Under the Radar
The Haiti-Greece Connection
July 29, 2015
By Max A. Joseph
Debt is an instrument of control and other insidious motives that have been in use since ancient times. Its potency painfully felt when the debtor becomes insolvent.
European Union member and bankrupt Greece may be thousands of miles away from United Nations-occupied and destitute Haiti, but the distance doesn’t preclude these two countries from experiencing similar issues inherent to the brutal nature of the global order.
Under a narrative that exculpates perpetrators and vilifies victims, these two countries are portrayed as unsuitable to their neighborhood and, by extension, unworthy of sympathy from their more affluent and powerful neighbors. Succeeding generations of Greeks, like their Haitians counterpart, will have to deal with the nasty consequences associated with being an insolvent nation. It certainly does not help that the institutions equally responsible for the Greek debt crisis – Europe Central Bank, the giant international banks and the IMF– are the ones formulating the solution.
Let’s start with Greece, a country of 10 million inhabitants and a national debt of $380 billion. As a member of the world’s largest economic bloc, the country certainly possesses many advantages that may be appealing to lenders. However, were these “advantages” sufficient enough to warrant such vote of confidence in its ability to repay this massive debt? Absolutely not; despite a highly-educated workforce, Greece is essentially a developing economy that relies mostly on tourism and agricultural exports.
It will never be able to pay off this enormous debt.
Because the global economy is interwoven, the Greek debt crisis remains a threat to global prosperity seeing that it could usher a domino effect, engulfing other heavily indebted and much larger EU economies. That being said, shouldn’t the international lenders shoulder part of the blame and absorb some of the losses that come with Greece’s inability to fulfill its contractual obligations?
In a normal situation that would be the reasonable thing to do but in the arcane world of international finance, such mundane solution is anathema because portion of the debt are essentially investments made by states and private pension funds on behalf of retirees. Though most of the debt is nominally owed to EU governments and banks, their true ownership might be retirees from Cleveland, Ohio; Marseille, France, Manchester, England, or Munich, Germany. These retirees no doubt will not be asked to take smaller retirement checks because of bad decisions by mutual or hedge funds and banks or the Greeks’ inability to pay.
Predictably Alexis Tsipras, the Greek prime minister, was fighting a losing battle despite the popular support expressed in the July 5 referendum in which almost 62 percent of his countrymen convincingly rejected the burdensome conditions of the EU lenders and the IMF. As recently as the beginning of the twentieth century, Greece would have been invaded and occupied by national armies seeking to collect on behalf of their respective banks. Fortunately for the Greeks, that primal approach to collecting debts has been in hibernation, meaning not completely abandoned, under the 1944 Bretton Woods Accords, which created the ultimate mechanism (IMF and World Bank) for a collective and more effective control of international finance by the western powers.
Likewise Haiti, a perennial outcast in the international arena and current holder of the unenviable title of “poorest country in the western hemisphere,” was not so lucky. Its path to poverty — perpetual political turmoil and insolvency, though wholly different than that of Greece– is consistent with the characteristics of international relations. July 28 marked the hundredth anniversary of Haiti’s first occupation by U.S. Marines on behalf of U.S. corporations, which lasted nineteen years (1915-34.)
Whereas Greece’s monstrous debt originated with bad decisions by that country’s leaders and greedy international lenders, that of 1915 Haiti in contrast was the end result of bullying and robbery by France.
To sum it up, the sacrifices made by the more than one hundred thousand slaves that perished during Haiti’s war of independence (1791-1803) were nullified when France, with the backing of England, Germany, Spain and the U.S. navies, imposed a huge indemnity on the young republic in exchange for a formal recognition of its self-liberation. Apparently NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) informally existed prior to its founding in 1949.
Adding insult to injury, Haiti was forced to borrow the money from French banks at an exorbitant rate, which inevitably bankrupted the country. The National City Bank of New York, aka Citibank, would later acquire the deed to that loan from under the U.S. occupation whose premise (the Monroe Doctrine) could not tolerate the presence of a European competitor.
When a comprehensive account of the April 1825 naval blockade of Haiti and subsequent U.S. occupation of that country on July 28, 1915 is finally written, preferably by non-western historians, these two episodes will rank among the most severe punishments ever meted out on a defenseless little nation by predatory powers.
Ever since ancient Greece was yanked from the Ottoman Empire by the British and resurrected in 1830, it has been unable to find it’s footing in a neighborhood infested with predatory powers. Haiti, which came into existence in the course of a hard fought struggle against slavery and colonialism, has been in a corresponding situation since its inception in 1804. Until small countries like Greece and Haiti find a way to extricate themselves from the grid, they can expect more of the same.
About Latest Posts
Max A. Joseph Jr.
Max A. Joseph Jr. is a small business owner and consultant who writes about politics.
Labels: DEBT, GREECE, HAITI, IMF, World Bank
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(ALTERNET) Wikileaks Reveals Obama Administration's Role in Stifling Haitian Minimum Wage
American corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss prefer to pay Haitians slave wages to sew their clothes.
January 16, 2014 |
Strike another one for Wikileaks. The ever-controversial leaker of the world’s best-kept secrets has published a wire on The Nation that reveals the Obama Administration fought to keep the Haitian minimum wage to 31 cents an hour.
According to the published wire (which came to light thanks in large part to the Haiti Liberte, a newspaper based in Port-au-Prince and New York City), Haiti passed a law in 2012 raising its minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. America corporations like Hanes and Levi Strauss vociferously objected, claiming such an increase would irreparably harm their business and profitability. According to the leaked U.S. Embassy cable, keeping these garment workers at “slave wages,” was better for the two companies The corporations in question allegedly stated that they would only fork over a seven-cent-an-hour increase, eventually going so far as to involve the U.S. State Department.
Soon, the U.S. Ambassador put pressure on Michel Martelly, the president of Haiti, to find a middle ground, resulting in a $3-a-day minimum wage for all textile companies. To put it in perspective, the United States’s minimum wage—already considered extremely low—works out to roughly to $58 a day.
Haiti has about 25,000 garment workers, who are somehow getting by on these abysmal wages. According to Business Insider, if each garment worker was paid just $2 more a day, it would cost their given corporate employers $50,000 per working day, or $12.5 million a year. Hanes, the garment company best known for their t-shirts, had roughly 3,200 Haitians working in their factory. An increase of $2 a day would cost the company a mere $1.6 million a year—for a company that had $4.3 billion in sales last year alone.
Rod Bastanmehr is a freelance writer in New York City with a passion for music, film and culture. Follow him on Twitter @rodb.
Labels: HAITI, NEOLIBERALISM, WIKILEAKS
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(GLOBALRESEARCH) Mass Protests in Haiti: “Time for Haitians to Stop Taking Orders From Colonists”
By Kim Ives
Global Research, October 04, 2013
Haïti Liberté 2 October 2013
On Sep. 30, the 22nd anniversary of the 1991 coup d’état against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets of Port-au-Prince and Cap Haïtien to demand two things: “Martelly must go! MINUSTAH must go!”
Knowing this agenda, the day before over 100 delegates representing about two dozen different popular organizations from all of Haiti’s ten departments gathered at the Fany Villa Reception Center in Port-au-Prince to reflect on and debate a proposal on how to form a provisional government which could lead the country to free, fair, and sovereign elections after Martelly’s departure from power, which all of the delegates felt would be coming in the days ahead, one way or another.
The proposal was made by the Kòwòdinasyon Desalin or Dessalines Coordination (KOD), a new formation headed by several prominent veterans of Haiti’s democratic struggle over the past 25 years.
“We are sure that the U.S. Embassy has made its plans for what to do after the Haitian people have chased Martelly and [Prime Minister Laurent] Lamothe from power,” said one KOD leader, Yves Pierre-Louis, who is also Haïti Liberté’s Port-au Prince Bureau Chief. “The Haitian people also have to work out their plans so that Washington, Paris, and Ottawa don’t simply impose another puppet on Haiti, as they have done so often over the past two decades.”
...
The essence of KOD’s proposal is the formation of a 13 member Council of State which would lead the country with a judge drawn from Haiti’s Supreme Court. The Council of State’s members would be drawn from key sectors of Haitian society: peasant organizations, popular organizations, political parties, non-aligned parties, women’s organizations, unions, the business sector, vodou, Protestant, and Catholic sectors, students, young people, and civil society.
“The Council of State would sit down with the Supreme Court judge to find a democratic formula to name a government,” the KOD proposal reads. “That government would put in place a democratic Provisional Electoral Council which would hold a general election in the country for all the empty posts in a time frame of no more than six months.”
KOD proposed that Haiti should accept no international financing for those elections which comes with any strings attached. “We would not refuse” any solidarity offered from foreign nations, “but they cannot meddle in Haiti’s internal affairs,” the proposal reads. “They can give their support, but without any conditions.”
In the same vein, the proposal calls on the 9,000 occupation troops of the UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH) to leave the country immediately. “The last MINUSTAH soldier should leave the country no later than May 2014, just as [a Haitian] Senate resolution [passed in May] demands,” said the proposal.
KOD works with a host of popular organizations which were also instrumental in organizing the Popular Forum such as the National Movement for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity of Haitians (MOLEGHAF), the Patriotic Force for Respect of the Constitution (FOPARK), the National Popular Platform (PNP), the Movement for the Survival of Haitian Society (MOSSOH), the Organization of Young Progressives of Avenue Pouplar (OJPAP), Organization for National Progress (OPNA), the Great Space Reflection for Social Integration (GERES), the Awakened Militants for Another Haiti (MRH), and the Popular Assembly for Change in La Saline (RPCS).
Many organizations from Haiti’s provinces also sent delegates to the Forum, including groups like the Organization of Young Patriots for the Development of Baradères (OPDB), the League of Progressive Youth from Grande Rivière du Nord, Pòt la from the Artibonite, and the Revolutionary Movement for the Development of the North West (MRDNO), and OPDSIC from the Grande Anse.
