Pedro sought a safer life. He traveled to Somerville from Chalantenango, El Salvador on foot, by bus, car, and in the back of a tractor-trailer truck.

Now he’s one of 60 new students from Central America who have enrolled in Somerville Public Schools after making it to the Texas border on their own or with other children, part of a wave of 70,000 youth who crossed the border earlier this year. And the district is concentrating on when those students are going, not where they’ve been.“Whatever student comes to our district will bring strengths and will add to our diverse community and we want them here. We want to give them that message." -- Sarah Davila

“As soon as the student comes to Somerville, they are our students, period, and we don’t need to know, and we’re not interested in knowing about their residency status,” said Sarah Davila, the schools’ District Administrator of Programs, English Learner Education and Family and Community Partnerships.“We want them to be successful.”

Pedro – who, like other students in this article, is not being identified by his real name – had a perilous journey. He has a gash wound in his arm from an injury he got on the way. He ended up in a cell in Texas and then was bounced to an immigrant holding center in Florida before being reunited with his father, who works as a cook in Cambridge.

By the time he got to Somerville, he had a lung infection that landed him in the hospital.

But the hazards of his hometown justified the risky journey, he said.

“It’s really dangerous there,” Pedro said. “There are thugs who don’t leave you in peace.”

Maria, 15, lived with her grandparents, also in Chalantenango. She never remembers meeting her parents before arriving in Somerville.

“I told my parents that, since I was turning 15, I needed to be with them,” she said. “Living with your grandparents is not the same as living with your parents.”

Miguel, 16, came from San Vincente, El Salvador. Back home he lived with an aunt. His mother works for a local bakery here. Miguel said he had been harassed but never hurt by the local toughs. However, one of his friends was regularly ransomed, Miguel said, because he wore nice clothing. Local gang members assumed he had money. They demanded higher and higher payments. Then one day, the friend’s cousin disappeared.

“He suspected that the gang was responsible,” Miguel said. “So he and his family started to save up money and now he lives up here.”

Almost 70,000 young people, mostly from Central America, were apprehended at the U.S. border during fiscal year 2014 (Oct. 1, 2013-Sep. 30, 2014), up 77 percent from a year earlier, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Most of them come from Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala.

Young migrants from those and all non-contiguous countries have the right to apply for asylum once they arrive. If their application is accepted, they get a court date and are then sent to a shelter or to the home of a family member, if one can be identified.

Those three countries are among the most dangerous in the world, according to 2012 United Nations statistics. Honduras had the world’s highest per-capita homicide rate in 2012: 90.4 homicides per 100,000 people, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. El Salvador came in fourth, with 41.2 homicides per 100,000, and Guatemala was fifth, with a rate of 39.9 homicides per 100,000 people.

Adapting to the classroom

The youth who make it to the border and arrive in Somerville face tough odds, according to school counselors and teachers, but the district is ready to take them in. All children in Massachusetts have the right to free public education, regardless of immigrant status or national origin.

All children in Massachusetts have the right to a free public education, regardless of immigration status or national origin. Somerville takes that right seriously, said Sarah Davila, District Administrator of Programs, English Learner Education and Family and Community Partnerships for the Somerville Public Schools.

“Unaccompanied youth is a particular profile,” Davila added. “They come with particular needs and we need to respond to their needs.

“Whatever student comes to our district will bring strengths and will add to our diverse community and we want them here. We want to give them that message,” she said.

The Somerville Public School system calculates that about 60 new students will arrive each school year, but this year the numbers will be much higher. While some students who crossed the border enrolled during the previous school year, in just the first two months of this academic year 48 new students – some unaccompanied minors, others who came to the community with their families – have enrolled, Davila reported. Some of them are high school age but have only a third or fourth grade level.

“Knowing that we have an increase in beginner students…  we’ve shifted our cluster of courses,” Davila said.

Even beginning students take all their courses in English, but now there are more entry-level math and sciences courses. In addition to regular courses, all English language learners take English as a Second Language, many of them from Sarah Sandager.

On a recent morning, a classroom of ninth graders chanted, “Today is October 28, 2014!” before getting back their corrected homework – vocabulary worksheets. Sandager moved up and down the rows, cajoling one student to do a re-write, praising another.

“They have so many challenges,” Sandager explained in an interview. Some have left behind parents or siblings, others have to work 40 hours a week, she said.

“You’re dealing with more than just them learning a language. You have to think about their whole self. The social and emotional component,” she said.

Pedro misses his mother but talks to her on the telephone every day. His dream is to graduate and get a good job “so my family and I can live a better life.”

In the meantime, he hopes the Somerville community will make an effort to understand the immigrant wave from Central America.

“I hope they… look how things are in our countries,” Pedro said. “I just ask people to understand us and give us a little support that we might need and that they don’t discriminate against us.”

A version of this story appeared in the Somerville Journal and Somerville Neighborhood News.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Every year, 65,000 undocumented youth like this star soccer player graduate from U.S. high schools. Brought to the country as children, and with immigration reform stalled in Washington, they are caught in limbo. Credit: Marcelo Brociner/IPS

By Jane Regan
SOMERVILLE, Massachusetts, May 6 2014 (IPS)

He did everything right. Worked hard. Excelled in school. Captain of his soccer team. He’s been scouted by a half-dozen colleges and universities.

“I had six goals and I had about 28 assists. My team went to the state finals,” the quiet 18-year-old explained.“I wish more people saw what it’s like to see students who have worked so hard… and then slowly they realise that not a lot of doors are open." -- Anne Herzberg

But this star soccer player from Somerville High School isn’t necessarily headed to college. He doesn’t qualify for most grants or loans. He can’t even get the lower “in-state tuition” guaranteed for state residents at public institutions like the University of Massachusetts, a savings of 13,000 dollars per year.

The soccer player is undocumented.

“I’m not going to lie. I go to bed every night thinking about it,” he said. (His identity is being withheld to protect him and his family.)

“Sometimes my mom sees my crying and she asks why, but I don’t like talking about it. I don’t want to hurt my parents who have been working so hard.”

Every year, 65,000 undocumented youth like the soccer player graduate from U.S. high schools. Brought to the country as children, and with immigration reform stalled in Washington, they are caught in limbo.

Probably a dozen and perhaps even several dozen of the seniors at the public high school are undocumented in this city of 77,000, where one-third of the households speak a language other than English at home, and where some two-thirds of the student body is characterised as “minority.”

Because U.S. laws guarantee all children an education and prohibit school officials from asking children about their status, nobody knows exactly how many are undocumented. An estimated 11 million undocumented people currently live in the U.S.

School counselor Anne Herzberg, who helps students with college applications, sees far too many of them come through her doorway.

“One of the hardest things I see every year is kids who have done everything right in high school… [but] because of their status here they are unable to find a place that will accept them and give them the financial support that they need to be able to attend a four-year college,” she told IPS.

A four-year college or university in the U.S. can cost up to 60,000 dollars per year, including room and board, at private institutions. State schools cost about 15,000 to 23,000 dollars, with room and board, if a student qualifies for in-state tuition.

Some undocumented youth have options. Sixteen of the 50 US states offer in-state tuition rates to undocumented residents. But Massachusetts is not one of them.

Another option is the stopgap programme called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA. Instituted in 2012 by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, it gives undocumented young people temporary working papers and the ability to qualify for in-state tuition and a few other programmes.

Youth must have arrived in the U.S. by Jun. 15, 2007, and be under the age of 31 as of Jun. 15, 2012. The fee is 465 dollars, and the DACA card is only good for two years. Renewal costs another 465 dollars.

As of the end of 2013, a total of 610,694 people had received DACA status nationwide, 5,232 in Massachusetts, according to Homeland Security.

“Somerville does have a large number of students that do qualify for DACA,” Herzberg said, noting that she was aware of 10 current students who applied.

But, she added, “It is expensive.“ And, “for the students that I work with, the vast majority actually came after 2007.”

Like the soccer player.

“I arrived in the U.S. on Jan. 27, 2009,” he said. “I was two years late.”

“I wish more people saw what it’s like to see students who have worked so hard… and then slowly they realise that not a lot of doors are open,” Herzberg noted. “As an immigrant myself and as a counselor, it’s hard for me to not to believe in the ‘American dream’ – that students can be here and be successful and work hard and achieve.”

Back in 2001, legislators proposed a stopgap measure: the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors or DREAM Act. It was reintroduced in 2009. If passed, DREAM Act beneficiaries would get a shot at legal status if they attended college or served in the armed forces for at least two years. Afterwards, they would have a five-year waiting period before applying for Permanent Residence.

Between 800,000 and two million youth are eligible for the DREAM Act (depending on the calculations), some 27,000 in Massachusetts, according to the Center for American Progress’ count. The think tank calculates that passage of the law would add “$329 billion to the U.S. economy and create 1.4 million new jobs by 2030.”

But like other immigration legislation, the DREAM Act is stuck in the legislative deadlock that characterises what is probably the least efficient Congress in history.

Congressman Michael E. Capuano, a Democrat from Massachusetts, supports the DREAM Act “as a bridge to where we really want to be,” which is comprehensive immigration reform.

The congressman, who is of Italian and Irish descent, deplores the fact that so many young people are being held “hostage.”

Congressman Michael E. Capuano (D-MA) points to his Italian grandfather’s U.S. citizenship papers from 1922. His grandfather, who came to the U.S. as an orphan at the age of 18, was 37 years old. Credit: Jane Regan/IPS

“Look, you can make an argument every day of the week about adults who may have come here illegally or usually stayed here illegally. I just don’t think it’s a valid part of the discussion to include children who really didn’t choose their lives,” he said. “They’re pending in limbo and I think… we’re wasting their future. I think it’s a terrible tragedy.”

“Immigrants are here for the same reason my families came here,” Capuano continued. “To make their lives better and to make their children’s’ lives better.”

School counselor Herzberg said she encourages her undocumented students not to give up.

“My advice to undocumented students who want to attend college is: ‘You can attend college and you need to fight for it,’” she said. “’Get involved in different organisations that fight for the rights of immigrants… The more that they do, the more chances that things will change for the better, whereas just sitting back is not going to change minds.”

The soccer player doesn’t know what he is going to do. If he and his family can scrape together the money, he may attend community college. Or he may head back to Brazil.

“I think good things happen to good people and I worked hard for myself, my success and my future,” he said. “I still have hope. Hope is the last thing that dies.”

Additional reporting by high school journalist Marcelo Brociner.

Mimose Gérard, 57, washes clothes and collects plastic bottles from the trash in order to survive. She is still living in a tent camp four years after Haiti's earthquake. Credit: Milo Milfort/IPS

By Jane Regan and Milo Milfort
Carrefour, HAITI, Jan 20 2014 (IPS)

Mimose Gérard sits in her tent at Gaston Margron camp, surrounded by large bags filled with plastic bottles. She earns just pennies for each, but that’s better than nothing.

“I’ve lived in the camp since Jan. 13, 2010, when I was set up with a tent. It’s been a painful existence,” she tells IPS. “I’m just a regular person on this piece of land. I have nowhere to go.”"It’s repugnant to see how authorities treat people because of the simple fact that they are poor." -- Sanon Renel

Collecting bottles to recycle is the livelihood of at least a dozen people in this camp that about 800 families call home, located in Carrefour, on the southern edge of Port-au-Prince. Four years after the earthquake, there are still about 300 internally displaced person (IDP) camps mostly scattered around the capital region, and in a large new slum on desertic slopes outside the city.

Gérard is 57 years old, and has 11 children. She also does laundry to earn a few more pennies. Her hands are rough and chapped.

“The conditions are inhumane, but we have nowhere to go. Those whose families helped them have gotten out. But I don’t have anything like that, so I am staying,” she says.

Gérard added that residents are also forced to consume untreated water – in a country gripped by a cholera epidemic.

“We have no toilet. This is where people drop off their bag of fecal matter,” she says, pointing to a weedy area where residents open or dispose of the little plastic bags used as “portable toilets” in the night, when it can be dangerous to leave one’s tent.

On top of thieves, camp residents have to deal with the police and armed men working for landowners.

“The police try to force us to leave the camp,” Gérard claimed. Officers appear and shoot in the air, trying to scare residents. “The owner himself has come three times.”

According to the U.N., residents in about one-third of the 300 or so remaining camps are at risk of eviction.

On Jan. 11, the eve of the fourth anniversary of the earthquake, an inferno raced through the 100 or so tents and shacks on a camp in Delmas, not far from downtown Port-au-Prince. Four people – a 38-year-old woman and three small children – were burned to death and dozens injured.

Aside from transporting some victims to the public hospital and handing out mattresses, municipal and federal authorities have not made any statements, nor have they launched an investigation into the origin of the blaze, which many suspect was arson. The land is owned by a Haitian printing company.

“Four people died in the fire, including three young children, whilst around thirty others were hospitalized with burns. All of the makeshift shelters of the 108 families who lived in the camp were completely destroyed by the flames, along with their personal belongings,” Amnesty International noted in a statement released on Jan. 17.

Sanon Renel, leader of the Front for Reflection and Action on the Housing (FRAKKA) coalition, said the murderous fire and the lack of official response do not augur well.

“It seems like the private sector is stepping up its evictions,” he told IPS. “They realise that the government practically supports their actions, so they can do whatever they want.”

“It’s repugnant to see how authorities treat people because of the simple fact that they are poor,” he continued. “They don’t consider them as human beings. I think they see them as animals.”

Four years vs. 35 seconds

Thirty-five seconds. That’s all it took the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010 to wipe out almost a quarter of a million people, collapse almost half a million buildings – leaving 1.5 million people homeless – and trigger widespread destruction. The estimated cost of damages to the housing sector alone almost hit 2.5 billion dollars.

Four years later, some 200,000 people are still stuck in camps, like Gérard. Only 7,515 new permanent houses have been built while 27,000 have been repaired, and about 55,000 families have received one-time payments of about 500 dollars to leave the camps.

But a year later, those families “face another housing crisis as their housing subsidy runs out,” a recent study from the Washington-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti found.

A U.S. government plan to build 15,000 new houses has reduced its goals by over 80 percent, according to the Centre for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR). Now the plan is to build only 2,500. Although USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, has built over 900 houses in Haiti, it has decided to withdraw continuance.

Overall, of the 6.43 billion dollars disbursed by bilateral and multilateral donors to Haiti from 2010 to 2012, just nine percent went through the Haitian government while the rest went to foreign contractors.

“It’s a really profitable business for U.S. contractors to make money off of this disaster,” CEPR’s Dan Beeton told IPS. “This was an opportunity to turn a disaster into something that could benefit Haitians as they rebuild their own country, but they were just bypassed.”

“I’ll pick up pots in the street and get 20 to 25 gourdes [46 to 57 cents],” she says. “Every morning when we wake up, we pick up bags of feces and go throw them in a hole. The stench prevents us from cooking.”

Like Gérard, Ilien deplores the lack of potable water.

“When the camp was first built we had drinking water, but not anymore,” she says. “The water we drink isn’t good.”

Nor surprisingly, Ilien and other camp residents are afraid of being infected with any one of Haiti’s water-borne diseases, particularly cholera. Studies by numerous authorities, incuding the U.S. Centres for Disease Control (CDC), say the bacteria was brought to Haiti by Nepali peacekeepers who are part of the 9,500‑strong U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).

Introduced to the country in October 2010, to date it has infected almost 700,000 people, killing almost 8,500 of them. The CDC says that approximately two people per day still die from cholera. While U.N. agencies consider it an epidemic and a humanitarian crisis, so far the body has refused demands for compensation.

“Cholera and housing are being ignored, but they do go together,” Beeton says. “There’s no clean water, so the disease will spread. Cholera eradication is also lack of political will.”

The U.N. has 18 organisations – including MINUSTAH – currently operating in Haiti. They collaborate with approximately 43 large non-governmental organsations or NGOs, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the government, and hundreds of smaller agencies.

Reduced funding, however, has caused humanitarian assistance to dwindle, although MINUSTAH’s approved budget has remained high – almost 577 million dollars for July 2013 to June 2014.

“MINUSTAH is a waste of money, in my opinion, because there is no armed conflict in Haiti, and the money could instead be spent on ending the cholera epidemic that MINUSTAH troops started,” Beeton said.

UN-Habitat notes that Haiti already had an immense deficit in adequate housing dating back before the earthquake, with many living in slum areas.

“We are clearly out of the emergency stage and we will allow Haiti to take care of itself, but that cannot go forward unless there are means,” a spokesperson for the agency told IPS.

With additional reporting by Lorraine Farquharson at the United Nations.

Workers stitch Hanes tee-shirts at a factory in the CODEVI free trade zone in Ouanaminthe, Haiti. Credit: Jude Stanley Roy/IPS

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Dec 3 2013 (IPS)

Haiti’s minimum wage will nudge up 12 percent on Jan. 1, from 4.65 to 5.23 dollars (or 200 to 225 gourdes) per day. Calculated hourly, it will go from 58 to 65 cents, before taxes.

But the raise will not affect Haiti’s 30,000 assembly factory workers, who are supposed to already be receiving about seven dollars for an eight-hour day – about 87 cents per hour. Recent studies have found rampant wage theft at almost two dozen of the factories that stitch clothing for companies like Gap and Walmart.“If I hear there is going to be a demonstration, I’ll be there. I cannot make it with this pocket change. The bosses know that." -- Haitian garment worker

The wage hike comes almost five years after the Haitian parliament asked for a 200-gourde minimum wage, then worth 4.96 dollars a day, but failed to overcome Washington-backed industry opposition [see sidebar].

Agreed to on Nov. 29 by a government-convened Council on Salaries (CSS) – made up of labour, business and government representatives – the raise falls far short of the minimum wage of 11.63 dollars (500 gourdes) that factory worker unions and others were demanding.

Last month, in the capital and in Haiti’s north, the Collective of Textile Factory Unions federation (KOSIT), which represents workers in three industrial parks, mobilised for the 500-gourde wage.

On Nov. 7, to chants of “500 gourdes! 500 gourdes!,” over 5,000 workers and supporters marched outside the gates of a free trade zone on the border of the Dominican Republic in Ouanaminthe. Hundreds of others marched on Nov. 26 in the capital.

The factory owners countered late last week with an open letter which pled to “keep Haiti competitive” with what they identified as their “big rivals” – Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam, countries all known for harsh conditions and abuse.

Union members, other workers and their supporters demonstrate to demand a 500-gourde minimum wage in Port-au-Prince on Nov. 26, 2013. Credit: Batay Ouvriye

“We recognise that the clothing and assembly sectors are not ends in and of themselves, but they can be a very important stimulus and can serve as a motor to help Haiti open up and present itself as a country that is changing and modernising,” said the 23 Haitian, Dominican and South Korean factory owners and industrialists from the Association of Haitian Industries (ADIH).

Two days later, on Nov. 29, eight of the nine members of the CSS, including all three union representatives, approved the 225-gourde wage. (None of the union representatives were from KOSIT.)

Yannick Etienne of Batay Ouvriye (Workers Struggle), a labour group which supports KOSIT and other textile unions, said her organisation and the unions disagree with the 225-gourde salary.

“We think it is a shame that the CSS union representatives agreed to the miserable wage of 225 gourdes. At a meeting the night before, we requested that they refuse to sign any agreement that was less than 300 gourdes,” Etienne told IPS.

Rampant wage theft

The country’s 30,000 workers – almost two-thirds of them women – in Haiti’s free trade zone assembly factories stitch together clothing for Gap, Gildan Activewear, Hanes, Kohl’s, Levi’s, Russell, Target, VF, and Walmart. Haitian law stipulates that “the price paid per production unit… must be set in a way that permits a worker to earn at least 300 gourdes for an eight-hour day.”

But recent studies by three different international groups, including the U.N.’s International Labour Organisation (ILO), have documented that the vast majority of workers receive the legal minimum only rarely: about 25 percent of the time, according to the ILO.

A 29-year-old mother who works at the Multiwear factory, which makes tee-shirts for Hanes, is one of those being gypped. (Like all workers interviewed for this story, she agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity.)

“I support my four-year-old, and two sisters, and one brother,” she told IPS. “Sometimes I make the quota and get 300 gourdes, but just once in a while.”

In its October 2013 report, the ILO’s Better Work textile factory monitoring programme found all 23 factories surveyed, including Multiwear, to be “non-compliant” with the law. To be “compliant,” Better Work said that “at least 90 percent of experienced workers” should be able to make 300 gourdes in an eight-hour day.

The mother is her family’s sole support.

“I am the oldest,” she continued. “Right now, my husband is not working. We live in one room.”

She wants the minimum wage to be raised, but said “many people won’t even show up to a sit-in, because if the bosses think you support a wage hike, you’ll immediately be fired.”

Workers, KOSIT leaders, several reports and many economists agree that 225 gourdes, and even 300 gourdes, are not living wages.

A 2011 study by the U.S.-based AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Centre held that a factory worker living in the capital and supporting two children would need to earn about 29 dollars per day (1,152 gourdes), six days a week, to support his or her family.

A 54-year-old worker from One World Apparel, owned by former presidential candidate Charles Henri Baker, also rarely earns 300 gourdes, she told IPS.

“When the boss started to hear talk about the minimum wage going up, he clamped down on us,” said the mother of three, who said she has worked at One World for eight years.

“You have to do 75 dozen pieces, but not every job is the same. Sometimes you can make the quota, but sometimes you can’t. No matter what the job is, the number is the same. Once in a while, if I work really hard, I can at least make 225 gourdes,” she added.

Both Gildan and Fruit of the Loom recently released statements promising to ensure their subcontractors respected the 300-gourde minimum.

“It is our view that the clear intent of Haiti’s minimum wage law is for production rates to be set in such a manner as to allow workers to earn at least 300 gourdes for eight hours of work in a day,” Fruit of the Loom said in a statement. “Based on our independent investigation, we concur with the WRC that the garment industry in Haiti generally falls short of that standard.”

In addition to denying most workers the 300-gourde minimum, bosses were regularly cheating labourers out of overtime and making them work essentially for free, according to a report from the Washington-based Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), issued Oct. 15, 2013.

In Stealing from the Poor, based on worker interviews and pay stubs from five factories (four in the capital and SAE-A at the Caracol Industrial Park), the WRC found repeated cases of employers paying workers the incorrect amount for overtime hours. (The ILO reported only nine percent of factories cheating workers out of overtime.)

In the capital, WRC maintains that at the four factories surveyed – One World, Genesis, Premium and GMC – workers were “being cheated of an average of seven weeks’ pay per year.” Workers sometimes willingly work “off the clock” in order to make the quotas necessary to be paid 300 gourdes, the group reported.

Economist Camille Chalmers, director of the Haitian Platform Advocating an Alternative Development (PAPDA), is highly critical of the Haitian government for, among other things, not enforcing the 300-gourde minimum. He has called for a 560-gourde minimum wage.

“The government does not play the role of arbiter, as it should,” said the university professor while speaking at a Nov. 18 meeting on the wage issue. “Government authorities instead tend to listen to the embassies, to ADIH… Our government is really tied to the upper class, the oligarchy.”

The current government – whose slogan is “Haiti is Open for Business!” – has pushed Haiti’s low wages at numerous national and international conferences.

The mother of three agrees that the minimum wage needs to go up to at least 500 gourdes.

“If I hear there is going to be a demonstration, I’ll be there,” she told IPS. “I cannot make it with this pocket change. The bosses know that. They are just cruel.”

The recent ILO/Better Work report is the seventh Better Work report to document shortfalls and violations.

Additional reporting by Patrick St. Pré.

Frank Connolly, head of communications for Ireland's SIPTU, speaks to participants and is recorded by Dublic Community TV on Jun. 24, 2013, as part of the OURMedia conference. Credit: Jane Regan/IPS

By Jane Regan
DUBLIN, Ireland, Jul 1 2013 (IPS)

Communications scholars from around the world deplored the global financial crisis and called on their peers to take more active roles in the search for solutions at a recent four-day conference in Dublin, Ireland.

Over 1,400 professors and researchers from the International Association for Media and Communications Research (IAMCR) spoke, listened, lamented and argued at its Jun. 25-29 annual conference, this year centred on the theme “Crises, ‘Creative Destruction’ and the Global Power and Communication Orders.”

The term “creative destruction” comes from conservative Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter, who borrowed the idea from Karl Marx.

“I proposed the theme,” DCU Professor Paschal Preston, head of the organising committee, told IPS. “I chose it to get away from the media-centred and media-centric analyses… Scholars are too often ignoring the growing and glaring failures of democracy in the West.”

The Dublin conference attracted a record number of academic papers from over 80 countries. At the plenaries and in the panels, academics spoke about the challenges facing the media, communications scholars, and the planet as a whole.

Anti-neoliberal, anti-capitalist speakers

Ireland’s President Michael B. Higgins opened the conference speaking Irish and then switching to English. The former head of Ireland’s Labour Party lamented the fact that media consumers get more and more “formulised, homogenised content” and criticised the concentration of media ownership at the global level by mostly U.S. corporations.

“We don’t even know which conglomerate owns which media,” Higgins told the audience.

Later in the week, scholars from Africa, Europe and the U.S. challenged the assembled academics – perhaps half of whom came from Europe and North America – to get out of the classroom and grapple with the crises facing the planet.

In a talk delivered via internet, University of Cape Town Professor Francis Nyamnjoh noted that the crisis scaring Western Europe is nothing new for those in Africa or Latin America.

“As a 50-year-old African I am used to life as a constant crisis,” he said.

Annabelle Sreberny, a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and a former president of IAMCR, said the world is facing “many crises… the academy is in crisis and indeed our democracies are in crisis.”

Sreberny, whose recent research focused on the U.S. government-manufactured Stuxnet computer worm, condemned the U.S. and British “cyber-military industrial complex”.

Speaking later to IPS, she warned of “the dark side of the internet”.

“I think that academics in this field, who have worked through a great period of ‘cyber-utopianism,’ need to take seriously the revelations and hypocrisy of our governments,” the professor said.

University of Oregon sociologist John Bellamy Foster was among several speakers on panels that discussed the environmental crisis. Editor of the New York-based Monthly Review and author of several books, Foster said the capitalist system “is falling apart” and urged academics to open their minds to alternatives.

“There is no existing alternative – we have to create it,” he said. “Capitalism isn’t an alternative unless you think the destruction of the species is an alternative.”

