A family inside their home in Cannon Camp in Haiti. Credit: Susan Robens-Brannon/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 18 2013 (IPS)

Several years after the start of the economic crisis in the United States and Europe, which led to a shift in migration patterns, Latin America still lacks a more inclusive view of the phenomenon of people seeking a better life abroad.

This is seen as a critical factor to be discussed at the Regional Conference on Population and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, to be held Aug. 12-15 in Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital.

In the two decades since the September 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, demographers have insisted on territorial inequality as one of the key factors in Latin America driving people to leave their homes in search of better quality of life.

The ICPD redirected the emphasis from demographic goals to rights, said Jorge Rodríguez of the Latin American and Caribbean Demographic Centre.

“The focus became more social, and above all, more about rights,” Rodríguez told IPS. “The conference installed the question of rights on the agenda. And in the last 20 years, the importance of international migration for the region changed.”

Since the economic crisis hit Europe in 2008, there have been signs of slowing emigration from this region, and signs that immigrants are returning, Rodríguez said in Rio de Janeiro, at a Jul. 15-17 preparatory meeting for the regional conference.

“Now we are facing an emerging issue: the return of emigrants due to the economic crisis,” he said. “Latin America extended its migration networks. We are always looking at migration to the United States and Europe, but within the region there is a great deal of migration as well.”

This mobility has taken on more specific features in the case of environmental migrants – people forced to leave their home regions due to sudden or long-term changes to their local environment such as natural catastrophes.

“Now the concept is taking on much greater diversity, and it requires special treatment,” Rodríguez said.

Twenty years since Cairo, progress must be made towards respect for migrants, regardless of their legal status, said demographer and economist Duval Fernándes of the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais in southeast Brazil, who is also a member of the Latin American Population Association.

The situation of immigrants from Haiti, who fled their country after the devastating January 2010 earthquake, is a reflection of the challenges facing Latin America today.

Haiti’s severe environmental crisis was aggravated by the quake, which killed 200,000 people and destroyed tens of thousands of homes, besides public buildings and infrastructure.

To make matters worse, a number of storms may hit the country in the current Atlantic hurricane season (June to November).

Brazil appeared as an alternative destination for Haitian migrants immediately after restrictions were put in place in the neighbouring Dominican Republic – which shares Hispaniola Island with Haiti – and in the United States.

“The children of undocumented Haitians born in the Dominican Republic are not registered at birth, and are left stateless,” Fernandes said. “This prompted people to seek different destinations, and that’s where the possibility of travelling to Brazil emerged.”

Since November 2010, thousands of Haitians without the proper documents have entered Brazil across the northern border. Small cities in the Amazon hinterland were not prepared for the influx of immigrants, who arrived after complex, often harsh, journeys.

“It has become a calamitous situation,” the Brazilian demographer said. “Our countries don’t know how to deal with this problem.”

The legal process in Brazil has been slow-moving, because Haitians were not granted refugee status. An estimated 10,000 have arrived so far.

“They pay ‘coyotes’ (people smugglers) between 2,500 and 4,000 dollars, for the journey,” Fernandes said. “Multiply that by 10,000 people and we’re talking about 30 million dollars or so. This people trafficking racket has to be dismantled. The Haitians are deceived – they believe they’ll earn 2,000 dollars a month in Brazil.”

The solution found by the government was to grant them humanitarian visas. When they cross the border, the Haitians apply for asylum, and in six months the National Refugee Council rejects the request and refers them to the National Immigration Council, which issues the visas.

“The Haitians may be environmental refugees, but there is no official recognition of that condition. The big problem is that when the visas are finally granted, the people are somewhere else, and in some cases they don’t even find out.”

Fernandes proposed humanitarian policies and measures for Haitians and the creation of special mechanisms to regularise their migration status.

A regional agreement is needed to tackle the question of immigration in a more orderly fashion, said another expert interviewed by IPS, Gabriel Bidegain, technical adviser to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Haiti.

“A new human geography” was built in Haiti, because of the high levels of migration to the Dominican Republic and the United States, and later, Brazil, he said.

“Because of the crisis in the United States and Europe, Brazil became the new mecca: it began to be promoted as the ‘golden route’ and Portuguese started to be taught; it made sense that they would come,” he said.

However, the number of Haitians in Brazil is still a far cry from the size of the Haitian diaspora in the Dominican Republic – around 800,000 – and the United States – some 600,000.

And in Haiti, an estimated 400,000 environmental refugees are still living in camps around Port-au-Prince.

Bidegain called for a regional agreement on migration capable of providing a response to the vulnerability of those who are forced to leave their countries, especially because of environmental catastrophes.

By Beverly Bell
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Apr 24 2012 (IPS)

In honour of Earth Day, we run an interview with Yves-André Wainright, who discusses ways that poor governance and the role of foreign donors have contributed to the country’s environmental catastrophe.

He also lays out a blueprint for what could turn the situation around, effectively mobilising both government and the population to begin restoring the environment.

Yves-André Wainright served twice as Haiti’s minister of environment. Trained as an agronomist, Yves-André’s work has focused on environmental management, especially management of natural resources and waste.

His comments follow:

My approach towards management of the environment is to have Haitians who face (the same environmental) challenges come together. We might not all share the same economic interests, but if we work together, we can reach a compromise where one’s interest won’t trump another’s.

A second issue is that (central) government ministries act as competitors rather than allies. As a result, information is not shared and institutions are not organised to provide assistance and directives to local government or NGOs (non-governmental organisations, and international agencies).

Since management of the physical environment is a crosscutting and long-term challenge, it’s very difficult to maintain continuity from one government to the next, which hinders the implementation of required programmes.

For example, in the 1990s, I led the preparation of an innovative programme to fund peasant-managed micro-enterprises for families who depended on cutting down trees in national parks. All state institutions including local governments, the judicial system, the national police, and key ministries would be able to give input and would receive training in the sustainable management of biodiversity.

The project facilitated coordination among the various stakeholders, public and private, through various management committees. The first disbursements were made two weeks before I left the government.

(When I returned,) the project was considered overall as having failed. The governance structure of the project was considered too complex, and (since) normally in the government, people from different ministers don’t talk to each other, the project’s implementation lacked leadership.

There were even 70 or so agronomists trained, and about 10 who went abroad for professional specialisation, but none of them were never put to use. And, the peasants never benefited from the comprehensive technical and financial assistance I had dreamed of.

The third issue I wish to highlight is the role of donors from the international community. They put too much emphasis on ‘transparency’ toward their foreign constituency and lack sensitivity to the process of building democracy within communities receiving aid.

I admire the abundance of documentation donors have accumulated on Haiti but feel that not enough effort is put into making this information available to local stakeholders. This has facilitated the creation of an oligarchy of consultants and specialists who monopolize the field of international assistance. Donors don’t seem to trust the initiatives from people outside of this circle.

For instance, during my first term as minister of environment, USAID and the World Bank were the main donors providing assistance to the process of clarifying the role of the newly created ministry and prioritising actions for environmental management and rehabilitation.

I started to organise multi-stakeholder platforms towards preparation of a National Action Plan for the Environment, but the donors decided to replicate the preparation process from various African countries – a plan written by specialists and validated afterwards by the civil society. They succeeded in having beautiful documents prepared, which are currently embellishing shelves of libraries in foreign universities.

What is needed is to help Haitians develop partnerships around common environmental concerns.

(In 2010), the office of the prime minister organised a forum on lessons learned from watershed management over the past 30 to 40 years. That forum had a large participation of funders, with data- rich presentations by the experts.

These presentations confirmed that, during the period considered, more and more short-term NGO-led projects promoted market-linked incentives for environmental protection instead of building of decentralised state capacity so that the government ensures respect of environmental norms.

(Participants of the forum) acted as though the state were outsiders of the process and that the government should be replaced by the market as the driving force for livelihood improvement.

But the problem is that the market promotes individualism and a spirit of competition. It can’t instill the feeling of community and citizenship needed to stimulate Haitians to take part in the rehabilitation of the environment.

We must have regulations that guarantee the socioeconomic and environmental rights of all citizens: the right to be informed of initiatives affecting their environment; the right to have input into (environmental) mitigation measures to be implemented; the right to an unbiased judicial system to (ensure) the application of norms.

We must also have an appropriate democratic governance structure able to implement this at the regional and local level. Otherwise, even if the billions of dollars pledged would be effectively disbursed, we won’t resolve anything.

One of the principles in the Rio Declaration on Sustainable Development (endorsed by 165 countries in June 1992) states, “Peace, economic development and protection of the environment are interdependent and indivisible.” There is no peace without social justice. I’m not preaching anything new.

Fortunately, there is progress being made. In October 2005, the government adopted an important environmental decree. It integrates most of the international principles for managing the environment promoted by the Rio Declaration. It identifies nine priorities (to be implemented by government authorities and) the private sector. By the private sector, I don’t just mean the bourgeoisie in town, but also peasants and small merchants.

There are ways to improve governance of the environment around these themes, provided they are integrated into a comprehensive and progressive land-use zoning process.

For example, alleviation of the pressure of agriculture production on mountainous lands should be a common objective for all groups working on any of these nine issues. With more than 500,000 families depending on subsistence agriculture on eroded lands, there’s no potential for improving living conditions.

Policies must be proactive in providing alternative means to make a living, and we have to invest more in building governance capacity at the municipal level.

We have to start working collaboratively. We can be successful in the nine priorities listed, but only if we admit that whatever our capabilities and our excuses, we’re condemned to fail without cooperation. By we, I mean the government, the ministries, the parliament, the NGOs and their networks, grassroots organisations and social movements, enterprises and trade unions, donors and others.

*Read the full, unedited interview with Yves-André Wainright here.

Interview translated by Larousse Charlot and David Schmidt.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance and is working on the forthcoming book, Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s New Divide. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Alexis Erkert is the Another Haiti is Possible Coordinator for Other Worlds. She has worked in advocacy and with Haitian social movements since 2008. You can access all of Other Worlds’ past articles regarding post-earthquake Haiti here.

Excerpt:

Rosemie Durandisse stands with one her children in front of her temporary home. Credit: Fritznelson Fortuné/IPS

By Correspondents
HILLS ABOVE LÉOGÂNE, Haiti, Mar 15 2012 (IPS)

Almost half of the emergency shelters distributed by the British organisation Tearfund in the mountains above Léogâne remain uninhabited six months after they were built.

A two-month investigation by the Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) investigative journalism partnership in the hamlets of Fonds d’Oies and Cormiers, the tenth and twelfth sections of Léogâne, found that 34 of the 84 families who received temporary houses didn’t live in them, and that 11 families got two houses from two different humanitarian organisations.

If these 34 houses – built for 3,000 dollars each, according to Tearfund – are sitting empty or, worse, are up for rent, that means at least 102,000 dollars was wasted while tens of neighbouring families are still living in tents or makeshift huts.

“The emergency shelters distributed around here weren’t passed out fairly,” Rosemie Durandisse seethed.

The 50-year-old farmer, her husband and six children used to live in a four-room concrete home that was destroyed during the earthquake, whose epicentre lies about 25 kilometres away. Now she and her family cram into a shack made of wood, cloth and plastic.

“The houses respect the norms (established for post-disaster housing),” Kristie van de Wetering, Tearfund’s earthquake programme director, told HGW. “And one of the things we did was to look for extra money so that we could implicate the beneficiaries and the community in the project.”

The 18-square-metre, two-room houses are built of plywood and two-by- fours on a cement base, with a tin roof. The price per home is about 3,000 dollars, according to the organisation.

In total, over the past two years, humanitarian organisations have built about 110,000 T-Shelters in the earthquake-struck zones, for a total cost of about 500 million dollars.

The total number of families in need of housing following the quake topped 300,000. To get a T-Shelter, a family had to have proof it owned land or had a long-term lease. Over two-thirds of the post-quake refugee families – some 200,000 families – were renters, meaning they were not eligible for the structures.

The focus on T-Shelters as a solution was not without controversy. [See also Abandoned like a stray dog and What is the plan for Haiti’s homeless?]

Gift for rent

At the Tombe Gâteau marketplace along the Jacmel road, two houses sit in the same yard, just a few steps from the Bangladeshi organisation BRAC, who built the one of concrete. The wooden one came from Tearfund.

Everyone in the neighbourhood says both houses belong to the same person, Cevemoir Charles.

A “For Lease” sign sits on top of the BRAC house.

When asked, Charles lashes out and moves away quickly, grumbling as he goes: “These houses don’t belong to me. They belong to my wife.”

Charles’s case is not unique. Ask Résilia Pierre, a mother of three children who lives with her husband and two other people in one of the two houses she received, the one from BRAC. She is also seeking a tenant.

“I live in this shelter and the other one is empty,” she admitted, as if it were perfectly normal. “Once in a while I sweep it out and do a little cleaning.”

Tearfund’s local liaison officer swears there are no duplicates.

“We take into account if someone has already received a shelter from another NGO (non-governmental organisation)”, Booz Serhum said. “That is one of the criteria we want to respect everywhere, because that assures a fair distribution.”

His supervisor, van de Wetering, seconded Serhum, adding, “One of the fundamental elements of our programme is coordination with other organisations.”

But what kind of coordination? In the two communal sections sampled, the coordination was, at the very least, inefficient. It didn’t prevent over 10 duplications in the same region, or the fact that many others got shelters without needing them since they live somewhere else or are renting them out.

Blame game

What explains the empty T-Shelters just down the road from families still living in tents or damaged homes? Journalists found apparent lack of coordination, weaknesses in the method used to pick beneficiaries, as well as lies and errors.

Local officials were the first to recognise the disastrous situation.

“Victims complain that people who don’t need shelters got shelters, while others who were more vulnerable and more in need, didn’t get anything,” said Laurore Joseph Jorés, a member of the Cormiers Communal Section Administrative Council (Conseil d’administration de la section communale or CASEC).

“A lot of people who lost their homes thought the CASECs could help them get a shelter,” he added.

Innocent Adam, coordinator for the Fond d’Oies CASEC, agreed with his colleague but noted that local authorities are powerless.

“We can’t do anything. We are not responsible,” he said. “Our task was to simply oversee issues related to land-ownership and land titles.”

If local officials didn’t choose the beneficiaries, who did? Tearfund says the community committees set up with Tearfund’s assistance after the earthquake had final say, but the committees said Tearfund decided everything.

Who really chose? What both sides agree on is that Tearfund conducted a field study to identify the victims who were truly “vulnerable”.

“We focused on the person’s revenue, their living conditions, the number of children for whom they were responsible, their health situation, etc.,” Serhum said, explaining that community committees seconded the work.

While the committees admit to having worked with Tearfund, committee members deny that they had the final word.

“The committee’s job was to inform the beneficiaries chosen by Tearfund,” Févry Gérésol, a member of the Cormier committee, explained. “We didn’t have the power to choose the beneficiaries.”

“The committee’s job was to look at the list,” van der Wetering countered. “They knew the quantity of shelters available for their community. The committee chose beneficiaries from the list.”

But according to Sanon Dumas, member of the Fond d’Oies committee, the group was only responsible for assuring that the construction was carried out correctly, and then reporting to Tearfund.

However, he admitted: “If we did make a few choices, it was to help Tearfund pick from the list of those who had already been registered and were in the computer database.”

Dumas’s mother got a T-Shelter.

As of early March, it was still empty.

Tricks, liars and questions

Some feel that Tearfund was tricked on many occasions.

“The initial field study was done by people who didn’t know anything about the local context,” committee member Gérésol noted. “There were people who got a shelter by shady methods or by lying.”

Gérésol himself has two T-Shelters from two different organisations: Tearfund and the Swiss Red Cross.

Not knowing the region, the researchers were fooled by people who pretended that abandoned, destroyed homes belonged to them. Tearfund – which also built 27 temporary schools, a dozen wells, and carried out other programmes in the region – doesn’t reject the possibility.

“It’s quite possible that some people were not honest, and they said that had no home, or that this or that home belonged to them or to their family. That probably happened,” Serhum said.

“Someone might tell you that their home was destroyed, but later you learn that what they showed you was their kitchen (often a separate hut or semi-walled building), not their home.”

Nepotism and favouritism also appear to have played a role in the distribution of at least some of the shelters.

HGW journalists noted that in the sample communal sections, most of the families who got shelters had some kind of link to the committee members. For example, about 10 families living near Sanon Dumas have shelters, while potential beneficiaries only a few kilometres away still live in damaged houses.

Berline Cérival, from Grand Bois, well understands the advantages of a friendship.

“I wasn’t counted by the researchers, so I went to see Partisan (a committee member),” she said. “He contacted an engineer at Tearfund to organise the shelter for me, and here I am today!”

Editor’s Note: The interview with Tearfund took place before the fieldwork for this story. The HGW team tried many times to do a follow-up interview with Tearfund.

*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 and students from the State University’s Faculty of Human Sciences.

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

Excerpt:

By - - and Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 10 2012 (IPS)

In Haitian refugee camps, women are still crammed under plastic or cloth tarps that provide no security and quickly become overheated by the sun. Sexual abuse, harassment, assault and rape run rampant, even as political responses to these dangers have stalled. But KOFAVIV, a women’s organisation founded by and for rape survivors, offers a glimmer of hope.

Eramithe Delva, founder of KOFAVIV, a Haitian women's organisation founded by and for rape survivors. Credit: Courtsey of KOFAVIV

The lack of sanitation infrastructure forces women to walk long ways to reach bathrooms and showers, even when it’s “pitch dark after sunset”, she explained, since some camps have no lighting at night.

“Women are scared to walk by themselves at night because of that; they are scared that people will walk into their tent and rob or hurt them,” she added.

Other problems relate to children, education and income. Mothers “have the choice of staying in or around their tents to stay with their children, or leave them behind with a friend or a neighbour to be able to try and make a little bit of money”.

IPS spoke with Delva about how a women’s organisation founded “by and for rape survivors” is trying to make a difference while political decision makers remain, for the most part, idle.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: In a recent report, you shed light on survival sex, a problem for displaced women and girls that has gone neglected. What has changed since that report? A: “Survival sex” occurs when women and teenage girls have no other options but to sell their bodies to make a little bit of money to provide for themselves and their families. Although they are similar, we consider “survival sex” to be different than prostitution or sex work, because the person engaging in the sexual exchange did not choose to do it willingly.

Most, if not all, of the women and girls engaged in survival sex have told our outreach workers that they don’t like doing it, and that they would stop if they found another way to provide for themselves and family members.

Since the report, nothing has really changed. Reports aren’t going to change anything by themselves; it is through direct work and activities within the affected communities that we can start seeing changes.

Our network of outreach workers lives in the camps and in the poor communities, so this is part of their daily lives, and they will tell you that not much has changed. KOFAVIV has provided shelter for young women and young mothers who are (or have been) engaged in survival sex, but a lot more needs to be done to change that.

Q: What are main causes of this problem and what must be done to tackle them? A: There are many different causes. We consider poverty, the lack of access to economic opportunities and all the accompanying complexities to be the main ones.

It will be very difficult to solve this problem because it exists on so many levels, but we think that there needs to be an infrastructure created to support and provide relief for the young women engaged in survival sex.

First of all, they need to be able to finish their studies. A lot of the young women and girls who come to the KOFAVIV Centre have told us that they are engaging in these activities to be able to pay for their school fees.

They need to be taken out of the camps and placed in secure housing. There need to be programs and activities where they can receive counselling and medical services, where they can participate in trainings and classes to learn skills that they could apply to income generating activities.

Q: Fighting sexual violence is high on the political agenda in Haiti, at least rhetorically. What kind of governmental support have you observed reaching out to women in camps, including survival sex? A: There have been talks of combating sexual violence but I have not seen any concrete plans or activities being implemented by the government. As a grassroots organisation working directly in the affected areas, we have not seen much change. Most people displaced by the earthquake are still living in horrible conditions.

Q: Where you have seen major progress being made? A: In terms of our organisation, KOFAVIV has been able to make a lot of progress and to make a difference for survivors of sexual violence.

We provide legal services and accompaniment to victims of gender-based-violence (GBV), with the support of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI). Through this partnership, our legal unit of outreach workers accompany the survivors to report her attack, to file a complaint and to go to trial to pursue her aggressor.

From 2004 (KOFAVIV’s inception) to 2010, we barely had ten cases make it to the justice system. Since the earthquake, from 2010 to 2012, we have had about 200 cases that have made it through the justice system, five of which are awaiting a ruling.

It might not seem like a lot compared to the number of women and girls that have come forward, but to us that is a great accomplishment.

Because of our presence in the camps and throughout the communities, rape survivors know about us and the type of work that we do; they are coming forward and talking about their attacks.

Survivors of sexual violence (rape, sexual assault, conjugal violence, etc.) are sometimes humiliated and shamed by their communities so they often kept their abuse a secret. But now, to see women and girls come to our centre or call in to our call centre to report abuse and to seek help and justice is great progress.

Furthermore, our emergency shelter in the centre is open to survivors of sexual violence if they feel it is too dangerous for them to go back to their home or tent. They can stay safely at and participate in all the services and activities offered by KOFAVIV.

Excerpt:

Gérald Saintilimé and Gary Mathieu digging a septic pit at the Tabarre Issa camp. Credit: Fritznelson Fortuné

By Correspondents
TABARRE, Haiti, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

Complete with gallery and garden, the 534 wood and plasterboard houses are arranged in neat rows on a gravel plot of former sugarcane land northwest of the capital.

At first glance, all seems normal in this new community, or as normal as anything has been in a country that suffered a 7.0 earthquake 26 months ago.

In most camps, refugees complain because they are still living in tents. Not here.

At the Tabarre Issa camp – built by the Irish humanitarian organisation Concern Worldwide for a total cost of over three million dollars – the complaints centre not on the new 5,000-dollar “transitional shelters” that serve as homes to about 2,500 people. Instead, they target the new-fangled “ecological toilets” inside their homes: one in each of the 534 homes meant to last three years.

“No! I am not used to that sort of thing! No! This is not possible!” said resident Sherline Aldorage about the “UDT” or Urinary Diversion Toilet that came with the two-room home she moved into last year.

Repulsed by the process, Aldorage ripped the gift toilet from its foundations and threw it away.

Worse, she and scores of her neighbours have replaced them with flush toilets that empty into pits they’ve dug themselves into the former farmland.

Camp residents’ refusal to use the UDT system does more than highlight the risks run by aid organisations who fail to get beneficiaries on board a project, it has created a new risk that threatens to spread beyond camp boundries.

Tabarre Issa is not out in the middle of nowhere. It sits right atop the aquifer that supplies much of the capital’s water supply; dozens of trucks fill up in Tabarre every day.

The human excreta landing in the unlined pits likely carries various pathogens and, because of Haiti’s October 2010 cholera outbreak, it may also carry the vibrio cholera germ. The potential health consequences are immeasurable.

But Tabarre Issa residents appear to be more concerned about their immediate situation. The president of the camp management committee, Jean Auguste Petit-Frere, shares Aldorange’s sentiment.

“These toilets spread flies, cockroaches and odors,” he fumed. “They impact health. I can no longer breathe in my house.”

A survey conducted in January by Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) of 50 families of the Tabarre Issa camp – about one-tenth of all residents – uncovered three major complaints: odor, pollutants and cockroaches.

And it uncovered much worse: Only two percent of them actually used the UDT toilets and most – 90 percent – said they had already replaced them with flush toilets.

Behind the toilet revolt

Why such distrust – revolt even – against a system which has been proven to be effective, and accepted, around the world?

Certainly, ecological toilets are a novelty in Haiti and require some maintenance. But it is also true that beneficiaries have ingrained sanitary habits and these toilets – for all their ecological logic – demand that people learn new habits.

Concern hired a trainer – Maryse François – to explain to Tabarre Issa residents how to use the new ecological toilets. But she herself was never able to master the system.

“I was a Concern training officer and even I couldn’t adapt to this latrine. For a person who did not follow the training, it was worse!” she said. “No one who was using this system in the camp could adapt to it. It was a waste.”

Concern Worldwide – which has been working in Haiti in many domains since before the earthquake – knows about the problem, but notes that the UDTs were the only toilet option for camp residents, who asked that each small house be equipped with a private privy.

“It’s a transitional shelter, its not a permanent residence… if you look at the options, to put in a flush toilet… the feasibility of it is not there because of the cost,” Concern’s Nick Winn explained.

“If we had wanted to install the necessary water system, we would not have been able to convince a donor,” Concern assistant director Jean Frenel Thom added. Rather than 5,000 dollars each, the cost per house would have gone up to 7,500 dollars, according to Thom.

The UDTs were “the safest and cleanest option that was available as far as security and hygiene,” Winn chimed in. “Hygiene-wise it is just completely 100 percent sound.”

But if Concern gets a 100 percent grade for hygiene, it gets a zero percent for participation.

And there lies the fatal flaw: the Irish organisation appears to have failed to involve the population in its choice of the new toilet system. All 50 of the displaced families questioned by HGW said that they had not been consulted.

Little participation, a lot of condemnation

The need for community participation in development projects – and especially ones involving personal habits – is well established.

Study after study recognise that the idea of new toilets should be culturally accepted by the recipients first.

“The most important factors in getting a public to accept an ecological system are traditional attitudes and taboos related to defecation and excreta,” according to a 1998 study from the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA). “If users are not implicated in the choice of an alternative ecological toilet system, cultural barriers can result in the blockage of the project.”

“These toilets were imposed,” said Diana Paul, a former Bourdon Valley resident who made a living selling charcoal before the earthquake. “They did not ask our opinion. We would have told the trainers that we didn’t want this model.”

Concern doesn’t deny the allegations, but condemns the actions taken by residents.

“They took it upon themselves to replace the systems that were installed in their homes. Is it Concern’s place to prohibit them from doing this? They’re just replacing them. We can’t do anything about it because officially, Concern doesn’t manage this camp any more,” Thom explained.

Winn is worried: “If you are putting water into a pit, it won’t take a lot to fill it up.”

One of Concern’s partner organisations, the U.S.-based Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL), which works in ecological sanitation, was well aware of the environmental danger. At meetings and in emails, SOIL repeatedly warned Concern about the inherent complexities of getting 534 families to accept UDTs.

“We suggested that Concern do a pilot project to receive feedback from the users before embarking on a large scale programme,” SOIL director Sasha Kramer recalled. “But people were already in their homes.”

Concern contacted SOIL just three weeks before the toilets were to be completed, asking for help. The organisation turned down the request, saying that an effective awareness campaign was impossible to complete in only 21 days.

Winn conceded that many camp residents don’t use the UDTs.

“They could be more successful. Definitely… the use could be better,” he said.

His colleague Thom jumped in: “Yes, we are aware there is a problem. We recognise it here at Concern… Like all humans, we made mistakes, but we don’t consider Tabarre Issa a failure.”

And with its 534 homes and their gardens, the camp is not “a failure”.

Not surprisingly however, Concern has changed its practices for other camps.

“We are currently working with SOIL on a smaller camp. We plan to improve our education and see how we must transmit information adapted to the culture,” Winn assured. [See box]

But the improvements are for other camps. It’s too late for Tabarre Issa.

“Officially, we don’t manage the camp anymore. We have no rights over the houses,” Thom explained. “This is why we think that the government or DINEPA (the state water and sanitation agency) should come in.”

But do Haiti’s weak and underfunded authorities have the resources necessary to address the serious environmental threat that hangs over this major water resource for the capital?

*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) and community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media.

To see the photos, and read more stories from Haiti Grassroots Watch, visit http://www.haitigrassrootswatch.org

This report made possible with the support of the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Haiti http://fijhaitienglish.blogspot.com/

It is the second of a two-part series on water and sanitation problems in Haiti.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

The drawdown of hundreds of non-governmental organisations which have been in Haiti since the disastrous 2010 earthquake was inevitable. But with their departure, so too goes their purse and the millions earmarked for cleaning latrines.

What does that mean for the half a million displaced still living in camps?

Some 11,000 mobile toilets were installed by a rainbow of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) following the earthquake. Supplied largely by the Clinton Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development and UNICEF, and then redistributed by the NGO community to hundreds of camps, these latrines improved the living conditions and staved off pending health problems for some of the 1.5 million who were displaced.

Now, donor dollars are drying up even as toilets overflow. It’s one thing for the funders to cinch their belt; it’s another for those in the camps.

Because of the sheer number of people and organisations involved in human waste disposal, it’s nearly impossible to calculate how much has been spent over the last two years. Dozens of NGOs signed contracts with local companies to empty the latrines; eight dollars a day per toilet, or 125 dollars to empty a 125-gallon drum of sewage.

Each agency or organisation has its own tab. UNICEF spent 1.4 million dollars cleaning portable toilets over the last two years; the French Action Against Hunger (ACF) invested 2.675 million dollars in sanitation, most of which went for cleaning latrines. The Federation of Red Cross and Islamic Red Cross spent 55 million dollars for water and sewage treatment through September 2011.

“It’s important not to focus on the money but on the sanitary catastrophe that was avoided,” said Moustapha Niang, UNICEF’s hygiene, water and sanitation consultant.

“In an emergency situation, you have to respond quickly to save victims. This is always costly, but not sustainable. Everyone knows that,” said Anne Charlotte Schneider, head of Haiti’s ACF’s mission.

If sustainability were the name of the game, however, everyone would also know this approach was all wrong. Temporary latrines are just that – temporary. But because many of the camps were on private land, a temporary solution was the only one considered.

“When it’s impossible to build a sustainable infrastructure, we went with mobile toilets even though they were most costly,” said Peleg Charles, communications director for OXFAM, which worked on waste disposal in 123 camps.

Sanitary engineer Frantz Benoît, of the Haitian Association of Sanitary Engineering and Environmental Sciences, said that if there had been a sewer system, the task of managing the human waste would have been easier.

Prior to the quake, only 17 percent of the capital’s population had access to a standard flush toilet, so it was foolish to think that suddenly 1.5 million newly homeless could be connected to what was at best an antiquated sewage system. The Haitian authorities had neither the means, nor the technical competence, to do so. “Since there wasn’t (a sewer system), that meant that the NGO community, which came to help us, had to use what was available,” Benoit said. “The only criticism one can make of them is how the toilets were distributed among the camp dwellers.”

Distribution was as erratic as the earthquake’s aftershocks.

ACF identified one hundred families for only two latrines in a southern suburb; in the capital centre the latrines, stamped with the donor’s logo, surrounded camp perimetres like sentinels, but rarely was the international SPHERE standard of one toilet per 20 people – by gender – respected. Most residents use plastic bags.

In the case of Camp Acra, in the residential neighbourhood of Delmas, the ravine behind the camp is the resident “plastic bag” dumping ground.

“Besides the Haitian Red Cross and Samaritan’s purse (who gave us some things), we did not receive any support,” said 27-year old James Pierre, a Camp Acra resident. “And for the last year, they are gone along with their resources. Since then, we’ve been forgotten entirely.”

The most recent NGO to jump ship is the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which, as of Jan. 30, 2012, stopped all water and sanitation related activities in 31 camps in the metropolitan Port-au Prince region. IRC says it transferred its responsibility to either camp management committees, or the state agency: the National Directorate Agency of Water and Sanitation (DINEPA).

ACF will soon follow suit. At the end of the month it will stop emptying the portable toilet units at Champs Mars, across from the crumpled national palace.

To date, ACF has installed some 682 units in about 40 camps. According to its two-year financial sheet, the agency claims 800,000 people benefited from its services. In addition to Champ Mars, Schneider said ACF has also transferred latrine cleaning in all its other sites to DINEPA.

But DINEPA said it is not aware that it’s responsible for the formerly ACF-serviced latrines.

“The only officially registered transfer to date has been that of the Federation of Red Crosses,” said the DINEPA’s director of sanitation, engineer Edwige Petit, when questioned about the number of NGOs still present in the camps.

According to the International Organisation for Migration (OIM), there are still 490,545 people living in over 650 camps in the earthquake zones. Latrine cleaning was down 18.1 percent from the month before. And a bulletin recently published by the U.N.’s Organisation for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA) states that “356 latrines are going to be removed.”

“We are working with earthquake victims to return home,” said ACF’s Schneider. “We are now working on a multi latrine project (five families per latrine) for a total of 600,000 dollars.”

With the absence of data, it’s hard to compare sanitation before and after Haiti’s earthquake, but with an extensive outreach campaign it appears that there is better sanitation awareness among the population. And more tangibly, there is an excreta treatment center in Morne-à-Cabri north of the capital.

UNICEF, the European Union’s humanitarian branch, OCHA and the American Red Cross have earmarked 2.6 million dollars for the centre, which receives between 30-50 barrels of excreta every day. A soon-to- be released report by the U.N.-led group of non-governmental and governmental agencies working in water and sanitation (the WASH Cluster) says that 17,000 cubic metres of excreta have already been treated since the launch of operations three months ago.

Morne-à-Cabri’s sewage treatment plant is the first of its kind in the country. A second one is under construction in Titanyen, funded by the Spanish cooperation.

Ironically, the new plant does not receive excreta from the camps in the surrounding areas. Like much of the population, residents in nearby camps have no access to functioning latrines. And because public washrooms are not yet part of any national programme, they are also missing from public markets, bus stations, schools and churches.

With bilateral funding and financing from the Inter-American Development Bank, UNICEF and the American Red Cross, DINEPA is executing its 2012-2014 action plan to increase its sanitation work across the country.

This will include the construction of 12 wastewater treatment stations; the establishment of management/maintenance (including the reconstruction/rehabilitation) sanitary blocks in public places which include reconstruction and/or rehabilitation and a training and communication campaign to encourage the construction of toilets, according to the agency, which declined to reveal to cost of the plan.

But as necessary and ambitious as this plan is, it doesn’t address the challenges facing the 490,545 people living in squalid camps. Where will they go when the need to go?

*This article has been made possible with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Haiti, www.journalismeinvestigationhaiti.blogspot.com.

It is the first of a two-part series on water and sanitation problems in Haiti.

Excerpt:

A lack of long-term housing plans in Haiti's post-earthquake tent cities made the refugees even more vulnerable to natural disasters. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

As donors struggle to meet their aid commitments, and the number of people around the world in need of direct humanitarian and development assistance skyrockets, many experts and activists are asking the tough question: are donors being effective? A report published today by the Spanish non-governmental organisation DARA on donor effectiveness highlighted some of the biggest obstacles to aid reaching target populations, including insufficient consideration of women’s needs, politicisation of aid and lack of long-term plans for humanitarian assistance. “If donors want to make sure that money gets to the people, they must analyse the different needs of women and men,” Philip Tamminga, coordinator of DARA’s 2011 Humanitarian Response Index (HRI), told IPS. For example, after the 2010 floods in Pakistan, humanitarian agencies distributed inappropriate hygiene kits to women, and failed to address cultural norms that would have allowed women to be adequately cared for by men. Similarly, Tamminga explained, much of the gender-based violence that shook the post-earthquake tent cities in Haiti’s Port-au-Prince and outlying areas could have been avoided if women’s security at latrines and water and sanitation installations had been taken into consideration when building the refugee camps. Tamminga believes much of aid inefficacy is directly linked to a lack of preparedness for dealing with natural disasters and armed conflicts.

“In previous years four hurricanes hit Haiti,” he said. “Had donors focused on prevention at that time, Haitian authorities would have responded better to the 2010 earthquake and donors could have applied lessons learned there to (subsequent) earthquakes in Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. Donors have to make sure that the recovery stage takes long term solutions into consideration.” In most major disasters, donors and humanitarians work together to provide emergency shelter in transition to longer-term housing. In Haiti, however, there was no long-term housing strategy in place after the earthquake; as a result, when the hurricane hit, scores of people still languishing in temporary shelters were extremely vulnerable to the catastrophic impact of the winds. Another example of the dire consequences of insufficient preparation is the on-going food crisis in the Horn of Africa. Though the whole international community knew that a severe famine was brewing in the region, donor governments failed to scale up their funding, which resulted in the tragedy of over 100,000 preventable deaths. “There is no evidence that donor governments are changing attitudes in their transition from emergency to recovery and to the preparation of risk reduction. Emergency and long-term development are still considered as separate programmes,” Tamminga lamented. The situation is compounded by the increasingly politicised nature of aid. “When donors or host governments start to apply political considerations about to whom, how and when aid is distributed, the situation becomes very (precarious),” Tamminga stressed. “We have witnessed this in cases like Palestine, Somalia, Sudan or Colombia.” The most recent example is Syria, where the regime has failed to acknowledge the humanitarian crisis on its soil and refuses to act in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, which clearly state that besieged populations on all sides of a conflict have the right to humanitarian assistance. “We are very concerned when donor governments start to impose their agenda and tell humanitarian organisations where they can work,” Tamminga said. “In Somalia there are serious restrictions; Al Shabaab bear a grave responsibility for that.” He added, though, that countries like the United States, Canada and some European countries, bound by anti- terrorism legislations, also have a part to play. “They forbid humanitarian organisations from working with or having contact with those labelled “terrorists.” Yet humanitarian organisations are neutral, impartial and independent and they must be allowed to work with all parties,” he added. In 2011, only 62 percent of the U.N.’s appeal for 8.9 billion dollars to assist some 50 million people facing crises was met, resulting in huge gaps in the humanitarian response.

The HRI looked at 19 of the world’s biggest donors and ranked Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands as the ‘best’ donors, with the U.S. coming in 17th and Italy receiving the lowest rank on the index. While traditional donor governments still provide 85 percent of global aid, 40 percent of the funds channelled into relief work in Haiti came from private sources and new government donors like Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba. In fact, DARA has tracked a sustained shift from traditional donors to new, emerging funders. “We want to encourage good practices with these new donors,” Tamminga told IPS. “If not for new donors like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, Yemen, for example, would receive little aid. And many of these Gulf donors are becoming much more aware of international standards – Qatar and the UAE are good examples.” He stressed the importance of new and old players working together and teaching each other about cultural norms and the needs of specific populations. The private sector also has a lot to offer in terms of innovation, quick responses and utilising existing networks and infrastructure. In Haiti, cell phones proved to be a useful tool for disseminating messages on cholera prevention, when an outbreak erupted after the earthquake. “If the private sector understands humanitarian principles and good practices – like standards on the donation of drugs, that forbid sending medicines that are close to expiration – then it can contribute to using aid appropriately and effectively,” Tamminga concluded.

Excerpt:

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

The world reacted swiftly to Haiti’s catastrophic 7.0 earthquake in 2010. The United States shipped in 20,000 troops, some to perform lifesaving medical procedures, others to protect aid workers from earthquake victims deemed dangerous. Movie stars, criminals and other prospective parents rushed to adopt motherless Haitian babies.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and missionaries tripped over each other to distribute aid, from used shoes and bibles, to food and water. Televangelist Pat Robertson grabbed headlines, blaming the quake on Haiti’s “pact to the devil” – referencing Voodoo, Haiti’s traditional religion.

The only ones absent from media reports, it seemed, were Haitians, except as tragic victims.

A new book, Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake [Kumarian Press, 288 pages], sets the record straight. The compilation of more than 40 articles is edited by Mark Schuller, assistant professor at City University of New York and the State University of Haiti, and Latin American specialist Pablo Morales.

“One of the things we really felt was important was to get Haitian voices out there,” Schuller told IPS in a phone interview from New York. Half of the articles are written by Haitian activists, scholars and journalists, he pointed out.

To tell the story of the temblor that killed more than 300,000 and displaced 1.5 million, Schuller and Morales include information on the history that has left the island-nation particularly vulnerable.

“Understanding the disaster means understanding not only the tectonic fault lines running beneath Haiti, but also the deep economic, political, social, and historical cleavages within and surrounding the country,” the editors write.

A history of intrusion

Haiti has been pummelled by external forces since its birth 200 years ago. Soon after Haitians threw off the yoke of France, the former colonizer led an embargo against the young black republic, forcing Haiti to promise France the equivalent of 21 billion U.S. dollars for the loss of land and slaves. The debt wasn’t paid off until 1947.

Several articles explore international financial institutions’ neoliberal policies that led to overcrowding in Port au Prince and thus the large number of deaths and injuries from the earthquake.

In one, Alex Dupuy, chair of African American studies at Wesleyan University, cites World Bank and International Monetary Fund support for urban assembly factories, which brought peasants to the cities.

The international lenders further damaged the rural economy by imposing tariff reductions on agricultural products. Haiti’s markets had to compete with subsidized U.S. rice, “undercutting local production of the nation’s staple crop and dismantling the rural economy”, writes anthropologist Anthony Olivers-Smith.

A major theme throughout Tectonic Shifts is the negative role of NGOs, present in large numbers even before the earthquake.

In 1994, when President Bill Clinton brought President Jean Bertrand Aristide – Haiti’s first democratically elected president – back to Haiti after a coup d’état, the U.S. Congress bolstered NGOs’ presence. It refused to give aid directly to the Haitian government and instead filtered funds through NGOs, strengthening them and weakening the public sector.

The number of NGOs multiplied after the earthquake and included, according to Yolette Etienne, Oxfam America Haiti program director, “the full range of humanitarians, ranging from the most specialised organizations to amateur groups and even criminals on the lookout to exploit all forms of human misery”.

After the earthquake, the United Nations (U.N.) established “clusters” through which NGOs addressed issues of sanitation, water, food and housing.

But Haitians were largely excluded, as Melinda Miles of Transafrica writes. “By holding nearly all of its meetings within the confines of the [U.N.] base and refusing to offer Creole translation, Haitians… were effectively kept out of the process.”

Haitians are also kept out of relief contracts. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) studied USAID contracts worth 200 million dollars and concluded that just 2.5 percent went to Haitian companies.

Militarisation in Haiti

A number of articles underscore the destructive role of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH. After the United States flew Aristide into involuntary exile in 2004, Marines policed the country for several months and were replaced by MINUSTAH.

After the earthquake, the U.N. added more than 3,000 troops and police to the force, bringing the total to around 13,000.

U.N. military personnel have been accused of acting like an occupying force, murdering and sexually abusing Haitians and bringing cholera to the country. “To many, MINUSTAH’s primary role is to keep Haiti as a leta restavèk, a child domestic worker serving foreign interests,” write Tectonic Shifts editors.

The U.S. earthquake response was also militarised. Charles Vorbe, political science professor at the State University of Haiti, recalls media images depicting the “degrading nature” of giving aid. “U.S. soldiers perched in an army helicopter in full flight, tossing sacks of food overboard on earthquake victims, who, on the ground, come running from everywhere and fight among themselves to collect whatever they can.”

The military’s preoccupation with security is incompatible with the “respect for the dignity… of the beneficiaries,” Vorbe writes.

Meanwhile, about 600,000 Haitians still live in squalid camps, often lacking water and sanitation. Many face eviction. (The 600,000 doesn’t include evicted survivors living on the streets or in red- tagged houses.)

Legal complications

Mario Joseph, human rights attorney with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, writes that claims to land titles are unclear. “It is uncertain whether the alleged landowners who attempt to evict [Internally Displaced People] …really have legal rights to the land,” he explains.

“Because those purporting to own the land usually come from Haiti’s tiny but powerful elite, their word itself is generally feared among IDPs.”

In a Skype interview from Port au Prince, Joseph told IPS that the debate around land ownership avoids the central issue: international law and U.N. guidelines prohibit eviction of IDPs. “But the U.N. doesn’t apply this in Haiti,” Joseph said.

Still, the problem isn’t just with the U.N.

“The NGOs and the Haitian government, too, don’t… respect the rights of the Haitian people,” Joseph added, contending that because the international community put the president into power, government allegiance is to foreign interests and the wealthy elite, not to the Haitian masses.

To that end, Tectonic Shifts includes several articles about international interference with presidential elections that excluded a dozen political parties including Aristide’s party, Lavalas, the largest and most popular party.

“The international community is complicit with the rich people in Haiti to gut the rights of Haitians,” Joseph said, noting that he’s successfully trained camp leaders to organize others to effectively stand up for their right not to be evicted.

Tectonic Shifts includes hopeful articles about grassroots groups pressuring the government for change, but none address the future of Lavalas or the impact of Aristide’s return to Haiti one year ago. IPS asked Schuller about the omission.

“As a political party, Lavalas is factionalized,” he said, underscoring that, as a foreigner, it was not his place to comment on internal politics. He said the editors attempted to be balanced and non- partisan in the choice of articles.

“Maybe work is being done internally – they’re not out [in demonstrations] in big numbers; they’re not making a political statement,” he added.

Creole and French translations of the book will be published later this year, which means Tectonic Shifts can be used as an educational and organizing tool by grassroots activists and human rights workers, Schuller said.

“I see hope in the [grassroots] movements, despite the many challenges.”

Excerpt:

International and local human rights groups Tuesday strongly denounced the ruling by an investigating judge in Haiti that former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier should not face charges for massive human rights abuses committed during his 15-year reign, from 1971 to 1986.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said it was “extremely disappointed” by the ruling. The U.S. State Department, noting that the case could still be appealed to higher courts, urged “the Haitian government to investigate all credible allegations of corruption and human rights abuses regardless of who commits them and to prosecute those found responsible.”

“We’ve said over the years that Duvalier’s regime was one of repression and we sympathise with all those who were victimised during that period and who are seeking accountability and truth on behalf of themselves or their loved ones,” said State Department spokesperson Molly Lynn Westrate.

She added that Washington has offered to the Haitian government technical assistance in any investigation, but that the offer had not been accepted.

Investigating Judge Carves Jean reportedly ruled that the statute of limitations had run on human rights-related charges against Duvalier and that he could be prosecuted only for misappropriation of public funds, a relatively minor offence which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

The judge declined to make the ruling publicly available, but it reportedly followed recommendations by the state prosecutor, a sign that Haiti experts here believe suggests that the one-year-old government of President Michel Martelly, who is believed to have personally consulted on occasion with Duvalier, has no interest in pursuing the case.

“This wrong-headed decision, if upheld on appeal, would entrench Haiti’s culture of impunity by denying justice for Duvalier’s thousands of victims,” said Reed Brody, special counsel for New York- based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

“The handful of victims who have been interviewed had been subjected to intimidation by Duvalier supporters and his lawyers,” noted Javier Zuniga, special adviser on Haiti to Amnesty, who called the investigation a “disgrace”.

“It is clear that the investigating judge left out invaluable evidence and decided not to interview all the victims who filed complaints,” he added. “It is a dark day for Haiti and for justice.”

Local human rights groups were no less outraged. Anthonal Mortimé, who directs the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organistions (POHDH), called the judgement a “scandal” and vowed to seek its reversal by the attorney general who will review the case under Haitian law.

Duvalier, who inherited power from his more-notorious father, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, was ousted from power in a popular uprising in 1986. He fled to France, where he lived undisturbed until his surprise return to Haiti one year ago when the Caribbean nation was still struggling to recover from the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the capital, Port-au-Prince, and much of the rest of the country. As many as 300,000 people are believed to have been killed.

Under the 29-year Duvalier dynasty, tens of thousands of Haitians are believed to have been killed, most of them by the dreaded Tonton Macoutes, the family’s personal militia. In addition to the killings that continued during “Baby Doc’s” rule, hundreds of political prisoners were held at any one time in a network of prisons, including the infamous Fort Dimanche in Port-au-Prince, where they died of neglect, torture and mistreatment.

Duvalier, now 60 years old, was initially ordered by the government to remain confined to his residence in the capital while prosecutors investigated charges that he embezzled as much as 800 million dollars and criminal complaints by victims and victims’ families of massive human rights abuses during his presidency.

After Martelly’s inauguration last May, however, Duvalier began travelling around the country, meeting with his old friends and followers. Last month, he spoke at commencement exercises at a law faculty in Gonaives.

On the second anniversary of the earthquake earlier this month, he attended the government’s memorial and even shook hands with former President Bill Clinton, who has played a key role in marshalling U.S. and international support for earthquake relief and reconstruction.

Since taking office last year, Martelly, who also has family ties to Duvalier, has made clear that he was committed to national reconciliation and had little interest in a trial that could provoke renewed divisiveness and instability. During a visit to Europe last week, for example, he suggested that he would pardon Duvalier if the case were pursued, although he subsequently backtracked.

“Inviting Jean-Claude Duvalier to take part in public official ceremonies clearly showed that the government wanted to rehabilitate him instead of holding him to account,” Amnesty’s Zuniga said.

“Given the influence of the executive branch on the judiciary in Haiti, we could expect such an outcome,” said Robert Fatton, a Haiti expert at the University of Virginia, about Tuesday’s ruling.

He also noted that the sons and daughters of many prominent Duvalierists are advising or serving in Martelly’s government.

“But to be absolutely fair, there are issues of stability,” he told IPS. “If there were a trial of Jean-Claude, all of the people opposed to (former President Jean-Bertrand) Aristide will call for a trial for him. You can see the situation really disintegrating.”

“At the same time, I can’t see any kind of reconciliation in Haiti without some sort of trial or truth commission,” he went on. “The idea you can just say it’s finished doesn’t do anything for reconciliation. It can only exacerbate tensions, because people say it’s impunity.”

Ironically, Tuesday’s ruling came less than two weeks after eight police officers, including high-ranking officials, were sentenced to up to 13 years of prison for the 2010 massacre of at least 20 detainees in Les Cayes in what was hailed as a major blow against impunity in Haiti.

In their reactions to the Duvalier ruling, human rights groups argued that international law superseded Haiti’s statute of limitations. They pointed to decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights by whose judgements Haiti is legally bound.

The Court has held repeatedly that neither statutes of limitations nor amnesties can be applied to gross human rights violations under the American Convention on Human Rights.

“It is clear under international law that there is no statute of limitations for such crimes…,” Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner, told reporters in Geneva.

The State Department’s Westrate stressed that Washington believes that “a Haitian-led process consistent with Haitian law is the way forward for addressing Duvalier’s actions as president,” and she stressed that the victims “still have recourse at the appellate court and, if necessary, the Haitian supreme court.”

But Fatton was sceptical about Washington’s willingness to press the Martelly government to pursue the case.

“I think the U.S. would be perfectly fine with the status quo,” he said. “Its primary objective in Haiti now is to have a government that functions and that is stable. Anything that would potentially generate some sort of instability would not be welcomed,” he said.

Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue (IAD), agreed.

“The U.S. won’t risk antagonising the Martelli governmentt over this issue,” he said. “One of the big issues now is (Martelly’s proposal to) bring the army (which was abolished under Aristide) back. I think the U.S. is unhappy about that; in fact, the whole international community is unhappy about that, so Duvalier doesn’t seem like the highest priority.”

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

The Caribbean nation of Haiti, still struggling to recover from the devastating 2010 earthquake, is once again trying to cope with the sexual abuse of minors by U.N. peacekeepers – for the third time in five years.

U.N. peacekeepers and U.S. soldiers secure a food distribution point in Haiti in the aftermath of the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. Credit: UN Photo/Sophia Paris

The two cases of “sexual exploitation and abuse involving minors”, reported last week, are traced to U.N. police officers serving with the U.N. Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).

“The United Nations is outraged by these allegations and takes its responsibility to deal with them extremely seriously,” U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters Monday.

In view of the gravity of the situation – and the recurrence of sexual abuse by peacekeepers in Haiti – the United Nations has already dispatched a team of officials to the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince “to investigate these allegations with the utmost determination”.

MINUSTAH is emphasising the responsibility and accountability of the chain of command in both preventing and taking prompt action when such allegations arise, Nesirky said.

The mission will take action to support the alleged victims, he added. But he did not disclose the nationalities of the police officers involved.

Unlike cases involving U.N. military personnel – who are answerable only to their home countries – investigations into allegations involving U.N. Police fall under the responsibility of the United Nations.

The civilian and police personnel serving in peacekeeping missions are treated as international civil servants under the authority of the United Nations.

Mariano Fernandez, the secretary-general’s special representative and head of MINUSTAH, said: “I want to reiterate my commitment to uphold the policy of zero tolerance of abuse by the staff of the Mission.”

Each member of the U.N. personnel, whether he or she is a civilian, member of the military or police, must observe a standard of exemplary conduct, he added.

“This is a commitment that is required when joining the United Nations, anywhere in the world.”

“We will continue to take the strictest measures to ensure, where appropriate, that the perpetrators of such acts are punished with the utmost severity,” he added.

Back in November 2007, about 108 military personnel from Sri Lanka serving in Haiti were deported to their home country after being accused of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse of minors.

One of the expelled peacekeepers was quoted in a local newspaper as saying, rather defiantly, “What do you expect us to do when the U.N. is providing us with free condoms?”

Since the United Nations has no political or legal authority to penalise military personnel, most of them escape punishment for their criminal activities because national governments have either refused or have been slow in meting out justice within their own court systems.

Last year, five U.N. peacekeepers from Uruguay were accused of sexually assaulting a Haitian teenager, which was caught on tape, triggering public demonstrations and anti-U.N. protests in the streets of Port-au-Prince.

But early this month, all five were freed by a Uruguayan military court because the 18-year-old Haitian victim could not be traced.

The Uruguayans have promised to re-open the case if the youth appears in court.

In 2007, it was reported that girls as young as 13 were having sex with U.N. peacekeepers in Haiti for as little as a dollar, Ezili Dant, president of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN), said in a letter to the United Nations.

The continued sexual abuse of minors in Haiti – and also in other peacekeeping missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Cote d’Ivoire – has alarmed the United Nations.

Allegations of abuse have dogged U.N. peacekeeping missions since their inception over 50 years ago.

The issue was thrust into the spotlight after the United Nations found, in early 2005, that peacekeepers in Congo had sex with Congolese women and girls, usually in exchange for food or small sums of money.

The U.N. peacekeeping department instituted a “zero tolerance” policy toward sexual abuse, a new code of conduct for its more than 110,000 peacekeepers deployed around the world, and new training for officers and all U.N. personnel.

But that has not deterred the continued sexual abuse of women and minors in peacekeeping missions worldwide.

The United Nations says it has done much to confront the problem since 1999, when U.N. peacekeepers in Bosnia were reported to have been involved in a sex-trafficking ring.

In 2003, the United Nations issued a “zero tolerance” policy for sexual exploitation and abuse.

Currently, all peacekeepers undergo extensive training with a major focus on sexual conduct.

The image of United Nations peacekeeping operations has become seriously tarnished in recent years, say some independent experts who monitor the U.N. missions around the world.

Members of the Brazilian peacekeeping contingent in Haiti at a ceremony to hand over responsibilities to the new U.N. Force Commander. Credit: UN Photo/Marco Dormino

The latest example is the persistent report that its soldiers introduced a deadly cholera epidemic to a ravaged Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. Peacekeepers there have also been accused of sexually assaulting a young Haitian man in an incident which was recorded on a cellphone video.

Taking a close look in a new book at the 100,000 or more soldiers serving under U.N. auspices, a past advisor to the United Nations, Walter Dorn, says there is substantial room for improvement.

He concedes that the high-profile United Nations military missions in both Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo represent “mixed successes”.

A Canadian professor who teaches a course on peace missions at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto, Dorn is the author of “Keeping Watch: Monitoring, Technology & Innovation in UN Peace Operations.”

Dorn intends with his new book to make U.N. peacekeeping operations “more effective”, in terms of offering security for civilian populations facing warring factions or humanitarian disasters in a country like the Congo.

For instance, the modestly sized U.N. force of 22,000 uniformed personnel in the DRC “has been a very important stabilising force”, Dorn says.

But he adds the U.N. soldiers’ failure to a stop a 2008 massacre of at least 150 civilians in the eastern Congo village of Kiwanja despite the presence of peacekeepers a kilometre away stems from a still existing failure by the contributors of United Nations soldiers to take full advantage of affordable surveillance and communication technology for ground operations.

“In many of the developing countries where the majority of peacekeepers are today, they don’t have a familiarity with the technology,” Dorn adds.

A Canadian military historian at the Royal Military College in Canada in the city of Kingston, Ontario, counters that U.N. military missions are really counterinsurgency operations.

“In the Congo, the U.N. is not exactly neutral, going after militias on behalf of the government,” says Sean Maloney, a professor at the Royal Military College in Kingston Ontario.

What occurs today under U.N. auspices has nothing to do with the original concept of armed peacekeeping as an impartial force. That is keeping the peace under international agreement between warring sides as developed by a Canadian general E.L.M. Burns in the mid-1950s for the Arab-Israeli conflict, continues Maloney, the author of the 2002 book, “Canada and UN Peacekeeping – Cold War by Other Means, 1945- 1970.”

Maloney told IPS the impartial style of peacekeeping as represented by Canadians serving as U.N. soldiers and keeping armed Greek and Turkish-speaking people at bay in Cyprus in the 1970s was rendered “obsolete” starting in the 1990s.

“We are going to see more interventions. They will be more coercion- style interventions (like the NATO mission in Afghanistan where Canada had upwards of 3,000 soldiers) that will be siding with one side or another,” adds Maloney, describing himself as pro-military and “libertarian”.

Laura Seay, an assistant professor of politics at Morehouse College in the U.S. and an expert on the DRC, says a tiny U.N. mission faces an “impossible” task by operating in a country like the Congo that is the size of Western Europe but minus sufficient resources to do its job.

“They are too spread out. If there was a problem in one area, they would have to leave civilians behind vulnerable to attack,” she told IPS.

Among the litany of complaints is that the U.N. peacekeepers in the DRC who tend to come from various south Asian countries are ill- trained, ill-equipped, cannot communicate in the common language of Swahili and do not interact with the local population.

Seay confirms that the U.N.’s support of the central government in the capital Kinshasa has a downside.

“The Congolese army is a source of human rights violations. If you are supporting the army and its activities, you have a perverse affect on civilian protection,” she said.

Nevertheless, the U.N. has created “a semblance of normal life” in the strife-ridden eastern Congo and made commercial activity possible, which in turn has made the peacekeepers popular, she added.

However, the U.N.’s stabilisation mission in Haiti is quite overbearing, reports Courtney Frantz, the author of a recent report for the Council of Hemispheric Affairs in Washington.

“They have become an instrument of the U.S., France and Canada in terms of their economic interests (including privatisation in Haiti),” he said.

A little under 10,000 U.N. “blue helmets” were dispatched to Haiti in 2004 following the overthrow of the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide under chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, where the Security Council has determined that the situation “constitutes a threat or breach of the peace”.

“There is no international threat; there is no war going on in Haiti, as there was in Iraq, Afghanistan or the Congo,” Frantz, a research associate at the COHA told IPS.

The party of the former president, Aristide, the Lavelas Party, was not permitted to participate in the recent Haitian election.

Finally, Frantz adds, the U.N. peacekeeping mission has not played a significant role in alleviating the damage caused by the earthquake in early 2010.

“The U.N. has done very little humanitarian assistance that they said they were going to do. More on preventing looting,” he said.

Walter Dorn maintains that the U.N. has delivered “law and order” in Haiti following the high-profile 2006 raid of Cite Soleil in Port-au- Prince, the capital.

But Courtney Frantz counters that the U.N. has ignored extrajudicial killings in Haiti and “perpetrated acts of violence” against local people in Cite Soleil.

Not everybody is convinced that pure peacekeeping is passé.

“The idea of Canada being a peacekeeping nation is not a bad thing for Canadians to identify with,” journalist Jamie Swift, co-author of the upcoming book, “Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety,” told IPS.

“You don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. But you cannot ignore the imperial and post-colonial (circumstances) in which peacekeeping forces have been deployed.”

Eighteen-year-old “Kettlyne”, a Haitian orphan living in the rubble-strewn Croix Deprez camp – one of the many remaining tent-cities that houses refugees from the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake – is unable to feed her three-year-old daughter.

Starving and alone, the girl says she has resorted to exchanging sex for food scraps, selling her body to older men who routinely beat and abuse her, often refuse to wear condoms, and sometimes don’t even pay her at the end of the night.

Though Kettlyne dreams of returning to school and someday saving up for her daughter’s education as well, she says resignedly, “If my baby is crying for food, I am obligated to do anything.”

Kettlyne is one of numerous interviewees in a joint report released Thursday by MADRE, the Commission of Women Victims for Victims (KOFAVIV), the International Women’s Human Rights (IWHR) Clinic at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law (GJC) and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at UC Hastings College of the Law (CGRS).

Coinciding with the two-year anniversary of the disaster that rendered more than a million Haitians homeless and plunged the country’s teeming displacement camps into a dark period of lawlessness, the report comes amidst an outgoing wave of humanitarian workers, NGOs and international observers from the island, with the message that, though time has passed, the crisis for Haitian women and girls continues unabated.

Roughly 300,000 women and girls still languish in makeshift shelters in and around the capital city of Port-au-Prince, places where all existing social structures – from families and homes to schools and medical facilities – have broken down in the face of extreme poverty, hopelessness and hunger, leaving scores vulnerable and desperate.

“With international organisations moving out, taking with them the few temporary services that had been available after the earthquake, girls as young as 13 years old are trading sex for the equivalent of half a sandwich, a few U.S. dollars, or access to education,” Lisa Davis, MADRE human rights advocacy director and co-author of the report, told IPS.

After conducting a series of in-depth interviews with women and girls between the ages of 18 to 32 living in the Champ de Mars, Christ Roi and Croix Deprez displacement camps, and in the neighbourhood of Carrefour, the report concluded that none participating in this new- found “economy of survival” described themselves as commercial sex workers. Rather, their actions are a “coping mechanism” in the face of supreme hardships.

Most of the sexual transactions take place between young girls and men who hold positions of power in the camps: administrators of cash- for-work programmes, managers of food supplies and especially men in charge of educational programmes.

According to a 2012 UNICEF report, Haiti’s educational infrastructure was already in shambles before 2010. Still, the earthquake took with it over 4,000 educational establishments, stripping roughly 2.5 million students – well over half of Haiti’s four million youth under the age of 18 – of a chance for education.

A gaping lack of medical facilities has seriously exacerbated the problem.

Last year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published its findings from a series of interviews, revealing that few women had access to prenatal or obstetric care.

Though all of the 128 women interviewed claimed that they wanted to deliver in a hospital, well over half gave birth outside of a medical institution, without a skilled medical attendant present, while many delivered their children on the mud floors of tents or in the streets on the way to the hospital.

Though no reliable data has yet been collected on the consequences of transactional sex, Davis speculated, “I can only imagine that it’s going to make women and girls much more vulnerable to HIV and other (sexually transmitted diseases). Already, Haiti has the worst HIV rate in the hemisphere in terms of numbers.”

The deficiency in medical care also means more illegal abortions and higher rates of maternal and infant mortality. Already, 3,000 Haitian women and girls die annually from complications in pregnancy and childbirth, so the possibility of a further deterioration in maternal and child health could spell disaster for the small, struggling country.

While it is vital to shed light on the immediate crisis and the short-term needs of the affected population, the long-term causes and consequences of this epidemic remain of central concern for many experts.

Economic underdevelopment caused largely by western-imposed structural adjustment policies, misdirected or mismanaged foreign aid and a constitution that has long ignored the tragedy of gender-based violence, particularly in times of political instability, have all fermented into the current crisis.

“Grassroots organizations like KOFAVIV do a lot of work to fight GBV, sexual violence, and survival sex; however, our voices are not always heard,” Malya Villard-Appolon, co-founder of KOFAVIV, told IPS. “We are rarely included in decision-making processes so government agencies that have the resources to enact change do not hear our perspectives and reports from the ground.”

“Women have not received equal treatment in government positions,” she added. “Of 17 ministers, only three are women.”

Villard-Appolon repeatedly stressed the need for a more comprehensive and inclusive educational framework for girls who have long been disenfranchised even at the familial level, staying home while their brothers are sent off to school.

“Although President (Michel) Martelly has stated his commitment to enforcing the constitutional right to a free primary education in Haiti, this is far from the reality,” Blaine Bookey, staff attorney at the CGRS and co-author of the report, told IPS. “We are concerned about reports from the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee that millions collected in taxes for educational purposes are unaccounted for.”

She also made various recommendations for moving past the crisis, including allocating more resources to grassroots coalitions, restructuring the government and judicial system to better tackle sexual violence and exploitation of all kinds and exerting more control over reconstruction funds such that aid doesn’t simply flow back into the coffers of international NGOs and private contractors or corporations.

“Survival sex will not end until Haitian women and girls can access what they need to live,” Margaret Satterthwaite, professor of Clinical Law for the GJC, said Thursday.

“Haitian women want economic opportunities and the capacity to access basic resources. The international community should work closely with the Haitian government to create jobs, extend microcredit to women and provide free education to all.”

Brazil, for decades a source of migrants to the United States and Europe, is now facing its own humanitarian challenge: applying the international solidarity it trumpets to the Haitians who are arriving in the thousands, in search of a better life.

The alarm was triggered by newspaper reports published in the first week of the year about “coyotes” or people smugglers bringing Haitians into the country across the border with Bolivia and Peru, in the Amazon jungle.

The Haitians reportedly pay between 2,500 and 5,000 dollars apiece for a trip that includes a plane ticket to Ecuador, Colombia or Peru and an arduous overland journey to Brazil.

The Haitian diaspora has grown exponentially since the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake that claimed some 300,000 lives and left 2.1 million people homeless in the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

Drawn by the economic boom in Brazil, now the world’s sixth largest economy, and the major infrastructure works in preparation for the 2014 football World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games to be hosted by Rio de Janeiro, some 5,000 Haitians have flocked to this country since the earthquake, according to the Institute of Migration and Human Rights.

“Brazil has become part of the map of the Haitian diaspora,” sociologist Rubem Cesar Fernandes, director of Viva Rio, a Brazilian NGO that has been carrying out social, economic and cultural projects in Haiti since 2004, told IPS.

The traditional destinations of Haitian migrants are Canada, the Dominican Republic, France, the French West Indies, and the United States. And now Brazil has been added to the list, for specific reasons, said Fernandes.

Since 2004, Brazil has headed the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, and Latin America’s giant has a growing presence in that Caribbean island nation.

“Brazil is now part of the collective consciousness of Haiti,” Fernandes said, referring to newfound “affective ties” between the two nations in areas like music and football, as well as the shared African origins of Haitians and much of the Brazilian population.

Furthermore, the first signals sent out by Brazil to Haitian immigrants were “friendly and welcoming, and non-repressive,” Fernandes said.

“I came in 1992, when we didn’t yet feel the Brazilian presence in Haiti,” said André Yves Cribb, an agronomist from Haiti who works on development aid projects for his home country at Embrapa, the Brazilian government’s agricultural research agency.

“Brazil started to play a more active role on the international stage and the foreign policy front,” he told IPS. “And this country’s growth has drawn the attention of people who are trying to find a way to survive,” he said, adding that there are also subjective factors like the Haitian people’s identification with the Brazilian people.

The Catholic humanitarian organisation Caritas says the majority of the most recent arrivals from Haiti, who came in early 2012, are waiting in the border towns of Tabatinga and Brasiléia, hoping they will be granted humanitarian visas that would allow them to work, since the Brazilian government does not consider them refugees.

“Brazil understands the situation. There has been no mistreatment, and humanitarian and work visas are being issued,” said Cribb.

The problem is that during the waiting period, which can take up to six months, the two small towns do not have the infrastructure or the conditions to receive so many immigrants.

The national bishops’ conference reported, for example, that in Brasiléia, in the northwestern state of Acre, there are now 1,250 Haitians – 10 percent of the population.

As of Dec. 23, 4,015 Haitians had applied for refugee status and the applications are being studied by the National Committee for Refugees.

“The immigrants are sleeping in the town square, or as many as 10 are crammed into rooms for three or four people,” said a local Catholic priest.

“The ‘coyotes’ are clearly exploiting people along these immigration routes,” José Magalhaes, Caritas national adviser for risk and emergency management, who is providing assistance to the immigrants, told IPS.

The governments of the Amazon rainforest states where the immigrants are arriving are unable to meet the rising demand for housing, food and healthcare, he added.

Many of the Haitian women who have arrived are pregnant, he noted. Under Brazilian law, anyone born in Brazil automatically becomes a citizen.

In the first days of the year, the situation was aggravated by the arrival of around 500 new undocumented Haitians.

The latest wave of immigrants prompted the government to take a definite stance and adopt measures, after wavering between granting humanitarian visas and worrying that doing so would open the floodgates to new arrivals.

On Tuesday, Jan. 10 President Dilma Rousseff authorised the regularisation of the situation of all Haitian immigrants who are already in the country.

But at the same time, she announced restrictions aimed at curbing the influx of undocumented Haitians. From now on, visas – a maximum of 100 a month – will only be issued by the Brazilian embassy in Haiti.

“The Brazilian government will not be indifferent to the economic difficulties faced by Haitians. But only people with visas will be allowed to enter Brazil,” said Justice Minister Eduardo Cardozo.

The government will also step up security along the borders with Bolivia and Peru, and will negotiate special measures with those two countries and Ecuador.

“We have to crack down on this illegal immigration and people smuggling route,” the minister said, to explain the measures that have been interpreted by many as a de facto barrier to Haitian immigrants.

Joseph Handerson, a Haitian student with the graduate studies programme in social anthropology at the national museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, questioned the measures.

“The ones who are arriving now are in the same situation as those who had already come and were granted legal status. Why are they being treated differently? Brazil should rethink its position and humanitarian policies,” he said.

Magalhaes took a similar stance, pointing out that Brazilian history was built by immigrants from Europe and from the rest of Latin America, and slaves from Africa.

“We in Caritas clearly see this as a humanitarian situation of the first order, one that calls for international solidarity,” he said.

Magalhaes said “these situations are complex.” But speaking in a personal capacity, he stressed that Brazil “has to have political coherence” and must understand that it has joined the route of the Haitian diaspora because it is now a financial powerhouse and is in need of workers due to the sports events to be hosted in the next few years.

“It should not shut its borders but should help these immigrants stay here,” he said, pointing to the humanitarian tradition of Brazil, which has granted refugee status to 4,359 refugees, 2,813 of whom are from Africa.

Cribb said the arrival of Haitian immigrants, many of whom have already been hired to work on hydroelectric dams under construction in Brazil, is doubly beneficial.

He said that, given the economic boom that Brazil is experiencing as an emerging country, the new immigrants – many of whom are skilled workers or university graduates in areas like engineering – will contribute to the country’s growth while themselves benefiting from their insertion in a dynamic economy.

Handerson explained to IPS that 80 percent of the Haitians who have arrived in Brazil are now living in the city of Manaus, the capital of the northwestern state of Amazonas, 10 percent headed to French Guiana, and the rest are in Brazilian states like São Paulo, Roraima and Minas Gerais.

And of those who are living in Manaus, 80 percent have jobs, mainly as construction workers, painters, carpenters, steelworkers or waiters, in the case of men, and as domestics, cooks or manicurists in the case of women.

But in Tabatinga, in the same state, the conditions are more complicated because there are not enough jobs or housing for the 1,300 Haitians in the town.

According to Handerson’s study, the great majority of Haitian immigrants in Brazil have not completed secondary school, but some have tertiary studies. Nearly all of those living in Manaus speak three languages – French, Creole and Spanish – and they earn around 400 dollars a month on average.

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.

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