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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Model camp leads to disaster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NABATEC wants to be paid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeking funding from, and for, the promised land

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

According to David, an initial plan is ready.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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