A day later, U.S.-based Professor Jodi Dean echoed his call

In a talk on what she calls “mass personalised media” – Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms – the professor and author from Hobart and William Smith Colleges urged scholars to think more critically. Explaining her theory of “communicative capitalism”, Dean explained how social media obfuscate class while intensifying individualism, and said they are not “free”.

“We pay with attention, and the cost is focus,” Dean told her audience.

Calls for new theory, renewed engagement

The IAMCR was founded in 1957, with the blessing of UNESCO, and is both an academic and an advocacy organisation, but some in Dublin voiced criticisms. At several sessions, participants called on the association to take more proactive stances on the government spying scandals and other issues.

Stefania Milan, of Tilburg University in The Netherlands, was one of several who noted the growing influence of corporate funding on universities and the fact that in the U.S., full-time professors are being replaced by part-time teachers and by MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Several studies peg the number of courses taught by adjuncts in the U.S. at about 70 percent, with Europe following close behind. Milan urged the IAMCR to speak out.

“We need to be an organisation that takes sides,” Milan said at a session called to examine IAMCR’s future.

At another forward-looking panel, this one called to “rethink” communication theory, scholars from Jamaica, China and India urged theorists to look beyond Western theory. Among the speakers was Pradip Thomas, from the University of Queensland, who said the global capitalist crisis “offers us an opportunity to deal with the underbelly: communication capitalism.”

Hopeton Dunn, director of the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communication (CARIMAC) at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, told IPS he organised the discussion in order to look at the “conceptual and theoretical crisis” of the field.

“There is a major gap between what is happening in the poor countries and the analysis taking place that is informed by thinkers in the rich countries,” he said. “The Academy is not playing enough of a role in addressing the real needs of real people.”

Crisis dominates

Panels, book launch parties and even some of the music at the IAMCR were dominated by the “crisis” theme. A song by Irish singer Clara Sidine, who entertained one evening, was accompanied by images of Rolex watches, mansions and roulette wheels, followed by photos of foreclosed houses and boarded-up shops.

Sidine told the crowd that Ireland’s economic crisis had inspired her to write “What’s a Boy To Do?” about a month ago.

Last week, Ireland’s government announced the economy had slipped back into recession. Ireland’s official unemployment rate stands at about 14 percent, and the state has one of the highest debts compared to GDP in Europe, at 118 percent.

“Ireland has gone from being the neoliberal pin-up to ‘failed state’ or bankrupt state,” explained DCU’s Preston, whose area of specialisation is political economy. “The Irish people have been carrying huge burdens of debt, way beyond other countries.”

Preston’s own department has also felt the crunch. In the past four years, DCU’s School of Communications has shrunk from 25 to 20 full-time staff, he said, and everyone has had to accept 20-percent pay cuts.

Asked what might come out of the IAMCR conference, the professor said he hoped it would help create “a more engaged community of communications scholars.”

“We need to link media issues to the deeper and structural crises of democracies in our societies,” he said.

Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier at his Feb. 28, 2013 hearing. The sweltering courtroom was packed with over a dozen victims of the regime and with local and foreign journalists, lawyers and representatives of human rights groups. Credit: Milo Milfort/IPS

By Jane Regan and Milo Milfort
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 1 2013 (IPS)

For the first time ever, on Thursday Haiti’s former dictator faced his accusers, answering questions about corruption and human rights abuses during his brutal 15-year regime (1971-1986).

The court of appeals hearing was part of a process that will determine if Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier is to be indicted on rights abuses.

“We think that this is a wonderful day for justice in Haiti,” rights attorney Nicole Phillips of the Washington-based Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), told IPS. “For the first time… and despite the efforts of his attorneys, Jean-Claude Duvalier came to court.”

The ex-dictator showed up on Feb. 28 only after first disregarding three previous orders.

The sweltering courtroom was packed with over a dozen victims of the regime and with local and foreign journalists, lawyers and representatives of human rights groups.

After his lawyers failed to convince judges to hold a closed session, for four hours the sickly looking 61-year-old, dripping with perspiration, answered judges’ questions and accusations, whispering his evasive and oft-flippant denials to the clerk who read them aloud.

A group of aging supporters of the 29-year (1957-1986) regime of “Baby Doc” and his father François “Papa Doc” Duvalier applauded the former despot’s more irreverent answers.

When Judge Jean-Joseph Lebrun asked Duvalier about murders and executions during his rule, the ex-dictator responded: “All countries have murder.”

“Were there political prisoners in Fort Dimanche?” the judge asked about the prison known as “Haiti’s Auschwitz,” where an estimated 3,000 prisoners were executed or died of hunger and disease.

“Fort Dimanche was full of all kinds of delinquents,” Duvalier replied.

At one point Duvalier even claimed, “In every domain, I have a good record” and even tried to turn the tables.

“Everything was going well when I was here. When I came back [in 2011], I found a broken and corrupt country. I should ask you, what have you done with my country?” he asked.

Human Rights Watch estimates that between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed during the reigns of “Baby Doc” and his father. Rights groups also documented torture, rapes, forced exiles and forced disappearances during both regimes.

Among those seated in the space reserved for victims was Robert “Boby” Duval, a former Fort Dimanche prisoner.

When asked by judges, Duvalier claimed Duval had been arrested for “subversive activities” and “weapons possession,” saying the then-young businessman had been “well-treated” in prison.

“A member of his family brought him food three times a day,” Duvalier maintained.

“I didn’t have any weapons,” a visibly angry Duval later told IPS. “He told a lot of lies about me.”

“He sent me to Fort Dimanche, forcing me to drop to 90 pounds,” continued the now burly ex-soccer player, who spent 17 months in prison in 1975 and 1976, eight of them in Fort Dimanche. “They gave us 300 calories a day… They jammed 40 people into a four-by-four meter cell. Two or three people died every day.”

The judges also asked Duvalier about the accusations of corruption and embezzlement. Experts estimate “Baby Doc” stole at least 300 million dollars.

Asked if he still had money in foreign accounts, Duvalier replied “no,” even though at least four million dollars is in a frozen Swiss account.

While life in much of the country proceeded much as usual on Thursday, outside the makeshift courthouse, several dozen aging Duvalier supporters dressed in red and black – the colors of the former regime – chanted “Long live Duvalier!” and “Duvalier, this is your country, do whatever you want!”

On the radios, and online, Haitians and Haiti-watchers stayed abreast of the proceedings through Tweets, photos and videos sent out by journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates.

Haitian journalist Rachèle Magloire sent out quotations every minute or so, at one point tweeting out that Duvalier said, “I am the son of a great nationalist. If it weren’t for me, the country would have fallen into civil war.” Another journalist tweeted from the room: “Duvalier supporters clamouring” while a correspondent abroad noted: “Extraordinary day in #Haiti.”

The hearing ended at about 3:30 pm and is to be continued on Mar. 7, when victims like Duval and others are expected to testify.

Thursday’s session is part of an appeal by regime victims who filed a complaint against the former dictator in 2011 for crimes against humanity. In January 2012, a judge rejected the charges, citing Haiti’s 10-year statute of limitations on murder as one reason. The ruling was condemned by local and international rights groups, and by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The Bureau of International Lawyers (Bureau des Avocats Internationaux – BAI), one of the groups representing the victims, noted that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch all say the abuses under Duvalier’s rule constitute crimes against humanity.

“These crimes cannot be barred by any statute of limitations pursuant to international law that is binding on Haiti. As a matter of law, the Court of Appeals must grant the victims’ appeal and allow Duvalier to stand trial for his both his political violence and fraud crimes,” BAI attorney Mario Joseph said in a statement on Thursday following the hearing. “Given the events today, we are hopeful this court will issue a fair decision.”

From left to right, Veronique Roy, often referred to as Duvalier's "long-time companion", Jean-Claude Duvalier, and General Prosper Avril, a former dictator and ex-member of François Duvalier's Presidential Guard. Credit: AlterPresse/Stephen Ralph Henri

By Jane Regan and Milo Milfort
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 26 2013 (IPS)

Angry and frustrated, but also cautiously hopeful, victims, human rights advocates and the Haitian population are waiting for Thursday, Feb. 28, the day former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier has been ordered to appear at a hearing to determine whether or not he will face charges for human rights abuses committed during his brutal 15-year regime (1971-1986).

The order was issued on Feb. 21 when, once again, the 61-year-old ex-dictator refused to show up at court. The sweltering room was packed with representatives of foreign and local human rights groups, journalists and with some of the 30 victims who are suing Duvalier on the rights violations.

After listening to arguments from Duvalier’s lawyer, the three judges issued an order saying it was “imperative” that Duvalier come to a Feb. 28 hearing, with police escort if necessary.The pencil of history has no eraser, and people are watching, taking notes. We will never stop demanding justice.

Victims, including Robert “Boby” Duval, imprisoned by the regime for 17 months in 1976 and 1977 and who was in the courtroom, were cautiously hopeful about the ruling.

“It’s a big deal,” Duval later told IPS. “If the Haitian legal system can judge a criminal like Duvalier, that means people can start to have a little bit of confidence in it.”

But the 59-year-old Duval – who nearly died in Fort Dimanche, which is sometimes called “Haiti’s Auschwitz”, and who later co-founded a human rights group called League of Political Prisoners, Friends and Families of the Disappeared – warned that the order is only one small step.

Thursday’s session will only determine if the government will open an investigation and begin to hear victims’ complaints, he said.

Since Duvalier’s sudden return to Haiti in 2011 after 25 years in exile, “it’s almost like the government has been protecting him, and that’s a problem, because they are under international obligation to judge him,” Duval said.

Duvalier was first indicted for crimes against humanity in 2008 and then again in 2011. But last year, the court suddenly ruled that he would only be tried for embezzlement, saying that the alleged abuses had taken place too long ago.

Human rights groups, victims and even journalists denounced the decision, noting that under international law, there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. This week’s hearing is seen as perhaps the last chance for Haitian victims and Haitian society.

“The State has an obligation to ensure that there is no impunity for serious violations of human rights committed in the past,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a statement on Feb. 21. She noted that Duvalier is accused of overseeing “torture, extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances and rape”.

“Such systematic violations of rights must not remain unaddressed,” Pillay continued. “All those Haitians who suffered such abuses have a right to see justice is done.”

Human rights activist Marie Yolène Gilles, director of programmes for the National Human Rights Defense Network in Port-au-Prince, has been fighting for justice in Haiti for over two decades.

A journalist at a radio station destroyed during the Sep. 30, 1991 coup d’état carried out in large part by former members of the ancien régime and against democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, she has been forced into hiding several times over the years. She is not entirely optimistic about the current government’s commitment.

“The people in power always say they are working for democracy, for a ‘state of law,’ but if that’s true they need to send clear signals,” Gilles told IPS.

Mixed signals

Since Duvalier’s sudden and suspicious return to Haiti in 2011 (he arrived with no passort), signals from President Michel Martelly – an admitted former “Tonton Macoute” during Jean-Claude’s reign – have been anything but clear.

Martelly paid the aging ex-despot a very public visit and called for reconciliation. More recently, the government issued Duvalier a diplomatic passport, claiming that as a former “president”, he was entitled to it.

Last year, despite a judge’s order that he stay in the capital, Duvalier attended an event commemorating the second anniversary of the 2010 earthquake in Gonaives, about 100 kilometres up the coast. He sat in the front row next to the ex-dictator and accused human rights violator General Prosper Avril, and even shook hands with President Bill Clinton and the presidential couple.

He is also often seen out and about at swank restaurants with friends and political allies, some of whom hold government posts.

Many in Haiti also criticise the U.S. government for not taking a stronger stand. In contrast to the U.N. and human rights groups, Washington has been largely silent, or has implied that judging the ex-dictator was not a priority.

Noting that Duvalier had a record of “repression”, in a 2011 interview with CBS, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was up to “the government and people” to decide on his fate, stressing: “[W]e’re focused on trying to maintain stability, prevent chaos and violence in this very unpredictable period with his return.”

“The so-called ‘friends of Haiti’ countries have been too tolerant,” Duval told IPS. “That doesn’t happen in other countries. This is a lack of respect for the Haitian people. So many people died during the Duvalier regime.”

Except for a brief period, the U.S. government supported the 29-year Duvalier dictatorship (Jean-Claude’s father, François, controlled Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971) with military and development aid, as well as with direct budget support.

Jean-Claude Duvalier’s government also received millions of dollars in assistance (grants and loans) from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank.

“The pencil of history has no eraser”

The Feb. 28 hearing is part of an appeal brought by a group of 30 victims that is being closely watched by local and international rights groups, many of whom had representatives in the courtroom last week, among them Béatrice Vaugrante of Amnesty International.

“Jean-Claude Duvalier cannot be beyond the reach of justice,” Vaugrante said in a statement issued after last week’s order. “The authorities in Haiti have the duty to do all they can to ensure he faces the courts for the systematic abuses that took place during his time in office. If he continues to avoid the hearing, he must be arrested.”

Rights activist Gilles agrees.

“Duvalier must be judged. That would show people that you have to pay for what you do. He needs to face up to all of the accusations and society must know why all those crimes happened, why so many died, why they tortured people at Fort Dimanche,” Gilles told IPS, quoting a Haitian proverb: “‘The pencil of history has no eraser’ and people are watching, taking notes. We will never stop demanding justice.”

Map showing location of Morne Bossa property (VCS / Société Miniere Delta). Credit: VCS website

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 24 2013 (IPS)

Outraged that they have not been consulted, this week Haitian senators called for a moratorium on all activities connected with recently granted gold and copper mining permits.

In a resolution approved by 15 of 16 senators present, the lawmakers also demanded the establishment of a commission to review all of the current mining contracts and “a national debate on the country’s mineral resources”.For a country with a weak state, the royalty is the safest place to get your money. Anything under five percent is just really ludicrous.

The resolution – voted Wednesday in reaction to three new gold and copper mining permits issued late last year by the government – decried “the genocide that accompanied the pillage of our mineral resources in the 15th century”, “the waste of resources… since the January 12, 2010 earthquake”, the foreign mining experiences of the 20th century which caused “trauma”, and “the incapacity of our country to calmly undertake negotations related to its mineral resources in a context of political disequilibrium”.

News of the permits first caused an uproar in January. Journalists, experts and politicians speculated on what Haiti had lost or would gain, and accused the state mining agency (the Bureau des Mines et d’Energie – BME) of granting “illegal” contracts.

Parliamentary protest

The senators say that the three new permits violate the Haitian Constitution because they are based on 1997 conventions that were never approved by the parliament.

The Constitution says that the parliament must “approve or reject international treaties and conventions” (Art. 98-3). According to attorney Mario Joseph, director of the Office of International Lawyers, “The conventions are illegal, because the parliament did not ratify them.”

At a special hearing on Jan. 22, senators accused BME director Ludner Remarais of subverting the law.

“In 20 years the parliament has never ratified any mining conventions,” Senator Steven Benoit (West) thundered, while Senator Andris Riché (Grande Anse) shouted: “We must not accept wacky contracts that seek to bury the people.”*

“I am sorry the Senate was never contacted,” Remarais responded, tears in his eyes.

However, the conventions are not “international” because they concern the government and companies that – at least on paper – are Haitian. The BME’s former director, Dieuseul Anglade, maintains that the conventions are not “illegal” because the government decided to sign and publish them as decrees, i.e., without ratification.

“Decrees have the same authority as laws. If someone wants to be a demagogue or make political hay, he can call the conventions ‘illegal,’ but they are legal,” Anglade told IPS in a telephone interview on Feb. 6, 2013.

New permits not really “new”

The three “new” permits – for mining deposits in Morne Bossa, Douvray and “Faille B” in Haiti’s North and Northeast departments – are not new. They are the conversion of permits for “exploration” into permits for “exploitation”.

They were originally granted in 1997 by the René Préval government via two mining conventions with two Haitian companies – St. Genevieve S.A. and Sociète Minière Citadelle S.A. Because they were sold or they changed their names, today the conventions are held by two small firms, also ostensibly Haitian: Société Minière Delta and Société Minière du Nord-Est SA (SOMINE S.A.).

But in both cases, the power rests overseas, in the hands of foreign companies and shareholders.

The Société Minière Delta is the property of VCS Mining, a small U.S. private company registered in the state of Delaware, infamous for its laws which permit firms to hide their profits, keep their operations secret and pay minimal taxes.

SOMINE S.A. is a subsidiary of the Canadian mining company Majescor which says it specialises in “emerging” regions. Last month, Majescor offered for sale over two million dollars worth of shares for “the SOMINE project.” Majescor says it controls SOMINE because it controls a company called SIMACT Alliance Copper-Gold Inc., which in turn controls the majority of SOMINE shares.

The three mining permits are the most advanced of the dozens of permits for one-third of Haiti’s north (about 2,500 square kilometers) handed out in recent years and will convert into concessions once the companies start mining.

VCS Mining, the company working in Morne Bossa, maintains that it has followed Haitian law from the beginning. Last year, VCS submitted the required “feasibility study” for the site, which maps out the steps they will take in order to prepare for mining, and it was finally accepted by the BME in November, a representative told IPS in a telephone interview.

The spokesman – who asked not to be identified by name because his company has decided to keep a low profile until the resolution of the BME-Senate conflict – insisted, “We have done the work as required by law. The permits are legal.”

The VCS representative also said that his company has invested over four million dollars in the Morne Bossa site so far, and that since gold was first discovered by U.N. geologists in the late 1970s, “over 38 million (dollars) has been spent.”

Now what?

Seeking verification and clarification, IPS requested an interview with BME director Ludner Remarais. The interview was three times promised, and then denied. IPS wanted to confirm what VCS said, to ask for a copy of the feasibility studies and also to ask about the illegality of the original conventions.

IPS also wanted to ask Remarais about the very low royalties in the two mining conventions. Both award the Haitian state only 2.5 percent of the value of the minerals extracted – a number that is “really low,” according to mining royalties expert Claire Kumar.

“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,” Kumar told IPS in 2012.

According to Haitian mining law, the financial agreements in a convention can be “revised”, but so far, no government official has mentioned the possibility.

The other major concerns are lack of transparency, and the lack of participation from and benefits to local communities. See Sidebar: Morne Bossa Neighbours Nervous

The Feb. 20 Senate resolution cannot legally block mining activities, but it will undoubtedly cause the BME and the government to pause, according to Eddy Laguerre, a lawyer and also a member of the editorial staff at the Haitian weekly Le Matin.

“When the Senate votes a resolution, the executive needs to be careful,” Laguerre told IPS in a telephone interview. “If the resolution is not respected, the Senate can find ways to punish the executive, and can even punish it politically by calling for a change in government.”

*This story was produced in collaboration with Haiti Grassroots Watch. For more information, see Haiti Grassroots Watch series “Gold Rush 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.

Middle sign reads: "Community Radios Won't Be Shut Down!" Photo: M. Milfort/HGW

By Milo Milfort and Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Dec 10 2012 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

A community radio station silenced by Haitian authorities is open again thanks to the mobilisation of other stations as well as organisations and associations both inside and outside of Haiti.

On Nov. 9, the state telecommunications agency – the Conseil National de Télécommunication or CONATEL – shut down Radio Voice of Claudy Museau (Vwa Klodi Mizo – RVKM), a radio station in the southern city of Les Cayes founded in 1996 by the Unified Popular Movement of Les Cayes (Mouvement Unité Populaire des Cayes – MUPAC).

RVKM is named after the high school teacher and democratic militant Claudy Museau who was killed during the bloody coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1994).

CONATEL authorities ordered police to seal off the station the day after President Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly visited Les Cayes, and came as Martelly is coming under increasing criticism across the country, with rights groups, students, professors and others organising strikes and roadblocks almost every week.

RVKM is known in the city and the region for its educational, cultural and political programmes and for providing space for programming and guests critical of the current government.

“Our governments always show they would like to control the community radios,” says Professor Ary Régis of the State University’s Faculty of Human Sciences.

The shutdown was strongly denounced by local and international organisations, and in a demonstration on Nov. 28. Dozens of members of community radio stations from across the country, joined by students and representatives of various organisations, filled the streets in front of the CONATEL and Ministry of Communication buildings.

Marchers carried posters with slogans like, “Community radios are the result of struggles by democratic and popular sectors! You can’t just shut them down!” and “Long live freedom of the press – NO to censorship!”

Haiti’s 1977 telecommunications law dates from the brutal days of the François Duvalier (“Papa Doc”) dictatorship and does not recognise community radios, even though there are some 40 across the country. A new law – prepared with help from the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters – has been ready since 2007, but so far parliamentarians have not considered it.

“CONATEL used a legal pretext to close VKM,” shouted Sony Estéus of a small institution that works with the stations, the Society for the Broadcasting of Social Communication (in Creole: Sosyete Animasyon Kominikasyon Sosyal – SAKS), into a megaphone during the Nov. 28 demonstration.

As marchers amassed in front of the Ministry of Communications, Minister Ady Jean Gardy invited representatives to an ad hoc meeting. That consultation, other negotiations and mounting pressure resulted in the re-opening of the radio on Dec. 1, and the decision that all community radios would be allowed to operate “until the publication of a law… thanks to an authorisation that will be published by CONATEL,” according to RVKM news director Jean Claudy Aristil.

“We are very pleased with the decision,” Aristil added. “This is an important step for freedom of the press in Haiti.”

Haiti’s community movement began in secret, during the 1991-1994 coup d’état regime. Pirate radio stations in the capital and a few timid beginnings in the countryside led to a flourishing movement in 1995.

With the help of equipment and training from SAKS and other groups, peasant, youth, labour and other organisations in Haiti’s democratic and popular movement founded stations across Haiti. Some have not survived due to financial challenges and to offensives from local politicians and foreign funders seeking to co-opt the stations.

But many – bearing names like “Radio Star of the Peasant,” “Radio Zèb Tenite” (named after a tenacious grass that survives droughts) and “Radio Working Together – are still on the air. In a country where most people get their news and information from the radio, and where a large percentage of the population lives in the countryside, community radios play many important roles.

“Haiti is dominated by economic and social problems, and by ‘communicational marginalisation,’” according to Professor Régis. “Community radios can help the country develop because they allow people to discuss problems, participate in debates and increase transparency.”

*RVKM is one of dozens of community radios across the country who partner with Haiti Grassroots Watch.

For two years now, since her husband was one of the estimated 230,000 Haitians killed in the massive earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010 and she and her three children became homeless, little has changed for Dieulia St. Juste.

Young children sit outside together at a displaced persons camp situated at the Sports Center of Carrefour, Port-au-Prince, on Jan. 6, 2012. Credit: Stuart Ramson/Insider Images for UN Foundation

“Two years after the earthquake, it is difficult for me to talk about our living conditions,” she said. “We don’t have a nice life… In this tent we are living like dogs. Nobody is helping me take care of my children. I have to walk up and down the streets selling cosmetics every day and hope I can take care of my kids that way.”

On the eve of the second anniversary of the earthquake, which affected an estimated three million people in what was already the poorest country in the western hemisphere, St. Juste was not optimistic.

“I think things are getting worse for the people who live in the camps. If I had the means, I would not stay here,” she said.

From tents to slums

Of the 1.3 million people sheltering in over 1,300 camps a year ago, there are now about 500,000 people in 750 camps.

However, according to investigations by Haiti Grassroots Watch and other researchers, the majority of those moved out of the camps are back in the unsanitary slums, and many currently live in housing damaged during the earthquake and marked “red” by engineers – meaning it should be destroyed.

Others are on the precarious hillsides in makeshift homemade shelters, shoddily built concrete shacks, or in one of the approximately 100,000 “transitional shelters” meant to last three years and built with some 200 million in aid dollars.

Many more millions have been spent maintaining the camps. Relatively little has been spent on reparations and new housing, although some small projects – 400 houses here, 1,000 houses there – are currently in the works.

According to the U.N. Foundation, since the earthquake, the United Nations and its partners have provided 1.5 million people with shelter, clean water, and access to latrines; 4.3 million people with food aid; 1.5 million emergency and reproductive health kits; 750,000 children with free education and school supplies; and supported the removal of more than half the rubble.

A recent analysis by GiveWell, an independent, non-profit charity evaluator, found that 5.2 billion dollars has been raised or pledged, and about 1.6 billion dollars has been disbursed so far on relief and recovery efforts.

However, Renel Sanon, organiser and executive secretary of the Force for Action and Reflection on the Housing Issue (FRAKKA by its Haitian Creole acronym), says the socio-economic situation of most displaced people is actually worse today.

“There has not been any improvement in their living conditions, despite the exorbitant sums that have been spent,” he said.

“The housing question will become even more difficult in the coming years if it is not addressed correctly… the way he government is dealing with re-housing the displaced people is creating more slums in the capital.”

Sanon added that housing cannot be addressed in a vacuum. The government should also be working on providing water, sanitation, health care and education for its citizens.

“The fact that you are putting a displaced person in a ‘transitional shelter’ has nothing to do with the reconstruction process.”

Antonal Mortiné, executive secretary of the Platform for the Defense of Human Rights, which groups together half a dozen Haitian human rights organisations, said that the right to housing has been systematically violated by the Haitian government and its partners.

“The displaced, the ones first concerned with the process of reconstruction, are totally excluded. When making its plans, the state doesn’t take them into account at all,” he said.

Marie Felicia Felix, 41 and handicapped, lives in a Red Cross/Red Crescent-built plywood “temporary shelter” in a camp set up at the old military airport, called “Airstrip Camp.” She lost a leg on Jan. 12, 2010.

“I am living better here than when I lived in a tent in the Jean- Marie Vincent Plaza Camp. I feel okay here. I’m not worried when it rains,” she said. “Of course, we don’t have much infrastructure, like electricity or water, but it’s still better than before. But I don’t see any real efforts by the authorities to really reconstruct the country.

“In fact, us handicapped people are forgotten in the big decisions being taken. None of our leaders has ever come to visit us here,” she said.

The numbers of people handicapped by the earthquake vary, but some reports say there were as many as 4,000 amputations performed in the days following Jan. 12, 2010.

Handicap International reports that it has fitted about 1,500 orthopedic devices and distributed about 5,600 “mobility aids” such as canes. The group notes that some disabled Haitians still haven’t received needed prosthetics and rehabilitation therapy.

No end in sight to cholera epidemic

But the most pressing health issue remains the ongoing cholera epidemic, which broke out in October 2010 and is the worst recorded in modern history.

Speaking a U.N. press conference on Jan. 6, Dr. Jon Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), reported that, “As of mid-December 2011, we registered 525,000 cases and 7,000 deaths in Haiti, and 21,000 cases, 363 deaths in the Dominican Republic (with which Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola).

“We really need to refocus national and international help to fight this epidemic,” Andrus stressed, noting that there continue to be 200 new cholera cases every day.

According to the Washington-based Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR), numerous scientific studies have found a clear link between the cholera strain in Haiti and the U.N. peacekeeping troops stationed at a base in Mirebalais, near the Meille River, where the outbreak began.

Petitions for damages from the U.N. have been filed by U.S., Haitian, and Brazilian-based organisations on behalf of thousands of cholera victims.

“People’s lives continue to be endangered, and justice denied because of U.N. negligence, and the U.N.’s refusal to take responsibility,” said CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot.

Tracking the money

While billions of dollars were pledged for relief and reconstruction, an analysis published in early January found that only one percent went to the Haitian government. Four-tenths of one percent of the funds went to Haitian NGOs.

Professor Jean-Yves Blot, an anthropologist and vice dean of research at the Faculty of Ethnology, State University of Haiti, and a contributor to the newly published book “Tectonic Shifts – Haiti Since the Earthquake” (Kumarian Press, 2012) decried the perceived failure of the Haitian state.

“We think the problem is with us, that we don’t know how to manage, that we have ‘governance’ challenges,” he said. “I just visited a vodou community that has existed for 220 years. That shows that we Haitians do know how to manage things! Haitians have a lot of expertise in management and ‘governance,’ but propaganda makes us believe that we need foreign experts.

“We need to find a response to this crisis. We are the ones who need to research, to organise, and to find a solution ourselves.”

*With additional reporting from the United Nations in New York by Mathilde Bagneres.

Jane Regan and Sylvestre Fils Dorcilus are members of Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW), a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti, and community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media.

IPS is pleased to have worked with HGW since the earthquake to reprint its investigations into how reconstruction and recovery funds have been spent, and issues of transparency or accountability by NGOs and the international community.

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, May 9 2011 (IPS)

“In my opinion, there is no such thing as a natural disaster,” says Sylvia Richardson, a volunteer broadcaster, mother of two, assistant librarian, and the new vice president of the North American region of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC).

Sandra Maccou of Radio Sofaia Altitude, Guadeloupe, reads the French version of the final declaration. Credit: Ralph Henry/IPS

“Poor people are forced to live in conditions that make them vulnerable. The real question is, why do we have this idea that poverty is ‘natural’?” she asked.

Born in El Salvador and now living in Canada, Richardson was speaking at the first-ever Caribbean Conference of Community Radios held in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, the site of what the U.N. has called “the worst disaster in decades”.

The three-day conference’s official topic was “Communication, Vulnerability, Managing Disaster and Climate Change”, but Richardson noted that the high death tolls of Haiti’s recent disasters – the earthquake in which some 230,000 people died, and the subsequent cholera outbreak, which has claimed the lives of almost 5,000 already – were not “natural”.

“Poverty is not natural and permanent. It is not something that just happens to certain people in certain places. We’re made poor by exploitation, by theft. By the theft of our resources, the theft of our labour and the theft of our dignity… when we are told that our lives are only worth what the market will pay,” Richardson told IPS.

Speaking at one of dozens of panels and workshops held over the weekend, Richardson is typical of the community radio members who gathered here to discuss peoples’ right to communicate and the importance of building bridges between radios in the Caribbean and throughout the world.

“When we are the authors of our own stories, when we organise and we mobilise, changes occur,” Richardson said.

The conference was organised by AMARC and a Haitian community radio training and production centre – the Society for the Animation of Social Communications (SAKS), in order to bring together radio broadcasters from a region which still bears many scars of the colonial period – poverty, arbitrarily drawn borders, and numerous languages.

“Here in the Caribbean, we are all in the same boat, facing natural disasters and also facing the disasters that are a result of the exploitation and mismanagement of resources by tiny national and international minorities,” SAKS director Sony Estéus told IPS. “We need to come together.”

And so AMARC’s newly elected board of directiors – hailing from all over the world – joined members of about 25 Haitian community radios and representatives of almost a dozen Caribbean radios and institutions from Jamaica, Trinidad, Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe and Dominica. In formal sessions and over meals, broadcasters and others fighting for the right to communicate shared experiences and stories in four languages: Spanish, English, French and Haitian Creole.

For example, community radio members from Jamaica and India talked about the roles their stations have played during times of disasters like floods and hurricanes, describing how stations became hubs of information and were sometimes the only place where people could charge their mobile phones.

“I was surprised to see photos of Jamaica,” said Anéus Nelson, director of programming for the Haitian station Radyo Soyèt FM (“Radio Poor Peasant FM”), referring to images of houses perched on riverbanks or steep slopes. “They have the same problems we do.”

“We are clearly facing the same issues,” Rosamond Brown of Roots Radio in Kingston, Jamaica, told IPS. “We we also all have challenges with being based on volunteers, problems with training and problems with sustainability.”

Haitian Senator Melius Hyppolite, who represents a region where one of the first community stations was founded, during the 1991-1994 coup d’état, showed up and promised the conference he would work to get the new parliament to pass a law legalising the stations.

AMARC officials announced plans to form a Caribbean audio news service modeled on PULSAR, AMARC’s mostly Spanish- language news exchange platform where radios can download audio and text stories from other stations all over Latin America.

“When there are important political events in Haiti and the Caribbean, where do we get information? From the dominant media, from journalists who come from North American and Europe,” PULSAR’s coordinator, Alejandro Linares, told conference attendees on the last day.

“It’s a matter of information autonomy. The language issue makes it difficult but we have to do it, so that others, from outside, are not the ones telling us about our own realities. We need to tell our own stories,” he added.

The conference ended with a joint declaration denouncing the fact that almost 16 months after the earthquake, nearly one million refugees still live in squalid camps where women and children are subject to violence and sexual exploitation.

“We call for transparency and accountability in the use of the resources for the reconstruction of the country and for that, there is need for independent and community media to guarantee that the reconstruction will be inclusive, participatory and have a gender perspective,” the declaration stated.

“The Haitian tragedy highlights the profound inequalities of globalisation that condemn local populations to live in dependency and paternalism,” it added.

Finally, participants called on Haitian judicial authorities to take action against the armed men who burned down a community radio station, coffee cooperative office and community library on May 21.

The station, “Radyo Tèt Ansanm” (“Radio Heads Together”), run by coffee growers, announced election results that apparently displeased supporters of “Inite”, the current ruling party.

Excerpt:

One year and one month after Haiti’s horrendous earthquake, the world’s eyes are focused elsewhere.

Banner from a protest on Jan. 12 reads: "Misery for Haitians, Millions for NGOs". Credit: Jane Regan/IPS

Aside from a few updates on ex-dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, Haiti has fallen from the headlines.

Gone are the foreign reporters and news crews pumping out anniversary stories.

Long-forgotten are the one-year reports from United Nations agencies, the non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and watchdog groups, full of self-congratulations or hand- wringing over the lack of progress on Haiti’s reconstruction. [See sidebar]

But there has been a kind of progress.

Haitian authorities – or, to be more precise, those who have authority in Haiti, but who are not necessarily Haitian – actually do have a plan for Haiti’s homeless.

The ambitious 30-page “Neighborhood Return and Housing Reconstruction Framework (version 3),” obtained last month by Haiti Grassroots Watch, outlines plans to rebuild neighbourhoods with better zoning and better services, help homeowners rebuild safer homes, or relocate homeowners to new homes in less precarious locations.

“With a few exceptions, the reconstruction is not going to make people homeowners who were not homeowners before,” Priscilla Phelps, senior advisor for Housing and Neighbourhoods for the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), told IPS and Haiti Grassroots Watch in January.

That means 192,154 families – more than half of the 1.3 million internally displaced persons tallied last fall – will be left out in the cold. Or, in the case of Haiti, out in the sun, the rain and the dust.

According to the Framework, “[r]eturn and reconstruction will not change the tenancy status of earthquake affected households: the goal is to restore owners and renters to an equivalent status as before the earthquake, but in safer conditions.”

For home- and land-owners, things are moving forward, albeit very slowly.

Humanitarian agencies have over 100 million dollars to build 111,240 “transitional shelters” or “T-Shelters” – small huts, usually 18 square metres. As of Feb. 1, only about 43,100 had been built, due to the rubble choking poor neighbourhoods and Haiti’s convoluted land ownership situation. (Most donors want to be sure on land titles before building a T-Shelter.)

Agencies and construction firms also have at least 174 million dollars pledged of the 350 million dollars needed – in 2011 alone – for repairing or rebuilding homes and neighbourhoods. As of Feb. 1, of the approximately 193,000 homes needing to be repaired or rebuilt, only 2,547 had been repaired and 1,880 rebuilt.

But for the hundreds of thousands of former renters living hunched under tents in camps with few or no services, with an average of 392 residents per latrine, there is no shelter – transitional or permanent – on the horizon. Because they are supposed to rent.

Sanon Renel, of the Housing Reflection and Action Force coalition (Fòs Refleksyon ak Aksyon sou Koze Kay – FRAKKA), which is mobilising with unions and other groups on the housing issue, is outraged.

“This is pure and simple exclusion. You could even call this an official policy of apartheid,” Renel told IPS.

In addition to losing all their belongings, many of Haiti’s displaced also lost jobs, as well as the huge sums they had paid out for school tuitions and rent prior to the earthquake. In Haiti, one rents six, 12 and even 24 months at a time. Renel noted that it will take years for families to save that up again.

“These people are factory workers, day labourers. Many are former peasants forced into the city because their land has given out, or because they can’t make ends meet. They are the eternal victims of an economic system that protects big landowners and rich capitalists,” said Renel.

A typical example of “reconstruction”

The way the housing issue is being handled offers a typical example of Haiti’s “reconstruction”.

The Framework “is intended to signal what the approach is going to be,” according to the IHRC’s Phelps, who likely helped author the plan and who recently co-wrote ‘Safer Homes, Stronger Communities: A Handbook for Reconstructing After Natural Disasters’ for the World Bank.

But the document has never been approved by the government of Haiti. Not by the parliament, not by President René Préval, and not the Inter-Ministry Commission on Housing, which groups together five ministers.

Nor has the document ever been held up to public scrutiny or discussed at fora where local urban planners, construction firms or other stakeholders – like FRAKKA and the homeless people themselves – could perhaps make their opinions known.

Nevertheless, the Framework is more than what the “approach is going be”.

De facto, it is the plan. Because NGOs are moving forward, according to Jean-Christophe Adrian of UN-HABITAT, which chairs the “Shelter Cluster” of the 200 or so NGOs working on the housing issue.

“The document represents the consensus,” Adrian explained.

Phelps notes that the Inter-Ministry Commission on Housing has “seen it and made remarks,” but they have never openly approved or disapproved of it, nor has it been made public.

In fact, national government officials have only gone public on one housing project – a plan for 3,000 to 4,000 apartments in the Fort National neighbourhood overlooking Haiti’s National Palace.

“It’s a project of public housing high-rises, respecting building norms for earthquake zones, which will house many hundreds of families,” Jacques Gabriel, Minister of Public Works, told Agence France Presse in January.

But when Minister of Social Affairs Gérald Germain and his bodyguards showed up to place the cornerstone on Jan. 12, they were chased away by angry, homeless protestors.

“We want explanations!” a man who identified himself as Leguenson told AlterPresse.

Haiti’s homeless are not the only ones who want explanations. According to Phelps, the project does not yet have IHRC approval.

Nevertheless, not unlike the lack of coordination and communication sometimes apparent in other sectors, the first stone for the Fort National project was going to be placed even before it received the IHRC’s green light.

Or perhaps the Haitian government has decided to skip the IHRC? But according to a decree, it is “responsible for continuously developing and refining development plans for Haiti.”

“There are still a lot of questions that have to be worked out,” Phelps explained. “The proposal they have made is one that needs some vetting. It’s quite expensive.”

Shelter Cluster authorities are also sceptical. “Our experience shows us that, in all countries, these types of projects end up benefiting the middle classes. They don’t benefit the poorest people,” Adrian said.

With authorities bickering, with no high-rise in sight, and with construction and reconstruction only planned for the homeowners, 13 months later, Haiti’s poorest earthquake victims are left exactly where they were on Jan. 13, 2010 – in tents and under tarps, living in subhuman conditions, under constant threat of eviction, facing a depleted housing stock with no savings.

By Jane Regan and Kanya D'Almeida
PORT-AU-PRINCE/NEW YORK, Jan 6 2011 (IPS)

Up a rubble-strewn street, turn right past a crumbled house, and 60 men and women are in the yard and parlor of the offices of the Commission of Women Victim-to-Victim (Komisyon Fanm Viktim pou Viktim, KOFAVIV) association.

The women are members of KOFAVIV, and they live in the squalid refugee camps and some of the capital’s toughest and poorest neighbourhoods. Today, they each brought along a male friend for a workshop on how to prevent violence.

Dressed in their Sunday best, the participants joked and jostled as they broke into groups.

“Happy New Year!” said one young woman with huge hoop earrings, but then she corrected herself – “No, I won’t say ‘happy,’ but I’ll say, ‘good health to you.'”

As the discussions started up, smiles melted away.

“Well, that’s what we have in our camp too,” said a young girl in blue jeans and a spaghetti strap top.

A man wearing a perfectly ironed white shirt interjected, “Okay, but what are we going to do about it?”

A full year after a 7.0 earthquake in Haiti obliterated 230,000 lives, injured 300,000 and rendered a quarter of the population homeless, Haitian women are now weathering a second catastrophe.

In the 2,000 makeshift displaced persons camps clustered across the country, women and girls are caught in the midst of an onslaught of sexual abuse, savage beatings and heinous crimes against humanity.

Two million people are still crammed into enclosures, which have become microcosms of pre-earthquake patterns of the gross income inequality, social exclusion and abject poverty that has plagued Haiti for centuries.

A report released Thursday by Amnesty International lays bare the appalling conditions in which Haitian women are forced to live – the paltry shelters in the open-air camps seldom comprise anything more than flimsy tents, or tarps stretched over a patch of earth.

According to the report, “Aftershocks: Women Speak Out Against Sexual Violence in Haiti’s Camps”, over 250 rapes, in various camps, were reported a mere 100 days after the earthquake first struck. Many women and girls have been raped multiple times, often by several different men at once. Virtually every victim has also been beaten and tortured.

Medical and sanitary conditions in the camps are appalling; women and girls are forced to bathe in public and walk long distances to communal toilets at night. A total absence of privacy, lighting or solid barriers against perpetrators leaves even girls as young as 12 and 13 years old entirely vulnerable to the wave of sexual violence, most of which occurs after dark, the report says.

“Women’s organisations on the ground helped us access the victims,” Kerrie Howard, a Haiti expert at Amnesty International, told IPS. “Because the camps are a very closed community, it’s extremely difficult for women and girls to speak out.”

One of Amnesty’s key local partners, and arguably the most active organisation working through the crisis, is KOFAVIV.

“At KOFAVIV we believe in education and we believe in preventing violence before it happens,” Jocie Philistin, KOFAVIV’s project coordinator, told IPS. “All of our members are survivors who are rehabilitated, and we are now trying to help others. And the solution doesn’t lie with women only. We need men and women to work together.”

But neighbourhood watch patrols and training sessions aren’t the only answer, Philistin admits.

“Violence has two aspects – one is poverty, meaning it’s economic. The other is politics,” she said.

Whenever there is political turmoil or the economy worsens, violence against women increases. Rape has been used as a political weapon. Young people, especially girls, trade sex for a meal or a roof over their heads.

Now, one year after the quake, KOFAVIV admits a sense of hopelessness.

“In the camps, in the communities, things have gotten worse,” Philistin said. “We have a completely absent state, we have NGOs who are in the camps mostly for public relations and they aren’t even allowed to work in the ‘red zone’ areas, which are the most dangerous neighbourhoods.”

A ray of hope

In early October, a coalition of prominent legal and social justice groups, including MADRE, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and the Bureaux des Advocats Internationaux filed a formal request with the Inter- American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of 13 Haitian women and girls.

On Tuesday, the IACHR accepted the request and issued unprecedented recommendations to the Haitian government, which are binding under Haitian national law.

The measures include providing medical and psychological care such as emergency contraception and culturally sensitive female medical staff members; implementing effective security measures like street lighting and increased patrolling by security forces; and, perhaps most importantly, ensuring the full participation and leadership of grassroots women’s groups in planning and implementing policies to combat the sexual violence.

Lisa Davis, the human rights advocacy director of MADRE, was the primary author of the request.

“We have been working with women’s groups in Haiti since the rape crisis in the 1990s,” Davis told IPS. “And we consult with our local partners every step of the way.”

While Haitian women are of course concerned with long-term political changes that address the root causes of sexual violence and the blows of patriarchy, the need for immediate safety now trumps all, she said.

In a report entitled “Our Bodies Are Still Trembling: Haitians Women’s Fight Against Rape”, the parties of the IACHR request record in chilling detail testimony from women and girls in the camp. Women as old as 60 and as young as eight or nine have all been subjected to unspeakable cruelty which has increased sharply since the 2010 elections.

“We have reports of men going into camps and randomly shooting women who were wearing politically-charged t- shirts,” Davis said.

“Every single woman I talked to said what she wants more than anything is housing,” she stressed. “And if they can’t get that – because it’s not being offered to them right now – then they want to feel safe.”

*Jane Regan reported from Haiti.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente and Jane Regan
BUENOS AIRES/PORT AU PRINCE, Oct 22 2010 (IPS)

Neither hurricanes nor floods, nor the devastating January earthquake or Haiti’s chronic political instability managed to wipe out the organic gardening initiative underway in that country since 2005. The seed was planted in Argentina twenty years ago.

Haitian woman picks greens in her family garden. Credit: Courtesy of Programme d'Autoproduction d'Aliments Frais

The aim of the programme, which began in Argentina under the name Pro-Huerta and is known in French as Programme d’Autoproduction d’Aliments Frais (“Self-Sufficient Fresh Vegetable Programme”), is to promote organic gardens in both cities and rural areas

So when the Haitian capital and several smaller cities and towns were devastated by the catastrophic Jan. 12 earthquake, which killed more than 220,000 people and left 1.3 million homeless, some families had their own garden production to fall back on and cover some of their food needs, agronomist Emmanuel Fenelon, director of the programme in Haiti, told IPS.

“Some families told us they were glad they didn’t have to stand in line all the time to suffer the humiliation of asking for food,” Fenelon said.

The initiative first emerged in Argentina in 1990, where it has since grown to 630,000 gardens and farms distributed in 3,500 urban and rural settings across the South American country. The model has also been replicated in other countries of the region, including Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and Venezuela.

“We interact in one form or another with places all over the region. There are all sorts of initiatives, which either replicate the model or take some elements from it, and there’s also an international course to provide training in other countries,” agronomist Roberto Cittadini, Pro-Huerta coordinator in Argentina, told IPS.

But “the Haitian experience has been particularly successful because a great deal has been achieved without considerable inputs or efforts,” Cittadini said.

According to Cittadini, with a 100-metre garden a family can grow enough food to cover its needs, but a space half that size is also good. And community or church plots can be used too.

All anybody needs to do to get started is take a short instruction course, which typically involves eight half-day classes, but varies according to local circumstances. “Although the target beneficiaries are vulnerable families, this is not a welfare-style programme; it requires their active engagement,” Cittadini said.

A programme coordinator works with a technical team in each province to inform the population about the programme, distribute seeds, tools and handbooks, and monitor progress on the gardens with the help of volunteers who do follow-up work.

In 2003, Pro-Huerta was included in Argentina’s National Food Security Strategy. Despite being a large food producer, 18 percent of the Argentine population had basic unsatisfied needs in 2001, and today more than three percent of the country’s 40.5 million people are living in extreme poverty, according to official figures.

These organic gardens are also sprouting in schools, prisons, community soup kitchens and senior citizen groups.

Food is mostly grown for personal consumption, but trade networks have also emerged. “This is agroecological production: no chemicals are used, pest control is done naturally and the soil is allowed to recover through crop rotation,” Cittadini said.

In Haiti, where some 2.4 million of the country’s nine million people are considered “food insecure” and half the food consumed in the country is imported, these small gardens are making a difference, the programme’s agronomists say.

“It’s impressive. Many women tell us that they no longer need to buy parsley or cabbage. I know we’re having an impact,” said Fenelon, the first agronomist to join the programme, which is housed in the Haitian headquarters of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and is also backed by the governments of Spain and Canada.

In addition to working with women’s, youth, and peasant organisations, as well as churches, the programme’s agronomists cooperate with the Agriculture and Functional Literacy Ministries, training colleagues, literacy teachers, promoters and volunteers.

Young adults who are just now learning to read and write in Creole — one of Haiti’s two official languages, but the only one spoken by all Haitians — receive a colourfully illustrated booklet showing a family planting their garden.

The booklet, based on a similar one from Argentina, uses drawings to show how to start the planting process in boxes, discarded tubs or old tires, how to rotate crops, how to make compost, and other gardening techniques.

Since its inception, Pro-Huerta has spread from Argentina throughout Latin America. Pro-Huerta was brought to Haiti in 2005, after Argentina sent military and police forces to take part in the United Nations Stabilisation Mission (MINUSTAH).

Today the programme operates in six of Haiti’s ten departments or provinces: Artibonite, Centre, Northeast, North, West and South, and is expected to be launched soon in the Northwest department, with the support of the governments of Colombia and Barbados. National authorities are hoping to reach one million people by 2013.

Towards meeting that goal, a delegation headed by Haiti’s agriculture minister, Joanas Gué, travelled to Argentina in late September and visited several organic farms and gardens that have made progress in local seed production, poultry raising and water management.

Pro-Huerta “is probably the most successful example of South-South cooperation,” Argentine foreign minister Héctor Timerman said.

Argentine engineers Francisco Zelaya and David Arias Paz continued their visits to Haiti, even after the January earthquake, staying in tents, and “they did an excellent job with Fenelon, making it possible for the programme to thrive despite the odds,” Cittadini said.

“Lately we’ve been training families to produce their own seeds, good seeds,” Fenelon said. “This is an important step towards assuring food security and food sovereignty.”

Seeds are a flashpoint issue in Haiti. Following the earthquake, the agroindustrial giant Monsanto donated four million dollars worth of hybrid maize and vegetable seeds to the government, sparking outcries and protests, including the burning of mounds of seeds. As it turned out, the seeds were not really donated but offered to farmers for a fee.

Fenelon says his country has no use for hybrid seeds. “With programs like Pro-Huerta, we can help Haitian farmers improve their own seeds, their nutrition and their economic situation, all at the same time,” he concluded.

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Apr 18 2005 (IPS)

In Haiti, violence, political divisiveness, exclusion and poverty are inextricably interconnected.

Tackling them together, and adjusting the mandate of the peacekeeping mission here, are crucial if Haiti is to extricate itself from the downward spiral of violence and poverty, a high-level United Nations Security Council delegation concluded at the end of its unprecedented four-day visit on Saturday.

The delegation of 10 Security Council members, headed by Brazilian Ambassador Ronaldo Mota Sardenberg, and members of the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) pledged support for a disarmament campaign, reform of the police force and justice system, economic and social development, and national elections slated for fall.

But they also stressed the urgency of Haitians working together to resolve their country’s problems.

"The international community should not replace the Haitian people but it should assist," Sardenberg told the press on Saturday before the delegation headed to the airport. "It is imperative that the Haitian people take advantage of this historic moment and undertake their responsibilities."

Sardenberg and other members of the delegation also promised to take into account criticisms of the U.N. peacekeeping mission they had heard over the course of the visit. The Council, slated to renew its mandate next month, will likely "expand" or "enlarge" the mission, he said.

Recently, the mission – composed of some 7,400 soldiers and police and a phalanx of consultants, and known by its French acronym MINUSTAH – has been reproached for being too lax in combating violence, protecting human rights, reining in Haitian police or carrying out disarmament.

"We are in agreement that the opinions of the Haitian government should be taken into account in the process of designing the new resolution," Sardenberg promised after the delegation met with interim Prime Minister Gérard Latortue and his ministers last week.

The U.N. Security Council rarely goes on jaunts, and especially not to countries as violent and volatile as Haiti.

As delegation members met with politicians, officials and representatives of civil society in hotel conference rooms overlooking Haiti’s grimy, strife-ridden capital last week, U.N. peacekeepers clashed with armed gang members twice in as many days, leaving one Filipino peacekeeper dead – shot through the head – in the seaside slum city of Cité Soleil.

The next day, up to a dozen alleged gunmen were shot dead by peacekeepers in a clash in the same area, and violence there and in other parts of the capital is expected to continue.

At least 400 people, including about 40 police officers and four peacekeepers, have been killed in violence, mostly in Port-au-Prince, over the past six months. Much of it is linked to former soldiers demanding the army be reinstated or to armed gangs demanding former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide be returned to office. Haitian police have also been accused of summary executions.

Aristide was chased from power on Feb. 29, 2004, following contested elections, a long civil anti-government movement and a brief armed rebellion. A U.S.-led multinational force immediately occupied the country, handing the reigns over to MINUSTAH last summer.

Aristide and part of his Lavalas Family political party claim he was "kidnapped" as part of a U.S.- and French government-hatched "modern day coup d’état."

Despite the presence of the peacekeeping mission, violence and general criminality have increased in recent months. The French NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) estimates that 100 people were killed by guns in the capital from September through December 2004.

Since then, MSF says it has treated 391 patients for gunshot and other wounds at a hospital the group runs – high numbers for a country where blue helmets are supposed to be keeping the peace.

Not surprisingly, the Council decided to check in on MINUSTAH – one of 17 current blue helmet missions around the world, and Haiti’s fifth – in person.

The U.N. cannot fail Haiti this time around, Chinese Ambassador Guangyan Wang, chair of the Security Council this month, told IPS.

"This is an important visit, especially since, when we look back, we find that probably the last mission was a failure," he said.

In Wang’s opinion, the U.N. did not stay long enough last time it was here. That mission, which started in 1995, was charged with helping stabilise the country following a U.S.-led military intervention that restored Aristide to power following a brutal three-year (1991-1994) coup d’état.

(Aristide’s term ended in 1995. He sat one term out and ran for reelection virtually unopposed in 2000 races characterised by extremely low voter turn-out and accusations of fraud.)

The 1995 mission changed mandates four times, each one more restricted, each time with a smaller number of members.

Wang also said he and other Council members feel that previous efforts also focused too much on politics.

"Apart from this political process, the U.N. should do more in the economic and social areas to help this country to address these issues," he said. "If people have a better life, that might reduce the political tensions."

International donors have repeatedly made similar pledges. In 1995, for example, U.S. President Bill Clinton promised 1,000 kilometres of new roads. No asphalt was laid down.

Last summer, foreign funders like the World Bank and the European Union pledged 1.3 billion dollars. Only about one-fifth has been disbursed.

But the head of the ECOSOC delegation, Canadian Ambassador Allan Rock, said that only a long-term economic plan designed by the next elected government, and supported by foreign countries and multilateral institutions, can provide more than palliative relief.

"The future of Haiti belongs to the Haitian population, not to us," he said. "But it’s going to take sustained support from the international community for Haiti to succeed."

Still, even if Sardenberg is right when he says "the crisis in Haiti is at its base a social crisis," Haitian political culture and its fractiousness remain a big concern – both for Haitian politicians and Security Council members.

Although national elections are being planned for next fall, at least one of the more vocal political parties has opted out. Every week, hundreds and sometimes thousands of supporters of Aristide’s Lavalas Family party demonstrate to protest elections and call for his return.

After a meeting with the Security Council, Father Gérard Jean-Juste, a Lavalas member and recognised head of one faction inside the party, spoke out.

"It is a sad day for Haiti," Jean-Juste told IPS. "Our elected president, the right president, the legitimate president is not here. He has been kidnapped."

Jean-Juste said that "Lavalas did not participate in the meeting," but another Lavalas leader recognised as part of the other faction, Senator Yvon Feuillé, did address the Council.

Still, after the meeting, his fellow party member, Senator Gérard Gilles, who wants Lavalas to participate in elections, was not overly optimistic.

"The U.N. mission here has failed," Gilles told IPS. "Even if we have heard about a few attempts to deal with the insecurity, insecurity continues to increase, and as far as creating a climate that would enable elections to occur, I don’t think MINUSTAH can say that, ‘Yes,’ it has created a stable climate."

Wang told IPS he wants elections to come off on time, but stressed that they are not the end of the process.

"Elections are important, but elections are important only in the sense that they can bring all the people together," he told IPS. "I sincerely hope that all the political parties in this country, regardless of their different views, get together and join this national effort."

"This time the presence of the UN here should be a success story," he said.

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Apr 11 2005 (IPS)

Traffic was steady and people cautiously optimistic in Haiti’s capital Monday, after weekend raids by Haitian police and U.N. peacekeepers left eight alleged gangsters, some of them ex-soldiers, dead.

Two of those killed – former Haitian soldier Remissainthe Ravix and Jean-Anthony René, also a former soldier but better known for his work as a brutal police “attaché” or civilian thug – have been blamed for much of the recent violence plaguing parts of Port-au-Prince.

The 7,400-member U.N. peacekeeping force, the Haitian police and the interim government have been criticised for failing to stem the crime and politically-tinged unrest which has left over 400 dead, hurt the already floundering economy and raised doubts about the general elections planned for the fall.

The 15-member United Nations Security Council is slated to make an unprecedented three-day visit to Haiti this week to assess the complex situation.

But for people in the grimy streets here, the solution to their problems has been simple all along.

“Now we’ll finally have some peace,” Josephine St. Fleur told IPS on Sunday.

A former shopkeeper, St. Fleur and her children had to leave her home and small business in the Bel-Aire neighbourhood because of violence there. She was among hundreds who flocked to the city morgue over the weekend to try to get a glimpse of the bodies.

“I want to know why they took so long to get these men. They made our lives miserable,” she said. “If they had killed them earlier, the country wouldn’t be this way. Now they should go to Bel-Aire and Cité Soleil (a gang-controlled slum) to finish the job.”

Ravix, a burly ex-sergeant who wore used military fatigues and carried a sabre, was a leader of the “rebels” (ex-soldiers and former police) that helped chase President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from power in February 2004.

Unlike other former soldiers who agreed to put down their guns and take off their uniforms in exchange for what they say is long-overdue severance pay, Ravix – fired by the army for drug-running in the early 1990s – took to the hills and vowed to fight to the death for the reinstatement of the Haitian Armed Forces, disbanded by Aristide in 1995.

René – more commonly known as “Grenn Sonnen” or “Ringing Balls” because of the fear he instilled in his male captives – gained infamy when he worked for Ravix’s former nemisis, the Aristide government, as a police informant and hit man.

According to the National Coalition for Haitian Rights in Haiti (NCHR-Haiti), which has studied the police attaché phenomenon for years, René headed a “Zero Tolerance” gang attached to the Delmas 33 police station from 2001-2004. He is believed to have been involved in dozens of murders and torture sessions during the last three years of Aristide’s rule.

The former enemies – one fought to overthrow Aristide and the other carried out Aristide’s police dirty work – struck up an unlikely alliance a few months ago when the police declared both of them outlaws and offered a reward of about 28,000 dollars for their capture.

Suddenly, they both had it in for the interim government. On radio shows, they threatened police officers and public officials. They and their followers were blamed for much of the violence that has terrified parts of the Central Plateau and capital in recent weeks, including the recent attacks on the country’s Electoral Council offices.

The two were also wanted for the assassinations of four police officers last February.

“We regret that Ravix and ‘Grenn Sonnen’ died rather than being brought before a judge to respond to all the accusations facing them,” NCHR-Haiti’s Marie Yolène Gilles told IPS today. “‘Sonnen’ was implicated in many murders and disappearances during the Aristide regime, and both of them were involved in the Feb. 20 attack on the prison.”

On that date, about a dozen armed men walked into the national penitentiary in the capital and freed 481 prisoners, including several former Aristide officials. The former officials and about 70 others later turned themselves over to authorities, saying they were not part of the escape plan.

On Haiti’s constantly buzzing airwaves Monday, a few politicians also had mixed feelings about the fact that the outlaws were not taken alive.

But in general, almost everyone at the morgue, on the streets and calling into talk shows were universal in their relief. Some even admitted that they shouted with joy or honked their horns the moment news of the deaths became known on Saturday and Sunday.

“I think it’s a good thing,” said one of hundreds of gawkers in the morgue yard on Sunday.

“It makes me very, very happy. I really appreciate it,” said another.

Some of the police called in to disperse the crowd strutted like roosters, giving each other “high-fives” and accepting embraces from men who greeted them as heroes.

The shoot-outs came as part of an operation planned by elite Haitian police units and U.N. civilian police, U.N. peacekeeping police spokesman Daniel Moskaluk told IPS.

Tips led police and peacekeepers to a hide-out in the Delmas neighbourhood on Saturday. Although most of the alleged criminals got away, police arrested three people and also seized a number of Haitian police and military uniforms, automatic weapons chargers, a gun belonging to one of the police officers killed last February, an M-16, other guns and ammunition, as well as three stolen vehicles.

One of them belongs to the Taiwan embassy and a second was used in a drive-by shooting attack on a U.N. bus last week, said Moskaluk, a police officer from Penticton, British Columbia, Canada.

“These guys were running around dressed as police officers committing crimes,” he noted. In recent months there have been numerous accusations of abuses against the police.

After the raid, Haitian and U.N. police tracked the fugitives to a factory complex in the mid-Delmas area. The bandits were surrounded and a shoot-out ensued. Ravix and two others were killed. A total of 18 people were arrested, police said.

The pursuit continued the next day, in the airport area. Police surrounded the house where René and accomplices were said to be hiding out. Once again a gun battle erupted.

René and five men were killed. No police or U.N. officers were hurt.

The aggressive police and U.N. action comes just two days before the U.N. Security Council is slated to arrive to “review progress achieved in areas such as security, development, the political transition, human rights, institution-building and the humanitarian situation.”

In recent months, U.N. peacekeepers and the Haitian police have been the targets of negative reports accusing police of torture and summary executions, and accusing peacekeepers of failing to live up to their mandate.

A joint study by Harvard law students and Brazilian rights groups said the U.N. mission has not correctly monitored human rights, adequately improved Haiti’s ill-trained police force or progressed quickly enough on disarming gangs.

The Geneva-based Small Arms Survey recently estimated that civilians and “non-state” armed groups have over 183,000 weapons and that “virtually every disarmament effort in Haiti has failed.”

In its report “Securing Haiti’s Transition,” the group said a programme of demobilisation, disarmament and reintergration “must be pursued assertively” and coupled with police and judicial reform as well as political and economic programmes and reforms.

“Without the permanent demilitarisation of armed groups, humanitarian assistance and development will be continuously endangered,” the report’s executive summary said. “Haiti’s vicious cycle will thus continue.”

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Apr 5 2005 (IPS)

For over a year now, Haitian political parties, U.N. officials and foreign consultants armed with plans, charts and millions upon millions of dollars have been planning for Haiti’s general elections.

But just seven months away from races for over 1,000 posts, elections don’t yet have the feel of a shoo-in.

One of the most vocal parties – Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas Family – is still on the sidelines and its supporters, sometimes thousands of them, hold demonstrations to denounce the planned contests.

Not that their anger surprises anyone. Aristide was ousted on Feb. 29, 2004, after a bitter two-year anti-government movement and a brief armed insurgency, both of which had at least some foreign encouragement.

Hours after Aristide left on a U.S.-chartered plane, his country was being occupied by a U.S.-led multinational force. The former priest and two-time president says he was kidnapped in a U.S. and French government-supported “modern day coup d’état.”

Added to the Lavalas conundrum, the Provisional Electional Council (CEP) has to photograph, fingerprint and register 4.2 million voters in only three months.

And most concerning of all, the security situation appears to be going from bad to worse, at least in the capital, with gang warfare, attacks on police and U.N. peacekeepers, murders, kidnappings and even assaults on the CEP headquarters.

On Mar. 29, two truckloads of men armed with automatic weapons opened fire on the compound, pocking the building and piercing an electricity transformer. Three days earlier someone lobbed a grenade at the door.

The national elections slated for Oct. 9 and Nov. 16 – for every office from local mayor up through president – have been touted as a key part of an internationally shepherded plan aimed at helping the country gain some semblance of stability.

Pulling off the races is the main task facing the caretaker government installed after Aristide left. The U.S., Canada and the European Union have pledged close to 40 million dollars to fund the polls and the Organisation of American States has dedicated a phalanx of specialised staff.

“Elections are the only way to assure the country moves forward,” interim Prime Minister Gérard Latortue said again on Mar. 31, during a visit to the CEP one day after the attack.

Elections are also the first priority of the Brazilian-led U.N. peacekeeping mission that landed here nine months ago. The 7,400 soldiers and police are to “provide a secure and stable environment within which the constitutional and political process in Haiti can take place.”

But as members of the country’s 91 political parties scurry around trying to rouse a disinterested and even suspicious electorate, Lavalas is crying foul.

“As long as Aristide isn’t back in Haiti, there won’t be any elections,” John Joel Joseph, a member of the Cité Soleil Lavalas political committee, told IPS on Apr. 1. “If they want to do a ‘selection’ of one of the mercenaries who work for the imperialists, fine, but you can’t call that elections.”

During the previous two days, several thousand Aristide supporters had marched through the streets of his sprawling seaside slum and also through Bel-Aire, a poor neighbourhood overlooking Haiti’s National Palace, to call for Aristide’s return.

Those neighbourhoods have also been the scenes of vicious battles between rival gangs and between police and gang members claiming allegiance to Lavalas. The violence has left over 400 dead since its eruption on Sep. 30, 2004.

“No Aristide, no peace! Aristide for five years!” the jubilant marchers chanted on Mar. 29 as they circled a bonfire with symbolic coffins for U.S. President George Bush, U.S. Ambassador to Haiti James B. Foley and a host of Haitian officials.

An effigy of Latortue blazed in the centre.

But not all Lavalas Family party members want to sit this one out.

Senator Gérald Gilles, who is still a senator but who has been without a salary since the interim government closed parliament last year, is planning to run.

“There’s a divergence in Lavalas right now,” Gilles told IPS. “One tendency does not want to participate, or it does but will not admit it, and the other, the more moderate tendency, does. If we do not find unity amongst ourselves, Lavalas could disappear..” [See sidebar for more on Lavalas]

But Gilles also noted that for the moment he has to move around the country carefully. He and other members of his party feel they are being unfairly persecuted by the interim government.

Several high-ranking party members, including former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune, are in prison on charges related to repression but have yet to be tried. Many other Lavalas supporters whom police say are gang members have been picked up but not yet charged. Gilles himself was arrested and briefly held.

The senator also admitted that campaigning is not possible in neighbourhoods dominated by what he calls pro-Aristide “extremists.”

“No intelligent person would hold a public meeting in Cité Soleil or Bel-Aire,” he said.

Members of the CEP say they have tried to get the Lavalas Family to participate in the elections, and are holding out hope that they will.

“I am committed to making sure that all the political forces in Haiti get equitable treatment,” CEP member and businessman Patrick Féquière told IPS.

But Féquière’s concerns are not limited to Lavalas. Before candidates can even officially get on a ballot, the CEP needs to register all of Haiti’s voters using a new – and what they say will be the country’s first fraud-proof – elections system.

Starting some time this month, all of Haiti’s voting age population – 4.2 million people – will be invited to one of 424 registration offices where they will have to prove their identity and then be photographed and fingerprinted.

If an adult does not have a driver’s license or birth certificate or similar paper, they have to come with two people who are already registered and who will vouch for him or her. Once everyone has registered, identities and fingerprints will be cross-checked in the capital and then the cards will be distributed across the country.

All in three months.

“We will have 610 computers,” CEP member Pierre Richard Duchemin explained to an audience of party representatives at a meeting last week.

Then, with a Power Point slide show, he illustrated that if each registration takes between 10 and 16 minutes at 610 computers across the nation, there will be about 61,000 new registrations a day.

A challenge, to say the least, in a country with scant electricity and poor roads, and where hundreds of thousands of people have no birth certificates.

But that is not what is worrying Féquière. He is more concerned about the insecurity, and not just for the elections.

“I don’t think the CEP is in more danger than the average business person sitting behind his desk,” he said. “The entire country is hostage.”

While visiting the CEP last week, Latortue did not hide his frustration with the U.N. peacekeeping mission.

“The international community is officially in Haiti to help us,” he said, “but we don’t always find them where we need them.”

A joint study by Harvard Law School students and a Brazilian human rights group agreed.

The blue helmets have “done little to establish stability, protect the populace or curb human rights violations,” they said. “Haiti is as insecure as ever.”

Féquière went further.

“The U.N. says elections are the priority,” he ruminated. “But I wonder about elections in this kind of situation. In a climate like this, is elections what we need? Will that kind of elections resolve our problems? It’s not obvious to me.”

SIDEBAR: Haiti’s Lavalas – One Man’s View

PETION-VILLE – Senator Gérald Gilles does not hide his political allegiance.

Gilles is proud of to be a member of the Lavalas Family party and he still believes it can play a leading role in moving Haiti forward.

Trained as a surgeon, the 38-year-old from Jérémie, a port town located on Haiti’s southern arm, has been involved with ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide ever since his student activist days.

In 1990, Gilles accompanied Aristide to the polling station as the ex-priest cast his vote in the presidential elections he later won in a landslide, and Gilles remained a Lavalassien throughout the nineties, struggling for Aristide’s return during the 1991-1994 coup that left 3,000 to 5,000 dead.

When Aristide broke from his former allies in the Lavalas Political Organisation (OPL) party in 1996 and formed the Lavalas Family, with himself as president, Gilles joined up, ran for senator in 2000 and won.

“Lavalas is still Haiti’s strongest party,” Gilles told IPS during an interview at his home in the hills above Haiti’s capital. “But it is split between two tendencies right now. If we can come together, we can win.”

Gilles was talking about his group and its supporters, which include Lavalas parliamentarians and others he calls the “moderates,” and a second group he calls “radical.”

The “radicals” include the groups that have recently led protests demanding Aristide’s return. They say elections are unconstitutional since Aristide is still president.

At least some of their members, those nicknamed “chimè,” or “angry monster,” are heavily armed. A number of guns even have Aristide stickers on them. They say they will do whatever it takes to bring their president back.

Other members include Father Gérard Jean-Juste, a priest well known in Haiti and also Florida, where for years he defended the rights of Haitian immigrants. Earlier this year, Jean-Juste was arrested and held for seven weeks in connection with organising armed pro-Aristide resistance. He was released without being charged.

During a three-day meeting where political parties were invited to sign a kind of “non-agression” pact laying down ground rules for the upcoming elections, Jean-Juste read off a nine-point list of demands he said had to be met for Lavalas to participate in the elections. At the top of the list was Aristide’s return. No Lavalas representative signed the pact.

(To foreign reporters, however, Jean-Juste dangles the possibility that he might run for president.)

The pro-return/non-elections Lavalassiens also include a number of former officials who are now in the U.S. and other countries, and also, of course, Aristide himself, in exile in South Africa and who continues to campaign for his return.

“I will return. I don’t know when, but I will return,” the South African Press Association quoted him as saying after a lecture he gave at a university there last month.

But Gilles thinks that is exactly what the Lavalas Family party does not need.

Instead, he wants members of the party to come together, assess the errors of the past and move forward. Under Aristide’s firm rule, Lavalas made errors, Gilles said.

Among them was Aristide’s encouragement of a “cult of personality,” he said.

“But the biggest error we made was in instrumentalising the poor, in turning them into pressure groups,” Gilles said, referring to the grassroots groups that were coopted by the Lavalas power structure and encouraged to harass opposition demonstrators or even Lavalas members deemed not sufficiently loyal.

Mostly young men – many of whom were on the payrolls of state institutions like TELECO, the telephone company – they can be seen leading pro-Aristide demonstrations today, even if they are joined by hundreds or thousands who never got a paycheck.

“We need to do a ‘mea culpa’ from our point of view, but the other parties need to do the same thing,” Gilles continued. He is working on a book tentatively entitled “Lavalas: Les causes de notre echec, les raisons d’éspérer” (“Lavalas: The causes for our failure, the reasons for hope”).

Haiti’s political culture has relied too much on violence and is too “Manichean” Gilles continued, with intolerance and polarisation ruling the day. Instead of dealing with Haiti’s problems, political parties and their seemingly eternal leaders take shots at one another.

According to the Lavalas Family statutes, Aristide is head of the party unless he “dies or resigns.” The non-democratic nature of the parties and their vicious power struggles hurt the nation, Gilles argues.

A glance at history attests: In 200 years, Haiti has had some 45 heads of state, most of them dictators. Only five have served out their terms. The rest have been poisoned, blown up, hacked to death, overthrown and/or driven into exile, sometimes with a little encouragement or assistance from foreign powers like the U.S. or France.

The playing field today does not look much better. There are 91 registered political parties. A half-dozen of them were founded by defectors from Lavalas.

Gilles wants to prevent more splits. He would like to reconcile the two “tendencies” and he wants Aristide to help.

“I think Aristide has a historic role to play,” he said.

But with Aristide’s lieutenants in Haiti, Miami and New York organising marches and teach-ins, hosting radio programmes, running websites, circulating petitions and writing articles, that does not appear too likely.

In an open letter on Mar. 29, the 18th anniversary of the constitution’s ratification, Aristide’s spokesperson accused the interim government of “genocide” and the deaths of “over 10,000 people,” a number no rights group or journalist has ever come close to matching. The letter also encouraged continued “mobilisation” for Aristide’s return.

As the title of his book implies, Gilles has not yet given up hope. But he recognises what is at stake if Lavalas does not come together and if Haiti does not somehow move forward, with or without Aristide.

“The failure of Lavalas would be my failure, too,” he admitted.

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Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PETION-VILLE, Haiti, Feb 15 2005 (IPS)

Last Thursday, automatic gunfire rattled away in this residential suburb of Haiti’s capital. Roads were blocked. School children scurried. Drivers slipped gears into reverse.

Black-hooded Haitian SWAT police crept along the road clutching M-16s and M-14s. Scores of UN peacekeepers rolled up in armored personnel carriers, radio crackling, rifles and grenade-launchers at the ready.

When it was over, a little five-year-old girl, Dorley Jean-Baptiste, had been shot dead and three other civilians injured, they claim by police gunfire. Police had also arrested three people, but not the man they were after: a former member of Haiti’s long-disbanded Armed Forces.

Jean-Baptiste’s killing is somewhere around the 250th – or maybe even 406th – death by gunshot in the capital over the past four months, depending on who’s counting. She was one more victim of the violence that has plagued the city ever since Sep. 30, 2004, when police and marchers demanding the return of ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide – overthrown on Feb. 29, 2004 – exchanged shots, resulting in deaths on both sides.

Since then, armed pro-Aristide gangs have attacked police, shops and drivers; police have retaliated, sometimes brutally and sometimes, critics say, outright eliminating peaceful Aristide supporters.

Former soldiers who helped overthrow Aristide and who now refuse to put down their arms have also entered the mix. In a number of provincial cities, they patrol and even make arrests with their aging weapons and worn fatigues.

Last Thursday, the Haitian National Police (HNP) decided they had had enough of ex-Sgt. Remissainthe Ravix, leader of one pack of ex-soldiers and a suspect in the recent murder of four officers, so they went after him and his crew. But like many HNP operations, there was “collateral damage”, and Jean-Baptiste’s name was added to the list of victims.

Four hundred and six or even 250 people dead in four months would be a high tally anywhere, but it is especially high for a country where some 7,400 U.N. blue helmets are supposed to be keeping the peace.

In place for seven months, but at full strength for only the past two, the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) has a complex task.

The Brazilian-led force – which, with its civilian component has a budget of 379 million dollars for its first 12 months – is supposed to assure a “secure and stable environment” for the transitional government and the preparation of elections this coming fall.

MINUSTAH is the sixth U.N. mission to hit Haiti in a decade, and comes on the heels of the country’s second U.S.-led invasion and occupation in as many years. When the mission deployed last year, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan promised that this time the U.N. would get it right, but there is a lot of correcting to do.

“Most of those missions, if not all, had as their primary objective the establishment of a stable environment in Haiti,” journalist and press rights advocate Vario Serant told IPS.

“But experience shows that in spite of all those missions, Haiti has remained unstable and her people have remained hostage to insecurity, violence by armed groups, drug-dealing and general criminality.”

Serant, news director for the private Tele-Haiti and a Radio France Internationale correspondent who has been covering events in his native Haiti for 15 years, is hesitant to be overly optimistic about MINUSTAH. After all, its predecessor missions were charged with training the HNP, members of whom are variously in jail for drug-running or human rights abuses, and some of whom led the armed uprising against Aristide last year.

“On paper, this mission isn’t different than the previous ones,” Serant noted. “Now, what is happening on the ground? MINUSTAH has been here seven months. There are still groups of armed people. There are still areas of the city one can’t go.”

But Haiti is not at war nor is it a protectorate. MINUSTAH is not supposed to take over policing from the HNP – a mere 4,000 men and women responsible for Haiti’s 8 million – even though it is ill-equipped and regularly accused of corruption, drug-running and summary executions.

The two forces have collaborated on many missions in the capital and in the countryside lately, carrying out raids, confronting gang violence or providing security for events. But that was not the case last Thursday when police attacked Ravix’s makeshift “base.” When he arrived on the HNP-ex-soldier shoot-out scene, MINUSTAH Commander Brazilian General Augusto Heleno Ribeiro Pereira was visibly upset.

“We were not informed (by the police) in advance. They called us after they started the operation,” Heleno said. “Now we are going to pull our troops out because we wanted to negotiate but the police have decided to bust up all the furniture… It’s not in our mandate to destroy houses.”

Haitian Police Chief Leon Charles expressed similar frustration this week, telling journalists that the HNP didn’t ask MINUSTAH for help – or criticism.

But police on their own haven’t been able to curb the violence nor disarm thugs from any camp.

And in addition to leading to the deaths of dozens of innocent people and some 30 police officers, insecurity in the capital has also led downtown businesses to close their shutters, import-export houses to cut back their orders and schools to lose days or weeks at a time, all of which upsets people like businessman Jerry Tardieu, the vice president of Haiti’s Chamber of Commerce.

“They have not worked at all at helping the police get better training, better equipment and better coordination,” Tardieu told IPS. “Moreover, their principal mission, which is disarmament, is a complete failure.”

A recent study by the International Crisis Group, an international peace-promoting think-tank, estimates there are 300,000 illegal arms in the country, many held by former soldiers or by urban gangs. This frustrates some peacekeepers.

“As police officers we have a real desire to confront the violence, but our mandate is to assist, to orient, to support,” Canadian Constable Jean-Francois Vézina told IPS recently.

The result is that, while there are U.N. peacekeeping bases all over the country, and many citizens say they feel more secure, there are still plenty of hijackings, kidnappings, rapes and robberies. And there are still plenty of armed groups, which bodes ill for the upcoming elections.

Peacekeepers admit they still have work to do. Their own people have been ambushed or shot at on several occasions.

But some say their hands are tied by the delicately crafted mandate. And almost all of the soldiers and police – who hail from over three dozen countries – cannot communicate with Haitians since they speak no French, let alone Haitian Creole, the only language all Haitians speak.

The peacekeepers are under close scrutiny, in part because of the failed missions here and elsewhere in the world during the 1990s.

A 2000 report by Undersecretary-General Lakhdar Brahimi, once the U.N. envoy to Haiti, said that the U.N. “had repeatedly failed to meet the challenge” of preventing war and spreading peace. The “Brahimi Report” recommended that future missions have clearer mandates, a better idea of how much and when to use force, stronger ties between “peace-keeping” and “peace-building” and more support from member states.

MINUSTAH has not been in Haiti long enough for its work to be judged. Peace-builders like U.N. Special Representative Juan Gabriel Valdez appear tireless as they host summit meetings, promote dialogue and help organise upcoming elections.

But the peacekeepers, while providing a visible presence at checkpoints, so far have not stayed in Haiti’s slums and gullies long enough to get to know people and disarm armed groups. Even if they wanted to, their mandate says the HNP should take the lead.

Serant, who continues to see co-workers chased into exile or gunned down, as recently as last week when a newspaper graphics person was killed, feels focusing on MINUSTAH and its shortcomings alone is misplaced.

“After all these international missions, why is Haiti still the way it is?” he asked. “That is the question that needs to be considered and that needs an answer. But it is Haiti, not the international community, who needs to find the answer.”

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 22 2004 (IPS)

"The ‘steamroller’ swept across Port-au-Prince … All night and into the morning furious battles took place throughout the lower city. Finally, as the army gained the upper hand, trucks began picking up littered corpses."

"The ‘steamroller’ swept across Port-au-Prince … All night and into the morning furious battles took place throughout the lower city. Finally, as the army gained the upper hand, trucks began picking up littered corpses."

Those lines could have come from a newswire story on any given day here over the past three weeks. The capital has seen headless bodies, handcuffed corpses, rotting piles of cadavers at the morgue, battles with automatic weapons and generalised terror. More than 55 people, among them nine police officers, have been killed here since Sep. 30.

But the words are a half-century old. They come from a book called ‘Written in Blood’, by Robert Debs Heinl, Nancy Gordon Heinl and Michael Heinl and describe a day in 1957 when the outraged masses (the "steamroller") of the capital’s Bel-Aire neighbourhood rampaged after hearing a rumour that their hero, the recently deposed populist president Daniel Fignolé, had been assassinated.

Five decades later, Bel-Aire is once again the scene of violence tied to loyalists to another deposed president. But today, instead of a steamroller, a much smaller gang of mostly gun-toting thugs terrorises downtown Port-au-Prince.

The violence erupted Sep. 30, the 13th anniversary of the military-led coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (during his first interrupted term in office). When several hundred people demonstrated to demand his return, police clashed with marchers. When it was over, three or four policemen and perhaps an equal number of demonstrators were dead.

While nobody can be sure who fired first, the rancour behind the carnage was clear. The headless bodies of three policemen were later found and men claiming allegiance to Aristide announced that "Operation Baghdad" (after the beheadings and other violent murders committed by insurgents in the U.S.-occupied nation) would continue until the president returned to the National Palace.

Aristide left on Feb. 29, after months of civil protest and as an armed force of former Haitian army soldiers and disgruntled police officers approached the capital. The former priest says he was forced from power by Washington and other foreign powers in a "modern coup d’état."

While Haiti has had some 33 coups and violent changes of power, Aristide is the only president to be thrown out of office twice.

Eight months after his departure, many things here do not appear to have changed for the better.

While diplomats, politicians and United Nations peacekeepers and their administrators discuss plans for more patrols or electronic voting machines or irrigation projects in their air-conditioned offices on the hills overlooking the harbour, down the slope the sporadic rattle of automatic gunfire has echoed across the dirty downtown almost daily this month.

On Oct. 15, grey smoke rose from burning tire barricades. Schools, businesses and banks in and around Bel-Aire were shuttered for the 15th day in a row. Black-hooded, black-helmeted policemen scurried down rock-strewn streets that looked like those of a country in a state of civil war.

"What is going on is literally insane," human rights activist Jean-Claude Bajeux told IPS on Oct. 16. "It is what we call in philosophy a ‘death march.’ If we can’t stop this, we are looking at the destruction of the Haitian nation. If we continue like this, we will not only miss the democratic transition, we are also putting in jeopardy our very existence."

Bajeux was not talking about the flooding that left some 3,000 dead when rain rushed down treeless slopes in and around the northern city of Gonaives in September; nor of the more than 1,500 Haitians killed in May flooding.

He meant the political violence that has dominated this nation that shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic since ex-slaves won their 13-year revolution against Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops in 1804.

Almost from the beginning, class, colour, clan and greed split Haitians, as interim Prime Minister Gérard Latortue acknowledged after laying a wreath at the tomb of revolutionary hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines on Oct. 17.

"Today is a very sad anniversary for all of us Haitians," Latortue told reporters. "Remember, it is division that led to the assassination of the founder of the nation. Unfortunately, since then Haitians have not learned that it is not division that will help the republic."

Dessalines, crowned emperor within a year of Haiti’s declaration of independence, was hacked and shot to death by his own soldiers only two years later, his mutilated body left to rot in the tropical sun. He was just the first of many Haitian leaders whose reign ended abruptly.

Latortue’s government, which has shut out members of Aristide’s Lavalas movement from its ranks, does not appear to be tottering on the edge just yet.

But while he spoke to the phalanx of foreign reporters who flocked into the country to cover what they thought might be another ‘fin de regime’, a few kms away a platoon of armed men dressed in camouflage exercised, brandishing arms ranging from M-14s to Uzis to semi-automatic Israeli Galils.

Haiti has no army – the Armed Forces was disbanded by Aristide in 1995 following the coup – but these men are demanding it be reconstituted.

Ex-Captain Remissainthe Ravix controls the ex-soldiers, who are believed to number 1,000 – 2,000 men and to be stationed in a number of cities around the country. Despite their obvious unconstitutionality, they carry weapons and patrol, police and even arrest people. And they are growing restless.

Early this month Ravix brought some 50 men into the capital to set up a base in an apartment building, hoping their presence would pressure the government.

"For the past three or four weeks we have been ready, waiting for the government to call on us to bring order to the disorder," Ravix told IPS on Oct. 19. "But it seems like the government doesn’t want us … We are the ones who got rid of the dictator, and this is the thanks we get."

Haitian police and U.N. peacekeepers have struggled to bring order to the streets but they give the ex-soldiers a wide berth. Fearing further violence, Canada and the United States recently advised their citizens not to visit Haiti, and Washington also moved all "non-essential" embassy personnel out of the country.

Latortue blames the violence directly on Haiti’s ex-president.

"His capacity is only to destroy," the interim leader told reporters at the Oct. 17 ceremony. "He knows how to kill, how to put fire, how to put violence, how to arm 12-, 13-, 14-year-old young people. He is the symbol of violence. He believes in that."

During Aristide’s last two years in power, groups of sometimes-armed young men nicknamed "chimère" ("monster") who got "zombie" cheques from government offices regularly threatened attacked anti-government marchers, journalists and even government officials not deemed loyal enough.

Aristide never clearly condemned them, nor has he damned this latest flare-up. Instead, he simply denied Latortue’s accusations.

"Latortue, stop the lying, stop the killings," Aristide said in an Oct. 20 statement he issued from South Africa, where he lives. The ex-priest also called for "dialogue."

Some Aristide supporters, like a man who said his name was Hot Pepper, say they are being unfairly targeted.

"The police come in here and shoot at just anybody. Why?" said the 22-year-old, whose shirt did not quite hide the handgun on his hip. "Just because we believe in Aristide? They can’t shoot me for that."

But police have shot, although they say only after being fired upon. Officers have also arrested hundreds, including two ex-parliamentarians and an outspoken Aristide supporter, Father Gérard Jean-Juste.

Officials say parliamentarians were the "intellectual authors" of the violence and have hinted Jean-Juste used his church compound to hide "Operation Baghdad" gunmen. But human rights group Amnesty International (AI) has protested the priest’s arrest, as has his lawyer, and so far no hard evidence has been presented to the public.

"This pastor joins a growing number of political prisoners in Haiti," U.S. law professor Bill Quigley said in an Oct. 16 statement.

The interim government is facing tough dilemmas: penniless and desperate chimères, an ill-equipped and poorly trained police force, an inadequate and corrupt justice system, frustrated and hungry ex-soldiers and a U.N. peacekeeping force whose mandate appears to stop far short of engagement. And that is just the beginning of the list.

One "helping" hand has been extended from Washington, where the Bush administration this week agreed to consider requests for weapons sales from the Latortue government on a case-by-case basis, effectively ending a 13-year arms blockade.

The United Nations has come under criticism from all sides for not stopping the violence. But U.N. Spokesman Damien Onses-Cardona said the situation is not as bad as local and international media make out.

"It’s not really that there is a systematic threat to the security of the country," he told IPS on Oct. 13. "There are people creating a state of chaos, I think, and I think this is intended."

"I would like to note that violence in Haiti is not something completely new, that just started two weeks ago, all of a sudden," added Onses-Cardona. "It is a country that has a very, very important history of violence and political violence."

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 22 2004 (IPS)

"The ‘steamroller’ swept across Port-au-Prince … All night and into the morning furious battles took place throughout the lower city. Finally, as the army gained the upper hand, trucks began picking up littered corpses."

Those lines could have come from a newswire story on any given day here over the past three weeks. The capital has seen headless bodies, handcuffed corpses, rotting piles of cadavers at the morgue, battles with automatic weapons and generalised terror. More than 55 people, among them nine police officers, have been killed here since Sep. 30.

But the words are a half-century old. They come from a book called ‘Written in Blood’, by Robert Debs Heinl, Nancy Gordon Heinl and Michael Heinl and describe a day in 1957 when the outraged masses (the "steamroller") of the capital’s Bel-Aire neighbourhood rampaged after hearing a rumour that their hero, the recently deposed populist president Daniel Fignolé, had been assassinated.

Five decades later, Bel-Aire is once again the scene of violence tied to loyalists to another deposed president. But today, instead of a steamroller, a much smaller gang of mostly gun-toting thugs terrorises downtown Port-au-Prince.

The violence erupted Sep. 30, the 13th anniversary of the military-led coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (during his first interrupted term in office). When several hundred people demonstrated to demand his return, police clashed with marchers. When it was over, three or four policemen and perhaps an equal number of demonstrators were dead.

While nobody can be sure who fired first, the rancour behind the carnage was clear. The headless bodies of three policemen were later found and men claiming allegiance to Aristide announced that "Operation Baghdad" (after the beheadings and other violent murders committed by insurgents in the U.S.-occupied nation) would continue until the president returned to the National Palace.

Aristide left on Feb. 29, after months of civil protest and as an armed force of former Haitian army soldiers and disgruntled police officers approached the capital. The former priest says he was forced from power by Washington and other foreign powers in a "modern coup d’état."

While Haiti has had some 33 coups and violent changes of power, Aristide is the only president to be thrown out of office twice.

Eight months after his departure, many things here do not appear to have changed for the better.

While diplomats, politicians and United Nations peacekeepers and their administrators discuss plans for more patrols or electronic voting machines or irrigation projects in their air-conditioned offices on the hills overlooking the harbour, down the slope the sporadic rattle of automatic gunfire has echoed across the dirty downtown almost daily this month.

On Oct. 15, grey smoke rose from burning tire barricades. Schools, businesses and banks in and around Bel-Aire were shuttered for the 15th day in a row. Black-hooded, black-helmeted policemen scurried down rock-strewn streets that looked like those of a country in a state of civil war.

"What is going on is literally insane," human rights activist Jean-Claude Bajeux told IPS on Oct. 16. "It is what we call in philosophy a ‘death march.’ If we can’t stop this, we are looking at the destruction of the Haitian nation. If we continue like this, we will not only miss the democratic transition, we are also putting in jeopardy our very existence."

Bajeux was not talking about the flooding that left some 3,000 dead when rain rushed down treeless slopes in and around the northern city of Gonaives in September; nor of the more than 1,500 Haitians killed in May flooding.

He meant the political violence that has dominated this nation that shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic since ex-slaves won their 13-year revolution against Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops in 1804.

Almost from the beginning, class, colour, clan and greed split Haitians, as interim Prime Minister Gérard Latortue acknowledged after laying a wreath at the tomb of revolutionary hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines on Oct. 17.

"Today is a very sad anniversary for all of us Haitians," Latortue told reporters. "Remember, it is division that led to the assassination of the founder of the nation. Unfortunately, since then Haitians have not learned that it is not division that will help the republic."

Dessalines, crowned emperor within a year of Haiti’s declaration of independence, was hacked and shot to death by his own soldiers only two years later, his mutilated body left to rot in the tropical sun. He was just the first of many Haitian leaders whose reign ended abruptly.

Latortue’s government, which has shut out members of Aristide’s Lavalas movement from its ranks, does not appear to be tottering on the edge just yet.

But while he spoke to the phalanx of foreign reporters who flocked into the country to cover what they thought might be another ‘fin de regime’, a few kms away a platoon of armed men dressed in camouflage exercised, brandishing arms ranging from M-14s to Uzis to semi-automatic Israeli Galils.

Haiti has no army – the Armed Forces was disbanded by Aristide in 1995 following the coup – but these men are demanding it be reconstituted.

Ex-Captain Remissainthe Ravix controls the ex-soldiers, who are believed to number 1,000 – 2,000 men and to be stationed in a number of cities around the country. Despite their obvious unconstitutionality, they carry weapons and patrol, police and even arrest people. And they are growing restless.

Early this month Ravix brought some 50 men into the capital to set up a base in an apartment building, hoping their presence would pressure the government.

"For the past three or four weeks we have been ready, waiting for the government to call on us to bring order to the disorder," Ravix told IPS on Oct. 19. "But it seems like the government doesn’t want us … We are the ones who got rid of the dictator, and this is the thanks we get."

Haitian police and U.N. peacekeepers have struggled to bring order to the streets but they give the ex-soldiers a wide berth. Fearing further violence, Canada and the United States recently advised their citizens not to visit Haiti, and Washington also moved all "non-essential" embassy personnel out of the country.

Latortue blames the violence directly on Haiti’s ex-president.

"His capacity is only to destroy," the interim leader told reporters at the Oct. 17 ceremony. "He knows how to kill, how to put fire, how to put violence, how to arm 12-, 13-, 14-year-old young people. He is the symbol of violence. He believes in that."

During Aristide’s last two years in power, groups of sometimes-armed young men nicknamed "chimère" ("monster") who got "zombie" cheques from government offices regularly threatened attacked anti-government marchers, journalists and even government officials not deemed loyal enough.

Aristide never clearly condemned them, nor has he damned this latest flare-up. Instead, he simply denied Latortue’s accusations.

"Latortue, stop the lying, stop the killings," Aristide said in an Oct. 20 statement he issued from South Africa, where he lives. The ex-priest also called for "dialogue."

Some Aristide supporters, like a man who said his name was Hot Pepper, say they are being unfairly targeted.

"The police come in here and shoot at just anybody. Why?" said the 22-year-old, whose shirt did not quite hide the handgun on his hip. "Just because we believe in Aristide? They can’t shoot me for that."

But police have shot, although they say only after being fired upon. Officers have also arrested hundreds, including two ex-parliamentarians and an outspoken Aristide supporter, Father Gérard Jean-Juste.

Officials say parliamentarians were the "intellectual authors" of the violence and have hinted Jean-Juste used his church compound to hide "Operation Baghdad" gunmen. But human rights group Amnesty International (AI) has protested the priest’s arrest, as has his lawyer, and so far no hard evidence has been presented to the public.

"This pastor joins a growing number of political prisoners in Haiti," U.S. law professor Bill Quigley said in an Oct. 16 statement.

The interim government is facing tough dilemmas: penniless and desperate chimères, an ill-equipped and poorly trained police force, an inadequate and corrupt justice system, frustrated and hungry ex-soldiers and a U.N. peacekeeping force whose mandate appears to stop far short of engagement. And that is just the beginning of the list.

One "helping" hand has been extended from Washington, where the Bush administration this week agreed to consider requests for weapons sales from the Latortue government on a case-by-case basis, effectively ending a 13-year arms blockade.

The United Nations has come under criticism from all sides for not stopping the violence. But U.N. Spokesman Damien Onses-Cardona said the situation is not as bad as local and international media make out.

"It’s not really that there is a systematic threat to the security of the country," he told IPS on Oct. 13. "There are people creating a state of chaos, I think, and I think this is intended."

"I would like to note that violence in Haiti is not something completely new, that just started two weeks ago, all of a sudden," added Onses-Cardona. "It is a country that has a very, very important history of violence and political violence."

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
ST. MARC, Haiti, Sep 7 2004 (IPS)

A dozen ex-soldiers from Haiti’s long-disbanded army paraded through the streets of this impoverished port town Monday to the improbable cries of “Long live the Haitian Army!”

The St. Marc show of force came on top of parades and building takeovers in at least a half-dozen Haitian cities since last week.

Groups of heavily armed ex-soldiers now occupy the police stations or other buildings in Petit-Goave, Cap-Haitien, St. Marc, Hinche and many towns in Haiti’s Central Plateau. In some cases they have chased the police out of town. And in at least one town they have taken over the police headquarters, their former barracks, and painted its blue and white walls yellow, the traditional army building colour.

Thus Haiti is once again a tinder box. In addition to the still-armed gangs and the usual collection of criminals, there are now three armed corps deployed around the country: the ex-soldiers, the demoralised and understaffed Haitian National Police force, and about 2,750 United Nations peacekeepers..

And while there have been no direct armed confrontations so far, there have been near-misses.

The interim government has condemned the movement but it has also sent contradictory messages.

Minister of Justice Bernard Gousse last week said the takeovers were “suspicious” and that the ex-soldiers were trying “hurt the prestige and dignity of the state”, but he also said they were welcome to apply for police jobs.

This week, the government set up a new committee to “negotiate” with the soldiers, but it also announced that police and peacekeepers would “imminently” retake control of government buildings.

The U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTHA) would not confirm that.

“We have no comment on the on the subject because it is a government problem. It is not a problem of the MINUSTHA,” spokesman Toussaint Kongo-Doudou told IPS. “This is a Haitian affair.”

Many Haitians agree, but if the airwaves have been burning up with commentary, most reporters and callers have been ambivalent despite the fact that only decade earlier, the khaki-clad soldiers were feared and reviled.

Yesterday, most St. Marcians merely watched the now pudgy but still heavily armed men from their stoops, but several hundred people danced and sang as they escorted the contingent through town right under the noses of the police.

“That’s my army! I remember them!” a lady in her seventies said as she paraded alongside the caravan. “They’re the ones we trust!”

“Call the police, they say they can’t come! No gas!” young men sang during the parade.

Haitians have little respect and even disdain for the young police force – founded in 1994 – which has been criticised for rights abuses and implicated in dozens of drug conspiracies.

“We are here because the population asked us to come,” former First Lt. Wilfrid Corisma told IPS. “We are here to provide people with security. We want our 10 years back salary and we want the army reconstituted.”

The mostly young men around him cheered as his fellow ex-soldiers brandished semi-automatic weapons, M-14s and M-16s, AK-47s and fragmentation hand grenades.

Haiti’s Armed Forces of some 7,200 men and a few women was disbanded by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide almost 10 years ago after the end of the army-led 1991-1994 coup against him, which left between 3,000 and 5,000 people dead. He was returned to power by a U.S.-led invasion of 22,000 soldiers.

That military presence made it possible for him to disband the infamous force which was responsible for decades of torture, murder and coups d’etat. The force had been set up by U.S. Marines early in the century, during the first U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). The army and 515 rural “section chiefs” oversaw a repression machine of spies and thugs that terrorised people with their own tax systems, jails and punishments.

Parliament was supposed to change the constitution and eliminate the army, but in-fighting and incompetence meant that it was never altered.

In late 2002, a band of former soldiers appeared on the Dominican border, running skirmishes into Haiti to attack police and others. Eighteen months later, in February 2004, those men were among the “rebels” who went from city to city attacking police and Aristide supporters and torching government buildings.

Coming on top of two years of civil protests, the movement is credited with helping lead to Aristide’s resignation on Feb. 29, part of what he called “a modern coup d’etat.” (Aristide and others suspect the ex-soldiers had support from U.S. and Dominican government sources.)

The hastily installed provisional government never arrested any of the ex-soldiers or other “rebels” for the February mayhem. Prime Minister Gerard Latortue even called them “freedom fighters,” a comment that caused consternation in Haiti and abroad.

Since Feb. 29, they have manned their own checkpoints, patrolled streets, sometimes in state vehicles, and some have committed petty crimes.

Former “rebel” and ex-Lt. Ramissainthe Ravix, the self-appointed leader of the ex-soldiers movement, has moved from town to town at will.

“The government doesn’t need to reconstitute us,” Ravix told IPS after his men took over the Petit-Goave police station last week. “We are here. We have always been here. The only thing the government has to do is pay us the 10 years, seven months they owe us and let us do our jobs.”

Ravix also said that he and other soldiers have no intention of handing in their arms by the Sep. 15 deadline the prime minister announced late last month.

“The deadline does not apply to us because we are in the constitution,” he said.

Dieuseule Pierre, 45, standing by the garbage-strewn shoreline of St. Marc yesterday, said he was not pleased with the reappearance of the army.

“ItâÇÖs as if people forgot what they were like,” the fish-buyer told IPS, shaking his head. “They did a lot of bad things, shot people, forced them into hiding.”

Eliphaite St. Pierre is general secretary of the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organisations (POHDH) which brings together nine rights groups. Like many pro-democracy militants, he risked his life struggling against the army during the 1991-1994 coup.

“We totally oppose the return of the Armed Forces,” St. Pierre told IPS. “All throughout history it has been a repressive vehicle, a tool used against the Haitian people.”

St. Pierre said the ambivalence of politicians who previously fought for the army’s dissolution is “very serious”.

“These people just go whichever way the wind is blowing,” he said. “They have no principles.”

As an example he pointed to Gerard Pierre-Charles, head of the People’s Struggle Organisation (OPL) and a former member of the Haitian Unified Communist Party (PUCH). Both parties lost dozens of members and supporters to army repression.

But on the radio this week, Pierre-Charles called for “compromise,” “dialogue” and “moderation”.

Samuel Madistin, who served two terms in parliament, said the ex-soldier problem is part of the wider crisis in Haiti.

“It is symptomatic of the malaise and even general dissatisfaction that the population has with the way the transition is being handled,” the lawyer told IPS.

Human rights continue to be violated, murders and kidnappings plague the country, and recently a renowned rights abuser from the coup era, former soldier and paramilitary leader Jodel Chamblain, was found “innocent” after what most observers agree was sham trial.

“All of this shows that the transition needs to be rethought,” he said. “We need a team of people who can take strong decisions and really address Haiti’s problems. This team of technocrats does not even have minimal popular support.”

It seems that in this perennially impoverished and violence-ridden country, the army does.

As volunteers painted the Petit-Goave police station yellow last week, at least a hundred supporters danced and sang: “Oh Army, oh Army, We were waiting for you! Now we are delivered!”

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jul 27 2004 (IPS)

When some 300 workers lost their jobs at factories in northeast Haiti last month, the two sides in the struggle pitting a clothing maker against a young union only dug in deeper.

The stakes are much higher than just one more boss versus dissatisfied and low-paid workers. More and more textile plants in North America are closing their doors and shifting production to low-cost factories in the South that labour activists call “sweatshops”, and Haiti’s minimum wage is the hemisphere’s lowest. A union’s fight for higher wages calls into question the “race to the bottom.”

As accusations of union-busting fly, labour bodies like the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) are protesting; Levi Strauss – which closed its last U.S. plant last fall and whose jeans are sewn at one Haitian factory – is taking heat; a 12-million-dollar World Bank loan is on the line; and Haiti’s own factory owners and interim government are scrambling to calm the situation as they strive to attract international investors.

On Jun. 11, Dominican Republic clothing giant Grupo M dismissed almost one-third of the 800 or so workers at its two Haiti factories in the CODEVI (Industrial Development Company) Free Trade Zone (FTZ), located outside of Ouanaminthe on the Haitian-Dominican border.

Grupo M, the largest employer in the Dominican Republic, where it has 13,000 workers in 24 plants, built the zone and the first two of a dozen projected factories there with a 12 million-dollar loan from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Although international mobilising forced the IFC to include language in the loan about respect for workers’ rights, CODEVI has been the site of labour strife almost since it opened.

Among those left jobless last month – the company says they were laid off, the union says they were fired – were seven of eight members of the executive committee of the recently founded in-house union. SOKOWA (Union of CODEVI Ouanaminthe Workers) said its members and other workers were fired because of their organising efforts. The massive move came after a one-day strike that was almost universally respected by workers.

“We want decent salaries, better working conditions and collective bargaining,” organiser Georges Augustin told IPS. Augustin, a former solderer, works for Batay Ouvriye (Worker’s Struggle), the labour group that helped organise SOKOWA earlier this year.

It is not the first time SOKOWA members lost their jobs. Last time around, on Mar. 1, only a few weeks after the union registered with the government, 34 employees were summarily fired. A month of international mobilising and a push from Levi got them their jobs back and elicited promises that negotiations would take place.

But as months went by, tenuous relations turned sour. After several failed sessions and what SOKOWA says were scare tactics by management, workers decided to hold a one-day strike Jun. 7. When they showed up the next day, they were locked out. Three days later, the lay-offs were announced.

“The company refuses to negotiate,” Augustin said during an interview at Batay’s Cap-Haitien office, a tiny hole-in-the-wall in a slum surrounded by fetid open sewers. “Instead, they harass and beat people and are threatening to close down completely unless workers join a ‘yellow union’ management is setting up.”

Grupo M denies the allegations and said it has officially recognised SOKOWA. At the same time, however, it blames Batay and the union for the lay-offs.

“Excessive labour activism by radical groups” has meant that Grupo M’s plants are not operating “with the necessary efficiency,” company spokesman Gonzalo Parra told IPS in an e-mail interview Jul. 26. “Batay Ouvriye has gone so far as to make all kinds of threats against workers to make them quit or work reluctantly, affecting our production pace.”

On Jun. 11, the company moved five production lines back to one of its Santiago plants, about two hours away in the Dominican Republic.

The strike and lay-offs have had their effects. Shortly after, Sara Lee – maker of Hanes, Wonderbra and other clothing lines – cancelled its contract with Grupo M’s Haiti facility, saying it wants labour-management issues resolved.

Levi Strauss has not yet pulled its contract but “is concerned,” Jeff Beckman, the firm’s director of worldwide communications, told IPS.

Beckman said productivity at the plant has dropped in recent months and added that Levi “is encouraging Grupo M management to engage in mediation with SOKOWA representatives.” In the meantime, Levi has reduced its orders of jeans from the Haitian plant.

Grupo M said it respects Haitian labour laws, paying workers at least minimum wage – 12 dollars (432 gourdes) for a six-day, 48-hour week. The average is 20 dollars, Parra said, and will rise as productivity increases.

But SOKOWA and local rights groups say workers regularly work a 55-hour week with no overtime pay, and that most employees earn 12 and not 20 dollars. Workers in Grupo M’s Dominican plants make on average 30 dollars a week.

Even if a Haitian worker is paid 20 dollars a week (3.30 dollars per day), or one-third more than the country’s minimum wage, that amount is only 30 cents more per day than the three dollars a day minimum wage set by dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier two decades ago.

Haiti’s current minimum wage of 70 gourdes per day (two dollars) was established in 1995 by then President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but was contested by Haitian unions and human rights groups. Neither two dollars nor three dollars is enough to live on, SOKOWA notes.

“A plate of food outside the plant costs 25 gourdes (almost one dollar). If you eat twice, that’s most of your salary,” Augustin said.

SOKOWA wants higher wages now, and also wants what it says is intimidation of union organisers to end.

The CODEVI conflict once again raises questions about FTZs and whom they benefit. With 43 million workers in the centres worldwide, the model is not going away any time soon and has been embraced by unlikely leaders.

Former President Aristide, once known as a “radical fire-brand,” was a strong promoter. He promised to open 14 FTZs by 2006.

“Haiti has an extraordinary potential to transform herself into a pole of attraction,” he said in his inaugural speech Feb. 7, 2001.

Despite strong opposition to the CODEVI project, Aristide pushed the initiative and bussed in his own supporters for the groundbreaking with Dominican President Hippolito Mejia 26 months ago.

The Haitian government has investigated the Grupo M conflict and should have trained labour inspectors in the region by Aug. 15, said an official from the ministry of social affairs. No wrongdoing has been found yet, he added.

“We don’t want to move too quickly; we want to promote dialogue,” Jean-Yves Georges, general director of the ministry, told IPS.

As far as the lay-offs, “a boss has the right to fire people,” he said. If the union thinks the lay-offs were a union-busting move, it can file legal complaints and let a judge decide, Georges added.

Haitian factory owners, while head-on competitors with Grupo M, side with the company, according to Charles Henri Baker, vice president of the Association of Haitian Industrialists (ADIH). He blames the lay-offs on the union organising.

“I’m very disturbed because as a Haitian, I’m trying to create jobs,” he told IPS. “These people (Batay Ouvriye and its international supporters) are spreading lies on the Internet. This kind of thing kills our business here.”

Baker runs PB Apparel and was also a main leader of the opposition movement against Aristide. When he was arrested and jailed for a few weeks late last year he lost all his contracts.

The entrepreneur is hoping to get back in business soon. He predicts that if the U.S. Congress approves the pending Haitian Economic Recovery Opportunity (HERO) Act, which will eliminate duties and tariffs on Haitian-sewed clothing, the number of jobs in the assembly sector could rise from the present 30,000 to over 200,000.

That benefit will come on top of other advantages Haiti has due to its impoverished state. In fact, saving labour costs is perhaps just one reason Grupo M shifted stitching operations to its neighbour’s soil.

With 52 free trade zones and 200,000 workers producing 4.7 billion dollars worth of textiles (2002 figures), the Dominican Republic has reached the limit of its U.S. textile import quota. But if the final stitch is sewed in Haiti, a Dominican company can send clothes to the United States with a “Made in Haiti” tag, thus taking advantage of that country’s largely unused quota.

Baker feels strongly that Haiti should take advantage of what it can, including its low wages.

“Our job as Haitians is to create jobs, even if it’s at 70 gourdes (about two dollars) a day,” he said. “That is, by far, more than workers make farming.”

The businessman was a promoter of the “social contract” put forward by the Group of 184 coalition during the anti-Aristide mobilisation last year. The contract calls for universal education, a “fight against poverty,” environmental protection and other measures, but it does not call for an increase in the minimum wage.

IFC Officer Mark Constantine told IPS he blames both the bosses and the union for the impasse at CODEVI. In his 20 years at IFC, he said, he has never seen a more complex case.

Grupo M is in a “learning curve” as far as working with and respecting unions is concerned, Constantine noted, but while some of the union’s claims are exaggerated, “there is a kernel of truth in all of them.”

The IFC plans to send a professional labour arbitrator to Haiti within the next two weeks to help SOKOWA and Grupo M negotiate a contract and working conditions acceptable to all parties, he said.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Constantine added, saying Grupo M is losing money in Haiti. With a 12-million-dollar debt staring it in the face, the company might give up and go home. Worse, it might declare bankruptcy, he said.

“We are going to try like hell to save this project. The interim government is trying to gain some traction. To have this fail would send a horrible message.”

In the meantime, labour activists remain mobilized. A large coalition of British unions and the “No Sweat” campaign are planning a protest Thursday at Levi’s London store.

Back in Cap-Haitien and Ouanaminthe, Batay Ouvriye and SOKOWA are not backing down. They know that by continuing to demand that the union’s members and other workers are rehired, and by struggling for higher wages and better conditions, they are taking the risk that the factory will close down altogether.

“We were opposed to the FTZ, but now that it is here, we are fighting for the workers’ rights,” Augustin said. “When you are trying to make people do what’s right, you have to go all the way.”

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jun 21 2004 (IPS)

Haiti has a new, all-embracing plan aimed at pulling the country out of its economic, social and political rut with new roads and schools, policy changes and millions upon millions of dollars.

The only problem, critics say, is that it was written behind closed doors, it follows a neo-liberal economic recipe and is little more than "disguised colonialism" because of the large role played by international institutions.

The Cadre de Cooperation International (CCI) or Interim Cooperation Framework, a draft summary of which was released earlier this month, does have a generally neo-liberal economic orientation. It calls for more free trade zones (FTZs), stresses tourism and export agriculture, and hints at the eventual privatisation of the country’s state enterprises.

But it also promises broad social and economic interventions, including the immediate repair or building of hundreds of kilometres of roads, the promotion of alternative energy sources and a radical improvement of the education system.

The CCI – which represents the first time that donors and lenders have sat down with one another and with the government to coordinate efforts in this overwhelmingly aid-dependent country – will be used to orient the aid "pledging conference" scheduled for Jul. 19-20 in Washington, DC.

Donors and lenders like the World Bank and the European Union are expected to make financial commitments to Haiti during those two days.

The plan was developed over the past six weeks by about 300 mostly foreign technicians and consultants, some 200 from institutions like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank, and the rest mainly government cadres.

That means that a two-year social and economic plan for a country of eight million has been drawn up by people nobody elected.

Haitian Prime Minister Gerard Latortue and his ministers were hand-picked last March to run the country by an eight-person "Council of Eminent Persons" who had backing from the world’s powers – led by the United States and France and backed by the United Nations Security Council.

Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned Feb. 29 following more than a year of protests and after an armed group took over half of the country’s police stations.

The ex-president – in exile in South Africa – continues to claim he was overthrown in a "coup d’etat", and Haiti’s fellow members in the Caribbean Community have refused to recognise the new administration and continue to insist on a probe into what exactly happened the night Aristide was flown from his country.

And the CCI will be carried out in a country where a U.N. peacekeeping mission of what will eventually be over 8,000 soldiers and police is rolling into place. The Brazilian-led force is charged with providing security and stability so that elections and development projects can be carried out.

One three-page criticism issued last week said the CCI "reinforces the structures and forms of (foreign) domination" of Haiti.

Almost no one from the country’s large and experienced national non-governmental organisation (NGO) community, the local and national peasant associations, unions, women’s groups or the hundreds of producers’ cooperatives or numerous other associations was invited to participate in the CCI’s 10 working groups.

And while the CCI documents have been available on-line for several weeks, only a tiny number of Haitians have access to the Internet. Further, the papers are written in English or French, a language that only 5-10 percent of Haitians speak and read. Most people here speak only Creole.

Even the seven-person Council of Eminent Persons, meant to serve as a kind for counter-balance for Latortue, was not aware of or invited to participate in the process.

"They didn’t ask us," Anne-Marie Issa, one of seven "eminent people" and the director of Radio Signal FM, told IPS. "We only heard about it like everybody else, in the press after it was all over."

On Jun. 11, some 60 representatives of more than three-dozen organisations and NGOs met at a religious retreat to learn about the CCI and to launch a counter-offensive. The room was full of anger, according to Joseph Georges, director of the Society for the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), an NGO that works with community radio stations.

"We thought we were finished with the habit of exclusion," he told IPS, referring to Haiti’s previous governments, including the recent Aristide administration.

"The document is completely lacking in any kind of nationalist vision. It calls for privatisation, for development only for tourism areas. And it was drawn up by ‘experts’, most of them from overseas. You can’t plan the country’s development without including the peasants," Georges said.

Among those organisations not invited to the table are groups like the National Association of Haitian Agronomists (ANDAH), the Haitian Platform for an Alternative Development (PAPDA), the Papaye and the Tet Kole peasant movements and women’s associations, he added.

Georges was among the signatories of a three-page document denouncing the CCI as "disguised colonialism" developed without "any concern for transparency," which "took place in a context of a growing loss of sovereignty."

"The CCI is on the way to becoming the provisional government’s programme," the groups said. "But so far, except for the ministries of agriculture and health, the (Boniface) Alexandre-Latortue government has not told the nation what its overall policy orientation will be for what remains of its 18-month mandate. This information deficit is all the more worrying since it is occurring while there is no sitting parliament."

Government officials reject the criticisms.

Minister of Economy and Finances Henri Bazin told IPS critics are misreading the CCI if they say it calls for privatisation.

A summary of the CCI released in early June calls for audits, training for directors and "the engagement of private management of certain public enterprises," but not privatisation, he noted. Bazin said he was "overall very satisfied" with the plan’s orientation.

Minister of Planning Roland Pierre, who helped coordinate the CCI, also rejected the criticism, and described it as "a Haiti-led effort".

"Ministry employees who have worked for the government 10 or 20 years oriented the CCI," he said in an interview.

The economic orientation of the CCI is not much different from the broad economic lines followed by the governments of Aristide and Rene Preval. (Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically chosen ruler, was president from 1991-1995, although that term was interrupted by a three-year coup, and from 2000 until his recent resignation. Preval, his former prime minister, ruled from 1995 to 2000.)

Both administrations pursued neo-liberal economic policies. In the mid-nineties, Aristide and Preval began the process of privatising state enterprises with the sale of the country’s flour mill and cement plant, and Aristide lowered tariffs on agricultural goods to zero or near-zero. During his second term, Aristide vowed to open 14 FTZs around the country.

Still, it is also clear the CCI planning process excluded most sectors, although Pierre told IPS he and other planners gave groups ample time to make their criticisms known.

"The documents are available at various ministries," noted the minister, adding that at meetings he attended, he heard little criticism, nor has anyone offered alternative ideas.

But consultative meetings took place in late May or June, after the bulk of the CCI documents were written, and the ones in the countryside were very poorly attended, according to Georges. Groups like SAKS and ANDAH have not yet been invited to give their opinions, he added, and are working on an alternative proposal.

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, May 26 2004 (IPS)

After a slow start, money is starting to trickle into the ministers who recently took over the country classified as the poorest, hungriest, most environmentally degraded, least electrified, sickest, most unemployed and least educated in the Americas.

"It’s not coming as soon as we wanted, and maybe it won’t be the amount we wanted, but it will be coming," Minister of Economy and Finances Henri Bazin told IPS.

It is coming, if one goes by recent promises. The European Union, France, the United States and others have guaranteed grants and assistance totalling over 200 million U.S. dollars in recent weeks. That is in addition to 350 million dollars in loans that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has said it is ready to disburse. But that cash flow is not fast enough for many.

Bazin and the other ministers in Prime Minister Gerard Latortue’s cabinet – an interim team that is supposed to be replaced after elections in 2005 – have been in office for only about two-and-a-half months. For Haiti’s population of eight million, who see food and medicine prices going up, garbage choking streets, criminals still rampaging freely and cities cloaked by nightlong blackouts, that period seems like ages.

Never spared from regional calamities, this week the nation that shares the Caribbean Sea island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic was slapped by another when flash flooding from a tropical depression killed hundreds of people and animals and destroyed houses and crops as water roared out of treeless hillsides and rivers jumped their banks.

It is estimated that 300 people are dead or missing, and roads remain sliced in two by the mountains of mud left behind.

"The foreigners said they would help us once (former President Jean-Bertrand) Aristide left, but so far we have only seen more suffering," Ernst Pierre, a farmer, told IPS as he sat on a stump of a wall, all that was left of his neighbour’s home, in Fond Verettes.

Local authorities there say 158 people, including a former parliamentarian, were washed away by the torrent in that town alone. The river devastated the valley, carrying away as many as 500 houses, according to United Nations officials.

This is the third time in a decade that Fond Verettes has been decimated by torrential floods. The town is located below one of Haiti’s three parks, the Pine Forest Park, where the administrations of Aristide and his successor Rene Preval did little to halt rampant tree-cutting and farming.

A 22.5 million dollar World Bank environmental grant to protect that park and others was largely squandered and finally shut down after 14 million dollars had been spent on projects that local and World Bank evaluators say brought no sustainable results.

"The forest up through here has been completely destroyed," Latortue told reporters during a visit to what was left of the town Tuesday.

"We have to go to the roots of the problem à and the roots of the problem is that we have to go and reforest the hill. Until we do that, every two, three, four years, after some heavy rain, the same thing will happen," he added.

Many bilateral and multilateral donors and lenders held up aid and loans to the Haitian government beginning in the late nineties, even before Aristide took office in 2001 to serve his second term. The former priest was previously elected in 1990, when he became the first democratically chosen leader of this nation of former slaves who fought and won independence from France 200 years ago.

Donors and lenders said they were disappointed with Aristide and his predecessor Preval for their tolerance of poor governance and corruption and for endless political squabbling and human rights abuses.

About 500 million dollars in aid was blocked and tens of millions more rerouted to non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

Aristide, who left the country on a U.S. jet Feb. 29 after a civil and armed paramilitary movement swept the country, frequently accused foreign governments and multilateral institutions of deliberately weakening his rule with an "aid embargo".

The former priest still maintains he was kidnapped by U.S. forces, an accusation that has caused leaders of fellow countries in the Caribbean Community to delay recognising Latortue’s administration.

But recent promises indicate that donors in the North approve of Latortue and that the "embargo" is over.

"Aristide resigned. This resignation opened a new period, a new epoch, a new stage in the life of this country," French Minister of Foreign Affairs Michel Barnier said earlier this month when he promised one million Euros (1.2 million U.S. dollars) to help the government pay teachers’ salaries that Aristide and Preval promised but never delivered.

When U.S. Ambassador James B Foley made a surprise announcement May 23 that Washington was mobilising 100 million dollars for Haiti – much of it slated to go straight into the treasury’s coffers – he could not have been clearer. The money will help the nation recover from the "wilful destruction and pillage" carried out by Aristide officials, he said.

Bazin, an economist who formerly worked at the United Nations, is pleased the money is starting to come in, but he stressed his government does not intend to earn a beggar’s reputation.

"We think there is an unfulfilled potential for increased tax revenues here.. Contraband, incompetence and tax evasion have kept the government from getting all that it could," Bazin said.

"There is a saying – ‘Sweep in front of your own door before you ask others to do the same’. We are trying to maximise our internal resources at the same time as we seek external assistance."

Port-au-Prince will know the full extent of that external assistance after a pledging conference to be attended by a full slate of bilateral and multilateral funders in late June in Ottawa, Canada.

Bazin is enthusiastic about the meeting, not only at the prospect of much needed cash for social services, education, infrastructure and other urgent needs, but also because of the way his government and its donors are preparing for the meetings.

"Contrary to what was done in the past, where there were little grants here and there, now we are going to organise things in programmes, coordinated programmes, so donors don’t fight with each other and so that we as Haitians can also make our voices heard," he said.

The government also hopes the World Bank and other multilateral donors will agree to classify the country as "post-conflict".

"You get advantages you wouldn’t otherwise get," the minister said. "First of all you get grants rather than loans, and second of all you get them quickly."

Bank officials say they are considering the request, which is supported by the governments of the United States, Canada and France, according to Bazin..

But grants and loans are only part of the answer. Presenting its 2003 version of an ‘Economic and Social Report Card’ study yesterday, the local U.N. Development Programme office and members of the Haitian Association of Economists painted a bleak picture..

Among other things, in 2003 Haiti’s economy shrunk.

"Concretely there has been no growth," economist Jean-Claude Paulvin told journalists. "Instead there was a negative growth of 1.6 percent."

When Aristide was returned to power in 1994 in the previous foreign intervention – the US-led "Operation Restore Democracy" – an estimated three billion dollars was spent on and in Haiti. But 10 years later, experts agree, it was neither enough nor was it well spent.

In a report he issued last month, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said his institution previously "failed to develop necessary sustainable partnerships with the Haitian society at all levels", and that the aid "did not bear fruit to the extent expected because it was at times ill-targeted and did not take into account the deficiencies in local absorptive capacity."

As Haiti and its donors head for another round of "nation-building", bets are still out on whether this time money and efforts will benefit the people..

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PETION-VILLE, Haiti, Apr 23 2004 (IPS)

When alleged death squad leader and rebel commander Louis Jodel Chamblain handed himself over to authorities this week, the number of gun-toting criminals on Haiti’s streets and hillsides dropped by one.

When alleged death squad leader and rebel commander Louis Jodel Chamblain handed himself over to authorities this week, the number of gun-toting criminals on Haiti’s streets and hillsides dropped by one.

But human rights observers are not overly optimistic.

With armed groups ruling many parts of the country, a nearly non-existent police force, an antiquated justice system based on Napoleonic Code and gross injustices and a society divided by sharp class and political differences, one more man behind bars probably will not change the situation much, they say.

In the north, a group calling itself the “Kosovo Army” ransoms people and has its own jail. In other cities and towns, members of the Haitian National Front rebel army and scores of armed thugs who joined them after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Feb. 29 ouster occupy police stations or intersections.

>From a force of 7,000, the notoriously corrupt and brutal Haitian National Police (PNH) corps has dwindled to only about 1,400 men and women. When enrolment for the PNH academy opened this week, a young man was trampled to death and almost two dozen others injured in the melee at the front door as officers snuck friends and paying clients in through the back.

Earlier this month, former Haitian army top commander and now Minister of Interior, Herard Abraham, surprised rights groups when he announced he will accept former soldiers into the crippled force.

Aristide dismantled the Haitian Armed Forces in 1995. A tool of the Duvalier regime (1957-86) and the post-Duvalier dictatorships it was responsible for generations of murders, coups and repression. Nevertheless, Abraham said that once ex-soldiers have been vetted and trained, “they will be integrated into the police”.

Today, the U.S.-led multinational force of some 3,600 men and women does little more than carry out occasional patrols, and these in only parts of the country. As of last week, only about 150 weapons had been collected in its “disarmament” efforts, which many Haiti experts call vital to the country’s future. Most of the weapons were rusty and dysfunctional, journalists observed.

The 3,000 prisoners the Front released from the country’s jails remain free. Murders, kidnappings, hold-ups and rapes are reported almost every day country-wide. This week the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said Haiti’s children have been severely affected by the recent crisis and violence, and that some 2,000 of them are living on the streets of the capital Port-au-Prince.

Most of Haiti’s cities and towns are running virtually on their own. The Aristide-appointed mayors and councils have evaporated, perhaps fearing reprisals for their actions while in power. The doors of most of the country’s courthouses are also locked shut. A number of them were ransacked in the days leading up to Aristide’s departure.

“It’s clear that this government doesn’t control the national territory,” Eliphaite St Pierre, general secretary of the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organisations (POHDH), told IPS. “And so far, the government has not shown us that it has any kind of different vision, not for disarmament or public security or justice”.

Amidst some pomp and circumstance and a great deal of media attention Thursday, Chamblain turned himself into the police exactly 10 years after Haitian soldiers and members of the paramilitary death squad FRAPH (the so-called Front for the Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People) attacked Raboteau, the poor seaside slum of the northern city of Gonaives, killing somewhere between eight and two dozen people.

FRAPH, which rights investigators and journalists later linked to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and to numerous cases of arson, rape and murder, terrorised and killed supporters of then-President Aristide in 1993 and 1994, following the 1991 coup.

Chamblain, who says the organisation was a purely political group, was FRAPH’s Number Two man. He and its leader, Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, fled Haiti when Aristide returned in 1994 – Constant to New York, where he remains today, and Chamblain to the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

Chamblain was eventually tried and convicted in absentia for the “Raboteau massacre” and for the murder of businessman and Aristide supporter Antoine Izmery. He returned to Haiti this year to help command the rag-tag rebel army that shot and killed at least a dozen people as it took over half of the country’s police headquarters last February.

Despite the convictions, Chamblain – as well as other convicted rights abusers and the over 3,000 prisoner rebels released from the country’s prisons – spent the last two months touring the country, giving interviews, calling for the reestablishment of the Haitian Armed Forces and even meting out justice at impromptu “trials”.

During the same period, new Haitian Minister of Justice Bernard Gousse arrested or issued travel bans for dozens of ex-Aristide officials and expelled scores of officers from the police. Among those behind bars is ex-Minister of the Interior Jocelerme Privert.

Groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the local National Coalition for Haitian Rights all raised their voices against the arrests, condemning the obvious double standard.

Perhaps that explains the choreographed and reporter-friendly event Thursday. Dressed to the nines in a grey suit and seated before a roomful of local and foreign reporters, Chamblain cried as he noted he was performing an “heroic act”.

“I am handing myself over to be a prisoner so that Haiti has a chance for the real democracy that I am fighting for, for the real justice for which I have always fought,” said Chamblain, tears welling up in his eyes.

Guy Philippe, commander-in-chief of the Front, had his hands on Chamblain’s shoulders, but he was crying so hard he had to leave the room.

Claiming that a fair trial would vindicate him, Chamblain called on others – including officials and members of Aristide’s Lavalas Family Party suspected in rights violations and corruption – to turn themselves in. He then walked across the room, gave his gun to another Front member, was fingerprinted and took up residence in a jail cell.

Minister of Justice Bernard Gousse was on hand at the police station. After the lock on the old cell door clicked shut, he spoke to reporters, praising Chamblain’s “good and noble decision”.

“Justice will be done, no matter what camp one is from,” said Gousse, who added that a judge will open new investigations and if evidence is found, will try Chamblain all over again.

Standing outside the jail, Philippe said he disagreed with Chamblain’s decision, adding that he hoped police would now arrest Aristide’s former prime minister, Yvon Neptune, and other members of the Lavalas party, whom he said are implicated in gross human rights violations.

While they cautiously applauded Chamblain’s gesture, many rights observers in Haiti and abroad are fearful he will be a free man soon. In both murder cases for which he was convicted, Chamblain was accused of being behind the crimes, but not present at the scenes of the killings.

“If Chamblain is not tried, or is tried and found innocent, it would be a catastrophe and would encourage impunity in the country,” Pierre Esperance, director of the National Coalition of Haitian Rights, a member of the POHDH, told IPS.

FRAPH, he added, was implicated in many barbarous acts, including the October 2003 murder of Minister of Justice Guy Malary.

Esperance added that he hoped the country would not witness a “comedy of justice”, noting that while the justice system is severely crippled, “there are some honest judges”.

At the same time, he said, many arrests are needed of people implicated in crimes allegedly linked to the Aristide administration, including the Dec. 5, 2003 attack on a state university dean, the infamous December 2002 murder of three brothers, allegedly by police officers, and the destruction of a number of private radio station antennae and equipment early this year.

“There are many, many arrests that need to take place,” Esperance said.

According to St Pierre, “the underlying problem is, what kind of justice system to we want? Justice for who?”

“The country’s social actors need to force this government to hand out real justice,” he added. “We need to get them to pose the question differently.”

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PETION-VILLE, Haiti, Apr 23 2004 (IPS)

When alleged death squad leader and rebel commander Louis Jodel Chamblain handed himself over to authorities this week, the number of gun-toting criminals on Haiti’s streets and hillsides dropped by one.

But human rights observers are not overly optimistic.

With armed groups ruling many parts of the country, a nearly non-existent police force, an antiquated justice system based on Napoleonic Code and gross injustices and a society divided by sharp class and political differences, one more man behind bars probably will not change the situation much, they say.

In the north, a group calling itself the "Kosovo Army" ransoms people and has its own jail. In other cities and towns, members of the Haitian National Front rebel army and scores of armed thugs who joined them after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Feb. 29 ouster occupy police stations or intersections.

>From a force of 7,000, the notoriously corrupt and brutal Haitian National Police (PNH) corps has dwindled to only about 1,400 men and women. When enrolment for the PNH academy opened this week, a young man was trampled to death and almost two dozen others injured in the melee at the front door as officers snuck friends and paying clients in through the back.

Earlier this month, former Haitian army top commander and now Minister of Interior, Herard Abraham, surprised rights groups when he announced he will accept former soldiers into the crippled force.

Aristide dismantled the Haitian Armed Forces in 1995. A tool of the Duvalier regime (1957-86) and the post-Duvalier dictatorships it was responsible for generations of murders, coups and repression. Nevertheless, Abraham said that once ex-soldiers have been vetted and trained, "they will be integrated into the police".

Today, the U.S.-led multinational force of some 3,600 men and women does little more than carry out occasional patrols, and these in only parts of the country. As of last week, only about 150 weapons had been collected in its "disarmament" efforts, which many Haiti experts call vital to the country’s future. Most of the weapons were rusty and dysfunctional, journalists observed.

The 3,000 prisoners the Front released from the country’s jails remain free. Murders, kidnappings, hold-ups and rapes are reported almost every day country-wide. This week the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said Haiti’s children have been severely affected by the recent crisis and violence, and that some 2,000 of them are living on the streets of the capital Port-au-Prince.

Most of Haiti’s cities and towns are running virtually on their own. The Aristide-appointed mayors and councils have evaporated, perhaps fearing reprisals for their actions while in power. The doors of most of the country’s courthouses are also locked shut. A number of them were ransacked in the days leading up to Aristide’s departure.

"It’s clear that this government doesn’t control the national territory," Eliphaite St Pierre, general secretary of the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organisations (POHDH), told IPS. "And so far, the government has not shown us that it has any kind of different vision, not for disarmament or public security or justice".

Amidst some pomp and circumstance and a great deal of media attention Thursday, Chamblain turned himself into the police exactly 10 years after Haitian soldiers and members of the paramilitary death squad FRAPH (the so-called Front for the Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People) attacked Raboteau, the poor seaside slum of the northern city of Gonaives, killing somewhere between eight and two dozen people.

FRAPH, which rights investigators and journalists later linked to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and to numerous cases of arson, rape and murder, terrorised and killed supporters of then-President Aristide in 1993 and 1994, following the 1991 coup.

Chamblain, who says the organisation was a purely political group, was FRAPH’s Number Two man. He and its leader, Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, fled Haiti when Aristide returned in 1994 – Constant to New York, where he remains today, and Chamblain to the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

Chamblain was eventually tried and convicted in absentia for the "Raboteau massacre" and for the murder of businessman and Aristide supporter Antoine Izmery. He returned to Haiti this year to help command the rag-tag rebel army that shot and killed at least a dozen people as it took over half of the country’s police headquarters last February.

Despite the convictions, Chamblain – as well as other convicted rights abusers and the over 3,000 prisoner rebels released from the country’s prisons – spent the last two months touring the country, giving interviews, calling for the reestablishment of the Haitian Armed Forces and even meting out justice at impromptu "trials".

During the same period, new Haitian Minister of Justice Bernard Gousse arrested or issued travel bans for dozens of ex-Aristide officials and expelled scores of officers from the police. Among those behind bars is ex-Minister of the Interior Jocelerme Privert.

Groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the local National Coalition for Haitian Rights all raised their voices against the arrests, condemning the obvious double standard.

Perhaps that explains the choreographed and reporter-friendly event Thursday. Dressed to the nines in a grey suit and seated before a roomful of local and foreign reporters, Chamblain cried as he noted he was performing an "heroic act".

"I am handing myself over to be a prisoner so that Haiti has a chance for the real democracy that I am fighting for, for the real justice for which I have always fought," said Chamblain, tears welling up in his eyes.

Guy Philippe, commander-in-chief of the Front, had his hands on Chamblain’s shoulders, but he was crying so hard he had to leave the room.

Claiming that a fair trial would vindicate him, Chamblain called on others – including officials and members of Aristide’s Lavalas Family Party suspected in rights violations and corruption – to turn themselves in. He then walked across the room, gave his gun to another Front member, was fingerprinted and took up residence in a jail cell.

Minister of Justice Bernard Gousse was on hand at the police station. After the lock on the old cell door clicked shut, he spoke to reporters, praising Chamblain’s "good and noble decision".

"Justice will be done, no matter what camp one is from," said Gousse, who added that a judge will open new investigations and if evidence is found, will try Chamblain all over again.

Standing outside the jail, Philippe said he disagreed with Chamblain’s decision, adding that he hoped police would now arrest Aristide’s former prime minister, Yvon Neptune, and other members of the Lavalas party, whom he said are implicated in gross human rights violations.

While they cautiously applauded Chamblain’s gesture, many rights observers in Haiti and abroad are fearful he will be a free man soon. In both murder cases for which he was convicted, Chamblain was accused of being behind the crimes, but not present at the scenes of the killings.

"If Chamblain is not tried, or is tried and found innocent, it would be a catastrophe and would encourage impunity in the country," Pierre Esperance, director of the National Coalition of Haitian Rights, a member of the POHDH, told IPS.

FRAPH, he added, was implicated in many barbarous acts, including the October 2003 murder of Minister of Justice Guy Malary.

Esperance added that he hoped the country would not witness a "comedy of justice", noting that while the justice system is severely crippled, "there are some honest judges".

At the same time, he said, many arrests are needed of people implicated in crimes allegedly linked to the Aristide administration, including the Dec. 5, 2003 attack on a state university dean, the infamous December 2002 murder of three brothers, allegedly by police officers, and the destruction of a number of private radio station antennae and equipment early this year.

"There are many, many arrests that need to take place," Esperance said.

According to St Pierre, "the underlying problem is, what kind of justice system to we want? Justice for who?"

"The country’s social actors need to force this government to hand out real justice," he added. "We need to get them to pose the question differently."

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
GONAIVES, Mar 22 2004 (IPS)

The flies hovering over the stinking, shining green open sewers here do not appear to notice any change. Nor do the naked children, their distended bellies and orange hair sure signs of malnutrition, worms or worse.

Still, life is different here, in Haiti’s fourth-largest city, halfway up the coast, where some 200,000 people try to eke out a living fishing or buying and selling produce and other goods.

It is not just that Jean-Bertrand Aristide is no longer president and that Gerard Latortue, a native of this dusty and dilapidated port town, has taken over with a largely technocrat cabinet.

Nor is it the presence of 150 or so French Legionnaires, whose sorties turn into parades when they are inevitably followed by scores of men, women and children on foot and bicycle.

The real change is that after months under virtual siege, life in Gonaives is getting back to normal.

Businesses and schools are open. The streets hustle and bustle with street merchants hawking piles of eggplant, tomatoes, used blue jeans and shoes, toothpaste and tomato paste from the United States.

The dozens of huge barricades of refrigerators, car hulks and garbage that blocked "National Highway Number 1", a two-lane road that in many places is more a riverbed than a highway, have been cleared away. Buses and trucks roll through town on their way north or south, careening wildly, barely missing the motor scooter taxis, students and travellers clogging the narrow route.

And the heavily armed street gang-turned-rebel army that patrolled the streets after taking over the city Feb. 5 have put down their guns, at least for now.

Sunday, the gutted shells of the jail and police stations were the only reminders of the three weeks of violence that left scores dead before Aristide’s Feb. 29 resignation, a move the ousted leader calls a U.S. and French-rigged coup d’etat.

The buildings have been picked clean of desks, beds, tin roofing, window frames, even cement blocks, by armies of the destitute, who live in a city where crumbling and grandiose two-storey wooden colonial houses recall a more noble past.

The new prime minister did not even mention the pillage during his visit Sunday. He helicoptered in with a U.S. and French military escort to tour the streets and speak to a sea of thousands, who cheered wildly as he promised housing, a paved highway and other improvements.

On the stage, rebel leaders, who include known human rights violators and convicted criminals, sported suits and ties and grinned as they rubbed shoulders with Latortue and new cabinet members.

Hunched in front of a charcoal fire a few streets away, however, life went on as usual for Marie Josue.

"I had five mouths to feed before Aristide left, and I still have five mouths to feed," said the 41-year-old as she stirred a bubbling mass of brown oil sprinkled with bits of "griot" or fried pork – really more fat than pork.

Josue lives in a two-room hovel near the salt mines wedged between the sea and the slum of Raboteau, the home base of the ‘Cannibal Army’ gang, whose members, now in neckties, were absorbed into the National Liberation Front rebel "army" of ex-soldiers and policemen that took over half of the country’s police stations during the uprising.

Josue’s street, floors and house are all made of the same mud. Her once-colourful dress is a U.S. cast-off. As one hand stirred her greasy fare with a heavy wooden spoon, the other waved flies away from the face of her youngest, a dusty-faced two-year-old named Dieudonne, which means "gift of God". None of her children is in school.

"Aristide was a crook, a drug-dealer. He didn’t care about us. He made promises and then lived his beautiful life with his beautiful wife and his beautiful children," Josue said.

"Now he’s gone and a new one is in." She jerked her thumb in the direction of the city’s main square. "And soldiers are here. But I don’t know if anything will change."

Realistically, the most Josue can hope for is that a few more gourdes (Haiti’s currency – 40 gourdes = 1 U.S. dollar) come into her slum so her neighbours can buy the griot she sells. In this impoverished city there are few jobs, paved roads, public schools or doctors, and there will not be anytime soon.

Two miles away, things are a little more positive at Chez Frantz, where Latortue and his entourage of ministers, counsellors, police and ex-rebel gang members was scheduled to stop for lunch.

A dozen employees stirred vast vats of griot, set tables, swept the yard.

Chez Frantz sits on Date Avenue, a boulevard once lined with grand Date trees. A few dying Dates and dozens of stumps serve as reminders of the city’s past, its legacy as Haiti’s "City of Independence", where ex-slaves declared their freedom from France 200 years ago.

On Saturday, French soldiers patrolled the dusty avenue on foot and in armoured vehicles sporting gun turrets. This is the third time in 100 years that foreign troops have tread the country’s streets and highways.

"On the security level, things are fine now," said Eric Thiesfeld, 52, co-owner of the restaurant and guesthouse that bears his late father’s name. "Things are mostly back to normal, although prices are still a little high."

Thiesfeld, whose family has been in Gonaives for generations, sits on several impromptu committees set up after Aristide left and local officials fled town. Lawyers, judges, teachers and ex-gang members have organised themselves into groups to try to get the city running again, he said.

"Now civil society is taking a role," Thiesfeld noted as he supervised the last-minute preparations. "Maybe there can be more control over the politicians and the police now."

During the previous four years, contraband flowed through the gang-controlled port and a local airstrip was sometimes used as a cocaine drop point. Police and the Lavalas (Aristide’s party) "nomenclature", as Thiesfeld calls them, all got a cut, he said.

Businesses like his barely hung on as the economy spiralled downward.

"To make things different this time around, we need disciplined police and ministers," Thiesfeld concluded. "It will be very difficult because Haitians don’t like discipline."

His 89-year-old mother, sitting in a nearby chair so she could hear the conversation, nodded.

The challenges seem enormous for interim leader Latortue, who has promised elections within eight months.

In a nation deadlocked politically for the three years prior to Aristide’s flight, the new prime minister’s cabinet has already been condemned as non-representative by both the political opposition and Lavalas supporters.

One hundred sixty kilometres off Haiti’s coast, the former president is "visiting" for up to 10 weeks in neighbouring Jamaica, where he continues to claim he remains Haiti’s constitutional ruler. And to date, international donors and lenders still have not restored 500 million U.S. dollars in aid they blocked after ”flawed” Senate elections in 2000.

Suddenly the prime minister’s convoy roared into the parking lot. Police with rifles and submachine guns jumped out and the robust prime minister, until last week an economist and consultant in the U.S. State of Florida, got out and made his way through the sea of admirers and job-seekers.

That day, Chez Frantz would serve at least 100 meals, but on Monday they would be back to cooking up only a handful of fish or goat stews. The restaurant has lost money for the past eight months, Thiesfeld’s wife Mona said.

"Things won’t change tomorrow. Not immediately. I don’t see how it can happen," she added after serving Saturday’s meals. She looked up and out towards dusty Date Avenue.

Dozens of hungry-looking boys loitered around the gate.

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 9 2004 (IPS)

At an inauguration ceremony guarded by U.S. Marines, Haiti’s interim president on Monday called for "reconciliation" and "peace", but as shooting, looting, threats of a resurgent rebel army and political squabbling continue against a backdrop of foreign troops, these simple goals might remain illusive.

On Tuesday, Marines shot and killed a man – their second victim – as they patrolled the streets in an attempt to deliver stability and calm to the beleaguered nation eight days after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced to flee the country.

The soldiers killed a taxi driver who did not halt when ordered to, Radio Metropole reported. The Associated Press quoted a military spokesman who said the car approached a military checkpoint at high speed so soldiers opened fire on the driver. A passenger was wounded.

U.S. and other foreign troops are not here to police the streets, but increasingly that task is falling on their shoulders in a country where many hundreds if not thousands of Haitians – rebel soldiers from the disbanded army, ex-police officers, gang members and criminals – have guns.

Just one day ago, ex-Chief Justice Boniface Alexandre – designated president to replace Jean-Bertrand Aristide who says he was forced to resign and kidnapped by U.S. forces Feb. 29 – appealed for the nation’s disparate factions and forces to work together.

But outside, as military helicopters criss-crossed the skies above the sprawling slum-ringed capital, many hundreds of Aristide supporters surged around Haiti’s National Palace shouting, "Aristide must come back! No coup d’états!"

Only a day earlier, six people died and at least 26 others were injured when gunmen attacked an anti-Aristide demonstration in almost the same spot.

Inside the palace, Alexandre spoke in a half-empty hall, where a small audience of diplomats, a smattering of politicians and a few officials had gathered. He asked them to help him mend Haiti’s shattered social and economic fabric, undertake emergency steps to fight hunger, disarm weapons-laden groups and prepare for elections.

"The organisation of good elections … will allow the Haitian people to choose their representatives and leaders," Alexandre said.

The next step in that process is Tuesday’s scheduled choosing of a prime minister to replace Yvon Neptune, who served under Aristide, by a seven-member "council of sages", which includes a radio station owner, a feminist activist and businessmen and women..

Among the candidates are one of Aristide’s former prime ministers, businessman Smarck Michel; former Haitian Armed Forces general Herard Abraham, who served as president for three days just prior to the elections that brought former Catholic priest and champion of the poor Aristide to power in 1990, and Gerard Latortue, a former U.N. official and an international business consultant, who was foreign minister in 1988.

Boniface, the new prime minister and an interim cabinet are supposed to prepare for general elections within three months.

But the process and indeed the country are riddled with weak spots.

The formula being followed is unconstitutional, according to human rights lawyer Samuel Madistin. Once a member of Aristide’s Lavalas Family Party, he served two parliamentary terms, one in the lower house and once as a senator, but later became an outspoken critic of the president.

"We are in what I call an undeclared ‘exceptional period’," Madistin said in an interview last week. "All of these committees are extra-constitutional and illegal, but none of the authorities has the courage to say that".

Boniface and the foreign diplomats supporting Haiti’s latest transition – the "Group of Six" United States, France, Canada, the United Nations, Organisation of American States (OAS) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) – have a tough row to hoe to prepare the nation for polling.

Marines on patrol in their Humvee armoured vehicles were shot at Monday as they rolled through a pro-Aristide neighbourhood on the hill above the Palace.

Near the airport, a group of 18 Marines struggled to keep looters from invading the capital’s huge Industrial Park, where earlier in the day, hundreds had ripped through thousands of dollars worth of merchandise. Haiti’s half-staffed and demoralised police force was unable to stop them.

"Stay back! Stay back! You heard me!" shouted a young Marine as he sprayed mace towards the men and women who wanted to get over the wall.

When the soldiers left at the end of the day, the looters were back at work.. Tuesday’s shooting took place as Marines were trying to control the vast park area.

The 2,000 or so troops here – U.S., French and Chilean, soon to be joined by U.N. peacekeepers – are charged with providing security, but not policing. That fine line has been hard to discern as violent attacks on people and property continue, and its fuzziness is already raising the ire of Haitians.

On Sunday, unknown gunmen sprayed high-calibre bullets at a huge anti-Aristide demonstration although it was accompanied by a phalanx of U.S. and French soldiers.

Tens of thousands of marchers were demanding Aristide and members of his government be brought to justice for alleged crimes like corruption, human rights abuses and drug-dealing.

As they passed the National Palace, an area traditionally controlled by pro-Aristide thugs, the foreign troops were long gone when the tail end of the march was attacked by assailants in vehicles, on foot and on rooftops.

While the attackers’ identities remain unknown, previous marches organised by the same coalition were repeatedly attacked by gun-toting thugs claiming allegiance to Aristide.

Marines say they shot and killed one gunman, but despite repeated calls over the course of almost a half-hour, the soldiers never made it to where a half-dozen men were pinned down by sniper fire, including cameraman and reporter Jose Ricardo Ortega, 37, of Spain’s Antena 3, who was shot in the chest just as a reporter finally found an ambulance to evacuate other injured people.

He died of his injuries soon after reaching a hospital.

In all, six people were killed and at least 26 injured, the National Coalition for Haitian Rights said.

At the hospital, where three bodies lay in pools of blood and a dozen or so bloodied injured people sat in the halls, hundreds outside protested that foreign troops had not done enough.

Charles Baker, a factory owner and spokesman for the coalition that called the protest, was inside, visiting and consoling the injured.

"This is a disaster," he said as he came out of the emergency room, his shoes bloody.

"This happened while the international community was there’ the Haitian police were there, and they are promising to protect us. But basically, until they go after the chimeres (a term used to refer to violent, pro-Aristide militants) and arrest them, until they go after Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and other members of the government, this will keep happening."

Guy Philippe, the leader of the Haitian National Front rebel army that took over police stations in about one-half of the country in the three-week uprising that led to Aristide’s fall, was also at the hospital.

Philippe and other soldiers, who include convicted murderers and known human rights abusers, were wildly cheered when they took part in Sunday’s march..

The rebel leader announced that instead of disarming his soldiers, as he had promised, they would remain mobilised.

"If (the foreign troops) can’t defend the Haitian people … as commandante, I will soon be forced to tell all my troops to take up their arms," Philippe said on Radio Vision 2000, a popular station relayed around most of the country.

Rebel soldiers are still visible in much of Haiti’s north, since police abandoned their posts in the region’s main cities.

Half a world away Monday, Aristide – in his first press appearance since leaving Haiti a little over a week ago – declared he is still the country’s legal president.

"I am the elected president and I remain the elected president," he said at a press conference in Bagui, Central African Republic, sitting by his wife Mildred. Repeating that he had been kidnapped, Aristide called for "peaceful resistance" to the "occupation", and vowed to return to Haiti.

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 4 2004 (IPS)

For the fourth time in the past 100 years, U.S. army boots are marching on Haitian soil.
     Humvee armoured cars rumble down the main boulevards of the capital and camouflaged tanks train their long cannons towards the pedestrians and drivers who pass the proud gleaming white National Palace and stately prime minister’s office.

For the fourth time in the past 100 years, U.S. army boots are marching on Haitian soil.

Humvee armoured cars rumble down the main boulevards of the capital and camouflaged tanks train their long cannons towards the pedestrians and drivers who pass the proud gleaming white National Palace and stately prime minister’s office.

When President Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned – whether he was coerced is a fierce subject of debate and could be the source of a United Nations probe if Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours get their way – he handed his letter not to a prime minister or judge, but to a U.S. embassy employee.

Diplomats will help pick the country’s interim prime minister. And many business people, politicians and even the leader of the rebel Haitian National Front group that took over half the country before Aristide’s flight aver to the role of “the international community” as they discuss the country’s future.

And so the world’s first black republic, the nation considered by slaves and other oppressed people as a beacon of freedom two centuries ago, and an example of a people’s movement taking power when ex-priest Aristide won the presidency in 1991, is also perhaps the hemisphere’s most invaded country.

In addition to a brief disembarkation in 1914, Washington deployed many thousands of soldiers in 1915 and then again in 1994, both times supposedly to restore order and to assist the Haitian people in their quest for economic, social and political progress.

But as with all foreign policy from Washington, the determining interest has not been Haiti’s but that of the United States.

So as Marines trudge the capital’s grimy garbage-piled streets once again, many are asking what yet another occupation – or foreign military presence – will bring.

According to Alix Rene, professor at the State University’s faculty of human sciences, “the main objective of the U.S. is stability in the region”.

“Each of the interventions occurs where the political system is in crisis, when the political elite are unable to assure the management of the system,” he told IPS.

In 1915, Marines stepped ashore after the angry population ripped a president apart, limb from limb.

While perhaps the “mother of liberty”, as Aristide said in his bicentennial speeches, Haiti is also home to a skewed and exploitative economic system that leads to unstable and explosive politics. With Aristide’s departure the nation has now seen 33 violent changes of power, with only a handful of presidents serving their entire terms.

During their first occupation (1915-1934), the Marines contributed little to long-term stability.

If some of the roads, schools and buildings they put up survive, the soldiers also seized and expatriated Haiti’s gold reserves to forcibly pay the country’s foreign debt, centralised the government administration, emasculating the vibrant provincial centres, and took over the lucrative customs offices.

They also set up an army that later would excel in coups d’etats.

The country’s new constitution, penned by then Navy officer and future U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, allowed foreign investors great access to Haiti’s natural resources.

The soldiers also did their best to crush any threat to the new status quo, whether peasant uprising against taxes, student marches or the Caco movement, the hemisphere’s first guerrilla campaign. Some 3,000 peasant fighters died fighting the Marines and thousands more perished in U.S.-organised jails.

“The objective of that occupation was to expand U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere,” Rene summed up.

The second occupation came when Washington under former President Bill Clinton decided to help Aristide regain his office after a three-year military coup tossed him out in 1991.

Even though officers on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) payroll were involved in the putsch, Aristide asked for, and got, a U.S. intervention in 1994.

But Washington also chose to send troops because of the massive outflow of tens of thousand of refugees. The United States wants stability in Haiti, but more importantly, it does not want Haitians on the beaches of Florida, the state commonly believed to have swung the controversial 2000 presidential elections to George W. Bush – and governed by his brother Jeb.

The 1994 intervention stopped the refugee flow and restored Haiti’s president and “constitutional order” but did little to address the political and social schisms in the small country. Nor did it touch one of their main underlying causes: an economy in agony, where 20 percent of the population lives on 1 U.S. dollar a day and another 60 percent on only 2 dollars.

Ten years later, squabbles present in 1994 boiled over into irreconcilable positions. As opposition groups gathered strength, sometimes aided by U.S.-backed consultants and funders, and Aristide responded with force and armed gangs, the impasse grew untenable.

All around the politicians, the economy and social tissue were falling apart.

“We are witnessing a society that has complete disintegrated,” said Lenz Jean-Francois, a professor of social psychology at the faculty of human sciences and a colleague of Rene.

As that deterioration increased, an accused coup-plotter and former soldier and policeman – Guy Philippe – led a small army across the border from the Dominican Republic and began to take over police stations.

Scores died in the fighting, many of them policemen. Rebel roadblocks cut the country in two, and the refugee flow out of Haiti appeared to be increasing. With no obvious end to the crisis, Aristide resigned – or was forced to resign – and the troops landed once again.

Aristide rose to power 14 years ago in part because of the country’s vibrant popular movement, a left-tinged coalition of organisations and mass movements with strong strains of anti-imperialism and nationalism. But as the tanks and humvees rolled off the cargo planes this week, that movement has remained mute.

“The same social deterioration that ended up giving us this invasion has also hit the popular movement,” said Jean-Francois, an associate of Aristide’s when he was involved in popular organisations that grew up around the president’s church, St. Jean Bosco.

“The movement is incapable of even articulating its disapproval or of offering an alternative.”

Jean-Francois should know. He was a founding member of “Solidarite Ant Jen – Veye Yo”, a St. Jean Bosco group that later turned away from Aristide, and accused the president of selling out the popular movement.

“One reason for the social disintegration is that we have never been able to construct a nation,” he said in an interview. “We have never been able to figure out how to live together.”

Jean-Francois puts most of the blame on the popular movement’s inability to mobilise the masses and also on Haiti’s huge wealth gap. His colleague Rene sets a great deal of blame on the state and the political culture.

“The Haitian state, ever since it was founded in 1804, has existed to exploit and repress the masses,” Rene said.

Whichever it is, this occupation already has commentators on the radio – from both Aristide’s Lavalas Party and the political opposition – criticising the violation of Haiti’s sovereignty by troops who appear mostly concerned with protecting their embassies and a few state buildings as the capital burns and armed gangs still rule many streets.

“People are really uneasy,” said Jean-Francois. “They are ashamed that in 2004, our 200th anniversary of independence, foreign soldiers are here again.”

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 4 2004 (IPS)

For the fourth time in the past 100 years, U.S. army boots are marching on Haitian soil.

Humvee armoured cars rumble down the main boulevards of the capital and camouflaged tanks train their long cannons towards the pedestrians and drivers who pass the proud gleaming white National Palace and stately prime minister’s office.

When President Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned – whether he was coerced is a fierce subject of debate and could be the source of a United Nations probe if Haiti’s Caribbean neighbours get their way – he handed his letter not to a prime minister or judge, but to a U.S. embassy employee.

Diplomats will help pick the country’s interim prime minister. And many business people, politicians and even the leader of the rebel Haitian National Front group that took over half the country before Aristide’s flight aver to the role of "the international community" as they discuss the country’s future.

And so the world’s first black republic, the nation considered by slaves and other oppressed people as a beacon of freedom two centuries ago, and an example of a people’s movement taking power when ex-priest Aristide won the presidency in 1991, is also perhaps the hemisphere’s most invaded country.

In addition to a brief disembarkation in 1914, Washington deployed many thousands of soldiers in 1915 and then again in 1994, both times supposedly to restore order and to assist the Haitian people in their quest for economic, social and political progress.

But as with all foreign policy from Washington, the determining interest has not been Haiti’s but that of the United States.

So as Marines trudge the capital’s grimy garbage-piled streets once again, many are asking what yet another occupation – or foreign military presence – will bring.

According to Alix Rene, professor at the State University’s faculty of human sciences, "the main objective of the U.S. is stability in the region".

"Each of the interventions occurs where the political system is in crisis, when the political elite are unable to assure the management of the system," he told IPS.

In 1915, Marines stepped ashore after the angry population ripped a president apart, limb from limb.

While perhaps the "mother of liberty", as Aristide said in his bicentennial speeches, Haiti is also home to a skewed and exploitative economic system that leads to unstable and explosive politics. With Aristide’s departure the nation has now seen 33 violent changes of power, with only a handful of presidents serving their entire terms.

During their first occupation (1915-1934), the Marines contributed little to long-term stability.

If some of the roads, schools and buildings they put up survive, the soldiers also seized and expatriated Haiti’s gold reserves to forcibly pay the country’s foreign debt, centralised the government administration, emasculating the vibrant provincial centres, and took over the lucrative customs offices.

They also set up an army that later would excel in coups d’etats.

The country’s new constitution, penned by then Navy officer and future U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, allowed foreign investors great access to Haiti’s natural resources.

The soldiers also did their best to crush any threat to the new status quo, whether peasant uprising against taxes, student marches or the Caco movement, the hemisphere’s first guerrilla campaign. Some 3,000 peasant fighters died fighting the Marines and thousands more perished in U.S.-organised jails.

"The objective of that occupation was to expand U.S. hegemony in the hemisphere," Rene summed up.

The second occupation came when Washington under former President Bill Clinton decided to help Aristide regain his office after a three-year military coup tossed him out in 1991.

Even though officers on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) payroll were involved in the putsch, Aristide asked for, and got, a U.S. intervention in 1994.

But Washington also chose to send troops because of the massive outflow of tens of thousand of refugees. The United States wants stability in Haiti, but more importantly, it does not want Haitians on the beaches of Florida, the state commonly believed to have swung the controversial 2000 presidential elections to George W. Bush – and governed by his brother Jeb.

The 1994 intervention stopped the refugee flow and restored Haiti’s president and "constitutional order" but did little to address the political and social schisms in the small country. Nor did it touch one of their main underlying causes: an economy in agony, where 20 percent of the population lives on 1 U.S. dollar a day and another 60 percent on only 2 dollars.

Ten years later, squabbles present in 1994 boiled over into irreconcilable positions. As opposition groups gathered strength, sometimes aided by U.S.-backed consultants and funders, and Aristide responded with force and armed gangs, the impasse grew untenable.

All around the politicians, the economy and social tissue were falling apart.

"We are witnessing a society that has complete disintegrated," said Lenz Jean-Francois, a professor of social psychology at the faculty of human sciences and a colleague of Rene.

As that deterioration increased, an accused coup-plotter and former soldier and policeman – Guy Philippe – led a small army across the border from the Dominican Republic and began to take over police stations.

Scores died in the fighting, many of them policemen. Rebel roadblocks cut the country in two, and the refugee flow out of Haiti appeared to be increasing. With no obvious end to the crisis, Aristide resigned – or was forced to resign – and the troops landed once again.