There were also international delegates who attended from the Guadeloupe Haiti Tour Committee and the International Support Haiti Network in the United States, and from the Travayè e Péyizan (Workers and Peasants) organization in Guadeloupe. Messages of solidarity were also sent from unions and parties in Brazil and Argentina.
The meeting was chaired by two other KOD leaders, Oxygène David and Pierre Michaël, who kept the speeches moving at an efficient clip. FOPARK’s Biwon Odigé, whose organization initiated the call for a massive march on Sep. 30, also shared the podium.
“Overall, the delegates welcomed and received well KOD’s proposal which was presented at the beginning of the day,” said another KOD leader, Mario Joseph, one of Haiti’s most prominent human rights lawyers, at an Oct. 1 press conference at the Office of International Lawyers (BAI).
“The delegates divided themselves into eight workshops which met for almost two hours to analyze the proposal. Afterwards, each workshop presented a summary of the delegates’ reflections on how to reinforce and enrich the proposal. In the days ahead, a committee of synthesis will review the reports of each workshop to draw up a final resolution. All popular organizations who approve the final resolution can sign it, even if there are some who were not able to participate in the Sep. 29 Popular Forum.”
Lawyer André Michel, who has been severely persecuted for bringing a corruption lawsuit against the Martelly government, also attended the Forum, as did outspoken Sen. Moïse Jean-Charles, who electrified the room with his address.
“Today we will try, even if we have only a little time, to bring a little light to the battle we are leading as political militants,” said Sen. Moïse. “We are clear about it: the international community has an agenda for Haiti. In 1990, we disrupted their plans and elected our own government. Seven months later, they carried out a bloody coup d’état. Since then, it is they who have imposed what they want in Haiti. This cannot continue. They imposed President Martelly on us. They imposed Laurent Lamothe on us…. It is we, the Haitian people, who have to take our destiny in hand. And that is what we are beginning to do here today.”
In concluding its proposal, KOD wrote that the Martelly administration along with the embassies of Washington, Paris, and Ottawa “will say that what we propose is not legal, is not acceptable…. But when the imperialists make a coup or an illegal election, even when the people reject it, they don’t care… What we propose is more democratic, more authentic, more honest and more sovereign than any of the maneuvers the imperialists have carried out in Haiti. It is time for the Haitian people to stop taking orders from the colonists. We have to construct our own democracy, because we are a nation, not a colony. We are our own masters.”
Labels: COLONIALISM, HAITI, MINUSTAH, NEOCOLONIALISM, UN
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(BLACKAGENDAREPORT) Haiti: US to Re-Write Haiti Constitution to Better Service the One Percent
Tue, 07/02/2013 - 22:11 — Ezili Danto
by Ezili Dantò
When the U.S. overthrew Haiti’s government in 2004, Washington proclaimed the invasion a “humanitarian” enterprise. Now it turns out that Haiti’s earth and waters are filled with gold and oil. The U.S.-controlled World Bank has volunteered to help rewrite the Haitian constitution, to allow easier access for foreign extraction corporations. Haitians must, as always, “look out for themselves.”
Haiti: US to Re-Write Haiti Constitution to Better Service the One Percent
by Ezili Dantò
“It's a slightly repackaged imperial economic pillage but the same old arsonist/fireman modus operandi.”
The leech says, "I cling to you because without your blood, I have no life."
As long as white supremacy paints Haiti as a failed state because of weak public services, when Haiti is prevented by US unfair trade and World Bank/IMF structural adjustments from investing in its own local economy and paints the Clintons, Paul Farmers, UN, World Bank, the NGOs and their three-piece suited Eurocentric-Haiti collaborators with the mark of international distinction and service to humanity, Haiti's pains will continue to be their cash cow.
"The holocaust in Ayiti continues. The insane imperial narrative and custom of honoring rapists, murderers, torturers, degenerate pedophile maniacs, pillagers, plunderers, enslavers and poverty pimps, starting with Christopher Columbus, who set forth the most prolonged genocides and horrific terrors in recorded human history, continues today. Officialdom honors the UN and UN envoys to Haiti as ‘humanitarians’ or ‘God’ bringing security, stability, peace, law, Christian ethos and ‘Western civilization.’ Too many have jobs, egos, power and prestige invested in the profit-over-people system to see that the current saviors of Haiti extend mostly the same narcissistic, cultural blindness and denials as the initial ‘missionaries/humanitarians’ brought to Haiti in 1492."–Ezili Dantò of HLLN, Oct. 10, 2011 , Bill Clinton has more power in Haiti than Haiti’s president: The Holocaust Continues.
There's a new move by the discredited Haiti rescuers, led today by Obama/the Clintons/USAID/UN, the Paul Farmer-led NGOS and their International Financing Institutions to refocus their fundraising scam away from "earthquake reconstruction relief" now to "cholera relief," or to "local agriculture relief," and "mining protection relief for Haitians!" It's a slightly repackaged imperial economic pillage but the same old arsonist/fireman modus operandi. Same failures intended to enrich the global North, impoverish Haiti (UN Capitalizing on Cholera: playing arsonist and fireman and The Pain Rush in Haiti : Clorox Hunger lives in the same space that billions of dollars in "aid" are supposed to have being poured.)
The NGOs carry out US imperial policies in Haiti in exchange for "charity funding" - which means, they money launder US tax payer and donor dollars and put it in their pockets. US imperial policies is about destroying Haiti manufacturing and local economy, expropriating Haiti natural resources and making a larger Haiti market for their subsidized Wall Street monopolies.
Se mèt ki veye kò - The Haiti Population Must Look Out for Itself
Racism continually allows the Haiti perspective and non-colonial narrative to be marginalized. But Ezili's HLLN has been the voice ahead of all to sound the alarm, to consistently and almost daily provide the tools for Haiti defense for nearly ten years now. We cover all things Desalin, Dantò and about Haiti riches, Haiti epistemology.
Back in 2004, when Ezili's HLLN noted that the US occupation of Haiti wasn't because the US wanted to protect Haiti civil rights and stop a supposedly abusive Haiti elected government under Aristide. It was about stopping that popularly elected government from nationalizing Haiti resources. When we pointed this out, not one of the charitable industrial complex organizations today purporting to be helping Haiti protect itself with "good mining" laws would quote our work, not then and not now.
We were called the apologists for Lavalas and most of the foreign Haiti experts announced that Haiti had no resources the US could want. Today, the US occupiers are freely announcing their intent to change Haiti's mining laws with little public dissent of their nefarious occupation and resource pillages in Haiti. Ezili's HLLN is still the only voice out here exposing Oxfam, World Bank and the other fake philanthropic folks involved in protecting the interests of the one percenters, re-writing Haiti mining laws.
The invaders in Haiti finally admit Haiti has gold, iridium, uranium. It seems Haiti's $20 billion in gold exist only when the "discoverers" are ready to proclaim Haiti has riches. They've still strategically refuse to acknowledge that the US has built its fifth largest embassy – after Iraq, Afghanistan, China, Germany – in Haiti because Haiti oil is an Olympic pool to Venezuela's glass of water. (See, Haiti Riches and Haiti rich in unexplored hydrocarbons (with potential oil reserves larger than those of Venezuela) , gold, copper, uranium 238 and 235 and strategic metals and Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?)
If you want to be ahead of the corporate lies, there's a Kreyòl, Lakou New York Interview where HLLN’s Ezili Dantò talks about environmental degradation concerns, Haiti resources and the foreign mining of Haiti resources. It was broadcasted in 2009 before the earthquake, before foreign cholera, before the public pillage of earthquake donor dollars. The English parallel (the text is here) to the 2009 Kreyòl interview may be listened to at Ezili Dantò with Chris Scott- CKUT on Haiti Riches.
At the point we did the interviews, it had just been announced that Haiti was no longer the "poorest" country in the Western Hemisphere, Nicaragua was. This was because of all the billions the foreigners had made in Haiti from 2004 to 2009 during the US occupation of Haiti. The economic elites made billions upon billions before the $9-billion the US "big-hearted humanitarians" would add to their coffers from laundering earthquake relief dollars largely back to US groups.
“The US occupiers are freely announcing their intent to change Haiti's mining laws with little public dissent of their nefarious occupation and resource pillages in Haiti.”
These interviews on Haiti Riches were done before the UN poisoned the Artibonite river with cholera. Haitians wondered then, in terms of US mining, what happens if mining chemicals poison the Artibonite river? Very uncanny this foreshadowing. For the invaders found another way to poison Haiti waters with greater market effectiveness.
We point to these unheralded Haitianist efforts to defend Haiti because of the current multinational and NGO efforts in Haiti to link mining to Haiti development! (See, Haiti must avoid the resource curse ; Haiti gets $35.5M grant to improve water services and World Bank says its helping Haiti draft mining legislation.)
Our "rescuers’" benevolence is the decoy used for manufacturing consent to the US occupation in Haiti. Period, no comma. OXFAM, the IDB, the UN and the World Bank are simply howling a wolf's care for the sheep they're tearing apart.
Neither Oxfam, nor the World Bank are questioning that US Newmont mining, VCS Mining and Canada’s Majescor et al, have managed to get the puppet Haiti president to WAIVE Haiti environmental and mining laws – its Constitutional laws – in order for US mining do open pit mining in areas close to earthquake fault lines in the North, in a country devastated by the last earthquake and with its water already poisoned by UN cholera. But the corporate media – liberal and conservative – are blithely writing PR articles about the World Bank "helping" Haiti draft mining laws. There's no outrage or concern that mining and oil drilling trigger are known to cause earthquakes.
Se mèt ki veye kò – Haiti look out for yourself.
HLLN on the cholera case
Infecting over 650,000 and killing 8,200 Haitians with cholera in less than 2-years provides the NGO and multinational companies commercializing poverty and their Paul Farmer/Jim Yong Kim ilks with 1) more opportunity to raise funds that will be laundered back to this corporatocracy but called "Haiti aid" 2) the more Haitians die, the better to bring demand down and balance the elites' capital markets and 3) our deaths provide the multinational companies with the opportunity to privatize all sources of Haiti water under the pretext of cleaning Haiti water for the public's good health.
In October 2010, the very month that the UN imported cholera to Haiti, before the charitable industrial complex saviors entered the fray as big-hearted humanitarians to delay and defer Haiti justice, HLLN wrote:
"The accused cannot investigate itself. The United Nations being the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner, all in one, in the Haiti cholera case, is contrary to established traditions as well as established national and international laws. (Listen to Oct 30, 2010 interview with Yves Point Du Jour
"HLLN has never subscribed to the callous and profiting-on-misery notion of letting the UN independently investigate itself while Haiti's people die unmercifully. " --- Excerpt from HLLN complaint against the US occupational forces for bringing cholera to Haiti.
"The Alien Tort Statute (28 U.S.C. § 1350) of the United States Code reads: ‘The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.’ This statute is notable for allowing United States courts to hear human rights cases brought by foreign citizens for conduct committed outside the United States." --- Excerpt from HLLN complaint against the US occupational forces for bringing cholera to Haiti.
Do not be shocked if the UN/PAHO/WHO stealthily concludes and garners public consensus for the proposition that justice for Haiti cholera victims shall be served if a law is passed that makes all sources of Haiti water property of a foreign company like Bechtel and it shall clean Haiti's water and sell it back to Haitians.
“Our deaths provide the multinational companies with the opportunity to privatize all sources of Haiti water under the pretext of cleaning Haiti water for the public's good health.”
The Bolivian water wars is a good parallel to study in order to understand why Brian Concannon's Institute for Justice for Democracy (IDJH), a Dr. Paul Farmer affiliate, is "legally representing(?)" the Haiti cholera victims. IDJH like Paul Farmer have glaring ethical conflicts of interests issues that makes it impossible for them to vigorously defend the cholera victims by naming their own funders, employers, business associates and the primary funder of the US occupation – the US government that occupies Haiti, their consulting firms and NGO cohorts as the Respondiat Superior for the destruction of Haiti government and water systems.
A first-year law student readily understands that Haiti needs immediate injunctive relief, restitution and damages. Injunctive relief is not subject to immunity laws. Neither the US government nor the UN are too big to be prosecuted for human rights crimes, tort or gross negligence. As the largest funder and the main orchestrator of the UN presence in Haiti, the US government, is legally, the Respondiat Superior for the cholera wrongdoings in Haiti along with the UN.
But the NGOs and their Hollywood, media and academic cohorts play firemen to the US government's arsonist role in Haiti and the global south. The professional posers – the white industrial charitable complex – play an underhanded game. For instance "The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) analyzed the $1.15 billion pledged after the January 2010 quake to Haiti and found that the "vast majority" of the money it could follow went straight to U.S. companies or organizations, more than half in the Washington area alone." (See also US military company DynCorp gets $48.6 million contract in Haiti to staff officers for UN mission ; Capitalizing on Cholera: playing arsonist and fireman and Haiti's earthquake generated a $9bn response – where did the money go?)
Yet, CEPR and such foreign "policy researchers" on Haiti also claim IDJH/Paul Farmer and their fake cholera "lawsuit" against the UN along with the US/UN non-funded $2 billion proposal for privatizing clean water in 10-years in Haiti is a DIFFERENT, more positive paternal step for Haiti. That this sort of bait and switch, fraudulent Haiti aid and NGO funding always further weakens Haiti’s ability to handle its own affairs is of no consequence.
US to re-write Haiti Constitution, Again
(with change in mining laws)
ARTICLE 36-5 of the Haitian Constitution, states:
"The right to own property does not extend to the coasts, springs, rivers, water courses, mines and quarries. They are part of the State's public domain."
So, how is it legally possible for the US to re-write Haiti mining laws? To legally change the Haiti constitution on ownership of Haiti resources at mines, coasts, springs, rivers, water courses and quarries? Who will stop this US occupation forces' re-writing of the Haiti Constitution to benefit US resource extraction companies and for privatization of Haiti's water? Ayisyen kote nou ye? – Where are the Haitians? (See World Bank says its helping Haiti draft mining legislation.)
Se mèt ki veye kò – Haiti must look out for itself!
Haiti’s current law doesn’t allow drilling without a signed mining convention. But US Newmont mining got a “waiver” to the current Haiti law without the approval of even the puppet Haiti legislature. Martelly signed it in violation of the Haiti Constitution. (Gold Rush in Haiti: Mining Investment Good for Whom?)
The US companies were offered a friendly, public-private partnership by the Aristide government to exploit Haiti oil, gold, iridium, uranium and other strategic resources. That idea of equitable revenue sharing with Haiti peoples insulted the northern US-Euro monopolies so much, they hired and trained death squads in the Dominican Republic from former Haiti army officials to take down Haiti's duly elected government. And when the hired jackals and US mercenaries, including Guy Philippe/Louis Jodel Chamblain paramilitaries, could not do the US regime change themselves, US Special Forces along with Canada and French troops landed in Haiti on February 29, 2004, and through extraordinary rendition put President Aristide and the first lady on a plane to Africa. This merciless and shocking malevolence was followed by a brutal 3-months US Marines sweep of Site Solèy, Bel Air, Solino and other dissenting areas and then covered up with US MINUSTAH's permanent war in Haiti behind NGO imperialism.
“The US is re-writing Haiti mining laws for its corporations.”
Between 2004 to 2006 the US occupation behind UN guns slaughtered 14 to 20 thousand Haitians. If it wasn't for organizations like Ezili's HLLN the Wall Street assassination squads in Haiti might have slaughtered more in the same manner the CIA orchestrated paramilitary death squads in Guatemala killed 200,000 Guatemalans on behalf of US United Fruit companies. In Haiti, with former UN employee Gerald Latortue illegally imposed as Prime Minister, the oligarchs urged Brazil commanders to kill more poor Haitians so that Haiti oil and gold can now freely be carted off to service the Northern vampires as Haiti majority die of Clorox hunger, UN cholera, unfair trade, endless debts and World Bank neoliberal death plans. (The Pain Rush in Haiti : Clorox Hunger lives in the same space that billions of dollars in "aid" are supposed to have being poured.)
Today, the US is re-writing Haiti mining laws for its corporations.
"Now that these ghouls think we indigenous Haiti are all infected with vampire blood and dead, it's no surprise that the NGO OXFAM/World Bank is howling out a wolf's care for the sheep they're tearing their fangs into – funding conferences, issuing action alerts with the other wolves guarding Haiti from the mining companies? I would laugh out loud at these media missives if the depravity these hidden war criminal collaborators bring forth wasn't as evil to the Haiti majority as a Hitler's holocaust was." (Excerpt from [ezilidanto] NGO false benevolence manufactures consent for the US occupation in Haiti: OXFAM & World Bank howling a wolf's care for the sheep they're tearing apart; or here.)
The global North's insane sense of entitlement knows no bounds, no law, no morality, no ethics. The US government destroys Haiti farmers, Haiti manufacturing, Haiti water system, Haiti politics, Haiti spirituality in order to reshape, privatize and call Haiti resources their own. (Se mèt ki pou veye kò.)
With respect to this sudden US public effort via coup d’etat NGO, Oxfam USA, purported to be about securing protection for occupied Haiti from US mining giants. This false benevolence is a way to do the mode soufle.
In Haiti, mode soufle (bite and blow) is where the cunning rural rat takes a bite while you're sleeping, then blows on the injury in order to lessen the pain, keeping you asleep longer so the rat increases its chances for getting a second bite before the peasant awakes from the piercing pain. While the US is destroying the provisions in the Haiti Constitution protecting Haiti from foreign mining companies, Oxfam and its other international cohorts are sent forth to do PR for America's commitment to protect Haiti's poor from the giant mining companies!
But keep your eye on the ball Haitians and true friends of Haiti. For they must especially eradicate these protective local Haiti laws that give the local Haiti inhabitants the right to exploit the mines or to participate in mining exploitation before the government may legally offer that opportunity to outsiders. To wit:
ARTICLE 39 of the Haitian Constitution, states that the "inhabitants of the Communal Sections have the right of preemption for the exploitation of the State's land in the private domain located in their locality."
ARTICLE 36-6 of the Haitian Constitution, states that "law shall establish regulations governing freedom to prospect for and work mines, or bearing earths, and quarries, ensuring an equal share of the profits of such exploitation to the owner of the land and to the Haitian State or its concessionnaires."
ARTICLE 36-5 of the Haitian Constitution, states:
"The right to own property does not extend to the coasts, springs, rivers, water courses, mines and quarries. They are part of the State's public domain. "
US occupiers mining on fault lines, stealthily privatizing Haiti water
Peruvian peasants have been struggling against US mining company Newmont's $5billion Conga gold project which is effectively privatizing certain public lakes:
"Lake Perol is one of several lakes that would eventually be displaced to mine ore from the Conga project. Water from the lakes would be transferred to four reservoirs that the U.S. company (Newmont) and its Peruvian partner, Buenaventura, are building or planning to build. The companies say the reservoirs would end seasonal shortages and guarantee year-round water supplies to towns and farmers in the area, but many residents fear they would lose control of the water or that the mine would cause pollution...'Why would we want a reservoir controlled by the company when we already have lakes that naturally provide us water?' asked…a peasant patrol group..."-- Peru protesters push to stop $5 billion Newmont mine, June 17, 2013.
Where are the Haitians – Ayisyen kote nou ye – concerned with the taking of Haiti water to mine $20 billion in gold for foreigners with open pit mining chemicals known to kill, pollute and cause earthquakes?
“Who will stand for justice, stop this US occupation force, its rampage and re-writing of the Haiti Constitution.”
Where's the public outrage when one notes media missives such as, World Bank says its helping Haiti draft mining legislation. Shouldn't the international community – these self-defined "big-hearted humnitarians" – be shouting that defenseless "Haiti can't take anymore Made-in-the-USA devastations. That human life and environmental health is more important than Northern profit?"
If Peru's $5 billion Newmont mine project requires displacing huge amounts of Peruvian water sources, how much more is Haiti's $20 billion gold mine project going to take of Haiti water sources which are already in grave shortage because of UN cholera poisoning? (Peru protesters push to stop $5 billion Newmont mine.)
It is only possible for the US to re-write Haiti mining laws because Haiti is under US tutelage and might makes right. Who will stand for justice, stop this US occupation force, its rampage and re-writing of the Haiti Constitution to benefit US-Euro resource extraction companies and for privatization of Haiti's water? Ayisyen kote nou ye? Haiti must look out for itself - Se mèt ki veye kò.
For those foreign charity workers reconciling with injustice like Farmer's Partner and Death, for the Haitian technocrats and diaspora collaborators pretending amnesia, proclaiming ignorance or innocence, occupied Haiti runs thus: “Recently, there was a government press conference. There was nothing ‘government’ about it; we organized it and told them what to say, explains the spokesman for one of the largest UN organizations in the Haiti." (Full article at The NGO Republic of Haiti).
The hidden US occupation of Haiti
On December 31, 2003 this author was in Haiti to honor the bicentennial of Haiti's independence. It was very late, I'd already gone up to my room for the night. But my good friend Jafrikayiti (Jean St-Vil) had come to the Montana Hotel in Petion-Ville to meet up. He called from the front desk. I took the elevator down and found a heated conversation in progress with US career diplomat and current member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Luigi R. Einaudi, who was then the Assistant Secretary General at the Organization of American States. Journalist Kevin Pina was arguing with him. What Einaudi said as he exited towards the elevator up to his room was so astonishing, I took out pen and paper and wrote it down. On the eve of Haiti's 200-year independence, the OAS's Luigi Einaudi said, "the international community is so screwed up they're letting Haitians run Haiti."
One month later, in February 2004, the international community got itself together and started ruling Haiti. The US occupation of Haiti has been going on for nearly ten years now. Its colonial, bipartisan violence is hidden behind a UN and NGO humanitarian cover. (See, 30 U.S. Humanitarian and Advocacy NGOs Encourage Support for Royce-Engel Amendment to Farm Bill to Reform Food Aid to Feed More People, More Quickly, at a Lower Cost.)
The US occupation of Haiti is hidden by the white saviors, their educational and professional institutions and media outlets. These operatives hide the re-enslavement of Haiti by centering the uninformed persons' attention on the UN or, on their own "good works" in Haiti. Empire's various celebrity front-men are constantly awarded and elevated with the highest international distinction for their "service to humanity." When one lifts up the white supremacy visor, the stark reality is that the fake US progressives control the conversation on Haiti to improve the rabid elites' global feudal system, not to take it down.
Haitians require an end to the US occupation of Haiti, a stop to the mining companies and the NGO republic. If the Haiti government was sovereign and free from US bullying neoliberal World Bank/IFIs policies; if Haiti oil, gold, iridium, marble and uranium resources were not privatized but used for Haiti's public welfare, there would be no need for food-aid in Haiti.
“These operatives hide the re-enslavement of Haiti by centering the uninformed persons' attention on the UN or, on their own ‘good works’ in Haiti.”
If the Haitian government would be allowed by Paul Farmer's partner at the World Bank, President Jim Yong Kim, to invest in its own health care, its own people's education, water management and to protect its own local economy from unbalanced US trade with protective Haiti tariffs, there would be no need for NGOs in Haiti. There would be no need for a Paul Farmer hospital in Mirebalais, Haiti, not accountable to the Haitian public; no need for food-aid, no need for the NGO pèpè schools and "orphanages."
USAID just launched its newest money laundering scam – Feed the Future North – to capitalize on the media brainwashing of US tax payers and carry forth its usual extortions in Haiti. Media misinformation on Haitiallows death squad-maker USAID to freely use tax payer dollars and "aid" monies for creating new markets in Haiti for their biotech, pharmaceutical, shipping and big-agribusiness companies.
How much sense does it make to empower NGOs to provide local agricultural aid in Haiti while keeping the Haiti government weak and unable to respond to its farmer constituents. When will the human rights community stop getting funds from the imperialist, divest from the system killing the poor and commercializing poverty. Use their platform to act as real humanitarians to confront subsidized big agribusiness destructions, Monsanto genetic poisons and World Bank/IFS priorities inhibiting local agricultural and manufacturing growth? The current NGO push to "help" Haiti local agriculture is nothing more than another means to further increase NGO capacity and to create more unwilling markets for the US biotech and big agri-business industries instead of increasing Haiti governmental capacity and supporting autonomous Haiti community-based organizations that are the real engines of progress and Haiti's only hope for sustainable development. (Feeding Dependency, Starving Democracy: USAID Policies in Haiti Grassroots International and Ezili Dantò' at Foreign Investment means Death and Repression: A Historical Perspective.)
Haiti misery and the general American public's cluelessness is their cash cow. US false benevolences in Haiti, its fairly uninterrupted corruption, has been going on for over two centuries. But as recently as in 1997 when a similar USAID initiative was analyzed, Grassroots International noted :
"CARE has been 'helping' people in the Northwest for decades. But each year, the misery of the people of the Northwest increases. What is the real impact of this aid? To make people more dependent, more vulnerable, more on the margins?...The aid is not given in such a way as to give the people responsibility, to make them less dependent....This is what you call ‘commercializing’ poverty....The people's misery should not be marketed – Samuel Madisten, Haitian Senator.” (Feeding Dependency, Starving Democracy: USAID Policies in Haiti Grassroots International 6 March 1997.)
Unless Haitians start protesting like the Peruvians, the World Bank, NGOs and US mining companies will gather together as one and with depraved indifference to Black life and environmental health in Haiti successfully amend the Haiti constitution as the US marines did during the first occupation (1915-1934), to destroy more Haiti life than UN cholera, privatize all sources of Haiti water.
Ezili Dantò is an award winning playwright, a performance poet, author and human rights attorney. She was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in the USA. She holds a BA from Boston College, a JD from the University of Connecticut School of law. She is a human rights lawyer, cultural and political activist and the founder and president of the Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN). She runs the Haitian Perspectives on-line journal and the Ezili Dantò Newsletter.
She can be contacted at http://www.ezilidanto.com/zili/contact-us/.
Listen to us on the Black Talk Radio Network at www.blacktalkradionetwork.com
Labels: HAITI, NEOLIBERALISM
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(GLOBALRESEARCH) HAITI: Reconstruction’s Massive Slum Will Cost “Hundreds Of Millions”
By Haiti Grassroots Watch
Global Research, June 20, 2013
Haiti Grassroots Watch 17 June 2013
Three years after its star-studded launchby President René Préval, actor Sean Penn and various other Haitian and foreign dignitaries, the model camp for Haiti’s 2010 earthquake victims has helped give birth to what might become the country’s most expansive – and most expensive – slum.
Known as “Canaan,” “Jerusalem,” and “ONAville” – the new shanty-town, spread across 11 square kilometers, is here to stay, Haitian officials told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW). Taxpayers and foreign donors will likely spend “many hundreds of millions” to urbanize the region, and as much as another US$64 million to pay off the landowners who are threatening to sue the government and the humanitarian agencies.
Three years after the launch of the temporary model camp “Corail-Cesselesse” – located about 18 kilometers northeast of the capital and named after the nearby habitation (plantation) that was once home to sugarcane and sisal fields – the landscape differs from the orderly camp visited by celebrities. Surrounded by tens of thousands of squatters’ shacks and homes, today it is a cause of embarrassment for local and international actors alike.
Before the earthquake, most of this arid, rocky expanse running from the northern outskirts of Port-au-Prince up to Cabaret was largely empty. Much of it is owned by the Haitian firm NABATEC, S.A.. Since 1999, the firm had been developing it into an “integrated economic zone” (IEZ) called “Habitat Haïti 2020” that would have industrial parks, single- and multi-unit housing for various income levels, schools, green spaces, and a shopping mall. A Korean company and a U.S.-based humanitarian group had already purchased land within the perimeter, and NABATEC was in discussions with a number of foreign firms.
... “It was a 15-year, US$2 billion project, and everyone had already given their approval, including the Haitian government and the World Bank,” according to architect Gérald Emile “Aby” Brun, NABATEC’s president and vice president of TECINA, S.A., a planning and construction firm. A 2011 World Bank study of potential IEZ sites ranked it best out of 21 possibilities around the country, calling it potentially “high-performing” and “the clearest application of the IEZ concept among any proposed project in Haiti.”
But today, the land – equal to about three Central Parks – is home to between 65,000 and 100,000 people: 10,000 in the planned camps and the rest squatters. And they aren’t going anywhere.
“We can’t move them out,” Haitian government planner Odnell David told HGW in an exclusive interview. “The idea is to reorganize the space so that people can live.”
Urbanizing about half of the wasteland will cost Haitian and foreign taxpayers “many hundreds of millions of dollars,” noted David, an architect and the director of the housing section of the government’s Unité de Construction de Logements et de Bâtiments Publics (UCLBP or Unit for the Construction of Housing and Public Buildings). The price tag for initial infrastructure work already tops US$50 million.
Model Camp Leads to Disaster’s Disaster
Opened in April 2010, the Corail “Sector 3” and “Sector 4” camps together represented the reconstruction’s model resettlement. They sit on two sloping parcels of 50 square kilometers of private land declared “of public utility” by the central government in March 2010. Right from the start, the choice to move people to the desert-like plain was controversial, for two reasons. First, some critics accused Brun and NABATEC of seeking to profit from the disaster, and next, many said the land under the camps, and indeed much of the region itself, is not appropriate to any kind of settlement, temporary or permanent, for environmental and economic reasons. [See sidebars Capitalizing on Disaster? and Controversy over Corail Camp.]
Despite the controversies, humanitarian agencies like the International Organization for Migration (IOM), World Vision, and the American Refugee Committee (ARC) together spent over US$10 million to build the two “sectors” – which have schools, playgrounds, latrines, and some electricity, but which still lack water. They had planned to build many more camps, including “Sectors 1 and 2” which sat close by. However, as soon as the first U.S. Army bulldozers started to level the land, tens of thousands of people – some but not all of them earthquake victims – invaded those areas as well as land around and north of the camps, “buying” parcels from racketeers, marking off their plots and pitching makeshift tents.
...
Nobody in the central government said anything to prevent the land seizures, which continue today. Many say the land was offered to supporters of Préval’s “Inite” political party for US$10 per square meter. The new “landowners” got fake “titles” in exchange for cash and their votes in the upcoming presidential elections, according to Brun and other sources who asked not to be named.
“It was an electoral thing,” said Brun.
Planned or not, and political scheme or not, today those tents have turned into houses built every which way, in what the UCLBP’s David calls a “savage urbanization… no infrastructure, no water, no electricity, no sanitation: people just appropriated land and are trying to accomplish their dreams of becoming homeowners.”
“The state has a moral obligation to intervene,” David continued. “You can’t leave it like it is… Those people are living in difficult conditions.”
Police and local authorities have already set up offices in tractor-trailer containers.
Life in the camps
Despite the unforgiving sun and its sweltering heat, Joel Monfiston is working. Hammering a piece of worn plywood to a battered two-by-four, watering flowers, and picking the weeds out from between rocks and pebbles.
The 34-year-old father of three crouches in front of his one-room home in Sector 3. Monfiston and his family first lived in a tent. Now they have a 24-square-meter “temporary shelter” built mostly of plywood and sheet metal by World Vision for US$4,500, according to the agency. Like most Haitians, he survives with a day job here and there and through help from friends and family. And, he tries his hand at commerce.
“Things are not easy. Imagine: they put you here, but there’s no work,” he said.
Monfiston has dreams. He hopes to set up a shop in the little shed he is building. He would like to grow more in his garden. But those remain dreams. For now, all he has are a few flowers and a few walls for his “store”… no shelves, no door, no cooler, no products.
And, like other Corail residents, while he does have access to latrines, electricity (solar-powered street lamps), playgrounds, a clinic, and schools, water is not so easy to find.
Back in 2011, the UN and Oxfam promised that a new system of cisterns and kiosks would soon provide residents with water from the state water agency. Two years later, the faucets remain dry. Residents buy water at 5 gourdes (about US$0.12) a bucket from private vendors or from the committees that manage the few still-functioning water “bladders” left over from the camp’s early days when water and food were free and when agencies provided “cash for work” jobs and start-up funds for would-be entrepreneurs.
Today, all of the big agencies have abandoned the Corail camp and its 10,000 residents. Trumpeting their success and claiming to have prepared a “transition” to the local authorities, IOM, ARC and World Vision all pulled out (although World Vision still supports the Corail School, which it built).
“Mayor of Croix-des-Bouquets is the New Camp Manager,” a cheery article from the UN military mission declared in a May 27, 2011 bulletin. But HGW found no evidence of any local authorities, or assistance, on two different visits. The “City Hall Annex” at the Corail camp was shuttered. Residents told journalists that they could not remember when they last saw anyone from the government. [See Controversy over Corail Camp.]
“Nobody from the mayor’s office has set foot here for many months,” said Racide d’Or, a member of the Corail residents committee. “They were only around when they knew there was land in the area they could ‘sell,’” continued the mother of two, who lost her Delmas home in earthquake. “There is no ‘government’ or ‘state’ for those of us who live here. We have to figure out everything ourselves.”
The Croix-des-Bouquets City Hall annex in Canaan is sweltering at midday. The “office” is an empty container and a “conference room” of plywood and a blue plastic tarp roof. Two men there said they worked for City Hall but refused to give their names or allow their voices to be recorded.
“They just dumped us here,” said one, aged about 30. “We don’t have the means to work. Our supervisor never comes to see how we are doing.”
“I’d like to know what they were thinking when they put this office here,” said the other one, older, who was slouched in a plastic chair. “We don’t do anything.”
The absence of humanitarian agencies has one benefit. When agencies were handing out food, jobs, and cash, gangs and “mafias” ran various parts of the camps. An Oxfam program that handed out up to US$1,000 to some – but not all – small business-people led to disagreements, rumors, protests, and eventually arrests.
“The NGOs divided us. People fought with each other,” Auguste Gregory told HGW. Gregory was sitting with friends next to his telephone-charging business: a table covered with power strips and chargers. “Some people went to prison. Others went into hiding. We were all there for the same reason, but they divided us,” he remembered.
For much of 2010, a gang calling itself “The Committee of Nine” threatened residents and aid providers alike, so much so that ARC Camp Manager Richard Poole quit his job and left the country.
“My three months at Corail were one of the most difficult periods I have experienced in my 30 years as a humanitarian worker,” Poole later told HGW in an email interview. ARC received about US$400,000 to manage the camp for eight months in 2010.
But, some humanitarian actors say the Corail settlement was not a complete failure.
“It is important to look at where the families were at the beginning of the earthquake and where they are now,” World Vision told HGW in an email. The agency says it spent about US$7 million on 1,200 shelters, a school, playgrounds, and various programs.
People “came from areas which were prone to flash flooding, mudslides, and disease outbreaks, but now they are in a safer and more secure community,” the agency pointed out. “The families have homes and are protected… We are pleased with these outcomes.” [See also Controversy over Corail Camp]
Not everyone is pleased
NABATEC president “Aby” Brun is not pleased.
At first, Brun said he and NABATEC hoped the government and the major reconstruction actors would intervene to eject the squatters and camp residents, or to at least turn the camp’s temporary shelters into permanent houses so that they could become the beginning of Habitat Haïti 2020 [see Capitalizing on Disaster?].
In the meantime however, Brun deplored the fact that the Michel Martelly government decided “follow the same abusive logic” and seize two other pieces of NABATEC land: one at the corner of Highway #9 and Highway #1 to build a waste treatment facility on what was slated to be an industrial park, and another, across the road, to build the offices of the Haitian Olympic Committee. Those two pieces had been valued by the government tax office – theDirection Générale des Impôts (DGI) – at US$10 million, according to Brun.
As months went by, the NABATEC partners – some of them members of Haiti’s most economically powerful families – realized their project would no longer be possible.
“The country lost a great opportunity,” Brun said. “I have been working on that project for 16 years.”
Now, NABATEC wants to be indemnified, according to the law and the Constitution. The company has submitted paperwork to the DGI and to each of the three Finance Ministers who have held office since the “public utility” declaration.
“The last ‘refresher’ meeting was under Marie-Carmelle Jean-Marie about three months ago,” Brun said. Jean-Marie resigned in April, allegedly over differences of opinion concerning a series of no-bid contracts and other expenditures.
All told, if the government reimburses NABATEC for that land and the land currently occupied by the camps and the squatters, NABATEC is due US $64 million.
“We have submitted all the papers and titles,” Brun said in May. “Verbally, in conversations, they say, ‘Yes, we recognize it’s your land,’ and they say they are going to pay us, but… nothing on paper.”
Hoping to confirm Brun’s statements, HGW made almost a dozen requests for interviews with DGI officials, in writing and in person, over the course of three months. Finally, in February 2013, Raymond Michel, head of the DGI’s property division, promised an interview, noting: “This dossier is very, very sensitive.” Michel never contacted HGW again.
Brun, meanwhile, is growing impatient. NABATEC is open to the idea of negotiating, but the company is also thinking about suing both the government and the humanitarian agencies that are continuing to do projects at Corail or are helping the squatters in the areas outside the camps, for “infringing on property owners rights.”
“It’s been three years now,” Brun said. “I understand the difficulties facing people who don’t have a house, or work, or schools… but that doesn’t allow for mafia and extortionists to use people’s distress to make money, and we sit there with nothing.”
Seeking funding from, and for, the promised land
While NABATEC lobbies the Finance Ministry and the DGI for monetary compensation, another branch of the Haitian government is also seeking monies, but not to pay the landowners.
Instead, the UCLBP hopes to take NABATEC’s place and build its own project: the urbanization of about 500 hectares for a population of 100,000.
According to David, an initial plan is ready, thanks to the Canadian firm IBI/DAA and the Haitian firm SODADE. Asked about the plan and how much it cost, the architect declined to give the price tag and added that it had not been put out for bid. Instead, it was tacked onto another plan already being drawn up by IBI/DAA, which is a frequent beneficiary of government contracts.
“It is a very perfect plan. It has roads, it has water systems, it has sanitation,” David added, but he said that HGW could not see because it had not yet been approved.
Preliminary infrastructure work for a site will cost “about US$50 million.” But the proto-slum won’t turn into an organized neighborhood any time soon. Among other challenges, the residents who have marked out “their” land will have to be convinced to move to make way for infrastructure.
“It’s a very long term project,” David admitted.
Finding the money will not be easy, either. “We will need a lot of resources and the state doesn’t have all the funding it would need… We are seeking financing so that we can at least begin,” he said. “It won’t happen tomorrow.”
In the meantime, newcomers continue to arrive at the no man’s land with bundles of belongings, tent stakes, and a few cement blocks.
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.
Capitalizing on Disaster?
Writing about the Corail-Cesselesse disaster in an article and his recent book, Associated Press reporter Jonathan Katz accused NABATEC President Gérald Emile “Aby” Brun of pulling off a “backroom deal” by recommending NABATEC land for emergency refugee camps so that he could eventually offer foreign companies “a ready-made workers community.” Brun was a member of a presidential commission that recommended the site.
In extensive interviews with Haiti Grassroots Watch, Brun did not deny that he had hoped the camps might one day be integrated into “a decent and modern housing scheme that had already been approved” as part of the Habitat Haïti 2020 project. But he also noted that the expanse of territory owned largely by NABATEC is the only open space left near Port-au-Prince, which is bordered on one side by mountains and a lake and by the Caribbean Sea on another.
“When they were looking for land for debris, land for recycling, and eventually land for settlements, they realized that the state did not have any land larger than the size of a soccer field,” Brun said.
Numerous sources, including officials at UN-Habitat, confirmed that “the land problem” was one of the biggest challenges of the reconstruction.
Katz never spoke with Brun in person.
Brun – who resigned from the commission after Katz’s Jul. 12, 2010 article – said he never dreamed squatters would soon overrun the property.
“Why in the world would I have dropped a 14-year planning and investment dream and effort?” he asked HGW in a December 2012 email.
Once the land invasions started, foreign companies that had been negotiating with NABATEC, including Korean clothing firm SAE-A, dropped out of the project. (Today SAE-A is the “anchor tenant” of an industrial park in the north championed by Clinton and Martelly.)
“A dreamed of new city was killed by narrow minded and greedy people, under the tolerant observation of the international community,” according to Brun, who said NABATEC had spent over US$1.5 million on its project. “Habitat Haïti 2020 has been most likely killed by Corail and Canaan!”
Articles by: Haiti Grassroots Watch
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(GLOBALRESEARCH) The Disastrous State of Haiti’s Finances: Senate Reports Reveal Widespread Corruption
President Martelly gets travel expenses of up to $20,000 per day
By Yves Pierre-Louis
Global Research, June 04, 2013
Haïti Liberté 29 May 2013
In November 2012, Finance Minister Marie Carmelle Jean-Marie, who has since resigned, sounded the alarm about the state of public finances. She asked government officials to limit their spending, especially in non-essential travel.
According to Senator Moïse Jean-Charles, former President René Préval left some $1.9 billion in the treasury when he stepped down in May 2011. But nobody knows how this large amount was spent.
Furthermore, $150 million was earmarked for the reconstruction of the capital’s hilltop neighborhood of Fort National, which was devastated in the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. However, $50 million of that sum was diverted to build 3,000 houses in Morne à Cabri while the remaining $100 million has mysteriously disappeared.
Under the government of President Michel Martelly and Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, a great deal has been spent, but very little has been accomplished. Corruption has been the hallmark of the first two years of President Martelly’s government.
Now, the president of the Senate’s Economy and Finance Commission, Sen. Jocelerme Privert, has laid bare the sad state of the country’s finances. A budget deficit of 9 billion gourdes [$211.805 million] is already forecast for the current fiscal year 2012-2013. According to the budget forecast, the state should collect 52 billion gourdes [$1.224 billion]. But for the first half of the fiscal year, the state only collected 21.7 billion gourdes [$510.684 million], despite an increase in payroll and income taxes. Therefore, there is already a deficit of 4.3 billion gourdes [$101.196 million]. During the same period in fiscal year 2011-2012, the state collected 22 billion gourdes [$517.744 million].
Meanwhile, the exchange rate continues to rise. Today, one needs 44 gourdes to buy one dollar, up from 39 gourdes in 2011, so the purchasing power of households has decreased significantly, despite an 8% increase in money transfers from the diaspora. Charles Castel, the Central Bank’s governor, says the inflation rate is 7.2%, but independent economists say it is closer to 10%.
The Central Bank, also known as the Bank of the Republic of Haiti (BRH), has confirmed the budget deficit. However, Castel makes a difference between the revenue deficit, which is 9 billion gourdes [$211.805 million], and the fiscal deficit, which is 2.7 billion gourdes [$63.541 million]. Therefore, according to Castel, the deficit is less than 1% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Castel also announced the issuance of $15 million from the state’s reserve money supply to try to stabilize the Haitian Gourde’s exchange rate.
Despite the budget deficits, officials of the Martelly-Lamothe government continue to make a great number of unnecessary trips abroad, which entail hugely inflated per diem expense. For example, President Martelly gets travel expenses of up to $20,000 per day. Under previous governments, travel expenses were set at $600 per day for the highest ranking officials who needed to go to Europe, Africa, or Asia, and $500 per day for their travel in the Americas, while lower-level state officials received $300 to $400 per day, according to Sen. Jocelerme Privert, who spent many years working in different Haitian administrations.
Meanwhile, the Senate’s Public Works and Communications Commission, led by Sen. Jean William Jeanty, issued a report that discovered corruption, embezzlement, and numerous other irregularities in the management of funds which the Martelly/Lamothe government illegally collected on international phone calls from June 2011 to November 2012. The report notes that National Council for Telecommunications (CONATEL), a regulatory body, collected $50.4 million during that period, but only 60% of the money – about $30 million – was sent to the Treasury. About 10% of the revenue – $ 5 million – was spent to purchase equipment to fight telecommunications fraud, and another $4 million was spent to hire the Swiss firm Société Générale de Surveillance S.A. (SGS) to improve security against fraud. Much of the money was spent on large unexplained expenses for “staff” salaries and bonuses.
Sen. Jocelerme Privert said that according to the accounting that was available, CONATEL should have collected $69 million during this period. Furthermore, there is no law which authorizes the taxing of phone calls at 5 cents per call, nor the release of that revenue.
Meanwhile, about $63 million was collected on incoming and outgoing money transfers (at $1.50 per transfer) for the period from Jun. 15, 2011 to Apr. 16, 2013. These funds were supposed to have been collected to finance the Program for Free and Compulsory Universal Schooling (PSUGO), which is also largely funded by the World Bank. This program has left a trail of corruption scandals from the National Palace through the Education Ministry all the way to schools themselves.
Following the release of the reports, the Senate summoned Lamothe to appear before it on May 28, 2013 in order to explain the irregularities in the expenditure of scarce state resources, including 5 billion gourdes [$117.67 million] spent on an emergency funds program for Hurricane Sandy last autumn. Seven senators signed the summons: Moïse Jean Charles Jean-Baptiste Bien-Aimé, Irvenson Steve Benoit, François Joseph Annick, Jean William Jeanty, Westner Polycarpe, and John Joel Joseph. As has happened before, the Prime Minister did not want to answer the senator’s questions and requested a postponement of the session until Friday, May 31, 2013, [which was postponed to June 4, 2013] despite the the senators’ strenuous objections.
Meanwhile, President Michel Martelly, also on May 28, called members of the National Assembly to an extraordinary session to continue working on draft legislation. Most saw Martelly’s call for an extraordinary session to be a tactic to create a diversion from the attempt to convoke Lamothe.
If the Prime Minister does not respect the senators’ summons or if they are not satisfied with his answers, will they unseat him? This question will be answered in the days ahead.
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Well over 15,000 people poured out from all corners of Haiti’s capital to march alongside the cortege of cars that carried former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back to his home in Tabarre from the Port-au-Prince courthouse…
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(GLOBALRESEARHC, HAITI LIBERTE) HAITI: Massive March Signals Resurrection of Aristide’s Lavalas Movement
By Kim Ives
Global Research, May 21, 2013
Haïti Liberté 15 May 2013
Well over 15,000 people poured out from all corners of Haiti’s capital to march alongside the cortege of cars that carried former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back to his home in Tabarre from the Port-au-Prince courthouse he visited on May 8.
Thousands more massed along sidewalks and on rooftops to cheer the procession on, waving flags and wearing small photos of Aristide in their hair, pinned to their clothing, or stuck in their hats.
Led by Fanmi Lavalas party coordinator Maryse Narcisse through a gauntlet of jostling journalists, Aristide had entered the courthouse (the former Belle Époque Hotel) at exactly 9:00 a.m., the time of his appointment to testify before Investigating Judge Ivickel Dabrésil. Aristide had waited with Narcisse in a car outside the court’s backdoor for about 45 minutes. It was only the second time that Aristide had left his home (and the first time publicly) since returning to Haiti on Mar. 18, 2011 from a seven-year exile in Africa following the Feb. 29, 2004 Washington-backed coup d’état which cut short his second government.
Lawyer Mario Joseph said that he was “very satisfied” with the reception given by Judge Dabrésil, who is investigating the April 2000 murder of radio journalist Jean Dominique and his radio’s caretaker Jean-Claude Louissaint, for which Aristide is one of many prominent Haitians, including former President René Préval, interviewed for testimony. Joseph said the three hour deposition was very “cordial and relaxed.”
But many Haitians feared that the summoning of Aristide – even if only for testimony – was a trap set by President Michel Martelly, who, as the former vulgar konpa musician “Sweet Micky,” was the principal cheerleader of both the 1991 and 2004 coups d’état against Aristide.
“This summoning of Aristide is a political act remote-controlled by the Martelly government, the same as the now discredited legal suits brought a few months ago by Ti Sony [a former resident of the Lafanmi Selavi orphanage who claimed that Aristide had “exploited” him and other orphans] and some who lost money when the cooperative banks went bust [while Aristide was in power in 2002 and 2003],” said outspoken Sen. Moïse Jean-Charles. “Those previous efforts to smear and destroy Aristide failed, so now they are trying this.”
Many Haitian radio commentators point to Judge Dabrésil’s postponement of Aristide’s deposition from its original date of Apr. 24 as proof that there is a political hand in the judge’s proceedings. The deposition, and the expected anti-Martelly pro-Aristide outpouring, would have taken place during the 5th Summit of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS) from Apr. 23-26 held in Pétionville and attended by many regional leaders.
Furthermore, on Mar. 7, the Defend Haiti website reported that “Presidential Adviser Guyler Delva admitted, earlier this week, to giving Judge Ivekel Dabrésil a car, and Senator John Joel Joseph said on Radio Scoop FM on Wednesday [Apr. 30] that the administration had purchased a house in Florida for the judge.”
Another impetus for the massive turn-out came on the evening of May 7 when Haitian National Police (PNH) Director General Godson Orélus took to the airwaves to announce that the PNH had “received no formal notification of the demonstration” as required by law and that therefore “any demonstration is formally forbidden” along the route between Aristide’s house and the courthouse.
“The police don’t want any demonstration,” he concluded, throwing down a gauntlet which the Haitian people took up the next morning.
Lavalas leaders, including Narcisse, responded that the march was not a “demonstration” but an “accompaniment” of Aristide by the Haitian people. Many Lavalas leaders came to the courthouse to show their solidarity including Senators Moïse Jean-Charles, John Joel Joseph, Francky Excius, and Jean Baptiste Bien-Aimée; Deputy Saurel Hyacinthe; former senator Gérard Louis Gilles; former deputies Jacques Mathelier and Lionel Etienne; former Justice Minister Calixte Delatour; activists Farah Juste, Claudy Sidney, and Volcy Assad.
About 100 people had spent the night in a vigil across the street from Aristide’s home. At 6 a.m., hundreds more joined them to mass on the sidewalks in front of Aristide’s house.
But the real “accompaniment” began after the hearing. Leaving the courthouse at noon, Aristide’s ride home took five hours, passing slowly through downtown Port-au-Prince, the Champ de Mars, the hillside slum of Belair, Delmas 2, then the roads through the old military airport and past the international airport.
Parallel solidarity demonstrations were held in Cap Haïtien, Aux Cayes, and Petit Goâve.
Alongside the 20 or so cars that followed Aristide’s silver jeep, young and old walked, jogged, and ran, singing, chanting, and laughing. The river of humanity included motorcycles, bicycles, wheelchairs, and the occasional person on crutches.
Marchers also tore down pink government propaganda posters from lampposts along the way. Several posters declaring “With the Martelly/Lamothe government, Haiti is advancing” were torn up and left in pieces in the street for vehicles and marchers to pass over. (Martelly’s long-time business partner Laurent Lamothe is Haiti’s Prime Minister.)
Three times Aristide got out of his car to wave to the crowd — outside the courthouse gate, in Belair, and in front of his home — causing people to sprint toward his car and raise their arms, creating a sea of hands. Afterwards, people hugged and high-fived each other, some laughing, some crying.
One man dressed in rags moved down the line of cars following Aristide, wiping each car clean with a dirty cloth but asking for no money in return.
“Se pa lajan non, se volontè wi,” (It’s not for money, I’m here of my own free will) was the refrain of crowds which turned out for Aristide’s massive campaign rallies when he first ran for President in November and December 1990. The song was heard again on May 8, 2013 in the largely spontaneous march, which grew in size and volume as it made its way through the capital.
In contrast, when Martelly organized a carnival-like rally of a few thousand in the Champ de Mars on May 14, many participants were paid 1000 gourdes (US$24) a head to turn out. They were also given a t-shirt – either pink or white – to put on. But after taking the money, many “celebrants” discarded their t-shirts in the street, Haïti Libertéreporters observed. (A Haiti Liberté photographer was prevented from accessing a media stand at the May 14 rally after presenting his press credentials.)
Some pundits tried to banalize the historic march, saying it was merely the beginning of the electoral campaign of the Lavalas Family (FL), the party that Aristide founded in 1996. (Many Haitian political leaders, including those in the FL, strongly doubt whether free and fair elections can be held under Martelly, or whether he even wants to hold them. “No matter what, Martelly has to go” was another chant heard during the march.)
But May 8, 2013 was much more than a mere campaign rally. It was a watershed event, a popular show of force which has changed the political calculus of Haiti in the near-term. Haitian history has shown that when the Haitian people begin to move in such numbers, major political change is imminent. The weeks ahead will reveal exactly what that political change will be.
(Additional reporting was done by Haiti Liberté staff reporters Wendell Polynice and Daniel Tercier)
Labels: HAITI, JEAN BERTRAND ARISTIDE
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(NEWZIMBABWE, THE ATLANTIC) UN under fire over cholera cover-up
COMMENT - Typical neoliberal garbage from The Atlantic, where
Tendai Biti laid out the MDC's treasonous agenda on Zimbabwe's national independence day - and we know how neoliberals feel about national sovereignty.
UN under fire over cholera cover-up
Cover-up ... Cholera patients with cups of sugar solution at Budiriro Polyclinic in Harare
03/04/2013 00:00:00
by The Atlantic
ZIMBABWE, a potential economic powerhouse which critics say has been ruined under President Robert Mugabe’s rule, is heading for a potential turning point.
A mostly peaceful, popular referendum on March 16 approved a relatively progressive constitution that includes a theoretically strong bill of rights, and general elections will likely be held later in the year.
But the past couple months have also seen another, less noted development that adds an additional layer of ambiguity to the country's future.
On February 26th, a UN tribunal in Johannesburg determined that Georges Tadonki, the head of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA ) in Zimbabwe in 2008, had been wrongfully fired from the UN after he attempted to warn headquarters of an oncoming cholera epidemic, whose severity was compounded by the on-going electoral violence.
He was fired after Agostinho Zacarias, then the UN's country chief in Zimbabwe and currently the UN Development Program's Resident Coordinator in South Africa, decided that his own closeness with Zanu PF overrode his responsibilities to the UN’s missions and values.
Yet Zacarias was actively abetted by officials at the UN headquarters in Turtle Bay, Manhattan in the US, who gave into his demands, which included the marginalisation and eventual firing of Tadonki, even as conditions inside Zimbabwe deteriorated.
The case raises the question of just how the UN will perform in Zimbabwe if the events of 2008 repeat themselves - or in the event that the country finally experiences its long sought-after democratic transition.
Tadonki brought a wrongful termination claim against the UN after the organisation effectively fired him in early 2009.
The UN's bulletproof legal immunity necessitates an unusual system for adjudicating such cases. Because the UN cannot be sued, tribunals convened by the UN itself deal with employment claims, pseudo-courts that don't adhere to several important aspects of accepted U.S. and European legal procedure.
Legal immunity
The UN-appointed judges found that Tadonki's firing was the result of concentric layers of favouritism and bad faith, tendencies that defined not only the country head's relationship with Mugabe's government, but Turtle Bay's apparently-backward view of the UN's entire mission in Zimbabwe.
According to the tribunal, in addition to upholding the egalitarian values of the UN Charter, Zacarias's job charged him with "speaking out about humanitarian issues and defending humanitarian principles." In these respects, he was a clear failure. He had a tight relationship with members of Mugabe’s Zanu PF ruling party.
According to Robert Amsterdam, who was one of Tadonki's lawyers, Zacarias' testimony revealed that he had known various Zanu PF leaders when they were based in Mozambique during Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle.
According to the decision, during his posting in Zimbabwe, Zacarias "would spend most of his social time with Nicholas Goche, a Zanu PF politburo member and current transport and minister. This closeness spurred a wilful ignorance of the country's deteriorating conditions.
In the run-up to the disastrous 2008 vote, "Zacarias seemed to not take cognizance of the fact that there was likely to be widespread and unprecedented violence," despite the mobilisation of pro-Zanu PF paramilitary.
Even as pro-Mugabe militants savaged the opposition MDC and its supporters, Zacarias did his best to shield himself from the ruling party's scrutiny, even if it meant discarding commonly-held humanitarian protocol.
"The bottom line," the tribunal concludes, "is that the political agenda that Zacarias was engaged in with the government of Zimbabwe far outweighed any humanitarian concerns that OCHA (Tadonki's office) may have had."
In the report's most scathing section, the judges explain that Zacarias's closeness to the Zanu PF made it impossible for Tadonki to carry out his duties as the head of OCHA - a stance which had deep consequences for Zimbabweans counting on the UN's assistance in the midst of a cholera epidemic and political emergency:
“There was a humanitarian drama unfolding and people were dying. Part of the population had been abandoned and subjected to repression. The issue between Tadonki and Zacarias was to what extent these humanitarian concerns should be exposed and addressed and the risk that there was of infuriating the Mugabe government,” reads part of the report.
“Matters started to sour when the Tadonki started doing his job. Zacarias preferred that the he remain quiet. But if he remained quiet, OCHA at (the UN) headquarters would say he was not doing his job. Therefore while silence would bring him trouble from OCHA, noise would infuriate Zacarias.
“When the Applicant started organising a forum made up of the NGOs, the United Nations and the donors to discuss the situation in Zimbabwe with the approval of Zacarias and to achieve a common understanding of the humanitarian situation, Zacarias became angry.”
Tadonki didn't stay silent however; he "had the courage to inform the OCHA Headquarters in New York that Zimbabwe was on the brink of a humanitarian crisis while Zacarias was pretending to the contrary."
Zacarias had undermined Tadonki at other points during the OCHA head's brief yet eventful stint in Zimbabwe, most notably by convincing the Zimbabwean government not to approve residency accreditation for Tadonki's wife and children, who were living in South Africa during his period of employment (covered in paragraph 163 of the ruling).
But Tadonki paid an additional and even deeper price for his willingness to warn Turtle Bay about Zimbabwe's humanitarian plight - he was fired in January 2009, after he had warned of the potential ravages of the looming cholera outbreak, which was worsened by the electoral chaos and eventually killed over 4,000 people.
Tadonki was investigated by a UN bureaucrat at Zacarias's behest, even when there was no proof of professional malfeasance.
"Part of the reason nobody could take on Zacarias was that his role was unassailable," explains Amsterdam. UN headquarters was convinced that in terms of their Zimbabwe operations, "Zacarias was the absolutely critical pivot, and everything could be sacrificed to him."
Tadonki's two predecessors were also fired after brief and tumultuous postings to Harare, and Amsterdam believes that the UN knowingly sent his client into an extremely hostile work environment.
"That they could have put anybody into the situation after Zacarias had savaged the prior two occupants of that post was just inhumane. It was like they were setting him up for exactly what transpired," said Amsterdam.
Still, the UN has stated that it is appealing its own tribunal's decision. A spokesperson refused to comment on the case last month - except to say that "judgments of the UN Dispute Tribunal are not final until they have been confirmed by the UN Appeals Tribunal," and that "the Organization intends to file an appeal of this judgment."
For Amsterdam, the decision to appeal reveals just how little the UN has learned from the Tadonki affair. "If you had a normal organisation, heads would roll," he says. "Structures would change. But clearly this is not a normal organization. This is an organization that's pathological in its respect for its employees."
The events in the Tadonki case mostly happened in 2008, but they are less distant than they seem - and not just because of the UN's plans to appeal.
In a plausible worst-case scenario, this coming year will bear a similarity to the crisis of 2008. With elections planned for an as-yet unannounced date later in the year, the country could be heading towards another inflection point, or even another explosion - situations in which international organisations would take on heavy humanitarian and moral responsibilities.
New elections
"The UN was being asked, and will be asked in the future, to play a key role in the transition in Zimbabwe, and they have been completely contaminated by their behaviour," says Todd Moss, a senior fellow at the Centre for Global Development, and an official in the US State Department's African Affairs office during the 2008 election crisis.
"It comes down to trust. Who is the UN supposed to be working for? The signals were pretty clear that parts of the UN office in Harare were working very closely with Zanu PF," he said
The successful constitutional referendum raises the possibility of an election that is at least procedurally sound.
In addition Zimbabwe and Zambia are co-hosting the UN World Tourism Organization's general assembly in August of this year, raising hopes that an influential faction within Zanu PF genuinely wants to reintegrate the country with the rest of the region and the international community more generally. A clean vote would be an ideal place to start.
But Moss sees little reason to believe that the party's brutal electoral calculus has changed.
"There's no prospect of an opposition victory as long as Mugabe is alive," says Moss.
There's evidence that Zanu PF is already going after opposition and civil society organisations in the run-up to an election that hasn't even been scheduled yet.
In January, agents broke into the offices of the Zimbabwe Peace Project, which keeps a database of police malpractice, and arrested its director; in December, police arrested members of the independent Zimbabwean Electoral Support Network for holding "an unsanctioned public meeting."
Police also recently raided the studios of Radio Dialogue, an influential community broadcasting project, and, most notably, human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa and four Tsvangarai aides were arrested in late March.
"There's an impressive level of political direction and assertiveness by ordinary citizens, human rights defenders, and civil society," says Jeff Smith, an advocacy officer for the Robert F. Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights.
"What's worrying is that the Zanu PF regime has really been able to keep these social forces in check."
This year's vote could be no more legitimate than 2008's. The question however, is still whether Mugabe will allow the opposition to win - and whether it's possible to have any kind of democratic process in a country where the government is so determined to hold onto power.
Labels: CHOLERA, HAITI, UN
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Humanitarian Malfeasance
The United Nations is responsible for killing more than 8,000 Haitians since 2010. And it’s not even willing to say it’s sorry.
By Jonathan M. Katz|Posted Monday, Feb. 25, 2013, at 2:12 PM
A horrendous mistake made by the United Nations has led to the death of 8,000 Haitians since 2010. Why do U.N. leaders refuse to take responsibility for Haiti’s cholera epidemic?
International affairs can be complicated, but sometimes a case comes along that’s so simple it’s almost absurd. In 2010, the United Nations made a horrendous mistake that, so far, has claimed more than 8,000 lives. Its officials tried to cover it up. When the evidence came out anyway, lawyers for victims’ families petitioned the U.N. to end the crisis, pay damages, and apologize. For a year and a half, the world’s leading humanitarian organization said nothing. Then, last week, it threw out the case, saying, “The claims are not receivable.”
The background should be well-known by now. But despite the fact that American taxpayers have footed the lion’s share of the bill for the U.N. peacekeepers responsible for this disaster—to the tune of roughly $1.5 billion since 2004—the story remains largely unknown in the United States.
The place was Haiti. The mistake: a killer combination of cholera and gross negligence. The peacekeeping mission, known by its French initials, MINUSTAH, had been in the country since 2004, when it was authorized to protect an interim government installed after a coup. Six years later—thanks to a healthy dose of mission creep—the peacekeepers were still there. While rotating troops into what was now post-quake Haiti, the U.N. neglected to adequately screen a contingent of soldiers coming from an active cholera outbreak in Nepal. Upon arrival, the soldiers were sent to a rural U.N. base, outside the quake zone and long known for leaking sewage into a major river system that millions of Haitians used to drink, bathe, wash, and farm. Within days of their arrival, people downstream began to die. The epidemic then exploded, sickening more than 647,000 people, and killing in its first year more than twice the number of people who died on 9/11.
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The imported strain, which could turn a healthy adult into a shivering, vomiting, diarrhea-ridden puddle within hours, has since been popping up across the region. After a protracted fight and a spate of investigations, scientists were soon able to confirm the source of the infection. They found it was a perfect match for the specific strain circulating 8,900 miles away in Nepal. There had never been a confirmed case of cholera in Haiti before.
To many, inside the U.N. system and out, it seemed the best thing would be to acknowledge the disaster, make amends, and move on. But that’s not what Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the U.N.’s leadership decided to do. From the outbreak’s first days, the officials and staff of an organization dedicated to establishing respect for the rule of law chose to lie, dissemble, destroy evidence, persuade allies to change the topic, and cajole critics. (You can read the story of my investigation, and this early cover-up, in my new book.) A more recent tactic has been for the U.N. to shut down talk about the epidemic’s cause by discussing its new effort to eradicate the disease—despite the fact that the primary program it is touting is not actually a U.N. effort, lacks clear goals, and remains almost totally unfunded.
For the last year, the U.N. had deflected questions by insisting it could not comment on a pending case. The victims’ families thus found themselves in the awkward position of waiting for the organization whose negligence had killed their loved ones to decide whether it would consider prosecuting itself.
Then, on Thursday, the answer came back: No. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added a generic statement expressing sympathy for the thousands killed and hundreds of thousands sickened or left unable to work by the disease. His spokesman dodged all further questions.
Haitians wash clothes in a stream January 8, 2011 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Haitians wash clothes in a stream January 8, 2011 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Many homes in the area were destroyed and residents have set up makeshift tents to live in nearby.
Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
The rationale for throwing out the case was seemingly blunt: The U.N. claimed total immunity from prosecution, liability, and the law. It based this notion on a U.N. convention, by way of a status-of-forces agreement, or SOFA, signed by Haiti’s interim prime minister (a former U.N. official) in 2004. Such agreements make it possible for foreign militaries to work without fear of harassment by local courts or police. They’re common—the United States has one with nearly half the world’s countries. But they’re supposed to be a two-way street. In one crucial section, for instance, MINUSTAH agreed to “cooperate with respect to sanitary services and … in matters concerning health, particularly in respect to the control of communicable diseases.”
Another crucial section comes a few pages later. Since the SOFA meant that Haitian courts could not prosecute U.N. personnel, it laid out a procedure for resolving disputes: the formation of a “standing claims commission.” This, too, is standard, though no one is quite certain what such a commission would look like—the U.N. has never actually formed one.
It’s not clear exactly how the U.N. justified not forming a commission to adjudicate the claim, but spokesman Martin Nesirky gave a clue in his press conference. He told reporters that “consideration … would necessarily involve the review of political and policy measures.” Nesirky appears, quite vaguely, to be invoking an exemption in the SOFA, which says a commission does not have to be formed if a claim arises from “operational necessity.” Is the U.N. arguing that dumping infected sewage into a major river was an operational necessity? The U.N. press office rebuffed my request for clarification.
The U.N.’s claim of immunity is ironic in Haiti, where, after all, a lack of immunity was the problem: Haitians had no resistance to the imported disease because they’d never been exposed to it before. That nightmare continues. Though cases have tapered off, there are indications the disease is once again on the rise. Haiti’s health ministry reported a spike in cases nationwide in December 2012 and January 2013, with active outbreaks continuing in three of the country’s departments.
Fifteen-year-old cholera patient Jonas Florvil sits on a cot in a ward at a Samaritan's Purse cholera treatment center in the Cite Soleil neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Jan. 8, 2011.
Fifteen-year-old cholera patient Jonas Florvil sits on a cot in a ward at a Samaritan's Purse cholera treatment center in the Cite Soleil neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Jan. 8, 2011.
Photo by Allison Shelley/Reuters
It doesn’t have to be this way. Cholera, which spreads through contamination of food or water, can be prevented with good sanitation. It’s even easier to treat: Medicine is usually not required, just the speedy replacement of lost fluids. The U.N. estimates it would cost $2.27 billion to provide the necessary infrastructure in Haiti over the next 10 years. The victims’ lawyers have asked for up to $100,000 in additional compensation for each of the families they represent. In all, the total cost would probably be shy of $3 billion—a bargain compared with the economic, social, and personal damage the epidemic has brought. To put that figure in perspective, MINUSTAH’s budget for 2013 alone—again, a quarter of which is provided by the United States—is $644 million. Reduce the size of the nine-year-old peacekeeping mission, which after all is patrolling a country that’s not at war, and you could start paying that debt down quickly.
So what happens now? The U.N. could decide to pay on its own, perhaps without an admission of responsibility. But given its actions over the last two years—as officials who have publicly lied about the facts of the case have been promoted while the organization ponies up a scant 1 percent of the cost of its adopted initiative—that seems unlikely, absent outside pressure.
The families’ lawyers with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti—a longtime U.N. foe—have vowed to take the fight to the courts, hoping the denial of accountability will win the sympathy of a judge in Europe, Haiti, or the United States. But they know it’s a long shot. The world body will likely claim immunity there, too, and many judges will be inclined to agree. The U.N.’s interpretation of its own immunity statutes and agreements is hard to overrule.
But there’s one other document worth considering in the meantime: “To reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small. To establish conditions under which justice and respect for … international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” Those are the words of the preamble to the United Nations charter. It’s not too late for the U.N. in Haiti to live up to them.
Labels: BAN KI-MOON, CHOLERA, HAITI, NEOCOLONIALISM, UN
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