how will the shock doctrine apply to haiti?

[luke]

i was watching the news earlier and they were showing some of the footage from haiti and it got me thinking what the bastard capitalists will try and push through while the country is in this state of shock ...

lenins tomb has this;



and naomi klein on democracy now;



and media lens has some background ( which jon snow was determined to keep out of the discussion on channel 4 news - western backed coup, neo liberal economic policies impoverishing the population - change the subject! )

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040301_Hell_Haiti_1.html
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040302_Hell_Haiti_2.html
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040310_Haiti_No_News.html

[luke]

IMF to Haiti: Freeze Public Wages

Since a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti on Tuesday--killing tens of thousands of people--there's been a lot of well-intentioned chatter and twitter about how to help Haiti. Folks have been donating millions of dollars to Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti (by texting "YELE" to 501501) or to the Red Cross (by texting "HAITI" to 90999) or to Paul Farmer's extraordinary Partners in Health, among other organizations. I hope these donations continue to pour in, along with more money, food, water, medicine, equipment and doctors and nurses from nations around the world. The Obama administration has pledged at least $100 million in aid and has already sent thousands of soldiers and relief workers. That's a decent start.

But it's also time to stop having a conversation about charity and start having a conversation about justice--about recovery, responsibility and fairness. What the world should be pondering instead is: What is Haiti owed?

Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor--by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.

Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake. To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF's extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.

For Haiti, this is history repeated. As historians have documented, the impoverishment of Haiti began in the earliest decades of its independence, when Haiti's slaves and free gens de couleur rallied to liberate the country from the French in 1804. But by 1825, Haiti was living under a new kind of bondage--external debt. In order to keep the French and other Western powers from enforcing an embargo, it agreed to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners (yes, that's right, freed slaves were forced to compensate their former masters for their liberty). In order to do that, they borrowed millions from French banks and then from the US and Germany. As Alex von Tunzelmann pointed out, "by 1900, it [Haiti] was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments."

It took Haiti 122 years, but in 1947 the nation paid off about 60 percent, or 90 million francs, of this debt (it was able to negotiate a reduction in 1838). In 2003, then-President Aristide called on France to pay restitution for this sum--valued in 2003 dollars at over $21 billion. A few months later, he was ousted in a coup d'etat; he claims he left the country under armed pressure from the US.

Then of course there are the structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s. In 1995, for example, the IMF forced Haiti to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent, leading to a massive increase in rice-dumping, the vast majority of which came from the United States. As a 2008 Jubilee USA report notes, although the country had once been a net exporter of rice, "by 2005, three out of every four plates of rice eaten in Haiti came from the US." During this period, USAID invested heavily in Haiti, but this "charity" came not in the form of grants to develop Haiti's agricultural infrastructure, but in direct food aid, furthering Haiti's dependence on foreign assistance while also funneling money back to US agribusiness.

A 2008 report from the Center for International Policy points out that in 2003, Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million. In other words, under a system of putative benevolence, Haiti paid back more than it received. As Paul Farmer noted in our pages after hurricanes whipped the country in 2008, Haiti is "a veritable graveyard of development projects."

So what can activists do in addition to donating to a charity? One long-term objective is to get the IMF to forgive all $265 million of Haiti's debt (that's the $165 million outstanding, plus the $100 million issued this week). In the short term, Haiti's IMF loans could be restructured to come from the IMF's rapid credit facility, which doesn't impose conditions like keeping wages and inflation down.

Indeed, debt relief is essential to Haiti's future. It recently had about $1.2 billion in debt canceled, but it still owes about $891 million, all of which was lent to the country from 2004 onward. $429 million of that debt is held by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), to whom Haiti is scheduled to make $10 million in payments next year. Obviously, that's money better spent on saving Haitian lives and rebuilding the country in the months ahead; the cancellation of the entire sum would free up precious capital. The US controls about 30 percent of the bank's shares; Latin American and Caribbean countries hold just over 50 percent. Notably, the IDB's loans come from its fund for special operations (i.e. the IDB's donor nations and funds from loans that have been paid back), not from IDB's bonds. Hence, the total amount could be forgiven without impacting the IDB's triple-A credit rating.

from http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/517494/

[luke]

not relating to the shock doctrine, but looking at the how the media has covered haiti, and most importantly the history ...

there was also a good bit on charlie brooker's newswipe

MEDIA ALERT: HAITI - THE BROKEN WING

It matters that the media have lavished so much attention on the aftermath of Haiti’s January 12 earthquake. The coverage has helped inspire people around the world to give of their time, energy and money in responding to the disaster. On the Democracy Now! website last week, filmmaker Michael Moore described how almost 12,000 members of the US National Nurses Union had signed up to leave for Haiti immediately. Moore explained:

“... the executive director of the National Nurses Union. She contacted the [Obama] administration. She got put off. She had no response. Then they sent her to some low-level person that had no authority to do anything.

“And then, finally, she’s contacting me. And she says, ‘Do you know any way to get a hold of President Obama?’ And I’m going, ‘Well, this is pretty pathetic if you’re having to call me. I mean, you are the largest nurses union... I don’t know what I can do for you. I mean, I’ll put my call in, too.' But as we sit here today, not a whole heck of a lot has happened. And it’s distressing.”
(http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/26/michael_moore_on_haiti_the_supreme)

The courage and compassion of thousands of people willing to enter a chaotic disaster zone threatened with aftershocks are very real. Compassion arises out of a recognition that ‘their’ suffering is no different to ‘my’ suffering. The heart trembles and softens in response to this awareness. Such a subtle resonance and yet it has the power to relieve much of the world's despair. It is the only counter force to the brutality and greed of human egotism willing to sacrifice everyone and everything for ‘me’.

But if compassion is to make a real difference, it must be allied to rational analysis. In the absence of this analysis, compassion is like a bird with a broken wing flapping in futile circles, never leaving the ground.

