On Oct. 16, 1993, Alerte Belance was abducted from her home and taken to Titanyen, a small seaside village used by Haiti’s rulers as a mass grave for political opponents. There she received machete chops to her face, neck, and extremities. Despite her grave injuries, Belance was able to save herself by dragging her mutilated body onto the street and asking for help.

The president of Haiti - a country with no external threats, a history of military repression, and an abundance of more pressing problems - is rebuilding the once-banished Haitian military.
Belance’s survival was extraordinary, but not all were so lucky.

On Jan. 18, 1994, Wilner Elie, a member of the Papaye Peasant Movement, was knifed to death by a group of masked men in his own home. His 12 children were handcuffed by the assailants and forced to watch helplessly as their father was brutally murdered.

Elie and Belance’s tragic stories were not anomalies. Not long ago in Port-au-Prince, decapitated bodies littered the streets, warnings to would-be dissidents. Violent men sexually abused young women seemingly for sport.

People were ambushed in their homes and shot to death for attempting to escape. Thousands of Haitians fled in shoddy boats through treacherous waters to the United States, only to be sent back despite outcries from human rights groups.

Though it reads like a horror script or dystopian novel, this is not fiction. This was reality for millions of Haitians living under military rule. And now, as the Haitian government moves to rebuild its once-banished army, some Haitians are wondering whether a sequel is in the works.

A dark legacy

Haiti has a lengthy history of military and state-sanctioned violence. Shortly after coming to power in 1957, the infamous dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, feeling threatened by the regular armed forces, created a paramilitary force to protect himself.

Nicknamed the Tonton Macoutes (Uncle Gunnysacks) after an old tale about a bogeyman who abducted unruly children and placed them in gunnysacks to be eaten at breakfast, these men carried out unimaginable murders and sent tremors of fear throughout the nation.

Accountable to virtually no one, they continued their reign of terror after Papa Doc’s death and through the rule of his successor and son, Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. After Baby Doc was forced to flee in 1986, the Tonton Macoutes were officially disbanded, but other paramilitaries continued in their footsteps.

Meanwhile the military itself continued to interfere in Haiti’s politics. On Sep. 29, 1991, Jean Betrand-Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, was ousted by a military coup just eight months into his presidency.

The coup, led by Lieutenant General Raoul Cedras, plunged the nation into a particularly violent and turbulent period. For three years the Haitian military and its paramilitary arm, the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, ran an exceptionally brutal regime, kidnapping, torturing, and murdering supporters of the ousted Aristide. By 1994, the death toll had reached an estimated 5,000.

Haitian President François Duvalier in 1968. Credit: Public domain

Following an intervention by the United States, Aristide was restored to power in late 1994 on condition that he implement economic reforms favored by Washington. He dismantled the military the following year. The disbandment of the military did not cure Haiti of all its ills, but the dissolution was followed by three successful transitions of presidential power – in 1996, 2000, and later in 2010.

In 2004, however, a paramilitary force consisting of former soldiers with help from United States, France, and Canada organised a second successful coup against Aristide, who had been elected to a second term in 2000 after serving out his first in 1996. Even after their official disbandment, former soldiers were still able to influence political outcomes in Haiti.

A return to form

And now, after two decades in the shadows, the military is back: Haitian President Michel Martelly has followed through on a campaign promise to reconstitute the Haitian military. The new force launched its first operations this February.

This has left many Haitians wondering why a country with no external threats, a history of violent, military-led repression against its own citizens, and an abundance of more pressing problems would need—or even want—a new military. “Given the history of Haiti’s military,” warned Mark Weisbrot, its “existence alone could be considered a threat to security.”

Martelly’s personal history provides some clues about his own sympathies. Before he began his political career, Michel Martelly was a provocative konpa singer who went by the name Sweet Micky. During the Duvalier era, he ran a nightclub named Garage that was frequented by military officials and other members of Haiti’s tiny elite.

Around this time Martelly befriended Lieutenant Colonel Michel Francois, the man who would later become chief of the secret police under Raoul Cedras. Martelly remained a “favourite” of the thugs who worked for the Duvalier regime and, after its collapse, would even accompany the death squads organised by Francois to murder Aristide supporters.

While death squads hunted dissidents by night, Martelly taunted them by day. Lavalas, the massive pro-democracy movement launched by Aristide after Baby Doc was ousted, quickly became the target of Martelly’s biting lyrics. Throughout Aristide’s presidency, Martelly remained an outspoken critic of the president and his supporters, eventually emerging as a politician in his own right.

After a hotly contested and controversial election in 2011, Martelly was elected president of Haiti. Later that year, an anonymous Haitian official leaked a document to the Associated Press outlining a plan for the revival of the Haitian military.

Solving the wrong problems

The document cited several reasons why Haiti supposedly needs to spend 95 million dollars building up a new military force: to provide opportunities for young people, to rebuild Haiti’s infrastructure, to patrol its border with the Dominican Republic, and – perhaps most ominously – to “keep order” during times of chaos.

Although Haiti is well within its rights to establish an army, the purpose of a military is not to provide internal security, but to combat external threats. A Haitian official claims that it’s embarrassing to have the United Nations providing security in Haiti.

But although its mission in Haiti has been marred by scandal, the U.N. is training a national police force to provide security and keep order once the peacekeepers finally leave. It’s unclear why a military would be preferable in this regard to a civilian security force.

And it’s similarly unclear why Martelly thinks he needs to build a military to create jobs or invest in infrastructure. Haiti is in desperate need of construction workers – even before the 2010 earthquake leveled buildings and destroyed homes, Haiti’s infrastructure was already in a precarious position.

If Martelly truly wanted to provide opportunities for the young people of Haiti, he could initiate a programme that would train men and women in construction and create jobs for the multitudes of unemployed Haitians. Instead, the new military will supposedly be rebuilding the country while millions of Haitians continue to languish in poverty.

In a country with a sparse amount of cash and a government unable to provide even the most basic necessities to its own population, it seems fiscally irresponsible and morally bankrupt to spend 95 million dollars on rebuilding an army that has such an atrocious record of human rights abuses.

The cholera outbreak, food insecurity, and the 500,000 squatters lacking permanent homes are just a few of the litany of problems facing Haiti today. The lack of a military force is not high on that list of priorities.

Although Haiti’s elite and powerful seem to support the new military, a poll conducted over five years found that fully 96 percent of Haitians oppose its recreation. Defying the widespread opposition and pressing need for other development projects, Michel Martelly’s plan has finally come to fruition.

Despite assurances from officials that this military force will not have the means to imitate its predecessors, the horrors from the recent past still linger in the minds of those who remember. If history repeats itself like it is prone to do, Haiti could revert back to the days where standing on the wrong side of the ideological fence means certain death.

Nathalie Baptiste is a Haitian-American contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus who lives in the Washington, D.C. area. She holds a BA and MA in International Studies and writes about Latin America and the Caribbean. You can follow her on Twitter at @nhbaptiste. This article originally appeared on Foreign Policy in Focus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Make-up job”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who benefits?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The state guarantees the right to education’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quality control and fraud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the demonstrators running through the streets of Haiti's capital on Sep. 30, 2012. Credit: Lionel Fortuné/IPS

By Milo Milfort and Lafontaine Orvild
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 1 2012 (IPS)

Several thousand marchers demonstrated against Haitian President Michel Martelly on Sunday, the anniversary of a bloody coup d’état that toppled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide 21 years ago.

With posters and slogans denouncing the rising cost of living, the government’s authoritarianism and corruption, and also calling for Martelly to step down, demonstrators made their way to the ruins of the National Palace, crushed in the devastating earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010.

“One way or the other, he’s got to go!” was one of the many slogans shouted by demonstrators, whose ranks included hundreds of supporters of Aristide’s Lavalas Family party, as well as people from parties and groups who once marched in the streets against the popular former priest and president.

Aristide was ousted in 2004 with support of these same political groups, and also in a coup d’état in 1991 that resulted in a brutal three-year military regime. Both efforts had overt and covert support from Washington.

On Sunday, the former sworn enemies were marching together in a demonstration that brought to a close several weeks of protests around the country. Some of the marchers carried red cards – indicating a fatal “penalty” in football – while others carried posters.

The Martelly government has also faced increasing criticism for its failure to re-house earthquake victims as well as for rising prices due in part to the falling value of the Haitian gourde. Consumer prices rose almost one percent in August alone, bringing inflation over the past 12 months to over six percent, according to the government Haitian Institute of Statistics and Data Processing.

In an effort to calm the population, in September the government formed a “price stabilisation committee” and announced it would import 300,000 sacks of rice from Japan. Rice farmers and economists have denounced the measure as populist and harmful to local agriculture.

“The government decision to subsidise rice ‘dumping’ is a direct consequence of the protests of people who have seen their cost of living rise,” rice farmer and peasant leader Nesly Voltaire told IPS in an interview in the country’s “breadbasket”, the Artibonite Valley. “The money the government is investing in importing rice could have been used instead to finance small farmers.”

Speaking with the online news agency AlterPresse on Sunday, Schiller Louisdor of the Lavalas Family said the deterioration in people’s living conditions was the direct result of both “coups d’état” and added: “We want to tell the president that we won’t accept this situation of misery.”

Over the past two weeks, students, teachers, workers, mothers and fathers who can’t muster school fees for their children, and the unemployed have taken to the streets in a half-dozen cities across the nation to protest rising food prices, unpaid teachers’ salaries, poor conditions at the state university in Gonaïves and insecurity and crime that plague many cities.

Les Cayes and Cap-Haïtien have also both seen strikes. While some of the demonstrations only gathered a few hundred, others – notably in Cap-Haïtien in Haiti’s north – have brought out thousands.

“This movement is going to spread! Other cities are going to demonstrate!” declared Senator Moïse Jean Charles of the North department in radio interviews last week. Jean Charles is one of the regime’s most outspoken critics.

Other politicians have also been adding their voice to the chorus. On the radio last week, former presidential candidate and constitutional scholar Mirlande Manigat said the public “should pay attention to the demonstrations”.

“We need to watch all of this closely. Every city has its own problems,” added the head of the Rassemblement des Démocrates Nationaux Progessistes (RNDP – Assembly of Progressive National Democrats). “These developments show that now the people are no longer just talking; they are acting.”

The Organisation Peuple en Lutte (OPL – Organzation People in Struggle) party issued a “communiqué” on Sep. 22 deploring “the lamentable situation in the country and the depressing possibilities for the future as a result of the government’s antidemocratic attitude and the autocratic decisions of authorities which are leading the whole society down dangerous paths of illegitimacy and chronic political instability.”

The “illegitimacy” and “autocratic decisions” to which the opposition party referred are related to the executive’s ramming through constitutional amendments last June. Scores of analysts and scholars – including Manigat – have called them “unconstitutional”.

More recently, the executive has attempted to force the creation of an electoral council without properly following proper procedure. So far, the legislative branch has failed to choose their representatives. Elections originally slated for November have been indefinitely delayed, leaving every single city hall, and one-third of the Senate, without elected officials.

Last week, the minister of justice suddenly fired the Commissaire de Gouvernement (top government prosecutor) Jean Renel Sénatus for insubordination and for “disrespect”. The next 48 hours saw a virtual revolving door of two more nominations and then resignations for the same post, until it was finally filled on Saturday.

Quoted in the Haitian daily Le Nouvelliste on September 28, Sénatus agreed he had been insubordinate.

“In less than three months, the minister (of justice) asked me to execute 17 illegal orders. In these cases, yes, he can say that I didn’t execute orders and that I was disrespectful,” the former prosecutor said, adding that the minister had also asked him to arrest 36 people for a “plot against the security of the state and association with criminals”. Sénatus said he also refused to carry out those orders.

Due to the implementation of draconian neoliberal policies in Haiti over the past two decades – which include the lowest tariffs on food imports in the Caribbean – and recent governments’ inability or lack of will to adequately intervene in the agricultural sector, Haitian rice production has failed to keep pace with population growth and consumer demand. Foreign rice routinely sells at 40 to 50 percent less than Haitian rice.

During a recent visit to Haiti, U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Ivan Simonovic deplored the government’s lack of progress in achieving even minimal benchmarks.

“For too long many Haitians have been claiming their economic and social rights in vain, and have not even been reached by basic services. The new development efforts must be based on human rights and ensure that benefits are enjoyed by all, in particular the poorest,” Simonovic said, according to a UN News Centre release on Sep. 17.

Speaking at the U.N. General Assembly on Sep. 26, Martelly called for rich nations to keep their promises to help Haiti recover from the earthquake. Thirty-two months after the catastrophe which killed at least 200,000 people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage, only about only about one-half of the 12 billion dollars pledged for relief and recovery by bilateral and multilateral donors has been disbursed, the U.N. Special Envoy’s office reporter last month.

Some 360,000 people still live in squalid tent camps. More than two-thirds of Haitians live on less than two dollars a day, according to the World Bank.

A building at the former Faculty of Medecine and Pharmacy. Credit: INURED

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 24 2012 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

When the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission failed to approve, or even respond to, a proposal by the University of the State of Haiti (UEH) for a unified campus to replace the nine destroyed or badly damaged faculties in the capital, Vice Rector Fritz Deshommes was not surprised at the silence.

Nor was he shocked at the fact that, 25 years after students and professors asked for help from Haiti’s post-dictatorship governments, they remain in separate faculties sprinkled across Port-au-Prince.

“The reason that the university campus has never been built is political. Because if all the students were permanently together in one place, they would have the necessary material conditions to better organise themselves and make their demands heard,” Deshommes told Haiti Grassroots Watch.

“Then they would be able to turn everything upside down. The political authorities understood the importance of this. A single campus is not in their interests,” he said.

The fight for a campus didn’t start only after the earthquake. It was born after 1986, the date of the end of the dictatorship of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier.

Ever since a 1960 strike of students at the University of Haiti, François Duvalier established his control over the various faculties. He issued a decree on Dec. 16, 1960 creating the “University of the State” in the place of the University of Haiti, whose fascist character was apparent in the language of the decree.

Among other things, it said “considering the necessity to organise the University on new foundations in order to prevent it from transforming into a bastion where subversive ideas would develop…”

Article 9 was even clearer. It said that any student wanting to enroll in the university had to get a police paper certifying that he or she did not belong to any communist group or any association under suspicion by the state.

After Feb. 7, 1986 – which saw the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier in a U.S.-government chartered airplane – one of the most dominant slogans became “Haiti is free!”

The political uprising that spread throughout the country also extended to the university system. As in other sectors of Haitian national life, professors and students at the university demanded a number of reforms, as well as the construction of a campus that would gather together all the faculties sprinkled throughout the capital.

Since then, there has been some progress – the name was changed to UEH, there has been some democratisation, the level of teaching has been improved – but lack of financing has paralysed the institution. The budgets from the last few years show that UEH has never received more than one to 1.3 percent of the state budget.

Even worse, the government’s Action Plan for Renewal and Development (PADRN in French), proposed by the René Préval team, asked for only 60 million dollars for “professional and higher education” as part of its request for 3.864 billion dollars sought for reconstruction – only 1.5 percent of the total.

The new Michel Martelly government showed signs it would increase UEH’s budget, but according to a recent report by AlterPresse, a member of the Haiti Grassroots Watch partnership, the most recent budget dedicates only 1.5 percent to UEH.

“This budget shows the contempt that our elected officials have for the country’s principal public institution of higher education, as well as their evident desire to weaken it and perhaps even do away with it altogether,” Professor Jean Vernet Henry, rector of UEH, told AlterPresse in the Jan. 27 article.

“Friends of Haiti” support the private sector

At the very moment the proposal for the State University of Haiti campus was locked in a drawer, the Dominican Republic built a university campus in the north of the country – the King Henry Christophe University. Built in only 18 months, the campus cost 50 million dollars.

And the universities and government of the “friends of Haiti” countries?

Despite a number of meetings and conferences held abroad and at seaside hotels and at the most expensive conference centres in the country, despite the promises of a number of U.S. universities, through at least two consortia, and despite the promises at the Regional Conference of Rectors and Presidents of the Francophone University Agency (AUF in French) as well as the AUF, most courses are still taught in sheds and temporary buildings.

“We have hosted a lot of universities who are capable of assisting us, but they don’t have the resources to build,” Rector Henry told the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article published last January.

“They can (only) only help us through long-distance courses, scholarships and exchanges,” he added.

In the meantime, at Quisqueya University, a private institution, reconstruction is moving along well. Back in October, the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission gave a green light for a project of the Faculty of Medicine, and more recently – last December – the Clinton Bush Fund offered 914,000 dollars for a “Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation”.

“The Center will be a destination for business people of all levels,” the Fund’s Paul Altidor said in an article on the Fund’s website.

The focus of Haiti’s “friends” is clear.

The future in peril

But a 2000 study of public sector universities in the developing world called “Peril and Promise” is also clear, especially on the urgency of investing in public sector higher education.

It says, “Markets require profit and this can crowd out important educational duties and opportunities… The disturbing truth is that these enormous disparities are poised to grow even more extreme, impelled in large part by the progress of the knowledge revolution and the continuing brain drain…

“For this reason the Task Force urges policymakers and donors – public and private, national and international – to waste no time. They must work with educational leaders and other key stakeholders to reposition higher education in developing countries.”

That was back in 2000.

Have Haitian politicians, donors, and the “citizens” in the north and others trying to take over the King Henry Christophe University read that report?

Many critics fear that Haiti’s past and present governments – who permitted in the past and persist in permitting the deterioration and denigration of a commonly held good, the State University of Haiti – have been so completely swept away by flood of neoliberal thinking that they don’t see the catastrophe that they have and are in the process of constructing, through non-reconstruction.

*Students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti collaborated on this series.

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 visit Haiti Grassroots Watch.

Excerpt:

A demonstrator supporting a unionisation campaign in October holds a sign that says, "Respect the rights of working people." Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Dec 20 2011 (IPS)

Ever since being elected earlier this year, Haitian President Michel Martelly and his team have been betting Haiti’s reconstruction on foreign investors.

“We are ready for new ideas and new businesses, and are creating the conditions necessary for Haiti to become a natural and attractive destination for foreign investment,” the new president said at a meeting in New York City last fall.

“The window of opportunity is now,” an aide added. “Haiti has a new president and a new way of thinking about foreign investments and job creation.”

The new government’s showcase project is the Caracol Industrial Park, being built with 124 million dollars of U.S. taxpayer funds, and another 55 million dollars from the Inter-American Development Bank.

While the president might be new, and there might be new actors on the scene, there’s not much new about the plans. A recent report from the Haitian investigative journalism partnership, Haiti Grassroots Watch, shows that the focus on assembly industries is not such a “new” idea.

In the early 1980s some 80,000 people were stitching baseballs and piecing together electronics for mostly U.S. companies.

The sector atrophied after the dictatorship. Many foreign companies picked up and left as popular unrest increased. But the national industrial park SONAPI stayed open and the governments that followed have continued to court foreign investors, counting on the needs of multinationals to guide the country’s economic development.

Today, about 29,000 people work in the hangar-like factories, but the Martelly government has said it wants to “create” 200,000 or even 500,000 assembly industry jobs.

Economist Camille Chalmers told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) that the industries did create jobs in the past, but added, “if we can say SONAPI created 60,000 jobs, we can also say it attracted two million unemployed people (who emigrated from the countryside)… We all know the conditions in Cité Soleil (where the capital’s poorest live). People live like animals.”

Nevertheless, Haitian governments have continued to bet on assembly industries.

In 2002, then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide government signed into law legislation granting foreign investors 15-year tax holidays and other benefits. In 2003, Aristide himself traveled up to northeast Haiti to break ground for the CODEVI free trade zone.

More recently, in an exclusive interview with HGW, Luc Especa of the government Free Trade Zone office explained the strategy this way:

“The state does all this to allow for investment and job-creation… A guy won’t invest to create jobs, he does it to make a profit, so you have to show him that he is going to make a profit. You have to guarantee that. You are smarter than him. You have your objective, too. Your objective is make sure the investment happens, so jobs get created.”

Chalmers, who heads the Haitian Platform for Alternative Development, deplores what he calls incredible “short-sightedness” and lack of vision.

“They are betting Haiti’s future on slave labour,” he said. “I think it is more than just an error. It’s a crime, because in general assembly industry factories don’t bring development, they don’t bring prosperity, and they won’t help us get out our current situation.”

U.S. taxpayers subsidise “sweatshops” and the “race to the bottom”

The first company to sign up for the new Caracol Industrial Park was South Korean textile giant Sae-A which, according to media reports, produces 1.4 million pieces of clothing a day in its 20 factories. Sae-A ships to K-Mart, Wal-Mart, GAP and other major U.S. clothing chains and has promised to invest 78 million dollars.

“Investors still do not believe or understand the value and potential of Haiti as we do,” Kim Woong-ki, chairman of Sae-A, told the Associated Press after a ceremony inaugurating construction at the Caracol park last month.

Sae-A will be well-positioned with a new mega-factory and the cheapest labour in the hemisphere: Five dollars a day or less, which qualifies as a “sweatshop” rate by any standards. [See story #1]

And what remains unspoken – both in Haitian and foreign coverage – is the fact that the U.S. taxpayer-subsidised factories in Haiti likely result in lay-offs for workers in countries with higher wages, including the U.S., which has lost over 700,000 textile and apparel jobs since 2000.

Caracol site and the environment

The area chosen for the country’s new 243-hectare Caracol Industrial Park is near the coast, halfway between the northern cities of Cap- Haitien and Ounaminthe. It was recommended by a U.S.-based consulting firm hired by the Ministry of Economy and Finances (MEF), Koios Associates. Koios’s September 2010 study said the site was ideal, in part because the land was “devoid of habitation and intensive cultivation”.

Except it wasn’t quite “devoid”. The Caracol site was home to 300 farming plots.

“The place they chose to put the park is the most fertile area of the department,” farmer Renel Pierre explained to HGW. “In Chambert, they grow plantains, beans, manioc and other things. If, for city people, their ‘treasury’ is their savings account book, for peasants, their ‘treasury’ is this land.”

But last January, without notice, contractors put fences around 243 hectares, mostly lands that had been leased by peasant families from the state for decades. Most of the farmers have been paid for their lost crops, and many have been offered replacement land, but in less fertile areas.

Putting an industrial park – which will attract between 20,000 and 200,000 new residents – in the midst of a fertile area is not necessarily going to contribute to Haiti’s “sustainable development”, despite government claims to the contrary, economist Chalmers notes. Haiti has gone from virtual food self-sufficiency three decades ago to importing over 60 percent of its food. Taking more land out of production will only increase that figure.

“Before 1992, 90 percent of our cereal needs were met here in Haiti. That’s all changed. The country has become more dependent,” Chalmers told HGW. “That means food has become more expensive as salaries have gotten lower. You get paid in gourdes, and you consume in U.S. dollars. That is terrible for the country… it is sinking us deeper into dependency.”

Perhaps just as disturbing is the fact that the park is being set up in the middle of one of Haiti’s major watersheds. But, according to the Koios study, this is precisely the reason the site was chosen, because “it is capable of absorbing a large volume of treated water.”

Despite being slated to be home to Haiti’s first modern textile mill – which will be using toxic dyes – the Caracol park is being built only about five kilometres from the Caracol Bay, home to some of the country’s last mangrove forests and coral reefs.

But – by its own admission – the Koios firm didn’t consider any of these factors, nor did it consult with the Ministry of the Environment.

In its second study, on environmental and social impacts and dated in May, 2011, Koios admitted: “The study process and the section of sites was not accompanied by extensive environmental, hydrologic or topographic research.”

Koios also claimed it was not aware of the “the complex and precious ecosystem of the Caracol Bay” when it recommended the industrial park site, despite the fact that there are numerous public documents on plans to turn the bay into a marine park. Koios also recommended that – due to the “new” information – perhaps the government ought to consider moving the site.

Not surprisingly, the study was never discussed by the media. The industrial park site was not moved. And, despite repeated requests, neither the Ministry of Environment nor the Ministry of Economy would speak to HGW about these documents, the Koios recommendations, or the choice of Caracol.

Since then, even though most of the documents are available to the public, no major media outlet has discussed them or the considerable environmental risks related to the bay, the water table, the inevitable population boom and associated water and sanitation challenges.

*This story is the second of a two-part series on the pitfalls, disadvantages and risks of a major new industrial park and the Martelly government’s focus on luring foreign investors to Haiti. It was adapted from a longer investigative series by Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW).

HGW is 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.

Excerpt:

Workers arrive early in the morning at the One World Apparel factory in Port-au-Prince to assemble garments for export from Haiti. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Dec 20 2011 (IPS)

“Haiti is open for business.” That’s what President Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly said at a recent ceremony as he and former U.S. president Bill Clinton laid a cornerstone for a giant industrial zone being built in northern Haiti.

Across the country and abroad, Martelly, his government, and their advisors – like Clinton – have been pushing the island nation as a foreign investor’s dream come true.

They have good reason to say Haiti is “open for business”. With 15- year tax holidays and – in some cases – massive subsidies, there are deals to be had. Airplanes and hotels are full of foreign investors looking to get in on the ground floor of the post-earthquake reconstruction. Hundreds poured into the capital at the end of November for a two-day conference.

Apparel makers, especially, want to set up shop, according to factory owner Georges Sassine, head of the Association of Haitian Industries.

“I remember somebody saying a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” Sassine told National Public Radio in 2010. “It is true, the opportunity has been thrust upon us.”

The new government’s showcase project is the Caracol Industrial Park, being built with 124 million dollars of U.S. taxpayer funds, and another 55 million dollars from the Inter-American Development Bank. [See story #2]

“This is the kind of change we want,” Martelly said the Caracol ceremony last month. “This is what they call ‘sustainable development.'”

But a new report from Haiti Grassroots Watch shows that the focus on assembly industries does not represent a big “change”, nor will it necessarily deliver “sustainable development”.

Despite the many pitfalls, disadvantages and risks, major Haitian and foreign media have been unanimously supportive of the new park and of Martelly’s focus on foreign investment, using unqualified terms like “hope”, “good news” and “progress”, without even raising questions.

But there are definite winners and losers in the gambit.

In a new seven-part series, produced after four months of interviews and the review of dozens of studies, the investigative journalism partnership exposed the challenges, risks and arguably erroneous thinking behind the new park and the gamble of betting Haiti’s development on five-dollar a day wages and “the race to the bottom”.

“Sweatshop” wages by any standard

“I have a problem with my country, Haiti – I’ve been working in factories here for 25 years, and I still don’t have my own house,” Evelyne Pierre-Paul told HGW.

Pierre-Paul, 50, whose name was changed in order to protect her from reprisals at the hands of her boss, doesn’t even rent a house. Before the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, she and her three children rented two rooms for 10,000 gourdes (about 250 dollars) a year.

But the building was destroyed in the earthquake and she hasn’t been able to save up a year’s rent yet. Twenty-three months after the catastrophe that killed hundreds of thousands, she and her children are still living under a tent in one of the capital’s hundreds of squalid refugee camps.

Pierre-Paul’s average daily take-home wage is actually more than Haiti’s minimum factory wage of 150 gourdes, or 3.75 dollars, a day. She earns about 236 gourdes, or 5.90 dollars a day. But that doesn’t cover even one-quarter of what would be considered a family’s most basic expenses.

A study by HGW of assembly workers’ expenses in the capital and at the Haiti-Dominican Republic border revealed that on an average day, workers spend more than 50 percent of an average day’s wages just getting to work and back and eating their midday meal.

A recent study by the U.S.-based Solidarity Center, which is linked to the AFL-CIO trade union federation, determined that a “living wage” for a worker with two children is 749 dollars a month – almost five times the average monthly wage.

Pierre-Paul’s wage – about 150 dollars a month – is far from “living”. She can’t afford to send all her children to school. She can’t even afford to move out of the squalid camp.

Indeed, in buying power, Pierre-Paul earns less than workers did during the assembly factory boom in the 1980s. At that time, the daily wage was worth about three dollars. Today, measured in 1982 dollars, the minimum factory wage is worth 1.61 dollars. The average wage of 236 gourdes a day – as determined by the HGW study – is worth only 2.53 in 1982 dollars.

“The salary question is a veritable scandal,” economist Camille Chalmers told HGW in an interview. “The salary has gotten lower and lower. (Workers) get paid in gourdes but in fact (because almost half of food eaten in Haiti is now imported), they consume in dollars.”

“It’s a big error to bet on the slave-wage labour, on breaking the backs of workers who are paid nothing while (foreign) companies get rich. It’s not only an error, it’s a crime,” he continued.

Pierre-Paul’s boss, One World Apparel owner Charles Baker, admits that he doesn’t pay his workers enough.

“If a person is honest, it’s clear that it’s not enough,” Baker, a two-time presidential candidate, told HGW. “If I could give a worker 1,000 gourdes a day, I’d pay that. But the conditions in Haiti don’t permit us to pay 1,000 gourdes.”

Baker and other factory owners claim they can’t pay more because of they did, their international clients – like Gildan Activewear, Hanes, Levis, GAP, Banana Republic, K-Mart and Wal-Mart – would pick up and move out. And so the Haitian government – with the full backing of the U.S. government, as recent Wikileaked cables revealed – remains the lowest wage in the hemisphere-wide “race to the bottom”.

But Baker insists the assembly industry phase of Haiti’s development is just a “step”.

“Yes, it’s a race to the bottom… if you count on it!” Baker said.

Baker claims that low-wage, low-skilled assembly industries are temporary, and that they will be a big part of the Haitian economy for only about “10 or 15 years”.

“It’s a step. We’re going up the stairs and it’s one of the steps,” he said.

Haiti has been on the same step for almost 30 years. [See story #4]

The “race to the bottom” pits Haitian workers against workers in the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

CODEVI, a free trade zone industrial park in Ouanaminthe, in the Northeast Department opened on the Dominican border about eight years ago, after salaries got “too high”, CODEVI director Miguel Angel Torres told HGW.

“In the early 2000s, clients told Dominican companies that the salaries were too high. They said they couldn’t pay. What happened? CODEVI appeared,” Torres said, proudly. “The benefits in Haiti are better than in other countries… We can compete with any company in the Dominican Republic!”

In the meantime, Baker and other Haitian factory owners remain vehemently anti-union, according to workers like Pierre-Paul and according to a recent study by the United Nations-affiliated International Labor Association/Better Work programme.

In an April 2011, report, the Haiti branch of the agency noted, “very significant challenges related to the rights of workers to freely form, join, and participate in independent trade unions in this industry in Haiti.”

Indeed, five months later, about a week after textile workers in the capital registered a union, all five union leaders suddenly lost their jobs. Better Work recently ruled the factories should reinstate all union officers but as of Dec. 12, most of the owners had not complied.

*This story is the first of a two-part series on the pitfalls, disadvantages and risks of a major new industrial park and the Martelly government’s focus on luring foreign investors to Haiti. It was adapted from a longer investigative series by Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW).

HGW is 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.

Excerpt: