An intersection showing mostly empty homes at the heart of the Lumane Casimir Village near Morne à Cabri on Sep. 19, 2013. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint-Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 20 2014 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Named after a famous Haitian singer, the Lumane Casimir Village sits in the desert-like plain at the foot of Morne à Cabri and will eventually have 3,000 rental units. About 1,300 are now ready.

The project was financed with 49 million dollars from the Petro-Caribe Fund, money that will eventually have to be paid back to the Venezuelan government.

During the May 16, 2013 inauguration, the president handed out keys to a group of families that had been assembled for the media. But they did not move in. From May to September, nobody actually lived in the apartments. Families only moved in starting in October. In the meantime, many were looted.

“Between 120 and 150 apartments were vandalised,” explained David Odnell of the Unit for the Construction of Housing and Public Buildings (UCLBP), one of three government agencies involved with housing. UCLBP is the supervisor of the site.

More than 50 toilets, and dozens of locks, windows, brackets, bulbs, electrical cables and outlets were stolen. Many apartments were also damaged by would-be thieves who used crowbars and other tools to try to wrench sinks, doors and windows from walls.

“The thieves still come,” Bélair Paulin told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW). Paulin spends a lot of time in the area because he is waiting to see if he will be chosen as a renter.

About 200 families have already moved in and others have their keys. Some 1,100 homes remain empty.

During a visit to the site on Dec. 20, 2013, Martelly announced that 250 police officers will be getting apartments and handed over keys to 75 of them, again, in front of the cameras. Several later denounced the fact that they were asked to hand the keys back after the ceremony.

All of the apartments have water and electric systems, new trash cans, a gas stove, a container for receiving and purifying drinking water, plants growing in a garden which will benefit from a regular watering service, and the promise of round-trip transportation to the capital for 20 gourdes (about 50 cents).

Under the heavy sun, the sounds of the new residents echo though the site. Voices, doors opening and closing, cars coming and going. The village is coming to life.

According to Odnell, eventually the village will have “a waste disposal system, a police station, a health center, a drinking water reservoir, a public square, a soccer field, a connection with the electricity system, a vocational school, an elementary school and a marketplace.”

The government is also building an industrial park across the street, where – authorities hope – residents can work.

“The mini-industrial park will have all the facilities necessary to create local jobs for housing beneficiaries,” Odnell promised, noting that a Canadian company has already expressed interest.

The park is not yet finished and – as of late 2013 – has not yet been registered as a “free trade zone” industrial park.

Like other projects, the new residents of Lumane Casimir Village are not necessarily earthquake victims. (Read Part One)

“There are three criteria for being eligible: 1) You have to have been affected by the earthquake, 2) the person has to have a family of not more than three to five people, and 3) the person must have a revenue. That is the most important, so you can pay your rent, which will be between 163 and 233 dollars per month,” according to Odnell.

Christela Blaise is one of the new renters. A cosmetician, she has lived at the village with her older sister and baby since October.

“After the earthquake, we lived in Bon Repos on the main highway. We were not direct victims of the earthquake, but like everyone who was looking for a place to live, we got a temporary shelter. But that didn’t last past three months, so we moved back to our home,” she said.

Housing: An immense challenge

The Haitian government recognises that it faces an enormous challenge. Some 150,000 earthquake victims still live in about 300 camps and another 50,000 live in the new sprawling slums Canaan, Onaville and Jerusalem.

Half of the camps have no sanitation services and only eight percent are supplied with water, according to an October 2013 report from the UCLBP and the Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM)/Shelter Cluster, part of the U.N.’s humanitarian presence in Haiti.

Residents of over 100 camps are in imminent danger of being evicted. In December, 126 families were forced to leave their homes and shacks in Canaan, near Village Lumane Casimir, and on Jan. 11, a camp in Delmas was consumed in flames. One woman and three young children were burned to death.

According to the government, the housing deficit will only continue to grow as people leave the countryside and smaller towns and move to cities.

“Haiti needs to meet the challenge of constructing 500,000 new homes in order to meet the current and housing deficit between now and 2020,” according to the UCLBP’s new Policy of Housing and Urban Planning (PNLH), released in October.

The new policy is ambitious but vague. The Executive Summary sketches out five “strategic axes” that will help “grow access to housing,” including “social housing” that meets construction norms, and through the promotion of “models of housing that assure access to basic services.”

The language of the document implies that the government will seek to resolve the deficit in partnership with the private sector. In the introduction to the PNLH, for example, Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe notes that “under the coordination of the UCLBP, the PNLH also makes clear the important role that the private sector is being called upon to play, side-by-side with the state.”

While this kind of orientation should not necessarily be rejected out of hand, already with the Lumane Casimir Village and the 400% and Chavez Houses projects, it appears that the government is no longer going to build social housing that is within reach of the majority of Haitians.

According to the World Bank, 80 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars per day. Even if a couple combines incomes, it would have only about 60 dollars a month. How could that family pay rent that runs from 39 dollars all the way up to 233 dollars per month?

Speaking at an event at the Lumane Casimir Village on Nov. 11, 2013, Lamothe affirmed his pride in the project, which he called “social housing.”

But, if the housing is not for the poor – such as, for example, the majority of the earthquake victims – and if, with monthly rents that reach 233 dollars, it is out of reach of 80 percent of the population, is it really correct to call it “social” or public housing?

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Excerpt:

One of the 400% residents coming home with a bucket of water on Sep. 19, 2013. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint-Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 20 2014 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Four years after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, questions continue to haunt the four main post-disaster housing projects built by the Haitian government.

Who lives in them? Who runs them? Can the residents afford the rents or mortgages? Are the residents the actual earthquake victims?“Nobody is in control over there. People just seized the homes." -- Miaud Thys

By some estimates, the catastrophe killed 200,000 people and made 1.3 million homeless overnight by destroying or damaging 172,000 homes or apartments. But the new projects do not necessarily house earthquake victims, over 200,000 of whom still live in tents or in the three large new slums.

In total, the new projects, with homes for at least 3,588 families, cost 88 million dollars. (In contrast, international donors and private agencies spent more than five times that amount – about 500 million dollars – on “temporary shelters” or T-shelters.) See HGW #9

Three of the new housing projects are in Zoranje, a new settlement not far from downtown, on the border between Cité Soleil and Croix des Bouquets. The fourth is at the foot of Morne à Cabri, about 25 kilometres north of the capital on the highway that leads to Mirebalais. (Read Part Two)

Clinton’s pet project now home to squatters

On Jul. 21, 2011, President Michel Martelly, former U.S. president Bill Clinton and then-Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive inaugurated the Housing Exposition, a fair featuring about 60 model homes in Zoranje.

One of the first projects approved by the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the Expo cost over million dollars in public reconstruction money. Foreign and Haitian construction and architecture firms also spent at least two million dollars more. The objective was to provide models for the agencies and businesses engaged in post-earthquake housing construction.

Everyone agrees the Expo was a failure. Few visited the site and fewer still chose one of the model homes – many of which were very expensive by Haitian standards – for their project. See HGW #20

“There were some really odd examples,” according to David Odnell, director of the government’s Unit for the Construction of Housing and Public Buildings (UCLBP), one of three government agencies involved with housing. “Some had nothing to do with the way we Haitians live or think about housing. It was a completely imported thing.”

Today, surrounded by weeds and goats, the fading and cracked houses are home to dozens of squatter families.

“All the houses have new owners. They have been taken over,” explained a young pregnant girl who said her parents are “renters.”

“Yes, that’s possible,” Odnell, an architect, said in a Nov. 19, 2013 interview. “And you know why. There is a void… and there is no authority there. But [the project] is not exactly a waste. I could call it poor planning, because the houses can always be recuperated.”

Odnell’s counterpart at the government Fund for Social and Economic Assistance agency (FAES), a government office also involved in housing, said much the same thing.

“Aside from the inauguration week, the project has been forgotten,” Patrick Anglade explained. “It’s a problem that can be solved, but we have to figure out how to do that.”

The director of the third government housing agency, the Public Enterprise for the Promotion of Social Housing (EPPLS), had little to say. (“Social housing” is known as “subsidised” or “public” housing in English.)

“We have nothing to do with that,” director Miaud Thys told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW).

Anarchy reigns in the House(s) of Chavez

Another new project sits across the street from the Expo: 128 apartments built by the Venezuelan government for 4.9 million dollars (according to its figures) during the Hugo Chavez presidency. They are usually called “The Chavez Houses.”

Earthquake-resistant, sporting two bedrooms, a bath, a living room and a kitchen, and painted in bright colours, today most of the homes house people who simply broke down the doors and moved in. Only 42 of the 128 have “legal” inhabitants: families invited by the Venezuelan Embassy. Empty for 15 months, some were vandalised. Fixtures, toilets, sinks and other items, including water pumps, were stolen. See HGW #12

“Nobody is in control over there. People just seized the homes,” Thys admitted to HGW. “We know that. Now we are trying to recuperate them.”

Inhabitants are already making adjustments: changing some doors, adding rooms and windows, building gates and fences.

Surrounded by neighbourhood men, Jules Jamlee sits on a broken chair across the street from a home that is being expanded. Like his friends, he is insistent about his right to “his” home.

“The president knows very well that we are revolutionaries,” he said. “He might make threats but he knows we don’t agree with them.”

Told of the residents’ insistence, Thys had a response: “Revolutionaries or not, we are not going to lose those apartments. We are going to send those people letters and invite them to leave so that we can recuperate them. Today we are starting with the carrot. We’ll use the stick later.”

The housing development still lacks water and residents complain that the lack of adequate water means that the toilets don’t work well. Many residents instead use nearby weedy areas for their physiological needs.

New Owners Not 400% Happy

Known as the 400% or “400 in 100” project because Martelly promised 400 homes in 100 days, the nearby 30-million-dollar project funded by the Inter-American Development Bank was inaugurated on Feb. 27, 2012. The development has three kilometres of paved streets, a water system (which lacked water until just recently), an electrical system, street lamps and a square with a basketball court.

“Everything was in place so that residents would have all the basic services. In that sense, we proved that in a short time and with minimal funding, we could do well,” Anglade explained in an Oct. 2, 2013 interview.

But not all of the new residents are earthquake victims. Many are public administration employees. There was a rush to fill the houses at the beginning. And there are other complications, because the houses are not gifts. Residents must pay a five-year mortgage.

“During the first phase, and because we were in a hurry… we weren’t that choosy. Some people who got housing do not actually have the means to pay for it,” Anglade admitted.

The mortgages are between 39 and 46 dollars per month. The contract says that “non-payment by the renter/beneficiary for three consecutive months will result in a 5% penalty for each unpaid month” and that “non-payment could lead to expulsion.”

The contract has caused a great deal of grumbling.

“The president did not give us a house. He is selling it to us. They are too expensive. What can a person do in this country where there is no work? How can one find 1,500 gourdes (39 dollars) each month?” asked Yves Zéphyr, an unemployed father of two who has lived in the development since November 2012.

FAES admits it faces a challenge.

“We are not achieving 100 percent payments, not even 70 percent,” Anglade said. “At least 30 percent are behind.”

A small poll by HGW gives an idea of why some people are behind. One-half of 10 residents questioned said they are unemployed.

When the project was launched, the government received financing to prepare the land, build the houses, and set up the electricity system, but not for the actual services necessary for a housing development, like water, septic system cleaning, a marketplace, schools, a clinic and affordable transportation to downtown.

“The project isn’t finished yet,” Odnell noted. “The government needs to continue working, in order to improve the lives of the people there. Normally when you plan a housing development, all of the services are supposed to be in place and the houses come at the end. But just the opposite happened with the 400% development.”

While many residents say they are happy with their new homes, HGW found problems. Some roofs leak every time it rains, and residents say electricity is rare. Some of the houses had been vandalised before residents moved in: tin roofs and toilets had disappeared.

Also, the septic systems for some of the houses are causing problems.

“They fill up in a quarter of an hour!” claimed André Paul, who has lived in “400%” since July 2013. “Some of them are completely blocked, others are just totally filled.”

EPPLS, which shares responsibility with the FAES for the site, recognises that the septic systems were “poorly built.” Director Thys promised: “We will correct them” although he was not sure how that would be funded.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Excerpt:

Agronomist Ludson Lafontant looking at one of the recently constructed ledges during a visit to Doucet in August 2013. It contains a young mango tree plant, a grass plant, and peanut plants. Photo: HGW/Milo Milfort

By Correspondents
Doucet, Petit-Goâve, HAITI, Nov 29 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Reforestation and soil conservation programmes costing many thousands of dollars in this rural community have resulted in hundreds of small ledges built of straw or sacks of earth. In certain areas, the earthworks seem to be lasting, but in others, they are disintegrating.

The construction and destruction of the anti-erosion ledges – all made with foreign development and humanitarian money – offer an example of how at least some of Haiti’s reforestation projects turn out.No matter what promises were made, a farmer will always be concerned with the immediate need of feeding and clothing his or her family first.

In the years since the 2010 earthquake, the 11th and 12th communal sections of Petit-Goâve, located 60 kilometres southwest of the capital, have hosted several soil conservation and agricultural programmes with budgets in the tens and even hundreds of thousands.

The U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), Helvetas and Action Agro Allemande (AAA), sometimes working with a local development organisation – Mouvman Kole Zepòl (MKOZE) – oversaw projects aimed at rehabilitating the watershed of the Ladigue River.

The steep slopes around the river “are very vulnerable to water erosion and mudslides,” MKOZE explained in a report on one project that had a budget of 91,534 dollars. “During rainy season, the waters from the Ladigue River dump a lot of sediment and rocks at the river’s mouth, destroying fields and causing homes to flood. Sometimes harvests, homes, animals and even human lives are lost.”

In the Petit-Goâve region, deforestation started about a half-century ago, according to many residents. It began with the devastating 1963 Hurricane Flora, which caused great damage and over 5,000 deaths in Haiti’s western and southern regions.

Molière Jean Félix, 62, remembers. “There were a lot of mango trees at the top of this mountain. We grew corn and rice. Now you can’t even plant Congo beans there,” recalled the farmer.

Haiti has less than three percent tree cover, down from about 60 percent a century ago, and perhaps 80 percent when Christopher Columbus first disembarked. In Haiti, trees are cut down primarily for fuel.

Most energy consumed in the country for cooking, industrial bakeries and dry cleaning – in fact, 75 percent of all energy used comes from wood and charcoal, according to government figures.

Félix sees tree-cutting almost every day. “Today, young people don’t have any way to make a living. They don’t produce coffee, they don’t raise pigs. So, they cut down trees in order to send their children to school,” he said.

In Doucet, as well as other parts of Haiti, foreign organisations often fund projects where local residents overseen by technicians are paid 200 to 300 gourdes a day (4.65-6.98 dollars) to build ledges made of sacks of dirt, dried reeds and wattle. The ledges are then planted with tree seedlings.

In addition to assisting with reforestation, development organisations also see the projects – known as “Cash for Work” (CFW) in English – as a kind of post-disaster emergency income programme.

“[CFW] helps us hire a lot of families and assures that they get a minimal revenue. This provides immediate assistance and is therefore a real advantage,” AAA’s Beate Maas told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW).

Reforestation vs. everyday needs

All around Doucet, many hills are decorated with hundreds of the new little ledges holding seedlings of fruit or eucalyptus trees. But there are many others where the ledges are disintegrating: mud is spilling out, and the saplings are dead or dying.

Farmers have planted peanuts, peas and other crops around the structures. In a few months, the hillsides will be as naked as they were before the reforestation project.

Ilomène Tataille is a mother, a landowner and a member of one of the voluntary committees set up to keep an eye on the ledges and the new plants, to assure that animals don’t eat them and to make sure the ledges are drained after each rainfall. Another task, she explained, is to make sure farmers don’t plant anything on the eroding slopes, and especially not peanuts, a popular crop in the region.

According to Tataille, even though the CFW workers and landowners all agreed at first not to disturb the hillsides, it is almost impossible to stop people from farming. Even she breaks her promise.

“Yes, I plant there also. We live in a very dry region. We can only farm peanuts. That is our profession. Sorry, but we don’t have any other job,” she said.

Tataille noted that another problem is the fact that landowners lease out their land, so even if they have made promises to AAA and MKOZE, they can’t force their tenants to follow suit.

Staff who work on the projects are aware of the vicious-circle element.

Agronomist Esther Paynis was a consultant to AAA for a project carried out with MKOZE between September 2012 and August 2013.

“We told people not to plant peanuts and other crops that involve digging into the earth, like yam and sweet potato. In the training sessions we held, everyone promised to respect those principles,” Paynis told HGW in a Sep. 30 email.

“If we give them advice that they later ignore, that’s not our fault. We told them the disadvantages of planting peanuts and how that could lead to the total degradation of the zone.”

During a visit in August 2013, journalists saw many young peanut plants on a number of hillsides near the ledges. Two months later, in October, many recently made structures on those same hillsides were in various states of disintegration. Many had been destroyed and tree saplings and other plants were dead, either drowned or buried by earth, both the result of the lack of maintenance.

One reason might be because the committees are voluntary.

“The committees don’t have any support. Some people agree to work for free, but others do not,” Junior Joseph, a member of a local peasant association, explained. “That’s when the structures deteriorate.”

In order to get an independent opinion, HGW consulted an agronomist who had not worked on the project. Agronomist Ludson Lafontant agreed with some of the criticism voiced by local farmers.

Reforestation is necessary but failure to implicate local farmers is a big problem, he said. No matter what promises were made, a farmer will always be concerned with the immediate need of feeding and clothing his or her family first.

“Lave men siyè a tè?”

During a visit in August 2013, Lafontant said he feared the reforestation project would be another example of wasted money, of the Haitian proverb “Lave men siyè a tè,” which means “wash your hands, dry them on the ground.”

But Lafontant also criticised the population and the government.

“I always say we ought to love ourselves more than others love us. In other words, the non-governmental organisations come here, they write projects, they look for the money and they do the project,” he said.

“The money has to be justified so they can be proud to say they have worked on a X number of hectares, built contours on a Y square metres of land and given Z number of people jobs. That’s how they justify their money. But whose problem is it? Whose country is it? It’s ours, here in our home. We need to become conscious of that.”

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

A rice delivery in Port-au-Prince on Sept. 24, 2013. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint-Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 10 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Haiti has been receiving food aid for half a century – over 1.5 million tonnes from the U.S. alone during the past two decades.

Recently, however, international aid agencies have raised a cry of alarm. Some two-thirds of all Haitians – almost seven million people – are hungry. About 1.5 million of them – twice as many as last year – face “severe” or “acute food insecurity.” Why?“They call the programme ‘Down with Hunger,’ but to me, it’s a ‘Long Live Hunger’ programme.” -- Haitian farmer Vériel Auguste

A new five-part investigative series sheds some light on the issue by considering the structural causes, as well as by taking a look at the inefficiencies and what one government official calls “the perverse effects” of food assistance.

Haiti’s agricultural sector has long languished, ignored by its governments and by foreign donors. Agriculture represents about 25 percent of the country’s GDP, and until recently it employed – directly or indirectly – up to two-thirds of the population.

Yet for several decades there has been little investment. The Ministry of Agriculture usually gets less than five percent of the government’s budget, and until recently, foreign funding for food aid far outstripped – and sometimes more than doubled – funding for agriculture.

In 2009, a mission from U.N. High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis deplored “the abandon of agricultural sector and of national production for the past three decades” and also criticised the government and various foreign government and non-governmental agencies for “multiple strategies and programs, which are sometimes contradictory” and for the “endless conferences that do not deliver any concrete results.”

Other issues – like the land tenure system, deforestation and other environmental degradation, and lack of adequate seeds, fertiliser and roads – all play a part in declining agricultural output.

But the sector has also had to contend with an influx of more-cheaply produced, and sometimes subsidised, foreign food – especially U.S. rice – beginning in 1995 when the Haitian government slashed tariffs under pressure from Washington and the international financial institutions.

Whereas the country imported less than 20 percent of its food in the early 1980s, Haiti now gets over 55 percent from overseas, mostly the U.S. and the Dominican Republic.

Since the 2010 earthquake, the government and foreign donors have launched programmes aimed at redressing these wrongs. Roads are being built and canals dredged, and various projects aim to help farmers up their productivity.

But in Grande Anse, one of the most verdant and productive provinces, agronomists are worried.

“Grande Anse was the breadbasket for the other provinces,” Vériel Auguste said. “But not any more. We are losing that potential.”

As he stood in his demonstration garden, where he grows root crops, grains and trees in an effort to inspire members of his cooperative, Auguste said that nearby, other gardens sit empty.

“People leave their land,” he said, because of the lack of technical support and because their crops cannot compete with cheaper foreign food. “Not far from here are a series of beautiful fields with good land! They are closed. The people have left.”

Earlier this year and for most of 2012, not far from Auguste’s plot, stores advertised a food aid programme that he and many others say has helped drive people from their land and increase the woes of Haiti’s farmers.

A food aid “test” reviled by farmers

Although it only provided food to 18,000 families in this country of 10 million, a Haitian government-approved CARE programme that delivered “disaster relief” food vouchers offers a glimpse of how food aid can be a double-edged sword.

Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the “Tikè Manje” (“Food Voucher”) programme distributed vouchers redeemable for mostly U.S. products like rice, oil and beans up through August 2013. It was supposedly meant to assist victims of Hurricane Tomas, which hit farmers’ fields in November 2010.

Instead, it did not start up until 11 months later, and only got into full swing in 2012, one year after the storm hit. It was expanded from 12,000 to almost 18,000 beneficiaries after Hurricane Sandy hit the peninsula.

Asked why it was allowed to start one year after Tomas, when U.S. and Haitian agencies deemed that hunger was abating, the director of the government “Aba Grangou” (“Down With Hunger”) programme admitted that the region had “probably already started to recuperate”.

“But since it had already been set up, the U.S. government decided to implement it,” Director Jean Robert Brutus said.

Haiti’s CARE office gave an additional reason. CARE said the programme was a “test” of a new food voucher system, which uses the Jamaica-based Digicel telephone company to transfer credit to beneficiaries. Digicel and the Haitian government both get paid every time a transfer is made.

The programme “is simply a test in certain regions to see if we can implement the programme everywhere in the country,” coordinator Tamara Shukakidze explained in a March 2013 interview, while the Tikè Manje was still running.

At the time, CARE was hoping to be a contractor for a future USAID-funded 20-million-dollar “social security net” project that would include food vouchers, according to CARE spokesman Pierre Seneq.

Farmers and agronomists like Auguste are still livid over the voucher programme because participants were given U.S. rice and vegetable oil rather than locally produced breadfruit and other traditional foods.

“They call the programme ‘Down with Hunger,’ but to me, it’s a ‘Long Live Hunger’ programme,” Auguste said.

Dejoie Dadignac, coordinator of the Network of Dame Marie Agricultural Producers, said her federation of 26 organisations was shocked.

“At every little store we visit, even ones that used to sell cement or tin sheeting, we see a sign: ‘USAID,’” Dadignac said in a September 2012 interview. “In their radio advertising, they say they are giving people plantains and breadfruit, but that’s not what we see. We see rice, spaghetti, oil, while our products are left out.”

Queried on the issue, CARE spokesman Seneq said future programmes would source local foods and thus “contribute to the economy rather than promote foreign food”.

On Sep. 27, USAID announced that CARE was awarded a contract for a new food voucher programme for 250,000 people. When asked where the vouchers would be distributed, and if the new programme would source U.S. or Haitian food, Seneq promised details but then never fulfilled that pledge.

The new programme is funded in part by a USAID food aid budget, Food For Peace, that requires most of the money be used to purchase and ship U.S. grown- and produced-goods. No other food aid programme in the world has those restrictions.

The current administration proposed changes, but because the 2013 Farm Bill – which covers food aid, farm subsidies and food stamps – has not yet been passed, those changes have not been implemented.

Merilus Derius, 71, said he thinks the younger generations are dissuaded from farming because they lack the means to prevent environmental degradation, but also because of cheaper or free foreign food, which are now more desired than products previous generations ate.

“Before, farmers grew sorghum and ground it. They grew Congo peas, planted potatoes, planted manioc. On a morning like this, a farmer would make his coffee and then – using a thing called ‘top-top,’ a little mill – he would crush sugar cane and boil the sugar cane water, and eat cassava bread, and he would have good health!” he said. “When you lived off your garden, you were independent.”

Read the entire Behind Haiti’s Hunger series and watch two videos, shot mostly in Savanette and on Grande Anse, here.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

A woman and a girl carry water along a road near a painted portion of the Jalousie neighbourhood in September 2013. Four gallons of water weighs about 11.4 kilogrammes. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Sep 26 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Pink, green, blue, red. From a distance, the thousands of brightly coloured houses look like a painting. The observer can’t see the suffering and dangers threatening the residents of the Jalousie neighbourhood – problems that are being ignored by the government, which is spending six million dollars on a massive make-up job.

Last month, experts announced that the hillside slum, home to 45,000 to 50,000 people, sits on a secondary fault.“What we need are water and electricity.” -- A Jalousie resident who lives in a small home with 11 others

“Not only does a fault run through Jalousie, but there is also the serious danger of mudslides in the area,” geologist Claude Prépetit, co-author of a new seismological study of the capital, explained at an Aug. 2 press conference.

Many of Jalousie’s small houses are built into the side of Morne L’Hôpital, on steep inclines or in ravines that serve as canals for rainwater. Every time it rains, walls of water rush down the slopes, where officially it is illegal to build, or even to cut down trees. Due to the lack of vegetation to hold it back, the water and mud can carry away people, animals and even entire houses.

A recent Environment Ministry document notes that more than 1,300 homes should be moved because they threaten both their residents and people living in the city below. In 2012, Minister Ronald Toussaint announced plans to move residents in those homes, but when people protested, President Michel Martelly intervened, cancelling the moves and firing the minister.

Jalousie, one of many slums that ring Haiti’s capital, has no water or sanitation system. According to a recent study from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), home sizes range from eight to 30 square metres and population density “may be as high as 1,800 people per hectare”.

Jalousie’s tiny concrete homes overlook the shops, restaurants, hotels and mansions of Pétion-ville, one of the communities where Haiti’s professionals and elite live, work and play. Every day, residents, including children, have to climb narrow stairways to get fresh water – costing up to 35 cents for a five-gallon bucket – which they then carry on their heads. Five gallons of water weights about 48 pounds or 19 kilogrammes.

“Make-up job”

The Haitian government says it is in the process of spending over six million dollars on the slum, but not to deal with the double-danger or to provide services.

A page from the recent seismologic “microzonage” study showing the areas at risk of mudslides.

Instead, the administration is doing what some have called a “make-up job” – painting the houses in a project called “Jalousie en couleurs” (Jalousie in Colours), as homage to the Haitian painter Préfète Duffaut (1923-2012), who often filled his works with brightly coloured hillside houses.

Phase 1 cost the government 1.2 million dollars. Completed early this year, it coincided with the inauguration of the Hotel Occidental Royal Oasis, a five-star establishment where a simple room costs 175 dollars and a “junior suite” runs more than 350 dollars. Two nights in a suite equal more than most Haitians earn in one year.

The Oasis faces the slum. Phase 1 of the government project assured 1,000 houses were painted, making the view a little more palatable, and allegedly included the “reinforcement” of some homes, although none of the 25 beneficiaries interviewed by Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) said their home had gotten more than a paint job.

“Phase 2 will be even bigger,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told a small crowd gathered by a soccer field at the Aug. 16 inauguration. Lamothe said Phase 2 would cost five million dollars.

In his speech, Lamothe said 3,000 more homes would be painted and that the soccer field would get new stands, dressing rooms and synthetic turf. The prime minister also promised a 1.2 kilometre (less than one mile) asphalted street and the improvement of 2.8 kilometres of alleyways.

But as Lamothe sang the praises of the project, two dozen protesters with signs shouted: “We want water! We have no water” and “Schools!” and “We need a clinic!”

Asking for “patience,” the prime minister said: “We’ll deal with all the problems little by little, but you know that you have many problems and we are trying to do a lot with little means.”

A new coat of paint is not the top priority for Jalousie residents, according to HGW’s mini-survey. Asked what was most needed, 24 of 25 said they wanted schools for their children and one-fourth added they wanted better access to water.

At least one resident – who, like most people questioned by HGW, said she would prefer to remain anonymous – is out of patience.

“What we need are water and electricity,” said a woman who lives in a small home with 11 others, including two children who do not attend school.

None of the beneficiaries surveyed reported being consulted even regarding the choice of colours.

Doing laundry by hand on her little porch, one resident said she was not at home when the painting took place, and that she is not satisfied.

“I can paint my own house,” she said. “When I got home, I saw a bunch of splashes of paint on my wall.”

Who benefits?

From afar the colours are striking. But for the houses not facing the hotel, the situation is different: grey cement blocks. Even the houses that benefited only got partial paint-jobs – just the outward facing walls get coloured.

One Jalousie resident, Sylvestre Telfort, has the same opinion as many: the project is meant to cover the slum with a kind of make-up or greasepaint because it sits directly in front of the Oasis and another new hotel, the Best Western Premier.

On its Internet site, the Oasis promises its clients a “magnificent views of the city”. Best Western, where rooms run 150 dollars a night, tells its future visitors that the hotel is “located in the beautiful hills of Pétion-Ville, a well-known fashionable suburb of Port-au-Prince”.

“The project to paint Jalousie is nothing more than a social appeasement carried out by the government to satisfy the bourgeoisie who for years has tried to exterminate us, in vain,” Telfort explained. “They can’t drop a bomb to eliminate people. So they have to took another tack and coloured the outsides of our houses.”

The former minister of the environment is worried. “The Morne l’Hôpital situation is chaotic. It’s a matter of public safety… The concrete constructions prevent rainwater from seeping into the soil,” Toussaint told HGW. “Painting is not the answer.”

Claude Prépetit, coordinator of the seismologic study, is also concerned.

Many residents are in danger “because of the risk of mudslides and earth movements [and] the magnification of vibrations during an earthquake,” the geologist said.

Prépetit thinks the government should “interdict all future construction in the region” and “identify the more hazardous areas and move out everyone whose lives are at risk.”

As a last step, after assuring the population has services, “they can paint the facades of the permitted houses, if they want to make them pretty,” he added.

During his visit to the slum, only 14 days after Prépetit and other experts announced the secondary fault, Prime Minister Lamothe made no mention of the seismic risks.

“You are going to see what we can do to improve people’s lives,” Lamothe promised. “You will be proud! You will be happy!”

After his speech, Lamothe and his entourage got into an SUV to drive back down the mountain. Residents went back to their daily journeys, going up and down stairs to find water, trying to survive one more day in the slum called by Best Western “a fashionable suburb”.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

The full unabridged series in English and French can be found here.

Styrofoam containers in one of the many drainage canals in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. Most dump into the Caribbean Sea after passing through poor neighbourhoods, like this one in Cité Soleil, where the human and animal fecal matter, styrofoam, and other trash regularly flood the zone after heavy rains. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint-Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Aug 16 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Despite two government decrees making their import and usage illegal, styrofoam cups and plates are used and littered all over the capital, as well as bought and sold, wholesale and retail, completely out in the open.

The first decree, dated Aug. 9, 2012, went into effect on Oct. 1, 2012, as part of a decree that also outlawed black plastic bags, used by street vendors as well as in greenhouses all over the country.“Plastic trash is a sanitation problem and a public health problem. It is also a problem because of the damage it causes to coral and marine ecosystems.” -- former environment minister Ronald Toussaint

The environment minister at that time, Ronald Toussaint, did not sign the 2012 decree, which was announced and lauded by various media and environmental websites as a big step forward for Haiti.

“Because of my experience in this domain, I did not sign the document,” Toussaint told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW). “The concerned parties – the polluters, the importers, and the business people – were not part of its elaboration. The government’s decree offered a very reductionist approach to dealing with plastic waste.”

Toussaint said he was also worried about the possible impact on agriculture, since many people and organisations sprout seeds in small black plastic bags.

In spite of the obvious failure of the 2012 decree, the government of President Michel Martelly and Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe recently adopted a new one, dated Jul. 10, 2013 and written in much the same language.

There is an “interdiction on producing, importing, commercializing, and using, in any form whatsoever, plastic bags and objects made of styrofoam for food purposes, such as trays, bottles, bags, cups, and plates,” according to the Jul. 10 issue of the government’s official journal of record, Le Moniteur.

“As soon as this decree becomes applicable, beginning on August 1, 2013, all arriving packages that contain these objects will be confiscated by customs authorities and the owners will be sanctioned according to customs regulations,” the decree reads.

In addition to being a bit demagogic in nature – given that the first decree was completely ignored – the new decree has also angered the Dominican Republic’s industries, Haiti’s principal suppliers of styrofoam plates and cups for take-out food.

A sea of styrofoam

If the last 10 months are any indication, there is little reason to think the new decree will bring about much change. The streets of the capital region are awash in styrofoam. Any passerby, police officer, or state official can see bright white products, as well as the illegal black plastic bags, being used and discarded everywhere.

Plastic trash has been catastrophic for the environment. The capital region is drained by open canals that lead directly to the Caribbean Sea. In addition to clogging the canals and causing flooding in the poor neighbourhoods through which it passes, sea currents carry the trash all over the world.

“Plastic trash is a real problem, in my opinion,” Toussaint said. “It is a sanitation problem and a public health problem. It is also a problem because of the damage it causes to coral and marine ecosystems.”

Easy to see and to buy

In spite of its dangers, and in spite of the two decrees, styrofoam products are everywhere.

An investigation by HGW in downtown Port-au-Prince and the adjoining city of Pétion-ville in May and June 2013 found that almost all of the street-food vendors were using the illegal products.

Downtown, on four streets studied, 28 of 28 vendors – 100 percent – used styrofoam dishes and cups. In six streets of Pétion-ville, journalists tallied 20 of 26 vendors – 77 percent – using the illegal products. A visit last week, after the new decree went into effect, revealed that nothing had changed.

Two very popular Pétion-ville restaurants, Contigo Bar Resto Club and Mac Epi, were also using styrofoam products, both before and after Aug. 1. And many – perhaps even all – of the nearly a dozen franchises and restaurants of the popular Epi d’Or chain use styrofoam take-out containers. Many also use styrofoam cups and styrofoam plates for those “eating in”.

On its website, Epi d’Or says it works “with strict respect for laws and for the public interest”.

Asked via email why the chain has been using the products, which have been illegal for over 10 months, owner Thierry Attié responded that his outlets had replaced the cups but not the “clamshells”. However, HGW observed styrofoam cups in use at Epi d’Or’s Pétion-ville outlet on Aug. 9, the day of Attié’s message.

Styrofoam products are also widely available wholesale. Of 11 food and general supply stores or stands visited in June and July, 10 openly sold the illegal products. On Aug. 5, five days after the new decree made them illegal for a second time, they were still on sale.

Speaking in June, one businessman told HGW that nobody really paid attention to the first degree.

“The ban was not applied,” said the merchant while working at his store on Rue Rigaud. “We heard about it on the radio.” (The HGW journalist did not reveal his identity and instead pretended to be a client. He did not ask most businesspeople for their names, but HGW has meticulous records of the stores visited.)

A businesswoman supervising a team unloading merchandise from a truck at her Rue Rigaud store told HGW, as did at least two other businesspeople, that she bought her styrofoam products at SHODECOSA, one of the city’s industrial parks housing assembly industries which receives regular deliveries from the Dominican Republic in large, closed containers.

SHODECOSA (Superior Housing Development Corporation S.A.) is the country’s biggest private industrial park. It belongs to the WIN Group, the conglomerate owned by the Mevs family, which also has interests in maritime transport, assembly industries, and ethanol. WIN also runs the country’s largest private port, TEVASA, in the Varreux area of Cité Soleil.

“Ever since Lamothe became prime minister, I stopped going to the Haitian-Dominican border because only the bourgeois have the containers that are authorised to cross the border with merchandise,” the businesswoman claimed.

“It is not easy to import plates,” another businessman said. “You have to work really hard to get them at SHODECOSA for an exorbitant price.”

A third said he buys at SHODECOSA and also buys them by the container at the border towns Elias Pinas and Malpasse.

HGW did not speak with WIN Group about the allegations. However, the fact that various Pétion-Ville stores told matching stories about where they got their products indicates that during the 10 months of the first decree, and perhaps still, styrofoam plates, cups, and other items were for sale somewhere inside the park.

A plastic decree vs. a rigid policy?

In the second anti-plastics decree, the Haitian government promised, “the Ministry of Economy and Finances will take the steps necessary to facilitate the import of inputs, recipients, and paper products or cardboard that are 100% biodegradable such as bags made of fiber or sisal.”

To date, apart from a raid on small wholesalers in the poor neighbourhood of Marché Solomon on Aug. 12, no “steps” have been announced, nor have there been any major confiscations or arrests at places like Epi d’Or or the SHODECOSA industrial park.  Restaurants, street sellers and others are still using styrofoam cups and plates that will eventually end up in ravines and canals.

Another law meant to protect the environment makes tree-cutting illegal, but piles of planks cut from Haitian trees are for sale on city streets all over Haiti.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Haitians concerned about the impacts of unchecked mining meet at a sweltering tin-roofed church near Grand Bois on Jul. 5, 2013. Source: HGW/Lafontaine Orvild

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Aug 1 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

As the government works on preparing “an attractive law that will entice investors”, Haitian popular organisations are mobilising and forming networks to resist mining in their country.

Already one-third of the north of Haiti is under research, exploration, or exploitation license to foreign companies."We in Baie de Henne are against any eventual mining because we will not profit one bit. It will have harmful impacts that destroy our fertile lands and our fruit trees and dry up our aquifers.” -- Vernicia Phillus, a member of the Tèt Kole women’s group

Some 2,400 square kilometres have been parceled out to Haitian firms fronting for U.S. and Canadian concerns. Some estimate that Haiti’s mineral wealth – mostly gold, copper, and silver – could be worth as much as 20 billion dollars. The awarding of permits behind closed doors, with no independent or community oversight, has angered many in Haiti, who fear that the government is opening the country up to systematic pillage.

But the head of the government mining agency told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) his concern is to assure that Haiti is made more “attractive” to potential investors.

“We need an attractive mining law,” said Ludner Remarais, head of the Mining and Energy Agency. “A mining law that will entice investors.”

The current law is obsolete, according to Remarais.

Haiti’s “gold rush” has been going on for the past five years or so, since the price of gold and other minerals rose. Until last year, the government and the companies cut their deals behind closed doors. After an investigation revealed that 15 percent of the county was under contract, on Feb. 20, 2013 the Haitian Senate adopted a resolution demanding all activities cease in order to allow for a national debate and for analysis of all contracts.

“We are scrupulously respecting the decision,” Remarais said, but he added that the resolution does not annul the rights already acquired.

Local resistance in the gold-rich regions

Peasant, human rights, food sovereignty and environmental organisations are worried about the disastrous effects the mining industry could have on water quality, farmland, and on the affected regions in general and have formed the national Collective Against Mining to assist local associations with information and consciousness-raising sessions.

On Jul. 5, over 200 farmers from the area around the Grand Bois deposit – about 11 kilometres south of Limbé, in the North department – got together to discuss the mining operation and their futures. They spoke of their worries for three hours in sweltering tin-roofed church.

“When someone talks about mining, our history makes us think of slavery, of the takeover of our farmlands,” said Willy Pierre, a social sciences teacher from a nearby school. “We could lose our fertile fields. We will be forced off our land. Where will we live?”

The Grand Bois deposit is rich in gold and copper, according to tests carried out by the Canadian mining company Eurasian Minerals. Eurasian owns the license given by the BME to its Haitian subsidiary, Société Minière Citadelle S.A.

During the meeting, many people said they were nervous.

“This mining business should be a lesson for all of us,” warned Jean Vilmé, a farmer from the Bogé region of Grand Bois. “Not only will those of us who live around the mineral deposit perish, the entire country will be swallowed up!”

Two weeks earlier about 50 members of local and national organisations met in Jean Rabel, an impoverished town in the Northwest department with poor roads and no water system or health facilities. Participants watched and debated a video on mining in Haiti and discussed their next steps.

Earlier that month, some 60 representatives of the associations in the collective organised a day-long meeting at Montrouis, northeast of the capital. Of particular concern are the protection of ground water, food sovereignty, agricultural land, biodiversity, health, and land ownership.

Clébért Duval, a member of the peasant association Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (“Small Haitian Peasants Working Together”) from Port-de-Paix, noted that a state that is working in favour of its people could use mineral resources to “change the conditions of the popular masses, peasants, vulnerable people, and could give this country a new face”.

However, he said, “If the state is a predator that is working for the multinationals, for the capitalist system which, since it is in crisis, is taking over the riches of poor countries to fight the crisis, then that state will always encourage mining. All the money that should go to the people will go to the foreign firms, except for a few crumbs for the local guys who are serving as go-betweens. The mining companies will get all the riches, just as they have in the past.”

Many rejected the officials’ arguments that mining is important for the country’s development and economy.

“In 2012, some companies did prospecting,” said Vernicia Phillus, a member of the Tèt Kole women’s coordination in Baie de Henne. “They took away soil and rock samples. Each person who worked for them got between 200 and 250 gourdes (4.65 to 5.81 dollars) a day.

“We in Baie de Henne are against any eventual mining because we will not profit one bit. It will have harmful impacts that destroy our fertile lands and our fruit trees and dry up our aquifers.”

Government and World Bank also organising

In early June, the Haitian mining agency and the World Bank organised a “Mining Forum” aimed at developing “the mining sector in a way that makes it a motor for the country’s economic takeoff.” Most of the speakers were from foreign institutions and from mining companies.

Parliamentarians, local elected officials, independent geologists and researchers, representatives of the people from the regions concerned, and grassroots organisations did not address the room.

One of the meeting’s principle objectives was allegedly to sketch out the general contours of a new mining law for the country, even though World Bank officials said they had kicked off that process earlier this year, according to media reports.

During the Jun. 3-4 forum, Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe said that his government was working with “competent experts who have [Haiti’s] national interests at heart”, according to the Associated Press.

But World Bank involvement with the law appears to be a conflict of interest. In 2010, the International Finance Commission (IFC), a branch of the bank, invested about five million in Eurasian Mineral’s Haiti operations, receiving Eurasian shares in exchange.

The World Bank is often criticised by organisations like Mining Watch Canada, Earthworks, and others for being lax where the protection of poor countries is concerned, and for its role in the “continuation of colonialism” in Africa, Asia, and Latin America through its important loans to mining companies.

In March, the U.S. government representative to the World Bank abstained in a vote to approve a bank loan for 12 billion dollars to a mining operation in the Gobi Desert, citing concerns over potential negative environmental impacts. The bank loans were approved anyway, according to Inter Press Service.

Asked about an eventual new law that would be “attractive” and capable of “enticing investors”, the director of DOP, a member of the Collective Against Mining, said he was concerned.

“Mining legislation that is ‘attractive’ will open the country up for ‘business,’” wrote attorney Patrice Florvilus on Jul. 14, 2013, making reference to the government’s slogan “Haiti – Open for business.”

“Business, without considering the deleterious effects on community life and on the environment, which is already deteriorating at a worrying pace,” he added.

In a Jul. 22 note, the Collective wrote the following: “We want a truly national law and international conventions that protect life, water, land, and the environment, and that outlaw mining which brings with it pollution, destruction, contamination, and more hunger.”

Please also see other Haiti Grassroots Watch stories on the issue: Dossier #18 and Dossier #27

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

A man crosses a bridge over one of Cité Soleil’s waste canals that lead to the Port-au-Prince harbor. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jul 26 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Lack of financing for a 10-year eradication plan means that cholera will likely be endemic to Haiti for years to come.

Cholera spreads via contaminated food, water and fecal matter. One of the essential parts of the government’s 2.2-billion-dollar National Plan for the Elimination of Cholera in Haiti is financing for sanitation systems nationwide.“Haiti is the only country in the entire world whose sanitation coverage decreased in the last decade.” -- Dr. Rishi Rattan of Physicians for Haiti

The majority of Haitians – about eight million out of the country’s 10 million people – do not have access to a hygienic sanitation system. They defecate in the open, in fields, in ravines and on riverbanks. The capital region produces over 900 tonnes of human excreta every day, according to the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS).

“Haiti is the only country in the entire world whose sanitation coverage decreased in the last decade,” noted Dr. Rishi Rattan, a member of Physicians for Haiti, an association of U.S.-based doctors and health professionals.

“Before the cholera outbreak or the earthquake, diarrhea was the number one killer of children under five and the second leading cause of all death in Haiti. Given that cholera is a water-borne illness that relies upon lack of access to clean water, it is highly likely that cholera will become endemic in Haiti without full funding of Haiti’s cholera elimination plan by entities such as the United Nations,” Rattan told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) in an email.

Cholera, brought to Haiti in October 2010 by soldiers from the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), quickly spread throughout the country. Almost 3,000 are infected each month. To date, over 600,000 people have been infected and at least 8,190 have died.

The death rate is on the rise in the countryside, due in part to the lack of cholera treatment centres. At the epidemic’s peak, there were 285. Today, there are only 28. Once financing ran out, most humanitarian agencies abandoned the country.

Worse, one of the two large waste treatment facilities built following the earthquake recently went out of service.

The cholera-excrement connection

Written with help from the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO), the U.S. government and UNICEF, the cholera elimination plan targets human excrement. The sanitation budget alone tops 467 million dollars.

“According to our figures, less than 30 percent of the population has access to what we might call basic sanitation,” Edwige Petit, head of sanitation for the government’s National Agency of Water and Sanitation (DINEPA), told HGW. “In neighbouring countries, 92 to 98 percent have basic sanitation.”

By DINEPA’s count, about half of households in the countryside, and 10 to 20 percent in the cities, lack access to a proper toilet or latrine. In Cité Soleil, a slum that is part of the capital region, some use any open patch of ground available.

“When our children have to take a poop, we put them on a little bowl,” explained resident Wisly Bellevue. “We put a little water in there. Once they are done, we throw it into an empty lot.”

Big institutions with septic systems are serviced by “desludging” trucks. In 2010 and 2011, for example, humanitarian agencies emptied the thousands of portable toilets in the refugee camps for the 1.3 million people made homeless by the 2010 earthquake.

Those who cannot pay for that service often hire a more economical one: the men called “bayakou” in Haiti, who empty latrines and septic systems by hand. The bayakou work at night. Most dump their cargo in rivers, canals and ravines.

Before the cholera epidemic, even the trucks used to dump the feces mixed with urine into the ravines that drain into the Caribbean Sea.

Advances and challenges

DINEPA and its partners have made considerable advances in sanitation since 2010. With assistance from the Spanish government, UNICEF and others, DINEPA built two treatment centres for the capital region, and hopes to build 22 others for a total budget of 159 million dollars.

To date, however, only three have begun to be built: near St. Marc, in Les Cayes in the south, and in Limonade in the north.

The impressive Morne à Cabri waste treatment centre, costing about 2.5 million dollars and inaugurated in September 2011, “has the capacity to treat 500 cubic metres of excreta per day, which is the equivalent of what 500,000 produce,” according to DINEPA.

But there is already a problem.

Today, the centre is closed down. The gates are locked. Lack of financing is one reason. The fees paid by excreta trucking companies don’t generate enough revenue.

Also, after the humanitarian agencies stopped managing the refugee camps – they pulled out once funding ended – deliveries from the portable toilets became problematic.

“We went from having latrine matter being made up of 10 to 20 percent trash, to 70 to 80 percent,” Petit explained. “The treatment centre was not built to handle trash. It was built to handle water and fecal matter. The pools collapsed, blocked with trash.”

Even though it is struggling financially, DINEPA is determined to get things working again.

“We are going to use government equipment. If we can get 40,000 or 50,000 dollars, we will be able to clean it,” she said.

Of course, the other treatment centre is working, but two challenges remain: convincing the bayakou and others to deliver their loads, and the financing issue. For, even if the excreta is delivered, bayakou will not be able to pay.

Another part of the plan is an education campaign aimed at combating “poor defecation and hygiene practices”. According to Petit, many rural families don’t even bother building latrines any longer.

“Over the past 30 years, a certain mentality has developed, where people know that it’s quite possible somebody else [like a foreign agency] will give them toilets,” Petit explained.

Rather than giving out free toilets and latrines, DINEPA hopes to set up a 120-million-dollar fund that will allow families to borrow the money necessary to do their own construction.

Anti-cholera plan up a creek?

But many aspects of the cholera elimination plan are on hold. Haiti requires 2.2 billion dollars, and a plan for the neighbouring Dominican Republic needs an additional 77 million dollars. For the years 2013 and 2014 alone, Haiti needs 443.7 million dollars.

The World Bank, PAHO and UNICEF recently promised 29 million dollars, and U.N. agencies just offered another 2.5 million dollars. But, as of May 31, the pledges remain around 210 million dollars, less than half of what is needed.

“[The U.N.] has decreased the amount of money they initially pledged and it has yet to actually be disbursed,” said Dr. Rattan. “This is crippling the Haitian government’s ability to implement their life-saving cholera elimination plan.”

In Cité Soleil, Michelène Milfort knows very well that there will be no plan implemented any time soon. She lives in a tent. Her camp has 38 deteriorating temporary shelters, tents and shacks and only three SOIL latrines to take care of their needs. Before SOIL’s help, they used a nearby empty lot.

John Abniel Poliné is a neighbour.

“Some people have no regular place to take care of their needs. Sometimes a person has to use a little plastic bag, that he then throws into a canal,” he admitted. “It is not always the fault of the individual. You need to understand that if the person had a place to go, he would not be forced to that extreme.”

Poliné said he wonders about the priorities of the Haitian government and of international actors, especially MINUSTAH.

“They just keep giving MINUSTAH thousands of dollars, while the people of Cité Soleil live in subhuman conditions,” he said.

MINUSTAH’s 2012-2013 budget is 638 million dollars, over 200 million more than what is needed by the Haiti and the Dominican Republic for the first two years of their cholera elimination plans.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

A typical Canaan hillside, with many houses under construction. Credit: HGW/Milo Milfort

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jun 19 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Three years after its star-studded launch by President René Préval, actor Sean Penn and other Haitian and foreign dignitaries, the model “Corail-Cesselesse” camp for Haiti’s 2010 earthquake victims has helped give birth to what might become the country’s most expansive – and most expensive – slum.

Known collectively as “Canaan”, “Jerusalem” and “ONAville”, the new shantytown spread across 1,100-hectares is here to stay, Haitian officials told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW). Taxpayers and foreign donors will likely spend hundreds of millions to urbanise the region and as much as another 64 million U.S. dollars to pay off landowners, who are threatening to sue the government and humanitarian agencies.

Three years after its launch, the multimillion-dollar model camp located 18 kilometres northeast of the capital of Port-au-Prince is today surrounded by tens of thousands of squatters’ shacks and homes that have become a source of embarrassment for local and international actors alike.

Before the earthquake, most of this arid, rocky expanse running from the outskirts of Port-au-Prince up to Cabaret was largely empty. Much of it is owned by the Haitian firm NABATEC S.A, which since 1999 had tried to develop it into an “integrated economic zone” (IEZ) called “Habitat Haïti 2020”.

The Habitat Haiti 2020 plan included industrial parks, single- and multi-unit housing for various income levels, schools, green spaces and a shopping mall. A Korean company and a U.S.-based humanitarian group had already purchased land within its perimeter, and on the eve of the quake, NABATEC was holding discussions with a number of foreign firms interested in setting up factories and was preparing to break ground.

“It was a 15-year, 2-billion-billion dollar project, and everyone had already given their approval, including the Haitian government and the World Bank,” according to Gérald Emile “Aby” Brun, an architect, the president of NABATEC and vice president of the TECINA S.A. planning and construction firm."We can't move them out... The idea is to reorganise the space so that people can live."
-- Odnell David

A 2011 World Bank study of potential IEZ sites ranked it best out of 21 possibilities around the country, calling it potentially “high-performing” and “the clearest application of the IEZ concept among any proposed project in Haiti”.

Model camp leads to disaster

Today, the plans have been shelved. The once empty landscape is now home to perhaps 100,000 people: 10,000 in the planned camps and the rest squatters. And they aren’t going anywhere.

“We can’t move them out,” Haitian government planner Odnell David told HGW in an exclusive interview. “The idea is to reorganise the space so that people can live.”

Urbanising about half of the wasteland will cost Haitian and foreign taxpayers “many hundreds of millions of dollars”, noted David, an architect and the director of the housing section of the government’s Construction of Housing and Public Buildings Agency. The price tag for initial infrastructure work already exceeds 50 million U.S. dollars.

Opened in April 2010 for earthquake victims evacuated from unsafe camps, the Corail-Cesselesse camp represented the reconstruction’s model resettlement. It sits on two sloping parcels of the 5,000 hectares of private land declared “of public utility” by the central government in March 2010.

But from the start, the choice to move people to the desert-like plain was controversial for two reasons.

First, some critics accused Brun and NABATEC of seeking to profit from the earthquake. Then, many said the land beneath the camps, and indeed much of the region itself, was not appropriate for settlement, whether temporary or permanent, for environmental and economic reasons. 

Despite the controversies, humanitarian agencies like the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), World Vision and American Refugee Committee (ARC) together spent over 10 million dollars to build about 1,500 small houses, schools, playgrounds, latrines and solar-powered street lamps.

Agencies had planned to build many more camps nearby, but as soon as the U.S. Army bulldozers cleared the first plots, tens of thousands of people invaded the surrounding area, “buying” parcels from racketeers, marking off plots and pitching makeshift tents.

No one in the central government said anything to prevent the incursions, which continue today. Many say the land was offered to supporters of President Préval’s “Inite” political party for 10 dollars per square metre.

The new “landowners” received fake titles in exchange for cash and their votes in the upcoming presidential elections, according to Brun and other sources, who asked not to be named.

Planned or not, and political scheme or not, today those tents have turned into houses built every which way, in what the UCLBP’s David calls a “savage urbanisation” with “no infrastructure, no water, no electricity, no sanitation”.

“People just appropriated land and are trying to accomplish their dreams of becoming homeowners,” he said.

NABATEC wants to be paid

At first, Brun and NABATEC hoped the government and major reconstruction actors would eject the squatters and camp residents, or to at least turn the camp’s temporary shelters into permanent houses so that they could become the beginning of Habitat Haïti 2020 (see Capitalising on Disaster?).

But as months passed, the NABATEC partners – some of them members of Haiti’s most economically powerful families – realised their project would no longer be possible.

“The country lost a great opportunity,” Brun said. “I have been working on that project for 16 years.”

Now, NABATEC wants to be indemnified according to the law and the Constitution. The company has submitted paperwork to the government tax office and to each of the three ministers of finance who have held office since the “public utility” declaration.

If the government reimburses NABATEC for that land and the land currently occupied by the camps and the squatters, the company is due 64 million dollars.

“We have submitted all the papers and titles,” Brun said in May. “Verbally, in conversations, they say, ‘Yes, we recognise it’s your land,’ and they say they are going to pay us, but… nothing on paper.”

In an effort to confirm Brun’s statements, HGW made almost a dozen requests for interviews with tax office officials, in writing and in person, over the course of three months. Raymond Michel, head of the property division, promised an interview, but warned, “This dossier is very, very sensitive,” and later reneged on his promise.

Brun, meanwhile, is growing impatient. NABATEC is open to the idea of negotiating, but the company is also thinking about suing both the government and the humanitarian agencies that are continuing to carry out projects at Corail or are helping the squatters in the areas outside the camps, for “infringing on property owners rights”.

“It’s been three years now,” Brun said.

Seeking funding from, and for, the promised land

While NABATEC lobbies the Ministry of Finance and the tax office for monetary compensation, the government’s Construction of Housing and Public Buildings Agency is also seeking funding, but not to pay the landowners. Instead, the agency hopes to carry out its own development: the urbanisation of about 500 hectares for the squatters.

According to David, an initial plan is ready.

“It is a very perfect plan. It has roads, it has water systems, it has sanitation,” David said, but he refused to share it with journalists, claiming it had not yet been approved.

But the proto-slum won’t turn into an organised neighbourhood any time soon. Among other challenges, the residents who have marked out “their” land will have to be convinced to move to make way for infrastructure.

“We will need a lot of resources, and the state doesn’t have all the funding it would need… We are seeking financing so that we can at least begin,” he said. “It won’t happen tomorrow.”

In the meantime, newcomers continue to arrive at the no man’s land with bundles of belongings, tent stakes and a few cement blocks.

Read the second article in this two-part series here. Original story at http://www.haitigrassrootswatch.org.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Excerpt:

Joel Monfiston next to his shed in Sector 3 of Corail-Cesselesse Camp. Credit: HGW/Milo Milfort

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jun 19 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Despite the unforgiving sun and its sweltering heat, Joel Monfiston is working, hammering a piece of worn plywood, watering flowers and picking the weeds out from between rocks and pebbles.

Monfiston, a 34-year-old father and husband, is one of about 10,000 people who live in what was publicised as the model settlement for the 1.3 million Haitians displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

Monfiston lives at the Corail-Cesselesse camp, inaugurated in the spring of 2010 by Hollywood actor Sean Penn, then-Haitian President René Préval and other officials. The settlement is 18 kilometres from the capital in the middle of an almost lunar landscape.

Soon after it opened, tens of thousands of squatters set up tents, huts and houses on over 1,000 hectares of land surrounding the camp, laying the groundwork for what will soon be Haiti’s largest slum. (See “Reconstruction of Haiti Slum to Cost Hundreds of Millions of Dollars”.)

At first, Monfiston and his family lived in a tent. Now they have a 24-square-metre “temporary shelter” built by the humanitarian agency World Vision for 4,500 U.S. dollars and made mostly of plywood and sheet metal. Like most Haitians, he survives with day jobs here and there and with help from friends and family. He also tries his hand at commerce.

“Things are not easy. Imagine: they put you here, but there’s no work,” he said.

Monfiston has dreams. He hopes to set up a shop in the little shed he is building. He would like to grow more in his garden. But those remain dreams. For now, all he has are a few flowers and a few walls for his “store”, which has no shelves, no door, no cooler, no products.

And, like other Corail residents, while he does have access to latrines, some electricity (solar-powered street lamps), playgrounds, a clinic and schools, water is not so easy to find.

In 2011, the United Nations and international humanitarian agency Oxfam promised that a new system of cisterns and kiosks would soon provide residents with water from the state water agency.

Two years later, the faucets remain dry. Residents buy water at five gourdes (about 12 U.S. cents) per bucket from private vendors or from the committees that manage the few still-functioning water “bladders” left from the camp’s early days, when water and food were free and when agencies provided “cash for work” jobs and start-up funds for entrepreneurs.

Today, all of the big agencies are gone. Trumpeting their successes and claiming to have prepared a “transition” to the local authorities, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), American Refugee Committee (ARC) and World Vision all pulled out (although World Vision still supports the Corail School, which it built).

“Mayor of Croix-des-Bouquets is the New Camp Manager“, a cheery article from the United Nations peacekeeping mission declared in a May 27, 2011 bulletin. But HGW found no evidence of any local authorities or assistance on two separate visits to the camp.

The “City Hall Annex” at the Corail camp was shuttered, and residents told journalists that they could not remember when they last saw anyone from the government.

“Nobody from the mayor’s office has set foot here for many months,” said Racide d’Or, a member of the Corail residents committee.

“They were only around when they knew there was land in the area they could ‘sell’, ” continued the mother of two, who lost her home in earthquake. “There is no ‘government’ or ‘state’ for those of us who live here. We have to figure out everything ourselves.”

The Croix-des-Bouquets City Hall annex in the nearby squatters’ settlement known as “Canaan” is sweltering at midday. The “office” is an empty container and a “conference room” of plywood and a blue plastic tarp roof. Two men there said they worked for City Hall but refused to give their names or allow their voices to be recorded.

“They just dumped us here,” said one, aged about 30. “We don’t have the means to work. Our supervisor never comes to see how we are doing.”

“I’d like to know what they were thinking when they put this office here,” said the other one, older, who was slouched in a plastic chair. “We don’t do anything.”

The absence of humanitarian agencies has one benefit. When agencies were handing out food, jobs and cash, gangs and “mafias” ran various parts of the camps. An Oxfam programme that handed out up to 1,000 dollars to some – but not all – small businesspeople led to disagreements, rumours, protests and eventually arrests.

“The NGOs divided us. People fought with each other,” Auguste Gregory told HGW as he sat with friends next to his telephone-charging business: a table covered with power strips and chargers.

“Some people went to prison. Others went into hiding. We were all there for the same reason, but they divided us,” he remembered.

For much of 2010, a gang calling itself “The Committee of Nine” threatened residents and aid providers alike, so much so that ARC Camp Manager Richard Poole quit his job and left the country.

“My three months at Corail were one of the most difficult periods I have experienced in my 30 years as a humanitarian worker,” Poole later told HGW in an email interview. ARC received about 400,000 U.S. dollars to manage the camp for eight months in 2010.

Still, some humanitarian actors say the Corail settlement was not a complete failure.

“It is important to look at where the families were at the beginning of the earthquake and where they are now,” World Vision told HGW in an email. The agency said it spent about 7 million dollars on 1,200 shelters, a school, playgrounds and various programs.

People “came from areas which were prone to flash flooding, mudslides and disease outbreaks, but now they are in a safer and more secure community”, the agency pointed out. “The families have homes and are protected.”

For Monfiston and his neighbours, however, the “outcome” has not yet produced a way that can pay for food and school for his children.

Alexis Roffy Eddiness Djoly Barns, an artist, is tired of waiting for work, for water and for an “outcome”. He is also nervous about the changing landscape of the region, which is now home to the 10,000 camp residents and perhaps 100,000 squatters.

“They are starting to build a slum right over there,” he said, indicating the expanse of small houses in Jerusalem and Canaan. “Each person is fighting for his little piece of land. The government should do what it’s supposed to do and say – ‘No, this must stop!'”

Read the first article in this two-part series here. Original story at http://www.haitigrassrootswatch.org.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Excerpt:

Students at a public school in Croix-des-Bouquets. Credit: Haiti Grassroots Watch/Marc Schindler Saint Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 17 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Ever since his election in 2011, Haitian President Michel Martelly has touted his “free school” program as one of the government’s major accomplishments. “A victory for students!” banners and posters boast.

The Program for Universal Free and Obligatory Education (Programme de scolarisation universelle gratuite et obligatoire – PSUGO) is a program that costs 43 million U.S. dollars per year and aims to send over one million young Haitians to school every year for five years.

A two-month investigation by Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) in Port-au-Prince and Léogâne, however, found more children in school but also discovered a long list of unkept promises, inadequate funding levels, late payments and even suspicions of corruption.

“In my opinion, the PSUGO is a failure!” exclaimed Jean Clauvin Joly, director of the Centre Culturel du Divin Roi, a private school in Croix-des-Bouquets about 15 kilometres north of the capital of Port-au-Prince. “Last year, we suffered under that program. One of the many terrible things was that we were paid late. Thanks to the delay, a lot of our teachers quit.”

At Joly’s school, first and second graders share the same room and the same teacher, Francie Déogène. A thin sheet of plywood that also serves as a “blackboard” separates her classroom from others. Dérogène doesn’t have a desk. She piles everything on a plastic chair. Facing her, on four benches, ten students repeat together “a pineapple, a melon…” This is a writing course.

‘The state guarantees the right to education’

During the 2011 presidential elections, “lekòl gratis”, or “free school”, was a favourite refrain of singer-candidate Joseph Michel Martelly. But in Haiti, the guarantee of free education is not just a politician’s promise; it is an obligation. According to the Constitution, the state “guarantees the right to education… free of charge”.

The PSUGO program aims to keep that promise by paying school fees for primary school children: 250 gourdes (about 6 U.S. dollars) for public school students and about  3,600 gourdes, or 90 U.S. dollars, for those at private school. (In Haiti, slightly more than 80 percent of schools are private.) PSUGO is also supposed to open new schools and ensure that students have supplies and books and that teachers are properly trained.

The government claims 1,287,814 new students are in school this year through the PSUGO program, an impressive number considering that Haiti has only about 3.5 million young people aged 14 and under. HGW was not able to confirm this figure and has reason to doubt it, first and foremost because it is only one of many.

HGW did not have access to the PSUGO budget, nor could it visit all of the 10,000 schools allegedly inscribed in the program. But journalists did visit 20 schools, most of them staffed by angry or frustrated teachers.

Jean Marie Monfils, a teacher and also the director of a school in Léogâne, about 30 kilometres west of Port-au-Prince, is furious about PSUGO’s false promises. “They talked about a uniform, about hot lunches, and other things. But from where I am sitting, I can say we haven’t gotten hardly anything. We are the ‘forgotten’ of Léogâne.”

Monfils’ experience is not unique. Hercule André, a man in his fifties who directs a public school in Darbonne, outside Léogâne, lauds the initiative but adds, “The only benefit that the students get is that they don’t pay anything. Apart from that, there’s nothing. The students come to school, but they don’t have the books that were promised so that they can follow courses.”

HGW’s investigation in the capital and around Léogâne discovered that only two of the 20 schools visited reported receiving school supplies and books. As of late November 2012 – ten weeks after classes had started – only one of the 20 schools reported having been paid for the current school year, and 16 out of 20 said the school still had not received the final payment for the previous school year.

“I can’t even tell you if we are part of the program or not,” Monfils admitted with an air of desperation. “At the moment I am speaking to you, we haven’t gotten anything from the authorities. It’s a really huge problem, because many of the schools that signed up with PSUGO haven’t even gotten what was due them for the 2011-2012 school year.”

The National Confederation of Haitian Teachers (Confédération nationale des éducateurs et éducatrices haïtiens – CNEH), one of the country’s national teachers’ unions, confirmed the claim.

“The fact that the government hasn’t disbursed the money on time has been a big problem for school directors, who haven’t been able to pay their teachers,” reported Edith Délourdes Delouis, teacher and CNEH General Secretary.

Quality control and fraud

Apparently, the government has also been unable to supervise new teachers to the degree it claimed it would. Despite the announcement that 2012-1013 would see a “turn towards quality” with more supervision, directors of schools visited by HGW said they could do virtually whatever they want. Of 20 schools visited, 25 percent had not received a single visit and another 24 percent had received only one.

Guillaume Jean, director of the Collège Chrétien in Léogâne confirmed, embarrassed: “We haven’t gotten many visits. They just call to get information.”

Perhaps because of its large size and even larger budget, the PSUGO program appears to have attracted cheaters.

In July 2012, a regional MENFP official in Port-de-Paix allegedly stole over five million gourdes (over 119,000 U.S. dollars). According to media reports, he used a group of young men as fake “school directors”, and wrote them checks of 200,000 and 300,000 gourdes. The official implicated fled to the Dominican Republic.

HGW does not have the means to investigate potential PSUGO fraud at the national level, or even in the capital. However, journalists did discover one school name on the MENFP list as having received payments, even though it had never functioned.

“Soon – the Justin Lhérisson College!” a small dusty sign announces on the Darbonne road near Léogâne.

“That was a project one of the local mayors set up when he was a candidate,” a neighbor claimed. “Once he got elected, he dropped it.”

A study from the Civil Society Initiative (CSI) last year concluded that the program had created number of “phantom schools”.

“We discovered that a third or a quarter of the schools being paid by the government hadn’t even been officially approved,” CSI Director Rosny Desroches, a former minister of education, told HGW.

At another school with both PSUGO money and foreign assistance, it’s almost noon. Under a blazing sun, scores of students focus on their work. The Charlotin Marcadieu national school was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake and today functions in 14 tents arranged in three rows. Gravel crunches under students’ feet. Before heading into his “classroom”, one of the teachers says bitterly, “After 10 in the morning, these tent-rooms are like furnaces.”

*Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

A typical scene: mounds of Dominican products for sale in a marketplace in Pétion-ville, Haiti. Photo: Jude Stanley Roy/HGW

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 16 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

“I get everything at the Haiti-Dominican Republic: carrots, squash, eggplant, cabbage, peppers, eggs, salami,” explained a merchant at the Croix des Bossales marketplace, her stand teeming with goods. “The border is what feeds us.”

The vendor – who refused to give her name for fear of reprisal from Haitian tax collectors – sells vegetables and other food products at Croix des Bossales, the biggest open market in Port-au-Prince. Here, as in Haitian supermarkets, mountains of Dominican pasta, towers of Dominican eggs, mounds of Dominican plantains and piles upon piles of tomato paste, ketchup, mayonnaise and other prepared foods are everywhere.

Haiti has food. But less and less of it is produced inside the country, and great deal of it now comes from the Dominican Republic, the Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) investigative journalism partnership has discovered. Haitian products are difficult even for merchants to find. “We can’t find them. They hardly even exist,” one egg seller attested as she sat next to a tower of eggs in grey Dominican egg crates.

In hardware stores, sacks of Dominican cement reach the ceilings. In most of the eight stores visited by HGW teams, salespeople said cement from the neighbouring nation sold at a lower price than the “Haitian” product, which is actually imported and then bagged in country.

“Haitian cement is more expensive, but it’s better,” a worker at one store, GB Hardware said. “Dominican cement is cheaper, but it’s also lower in quality.” At another store, Alliance Distribution S.A., a salesman reported that it getting Dominican cement delivered was “easier and quicker”.

Haiti undoubtedly needs these products. But is the flow of Dominican products a simple matter of exports, or is Haiti’s neighbor exploiting an economy weakened by a devastating earthquake?

Widening commercial deficit

Even before Haiti became independent in 1804, its economy was mostly extroverted, and governments after the revolution rarely developed economic policies that encouraged national industries and modernised agricultural production to keep up with population growth.

Local elites tended to export raw goods such as coffee, cacao, indigo and sugar and import foodstuffs and finished products. Haiti did not follow the “import substitution” trend that swept most ex-colonies in Latin America, Africa and Asia in the 1950 and 1960s, and up until the 1970s, Haiti was largely self-sufficient in fruits, vegetables, meats and cement. Since then, the country has suffered an increasingly negative trade balance.

“We are following a growth model that weakens productive sectors to the benefit of imports and importers,” explained economist Camille Chalmers, professor at the State University of Haiti and director of a platform of organisations who promote “alternative development”.

The bordering Dominican Republic, however, followed a different path.

Their model goes back “50 or 60 years”, according to Maria Isabel Gasso, president of the Santo Domingo Chamber of Commerce. “For a while, there were laws that promoted industries and production, and also laws promoting exports and the Free Trade Zones. These industries have been there for years…and they have benefited from various policies promoting exports and production.”

Neoliberal knockdown

Neoliberal economic policies – reduction of protective tariffs, privatisation of state industries, and cuts to social services – at the end of the twentieth century took its toll on Haiti’s ailing economy. Tariffs on food and other agricultural products were first cut in 1982 and plummeted to zero or three percent in 1995. Today, Haiti has the lowest tariffs in the Caribbean.

The drastic reductions were part of the 1994 “Paris Plan”, an agreement between the exiled government of Jean Bertrand Aristide and international actors such as the United States and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in which the Aristide government would enact a series of neoliberal policies in exchange for international support for its return to power in 1994 after being overthrown in a bloody coup d’état in 1991.

Since 1995, Haiti’s trade balance has widened, from about 500 million U.S. dollars that year to about 2.2 billion dollars for the 2011-2012 fiscal year, according to the IMF. Similarly, the food “deficit” has grown from 242 million U.S. dollars in 2000 to 342 million dollars in 2007. According to the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, Haiti imported 57 percent of its food in 2005. That figure is undoubtedly higher today.

Ministry of Commerce director general Luc Espéca is conscious of the damages wrought by these policies, admitting that local “producers can’t sell what they’ve grown. When you work had to produce something, but then you don’t make a profit, you get discouraged.”

The neoliberal policies affected the economy in other ways too. The Aristide government had to sell off state enterprises, among them the state cement company, even though Haiti possesses all the raw materials necessary for cement.

Still, imports and lowered tariffs are not the only reasons Haiti’s agricultural production hasn’t kept pace with population growth. Factors such as the lack of public and private sector investment in agricultural production, or Haiti’s antiquated land tenure system, have all contributed.

“When I came back to Haiti in 1976, we made everything: pipes, cement, etc,” remembered Gérald Emile “Aby” Brun, a vice president of the 30-year-old Haitian construction and architecture firm TECINA S.A, who regretted that his country no longer produces cement. The state telephone company, “the flour mill, the same thing happened to all of them”, he told HGW, blaming in part Haitian “capitalists”.

“The Haitian capitalist is afraid of the country’s instability and of the corruption of a series of governments,” Burn continued. “He doesn’t want to take any chances and wait 10 or 15 years to make his profit. In fact, Haitian ‘industrialists’ are not industrialists at all. Three-quarters of them are vendors, merchants.”

Haiti Grassroots Watch could not find exact data on the amount of Dominican cement exported to Haiti, but the Dominican Association of Portland Cement Producers said that six major companies employ 15,000 people and that cement makes up 21 percent of the country’s exports.

The direction of Haitian production

Many are calling for the Haitian government to rescue Haitian production, which cannot satisfy the nation’s demands. Dominican producers are increasingly capitalising on this weakness, especially since the January 2010 earthquake.

“The Haitian state is not defending Haitian economic actors,” said Chalmers.

Gasso, of the Santo Domingo Chamber of Commerce, generally agreed. “I personally would like to see Haitian products here, but the Haitian government is the one who needs to promote what it needs to promote in Haiti in order for there to be exports,” Gasso said. “They need a plan. When a boat leaves port without a destination, it doesn’t get anywhere.”

Surrounded by mountains of Dominican vegetables and seated beside colleagues hawking Dominican pastas and eggs, the Croix de Bossales merchant agreed with Gasso. She wanted to see change but remained pessimistic.

“We need a change but where will it come from? I don’t know. All we hear are beautiful words,” she said. “We need people to become aware so that we can rescue the country from this terrible situation.”

*Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

This report is part of the “New Visions for Haitian-Dominican Reality – More and better journalism” program, financed by the European Union and coordinated by the UNESCO Chair in Communication, Democracy and Governance at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. 

Building housing the water purification project. It has never functioned. Credit: HGW/Jude Stanley Roy

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 11 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

A World Bank-funded community development project in Haiti appears to have inadvertantly harmed or even dissolved some of the grassroots organisations it was designed to strengthen.

As World Bank economists Ghazala Mansuri and Vijayendra Rao note in their work (See Sidebar 2, Criticism for CDD, and research here, here and here), the people and organisations that tend to benefit the most from “community driven development” or CDD projects in poor countries are those who already enjoy privilege and power at the local level.

“A few wealthy, and often politically connected, men – who are not necessarily more educated than other participants – tend to make decisions at community meetings,” the researchers write in their June 2012 paper “Can Participation Be Induced?”

This phenomenon is known as “elite capture” and was listed as a risk in early PRODEP documents. While Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) could not conduct a complete survey of the Southeast department projects, anecdotal evidence and many interviews suggest ample “elite capture”.

“When someone gets a project, they do it not only to make money, but also, they immediately start making plans to become mayor or deputy,” reported elderly farmer Elace Dirou, a well-respected member of Kòdinasyon Oganizasyon Bene (KOB) or Coordination of Bainet Organisations.

Astoundingly, PRODEP’s national director boasts about the phenomenon. At a press conference last July, Michael Lecorps told reporters, “There are a lot of people who became deputies because of PRODEP. They created platforms, they became leaders.”

While Lecorps may see the use of World Bank dollars to consolidate political fiefdoms as positive, others associated with PRODEP – even those sitting on the local community committees that approved the projects – do not.

Farmer Emile Theodore, from Anba Grigri where HGW investigated PRODEP projects, deplored this construction of “political capital” as well as the sudden birth of dozens of “organisations” created solely to go after the funding.

“The fact that there was 17,500 dollars for small projects meant that a lot of organisations got created so they could get those grants,” Theodore told HGW.

In the Bainet region, the PRODEP method appears to have also hurt authentic or what Mansuri and Rao call “organic” grassroots organisations. KOB’s Dirou lamented that “when these projects come into our communities, they actually destroy organisations. They make people become enemies. People that used to share what little they had – salt, matches, etc. – now turn their backs.”

Dirou, also said that KOB – founded in 1990, just after the end of the Duvalier dictatorship – decided not to participate in PRODEP when it realised such social and political reengineering might result.

Writing in 2011, Mansuri and Rao partially corroborate Dirou’s claim, noting that in areas where CDD projects have been run, “some evidence points to a decline in collective activities outside the needs of the project.”

“Induced participation” is not the same as homegrown, they note, since organisations that “arise endogenously” are part of social movements, while “induced” ones tend to organise because they are seeking “cash and other material payoffs”.

Anthropologist Mark Schuller has been documenting such societal changes in Haiti since 2001.

A professor at the University of Illinois as well as the State University of Haiti, and author of the recently published book “Killing With Kindness – Haiti, International Aid and NGOs”, Schuller said, “With the influx of NGOs and projects, people lose their sense of solidarity, of working together. I think this is one of the most direct effects NGOs have had here. NGOs are based on contracts, on money, on ‘what can you do for me?

“There are a lot of organisations founded to channel funding from ‘NGOs,’” he added. “You could call those organisations ‘fake’’ or maybe ‘pocket organisations,’ because they have a piece of paper in their pocket that says they are an organisation, but for the majority of the population, they don’t really exist.”

Schuller also deplored what he sees as dependency and loss of self-reliance: “Because foreigners are the ones helping, after a while, people even cease to believe in Haitians! They say ‘Haitians can’t do anything’ because the NGO is doing all the work in their neighbourhood.”

Haiti’s “failed state” fails again?

One of the other questionable outcomes of the PRODEP system is what appears to be a deliberate undermining of what is often called Haiti’s “failed” state.

For decades, development and emergency funding has mostly bypassed the Haitian state, which many foreign governments and agencies dismissed as corrupt and/or inefficient. A 2011 study from the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy showed that in 2007, for example, only three percent of bilateral aid, and 13 percent of multilateral aid, was “budget support”, meaning funding for government ministries as well as for local authorities like the community council in Anba Grigri.

U.N. Deputy Special Envoy Dr. Paul Farmer prefaced the report by noting that “creating jobs and supporting the government” is key to ensuring “access to basic services”. He called on donors “to directly invest in the Haitian people and their public and private institutions. The Haitian proverb sak vide pa kanpe – ‘an empty sack cannot stand’ – applies here. To revitalize Haitian institutions, we must channel money through them.”

The World Bank economists agree, noting that CDD projects like PRODEP also work better when they work with local governments. But the PRODEP programme was designed to deliberately channel its funding to non-state service providers almost exclusively: agencies CECI and PADF, and the so-called community based organisations or CBOs rather than bolster Haiti’s local authorities, whose budgets pale in comparison to the PRODEP funding. [See also The Politics of PRODEP]

In 2008, the six PRODEP projects in Anba Grigri received nearly 100,000 dollars altogether, while the community council had an operating budget of only about 6,500 dollars for the entire year.

A “successful approach”?

According to Mansuri and Rao, over the past decade the World Bank has spent some 80 billion dollars on participatory development projects worldwide. At least 61 million dollars was spent in Haiti.

Was the Haiti experience a success?

Yes, according to its stated objectives. World Bank documents posted online note that the projects built or rehabilitated 785 kilometres of road, 444 water distribution points and 448 classrooms, and also contributed to building or stocking other community services like health clinics.

But questions persist, regarding the 20-30 percent of the projects that failed, and the apparent harm done to Haiti’s social fabric and the existing grassroots groups.

In an email to IPS, Diego Arias Carballo, a senior agricultural economist at the World Bank, noted that the Bank’s total portfolio in Haiti is 635.7 million dollars, with many projects that focus on improving the government’s own capacity to implement projects and deliver services.

“It is important to note that the NGOs who support the implementation of the subproject investments also provide technical assistance, training and capacity building to local communities,” Carballo said.

He added that a restructuring plan is being implemented to help problematic subprojects achieve the initial intended objectives before project closing. The World Bank financing is ending in June 2013.

Part two of two. For part one, click here.

*Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

The full HGW series can be read here.

Excerpt:

One of the boats built with the PRODEP money. Credit: HGW/Jude Stanley Roy

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 11 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

A 61-million-dollar, eight-year community development project funded by the World Bank and executed by the Haitian government and two international development agencies has raised questions of waste and corruption, and even carried out what could be called “social and political re-engineering”.

The Project for Participatory Community Development (Projet de développement communautaire participatif or PRODEP – See Sidebar: What is PRODEP?) enabled the construction of roads and schoolrooms, and the funding of agricultural and other projects.

But a lengthy investigation by Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) found that PRODEP and its millions of dollars appear to have done real harm to Haiti’s fragile democracy and have likely contributed to the country’s growing status as a so-called “NGO Republic”. These findings are largely corroborated by a new study of hundreds of similar “community driven development” or CDD projects by two economists working for the very institution which funded PRODEP, the World Bank.

Examples of various kinds of failure were not hard to spot in and around the small southern coastal town of Bainet, where HGW did its fieldwork in 2011 and 2012. According to the U.S.-based Pan-American Development Foundation (PADF), PRODEP funded a total of 60 projects in the commune of Bainet, and over 70 percent were “successful”.

But journalists from the capital and from a local community radio station came to a different conclusion when they visited two projects in town. The first, a water purification business run by Òganizasyon Fanm Bene or Organisation of Bainet Women (OFB), and financed with a grant of about 19,000 dollars, never even got off the ground.

“PRODEP/PADF gave us a bunch of machinery that never worked,” claimed an OFB member, who asked that her name not be used, as she unlocked the storefront. Inside, dust-covered machinery filled the room. The plastic bags meant to be filled with purified water lay flat in dusty heaps on the floor.

Nearby, the “OPA-net” cyber-café was also locked up tight. Run by Oganizasyon Peyizan an Aksyon or Organisation Peasants in Action (OPA) and funded with almost 20,000 dollars, according to World Bank documents, the project came to halt on Jan. 12, 2010, the day of the deadly earthquake, according to Coordinator Saint-Gladys Fleuranville.

“It was working very well until then,” he said. “PADF has a Reinforcement Programme that will help us. We are waiting for them because this is the only cyber-café in the entire community.”

Asked about the water and cyber-café projects, PADF’s Arsel Jerome, who runs their PRODEP programme, said he was aware that both were closed down.

“The way those projects began was a little amateurish,” Jerome admitted. So much so that they, and over 100 more of the 700 or so projects PADF oversaw, needed “correction” or “reinforcement”, he said. But Jerome refused to talk of corruption or even waste, calling the issues instead “administrative problems”.

Three years later, the “administrative problems” had not yet been resolved at either project in Bainet. Both remained padlocked.

HGW visited four more projects, in Bainet’s 9th communal section, Anba Grigri, on the other side of the Bainet River and up a bumpy, muddy and rocky road. The hamlet and surrounding hills are home to about 10,000 people who have no electricity, and no access to clean drinking water or modern sanitation. Farmers grow potatoes, corn, sorghum and herd cows and goats; coastal residents fish. For weeks at a time, villagers from Anba Grigri cannot reach Bainet because of the rain-bloated river.

A goat project appears to have been successful.

“Before, not too many of our members had goats. Now almost everyone has a goat because our organisation got the project funding,” said Alezi Jean Bastien, a member of the group that benefited. “Life has improved a little bit for people.”

But three other projects gave cause for concern.

The most infamous grantee is OD9S (Oganizasyon pou Devlòpman 9vyèm Seksyon or Organisation for the Development of the 9th Section), which got 17,500 dollars for a fishing project. Almost immediately, the organisation split over how the money should be used.

The fishermen prevailed, buying new engines and other materials, but an engine was soon stolen and other items disappeared. Today the boats sit in disrepair. Most alarmingly, OD9S fell apart.

“The project dissolved the organisation,” one of the fishermen told HGW.

Nearby, the Coordination of Bainet Woman (Kòdinasyon Fanm Bene or KOFAB) received a grant to set up a corn mill. But that’s not to say that KOFAB runs it. A man is in charge.

“People in the community are employing me,” explained manager Fabien Jean André Paul. “From time to time I meet with the women’s organisation and give them a report.”

Another grantee set up the so-called Community Store of Bainet. The shop stocks the same, mostly imported items that jam shelves in many small stores or “boutiques” throughout the zone: canned goods, rice, beans, spaghetti, cooking oil, tomato paste, crackers, rum and other products.

It sells products at the same prices and doesn’t get much business. During a HGW visit, store manager Delva Henry asked a friend to “buy” something for HGW’s camera.

“There are a lot of other stores in our communal section,” Delva admitted. He said he was thinking of “writing a proposal” to ask for more money so that he could better stock his store.

HGW concluded that PRODEP’s track record in and around Bainet is not “over 70 percent success” and this was confirmed by a member of the PRODEP-formed committee, COPRODEP, that originally picked the projects to be funded.

“The projects didn’t work out the way they were supposed to,” said farmer Emile Theodore. “The majority of them have disappeared. You can’t find a trace of them. There are others that are run by a husband and wife, like the community store. As for the fish project, a little group of people is running that one also.”

The World Bank says that an impact evaluation study completed in 2012 and two technical audits were carried out on a sample of 160 (out of a total of 1,700) subprojects and 20 training programmes. The studies show that 60 percent of the 1,700 subprojects are deemed successful; 20 percent are undergoing a process of strengthening and restructuring; and 20 percent have not produced the intended results.

HGW asked for and was promised the impact evaulation three times by staff from the Haitian government’s Office for the Monetisation of Development Aid projects, but it was never delivered.

“This overall result is consistent with international experiences with community driven development (CDD) projects,” Laurent Msellati, a sector manager at the Bank, told IPS by email.

Part one of two. For part two, click here.

*Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

 The full HGW series can be read here.

Excerpt:

An intersection of Jean-Jacques Dessailines Boulevard (also known as "Grand Rue" or "Main Street") and a side street, clogged with garbage and street vendors. Credit: HGW/Evens Louis

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 10 2012 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Even though a restrictive government decree that blocked reconstruction of downtown Port-au-Prince for almost two years was finally annulled, questions, frustrations and doubts abound about the eventual recovery of Haiti’s economic, cultural and political capital.

All signs indicate that rather than focusing on crucial infrastructure work, the government is more interested in rebuilding its ministries.

While the past 32 months have seen meetings, colloquiums, studies and declarations, a drive through downtown shows that, aside from rubble removal, little reconstruction has taken place.

Only one significant building has gone up. Everywhere else is a jumble of ruins, rubble, at least four corn fields, and mounds of garbage that poison the air. There are no signs of work on the sewage, drainage or electrical systems. And a lack of police presence means that thieves still plague the capital’s formerly crucial commercial area.

Many of the large businesses have left downtown for the suburbs, leaving “Main Street” to informal sector vendors who jam sidewalks and half the street. Other shopkeepers and businesspeople seem almost without hope.

“Port-au-Prince will never be like it was 25 years ago,” a shopkeeper in his fifties told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) as he sat in his mostly empty appliance store on the Rue des Miracles (“Street of Miracles”). “Nothing is going to happen,” he said.

Like most of the other 15 merchants questioned by HGW, he agreed to speak only if his name was not mentioned.

But the government maintains progress is being made.

“Downtown was and will again be the economic heart of the country. It will be even better than it was. We have to finish the studies. We have been working very seriously, non-stop,” Michel Présumé of the government’s Unit for the Reconstruction of Housing and Public Administration Buildings (UCLBP in French) boasted in a Jun. 19, 2012 interview.

A useless “public usefulness” decree

Haiti’s Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake was one of the greatest urban disasters of modern times. In addition to the estimated 200,000 killed, “(t)he quake produced urgent reconstruction costs estimated at $11.5 billion, destroyed over 80 per cent of Port-au-Prince and several towns and villages close by and flattened the seats of all three branches of government along with fifteen of the seventeen ministries, 45 per cent of the police stations and a number of courts,” the International Crisis Group wrote in a Mar. 31, 2010 report.

Then came the government decree of Sep. 2, 2010, suddenly designating about 200 hectares of downtown land “of public utility”, blocking all reconstruction.

“All construction, building of roads, division of lots, or any other exploitation of the land, including any and all real estate transactions, are and remain prohibited for all of the area defined in Article 1,” Article 2 of the decree reads.

Michelle Mourra, a founding member of SOS Centre-ville (SOS Downtown), an organisation of downtown business people and property owners, said the decree was “a terrible blow”.

“The private sector probably suffered worst material loses than any other sector on Jan. 12, 2010,” she wrote in an email to HGW on Jul. 16, 2012. “The public utility decree was an even worse setback, because we had to watch, powerless, for two years while downtown was looted and destroyed.”

The skeleton of a building looms over the pedestrians, vehicles and vendors on Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard. Photo: HGW/Evens Louis

Despite the change in government in May 2011, the decree wasn’t annulled until a year later, on May 29, 2012. But cancelling the decree was not the only hurdle. Not unexpectedly, a key challenge has been planning how to rebuild the devastated capital. Proposals have been put forward – one from England, one from Haiti – but so far no definitive approach.

The Ministry of Planning and Overseas Cooperation (MPCE in French), together with UN-HABITAT, held meetings in July 2010, and a forum “Vil nou vle a” (“The city we want”), in November 2011.

“It’s good that there’s a debate around certain ideas, but there’s a moment where one must say, ‘Okay, now let’s do a synthesis of all of these, let’s take the best from Prince Charles, the best from Trame, the best from the others, and let’s set up the framework and let’s move forward,” said Jean-Christophe Adrian, former head of UN-Habitat.

Infrastructure is important

One thing that all of the plans, and all of the actors, seem to agree upon is the importance of infrastructure.

In its presentation at the Vil nou vle a forum, the Canadian firm Daniel Arbour and Associates (also known as IBI/DAA Group) noted that the “provision of potable water, energy, pedestrian and vehicle access, sanitation and sewer services, (and) access to telecommunications and internet linkages” would be key.

“The first thing is to improve the infrastructures,” UN-HABITAT’s Adrian agreed. “You can’t reconstruct if the streets aren’t repaved, if there is no drainage system, if there is no water, if there is no electricity. You need roads, sanitation systems and electricity. That’s what needs to happen first.”

The Haitian government also appears to agree, at least in interviews.

“We must create conditions for the private sector where it feels at ease, protected and accompanied, so that it can then take risks,” Michel Présumé of the UCLBP said. “The government will play an important catalyst role. The first steps will certainly be taken by the Haitian government.”

But rather than initiating the massive infrastructure work necessary, the government recently opened work sites for three ministries at a price tag of 35 million dollars.

Private sector on its own?

While the government certainly has other documents and other sources of financing, Présumé – who is overseeing the reconstruction of government buildings – was clear that the government could not undertake all of the reconstruction.

““The authorities really do have the will to do things,” he said, but he added that “(a) country can’t develop without a dynamic private sector. The private sector must accompany (the government).”

SOS Centre-ville agrees that the reconstruction is a “konbit” (traditional Haitian collective labour effort).

“The reconstruction of downtown, and of the rest of Port-au-Prince, is a massive job. The government can’t do it alone. We are all concerned. The moment has come for everyone to collaborate,” Mourra wrote to HGW in her Jul. 16, 2012, correspondence.

But so far, the private sector is the one that finds itself “alone”. And interviews conducted by HGW discovered incertitude and frustrations.

“If (the government) did have will, they would have begun already. There are still places that haven’t even been cleared of rubble! All the money stays at the top, it doesn’t come down. In other words, the poor don’t have a government,” said a woman who has a wholesale soft drink business, as she got her hair done at a small beauty salon.

“Everyone likes beautiful things,” added another woman, who works at a small air conditioner supply shop. “Even in Puerto Rico, or the Dominican Republic, everything looks at least a little nice. You would really like your country to look like all the other ones. But here, it’s ‘look out for yourself only.’…I’ll only believe in (reconstruction) when I see it.”

*Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Read the full series here.

This model home from Perma Shelter, above, has been turned into a communal latrine. Photo: HGW/Milo Milfort

By Correspondents
ZORANJE, Haiti, Oct 2 2012 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Just months after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake killed over 200,000 Haitians and drove another 1.3 million into squalid camps, the Building Back Better Communities (BBBC) project got the green light from the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC), headed by former U.S. president Bill Clinton and then-Haitian prime minister Jean Max Bellerive.

[Read Part One of this story]

The project consisted of an exposition of some 60 model homes for post-earthquake reconstruction, and the building of an “Exemplar Community” for 150 families, planned for former farmland outside the capital Port-au-Prince.

Altogether, the BBBC cost over two million dollars in “reconstruction” funding. Most went for the Expo that was barely visited and whose models homes today sit empty, as well as for the Exemplar Community – a community that was never built.

Another two million was spent by the architectural and construction firms hoping to win valuable housing contracts with the government and NGOs, and also betting their house would be chosen for the Exemplar Community.

Today, a long list of BBBC organisers – including Arcindo Santos of the Inter-American Development Bank, which spent 1.2 million preparing the “expo” site, and former tourism minister Patrick Delatour who coordinated the exposition – call the project “significant”, “a good idea” and “a success”.

And for each of them, it was. Each person and agency accomplished his or her piece of the project, attending conferences, writing reports, inaugurating events. And most of them, and their employees, got paid.

But nobody carried the projects forward, nor does anyone seem to be bothered with them today. Rather than housing earthquake victim families as the government had promised, 14 months later, the 67 model homes are empty.

In his interview with Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW), even one of the project’s originators – architect and former Haitian government official Leslie Voltaire – admitted the Expo was “a farce”. While calling the Harvard/MIT report produced for the Exemplar Community an “excellent” document, he pointed out that perhaps the plan – his plan – was flawed from the beginning.

“Who was going to buy those houses?” he mused. “The Red Cross has money to do housing. World Vision has money to do housing. USAID has money to do housing. Maybe European Union, etc.? They are the ones who should have come to the Expo… but the ones who have the money, where are they? They have their own housing (model) in their heads already.”

Today, Voltaire noted, nobody seems to be in charge. Not the state housing agency, not the housing reconstruction office, not the Ministry of Tourism.

“Clinton and (Haitian President Michel) Martelly are implicated in this thing,” he said. “They inaugurated it. They are the ones who should take it in hand. Martelly can’t just dump it like that. And Clinton can’t just dump it like that. And they need to write to the firms who put the prototypes there.”

But Voltaire is implicated also, according to a ministry of tourism document. As of March 2011, he was put in charge of “the management and follow-up of the Exemplar Community”.

HGW did its own follow up, getting in touch with seven of the firms, based in Haiti and the United States. Only one was building houses, and it had obtained that contract before the Expo started. All were dismayed with how the project turned out.

“It was a waste of money with no respect for the builders,” Gabriel Rosenberg of GR Construction, a Haitian firm, said in a telephone interview. “We invested about 25,000 dollars. We expected to sell those houses.”

Jim Dooley of New Hampshire, U.S., said he got involved because he “wanted to help”. He and his partners formed the “Ti Kaye” (“Little House”) consortium and invested about 68,000 dollars, he told HGW. “At this point we have not sold one building,” Dooley said.

“We were told that the model would eventually become a protective shelter and home for a caring and needy family,” he added. “We can only hope that that is the future for this little building. We certainly designed it and built it with that foremost in mind.”

Today the Ti Kaye is locked up tight, and empty, while an estimated 369,000 victims still live in squalid camps.

Haitian entrepreneur Winifred Jean Galvan said she and her Mexican partners at Pamacon S.A. spent 27,000 dollars, part of that on customs fees. “We paid something like 30 percent,” she said, even though the 20,000-dollar house was a gift to the government.

Galvan and Pamacon got involved because they wanted to “to provide people with a decent house” and “to make a living doing that”, she said.

Today the little orange home sits empty. The paint is peeling and one wall is cracked.

“They took our money, they took our houses… with no respect for us,” the 58-year-old businesswoman said. “We thought they would call, at least to say if they chose our house or not (for the Exemplar Community). Not even a thank you. Not a goodbye. Nothing.”

HGW asked the Haitian government what was planned for the Expo houses.

“We’re going to sell some and rent some,” Clement Belizaire of the state’s housing reconstruction office told HGW recently. “Some of them will have state services in them. All of those houses will be used.”

But today, just one is occupied by a state agency. The model built by Haitian firm SECOSA now houses a police station.

*Note: Most interviews for this article were conducted in early 2012.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Weeds sprouting through the gravel at the Expo site. Photo: HGW/Jude Stanley Roy

By Correspondents
ZORANJE, Haiti, Oct 2 2012 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

The smells and scenes that greet a visitor to this eerily empty collection of over 60 brightly painted homes and buildings verge on the obscene.

Some of the houses are filled with piles of desiccated human excrement, their recently built living rooms and kitchens turned into public latrines. A few appear occupied by squatters. Paint is chipping. Doors have been torn from hinges, toilets and sinks ripped out.

This was one of the first Haiti reconstruction projects to receive approval, funding – over two million dollars – and the enthusiastic backing of former President Bill Clinton. Just months after the devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake killed over 200,000 people and drove another 1.3 million into squalid camps, the Building Back Better Communities (BBBC) project got the green light from the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC), headed by Clinton and then-Haitian Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive.

The idea was to “expose best practices for housing reconstruction by encouraging innovative ideas” with a “Housing Exposition” and to build an “Exemplar Community”, an IHRC document explains. The Clinton Foundation gave 500,000 dollars; the Inter-American Development Bank gave another 1.2 million dollars; the Deutsche Bank Foundation, the British government and even the Haitian government all contributed, according to officials involved with the project.

But 14 months after Clinton himself opened the Expo on this former farmland just outside the capital, most of the model homes sit empty. There are more goats than humans at the two-hectare site. Well over a dozen have been severely vandalised. All of them were built by Haitian and foreign firms which spent an average of 25,000 dollars each – over 1.5 million dollars altogether – to compete for contracts and in the hopes their model would be chosen for the Exemplar Community of 150 homes that was to be part of the project.

“All these houses had a security guard,” a young woman sleepily told visitors recently as she stood in the doorway of a little yellow house, built by Colorado-based RCI Systems and priced at 10,000 dollars.

A disheveled mattress lay on the floor behind her. “A lot of the guards left because they hadn’t been paid,” she said.

A four-month investigation by Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) confirmed that apart from admiration last July, the Expo and Exemplar Community project have been ignored, as have the architects, the construction firms, and the site and the houses themselves.

Expo-nential Errors, Waste and…

The Expo was dreamed up a few months after the earthquake during a meeting at Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to architect and former Haitian government official Leslie Voltaire, one of its originators.

The government would hold a competition and forum where local and foreign contractors could propose housing solutions. At the end, the houses would be handed over to homeless families, who would have to keep them clean so that interested individuals, humanitarian agencies or private builders could visit at any time.

“It was a kind of win-win,” said Voltaire in an exclusive interview with Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW). “The builder makes a gift, but also has an example that can be seen by NGOs.”

The architecture firm John McAslan and Partners of London was brought in, and soon the plan expanded to include the “Exemplar Community” – a village of 150 homes built with an “Expo” model house to be chosen by a jury, the architecture and planning schools at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) came on board to work on the Exemplar Community and recommend appropriate environmental, social and economic measures.

The Deutschebank Foundation committed 50,000 dollars, and on Aug. 17, 2010, the IHRC gave the green light, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) said it would prepare the site: about two hectares of very low floodplain land that had to be filled in with gravel.

“The zone is really low, so you have to fill in, at least one metre. And each cubic metre costs about, I think now it’s 25 U.S. dollars,” IDB urban designer Arcindo Santos explained.

None of the estimated 10 million cubic metres of earthquake rubble was used, the planner added, because “earthquake material wasn’t ready or available”. Instead, it took about 20,000 truckloads of gravel and fill dug from riverbeds and hillsides.

Voltaire decided to run for president soon after the project got started, so it was handed to the ministry of tourism and its minister, Patrick Delatour. The competition drew over 500 applications.

“In my opinion, the Expo was a success because we completed our mission, meaning, we organised a conference on housing and prototypes were constructed,” the former minister told HGW.

The architectural firm pulled in to oversee the competition John McAslan and Partners of London, agreed.

“The competition ranked as among the most successful in the world,” McAslan’s Nick Rutherford said in a telephone interview, because the contest generated what he called “affordable and sustainable houses”.

But the 60 or so models eventually chosen have an average price tag of 21,000 dollars and range up to 69,000 dollars – steep prices for humanitarian organisations, and even more steep for the population, most of whom live on less than two dollars a day. And many of houses are made with imported materials.

“Success” or not, the exposition did not take place in November 2010 as planned. Instead, the government decided to hold a housing conference in January 2011, and planned the Expo for later in the year.

“That was a kind of lollipop they gave contractors to keep them interested,” Voltaire admitted. “They were saying, ‘Nothing is happening!’ etc., so they (the government) did a conference.”

“It was the biggest joke I’ve ever seen,” deplored John Sorge of Innovative Composites International (ICI), a firm with offices in both the U.S. and Canada. “It was a hoodwink to promote the government… the whole Expo was a farce.”

And the Exemplar Community? Harvard and MIT teams made various visits to Haiti, and a Haitian delegation flew north for a retreat on Martha’s Vineyard Island, a swank vacation spot favoured by President Barack Obama. The effort produced an interesting bilingual report – but no community. The ball was dropped. The money needed wasn’t raised.

Read Part Two – Haiti’s Two-Million-Dollar Ghost Town

*Note: Most interviews for this article were conducted in early 2012.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Map of Eurasian Minerals licenses, as of late 2011. Credit: Eurasian Minerals website

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jun 27 2012 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Twenty billion dollars worth of gold, copper and silver hidden in the hills of the hemisphere’s poorest country. Investors in North America so convinced of the buried treasure, they have already spent 30 million dollars collecting samples, digging, building mining roads and doing aerial surveys.

The fairy tale is true, but it might not have a “happily ever after” ending.

A 10-month investigation into Haiti’s budding “gold rush” by the watchdog consortium Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) discovered backroom deals, players with widely diverging objectives, legally questionable “memorandums”, and a playing field that is far from level.

Although Haitian law states that all subsoil resources belong to “the Haitian nation”, so far the nation has been kept in the dark about the digging and testing going on in the country’s north.

Dieuseul Anglade, a well-respected geologist who headed the state mining agency for most of the past 20 years, was recently fired by Haiti’s newly installed prime minister. Was it because he has consistently championed tougher laws and better deals for the state, and for the Haitian people?

“Minerals are part of the public domain of the state,” the 62-year-old Anglade told HGW a month before he was removed from his post.

The geologist said that if tougher laws and better contracts with the mining companies aren’t written, it would be better to “leave the minerals underground and let future generations exploit them”. The geologist lost his job shortly after that interview.

Another major player in the gold game – Eurasian Minerals – has a different opinion of who should exploit Haiti’s riches.

The Canadian company and its Haitian subsidiaries are poised to mine on the very same ground where Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards once forced Haiti’s indigenous peoples to dig for gold.

Within 40 years of the famed 1492 landing, hard labour in the mines, murder and European diseases reduced the population from perhaps 300,000 to about 600.

Eurasian recently returned to the same hills where so many died, and has been quietly buying up licenses and conventions: 53 of them so far. The company controls exploration or exploitation rights to over one-third of Haiti’s north.

“Eurasian Minerals likes to acquire large tracts of real estate, add value by doing good geology, and then execute astute deals with good partners to advance our assets,” Eurasian’s David Cole said in a recent interview, and in another, he bragged that his company “control(s) over 1,100 square miles (1,770 square kilometres) of real estate” in Haiti.

Eurasian – which has tested over 44,000 samples so far – is partnered with the world’s number two gold producer, U.S.-based mining giant Newmont.

Another Canadian company, Majescor, and a small U.S. company, VCS Mining, and their subsidiaries have licenses or conventions for tracts totaling over 750 square kilometres. Altogether, about 15 percent of Haiti’s territory is under license to North American mining firms and its partners.

As Majescor’s Haitian subsidiary said in a recent corporate presentation: Haiti is “the sleeping giant of the Caribbean!”

The “sleeping giant” awakens

The giant was “asleep” because Haiti’s minerals have previously been too expensive to extract thanks to the tumult of the past three decades, characterised by brutal coups d’état, and due to local resistance to the mining companies.

But the price of gold has held steady above 1,500 dollars an ounce for the past year, Haiti hosts a U.N. peacekeeping force of 10,000 that will assure a modicum of security for the companies, and just next door in the Dominican Republic, foreign gold giants say they’ve found the largest gold reserve in the Americas: 25 million ounces.

Haiti’s newly installed prime minister is also optimistic. Laurent Lamothe, whose slogan is “Haiti is open for business,” has pledged to make mining one of the country’s new growth industries and to change laws in order to make them more business-friendly.

Speaking before the Senate last month, Lamothe said: “Our subsoil is rich in minerals. Now is the time to dig them up.”

In a nation where unemployment reaches 70 percent, where over half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, and where most of the government’s budget is covered by foreign aid, the buried treasure sounds like El Dorado.

But not all Haitians are as enthusiastic as Lamothe or the foreign mining companies. Pit mining can potentially poison water supplies and damage the environment. In the Dominican Republic, some regions are still suffering from mistakes made a few decades ago.

Nor is it clear that the eventual revenues that might be generated would benefit Haiti and its people.

“Invisible gold” with visible dangers

The mining companies estimate Haiti’s hills hold over 20 billion dollars in gold – much of it “invisible” because it exists in tiny particles in the rock and dirt. Extraction will only be possible with environmentally hazardous pit mines.

But Newmont Mining, Eurasian’s partner, knows its pits. The gold giant opened the world’s first pit mine in Nevada in 1962 and later dug in Ghana, New Zealand, Indonesia, and other countries. In Peru, Newmont runs one of the world’s largest open pit gold mines: the 251-square-kilometre Yanacocha mine.

But even with its years of experience, the company’s track record is far from error-free.

In Peru, farmers’ organisations claim their water supply has been slowly polluted with cyanide and in 2000, Newmont’s Peruvian trucking company spilled 330 pounds of mercury, causing dozens of people to become sickened with deadly diseases.

In Ghana, Newmont operates a mine located in a farming region known as Ghana’s “breadbasket”. So far, Ahafo South operations have displaced about 9,500 people, 95 percent of whom were subsistence farmers, according to Environmental News Service.

Newmont has poisoned local water supplies there at least once, by its own admission. In 2010, the company agreed to pay five million dollars in compensation for a 2009 cyanide spill.

In a May 25 email to HGW, Diane Reberger of Newmont wrote, “We can assure you that Newmont is committed to strong environment, social and ethical practices.”

While welcoming the possible benefits that well-built and -supervised mines might bring to Haiti, former state mining agency chief Anglade and other Haitian experts are worried that a pit mine could be dangerous to Haiti’s already fragile environment. Haiti has only about 1.5 percent tree cover, down from about 90 percent in 1492.

“Mines can cause big problems for the environment,” Haiti’s former environment minister told HGW.

Yves-André Wainright, an agronomist by training, noted that in addition to his heavy metal worries, some of the areas under license are “humid mountains”, meaning they play “an important biodiversity role and need to be protected, starting in the prospection phase.” They are also home to tens of thousands of farming families.

Nobody from the environment ministry has been seen at any mine sites, according to community radio journalists.

“When I really think about the possibility of mining, I am not so sure it’s a good thing,” farmer and peasant organiser Elsie Florestan told HGW.

She and her family have some land near Grand Bois, where they grow corn, manioc and sweet potatoes and where Eurasian and Newmont just finished test drilling.

“They say the company will need to use the river water for 20 years, and that all the water will be polluted,” continued the 41-year-old member of Haiti’s Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan (“Small Peasants Working Together”) peasant movement. “They say we won’t be able to stay here.

“If we don’t organise and make some noise, nothing good will happen as far as we are concerned,” she concluded. “We need to ask the president – what will happen to us peasants?”

Who is protecting Haiti’s interests?

Florestan’s fears may be justified.

Haiti has not signed the international Safety and Health in Mines convention or the voluntary Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, both of which – if followed – offer some protections. In addition, Haiti is ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world – coming in at 175 out of 200 countries.

So far, permits have been issued behind closed doors, deals have been sealed secretly, and the test drilling has been carried out with no public scrutiny and little government oversight, by the state mining agency’s own admission.

“The government doesn’t give us the means we need to be able to supervise the companies,” Anglade confirmed in an interview while still head of the agency.

An audit of the agency’s motor pool shared with HGW in January showed that only five of 17 vehicles were in working condition. And with a budget of about one million dollars, the BME is also strapped for human resources.

Only one-quarter of the 100 employees have university degrees. Another 13 percent are “technicians”. The rest are secretarial and “support” staff.

In addition, Haiti has one of the lowest royalty rates in the hemisphere, collecting only 2.5 percent of the value of each ounce of gold extracted.

“A 2.5 percent royalty share is really low,” according to mining expert Claire Kumar of Christian Aid. “Anything under five percent is just really ludicrous for a country like Haiti. You shouldn’t even consider it. For a country with a weak state, the royalty is the safest place to get your money. There is room for manipulation by the company, but it’s not as big as you would think.”

Former minister Wainwright shares Kumar’s concerns. Will Haiti’s “weak state” be able to keep an eye on the mining companies’ work and on the potential environmental damage?

“We have competent staff at the Mining Bureau, but they don’t have the means to carry out their jobs,” Wainwright said.

The mining companies also have friends in high places.

Former Minister of Finance Ronald Baudin – who sat across from Newmont at negotiating tables in 2010 and 2011 – went through the “revolving door” and now works directly for the company. Asked in an interview with HGW about the apparent conflict of interest, the ex-minister said “I have to eat, right?”

In March, Baudin helped facilitate a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) he says allows Newmont to do test drilling. The ex-minister told HGW said the MOU was “a waiver” to current law, which states that no drilling can take place without a signed mining convention.

Lawyers consulted by HGW confirmed that the only way to get around the requirements of a law is with a newer law that would remove the requirements of the old one.

Anglade, then head of the state mining agency, knows the law. He told HGW that he refused to sign the “waiver”.

“I told them it was illegal and that it was not in Haiti’s interest,” Anglade said. Two months later he was out of a job.

Despite Anglade’s refusal to agree, the MOU was signed by the then-ministers of Finance and of Public Works in late March, and Eurasian reported to its shareholders on Apr. 23 that “(t)he joint venture is allowed to drill on certain selected projects under the MOU, and drilling is currently underway.”

As drilling progresses and more ore is tested, the farmers in Haiti’s northeastern mountains say they feel like nobody is looking out for their interests.

Residents of the dirt-poor hillside hamlet of Lakwèv have panned for gold since the 1960s in order to supplement their farming income. Over the past few years, they have seen mining company crews come and go, but they rarely see anyone from the state mining agency or any other government offices.

“It’s always a couple of big white guys with some Haitians. They don’t even ask you who owns what land. They come, they take big chunks and put them in their knapsacks and they leave,” peasant organiser Arnolt Jean explained. “We need a government that controls what is going on, because we don’t have the capacity to do that.”

Lakwèv is destitute. No clinic, no state schools, no running water, and a rutted path as a “road”.

“Our country is poor, but what is underground could make us not poor any more,” Jean mused. “But since our wealth remains underground, it’s the rich who come with their fancy equipment to dig it out. The people who live on top of the ground stay poor, while the rich get even richer.”

Read the entire series at Haiti Grassroots Watch

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Made possible in part by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The Haitian weekly Haïti Liberté partnered with Haiti Grassroots Watch on this report.

By Correspondents
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 11 2012 (IPS)

With heads of state from more than 120 nations and tens of thousands of civil society and international development experts gathering for the U.N. Summit on Sustainable Development next week, it is accepted wisdom that rethinking agriculture is one of most critical issues facing this and future generations.

TerraViva spoke with Kanayo F. Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a U.N. agency that focuses on eradicating rural poverty in developing countries through hands-on interventions like financial services, markets, technology, land and other natural resources.

Kanayo F. Nwanze. Credit: Courtesy of IFAD

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: IFAD, and in general experts on agrarian matters, see the fight against poverty as inextricable from the preservation of the environment. In this context, what do you expect from Rio+20?

A: As it stands, today’s food and agriculture systems are failing smallholders in developing countries. This is because two key points are not understood well enough by policymakers and the general public. First, of the 1.4 billion people living on under 1.25 dollars per day, one billion of them are in rural areas in developing countries, and the vast majority of those depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. So poverty remains a rural phenomenon and small farms play a central role in providing food and employment.

Second, while it is known that agriculture has huge impacts on the environment, it is not fully recognised that small farms in developing countries are managing vast areas of natural resources. For example, 80 percent of farmland in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa is made up of small farms.

The problem is that these farmers, both women and men, are often not empowered to manage their natural resources. They do not have secure access to their land. They are reliant on the weather and do not have access to institutions and markets.

On top of this, smallholder farmers are facing growing threats and risks of volatile food prices and increasing scarcity of natural resources, such as land and water. Changes in climate patterns and expected increases in extreme weather conditions are making life even more difficult for rural communities.

While the Rio+20 negotiations are on-going, IFAD is continuing to work with farmers’ organisations, the Rome-based agencies and other partners, to raise awareness about the challenges facing the world’s smallholders and to promote an action-oriented agenda with agriculture at the centre. We expect the negotiators will take into account the case of smallholder farmers and give them a level playing field.

Q: Can you define the position you are advancing at the Rio+20?

A: We are advocating for three big changes to today’s food and agriculture system. Of course policies need to be in place for poor rural women and men to access new technologies. After nearly three decades of declining support for agriculture, it would seem that our goal of universal food and nutrition security is more elusive than ever.

But amid the dark clouds, there are rays of hope. Because of co-ordinated efforts, the devastation caused by the famine in the Horn of Africa today was less than we have seen under similar circumstances in the past.

And because of commitments to agricultural development made in recent years – from the African Union Maputo Declaration to the G8 L’Aquila summit – we are developing the framework to ensure that food security crises, such as those witnessed today, will someday become history.

We are pushing for massive scaling up of investments in “sustainable smallholder agriculture” that can increase farmers’ productivity and incomes, improve their resilience to erratic weather conditions, and prevent the natural resource base from further degradation.

Sustainable agriculture with smallholders means we do not need to make the false choice between reducing poverty or tackling climate change. In the long run we can do both through approaches that bring agriculture planning, such as increasing crop or livestock production, together with planning in other sectors like environment, energy, and transportation. This is the only way we will get the balance of social, environmental and economic benefits that is the basis of sustainable development.

Second, smallholders are entrepreneurs who don’t have a level playing field for running their businesses. It’s incredible how much they achieve off the sweat of their brows, their traditional knowledge and their unflagging ingenuity.

Smallholders have, for generations, been adapting to changing conditions and now that climate is changing so much more rapidly, there is a lot we can learn from them. We can support them with accessible technologies that can help them adapt to the new and uncertain conditions. But their lives will not change much if they cannot connect to markets.

There are plenty of examples of smallholder farmers driving agricultural production and supplying national and even global markets. They have the potential to increase their production and contribute to feeding nine billion people by 2050.They need a little support and not handouts. Part of this will be changing the perception of the private sector to see smallholders as entrepreneurs in their own right and potential partners for business deals.

Last but not the least is that no one government or organisation can do this alone. We need better partnerships to link smallholder women and men to government institutions, civil society, the private sector and researchers. We need a new paradigm of collaboration that allows us to plan across sectors from agriculture and health, to transportation and education, as well as cross cutting ecological landscapes that do not share the borders of our human communities and activities.

Q: How would you strengthen the role of poor peasant farmers and their organisations in order to reach these objectives?

A: IFAD is one of the largest sources of financing for agriculture and rural development in many developing countries, and we support government programmes that empower smallholder farmers and their organisations to interact more effectively with their governments, with their natural environment and with markets.

We want to enable poor women and men to have a voice in decision making and governance processes and form equitable partnerships and contractual relationships. In 2011, the projects we financed supported 13,000 marketing groups, trained more than 700,000 people in business and entrepreneurship, and 2.1 million people learned about community and natural resource management. We also work with many national and regional farmers’ organisations.

My organisation is also focussed on linking smallholders to markets. Over the past 12 years, the proportion of IFAD-supported projects that include work on value chains has increased dramatically from three percent in 1999 to 46 percent 2009, and this trend continues to rise.

Q: What you are proposing seems applicable especially to rural women.

A: Absolutely. I’ve always said that the average small farmer is a woman with a baby on her back. On average, women constitute 43 percent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries – in sub-Saharan Africa as much as 50 percent – but they are poorly paid, have less secure jobs, less access to education, and have less access than men to agricultural resources such as land, livestock, credit, fertiliser and machinery.

Experience shows how rural organisations, including cooperatives, can help women to overcome the social, economic, and environmental limitations they face through lending services, such as access to markets and information. I must also emphasise that the rural youth of today are the farmers of tomorrow. Investing in young people, both girls and boys, living in rural areas is key to enhancing agricultural productivity and food security.

In effect, organisations of producers and ties to non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the scientific community, and public and private agents also help small producers, both women and men, to express their concerns and interests in order to influence policy formulation.

Last year about half of all participants in projects that we supported were women, and 60 percent of the people trained in business, entrepreneurship and community management were women. Also, a full 83 percent of active borrowers served by IFAD-supported microfinance institutions were also women – a total of about 24 million of them.

Q: In your experience, what are the conditions necessary to broaden the long-term benefits to farmers and their communities of development projects intended to combat poverty while advancing environmental preservation?

A: I think the 10 principles of our environment and natural resource policy demonstrate how deeply we believe in integrated approaches to achieve the balance of social, environmental and economic benefits we must achieve. Here they are.

1. Scaled-up investment in sustainable agriculture

2. Recognise economic, social and cultural values of natural assets;

3. Promote “climate-smart” rural development;

4. Build smallholder resilience to risk and natural-resource-related shocks;

5. Engage in value chains that drive green growth;

6. Improve governance of natural assets;

7. Promote livelihood diversification;

8. Promote role of women and indigenous peoples;

9. Increase smallholder access to green finance; and

10. Reduce IFAD’s environmental footprint.

Excerpt:

With a court order to close one of Tajikistan’s most popular mosques, President Imomali Rahmon’s administration is stepping up its campaign to neutralise both Islam and the last vestiges of any political opposition.

The May 28 ruling to close the Muhammadiya Mosque – run by the family of Haji Akbar Turajonzoda, a popular theologian and charismatic leader during the country’s civil war in the mid-1990s – marks the latest confrontation between the authorities and the powerful family.

But the closure is also “part of a larger campaign against Muslim life in all its forms”, said John Heathershaw of the University of Exeter, an expert on Islam in Tajikistan.

Turajonzoda, who was the leader of the state-sanctioned clergy during the late Soviet era, is a contentious figure in Tajikistan’s recent history. Blamed by many for helping fan the civil war by siding with the Islamic opposition, he became first deputy prime minister in 1999 as part of a power-sharing agreement that helped end the civil war.

As deputy premier, however, he turned on his former allies and became a critic of the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT), Tajikistan’s main, but now marginalised, opposition movement.

After 2005, when Rahmon demoted him from the cabinet to the senate, Turajonzoda became a critic of the president, and was sacked in 2010. Since then, he has made headlines for making disparaging comments about the president. In addition, he has reportedly mended fences with the IRPT, apparently fueling government fears of a resurgent Islamic opposition.

Despite his popularity, or perhaps because of it, he is often accused of being both an agent of Moscow and a heterodox Islamist. Muzaffar Olimov, head of the Sharq Information and Analytical Center in Dushanbe, describes Turajonzoda as “a politician in the guise of a religious figure”.

Certainly, the Turajonzoda family is a powerful force. Their mosque in Vahdat regularly draws 15,000 men for Friday prayers. The sermons given at the mosque are sold on compact disks around the country.

The current dispute dates back to December. Alleging that Turajonzoda’s brothers, Nuriddin and Mahmudjon, had observed rituals commemorating the death of Imam Hussain – an event known as Ashura, which is observed by Sh’ia Muslims – the state-run Ulema Council, which regulates and interprets Islamic activities in the Sunni- majority country, attempted to remove the brothers and install a more doctrinally reliable imam.

The country’s chief mufti went to the mosque about 30 kilometres east of the capital Dushanbe during Friday prayers on Dec. 9 to read a statement accusing the brothers of trying to disturb the peace by introducing foreign religious rituals. But angry worshipers forced the mufti to flee. The State Committee on Religious Affairs immediately suspended prayers at the mosque for three months and brought charges against the brothers in a local court.

In the reading of a preliminary decision, the Vahdat court stripped the mosque of its right to observe Friday prayers. The written verdict, delivered in late May, however, went further even than the State Committee on Religious Affairs’ original demand, and closed the mosque altogether. A lawyer for Turajonzoda family asserts the court does not have that authority to issue such a closure order, and went on to question the judiciary’s independence.

Turajonzoda himself had earlier predicted the case would be decided against him and his family. Claiming the court order came as a “command from above”, he remains defiant.

“We are not going to stop praying in our mosque. Even if they decide to launch criminal proceedings, we (are) still going to pray here,” the Asia-Plus news quoted Turajonzoda as saying on May 30.

Observers in Dushanbe take him at his word and warn that his legion of followers will likely force the government to back down, for now.

Over the past two years, the government has waged a broad campaign against public expressions of piety. The Ulema Council has issued extensive guidelines on religious curricula in schools, restricted what imams can discuss, recalled Tajik seminary students studying abroad, regulated the annual Hajj pilgrimage, and banned children from praying in mosques.

Courts regularly sentence alleged extremists to long prison terms on flimsy evidence. An unexplained arson at a women’s mosque in October 2010 and raids on IRPT offices have also reinforced a belief among practicing Muslims that the government is intent on stifling religious freedom.

“There is no real concept of religious pluralism or tolerance” in Tajikistan, Heathershaw said. “This is about state control of religion.”

The uneasy relationship and deepening tension between official and uncontrolled religious observance is illustrated in the person of Turajonzoda, whose visible and varied career has spanned both secular and religious politics.

Turajonzoda “never shied away from criticising the government’s policy on religion,” says analyst Alexander Sodiqov. “People respect him mostly because he is not scared of standing up against what he sees as unjust policies on religion.”

The mosque’s closure appears to be an extension of recent attacks on the Turajonzoda family, which have included an aggressive press blitz following his removal from the Senate in 2010, a suspected case of arson at Turajonzoda’s cotton-processing factory in October 2011, and what appears to be a determined media effort to isolate and ostracise the family, publicly harassing many who associate with them.

Sodiqov attributes the government’s timing to presidential elections next year, recent violence that authorities blame on Islamists, and fear that Rahmon’s political opponents are drawing inspiration from the Arab Spring.

“This development is further proof that the regime is not ready to tolerate any kind of political dissent, particularly if it comes from religious leaders and groups,” said Sodiqov.

For Heathershaw, the mosque closure confirms “there is no possibility for dialogue on the place of Islam in Tajikistan.”

“Government policy is not about dialogue or diversity, it is about imposing its very narrow vision of Islam on society,” he said. “This,” he added, “will push more pious or divergent Muslims out of public life” – that is, underground, where observers fear they are more likely to become radicalised.

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

More than 100 Haitian families now have new housing, thanks to the support of two non-governmental organisations working on reconstruction following the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake.

Expanded slum on Morne L'Hôpital, comprised mainly of T-Shelters donated by NGOs. Credit: Evens Louis

But the circumstances in which the temporary shelters were provided, and the area where they were constructed, raise serious concerns about the role such organisations play in sustainable development.

On a mountainside slope overlooking the capital, 12 by 18-square- metre wooden homes, referred to as transitional shelters (T- shelters), dot land that used to be filled with vegetation, which is significant for a country where less than two percent of the land is forested.

Known locally as Morne l’Hôpital, the area is covered by a 1963 law and a 1986 decree which stipulate that the zone is specially protected. The Organism for the Oversight and Planning for Morne l’Hôpital (OSAMH) was set up by the government for just this purpose.

The American Red Cross and the United States government funded two of the international agencies which built homes on Morne L’Hôpital, respectively, the French-based ACTED and Irish-based GOAL. These humanitarian non-governmental agencies (NGOs) claim that they did everything by the book.

Others implicated claim differently, including the local authority for the specific area, Raoul Pierre-Louis and OSAMH director Montes Michel. In the end, it is an irresolvable he-said, she-said battle.

What is indisputable is the law which, published in the official government journal on Nov. 6, 1986, states: “Residential construction is not permitted unless permission is obtained from the relevant agencies……It is not permitted to graze cows or goats; to cut wood or bush, to undertake any kind of planting that involves hoeing…or do any kind of burning for whatever reason.”

But plots were cleared, trees cut, and foundations prepared for at least 100 of the shelters, if not more.

ACTED director Marianna Franco said that when the idea for T-shelters came along, there was no urban development plan for Port-au-Prince or the surrounding metropolitan area. “There still isn’t, so we built T- shelters where we could find space,” she said, explaining that every home was built on land where the recipient held a land title.

Pierre-Louis said that the NGOs signed papers that said “shelter”, not house. “In any case,” he explained, “they are temporary. They need to be moved.”

But that seems unlikely. All over the country, T-shelter recipients are busy converting their tiny wooden boxes into permanent homes with concrete walls, extra rooms and other additions.

“When you build a temporary shelter for someone, it is very likely that it will become permanent. We have seen people doing the transformation,” a GOAL agent admitted to Pierre-Louis during a telephone call made in the presence of a member of Haiti Grassroots Watch’s (HGW) investigative team. “Therefore, we said to ourselves, ‘Let’s see how we can help these people turn their temporary shelters into permanent homes.'”

OSAMH director Michel said good intentions to control the situation can’t compete with a lack of authority or human and financial resources.

“The state can’t really intervene (at Morne l’Hôpital) without the accompaniment of the police and representatives of the justice system,” Michel said. “It’s written in the law,”

But GOAL, which built about 1,000 T-Shelters in the Turgeau area, and at least 100 in the protected area of Morne l’Hôpital, claims it worked with Pierre-Louis as well as with an OSAMH agent, Canez Dellande, who oversaw the NGO’s work.

Michel said this was a “total lie”.

“We never delegated anyone to work with them,” he said. “We could never send an engineer out to set the limits if the NGO didn’t first give us a plan that outlined their activity.”

Plan or no plan, there’s no disputing the fragility of the area, and even one of the funders recognised this. Immediately after the earthquake, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) published a document announcing that the catastrophe had created an opportunity to protect the zone.

“The steeply sloped Morne l’Hôpital benefits, at least theoretically, from its special legal status as a ‘public utility,’ a protected area off limits to construction,” notes the document, which also says USAID partners with OSAMH. “The post-earthquake period provides an unprecedented opportunity to assert control over Morne l’Hôpital as a legally protected zone and prevent new housing construction on fragile slopes.”

HGW requested, without success, an interview with USAID’s Haiti office to understand why one US agency financed the deforestation of Morne l’Hôpital while another advocated for its protection. No one from USAID, including the director of the region in El Salvador, responded to HGW’s request.

Michel admits the government’s culpability in failing to protect Morne l’Hôpital, including the ongoing construction by the well-to- do, but says some NGOs have acted irresponsibly.

“We can’t stop the NGOs from doing work inside the 2,000 hectares,” he said. “But they should follow the law. If we let NGOs come, independent of OSAMH, and help increase the slums on Morne l’Hôpital, well, that is very bad for the country.”

Pierre-Louis was even more cynical, saying: “The ‘slumification’ of Port-au-Prince has just begun.”

*Kettie Guerrier and Milo Milfort for Haiti Grassroots Watch.

This report was made possible with the support of the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Haiti.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

(END)

Four years ago, Farida Hajimova’s husband left Tajikistan to work in Russia. After a time, he stopped calling. Ultimately, he never returned. She was left at home in Dushanbe with two daughters and not a lot of options.

Now she says she has no choice but to follow in her ex-husband’s footsteps – not to find him, but to find work herself.

Hajimova is one of an increasing number of Tajik women journeying abroad, mostly to Russia, as labour migrants. Until relatively recently, the overwhelming majority of migrant workers leaving Tajikistan were men.

But desperation and poverty are forcing tens of thousands of women to hit the road. Experts voice concern that many female migrants are at risk of being abused and trafficked for sex.

“I have only been able to find part-time work here in Dushanbe,” said 28-year-old Hajimova, who plans to follow two friends who work as cleaning ladies in Moscow. “My oldest daughter will go to school in September and I need to be able to afford to buy her the necessary supplies. The children will stay with their aunt and I will go to Moscow.”

Tajikistan’s dependence on remittances from labour migrants abroad is well-documented. Last year, Tajiks working in Russia sent home 2.96 billion dollars, the equivalent of 45 percent of the country’s GDP, according to the National Bank. That makes Tajikistan the world’s most remittance-dependent country.

The International Monetary Fund is projecting a 13-percent increase in remittance flows into Tajikistan this year. Over one million Tajiks, or roughly one out of every eight Tajik citizens, are estimated to work abroad as migrant labourers.

The share of Central Asian women going abroad to work is quickly growing. An analyst at the State Migration Service in Dushanbe estimates around 15 percent of Tajik labour migrants are now women. In 2003, his office said females comprised six percent of the migrant workforce.

“A mixture of poverty and increasing divorce rates in Tajikistan, which leave many women destitute, have contributed to this rise,” Natalia Bogdanova, Moscow-based rights activist and head of Migrant’s Rights, a non-governmental organisation, told EurasiaNet.org.

Like the men, many female Tajiks work abroad illegally. In December, Konstantin Romodanovsky, director of Russia’s Federal Migration Service, estimated that only 14 percent of the roughly 9.1 million foreign nationals working in the country had work permits, Russian media reported.

Without proper legal protections, Tajik migrants in Russia face threats arising from xenophobia, dangerous working conditions and hostile police. In 2011, Tajikistan received at least 818 boxes of “Cargo 200” – Soviet-era slang for coffins – from Russia, the Interior Ministry said in late December. Eighty-nine of the deaths were attributed to hate crimes.

Women face additional risks. “Most of the women work in domestic jobs, as cooks and cleaners. Many of them work here illegally,” Bogdanova said. “Many of them have very basic knowledge of Russian, leaving them open to exploitation, unsafe working conditions and blackmail.”

“We see cases in which women are promised jobs here and then forced to work for free, sometimes as prostitutes. …Crimes go unreported,” Bogdanova added, “because most women are not officially registered.”

That is what happened to Dushanbe divorcee Mavluda. “I married at 18, but soon my husband took a second wife and kicked me out of the house. A man approached me in Dushanbe and told me that he could arrange for me to work in Russia and I would earn 1,000 dollars a month,” Mavluda, who declined to give her last name for fear of reprisals, recalled.

When she arrived in Moscow, her new employers seized her passport and she was put to work in a café kitchen for no pay. “I was terrified. They told me that if I told the authorities, they would beat me. I begged them and after six months I got my documents back. I returned home to Tajikistan.”

Thirty-five-year-old Karomat Igamova from Kurgan-Tube, in southern Tajikistan, moved to St. Petersburg in 2009 after her husband divorced her and abandoned their four children. She found work selling fruit in a bazaar.

At first she struggled, but “the situation has improved recently,” she told EurasiaNet.org by telephone. “The economy is getting stronger and I am working five days a week now, instead of three. I now send home enough money to support my family,” two daughters and two sons who live with relatives.

Of course, conditions for many migrants remain difficult. “I live in an apartment with six other women,” Igamova said. “There is little privacy or personal space. Our landlord recently threatened to report us to the police unless we paid him a 100-dollar bribe.”

Such tales abound in Dushanbe. But in a country where half the population lives on less than two dollars a day, they are not a deterrent.

“Of course I am scared,” said Hajimova, the mother planning her first move to Moscow. “I have heard stories about life in Russia. But there are no opportunities here. What choice do I have? I have to feed my family.”

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

(END)

By Correspondents and - -
DOHA, Qatar, May 9 2012 (IPS)

A roadside bomb struck a Syrian military truck near Deraa, wounding six soldiers just seconds after a convoy carrying the head of the U.N. observer mission passed by.

An Associated Press news agency reporter who was travelling in the U.N. convoy said the explosion blew out the military vehicle’s windows and sent out a plume of black smoke. Vehicles in the U.N. convoy were not hit.

Major-General Robert Mood, the head of the U.N. mission, was in the convoy but escaped unharmed along with 11 other observers, said an AFP photographer travelling with them.

The Norwegian officer said the attack was “a graphic example of violence that the Syrian people do not need”.

“We were driving behind the U.N. convoy as protection when a roadside bomb exploded, wounding a first lieutenant and five troops,” a soldier who asked to be identified only by his first name, Yahya, told AP at the scene.

At least three bloodied soldiers were rushed away.

The blast went off after the head of the U.N. observer mission headed into the southern Syrian city with a team of observers and a convoy of journalists.

The explosion was more than 100 metres behind the convoy. It was not clear who was behind the blast.

‘Responsibility claim’

Al Jazeera’s Rula Amin, reporting from neighbouring Lebanon, said: “We heard some news coming from Free Syrian Army claiming responsibility for the attack, saying they did attack a military vehicle in Deraa, but it was a vehicle with no U.N. observers.

“How will this affect the U.N. mission and their free access is not clear.”

Bernard Valero, French foreign ministry spokesman, strongly condemned the attack. “We hold the Damascus regime responsible for the observers’ security,” he said in Paris.

Meanwhile, troops pounded a rebel hideout near Damascus killing at least three people on Wednesday, among them two soldiers and one civilian, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.

Residents of Douma, about 13km from Damascus, reported heavy shelling since dawn and bursts of gunfire in the town, the SOHR said.

Rebels fighting to overthrow the government of President Bashar al- Assad have apparently sought refuge in Douma.

In Damascus itself, clashes erupted briefly between a security patrol and rebels in the neighbourhood of Maisat, but there were no casualties, the SOHR said.

In the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, security forces carried out raids and arrests in the villages of Al-Safira and Al-Hisan.

Two members of Syrian security forces were killed after midnight in the Jura district of Deir Ezzor, the scene of heavy shooting and explosions, the watchdog reported.

On Tuesday evening, a man was killed in the town of Soura in Deir Ezzor after unidentified gunmen attacked his car, leaving his daughter wounded.

Reports of violence

One civilian was killed and three wounded in heavy machinegun fire by regime forces in Tell Ain al-Hamra, near the town of Jisr al-Shughur in the northwest province of Idlib, on Wednesday.

“Jisr al-Shughur is near the Turkish border and has had a significant presence of rebels since the beginning of the revolt,” the Observatory’s Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

Rural villages east of Jisr al-Shughur and the town itself came under mortar attack by security forces, he added.

In the same province, in the village of Ahsem, an army checkpoint was targeted by an explosion followed by gunfire, the Observatory reported.

Shots were also heard early on Wednesday in several districts of the central Syrian city of Homs, a stronghold of opposition groups.

Kofi Annan, the international peace envoy, said on Tuesday his peace plan that went into effect April 12 but has since been regularly violated by both sides to the conflict was “probably the last chance to avoid civil war” in Syria.

Nearly 12,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Syria since an anti-regime uprising erupted in mid-March last year, according to the Observatory.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

Disabled activists hold banner reading Return Freedom to Chen Guangcheng and His Family, on a thwarted visit to his village in October 2011. Credit: Ted Lipien/CC BY 2.0

By Correspondents
DOHA, May 3 2012 (IPS)

Blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng has said he wants to leave for the U.S. rather than stay in China, throwing into doubt a deal used to coax him out of the U.S. embassy in Beijing and defuse an impasse that has strained China-U.S. ties.

That stalemate appears all the more troublesome for the U.S., with Chen saying on Thursday that he feared for his and his family’s safety if he stayed in China under an agreement that U.S. officials initially said he was happy with.

Chen, a self-taught legal activist, is under Chinese control in a Beijing hospital, having left the embassy on Wednesday.

He had taken refuge at the mission for six days after escaping house arrest, and left under a diplomatic solution in which the U.S. said China promised that Chen could join his family and be allowed to start a new life in a university town, safe from the rural authorities who had abused him in prison and under house arrest for nearly seven years.

But Chen told the Reuters news agency on Thursday by telephone from hospital, where he was escorted by U.S. officials after leaving the embassy, that he had changed his mind after speaking to his wife who spoke of recent threats made against his family.

“I feel very unsafe. My rights and safety cannot be assured here,” he said, adding that his family supported his decision to try to get to the U.S.

The activist, citing descriptions from his wife, Yuan Weijing, said his family had been surrounded by Chinese officials who menaced them and filled the family home.

Chen, from a village in rural Shandong province, has two children.

“When I was inside the American embassy, I didn’t have my family, and so I didn’t understand some things. After I was able to meet them, my ideas changed.”

Precarious situation

Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride, reporting from Hong Kong, said that Chen’s new situation does not necessarily offer him much safety.

“At the moment he does seem to be in a fairly precarious position. Almost, you’d have to say, back in the position he was in before he sought sanctuary in the U.S. embassy,” he said.

Chen’s decision puts more strain on U.S.-China relations, at a tense time for both countries.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton found herself in the eye of the diplomatic storm on Thursday, turning up for the opening of annual bilateral talks in Beijing which have been overshadowed but not derailed by the Chen case.

She used the occasion to urge China to protect human rights, but made no specific mention of Chen, whom she had spoken to on Wednesday after he left the embassy.

“We believe that all governments do have to answer to citizens’ aspirations for dignity and the rule of law, and that no nation can or should deny those rights,” Clinton said as she opened on Thursday the annual strategic and economic Dialogue.

Chinese President Hu Jintao said in his speech that China and the U.S. must respect each other even if they disagree.

Hu said that “given our different national conditions it is impossible for both China and the United States to see eye to eye on every issue”.

Apology sought

China has demanded that the U.S. apologise for sheltering Chen in its embassy, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin said: “China is very unhappy over this. The U.S. action is an interference in China’s internal affairs and China cannot accept it.”

“Chen Guangcheng, a native from Yinan County of eastern China’s Shandong province, entered the U.S. embassy in Beijing in late April and left of his own volition after a six-day stay,” he said.

Chen, who has been blind since childhood, has long been a high-profile figure, and international rights groups have frequently expressed alarm at the treatment of him and his family.

Chen exposed how local authorities in Linyi, in Shandong province, forced thousands of women to have abortions or be sterilised as part of China’s one-child policy

He was placed under house arrest in 2010 after spending more than four years in jail for disrupting traffic and damaging property.

Chen’s colleagues said the escape from house arrest had taken months to plan, and was carried out with the help of a network of friends and activists.

He had jumped over the wall that the authorities had built around his house, and was taken to Beijing, where supporters say he stayed in safe houses before fleeing to the embassy. * Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

By Correspondents and - -
DOHA, Apr 26 2012 (IPS)

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has been convicted by the country’s Supreme Court of having committed contempt of court in a case that could see him expelled from office.

Gilani was sentenced to be detained in the court until the hearing was adjourned, the state broadcaster reported, and shortly afterwards emerged smiling and waving to supporters.

“For reasons to be recorded later, the prime minister is found guilty of contempt for wilfully flouting the direction of the Supreme Court,” said Justice Nasir-ul-Mulk while reading the verdict.

The judge said Gilani’s offence “tends to bring this court and the judiciary of the country into ridicule”.

The conviction was “likely to entail serious consequences” for Gilani under the section of the constitution covering the disqualification of MPs, Mulk said, and this was taken as a mitigating factor in sentencing.

The prime minister had faced a maximum sentence of six months in jail in the case, but was subjected only to a symbolic detention until “the rising of the court”.

A conviction for contempt of court could rule him out of holding public office, however.

Gilani to appeal

Earlier, Gilani was cheered by many supporters as he arrived at the Supreme Court building in Islamabad on Thursday morning.

The court was ruling whether Gilani was guilty of committing contempt of court by failing to obey its order to write to authorities in Switzerland requesting them to reopen a corruption case against Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president.

The court had ordered Zardari’s case, and several others, reopened after it struck down the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), a controversial 2007 amnesty law, as being unconstitutional.

Gilani says that reopening a case against a sitting president would itself be unconstitutional, as the holder of the post enjoys legal immunity while in office.

The contempt case, in court since January, has caused political instability and could force the holding of early elections if Gilani is finally disqualified from parliament and legislators cannot agree on a replacement.

Aitzaz Ahsan, Gilani’s lawyer and a sitting senator representing the PPP, said that his client would be appealing the verdict.

Federal Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan, a member of Gilani’s ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), said Gilani’s cabinet would be meeting the government’s legal team on Thursday. The party’s leadership was also due to meet with its coalition partners to discuss the verdict.

After the announcement of the verdict, Nawaz Sharif, the leader of the main opposition PML-N party, demanded that Gilani resign immediately “without causing further crisis”.

Irfan Qadir, the country’s attorney-general and a PPP loyalist, meanwhile, termed the court order “absolutely illegal”.

“This order is to be ignored,” he said.

Disqualification process

Even though he was convicted by the seven-member bench on Thursday, disqualification from holding public office is not a straightforward affair.

“The speaker of the National Assembly (the lower house of parliament) will be informed to process his disqualification as an MP on the basis of the conviction,” Rashid Rizvi, a former supreme court judge, said.

“The speaker has to write to the Election Commission of Pakistan within 30 days after the verdict to unseat the prime minister.”

The Election Commission would then have a further 90 days to make a decision on the case.

Gilani also has the right to appeal to a larger Supreme Court bench, Rizvi said, meaning the process could continue until an election date is announced.

“Since he is prime minister, the court can also suspend its own order for 15 days to enable his counsel to file an appeal,” he said.

Tight security

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said that he had ordered tight security measures to be taken around the court, with four helicopters to be stationed overhead for aerial surveillance.

About 200 riot police, armed with shields and batons, were stationed outside the court on Thursday, and approaches to the building had been closed to the public.

He urged activists from Gilani’s ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) not to come to the court, however, and asked them to remain calm regardless of the outcome.

Zardari and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, his late wife, were suspected of having used Swiss bank accounts to launder more than 10 million dollars, allegedly paid in bribes by companies seeking customs inspections contracts in the 1990s.

The cases were shelved, however, after the NRO was passed and Zardari became president soon after.

Were Gilani’s government to see out its term until March 2013, it would be the first democratically elected government to do so. Gilani is already the longest-serving prime minister in Pakistan’s chequered history with democracy.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

By Correspondents and - -
BISHKEK, Apr 24 2012 (IPS)

The Kremlin is getting cranky over Kyrgyzstan’s efforts to obtain aid without any diplomatic payback. To convey their displeasure, Russian officials are now delaying cooperation agreements and demanding an expanded share of a Kyrgyz military facility.

Russian analysts say than on visits to Moscow in February and March, President Almazbek Atambayev annoyed Russian leaders with persistent demands for economic assistance. What particularly vexed the Kremlin was that there was no “quid” to Atambayev’s “pro quo”.

In return for aid, Russian leaders expect diplomatic fealty. Yet Bishkek remains attached to a “multi-vector foreign policy”, in which Bishkek fosters warm relations with all regional powers, rather than cozying up solely to Moscow.

From the start of his administration, Atambayev has demonstrated a willingness to diplomatically defy Moscow, even as he repeatedly bangs on the Kremlin’s gates, playing the role of supplicant.

According to Alexey Malashenko, an expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center, Russian leaders have been displeased since December, when Atambayev invited a Kremlin bête noire, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, to his inauguration in Bishkek. Upon seeing the guest list, Russia cancelled plans for a senior Kremlin official to attend and sent a junior official instead.

“Relations between Moscow and Bishkek have chilled. Atambayev’s visits to Moscow were a failure,” Malashenko said. “Not a single agreement was signed during those trips.”

In Bishkek, many analysts take a less dire view of the situation. But some pundits see parallels in the Kremlin’s current spat with Atambayev with the last time Moscow grew annoyed with a Kyrgyz president. In that case, back in 2009-10, former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev lasted just a few months in power after the Kremlin started to turn the screws.

Among policymakers in Bishkek there is frustration with what is perceived as Moscow’s repeated failure to fulfill promises.

After the Russian legislative elections in December, the Kyrgyz authorities expected a 160-million-dollar loan from Russia, which Moscow had promised through the Eurasian Economic Community (EEC). Moscow postponed the transfer, however, saying the matter would be reviewed in 2012. Atambayev’s visits earlier this year passed without the loan being finalised. Bishkek had counted on the money to supplement the state budget.

In addition, Russian officials appear to have delayed a deal that has already been 10 years in the making, in which Russia’s Gazprom is supposed to purchase a 75-percent stake in Kyrgyzstan’s state-run Kyrgyzgaz. Kyrgyz officials say the aging Kyrgyzgaz infrastructure is badly in need of repair, yet they don’t have other investors.

After his February meetings with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev, Atambayev talked tough, scandalising observers in Moscow and Bishkek alike.

“If Russia is willing to help us as our strategic partner, we will accept help. But today what we see is not help,” he told the Kommersant business daily on Feb. 27. He added that a Russian airbase in Kyrgyzstan “only flatters the vanity of Russian generals. (…) Why do we need this?” and declared Bishkek would no longer beg for aid.

Though he was able to secure a “measly” 15 million dollars for overdue Russian military base rent during the trip, Russian officials reproached him, saying Atambayev was confused about which bases the rent was for. The Kremlin also pointed out that Kyrgyzstan owes Russia 480 million dollars.

The following month, during Atambayev’s trip to attend an EEC meeting, a Kremlin source announced Moscow was changing terms on yet another outstanding agreement.

In 2009, Moscow promised a 2.15-billion-dollar aid package including 150 million dollars in cash, a 300-million-dollar low-interest loan, and 1.7 billion dollars to help build the 1.9-gigawatt Kambarata-1 hydropower station on the Naryn River. In addition, in exchange for writing off 180 million dollars in debt, Russia would receive 48 percent of Dastan, a torpedo factory in Bishkek.

Former president Bakiyev, in turn, reportedly promised to evict the Americans from the Manas air base outside of Bishkek. After he received the cash (but not the investment or write-off), Bakiyev renegotiated with the Americans, allowing them to stay – a move that infuriated the Kremlin and, many argued, hastened his downfall.

The Kremlin now wants 75 percent of Dastan shares in exchange for the 180-million-dollar write-off. And Russian officials have said they will only participate in construction of the dam if Moscow gets 75 percent of those shares.

Russian analysts say the tougher bargaining underscores Moscow’s eroding sense of trust in Atambayev, who ran last year on a pro- Russian platform.

“After Atambayev was elected president, he changed Kyrgyzstan’s foreign policy rhetoric, abandoning all his previous statements regarding Russia,” said Alexander Knyazev, an Almaty-based political scientist who is seen as close to the Kremlin. Moscow is weary of such “cheap bargaining.”

Though Atambayev has repeatedly described Russia as Kyrgyzstan’s most important ally, and has said the U.S. airbase at Manas will close when its lease expires in 2014, he has not done enough to assuage Moscow’s concerns.

“The ‘multi-vector’ period is over, it is time the Kyrgyz make unambiguous their priorities – they must go with Russia and Kazakhstan, or with Georgia and the United States and maybe China,” Knyazev said.

Modest Kolerov, chief editor of Regnum.ru, a Russian news outlet, said Moscow hasn’t forgotten Bakiyev’s skullduggery, and thus wants clear assurances from Atambayev’s administration that Kyrgyzstan won’t try to pull another fast one.

From Bishkek’s viewpoint, Kremlin concerns seem overblown. Many Kyrgyz see Russia as a natural ally; hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz work in Russia and the countries share deep historical and cultural ties.

Temir Dzhumakadyrov, a political scientist from the Kyrgyz National University, attributed the toughening Russian stance to a desire by Putin to impress his domestic constituents as he prepares to reassume the presidency next month.

“Regular discussions of projects including the Manas base, Kambarata and loans are only tools of influence,” Dzhumakadyrov said, adding that Bishkek is being pragmatic scouting out other investors.

“But a critical point is coming, when (Kyrgyzstan) must make a decision in this or that direction,” he added.

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Excerpt:

By Correspondents and - -
DOHA, Qatar, Apr 23 2012 (IPS)

Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader, and newly elected MPs from her National League for Democracy (NLD) party have refused to attend the opening session of parliament over a dispute regarding the wording of the parliamentary oath.

Suu Kyi and other members of her party refused to travel to the capital Naypyidaw to enter parliament on Monday.

The NLD wants the phrasing in the politicians’ oath changed from “safeguard the constitution” to “respect the constitution”.

Al Jazeera’s Wayne Hay, reporting from Naypyidaw, said: “The National League of Democracy is not calling it a boycott, although it is really exactly that.

“They have not turned up to the parliamentary sessions today. They have not even made the trip from the former capital Yangon to Naypyidaw.

“We have had one session already of the Upper House and there was no sign of NLD. The issue of the boycott was not even on the official agenda of the Upper House.”

The NLD has petitioned the constitutional court to change the oath, and Suu Kyi has written to Thein Sein, Myanmar’s president, asking him to reword the vow of allegiance.

Historic by-elections

Suu Kyi, who spent much of the past two decades locked up by the country’s military leaders, campaigned in by-elections on a pledge to amend the country’s constitution, which was drawn up the country’s former government.

Her party won 43 out of 45 seats in the historic by-elections that gave the Nobel Laureate her first seat in parliament.

Sein said on Monday during a five-day visit to Japan that he had no plans to change the oath.

The president told reporters in Tokyo he would like to “welcome” Suu Kyi to parliament, but that it was up to her whether or not she took up the seat.

Analysts say the Myanmar president needs the opposition in the parliament, dominated by the military-backed party, to get international legitimacy.

Myanmar’s military rulers ceded power to a quasi-civilian government after a November 2010 election marred by opposition complaints of rigging, and won by a party set up by the military.

The new government headed by Sein has released hundreds of political prisoners and introduced a wave of reforms including loosening media controls, allowing trade unions and protests, talks with ethnic minority rebels and sweeping economic changes.

‘Sense of betrayal’

Bridget Welsh, associate professor at Singapore Management University, told Al Jazeera: “The international community may see this exactly for what this is, and that seems rather petty. It’s about a word and not necessarily on principles.

“Most of the international community recognises that there are much more serious problems facing the country, poverty, development and so forth.

“This could lead to backlash in the international community. Also it could lead to a backlash domestically, because I think it will be very hard to translate it to ordinary people who voted for her, they may feel a sense of betrayal.

“Finally, of course, this could jeopardise the trust relationship that’s been moving the process forward.”

The oath is in an appendix to the constitution, and it is unclear whether it can be changed without the approval of 75 percent of parliament.

The constitution automatically allocates 25 percent of the parliamentary seats to unelected representatives of the military, and Suu Kyi’s party maintains that is undemocratic.

It also bars people from the nation’s presidency if they, or any of their relatives, are foreign citizens; that effectively prevents Suu Kyi from ascending to the presidency because she married a British national.

The potential parliamentary impasse comes as Japan announced it would waive about 3.7 billion dollars of Myanmar’s debt and resume suspended assistance to the country.

The European Union has announced it is suspending most sanctions on the country as a result of its “remarkable” reforms.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

By Correspondents and - -
DOHA, Qatar, Apr 23 2012 (IPS)

Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president, has pledged not to negotiate with South Sudan amid reports of fresh air attacks on his country’s southern neighbour.

The renewed tensions come as South Sudan’s 10-day occupation of the oil town of Heglig has left parts of the town blood-soaked and in ruins.

“We will not negotiate with the South’s government, because they don’t understand anything but the language of the gun and ammunition,” Bashir told Sudanese troops at a barracks near an oilfield along the two neighbours’ contested border on Monday. “Our talks with them were with guns and bullets.”

General Kamal Abdul Maarouf, a Sudanese army commander who led the battles in Heglig, said the army had killed 1,200 South Sudanese troops in fighting in the area, an account South Sudan denied.

An AFP news agency correspondent who accompanied Maarouf said he saw piles of corpses bearing South Sudanese military uniforms scattered beneath trees in the border region.

South Sudan’s army said 19 of its soldiers were killed and that 240 Sudanese troops lost their lives.

‘So many bodies’

Early in the occupation, one South Sudanese soldier in Bentiu, capital of the South’s Unity state, said “there are so many bodies at the front line, so many dead”, that it is impossible to bury them or bring them back.

Despite the end of the occupation, Major General Mac Paul, the deputy director of military intelligence for South Sudan, said on Monday that two MiG 29 fighter planes dropped three bombs, two of which landed near a bridge that connected Bentiu and Rubkona.

“This is a serious escalation and violation of the territory of South Sudan. It’s a clear provocation,” he said.

Paul said ground troops from Sudan launched three waves of attacks about 10km on its side of the border.

“We are building up troops because we think that the Sudanese army is also building up,” he said.

Sudan denied carrying out the air raid, which drew quick condemnation from the U.S. and France.

The military “denies any sort of direct bombing inside the border of South Sudan”, an official from Sudan’s foreign ministry said.

The governor of Unity state, Taban Deng, said the Sudanese bombs fell on a key bridge and a market, killing at least two children.

The bombs prompted heavy bursts of gunfire from Southern soldiers hoping to shoot down enemy fighter jets, according to an AFP correspondent who was 50 metres from where the explosives occurred.

In the market, stalls were on fire and large plumes of grey smoke rose high into the air, as screaming civilians ran in panic.

Deng said that the violence was a result of his country’s pullout from Heglig.

“We have been pressured by the international community to pull out of Heglig and this is the consequence, we have brought the war to home,” he said.

“They have been given orders to wipe us out, they have called us insects,” Deng said, referring to Bashir’s earlier speech.

Conflicting accounts

Bashir and his defence minister, Abdelrahim Mohammed Hussein – both wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region – declared on Friday that their army had forced Southern soldiers out of Heglig.

Salva Kiir, South Sudan’s president, had already announced that his forces would leave under “an orderly withdrawal”. His army said the pullout was completed on Sunday.

A U.S. monitoring group said on Sunday that satellite imagery appeared to show the fighting around Heglig had caused major damage to oil- pipeline infrastructure.

The Satellite Sentinel Project said the images showed severe damage, and in such a critical part of the oil infrastructure that it would probably stop oil flow in the area.

From the main road in Heglig, destroyed oil-company vehicles could be seen, and the AFP correspondent found the area’s main oil-processing facility heavily damaged.

A storage tank appeared to have been destroyed by fire; eight generators which provided power to the facility were damaged; and some oil was leaking onto the ground at the plant operated by the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC).

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

By Correspondents and - -
DOHA, Apr 19 2012 (IPS)

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon the has called for a U.N. observer mission in Syria to be expanded, even though he says Damascus has failed to adhere to a ceasefire central to an agreed peace plan.

Ban Ki-moon. Credit: World Economic Forum

The council called for Ban to report back when it passed a resolution on Saturday which sent an advanced party of 30 unarmed military observers to Syria.

His report, obtained by the AFP news agency, said that even though Syrian troops have not withdrawn from cities and violence has escalated since the ceasefire began, “an opportunity for progress may now exist, on which we need to build”.

The 300 observers would deploy over several weeks and go to about 10 different parts of Syria to monitor the fragile cessation of hostilities which officially started on Apr. 12.

They would also monitor the implementation of U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan’s six-point peace plan, which Syrian authorities have agreed to support.

Ban said the proposed mission would “greatly contribute to observing and upholding the commitment of the parties to a cessation of armed violence in all its forms.”

The report will be discussed by the Security Council on Thursday and diplomats said a resolution allowing the full observer mission could be ready by early next week if there is agreement among the 15 members.

‘Intense shooting’

Meanwhile, a Syrian activist group says clashes between troops and army defectors in an eastern city have left at least one person dead.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says Thursday’s clashes in Deir el-Zour also wounded three civilians.

Activists say Syrian troops also shelled rebel-held areas in the central city of Homs and the nearby town of al-Qusair, which borders Lebanon.

The observatory says intense shooting and explosions could be heard in Homs’ al-Qarabis and Jurat al-Shayah neighbourhoods.

Al Jazeera is unable to independently verify reports of violence, as the Syrian government has placed strict restrictions on reporting.

The U.N. says well over 9,000 people have been killed in Syria since an uprising against Assad broke out in March 2011.

Activists says scores have died since the ceasefire started.

Ban said that violence “dropped markedly” when the ceasefire began, but Syria “has yet to fully implement its initial obligations regarding the actions and deployments of its troops and heavy weapons, or to return them to barracks.

“Violent incidents and reports of casualties have escalated again in recent days, with reports of shelling of civilian areas and abuses by government forces,” he said.

‘Partial’ action

Ban said only “partial” action has been taken on other parts of the Annan plan. “While difficult to assess, it does not amount yet to the clear signal expected from the Syrian authorities,” he said.

The U.N. secretary-general said it was “critical” for Assad to fully carry out his promise to “cease troop movements towards population centres, cease all use of heavy weapons in population centres, and begin the pullback of military concentrations in and around population centres.”

At the moment there are six observers in Syria, led by a Moroccan colonel. The full mission would be led by an officer of at least the rank of major general.

Ban said the team has so far been refused permission to go to Homs, with Syrian officials claiming “security concerns”.

The mission went to Deraa, the revolt’s epicentre, on Tuesday, where “it enjoyed freedom of movement” and “observed no armed violence or heavy weapons”.

But Ban confirmed violent incidents when the U.N. observers went to Arbeen, in the Damascus suburbs, on Wednesday.

“A crowd that was part of an opposition demonstration forced United Nations vehicles to a checkpoint. Subsequently, the crowd was dispersed by firing projectiles,” said the report.

“Those responsible for the firing could not be ascertained by the United Nations military observers.”

One U.N. vehicle was slightly damaged, but no injuries were observed by the team.

Ban said the new mission, to be known as the U.N. Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS), would include political, human rights, civil affairs, public information, public security, gender and other advisers.

However, it would not carry out humanitarian assistance duties.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Excerpt:

By Correspondents and - -
DOHA, Apr 12 2012 (IPS)

An internationally brokered ceasefire in Syria is only being “partially observed,” the opposition says, as state television reported that a roadside bomb had killed an army officer.

Heavy weapons and government troops remain deployed in cities, the main opposition bloc said on Thursday, hours after the truce deadline at dawn.

“There is no evidence of a significant withdrawal,” the Syrian National Council’s spokeswoman Bassma Kodmani said.

“The ceasefire is … only partially observed … To us it is clear that ceasefire implied withdrawal of all heavy weaponry from cities, populated areas. This has not happened.”

Kodmani also said three people had been killed in the towns of Idlib and Hama since the truce, negotiated by U.N. and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan, was to go into effect at 6am (03:00GMT).

Meanwhile, the government said “terrorists” were trying to sabotage the U.N.-backed peace plan.

State media reported that a roadside bomb in Syria’s second city, Aleppo, killed an army officer.

“An armed terrorist group used an explosive device to target a bus transporting officers and non-commissioned officers to their unit in Aleppo. It killed a lieutenant colonel and wounded 24 other people” at 8am (05:00GMT), the official SANA news agency reported.

Continuing protests

Activists reported anti-government protests at universities in the southern city of Deraa, Aleppo in the north, and the eastern city of Deir el-Zor. A protest march was also held in the northern village of Tamanaa.

China, which has stood by Syria during the 13-month crisis, welcomed the truce, saying it hoped the government continued to “take concrete actions to support and cooperate with Annan’s mediation efforts”.

Western leaders have expressed doubts that the Syrian government will honour the deal and have called on other nations to take additional action against Syria at the U.N. Security Council.

Syria’s official news agency, SANA, reported that the armed forces had called a halt to their mission as of Thursday morning, declaring the military “successful” in combating “criminal acts by armed terrorist groups”.

But the agency, quoting an unnamed defence ministry source, said the military would remain on alert to confront the “terrorists”.

Since protests inspired by uprisings in other Arab countries first broke out in Syria in March 2011, the government has brutally suppressed the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad, killing more than 9,000 people according to a U.N. estimate, and spawning armed action.

Humanitarian aid

Syrian rebels, loosely organised across Syria’s provinces, do not obey a set chain of command, and it remains a question whether they will comply with the ceasefire.

Al Jazeera’s Anita McNaught, reporting from Hatay in Turkey, said commanders in the opposition Free Syrian Army had declared their intent to abide by the ceasefire.

Rula Amin, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Beirut, said Annan “doesn’t expect a total halt of the violence” but wants to ensure at least enough room for humanitarian aid to arrive.

Saif, an activist in hard-hit Homs in the centre of the country, told Al Jazeera that he thought shelling would resume within hours.

“All the shops have been closed for more than two months, nobody is able to go to work, all communications except phone lines are disconnected in most of the areas, schools are closed also … there are many difficulties,” he said.

Abu Rami, another Homs activist, said that while shelling and attacks in the city in the hours before the ceasefire had “claimed dozens of lives,” there had been no shootings or explosions on Thursday.

But soldiers and armoured vehicles were still stationed at checkpoints, he said.

“I think many people will go down to the streets and keep protesting in their demonstrations and calling for their main goal, that this regime must step down,” he said.

Suspicion and cynicism

U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed in a telephone call on Wednesday that “more resolute” U.N. Security Council action was needed on Syria, the White House said.

“The President and Chancellor shared the concern that the Assad government was not complying with the terms of the agreement negotiated by Kofi Annan and continued to engage in unacceptable brutality against its own people,” a White House statement said.

“They agreed that this underscored the need for the U.N. Security Council to come together to take more resolute action.”

Al Jazeera’s Cath Turner, reporting from the U.N. in New York, said the statement by the Syrian government “has been greeted with a great deal of suspicion and cynicism”.

“Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and the current president of the U.N. Security Council (Mark Lyall Grant), spoke about the letter that has been submitted by President Assad, and she was very clear in the fact that she was not taking anything in that letter at its word, because, she said, President Assad did not have a very good track record at keeping his word,” our correspondent said.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

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By Correspondents and - -
DOHA, Qatar, Apr 11 2012 (IPS)

Kofi Annan, the joint United Nations-Arab League envoy on Syria, has welcomed Iranian support for his efforts to secure peace in the country, telling Tehran that it can be “part of the solution”.

Annan was speaking in Tehran on Wednesday following talks with Ali Akbar Salehi, the Iranian foreign minister.

But while endorsing Annan’s peace plan, which calls for a ceasefire by Thursday, Salehi said Syria’s government needed to be given time to implement reforms.

Tehran is considered a key regional ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who faces growing international pressure over the crackdown by security forces that has seen cities shelled and thousands of people killed.

Annan stressed again the urgency of finding a way to end the killing and to provide humanitarian assistance to those in need, before getting all parties to the table.

“The political process must be Syrian-led and respect the aspirations of the Syrian people,” Annan said. “What is important is that governments in the region and beyond work with Syria to resolve the crisis.

“The geopolitical position of Syria is such that any miscalculation can have unimaginable consequences.”

Regarding a ceasefire agreement which requires Syrian government forces to halt operations by Apr. 12, Annan said he had received assurances that the deadline would be honoured.

“If everyone respects it I think by six in the morning on Thursday we shall see improved conditions on the ground,” Annan said.

Answering a question whether he supported calls by some countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to arm the Syrian opposition, Annan said “any further militarisation will be disastrous”.

Salehi offered qualified Iranian support for Annan’s efforts.

“We believe the people of Syria, like other countries, have the right to enjoy all the rights enjoyed by other world nations, such as freedom of political parties, freedom of elections, a constitution that encompasses all the wishes of a nation,” he said. “At the same time, we have announced that we oppose interference in the affairs of all countries, including Syria. The government of Bashar al-Assad has promised change to meet the demands of the people… and in fact the opportunity must be given to the Syrian government.”

Ceasefire deadline

Annan’s peace plan, presented last month, calls on the Syrian government to withdraw troops from towns and end the use of heavy weaponry. Under the plan, both the army and opposition fighters must adhere to the ceasefire.

Walid al-Muallem, the Syrian foreign minister, on Tuesday demanded guarantees from Annan that rebels would also honour any truce.

“We will not ask the terrorist groups, which are killing, kidnapping and destroying infrastructure, for guarantees. We want Annan to give us these guarantees,” Muallem said during a visit to Moscow.

Syria failed to observe a Tuesday deadline to withdraw its forces from urban areas, and activists reported fresh violence on Wednesday.

The Local Co-ordination Committees said there was shelling of several opposition-held neighbourhoods in the central city of Homs.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said “tens of army vehicles” were deploying in the southern town of Maaraba amid intense shooting.

The Syrian National Council’s spokeswoman Basma Kodmani said that if Assad does not show sign of adhering to the ceasefire, the U.N. Security Council must set an ultimatum with the will to enforce by power.

“What we would like to see is a unanimous decision by members of the Security Council that sends an ultimatum to the regime with a deadline that is not too far down the road that says on such and such a date enforcement measures will intervene,” Kodmani told Reuters.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, was expected to meet Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, in Washington.

“We will have another go at trying to persuade the Russians that the situation is deteriorating and the likelihood of regional conflict and civil war is increasing,” she said on Tuesday.

Assad’s forces have killed more than 9,000 people in the past year, according to a U.N. estimate. Damascus says rebels have killed more than 2,500 soldiers and security personnel.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

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By Correspondents
DOHA, Qatar, Apr 9 2012 (IPS)

Gunfire from the Syrian side of the border has hit a refugee camp inside Turkey, wounding at least three people.

Two Syrian refugees and one Turkish translator were wounded in Monday’s incident when the Kilis border refugee camp in Gaziantep province came under fire from the Syrian side of the border, a Turkish foreign ministry official said.

However, it is unclear whether the camp was deliberately targeted.

A Turkish foreign ministry official said the Syrian charge d’affaires in Ankara was summoned to the ministry following the incident.

“We demanded an end to this (shooting),” the official said.

Al Jazeera’s Anita McNaught, reporting from Antakya in southern Turkey, said the incident signifies “a remarkable escalation in tensions on this already tense cross-border area”.

The incident occurred as reports indicated that Syrian government forces were trying to prevent refugees from entering Turkey.

Thousands of Syrians are sheltering in eight refugee camps set up in Turkey’s southern provinces of Hatay and Gaziantep, while others have crossed into Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

Against this backdrop, a U.N.-brokered ceasefire agreement that is due to come into force on Tuesday is looking shaky after Bashar al- Assad’s government raised new, last-minute demands that were rejected by the country’s armed opposition.

Under the deal, brokered by Kofi Annan, the U.N.-Arab League special envoy, the Syrian army is scheduled to withdraw from protest cities on Tuesday, with a complete end to fighting set for 48 hours later.

But Syria has since said it would only carry out its side of the bargain if the rebels first handed over written guarantees to stop fighting, a demand rejected by the leader of the largest armed opposition group, the Free Syria Army (FSA).

China has urged Syria to stick to its earlier pledge to stop fighting and start pulling back its troops, while also calling on the opposition to honour its commitments.

‘Criminal gang’

Colonel Riad al-Asaad said the FSA was committed to the peace plan but would give guarantees only to the international community and not the Syrian government.

“It is not a regime that is ruling the country. It’s a criminal gang. So we will not give guarantees to it,” Asaad told Al Jazeera just hours after the government issued its demand on Sunday.

Asaad said that if the Syrian government abided by Annan’s six-point plan to end the violence, the FSA would hold its fire. He demanded that the government withdraw its forces to bases and remove checkpoints from the streets.

Last week, Assad accepted the ceasefire agreement, which also called for the government and opposition fighters to lay down their arms by 6am local time on Thursday.

For his part, Annan urged Syria’s government to fully implement its commitment to the ceasefire, and condemned “a surge in violence and atrocities” that is occurring there.

The truce is meant to pave the way for negotiations between the government and the opposition over Syria’s political future.

However, activists say Syrian troops are continuing their assault on flashpoint regions.

Idlib shelled

Forces loyal to President Assad have also shelled an area in the province of Idlib near the border with Turkey, leaving dozens dead or injured, opposition activists said on Sunday.

Around 90 tanks and armoured vehicles, backed by helicopters, bombarded the al-Rouge Plain, southwest of Idlib city, the provincial capital, Reuters news agency reported quoting activists inside Syria and on the border with Turkey.

The activists further said fighters from the FSA were surrounded in al-Bashiriya, one of about 40 villages in the plain.

The Syrian National Council, as the main opposition umbrella group is known, called on Sunday for U.N. intervention after monitoring groups said 86 of those killed on Saturday were civilians.

Towns north of Aleppo have endured days of clashes and bombardment, prompting 3,000 civilians to flee over the Turkish border on Friday alone, about 10 times the daily number before Assad accepted Annan’s plan 10 days ago.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, said on Saturday the number of refugees entering Turkey was rising.

“At the moment, we have 24,000 Syrians who have entered Turkey. Of course, this number is rising,” Erdogan said before departing on a trip to China.

“In particular, Kofi Annan has to hold firm. He announced a deadline of April 10. I believe that he should monitor the situation very closely.”

The U.N. estimates that at least 9,000 people have been killed in Syria since the crisis began 13 months ago.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

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By Correspondents and - -
TASHKENT, Apr 6 2012 (IPS)

Religion is a wedge that is driving Uzbekistan and Turkey apart.

In recent months, Uzbek leaders have intensified a campaign to contain Turkish economic and cultural influences in Uzbekistan. The most prominent component of this crackdown has been the arrest of 54 Turkish entrepreneurs over the past two years and the closure of at least 50 Turkish-operated businesses.

In addition, the presidential administration in late February ordered all state-owned and private television channels to stop airing Turkish sitcoms, claiming that they were “inappropriate” for an Uzbek audience. Turkish-funded schools have also been forced to close.

Underlying Tashkent’s actions is mounting distrust of the Islamist orientation of Turkey’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP). It would seem that Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s government worries that the AKP is working to promote Islamic piety not only in Turkey, but in the Turkic states of Central Asia.

In particular, Tashkent is suspicious that the AKP is somehow abetting the activity of an Islamic evangelical movement led by the Turkish theologian Fetullah Gulen, whose ideas are rooted in concepts earlier espoused by Bediuzzaman Said Nursî in the mid-20th century.

Although avowedly non-violent, the Gulen movement is unwelcome in Uzbekistan, a country that keeps all forms of religious expression under tight government control. Adherents of the Gulen movement are known as Nurcus.

Tashkent and Ankara enjoyed a flowering of relations in the early 1990s, when Turkey sought to connect with the “Turkic” republics of newly independent Central Asia. But relations started to sour when Ankara refused to extradite political opponents of Karimov, who fled to Turkey to escape his growing authoritarian rule.

“Uzbekistan has accused Turkey of harboring Uzbek terrorists and sponsoring banned underground religious groups in Uzbekistan,” said a Tashkent-based journalist who specialises in Uzbekistan’s diplomatic relations. The journalist spoke on condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns.

There is an apparent religious dimension to the Uzbek clampdown on Turkish businesses. In late 2011, many of the accused Turkish entrepreneurs were sentenced to prison terms ranging from two to three years, and their properties were confiscated. Twelve of the 54 have since been amnestied and deported.

Amid the prosecutions, state-controlled television channels aired programmes clearly designed to stir up anti-Turk sentiments. For example, a late February documentary, titled “Crime and Punishment” and broadcast on two state-run channels, claimed that the arrested entrepreneurs took advantage of “our country’s favourable investment climate and committed economic crimes, including trade in counterfeit goods and the use of dishonest accounting practices to hide profits.”

The documentary – which included apparent confessions from some of the accused – asserted that several of the arrested entrepreneurs were affiliated with the Gulen movement.

In addition to the religious element, governmental corruption appears to be a factor in the crackdown, some observers contend. A Tashkent- based financial analyst suspects the attacks on Turkish ventures might be part of an ongoing redistribution of property that began in 2010.

That year, authorities closed down scores of foreign and local businesses, including Zeromax, a Swiss-registered company, and jailed more than a dozen local businessmen and confiscated their property.

The Turkish businessmen might have been punished for not sharing their profits with high-ranking officials, many believe.

“In our country, businesses have to give bribes if they want to continue operating,” the financial analyst said.

Among the closed venues were Demir and Turkuaz, two of Tashkent’s largest shopping centres.

“The Turks controlled lucrative retail stores, such as Turkuaz, and this has long caused the envy of their competitors,” said a Tashkent- based shopkeeper, who believes the “competitors” were high-ranking officials and their families.

In an interview, a senior Uzbek official denied claims the government actions were politically motivated. He said that in addition to the Turks, joint ventures with ties to Swiss, Emirati and Iranian investors have been punished for financial impropriety. (The owners of Komfort-Elite, a furniture store operated with capital from the UAE, are also reportedly under investigation for illegal trade and tax evasion).

Publicly, the Turkish government’s reaction has been muted. But in October, parliament did not include Uzbekistan in its list of countries with which it plans to form parliamentary friendship committees. The list did include the other four Central Asian republics.

Turkish media and businesspeople, meanwhile, are livid with Tashkent.

In an interview with Hürriyet Daily News in February, Vahit Gunes, an owner of Turkuaz Group, which had six shopping malls in Uzbekistan and who spent nine months in jail before being amnestied and deported, said Tashkent’s accusations were groundless.

“Nearly 60 million dollars was seized (by the Uzbek authorities) illegally,” Gunes said.

Rıza Nur Meral, the chairman of the Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists of Turkey (TUSKON), told Hürriyet Daily News in late February that “the mistreatment of Turkish businessmen should be ended immediately”.

In Tashkent, analysts fear the tumult may hurt Uzbekistan’s economy. Turkish companies are prominent in Uzbekistan’s various industries, including textiles, food production, medicine, plastics, construction and hotel services.

According to Turkish media reports, between 1992 and 2010, Turkish construction companies spent close to 1.8 billion dollars in Uzbekistan, and the value of trade between the two countries exceeded one billion dollars in 2010.

“Many Uzbeks who were employed by [Turkish] businesses lost their livelihood,” said a Tashkent resident. He also said that many are angry the government banned Turkish sitcoms, which were very popular. But most are afraid to air their grievances publicly for fear of retribution, he added.

At least one sector shows no sign of being hurt by the chill: security. In late February, the Turkish International Cooperation and Coordination Agency, Ankara’s development arm, announced it would sponsor four training sessions this year for Uzbek security forces. The sessions were designed to improve capacity in battling organised criminal networks.

“Though Tashkent does not trust the Islamic government (in Ankara), it has warm relations with the Turkish security forces,” said the Tashkent-based journalist.

Security ties remain strong because Tashkent believes the Turkish military is dominated by secularists.

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

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By Correspondents and - -
DUSHANBE, Apr 5 2012 (IPS)

Hunger, unheated barracks, beatings and regular outbreaks of disease: it could be life in a penal colony. But in this case, it describes the existence of a fresh military conscript in Tajikistan.

The brutal conditions are the reason many young Tajik men go to great lengths to evade country’s biannual military drafts.

“Many draftees emigrate, while those that have the means enter university because students are exempt until the end of their studies,” said Khursheda Rahimova, a lawyer for Amparo, a legal- support non-governmental organisation based in Khujand that monitors the draft.

Consistent shortages of draftees willing to serve prompt some recruitment officers in Tajikistan to resort to impressment, or the quasi-legal kidnapping of military-age men. It is a practice with a long historical tradition.

Most famously, Britain relied on impressment during the 18th and early 19th centuries to fill out the crews of naval vessels. It was a major cause of the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States.

In Tajikistan, the practice is known as “oblava” and it involves military press gangs making sweeps of city streets, bazaars and bus stations, rounding up young men who meet the desired criteria. According to a survey conducted by Amparo, around a quarter of all drafted men in 2011 were subjected to impressment tactics.

“I received notification of my call up several times. I ignored it. Then early one morning a team of recruitment officers turned up at my house and threw me into the back of a van. Had I known better I would have left the country like most of my friends did,” said Nasrallah Saidov, a taxi driver in Khujand who recently completed his service.

The reasons for staying out of the military are abundant. Conditions are rudimentary at many facilities, especially in the more isolated rural areas of the country, where conscripts face the prospect of cold buildings and erratic supplies of food. Pay is also an issue, with conscripts complaining they often earn less than two dollars a month.

“We were fed very little. My uniform didn’t keep me warm in the winter months. There were 120 of us sleeping in cramped conditions in an unheated dorm. I couldn’t sleep at night from all the (other conscripts) coughing,” said Saidov.

Last summer, several incidents in Sughd Province highlighted the problem of corruption and malnutrition in the armed forces. According to press reports, a unit of border guards had been helping local farmers harvest in return for food. Somehow the agreement broke down and the farmers complained the hungry border guards simply took 50 percent of his crop.

On top of the material hardships endured by the conscripts, the Soviet-era practice of dedovshchina, or ritualised hazing, remains prevalent in the Tajik military. Dedovshchina involves senior soldiers subjecting fresh recruits to physical and psychological bullying. As the new recruits gain seniority, they themselves take on the role of the victimiser, creating a cycle of implication and shame that ensures the perpetuation of the practice.

“Dedovshchina in the army is, of course, a problem. It is one of the main reasons why young people do not want to serve in the armed forces,” said Rahimova, the Amparo lawyer.

Labour migration would appear, on the surface, to be a significant factor in the shortfall of draftees. Hundreds of thousands of Tajiks go abroad each year in search of work.

The ministry of defence, however, claims that from an available pool of 600,000 18-27-year olds, only 100,000 are working abroad. A further 150,000 have temporary deferments. This leaves 350,000 men to fill 16,000 slots every year. Nevertheless, the armed forces still reportedly struggle to fill their quotas.

A lack of fairness in the system helps explain the problem. The children of the elite easily evade service.

“I went to university, took classes in the Military Department. I didn’t serve in barracks. … In the event of a general mobilisation, I’ll be a lieutenant,” a young manager at a state economic institution in Sughd, told EurasiaNet.org.

Others are reportedly able to buy their way out of service. One researcher in Dushanbe estimates the bribes prospective conscripts pay to defence ministry officials to evade service add up to millions of dollars per year.

“Temporary deferments” are rarely free, the researcher said.

Those that are left to serve are mostly from rural villages, kids who come from the country’s poorest and most vulnerable families.

“During the Soviet period it was an honour to serve. You could only find a good bride if you had. Now you can only find a good bride if you haven’t,” the young manager added.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the hardships, military suicides feature regularly in the Tajik press. In May 2011, Khurshedjon Normatov, a private, shot himself with his AK-47 while on duty near Isfara. Investigators said the conscript had been stripped naked, beaten and then photographed by his captain the previous day.

According to TajMigrant.com, the captain, a religious man, had decided to punish Normatov for not adhering to the stringent religious code of conduct that he had imposed on the regiment.

With stories like that, it seems the defence ministry is compelled to rely on press gangs to find conscripts.

One former conscript said he was forcibly seized from the street near his home in Khujand four years ago when he was still a high school student. After serving for two years, he entered university in Khujand and is now in his second year.

Having endured military service, the student now feels he has an advantage over his classmates.

“They (the authorities) say that they’ve stopped abducting people on the streets, and that everyone goes to serve voluntarily, but dedovshchina is just as bad as it used to be. Today I stand proud in front of my classmates, having lived through what they are all terrified of. I’m a real man, ready to tolerate cold and hunger,” the former conscript said.

*This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

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By Correspondents and - -
DOHA, Apr 5 2012 (IPS)

A spokesman for the main Tuareg rebel group, which recently seized the three largest areas in Mali’s north, says it has declared a ceasefire, one day after the United Nations Security Council called for an end to violence in the West African nation.

Tuaregs on the road between Mali and Burkina Faso. Credit: Marco Bellucci/CC BY 2.0

Moussa Ag Assarid, a Paris-based spokesman for the National Movement for the Liberation of the AZAWAD (MNLA), said on Thursday that the group was ceasing military operations because it had reached its goal.

“Since the day before yesterday when our units reached Douentza, which we consider to be the frontier [of the AZAWAD region], the military offensive is declared over,” Assarid said.

The rebels, battling alongside al-Qaeda-allied armed groups, swept through northern Mali last week, pushing government forces from Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu, the three northern regions of Mali that the MNLA says will form the new “Azawad” state.

The rebels were able to make gains when a group of disgruntled soldiers started a mutiny and within hours forced the president, Amadou Toumani Toure, to flee, ending two decades of democracy in Mali.

The soldiers say they did so because of Toure’s mishandling of the Tuareg rebels’ uprising in the north.

Uneasy relationship

The U.N. Security Council on Wednesday called for an immediate ceasefire but proposed no firm action to reverse a sequence that has seen a country hailed as a democratic success story descend into chaos in barely two weeks.

While the MNLA is fighting for a Tuareg homeland, Ansar Dine, the Islamist force that the MNLA has operated with, said it wanted to impose Sharia law in northern Mali.

Analysts say the loosely allied groups have an uneasy relationship, prompting speculation of future clashes between the two.

The MNLA statement asked the international community to protect Azawad, but African nations and world bodies have unanimously rejected the idea of Mali’s north seceding.

On Thursday, Alain Juppe, the French foreign minister, called for a political solution to deal with the rebellion in the north.

“There will not be a military solution with the Tuaregs. There needs to be a political solution,” Juppe told journalists, calling on countries in the region to work together. *Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

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