Joining compassion with reason means asking why over 80 per cent of Haiti’s population of 10 million people live in abject poverty. Why less than 45 per cent of all Haitians have access to potable water. Why the life expectancy rate in Haiti is only 53 years. Why seventy-six per cent of Haiti's children under the age of five are underweight, or suffer from stunted growth, with 63 per cent of Haitians undernourished. Why 1 in every 10,000 Haitians has access to a doctor. (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/haiti/intro.htm)

In September 2008, Dan Beeton of the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research told us:

“Media coverage of floods and other natural disasters in Haiti consistently overlooks the human-made contribution to those disasters. In Haiti's case, this is the endemic poverty, the lack of infrastructure, lack of adequate health care, and lack of social spending that has resulted in so many people living in shacks and make-shift housing, and most of the population in poverty. But Haiti's poverty is a legacy of impoverishment, a result of centuries of economic looting of the country by France, the U.S., and of odious debt owed to creditors like the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank. Haiti has never been allowed to pursue an economic development strategy of its own choosing, and recent decades of IMF-mandated policies have left the country more impoverished than ever.” (Email to Media Lens, September 9, 2008)

John Pilger has witnessed the reality on the ground that explains Western interest in the country:

“When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti's sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.” (Pilger, ‘The kidnapping of Haiti,‘ http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/4123)

Peter Hallward examined recent US policy in Haiti in the Guardian:

“Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.” (Hallward, ‘Our role in Haiti's plight,’ The Guardian, January 13, 2010; http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight)


The US Double Game

Aristide took office in February 1991 and was briefly the first democratically elected President in Haiti's history before being overthrown by a US-backed military coup on September 30, 1991. The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs observed after the coup:

“Under Aristide, for the first time in the republic's tortured history, Haiti seemed to be on the verge of tearing free from the fabric of despotism and tyranny which had smothered all previous attempts at democratic expression and self-determination.” His victory “represented more than a decade of civic engagement and education on his part,” in “a textbook example of participatory, ‘bottom-up’ and democratic political development”. (Quoted, Chomsky, Year 501 - The Conquest Continues, Verso, 1993, p.209)

Aristide's balancing of the budget and “trimming of a bloated bureaucracy” led to a “stunning success” that made White House planners “extremely uncomfortable”. The view of a US official “with extensive experience of Haiti” summed up the reality beneath US rhetoric. Aristide, slum priest, grass-roots activist, exponent of Liberation Theology, “represents everything that CIA, DOD and FBI think they have been trying to protect this country against for the past 50 years”. (Quoted, Paul Quinn-Judge, ‘US reported to intercept Aristide calls,’ Boston Globe, September 8, 1994)

Following the fall of Aristide, also with US support, at least 1,000 people were killed in the first two weeks of the coup and hundreds more by December. The paramilitary forces were led by former CIA employees Emmanuel Constant and Raoul Cedras. Aristide was forced into exile from 1991-94. Noam Chomsky summarised the situation:

“Well, as this was going on, the Haitian generals in effect were being told [by Washington]: ‘Look, murder the leaders of the popular organisations, intimidate the whole population, destroy anyone who looks like they might get in the way after you're gone.’... And that's exactly what Cedras and those guys did, that's precisely what happened - and of course they were given total amnesty when they finally did agree to step down.” (Chomsky, Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, p.157)

In 1994, the US returned Aristide in the company of 20,000 troops. This was presented as a noble defence of democracy, but in fact the US was playing a double game. As Chomsky noted, Aristide was allowed to return only after the coup leaders had slaughtered much of the popular movement that had brought him to power. His return was also conditional on acceptance of both the US military occupation and Washington's harsh neoliberal agenda. The plans for the economy were set out in a document submitted to the Paris Club of international donors at the World Bank in August 1994. The Haiti desk officer of the World Bank, Axel Peuker, described the plan as beneficial to the “more open, enlightened, business class” and foreign investors. (Quoted Noam Chomsky, 'Democracy Restored,' Z Magazine, November 1994)

In 2004, the US engineered a further coup by cutting off almost all international aid over the previous four years, making the government’s collapse inevitable. Aristide was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces. US Congresswoman, Barbara Lee, challenged the US government:

“It appears that the US is aiding and abetting the attempt to violently topple the Aristide government. With all due respect, this looks like ‘regime change’.” (Quoted Anthony Fenton, 'Media vs. reality in Haiti,' February 13, 2004; http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=4977)

In our search of the Lexis Nexis media database (February 3) we checked for articles containing the word ‘Haiti’ over the last month. This gave 2,256 results (some online press articles are not captured by Lexis Nexis). Our search for articles containing ‘Aristide’ gave 47 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘Voodoo’ gave 53 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘looting’ gave 136 results.

These numbers give an idea of how the broken wing of media analysis keeps public compassion grounded in an endless circling that is powerless to end the suffering of the people of Haiti.


Media Performance

The 47 mentions of Aristide in 2,256 articles discussing Haiti contained around nine articles that discussed US responsibility for his overthrow. We found several more online articles - notably two excellent pieces by Mark Weisbrot and one by Hugh O’Shaugnessey in the Guardian - that were not picked up by Lexis Nexis.

Hallward made a brief reference in his Guardian article, cited above. Seumas Milne wrote in the Guardian that Aristide’s challenge to Haiti's oligarchy and its international sponsors “led to two foreign-backed coups and US invasions, a suspension of aid and loans, and eventual exile in 2004” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jan/20/haiti-suffering-earthquake-punitive-relationship)

Isabel Hilton wrote in the Independent:

“President Clinton negotiated his [Aristide’s] return in 1994, reportedly on condition that he accept a US blueprint for Haiti's economic development. When Aristide won a second election in 2001, he was again deposed, in 2004, this time forcibly flown by George W Bush's administration to exile in Africa, where he remains.” (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/isabel-hilton-dont-blame-the-haitians-for-doubting-us-promises-1870940.html)

Mark Steel, Patrick Cockburn and Andrew Buncombe made similar comments in the Independent. To his credit, Buncombe published two pieces mentioning the US role in Aristide’s overthrow. This handful of brief references to the US role in destroying Aristide, restricted to two national newspapers - the Guardian and the Independent - represents most of the honest commentary on this issue available to the public. Meanwhile, a flood of mainstream broadcast and print coverage has depicted the US as the high-tech saviour of Haiti.

Even more shocking, not one of the above national media journalists made any mention of the role of the +media+ in suppressing the truth of the US role in Haiti. Journalists apparently do not find this silence problematic.

If it is important for journalists to hold governments to account, then why not their own industry? Public awareness and outrage +do+ have the power to obstruct government criminality. But the public cannot know enough to be outraged, to resist, if the media does not tell them what is happening and why.

Nevertheless, it seems clear to us that there has been a marked improvement in current media performance on Haiti compared to the output we analysed in 2004. Then, the US role was almost completely buried out of sight.

It could be that Aristide’s fate simply matters less now. Alternatively, it could be, as we believe, that this is evidence that the mainstream is beginning to improve its performance in response to pressure from alternative, web-based media. With all mainstream trend lines pointing down, notably advertising revenues, and with readers turning in droves to non-corporate websites, it could be that the mainstream liberal media are being forced to compete by publishing more honest, radical material. If so, this is an extremely hopeful sign for everyone who cares about working for a more peaceful, rational world.


Of Devils And Dignity Lost

The rest of recent media performance is consistent with earlier coverage. In 2004, as democracy was being crushed, The Times observed:

"Mr Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, won Haiti's first free elections in 1990, promising to end the country's relentless cycle of corruption, poverty and demagoguery. Ousted in a coup the following year, he was restored to power with the help of 20,000 US troops in 1994." ('Barricades go up as city braces for attack', Tim Reid, The Times, February 26, 2004)

There was no mention of the history of US support for mass murderers attacking a democratic government and killing its supporters.

The Guardian also believed the US had “restored” Aristide:

"To a degree, history repeated itself when the US intervened again in 1994 to restore Mr Aristide. Bill Clinton halted the influx of Haitian boat people that had become politically awkward in Florida. Then he moved on. Although the US has pumped in about $900m in the past decade, consistency and vision have been lacking." ('From bad to worse', Leader, The Guardian, February 14, 2004)

The BBC, Channel 4 News and other media followed the same themes (See our media alerts ‘Bringing Hell To Haiti’: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040301_Hell_Haiti_1.html and http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040302_Hell_Haiti_2.html)

Following the January 12 earthquake, Charles Bremner wrote in the Times: “Bankrupt, barren, misruled and ravaged by nature and human violence, the country on the western end of Hispaniola island serves as a text-book example of a dysfunctional nation.

“While the rest of the Americas have been pulling out of poverty in recent decades, Haiti has sunk deeper into destitution, dependent on foreign charity and a United Nations force to keep its eight million people from starving and fighting.”
(http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6985880.ece?print=yes&randnum=1151003209000)

And the explanation for this? Bremner quoted Joel Dreyfuss, a Haitian journalist, who observed sagely: "Some countries just have no luck. Haiti is one of those places where disaster follows on disaster."

The photo caption to Vanessa Buschschluter‘s piece on the BBC website read: “The Clinton Administration intervened to restore President Aristide to power.” She added: “US troops left after two years - too soon, some experts argue, to ensure the stability of Haiti's democratic institutions.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8460185.stm)

In the Observer, Regine Chassagne could only lament “the west's centuries of disregard”. (Chassagne, ‘Think of Haiti and imagine all that you love has gone,’ The Observer, January 17, 2010)

Tragicomically, the media has preferred to focus on the colonial past 200 years ago rather than on the destruction of democracy in the last decade. Ben Macintyre wrote in The Times: “But for many Haitians, the fault lies earlier — with Haiti’s colonial experience, the slavers and extortionists of empire who crippled it with debt and permanently stunted the economy. The fault line runs back 200 years, directly to France.” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article6995750.ece)

As for the role of the US: “When the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, pledged a US presence in Haiti for today, tomorrow and the time ahead, she was addressing a central concern of a relationship that has swung wildly from intervention to neglect.”

In the Guardian, Jon Henley wrote a piece entitled, ‘Haiti: a long descent to hell.’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/14/haiti-history-earthquake-disaster)

We wrote to Henley on January 26:

Hi Jon

In your January 14 Guardian article, 'Haiti: a long descent to hell,' you discussed Haiti's history without once mentioning the role of the United States. Also in the Guardian, Peter Hallward wrote on January 13:

"Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) 'from absolute misery to a dignified poverty' has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight)

In 2004, Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, wrote in The Nation:

"Haiti, again, is ablaze. Almost nobody, however, understands that today's chaos was made in Washington - deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly. History will bear this out." (Sachs, 'Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti', The Nation, February 28, 2004)

Why did you make no mention of these issues?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Henley replied on January 27:

hi david
obviously i "did not once mention the role of the united states" (which is untrue, in fact: i did mention the occupation) because i am a fervent believer in the longterm benefits of US cultural and commercial imperialism.
happy?
no seriously: the article was about haiti's colonial and post-colonial inheritance, the impossible reparations it was still paying until 1947, and the impact of its own corrupt and despotic rulers. i had five hours to write the piece and i ran out of time nd space to discuss the aristide era, about which many readers know something already and which in any event only compounded the country's pre-existing problems.
i'm sorry this meant the article did not meet your high quality criteria. many other people have expressed their appreciation for throwing some light on an earlier period in haiti's troubled history about which they knew nothing.
best wishes
jh
ps i assume you have chapter and verse to substantiate rofessor achs's comment. unfortunately, at time of writing, didn't.

If the media has had little time or space to consider the recent demolition of Haitian democracy, there has been room aplenty for speculation on the mysterious causes of Haitian suffering: “Why does God allow natural disasters?”, asked philosopher David Bain on the BBC website. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8467755.stm)

Archbishop of York John Sentamu wisely declared that he had "nothing to say to make sense of this horror", while Canon Giles Fraser preferred to respond "not with clever argument but with prayer". American Christian televangelist Pat Robertson said of Haitians: “They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil... ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.”
(http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/01/13/crimesider/entry6092717.shtml)

For others the problem with Haiti appears to be the innate lawlessness of Haitians - “looting” has been a constant, shameful theme in media reporting of survivors' efforts simply to stay alive. The BBC’s well-fed Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, opined from the stricken country that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti's past is long forgotten”. (http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/4123)
Other commentators have been awestruck by the fortitude and dignity of a people tragically accustomed to struggling against impossible odds.

Talk of colonial betrayals, deals with the devil, and a loss of dignity are fine. They are embarrassing, certainly, but not to the vested interests with the power to reward and punish. Expressions of sympathy in response to heartbreaking pictures on the evening news are also fine - they are important and admirable but ultimately unthreatening to the political and economic forces crushing the Haitian people.

More even than water, medicine, food and petrol, the people of Haiti need truth. They need donations of honesty from journalist whistleblowers willing to defy the self-imposed super-injunction on the complicity of their industry. They need journalists willing to break the silence, to defy the lie that only governments are to blame for the misery in our world.

[luke]

After Haiti: A conversation with John Perkins

When the earthquake struck Haiti last January, the first person I wanted to hear from was John Perkins. Several years before Naomi Klein coined the phrase “disaster capitalism”, John Perkins’ first person account Confessions of an Economic Hitman described very clearly how US economic interests set about exploiting crises in third world nations in order to gain control of them. I did finally get to speak to John in March, and our conversation ranged from Haiti to US policy in Latin America and the Caribbean, to a recent film that collates material from his books on this topic. Perkins, for readers not familiar with his work, is what is called in Hollywood a “hyphenate”. He doesn’t have one area of expertise that he can call on – he has several if not many of them and can speak to economics, to geopolitics, to culture clashes and compatibilities; in our brief conversation, he moved among these seamlessly, now describing the big picture, now zooming in on fine detail.

Haiti. The part of our conversation that dealt with Haiti centered on two points: One, the massive amount of American aid now being moved into Haiti will likely not benefit Haitians – not small farmers, small businessmen in tourism or fisheries or other kinds of entrepreneurs. The funds will go to multinationals who are seizing this moment as an opportunity to buy investments in this devastated nation. And two, what Amy Goodman called the “militarization” of Haiti in the aftermath of the quake sends a troubling message that reverberates around the region.

Long term aid. Shortly after the quake, President Obama called on Bill Clinton and on George Bush to spearhead a relief fund for Haiti. It’s a good bet that most Americans took the gesture at face value, as the current president calling on his immediate predecessors to step up and help one of our regional neighbors in their hour of need. It’s likely that few of our countrymen know that our own government had a direct hand in the latest undermining not only of Haitian democracy but also the Haitian economy and so, the infrastructure that might have helped this people respond to their own emergency.

As John noted in a January 21 blog entry at Huffington Post, the aid now flowing into Haiti for long term aid will not for the most part aid Haitians:

“We are encouraged to believe that USAID, the World Bank, and other institutions are truly philanthropic, there to serve the best interests of the people and the country. However, the reality is that, in previous cases -- such as the Asian tsunami -- much of this aid is employed to help huge multinational companies gain a strangle-hold on resources (including cheap labor) and markets. Instead of helping local fisherman, farmers, restaurant, and bed and breakfast owners rebuild their devastated businesses, the money is invested in projects that benefit the Krafts, Chiquitas, Monsantos, Marriotts, and big box restaurant chains of the world” (The Tremor Felt Around the World)

. A direct consequence of this mass of capital flowing into Haiti but not to Haitians is that local social movements are undermined. John compared the situation in Haiti now to that of the independence movement in Ache, Indonesia after the tsunami, a movement itself flattened by the tsunami of foreign influence dominating the political landscape in the aftermath of the natural disaster.

Militarization. When the United States took control of the airport and sent thousands of troops into Haiti, there were protests from France, Italy and Brazil. The immediate objection was that US military flights were being prioritized over humanitarian supplies and personnel. There seemed to be a brief tug of war between the UN peacekeeping force, our State Department and a few of the larger humanitarian missions. Now, I myself don’t remember anyone raising the question if this immediate taking of command and control by the US was a response to Aristide’s public announcement from exile that he wanted to return to Haiti to help the nation respond to the quake’s devastation. According to Randall Robinson, Aristide was told not to return to this hemisphere when he was ousted by a coalition of American, Canadian and French forces. In any case, the question of Aristide returning was put to rest as soon as American forces took control of that air field. And Haiti was left in the hands of precisely the government that the economic powers that be wanted in place.

Perkins pointed out that the Pentagon moving thousands of troops into Haiti sends a message to the whole region. He noted that the 4rth Fleet has been remobilized to operate in the region, that the Pentagon is acquiring seven new bases in Colombia. This build up of US military presence is seen as saber rattling by regional leaders; creates fearfulness, is experienced as an insult to autonomy. As someone who has himself been threatened, he emphasized how threats profoundly shape not only public opinion but diplomatic relations among nations, that they” blow back”. To underscore this point, Perkins suggested that the reason Chinese investment is more welcomed in the region than American investment is precisely because the Chinese have no military presence shadowing their business dealings.

Apology of an Economic Hitman, the film. I asked John about a film version of his memoirs now being shown on LinkTv, The film is described as a blend of noire and documentary and it combines re-enactments of his activity in Latin America while he was a “hitman”, file footage from that period that illustrates American investment in those countries, as well as segments with John himself in conversation. I wanted to ask him about two segments in particular, one where he is speaking with Martha Roldos Bucaram, daughter of the assassinated Ecudoran president Jaime Roldos and also, of John addressing a large audience in Quito about his activities in Ecuador before the hit on Roldos’s presidency and what it meant to him, to Roldos and to the Ecuadoran people.

When I asked John about Martha Roldos appearance in the movie, he told me that after “Confessions” came out, Martha Roldos contacted him and flew to Miami to meet with him. Roldos, now a popular politician in her own right, was a teenager when her father was killed. It is a measure of Perkins’ commitment to his project that this accomplished woman, who lost her father long ago, not only made her peace with him but is now his friend and chose to participate in this film.

A real center of power in the film, a scene in a theater run by the Casa de la cultura in Quito, turns out to have been unscripted. John had done a radio show that morning and had planned a short shoot in this theater with a few people behind him while he spoke to the camera.

As it happened, somehow word of the shoot got out and hundreds of people came to the theater listen to him but also, to confront him. At this moment in the film, the Quito audience is entirely engaged, at times, hostile. There are catcalls and mutterings. Perkins says someone called out “John Perkins for President of Gringolandia”. At times, the group is quiet and tense. That this American is standing there, owning up to his part in a tragic chapter of their history registers visibly and profoundly. It is a powerful moment of apology and a step forward toward reconciliation with the facts of a painful past. And Perkins remarkably pushes through that moment, moving on to lay out for the assembled community (in unscripted fluent Spanish) how the current Ecuadorian president and his government are again under attack by the same powerful economic interests. .

I asked John what he was working on at the moment. (A better question might have been, what are you not working on right now?) John has a full schedule of writing and speaking here, in Latin America, Asia and Europe. He gives seminars on international business practices, on sustainability and also on global and personal transformation. He blogs at the Huffington Post as well as at his own site, and has a column in Correo del Orinoco, a Latin American publication. The NewYork Times best selling author’s book on the global economic meltdown, Hoodwinked, was released in November.

from http://www.haitianalysis.com/2010/3/28/after-haiti-a-conversation-with-john-perkins

you can check the audio book for john perkins' confessions of an economic hit man in this thread

[major.tom]

Canada to spend $100M to join Haiti commission

The Canadian Press (link)

Updated: Mon. Mar. 29 2010 6:59 AM ET

OTTAWA — Canada is preparing to pay $100 million to join an exclusive new international club that would guide the rebuilding of earthquake-ravaged Haiti, The Canadian Press has learned.

That's the price tag for a seat on the proposed Interim Haitian Recovery Commission that is expected to be one of the key announcements to be made this week at the New York international donors' conference on Haiti.

"Canada has been a major partner and a major donor to Haiti in the past years, so we will be there," said a senior government official. "Not sure of the structure, but Canada will play a major role."

The new commission will be made up representatives from more than a dozen donor countries, the Haitian government, the Organization of American States, the 15-country Caribbean bloc known as CARICOM, NGOs and international institutions. Its creation is one of two major announcements expected from Wednesday's Haiti summit in New York, senior World Bank officials said.

The other is the creation of a trust fund for Haiti's long term reconstruction that would operate in concert with the commission.

"The deliverable from New York is to really assure the international community and Haitians that the elements are in place," Yvonne Tsikata, the World Bank director for the Caribbean said in an interview. "Fleshing out the reconstruction agency is one. Having the multi-donor trust fund operational is another."

The World Bank and other international actors are keen to see Canada play an active role in the decision-making commission. Haiti's government estimates it will ultimately cost $11.5 billion to rebuild from the Jan. 12 quake that killed more than 200,000 people.

"I see the role of both sharing Canadian experience in a number of sectors but also technical assistance and also the decision making process," Tsikata explained, noting that Canada has shown expertise in education, governance and judiciary programs.

"I wouldn't get fixated on the $100 million because that may be a small club, but everyone's going to be contributing to Haiti - both small and big amounts. As you know, Canadian citizens did a fantastic thing in terms of their personal contributions . . . so every little bit counts."

The government announced last month that it would match the $113 million in private donations to Haiti made by Canadians. So far, the government has made no specific spending commitments on Haiti. International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda said Canada would make those decisions after hearing from key stakeholders at Wednesday's meeting in New York.

Canada hosted the first international meeting on Haiti in late January. A major theme that emerged from that gathering of more than a dozen foreign ministers, international bankers and aid groups was that any future funding of Haiti would have to be accountable and not repeat failures of the past.

Tsikata said accountability would be directly addressed in New York, after the creation of the commission and the trust fund.

"Having in place an effective aid monitoring and aid tracking system is a third. And then the elements of how all of this is communicated, for transparency reasons, is also very critical," she said.

Prior to the quake, Haiti was making economic progress, in part because of massive international aid, but it remained the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti is the second largest recipient of direct Canadian aid after Afghanistan with $555 million earmarked for 2006-2011.

Tsikata said the Haitian government and its international partners are moving carefully to ensure the commission does not repeat the mistakes of the past.

"If this is going to be the key building block of the reconstruction architecture, then I think the time that's spent to get it set up right is really, really important. But also to have a mechanism where one can auto-adjust or auto-correct as you go on," she said.

"The importance of monitoring, evaluation, assessments with some frequency to try to adjust if necessary is equally important."

Tsikata said that ideally the commission would only be in place for 18 months before it morphs into an independent Haitian government entity. In the meantime, it would allow for a "more co-ordinated, more harmonized," approach to rebuilding Haiti.

Canada agrees with that approach.

"Co-ordination is a major point for every donor and major agencies that are involved over there," said the senior Canadian official. "Who does what will be key here."

Oda and Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon are representing Canada at the New York meeting, which is being held at United Nations headquarters.

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I'm trying to figure out why Canada needs to "pony-up" $100m for what sounds like an old boy's club designed to govern over Haiti. The whole thing sounds Orwellian.

I'm in favour of charity if it gets to the people who need it. But so far, I've only read reports of less than $.05 of every dollar given getting through. Where is the money going?

[luke]

'An investigation by the American news network ABC into the 23 biggest charities working in Haiti revealed this week that just 2 per cent of the $1.1bn (£728m) they raised has so far been released. A mere 1 per cent has been spent on relief operations. '

Haitians wait in tents for a recovery that has still barely begun
Billions were promised after the January earthquake. Six months on, little has changed, reports Guy Adams

They're still bringing victims to the Grand Cimitière in Port au Prince, a few blocks from the ruined Presidential Palace, which remains a globally recognised symbol of a crippled nation.

But almost six months after the worst natural disaster in modern history, the flood of new arrivals has slowed to a trickle. Oginel Pinchinat, a caretaker who mans the main gate of the 10-acre site, reckons on having to find burial spots for roughly a dozen new earthquake victims each day, a number he calls a relative trifle.

"Back in January, bodies were just being dumped, everywhere," he says. "Big trucks would pull up and leave them in piles, often a hundred at a time. It was a mess. Now, business is slower and people have more time to do things with dignity and respect. Even if they find an unidentifiable body in the rubble of a building they will at least wrap it up in a plastic sheet, and try to make sure that it gets laid to rest inside a proper tomb."

At the height of Haiti's tragedy, a walk through the Grand Cimitière was like a journey into hell. Corpses wrapped in bloody rags littered its pathways. Concrete tombs had been busted open so makeshift coffins could be illegally dumped. Clouds of flies swarmed around wheelbarrows and trailers full of death. When I last went there, three days after the quake, the gatekeeper was checking in fresh bodies at a rate of one every six minutes.

Today, a kind of order prevails. All the new arrivals are being properly interred. Some broken tombs are being patched up (though others have been smashed open by grave-robbers hoping to steal gold and silver jewellery which, under Voodoo custom, is often left with the deceased). Proper funeral services are now being held, albeit in a chapel that still lacks a roof and most of its walls. The worst of the horror is over, in other words, but things won't be returning to normal for a long time yet.

The same can be said of the entire city of Port-au-Prince, which on Monday marks the six-month anniversary of the earthquake. Measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, the quake left around 300,000 of the city's inhabitants dead, made 1.5 million people homeless, and destroyed the already shaky economy of the western hemisphere's poorest nation. The initial shock has worn off, and the world's attention has largely moved on. But the earthquake's terrible footprint can still be seen almost everywhere.

Drive through town, and you'll pass homeless camps full of tents and makeshift shelters on almost every patch of open ground. An estimated 1,300 of them now dot the country. Look for evidence of regeneration, and you'll see that virtually none of the country's roughly 280,000 damaged buildings have even been properly demolished yet, let alone rebuilt. Vast piles of concrete, steel and twisted rubble still litter almost every street.

The economy, meanwhile, remains pretty much crippled. There are no large employers, and most Haitians, unless they are able to work as street sellers or taxi drivers, or in other areas of casual enterprise, have no source of income and are therefore relying on handouts. At first glance, despite the huge sums that are supposed to have been spent getting the people of Haiti back on their feet, much of their city and way of life looks depressingly unchanged from six months ago.

Aid agencies warned this week they are being stretched to the limit even maintaining this uneasy status quo. The Red Cross, one of the organisations which, in the absence of a working government, or help from overseas administrations or the UN, is still providing most of Haiti's clean water and toilet facilities, said: "We are all stretched to our capacity and simply containing a critical situation, rather than solving it."

Médicins Sans Frontières issued a report highlighting the frustration among Haitians with the "dire reality" of their living conditions, and the fact that billions of dollars in aid promised immediately after the quake is nowhere to be seen. "There is a staggering gap between the enthusiasm and promises for aiding the victims of the earthquake in the early weeks, and the dire reality on the ground after half a year," it said.

Among Haiti's most vulnerable, a sense of helplessness perhaps understandably prevails. Chery-Jean Jonas, who on Thursday afternoon was walking out of a ravine in the Carrefour-Feuilles neighbourhood, where he once lived – but which now resembles a giant rubbish tip – said he was resigned to living under canvas, in a temporary refugee camp roughly a mile away, for at least the next year, and possibly forever.

"When the earthquake struck, almost everyone who happened to be in this valley at the time died," he said. "Afterwards, we broke down the rubble to look for survivors, but we hardly found any. Today, a few people are rebuilding, but most of us do not want to live in a house down there again, even if we could afford to rebuild. It is a place of death. And in any case, I am afraid that a new building will collapse in a quake, like the old one did."

Faced with long-term homelessness, hundreds of thousands left Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the disaster and returned to the countryside, or to smaller towns, where they are attempting to eke an existence from the land. They hope to return, when things improve. But most of the promised help has still not arrived. An investigation by the American news network ABC into the 23 biggest charities working in Haiti revealed this week that just 2 per cent of the $1.1bn (£728m) they raised has so far been released. A mere 1 per cent has been spent on relief operations.

To millions still living in Port au Prince's temporary camps, rebuilding can't come quickly enough. And the Caribbean's hurricane season brings a more pressing concern: in Haiti, there's no such thing as drizzle. When it rains, it pours. If you're living under canvas, a quick shower can instantly turn your home into a filthy puddle. A proper, tropical thunderstorm produces flash floods, which can lead to a crisis in sanitation and outbreaks of contagious disease.

Some people have managed to build more permanent shelters using wood or corrugated iron. In one such hut, in a camp in the Del Mar neighbourhood, Emeth Thomas – who lost his home and job selling lottery tickets in January – said he was persuaded to move to a new, more robust dwelling after a heavy storm forced his family to spend an entire night standing up.

"We were staying under a tarpaulin, sleeping on the ground with scores of other families. There was no privacy, and it was hopelessly over-crowded, and when it rained, that was the worst: we would have to stay on our feet all night long, and into the next day. We couldn't sleep at all, and the ground just became mud. So we have built a new place to live. Initially, it had a plastic roof, but that was incredibly hot. So now we have put one on made from sheets of corrugated iron which were donated to us by a charity."

Like many of the homeless, Emeth, who shares his 10ft by 10ft hut with three sisters, and three of their children, passes time watching a small television, which he has rigged up by throwing a wire cable over a nearby electricity wire. Despite being qualified, he has been unable to find even casual work in the carpentry trade – a sad reminder that the process of rebuilding has barely begun.

People hoped it wouldn't turn out like this. In January, many Haitians wondered, at least in private, if the quake would prove to be a blessing in disguise. It would, they thought, provide the perennial basket nation with a chance to push the reset button and capitalise on an outpouring of public sympathy – and billions of dollars in international aid. So far, they've been disappointed.

The scale of the disaster can be tough to fathom. In one recent interview, Haiti's President, René Préval, pointed out that 25 million cubic yards of rubble now litter the nation's narrow streets, turning them into impassible bottlenecks. A thousand trucks, clearing constantly, would still take a thousand days to get rid of all of it. And there aren't more than a hundred trucks to do the job, he noted, adding: "Until we move out the rubble, we cannot really build."

His comments illustrate not just the enormity of the disaster, but the constraints under which Haiti's unpopular government is working. It has almost no tax-raising powers, and lost around a third of its civil servants in the quake. Rightly or wrongly, the government is largely helpless. Mr Préval has conceded that his nation's fate remains in the hands of foreign governments and the UN.

Aid agencies are, quite naturally, cautioning against pessimism. Prospery Raymond, the Haiti country manager for Christian Aid, concedes that little appears to have changed since January, but he said yesterday that significant improvements have quietly been made, and that preventing the death toll rising higher than it did in the months after the quake had been an achievement in itself.

"Hundreds of families who were sleeping rough under tarpaulins are now living in more robust structures which protect them from the heavy rains. It's also important to recognise that there has been no major disease outbreak or famine... Even in places like Japan, it takes years to rebuild after a major earthquake. In Haiti, the infrastructure was already poor, and many people had no safety [net] when they lost everything. Reconstruction will take time."

But time is not a commodity that Haiti's most vulnerable necessarily have. At a centre for malnourished children in Martissant, a slum neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, 22-year-old Danielle Germaine – who lost both her husband and her livelihood selling rice and beans in the disaster – showed me her one-year-old son Schneider, who is severely underweight and suffers from nightly fever.

"I am sleeping in a shelter, under tarpaulin, but it is terrible for my baby's health. He has a constant fever. I saw a doctor recently and he said there was nothing I could do. It's because of the conditions there: it's terribly hot in the day and cold at night, especially when it rains. Of course, I would like to live under a proper roof, but without help, what can you do?"

No one wants to remain dependent on handouts for ever. And despite claims that it's hard to make a difference, small fixes do often work. On a walk through the Carrefour district, I met Messias Evans, an earthquake victim who, with nine other families, was recently loaned roughly $1,000 by a Haitian charity called Aprosifa to build and stock a pharmacy. His concrete shack is now selling supplies of cough medicine, fever cures and a product called Appetivit Plus, a food supplement for malnourished people.

"From this, everyone benefits. Nine families have somewhere to make a living from. The local community gets its pharmacy. Without this small amount of money, we would not have been able to get started in business, because we had no way of getting stock. Now we have it, we are free to go on improving our lives." His store is making a profit of 500 gourdes a day – roughly £10. Like the rest of Haiti's stuttering rebuilding effort, it may not be a lot; but it's a start.

The Haiti earthquake in numbers

70% of Haitians lived on less than £1.30 a day before the quake

300,000 people were killed in the earthquake

1.5m left homeless and thousands of homes destroyed

5,000 schools were damaged or destroyed

19m cubic metres of rubble remain in Port au Prince

300 truckloads of debris and rubble are cleared every day

£7.6bn cost of rebuilding, over 5-10 years

£101m raised by the UK's disaster appeal

1 emergency toilet has been provided for every 200 survivors

1.9m people in emergency shelters

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/haitians-wait-in-tents-for-a-recovery-that-has-still-barely-begun-2023128.html

[luke]

celebrity does good shocker!!

Hollywood star shows how aid can help Haiti
Sean Penn's tent city for victims of January's quake is no publicity stunt. As Guy Adams reports from Port-au-Prince, it's the best relief operation in town

The life of a Hollywood star isn't all red carpets and luxury hotels. Not if you're Sean Penn, who woke at sunrise yesterday in a tiny tent on a mosquito-infested hillside overlooking the city of Port-au-Prince, rolled up the sleeves of a filthy shirt, holstered his Glock pistol, and set about trying to make life better for some of the two million people left homeless by the earthquake that hit Haiti's capital six months ago.

Penn's been doing the same thing virtually every day since late January, when he heard singing coming from an open-air church on the fairways of a ruined golf course in Pétionville, once one of the city's most affluent neighbourhoods. After wandering over to take a look, he decided it would be an ideal location for his newly created J/P Haiti Relief Organisation to build a camp for displaced victims of the worst natural disaster in modern history.

Today, that camp is home to more than 50,000 people, making it one of the biggest of the tent cities in Haiti, where the earthquake on 12 January destroyed about 280,000 buildings, killing 300,000 people and leaving – at a conservative estimate – a million and a half more without homes.

Penn has become one of Haiti's most hard-working advocates, pausing in his rescue mission only to make very occasional fundraising trips to Washington, where he addressed Congress and the UN, before returning to the coalface, digging trenches, hauling sacks of food and delivering medicine to help the inhabitants of his tent city – which aid workers informally call Camp Penn – to survive outbreaks of malaria, diphtheria and TB.

On Friday, he was roaring around the hillside on a red quad bike, directing volunteers as they handed out plastic sheeting to 7,500 families hoping to protect their makeshift homes from the worst of the coming rainy season. It's all part of a new day job he began shortly after separating from his wife Robin earlier this year, and has publicly promised to continue "until there is more life than death in Haiti" and the stricken Caribbean country "doesn't need me any more".

Yet this isn't just the story of another well-meaning celebrity trying to save the world. Nor is it the tale of how the leftish 49-year-old – a political activist throughout his acting career – decided to reinvent himself after his marriage failed, even if when Vanity Fair asked him to explain why he came to Haiti, Penn said, with characteristic bluntness: "I was for 20 years in a relationship with Robin. I didn't have time to commit to anything, for real, in places like Iraq... But now I'm single. I can lend a hand."

Instead, the remarkable thing about Penn's Haiti tent city is how well it works. With a fraction of the money of mainstream relief organisations and almost no experience of the aid game, the Hollywood actor has created what is widely regarded as the most vibrant and by some distance the best-run humanitarian project in Haiti.

Walk around Camp Penn and you will notice more schools, more hospitals, more latrines, and more water stations than at any of the 1,300 similar tent cities that dot the country. The camp is tidier (they have daily litter collection), safer (you see regular police patrols) and better designed than any other. Its inhabitants may not have their lives back yet – not by a long way – but they at least feel as if things might be heading in the right direction.

"The difference between this camp and all the others? Where do I start?" asks Florian Blaser, a German doctor with Médicins Sans Frontières who has worked at facilities across the country. "There are no gangs roaming the streets. There are plenty of hospitals, so people have proper access to doctors. Children have at least four schools to choose from. You go to other places, and the earthquake victims are just existing. Here, they are thriving. There's a real sense of community."

When The Independent on Sunday visited, a long line of residents waited patiently, in 100F (38C) heat, to pick up aid. A party atmosphere prevailed, with vast speakers attached to an iPod belonging to one of Penn's volunteers blasting out Jay-Z. "In other camps, handouts can be chaos," said Mark Sweeting, a volunteer for USAID, which has a health clinic on the site. "Here, people are relaxed. And J/P HRO's volunteers are doing some amazing things. Nine premature babies have just been born in the camp in the past few weeks, and seven survived. That's an amazing achievement."

Penn's success matters, because across the rest of Haiti, relief efforts aren't all turning out so rosily. Although billions of dollars in aid was pledged after the disaster, only a fraction has been spent. Rebuilding has barely started. Questions are starting to be asked over how major charities and organisations such as the UN are spending their cash. A report by ABC News this week claimed that just 2 per cent of the $1.1 bn (£730m) that the 23 biggest charities in Haiti raised after the disaster has been released. Just 1 per cent has been spent on operations.

Yet while NGOs pay thousands of dollars a month to billet staff in air-conditioned houses (the cost of leasing a home with a pool in Port-au-Prince has doubled since the quake), the Hollywood A-lister and his volunteers sleep in identical tents next to the club's former tennis courts.

The thinking behind Penn's approach isn't just about spending money wisely. It also reflects a desire, surprisingly rare in the aid industry, to be seen as something approaching an equal by people he helps. Traditional agencies might parachute into disaster zones with aid deliveries, and then vanish for days. Penn strongly believes that he can only help a community if he lives in it and understands what makes it tick.

"It's a family here," says Alistair Lamb, a former RAF officer from Balham who is co-director of Penn's camp. "Sean is the visionary behind this, and his big thing from the start has been that he wants to retain cohesion, and a sense of community, and eventually to return people to where they came from. We are not a colonising force. We sleep in tents, just like them. We don't live in houses miles away. Those kinds of things make a big difference. They mean we understand the place, and can make better decisions because of it."

Compared to rival aid organisations, which employ dozens of full-time staff, Camp Penn has just four employees, whose salaries are financed directly by Penn and his co-founder Diana Jenkins. The donkey work, so to speak, is carried out by 70 volunteers, of whom roughly 50 are medical staff on fortnight-long flying visits. "He's created a platform for people who have the same sort of pragmatic, idealist, attitudes to problems as he does, to can come out here and just get stuff done," adds Lamb. "There is no 'system' to what we do. No rules. When we arrived, our starting point wasn't what we've done before. We had a totally fresh approach."

Speak to inhabitants of the camp and affectionate tales of Penn's eccentricity abound. "I came to his field hospital because my son had broken his arm," said one local, Ernest Missolme, who runs a stall selling cooked sweetcorn to fellow residents. "The two-way radio in the tent was playing very loud, and I could hear that there had been some kind of incident. Sean's voice was shouting, 'If you guys don't come down here and get back-up, I'm going to take him down myself!' I later heard that some guy had been walking around the camp with an M16 assault rifle. Sean and two UN guys pulled out their guns and arrested him."

The incident bore witness to the fact that, in Camp Penn, the Boy's Own stuff doesn't just happen for the cameras.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hollywood-star-shows-how-aid-can-help-haiti-2023810.html

makes you wonder if he can go in and seemingly do it so well, why are all the aid agencies and organisations doing so poorly?

[reject]

Fair play to Sean, always struck me as one of the 'good guys'....

meanwhile:

Port-au-Prince, Haiti - Tens of thousands of Haitians risk becoming homeless for a second time, as weary landowners clear their properties of makeshift refugee camps in order to build new homes or sell their land on Haiti's booming real-estate market.

Of 1,241 refugee camps here, only 206 are officially recognized, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Only the official camps are monitored by NGOs, meaning that the majority lack protection.

"Nobody is really watching,” says Deepa Pachang, a volunteer with International Action Ties, a nonprofit organization monitoring illegal evictions. “Sometimes authorities show up at a camp and all the people are already gone.”

This past spring, the government Commission of Damage Assessment, Temporary Shelter, Demolition and Reconstruction reportedly identified several sites totaling 6 million square meters (some 1,500 acres) for relocating people to the perimeters of the capital. Lengthy negotiations to secure the land have yet to secure relocation options for the 2.1 million people left homeless from the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Now, forced evictions from refugee camps are on the rise, officials say. With landowners exasperated by the slow pace, some are taking matters into their own hands.

continues at source
http://www.truth-out.org/still-homeless-haiti-earthquake-thousands-fight-forced-evictions61093

[major.tom]

Canadian singer to build new, better Haitian village
The Canadian Press
Updated: Sun. Aug. 29 2010 12:06 PM ET

source

MONTREAL — A Haitian-Canadian musician wants to help the earthquake-displaced people in his homeland by spearheading the building of a village.

But Luck Mervil's project wants to build homes that will withstand any natural disaster by using retired shipping containers as the main building blocks.

Mervil plans to use 900 retrofitted containers to construct a new village fit for 5,000, erected on a parcel of previously uninhabited land near Leogane, a coastal city west of Port-au-Prince.

Mervil, a Haitian-born, Quebec-raised singer, has taken leave from a successful musical career to concentrate efforts on Haiti.

Mervil is behind a Montreal-based organization called Vilaj Vilaj, which aims to build sustainable, long-term housing in Haiti and potentially elsewhere.

"I'm putting everything aside just to do this: by (building) the village, the idea is not to put a village there and leave, we're building the village with the people," Mervil said in a telephone interview.

"We came up with a solution where everything (we need) was already on the ground and part of the solution is that people are going to build their own village."

While container-driven architecture is becoming increasingly popular around the world, the buildings are a particularly good fit for Haiti because they are cost effective, easily convertible into larger structures and weather-proof.

"It's perfect for Haiti, it's a real house, it's a real place you can go and know that you're protected," Mervil said.

"We've created a design that would work in Haiti because the tools are there, the means are there and the need is there."

Eight months after the earthquake, many Haitians are still living in tent cities with hurricane season around the corner.

Upon returning from a brief trip to that country last week, Mervil says there are more than 20,000 NGOs on the ground in Haiti but none are thinking long-term and there's little co-ordination among them.

Mervil says he wants to do things differently.

The Canadian-designed village will consist of solid homes built with 40-foot and 20-foot containers -- about 320 square feet of living space and running water and bathrooms.

A prototype home was built in Canada in about 10 days for between $8,000 and $10,000. But Mervil says the costs will be significantly lower in Haiti and Haitians, who are adept at working with metal, should have no problem converting the boxes.

In addition to teaching them to build a village, the new outpost will be self-sufficient with space for companies to set up shop so that villagers can work, Mervil said.

"For example, if we're putting solar panels on the homes we're building, we don't want to buy them from China, we want to build them ourselves," Mervil said.

"So that way we can sell them around the world and Haiti can stop asking (for help) and saying 'if you really want to help me, buy my product."'

Mervil says fundraising will be done around-the-clock. The initial cost of building the village will be about $25 million, but the hope is to make the process entirely transparent.

Donors will be able to watch the construction live on the Internet and Mervil wants to put up weekly numbers to account for every dollar spent.

"We're not taking money from any government, I don't believe government has friends, it has interests," Mervil said.

"We want people to get involved and help us change it for real and we want to be the most transparent organization you've seen."

At Clemson University, researchers had been toying with how to convert shipping containers into homes that work against hurricanes when the earthquake hit last January.

They quickly started to think of how to help displaced Haitians.

"In the case of Haiti, the urgency is more on providing shelter first and a safe and secure environment that far exceeds the kind of self-construction that's going on there now and has been for years and years," said Doug Hecker, a professor at Clemson's school of architecture.

"A shipping container without any kind of foundation can resist 140 mile-per-hour winds, so it's a really robust structural building block."

Many places around the world have fashioned cargo containers into affordable housing. In some hurricane-prone, the sturdy steel structures are considered the best defence against the elements.

In Haiti's case, there are already containers on the island since Haiti's economy is import driven. Virtually no exports means the containers often get left behind.

Some critics say housing people in containers is inhuman, but retrofitted containers can actually be altered to be livable.

Haitians can't afford pre-fabricated houses built elsewhere and shipping them to the island at a cost between $30,000 to $40,000.

Mervil adds that some of the other temporary homes being pitched are too short term and likely to collapse as easily as the ones that came down in January.

Hecker said the containers already far exceed the structural code of any country in the world and greatly exceeds the non-existent building code in Haiti.

The Clemson group hopes to build its own project in Haiti with the help of the World Bank.

"Simply modifying the container for maximum adaptability over time -- by making simple cuts into the container and providing a home that's engineered well beyond what people in Haiti live in today," said Hecker.

"The idea is to get them into something safe and secure and give people time to build it up to their own satisfaction."

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A novel idea... Cost effective, structurally sound and expedient.