Aristide rose to power 14 years ago in part because of the country’s vibrant popular movement, a left-tinged coalition of organisations and mass movements with strong strains of anti-imperialism and nationalism. But as the tanks and humvees rolled off the cargo planes this week, that movement has remained mute.

"The same social deterioration that ended up giving us this invasion has also hit the popular movement," said Jean-Francois, an associate of Aristide’s when he was involved in popular organisations that grew up around the president’s church, St. Jean Bosco.

"The movement is incapable of even articulating its disapproval or of offering an alternative."

Jean-Francois should know. He was a founding member of "Solidarite Ant Jen – Veye Yo", a St. Jean Bosco group that later turned away from Aristide, and accused the president of selling out the popular movement.

"One reason for the social disintegration is that we have never been able to construct a nation," he said in an interview. "We have never been able to figure out how to live together."

Jean-Francois puts most of the blame on the popular movement’s inability to mobilise the masses and also on Haiti’s huge wealth gap. His colleague Rene sets a great deal of blame on the state and the political culture.

"The Haitian state, ever since it was founded in 1804, has existed to exploit and repress the masses," Rene said.

Whichever it is, this occupation already has commentators on the radio – from both Aristide’s Lavalas Party and the political opposition – criticising the violation of Haiti’s sovereignty by troops who appear mostly concerned with protecting their embassies and a few state buildings as the capital burns and armed gangs still rule many streets.

"People are really uneasy," said Jean-Francois. "They are ashamed that in 2004, our 200th anniversary of independence, foreign soldiers are here again."

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 27 2004 (IPS)

As the world waited Friday for a decisive move that would herald yet another extreme political change in this plagued nation, Haiti and the Haitian people find themselves in an almost impossible Chinese puzzle.

Although one-half of the country is under rebel control and armed gangs rule cities in the centre and the south, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has refused to leave, despite growing hints from France, Canada and others in the international community. Yet the country’s political opposition has refused to play ball until he does.

Armed Aristide supporters only lose the embattled president support as they rampage and ransom, and the rebel soldiers advancing on the capital Port-au-Prince – mostly ex-army men from the force that ousted the president in 1991 – march from town to town, often gaining supporters as they offer the exhausted and nearly hopeless Haitians a new cause for hope.

Late Friday, rebel leader Guy Philippe said that he planned to encircle the capital Port-au-Prince and stop supplies from entering the country.

“We want to block Port-au-Prince totally,” he told reporters in Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city, which the rebels of the Haitian National Revolutionary Liberation Front seized Sunday.

Philippe said the rebels would try to cut land routes into the capital, and would send two boats to attempt to prevent ships from bringing in supplies..

“Port-au-Prince now … would be very hard to take it. It would be a lot of fight, a lot of death,” Philippe said. “So what we want is desperation first.”

Earlier in the day, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned of “widespread bloodshed and indiscriminate destruction” if the rebels attacked the capital.

It called Philippe’s human rights record “dubious”, but labelled fellow rebel and former paramilitary Louis Jodel Chamblain, “responsible for countless atrocities under the military government that ruled Haiti from 1991 to 1994”.

Among the armed civilian supporters now poised to defend the capital from behind burning barricades, many “are criminals known for violence and abuses”, added HRW.

The Red Cross said Friday it was sending equipment to Haiti to be deployed in hospitals in Port-au-Prince and Gonaives to prepare for people wounded by violence.

The agency also expressed concern at reports that armed gangs had targeted some hospitals.

Aristide’s position appeared not to have changed from a day earlier.

“I will leave the palace on Feb. 7, 2006, which is good for democracy,” he told CNN in a telephone interview Thursday. “We have had 32 coup d’états. That is enough.”

But his rule and the very fabric of this island country – which more than one writer has labelled a candidate for ”failed state” – face a threat much more complex than a coup.

In the capital and a few other cities, the people wielding the guns are not trying to overthrow anyone. Instead, they say they are defending Aristide – but they sometimes use their guns to hold up drivers and pedestrians.

Several areas of the city are totally locked down by gun-toting Aristide supporters, who set up barricades every afternoon saying they are ready to defend this city of some two million people against the soldiers of the Haitian National Revolutionary Liberation Front.

“We are ready to defend Aristide to the death!” one man armed with a wooden club told a carload of journalists Thursday.

Thursday night, heavily armed thugs – not necessarily pro- or anti-government but certainly an example of the near anarchy here – attacked and pillaged several private terminals in the port area. A policeman speaking on condition of anonymity said his officers were no match for the thugs’ AK-47 machine guns.

In contrast, in Les Cayes southwest of the capital, two groups of armed groups – one opposed to Aristide’s rule and the other claiming to defend the president – faced off against one another Thursday. Police abandoned the police station, according to the local correspondent of Radio Quisqueya.

Yet in many cities where police have fled their posts, it is angry citizens who ransack and torch the stations. Haiti’s fledgling police force, whose numbers have dwindled from 7,000 to near 4,000, has been repeatedly accused of corruption, torture and even summary executions. While some rights abusers have been brought to task, many more remain in uniform.

And finally, the opposition to Aristide’s rule is a collection of disparate elements whose camaraderie will likely melt once their common objective – the president’s departure – is achieved.

Philippe’s Front, whose troops now control one-half of this Caribbean country, and who early this morning took the town of Mirebalais about 60 kms from the capital, chose arms to evict the beleaguered president.

Three weeks into the uprising, some 70 people are dead, many of them pro-government police officers.

“We will do whatever it takes,” said commander-in-chief Philippe, once police chief for Cap-Haitien, a city rebels overwhelmed Feb. 22. “But I don’t want to be president; I just don’t want Aristide to be president”.

Philippe’s former office in Cap-Haitien is nothing but charred concrete walls today.

“Down with Aristide! Liberty!” scores of young men and women shouted in Cap-Haitien on Sunday as they rushed in and out of police buildings, carrying away fax machines, furniture, anti-riot gear and anything else they could lift.

“Aristide is the one who handed out guns in the first place,” Philippe said three days later.

Rights groups like Amnesty International (AI) and HRW have repeatedly criticised Aristide’s government for tolerating and even encouraging armed pro-government gangs that harass his critics.

“He is the one who chose violent means,” said Philippe. “You can only fight violence with violence.”

The other half of the opposition says it advocates peaceful means.

“We are in favour of non-violence,” Micha Gaillard, spokesman for the Democratic Convergence, a platform of political parties now part of the broad Democratic Platform of business, political, union and other groups.

For more than a year those bodies have held dozens of massive rallies and marches. They are often attacked by rock-, machete- and gun-welding government supporters.

“Each sector is playing its own part, but we are in favour of non-violence,” repeated Gaillard, a university professor.

While Aristide and others say the political and armed opposition are part of the same organisation, both Philippe and Gaillard deny it.

Finally, there is the problem with the “peace plan” proffered by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Organisation of American States (OAS), which would see Aristide remain but within a power-sharing government, until his term ends in 2006.

Nobody invited the guys with the guns to participate.

“Nobody has tried to contact us,” Philippe said. “Nobody.”

His forces have now seized police stations in over one-half of the country, and thus control four of Haiti’s ten departments or provinces. Their next target is the capital.

“Once we have a civilian administration in place here, we can move toward the capital,” said Philippe’s second Gilbert Dragon, as he waited for Philippe by the swimming pool of a Cap-Haitien hotel earlier this week.

“Nobody has stepped forward to take over so we are having to spend a few extra days here.”

In other cities – like Gonaives or Hinche – local leaders have assumed the role of provisional “mayor”, and only a small group of soldiers stays behind.

The Front’s growing force, which numbers at least in the many hundreds, consists of cops who deserted their jobs, former pro-government thugs who have changed camps and, especially, ex-soldiers from the army Aristide disbanded nine years ago.

Accused of brutality prior to and during the Duvalier dictatorship, the army carried out a bloody coup d’état against Aristide’s first rule in 1991.

Philippe and Dragon belonged to the army, but were not involved in the coup since they were on a scholarship with Ecuadorian and U.S. army officers in Ecuador. When the army was disbanded, they joined the police force set up to replace it.

Both men were later accused of plotting a coup and fled to the Dominican Republic, where they met up with other disgruntled ex-soldiers.

Philippe said his attitude towards any of the many peacekeeping forces rumoured under consideration by the international community will depend on its objective.

“We won’t attack them if they are here to remove Aristide,” he said. “As we have always said, we turn in our weapons the day he’s gone and a transition government is set up.”

*(ATTN EDS: Adds info on warnings of violence, rebel plan)

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 27 2004 (IPS)

As the world waited Friday for a decisive move that would herald yet another extreme political change in this plagued nation, Haiti and the Haitian people find themselves in an almost impossible Chinese puzzle.

As the world waited Friday for a decisive move that would herald yet another extreme political change in this plagued nation, Haiti and the Haitian people find themselves in an almost impossible Chinese puzzle.

Although one-half of the country is under rebel control and armed gangs rule cities in the centre and the south, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has refused to leave, despite growing hints from France, Canada and others in the international community. Yet the country’s political opposition has refused to play ball until he does.

Armed Aristide supporters only lose the embattled president support as they rampage and ransom, and the rebel soldiers advancing on the capital Port-au-Prince – mostly ex-army men from the force that ousted the president in 1991 – march from town to town, often gaining supporters as they offer the exhausted and nearly hopeless Haitians a new cause for hope.

Late Friday, rebel leader Guy Philippe said that he planned to encircle the capital Port-au-Prince and stop supplies from entering the country.

“We want to block Port-au-Prince totally,” he told reporters in Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city, which the rebels of the Haitian National Revolutionary Liberation Front seized Sunday.

Philippe said the rebels would try to cut land routes into the capital, and would send two boats to attempt to prevent ships from bringing in supplies..

“Port-au-Prince now … would be very hard to take it. It would be a lot of fight, a lot of death,” Philippe said. “So what we want is desperation first.”

Earlier in the day, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned of “widespread bloodshed and indiscriminate destruction” if the rebels attacked the capital.

It called Philippe’s human rights record “dubious”, but labelled fellow rebel and former paramilitary Louis Jodel Chamblain, “responsible for countless atrocities under the military government that ruled Haiti from 1991 to 1994”.

Among the armed civilian supporters now poised to defend the capital from behind burning barricades, many “are criminals known for violence and abuses”, added HRW.

The Red Cross said Friday it was sending equipment to Haiti to be deployed in hospitals in Port-au-Prince and Gonaives to prepare for people wounded by violence.

The agency also expressed concern at reports that armed gangs had targeted some hospitals.

Aristide’s position appeared not to have changed from a day earlier.

“I will leave the palace on Feb. 7, 2006, which is good for democracy,” he told CNN in a telephone interview Thursday. “We have had 32 coup d’états. That is enough.”

But his rule and the very fabric of this island country – which more than one writer has labelled a candidate for ”failed state” – face a threat much more complex than a coup.

In the capital and a few other cities, the people wielding the guns are not trying to overthrow anyone. Instead, they say they are defending Aristide – but they sometimes use their guns to hold up drivers and pedestrians.

Several areas of the city are totally locked down by gun-toting Aristide supporters, who set up barricades every afternoon saying they are ready to defend this city of some two million people against the soldiers of the Haitian National Revolutionary Liberation Front.

“We are ready to defend Aristide to the death!” one man armed with a wooden club told a carload of journalists Thursday.

Thursday night, heavily armed thugs – not necessarily pro- or anti-government but certainly an example of the near anarchy here – attacked and pillaged several private terminals in the port area. A policeman speaking on condition of anonymity said his officers were no match for the thugs’ AK-47 machine guns.

In contrast, in Les Cayes southwest of the capital, two groups of armed groups – one opposed to Aristide’s rule and the other claiming to defend the president – faced off against one another Thursday. Police abandoned the police station, according to the local correspondent of Radio Quisqueya.

Yet in many cities where police have fled their posts, it is angry citizens who ransack and torch the stations. Haiti’s fledgling police force, whose numbers have dwindled from 7,000 to near 4,000, has been repeatedly accused of corruption, torture and even summary executions. While some rights abusers have been brought to task, many more remain in uniform.

And finally, the opposition to Aristide’s rule is a collection of disparate elements whose camaraderie will likely melt once their common objective – the president’s departure – is achieved.

Philippe’s Front, whose troops now control one-half of this Caribbean country, and who early this morning took the town of Mirebalais about 60 kms from the capital, chose arms to evict the beleaguered president.

Three weeks into the uprising, some 70 people are dead, many of them pro-government police officers.

“We will do whatever it takes,” said commander-in-chief Philippe, once police chief for Cap-Haitien, a city rebels overwhelmed Feb. 22. “But I don’t want to be president; I just don’t want Aristide to be president”.

Philippe’s former office in Cap-Haitien is nothing but charred concrete walls today.

“Down with Aristide! Liberty!” scores of young men and women shouted in Cap-Haitien on Sunday as they rushed in and out of police buildings, carrying away fax machines, furniture, anti-riot gear and anything else they could lift.

“Aristide is the one who handed out guns in the first place,” Philippe said three days later.

Rights groups like Amnesty International (AI) and HRW have repeatedly criticised Aristide’s government for tolerating and even encouraging armed pro-government gangs that harass his critics.

“He is the one who chose violent means,” said Philippe. “You can only fight violence with violence.”

The other half of the opposition says it advocates peaceful means.

“We are in favour of non-violence,” Micha Gaillard, spokesman for the Democratic Convergence, a platform of political parties now part of the broad Democratic Platform of business, political, union and other groups.

For more than a year those bodies have held dozens of massive rallies and marches. They are often attacked by rock-, machete- and gun-welding government supporters.

“Each sector is playing its own part, but we are in favour of non-violence,” repeated Gaillard, a university professor.

While Aristide and others say the political and armed opposition are part of the same organisation, both Philippe and Gaillard deny it.

Finally, there is the problem with the “peace plan” proffered by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Organisation of American States (OAS), which would see Aristide remain but within a power-sharing government, until his term ends in 2006.

Nobody invited the guys with the guns to participate.

“Nobody has tried to contact us,” Philippe said. “Nobody.”

His forces have now seized police stations in over one-half of the country, and thus control four of Haiti’s ten departments or provinces. Their next target is the capital.

“Once we have a civilian administration in place here, we can move toward the capital,” said Philippe’s second Gilbert Dragon, as he waited for Philippe by the swimming pool of a Cap-Haitien hotel earlier this week.

“Nobody has stepped forward to take over so we are having to spend a few extra days here.”

In other cities – like Gonaives or Hinche – local leaders have assumed the role of provisional “mayor”, and only a small group of soldiers stays behind.

The Front’s growing force, which numbers at least in the many hundreds, consists of cops who deserted their jobs, former pro-government thugs who have changed camps and, especially, ex-soldiers from the army Aristide disbanded nine years ago.

Accused of brutality prior to and during the Duvalier dictatorship, the army carried out a bloody coup d’état against Aristide’s first rule in 1991.

Philippe and Dragon belonged to the army, but were not involved in the coup since they were on a scholarship with Ecuadorian and U.S. army officers in Ecuador. When the army was disbanded, they joined the police force set up to replace it.

Both men were later accused of plotting a coup and fled to the Dominican Republic, where they met up with other disgruntled ex-soldiers.

Philippe said his attitude towards any of the many peacekeeping forces rumoured under consideration by the international community will depend on its objective.

“We won’t attack them if they are here to remove Aristide,” he said. “As we have always said, we turn in our weapons the day he’s gone and a transition government is set up.”

*(ATTN EDS: Adds info on warnings of violence, rebel plan)

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 27 2004 (IPS)

As the world waited Friday for a decisive move that would herald yet another extreme political change in this plagued nation, Haiti and the Haitian people find themselves in an almost impossible Chinese puzzle.

Although one-half of the country is under rebel control and armed gangs rule cities in the centre and the south, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has refused to leave, despite growing hints from France, Canada and others in the international community. Yet the country’s political opposition has refused to play ball until he does.

Armed Aristide supporters only lose the embattled president support as they rampage and ransom, and the rebel soldiers advancing on the capital Port-au-Prince – mostly ex-army men from the force that ousted the president in 1991 – march from town to town, often gaining supporters as they offer the exhausted and nearly hopeless Haitians a new cause for hope.

Aristide’s position is clear enough.

“I will leave the palace on Feb. 7, 2006, which is good for democracy,” he told CNN in a telephone interview Thursday. “We have had 32 coups d’état. That is enough.”

But his rule and the very fabric of this island country – which more than one writer has labelled a candidate for ”failed state” – face a threat much more complex than a coup.

In the capital and a few other cities, the people wielding the guns are not trying to overthrow anyone. Instead, they say they are defending Aristide – but they sometimes use their guns to hold up drivers and pedestrians.

Several areas of the city are totally locked down by gun-toting Aristide supporters, who set up barricades every afternoon saying they are ready to defend this city of some two million people against the soldiers of the Haitian National Revolutionary Liberation Front.

“We are ready to defend Aristide to the death!” one man armed with a wooden club told a carload of journalists Thursday.

Thursday night, heavily armed thugs – not necessarily pro- or anti-government but certainly an example of the near anarchy here – attacked and pillaged several private terminals in the port area. A policeman speaking on condition of anonymity said his officers were no match for the thugs’ AK-47 machine guns.

In contrast, in Les Cayes southwest of the capital, two groups of armed groups – one opposed to Aristide’s rule and the other claiming to defend the president – faced off against one another Thursday. Police abandoned the police station, according to the local correspondent of Radio Quisqueya.

Yet in many cities where police have fled their posts, it is angry citizens who ransack and torch the stations. Haiti’s fledgling police force, whose numbers have dwindled from 7,000 to near 4,000, has been repeatedly accused of corruption, torture and even summary executions. While some rights abusers have been brought to task, many more remain in uniform.

And finally, the opposition to Aristide’s rule is a collection of disparate elements whose camaraderie will likely melt once their common objective – the president’s departure – is achieved.

The Haitian National Revolutionary Liberation Front, whose troops now control one-half of this Caribbean country, and who early this morning took the town of Mirebalais about 60 kms from the capital, chose arms to evict the beleaguered president.

Three weeks into the uprising, some 70 people are dead, many of them pro-government police officers.

“We will do whatever it takes,” said the front’s commander-in-chief Guy Philippe, once police chief for Cap-Haitien, a city rebels overwhelmed Feb. 22.. “But I don’t want to be president; I just don’t want Aristide to be president”.

Philippe’s former office in Cap-Haitien is nothing but charred concrete walls today.

“Down with Aristide! Liberty!” scores of young men and women shouted in Cap-Haitien on Sunday as they rushed in and out of police buildings, carrying away fax machines, furniture, anti-riot gear and anything else they could lift.

“Aristide is the one who handed out guns in the first place,” Philippe said three days later.

Rights groups like Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have repeatedly criticised Aristide’s government for tolerating and even encouraging armed pro-government gangs that harass his critics.

“He is the one who chose violent means,” said Philippe. “You can only fight violence with violence.”

The other half of the opposition says it advocates peaceful means.

“We are in favour of non-violence,” Micha Gaillard, spokesman for the Democratic Convergence, a platform of political parties now part of the broad Democratic Platform of business, political, union and other groups.

For more than a year those bodies have held dozens of massive rallies and marches. They are often attacked by rock-, machete- and gun-welding government supporters.

“Each sector is playing its own part, but we are in favour of non-violence,” repeated Gaillard, a university professor.

While Aristide and others say the political and armed opposition are part of the same organisation, both Philippe and Gaillard deny it.

Finally, there is the problem with the “peace plan” proffered by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Organisation of American States (OAS), which would see Aristide remain but within a power-sharing government, until his term ends in 2006.

Nobody invited the guys with the guns to participate.

“Nobody has tried to contact us,” Philippe said. “Nobody.”

His forces have now seized police stations in over one-half of the country, and thus control four of Haiti’s ten departments or provinces. Their next target is the capital.

“Once we have a civilian administration in place here, we can move toward the capital,” said Philippe’s second Gilbert Dragon, as he waited for Philippe by the swimming pool of a Cap-Haitien hotel earlier this week.

“Nobody has stepped forward to take over so we are having to spend a few extra days here.”

In other cities – like Gonaives or Hinche – local leaders have assumed the role of provisional “mayor”, and only a small group of soldiers stays behind.

The Front’s growing force, which numbers at least in the many hundreds, consists of cops who deserted their jobs, former pro-government thugs who have changed camps and, especially, ex-soldiers from the army Aristide disbanded nine years ago.

Accused of brutality prior to and during the Duvalier dictatorship, the army carried out a bloody coup d’état against Aristide’s first rule in 1991.

Philippe and Dragon belonged to the army, but were not involved in the coup since they were on a scholarship with Ecuadorian and U.S. army officers in Ecuador. When the army was disbanded, they joined the police force set up to replace it.

Both men were later accused of plotting a coup and fled to the Dominican Republic, where they met up with other disgruntled ex-soldiers.

Philippe said his attitude towards any of the many peacekeeping forces rumoured under consideration by the international community will depend on its objective.

“We won’t attack them if they are here to remove Aristide,” he said. “As we have always said, we turn in our weapons the day he’s gone and a transition government is set up.”

Excerpt:

By Jane Regan
ST. MARC, Feb 14 2004 (IPS)

Even with death all around him, the hammers and saws at Marc Antoine’s coffin-making workshop lay still. In a city under siege, business is slow.

As this small port town endured another day of violence this week, doors to businesses and schools remained tightly shut, curtains pulled, bolts drawn..

Haiti’s long-smouldering political crisis – pitting President Jean-Bertrand Aristide against a political party opposition that has slowly gathered support – burst into deadly violence Feb. 5 when an armed gang took over the police station in Gonaives, Haiti’s fourth-largest city just up the coast from here.

The battle for the station and the police counter-offensive two days later left at least a dozen, and perhaps many more, dead. Many of them were police officers.

In the days that followed, unknown armed government opponents chased police out of almost a dozen other towns, and even occupied a few of them for a day or two. People angry at police repression, Aristide and his ruling Lavalas Family Party, also torched the stations and other government buildings.

At least 30 and perhaps as many as 50 people have died in nine days of shoot-outs, skirmishes and ambushes in Gonaives, St. Marc and Gros Morne.

Newspapers and television reports have blared headlines warning of a national "insurrection" and "spreading rebellion". In fact, while many towns are without police, as of Feb. 13, one week after the uprising started, only Gonaives is in the hands of armed rebels.

Police and armed government supporters – known as "chimère" or thugs – have successfully retaliated in other towns, not only chasing down and sometimes killing some of those who took over police stations, but also going after anyone suspected of anti-government sentiments.

Houses and radio stations have been attacked and burned, people shot, barricades erected.

But the violence and chaos reaches much further than the neighbourhoods and cities where clashes are taking place.

In St. Marc on Wednesday the streets were littered with carcasses of car chassis, engine blocks, trashed market stands, boulders and the remnants of burned tires.

Downtown was calm, but above the city police and armed pro-government militiamen were chasing anti-government militants from the Assembly of Consequent St. Marc Militants (RAMICOS). Gunfire crackled and popped from the hills.

There would be at least five dead when it ended two days later.

"This morning there were two burned bodies," Antoine said.

The other men idling in the street-side shop looked up, faces blank. The mounting death toll probably will not even mean more sales, since the three-year-long political crisis has plunged the Americas’ poorest country into a hole deeper than ever, with falling per capita revenues and employment.

"Those guys you see with guys down there," Antoine said, pointing to a man in fatigues and another in a Hawaiian shirt, both carrying guns.

"That’s Clean Sweep, the pro-Aristide gang. They’re allowed to have guns. But RAMICOS – they’re not. That’s how it is in Haiti. Everything for Lavalas. Nothing for the rest of us."

Antoine said he is not a member of RAMICOS; he is just a coffin-maker with four mouths to feed. But like many in this ruin of a town, he is angry at Aristide’s empty promises and at the corruption, greed and repression that have come from his government and police force.

For several years, graft has been rampant at the port – one of Haiti’s most important – and Clean Sweep members have terrorised anyone wanting to speak out against the president. Gang rivalry became gang warfare, and a poor but peaceful port turned into a war zone.

"Peace. I just want peace," Antoine says. "Aristide promised peace but he lied. The only way we’ll get it is if Aristide leaves, and no matter what, I won’t believe any promises any more," he said, causing heads to nod.

Up the highway in Gonaives, heavily armed militiamen dressed in Haitian National Police uniforms, U.S. Army surplus gear and muscle shirts manned huge barricades at both ends of town.

Haiti’s national highway number 1, which links the capital to three northern departments or provinces, has been blocked since Feb. 5. Nothing gets through: not gasoline, not produce, nothing.

Over the mountain in Limbé on Friday, a dozen women were hunched over piles of three-foot wide "kasav", manioc flatbread. They were distressed, batting flies off the stacks of traditional bread, drying out loaves that were on the verge of turning rotten.

Lilly Michele, who thinks she is 57, is distraught.

"You see these?" said the mother of six, pointing to a two-foot high pile. "They’re gone already. You see those? If the road doesn’t open up, they’ll be rotten tomorrow."

Michele, like the other kasav merchants waiting for a truck and a way to reach the capital Port-au-Prince with their wares, said she borrowed money to make her bi-weekly purchase.

"I borrowed about 125 U.S. dollars, which means I have to pay back about 160 dollars," she added. Loan-sharking in Haiti is rampant. "I’m ruined. What will I do?"

While Michele and her friends – all mothers, all rural residents and many the only revenue-earners in their families – were trying to figure out how to recuperate the equivalent of well over 1,000 dollars, in the capital, Haiti’s United Nations representative Adama Guindo warned of worsening hunger if the highway is not opened and the violence halted.

Western hemisphere leaders were reluctant Friday to pledge any sort of help to end the fighting. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, flanked by leaders from Canada, the Caribbean and the Organisation of American States (OAS), rejected any intervention in Haiti, but said they would consider sending an international police force, if requested.

Reports on Saturday said rebels had blocked the road to the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, cutting off another source of supplies.

Some 3.8 million people go hungry every day in Haiti, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) feeds 268,000 people in northern Haiti – many of them kids in school lunch programmes. But the blocked highway from the capital means stocks cannot be replenished.

So, where 1,400 tonnes of rice once stood, only 49 sacks remain. And insecurity and violence mean WFP is reluctant to send employees outside Port-au-Prince to flood-stricken areas, where tens of thousands have relied on the handouts.

"We have closed those operations," WFP Latin American and Caribbean Information Officer Alejandro Chicheri told IPS.

WFP hopes to get rice to Cap-Haitien by boat next week, he added.

Excerpt: