan.

A popular radio host here reminded everyone that the strength of the Haitian people cannot be underestimated, posting on his Twitter: “We can re-build! We overcame greater challenges in 1804” – the year Haiti threw off the yoke of colonial slavery in a mass revolt.

As the days tick by and the bodies pile up, it will take bold vision and hard work on that scale for Haiti to recover from Tuesday’s tremors.

Excerpt:

By Ansel Herz
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Nov 20 2009 (IPS)

Under a beating sun in the grassy field where two U.N. helicopters landed in Grand Goave last week, 19-year-old Benson Blanc moved his hands as if rapid-firing a gun into the ground in front of him and made a “tok-tok-tok-tok” sound. This is how the soldiers opened fire, he said.

Residents of this quiet seaside town an hour west of Port-Au-Prince were awoken at about 1 a.m. on Nov. 10 by the sound of helicopters flying low overhead. A curious crowd amassed around the aircrafts.

One of the helicopters had mechanical trouble and had to make an emergency landing, said U.N. spokesperson Sophie Boutaud de la Combe. To lighten the load on the damaged helicopter, the Chilean crew moved white boxes of supplies into the other helicopter for several hours.

She also said, in a radio interview broadcast here in the capital city, that troops only fired once into the air in attempt to disperse the crowd. They had called for backup from the local platoon of Sri Lankan U.N. troops.

“When the backup came they started shooting, the population ran away and hid behind the bushes,” Blanc said. “Their chief, Mr. Rodriguez, said that he is not playing with nobody’s ass. He said if anybody wants to cross the field they need to tell him first or he’ll shoot them.”

Over a week later, Rinvil Jean Weldy, 50, is still nursing a bulging wound on his right shoulder. He can’t use his right arm much because of the pain, as he tends to his family’s small beachside home. He said he’s a health worker who has worked for the Haitian government and the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.

“I was home then I heard a strange noise and I saw people running,” Weldy told IPS. “I wanted to give my help in case something bad happened. The crowd was too close to the helicopters so I wanted to move away. That’s when they opened fire and hurt me. I want justice and reparations.”

Haitians interviewed Sunday in Grand Goave said U.N. troops, known by their acronym MINUSTAH, fired several rounds into the ground at around 5 a.m. They said the soldiers would not let anyone, including farmers who wanted to reach the beach to go fishing, cross the field. A piece of a bullet struck Weldy, who was rushed to the hospital by Haitian police.

“When they saw the crowd getting big, they shot on the field,” said Louis Natacha, a woman who lives nearby. “There would have been more victims if we didn’t run away. Anybody could be a victim. Weldy was there like everybody, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. We want MINUSTAH to leave.”

Boutaud de la Combe, the U.N. spokesperson, told IPS there is an ongoing internal investigation into the incident. She said if troops fired into the ground, not in the air, that was a mistake. If Weldy wants reparations for his injury, she said, he needs to file an official complaint. Guatemalan U.N. military police visited him Monday, but Weldy said he did not feel comfortable speaking with them.

International officials and the Haitian government credit MINUSTAH with improving security in Haiti. But some Haitians see the foreign troops as prone to using reckless force with impunity.

When last summer massive crowds attended the Port-Au-Prince funeral of Father Gerard Jean-Juste, a popular priest, U.N. troops were seen on state television opening fire. A 22-year-old man was killed, although MINUSTAH denied responsibility for the shooting, saying the bullet’s calibre was smaller than that used by U.N. troops.

Brazilian U.N. troops arrested Franki Maze, a social leader in the Port-Au-Prince slum of Bel-Air, on the night of Sep. 9. While a medical exam from that night did not validate Maze’s claim that he was sodomised, it found bruising and inflammation on his face and body. He was released later that day.

The U.N.’s internal investigation cleared the troops of any wrongdoing and charged Maze with fabricating parts of his story. It said he was caught in possession of marijuana and tried to run away.

Mario Joseph, a human rights lawyer with Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, is frustrated with how the peacekeeping force handles accusations of abuse. “It’s their tactic: ‘All people in Haiti are liars for MINUSTAH’,” he said. “I filed two complaints in Cite Soleil cases. All the time they make their own inquires. We need to have independent inquires.”

The U.N. Security Council extended MINUSTAH’s mandate another year last month, marking its fifth year in Haiti. The Brazilian military commander, Gen. Floriano Peixoto Vieira Neto, told Reuters in a recent interview that the force is not likely to leave anytime soon.

“The strides we’ve made in security haven’t been matched by the socioeconomic gains we hoped for, and so that’s why we say that the status in Haiti is extremely fragile,” he said.

On Wednesday, the 206th anniversary of Haitian general Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ crushing victory over French colonial troops in the Battle of Vertières, two university professors and twelve students were arrested by Haitian police after protesting the presence of foreign troops on Haiti’s soil, according to the Haitian news agency AlterPresse. It is not clear why they were taken into custody.

*Ansel Herz can be contacted at ansel.herz@gmail.com.

Excerpt: