A demonstrator holds up an anti-U.N. poster during an October 2010 protest outside a MINUSTAH base in Port-au-Prince. Credit: Ansel Herz/IPS

By Thalif Deen and Patrick Saint-Pre
UNITED NATIONS/PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 31 2013 (IPS)

Some 2,400 kilometres from New York City, where victims of Haiti’s cholera epidemic are suing the United Nations in a U.S. federal court, the disease continues to burn through the populace with no end in sight.

In a single week between Oct. 19 and Oct. 26, the Pan-American Health Organisation reported 1,512 new cases and 31 deaths. New cases are reported in all 10 departments."It is clear that damage has been caused, the negligence of the U.N. is proven and it must assume its responsibilities." -- Mario Joseph of BAI

At the Cholera Treatment Centre run by Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders in Delmas 33, a commune in Port-au-Prince Arrondissement, nurse Viola Augustine says the clinic is so packed it cannot accept new patients.

“The centre has already handled over 20,000 cases of cholera since it opened. At the moment, the centre is full and we cannot take in the increase of patients due to the rainy season,” she told IPS. “We are forced, in this case, to transfer patients to other treatment centres when they are brought here.”

The spread of cholera in Haiti, which has killed more than 8,300 and infected over 680,000 people since October 2010, has been blamed on Nepali peacekeepers who are part of the 9,500‑strong U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH).

The United Nations has refused demands for compensation. Earlier this month, an advocacy group filed a lawsuit seeking reparations from the world body on behalf of the cholera victims.

Felicia Paul, 45, lives in Saint-Marc, about 100 kms northwest of the capital. She caught cholera in 2010, and survived it though extensive treatment with saline IV bags.

“I was infected with cholera for 12 days,” Paul told IPS. “My two daughters caught it while they were taking care of me. MINUSTAH brought cholera so we ask that they compensate me. We always drank water out of the river and it never made us ill. But that water has been contaminated due the spillage of the peacekeeper’s feces into the river.

“I still feel the effects of the disease,” she added. “It blurs my vision and weakens me every day.”

A former senior U.N. official from Nepal told IPS he strongly supports compensation.

“As a Nepali who lived in and loved Haiti, I feel special empathy for the victims of the cholera epidemic,” said former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Kul Gautam.

In a way, he said, even the Nepali peacekeepers are victims of the kind of poverty and poor governance that afflicts both Nepal and Haiti. The two nations are categorised by the United Nations as among the 49 least developed countries (LDCs), described as the poorest of the world’s poor.

None dispute that the lack of clean water and sanitation in Haiti has been a key driver of the epidemic.

“I wish a creative solution could be found whereby the Haitian victims would get some modest amount of financial support on humanitarian grounds, without the U.N. having to give up its diplomatic immunity,” Gautam said.

“For this to happen, some enlightened governments and foundations would need to offer help, not as a matter of legal obligation, but as a matter of humanitarian consideration,” said Gautam, a former deputy executive director of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.

Mario Joseph has been the director of Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) since its inception in 1995. BAI, together with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, is leading the lawsuit.

“The trial is proceeding normally like any other trial,” he told IPS. “We’ve taken the first steps with the U.N. to bring them to take responsibility. To submit our claim, we sent the case to [Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon, but unfortunately, the U.N. said it was protected by immunity.

“The U.N. experts have clearly established that it was the Nepalese peacekeepers who brought cholera to Haiti. It is clear that damage has been caused, the negligence of the U.N. is proven and it must assume its responsibilities.

“An organisation like the U.N. should not exercise a policy of double standard for evaluating itself vis-à-vis its member states. Haiti is a founding member of the U.N. In this sense the organisation must assume its responsibility concerning the cholera it brought into the country,” he said.

U.N. Spokesperson Martin Nesirky says the U.N. remains committed to do all it can to help the people of Haiti overcome the cholera epidemic.

“The United Nations is working on the ground with the government and people of Haiti both to provide immediate and practical assistance to those affected, and to put in place better infrastructure and services for all,” he told a press briefing this month.

Kanak Dixit, a veteran Nepali journalist and a civil rights activist, told IPS the fact that the epidemic has been traced to likely contamination of water sourced to the Nepali peacekeeping battalion is a matter of great consternation.

Nepal is heading into elections on Nov. 19, and the news has not received much attention there, nor has there been public discussion on the matter, he said.

“It would be extremely sad if it were true that a poor country in one hemisphere has been involved in the spread of the epidemic in an equally poor country in another part of the globe,” said Dixit, founder of the news magazine Himal SouthAsian.

He said it should be the collective duty of the United Nations to support the Haitian people in battling the epidemic, and supporting the victims’ families, rather than take a legalistic and hands‑off approach.

“Nepalis would understand the need to respond to the epidemic with humanitarian ethos and organisational efficiency,” Dixit said.

Nurse Augustine agrees. “For a disease like cholera that has led to so many victims, I think the United Nations should compensate those who have suffered because the illness is truly horrible.

“Talking about cholera and living with it are two different things,” she said. “Living with cholera is really frustrating.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cholera-excrement connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advances and challenges

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

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

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

But there is already a problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-cholera plan up a creek?

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

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

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

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

John Abniel Poliné is a neighbour.

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

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

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

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

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

An infected child resting on the floor of the Doin medical centre near Saint Marc, a town in the Artibonite Region, where UNICEF has worked to contain the cholera outbreak. Credit: UN Photo/UNICEF/Marco Dormino

By Ethan Freedman
WASHINGTON, Jul 20 2012 (IPS)

U.S. legislators are appealing to the United Nations to take a greater role in addressing Haiti’s cholera outbreak, now in its third year and which has has left thousands dead.

In a letter addressed to U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations Susan Rice, 104 U.S. members of Congress urged Rice to help step up U.N. concern over the outbreak.

“It is imperative for the U.N. to now act decisively to control the cholera epidemic,” Representative John Conyers, Jr. wrote. “A failure to act will not only lead to countless more deaths … and will pose a permanent public health threat.”

The cholera outbreak has been linked in analyses to Nepali peacekeepers stationed in Haiti in 2010. A 2011 study by the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that the cholera strand introduced into Haiti — Vibrio cholerae — matched a strain that was found in a South Asian source identified in 2002 and 2008.

The 2010 outbreak was the first time that a case of cholera was reported in Haiti for nearly a century, according to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

In March, former president Bill Clinton, now a U.N. special envoy to Haiti, stated that a U.N. peacekeeper was the “proximate cause” of the outbreak.

The U.N. offered no formal comment to IPS regarding the outbreak.

The letter from U.S. representatives was welcomed by the Haiti rights group Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), based in Boston, Massachusetts. The group is currently suing the U.N. on behalf of 5,000 cholera victms, for up to 100,000 dollars per death, and 50,000 per infected person.

“Congress’ call to action reflects a growing consensus that the U.N. has a moral and legal responsibility to address Haiti’s cholera epidemic, and that it must do so urgently before more lives are lost,” Brian Concannon Jr., director of the IJDH, said in a statement.

The U.N. has never accepted full responsibility for the outbreak, however, finding in a 2011 report that a “confluence of circumstances” caused the outbreak and that the epidemic was “not the fault of, or deliberate action of, a group or individual”.

According to some, the continued denial can be put down to the U.N. trying to save face. “It’s an embarrassment for them,” Daniel Beeton, director of international communications at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank based here, told IPS. “It’s the opposite of their mission.”

According to the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO), an arm of the World Health Organisation (WHO), more than 7,000 people have died from cholera in Haiti since the start of the outbreak in 2010.

Jon Kim Andrus, deputy director of PAHO, said that in addition to the death tolls, the Haitian government had reported a total of more than 520,000 cases of cholera.

The influx of cholera in Haiti has had adverse effects on the country beyond just health concerns, according to the WHO.

“In addition to human suffering caused by cholera, cholera outbreaks cause panic, disrupt the social and economic structure and can impede development in the affected communities,” the WHO has said.

The WHO cites the experience of Peru, which experienced a cholera outbreak in 1991. It ultimately cost the country 770 million dollars due to “food trade embargoes and adverse effects on tourism”.

Cholera, which induces diarrhea and vomiting in the victim that potentially lead to extreme dehydration, is impacting an economy that already has an unemployment rate of 40 percent, according to the Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook.

In response to the outbreak and humanitarian crises in Haiti, the U.N. requested 864 million dollars for stabalisation efforts, in 2010. The current budget for the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is 793 million dollars.

According to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the government has already distributed more than 73 million dollars in aid to Haiti in response to the cholera outbreak.

Cholera has also been spreading across the Caribbean. Cuba now has 170 confirmed cases of the disease, though it has not yet been definitively linked to the outbreak in Haiti. However, the Cuban Health Ministry has said that the last reported outbreak of cholera in the country, before this year, was shortly after the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Haiti has had additional problems previously with U.N. peacekeepers, notably over claims of sexual assault and excessive violence.

In March, the U.N. discharged three members of the Pakistani Formed Police Unit, who were serving with MINUSTAH, after they were accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year-old boy.

U.N. peacekeeping troops were also accused of pinning down and sexually assaulting an 18-year-old Haitian man in 2011, an event that was reportedly captured on a cell phone video.

As of February, more than 400,000 Haitians were still living in tent camps two years after the country's devastating earthquake. Credit: UN Photo/Victoria Hazou

By Betty Desir
PORT-AU-PRINCE, May 14 2012 (IPS)

Almost three months after the seat was left vacant when the former prime minister resigned due to disagreements and political wrangling with the president, as of Monday, Haiti finally has a new prime minister.

Businessman Laurent Salvador Lamothe, 39, will succeed Dr. Gary Conille who served in the important post for only four months. The doctor – who has also worked for several United Nations agencies around the world – resigned in February because of disagreements with President Michel Martelly, elected in May 2011.

Lamothe, an international entrepreneur, has been a business associate of Martelly for at least the past decade. The two partnered in a firm specialising in long distance refill telephone cards, and in a real estate holding company.

Lamothe also heads Global Voice Group, a telecommunications firm in Africa and Latin America, an apparently successful business that allows him to afford villas in many African countries.

Before taking on the position of prime minister, Lamothe served as minister of foreign affairs in the Martelly-Conille government. He said he was practicing the “foreign policy of business” because rather than focus on foreign affairs, he focused on foreign investments.

“The window of opportunity is open,” Lamothe declared during an international summit with foreign investors last year. “Haiti has a new president and a new approach to foreign investors and job creation.”

The Lamothe-Martelly vision for the country is based, at least partly, on its rock-bottom minimum wage, the lowest in the Americas: about five dollars a day. Many studies show that the wage is insufficient to provide for a worker, much less for a head of household.

However, Martelly’s government has pushed the country and a series of free trade zones as a destination for foreign companies to do their textile and furniture assembly work.

After the ratification of his general policy in front of the Senate last week, Lamothe declared his new government will continue to focus on foreign investment. In his speech, Lamothe made so many promises, the daily Le Nouvelliste subtitled an article “Profusion of Promises.”

Among other things, Lamothe promised roads, construction sites across the country, and new or repaired irrigation systems.

“History will remember a Martelly-Lamothe government that worked relentlessly, night and day, on the construction of a fair and inclusive society and on the edification of a real ‘State of Law,'” said Lamothe.

The U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince and the United Nations Mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, welcomed Lamothe’s ratification by the Senate last week.

“Political stability in Haiti is a key issue for the people of Haiti and the country’s ability to attract local and foreign investors to create jobs and increase the level of economic development,” said the embassy’s statement.

Mariano Fernández Amunátegui, special representative of the U.N. secretary general and head of the MINUSTAH mission of over 10,000 soldiers and police, also applauded the ratification.

He asked the Haitian people to “rebuild with a spirit of consensus in order to consolidate the foundations of national stability, strengthen democratic institutions and ensure peace, security and Haiti’s development.”

But consensus is still a distant dream for many organisations that work for social justice, fair minimum wage, respect of human rights and who are also waiting for answers for thousands of earthquake victims still living in tents.

Sanon Renel, executive secretary of coalition fighting for housing rights, the Force de Reflexion et d’Action sur la problématique de logement (Reflection and Action Coalition on the Housing Issue – FRAKKA), highlighted the government’s lack of social housing programmes.

“The government never put in a social housing programme after the 2010 earthquake. Canada recently gave 20 million dollars to re-house more than 13,000 families, but all the government did was hand each family 500 dollars to rent a house. Where did the rest of the money go?” Renel asked.

FRAKKA’s executive secretary also denounced the lack of sustainable development policies based on national production.

“The population has nothing to expect from this extreme right government characterised by lies, which will never take in account the people’s dreams,” he said.

The head of the Association of Women Haitian Community Radio Animators (REFRAKA), Marie Guyrleine Justin, said the new prime minister won’t bring about any changes in government policy, which she characterised as more pro-business than pro-women’s issues.

“If we talk about Bellerive (the prime minister before Conille), Conille and Lamothe, it is a ‘change’ within continuity,” she said.

The vice dean of the Ethnology Faculty at the State University, Professor Jean-Yves Blot, said he that while didn’t see much hope for change with the new prime minister, the politician’s speeches surpassed religion in their use of promises and rhetoric to instill and maintain hope in a complicated situation, where over two-thirds of the population are un- or underemployed, where cholera is on the rise, and where almost a half a million refugees still live in tent cities.

“The politician uses the religious language to fool people and to make them hope for the situation to change,” Blot said, adding that the ratification process violated Haiti’s Constitution.

The ratification wasn’t simple. Lamothe was accused of holding dual citizenship, which would make him ineligible to serve as prime minister. In addition, the session at the lower house on May 3 was tinged with vote haggling. Eight out of the 30 senators boycotted their ratification session on May 8.

The businessman-turned-public servant is facing significant challenges: a paramilitary force claiming to be retired army soldiers, refugees, crime, an impoverished state and cholera.

The disease, which arrived in Haiti via Nepalese peacekeepers in October 2011, has so far affected more than 500,000 people and killed more than 7,000 others.

(END)

Ten months after the earthquake in Haiti, protestors condemn NGOs and the U.N. for lack of shelter and basic services. The back of the man's red T-shirt says in Creole, "Down with NGO thieves/ We want good houses to live in." Credit: Judith Scherr/IPS

By Judith Scherr
BERKELEY, Feb 28 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 organise 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 organising tool by grassroots activists and human rights workers, Schuller said.

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