[News] Promoting Human Rights - Haiti's Resurrection

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/schuller04062010.html

April 6, 2010


Promoting Human Rights


Haiti's Resurrection

By MARK SCHULLER

Port-au-Prince.

Today is Easter, an important symbol of rebirth. 
Christians everywhere rejoice in the victory over 
death. In Haiti the faithful celebrate in ra-ra 
bands, processions in the street led by a brass 
band, often hand-fashioned instruments. Children 
fly hand-made kites, symbolizing the resurrection and hope.

This year there is little cause to celebrate, 
particularly for the many who lost their homes 
and family members. One ra-ra band snaked through 
the streets, and only a handful of kites rose up.

It rained three nights this week. The air is 
thick in addition to the heavy dust from fallen 
buildings. In the mornings after, squadrons of 
mosquitoes - possibly carrying malaria - circle 
overhead. Machin prive (private car, usually much 
newer than public transport) struggle with the mud puddles in the road.

Luckily the house is still standing and we didn't 
have to battle the elements while trying to 
sleep. A team of engineers from the Ministry of 
Public Works came by to inspect the five houses 
on the block that are still standing. After 
inspection the team tags the building with the 
French acronym MTPTC and the number of the team, 
one of nine roaming the remains of 
Port-au-Prince. Our house was tagged in yellow, 
meaning the house is structurally sound but requires major rehab.

Armed with sledgehammers, troops of four or five 
men clad in yellow MTPTC shirts chisel away at 
the remains of buildings already condemned, 
tossing blocks of cement and the intricate iron 
work to the street below, leaving only the iron 
rebar poles standing. Below, wheelbarrow-toting 
young men also in yellow move the rubble to large 
piles that can be bulldozed away. On one 
particular street this dozer was driven by a 
woman, adding a feminine touch to her yellow outfit.

Most of the streets have already been cleared by 
the will and collective labor of the survivors, 
and the taptap routes are functioning more or 
less normally, the taptap crowded as ever with 
people travelling across the city. Timachann 
(street merchants) - those whose bodies and goods 
have survived, anyway - have again taken their 
places along the street. Things would appear 
'normal' in some neighborhoods seen from the 
street. Other parts of the city feel like a ghost 
town, as an eerie quiet betrays the 800,000 
people now gone. Kabann kreyòl, a normally 
bustling open-air market with merchants selling 
hand-made bedroom furniture shouting at 
passersby, is now a shell of its former self, 
with only two men left, both of whom have long since lost their gusto.

Seen from atop my still-intact roof, however, the 
damage is overwhelming. Entire neighborhoods such 
as Fort-National have been leveled, people swelling the camps.

The rain is especially bad in these "tent 
cities." People who owned their house before the 
earthquake sleep in tents, even if their house is 
standing, out of fear for the next seismic event. 
They are lucky enough to still have a place to 
store their wares. When it rains, they are less 
affected since they have cement blocks from their 
house to elevate the tent. Better still if they have a tarp to sleep under.

This is not the case in the tent cities I have 
visited. The tents themselves vary greatly in 
quality, size, material, and shape. Some are 
simply makeshift domes of recycled plastic 
structured by PVC piping. In the Solino camp, 
housing some 6,000 people in the football field 
outside the local Catholic church, the tents are 
a thick plastic that rips easily and traps in the 
tropical heat. After the rains, for those whose 
tent is still structurally sound, the mud still 
seeps under the tents. The alleys between the 
uniform rows of tents are just wide enough for 
one person to pass, so it is impossible to avoid 
trudging through the mud or jump a puddle. The 
bottoms of the tents bear signs of this mud. Also 
owing to the narrow corridors, nowhere in the 
camp itself is there enough space to cook food. 
Said Handy Jean-Louis, a leader within Asanble 
Vwazen Solino (Solino neighbors assembly, AVS): 
"I hear in the news that blan complain that we 
sell our aid, but what good is the food if we 
can't cook it?" Getting food itself is a 
struggle, as the World Vision distribution site 
is a 20-minute walk away passing garbage-filled 
corridors, ravines, and streets.

Food aid here and all over Port-au-Prince follows 
a system of card distribution. NGO 
representatives or their chosen local committee 
(often created by this NGO itself) come by the 
night before and pass out cards to the women in 
the camp. Card holders enter U.N. checkpoints and 
queue up to receive the bags from a truck under 
U.N. guard, then leave another checkpoints to 
join their brothers or husbands who are waiting 
for them. Women begin lining up at 2 or 3 in the 
morning, and some all night, to wait for their 
aid to be given to them. Lambi Fund director 
Josette Pérard spoke for many: "It's humiliating 
to stand in line in the hot sun all day long."

We visited the Solino camp the day of the 
distribution. The cards were distributed between 
11 p.m. and midnight. Everyone we talked with was 
there because they hadn't received a card. 
Nathalie, a 26 year old mother of three, said, 
"You can't afford to sleep when you hear that 
there's a card distribution. You never know where 
and when they will give it out. You just have to 
follow the noise of the crowd and hope you will 
get yours." Sylvie, who has 14 people - including 
her infant daughter and her sister's family - 
living in her ripped tent, said that she never 
got a card because she doesn't know the NGO 
representatives. "It's all about your people 
getting the goods," she said. Several people in 
this camp, and leaders with KOFAVIV, retold 
stories of women being propositioned for sex in 
exchange for cards. Other news stories and 
reports including INURED pointed out that this 
system of cards is easy to exploit.

There are alternatives to the cards. Many 
grassroots groups that existed before the quake 
like KOFAVIV and AVS who ran free schools for 
neighborhood children took a formal census of 
their members or of the camp. Elvire Constant, a 
leader with a group called Organisation Femmes en 
Action (OFA) along with five other committees 
have a list of all 11,867 residents in the St. 
Louis de Gonzague camp between the two busy 
thoroughfares of Delmas 31 and 33. The big NGOs 
doing distribution in the area chose not to work 
in collaboration with these groups and make use 
of the information collected. In the town of 
Gressier closest to the epicenter, on the coast 
between Carrefour and Léogâne, ITECA took a 
census of all families and distributed tents, dry 
goods, food, and stoves according to their needs, 
checking people off their list as they came for 
the relief supplies. Both models rely on trust, 
long-term relationships, and local 
decision-making, a far cry from the $1000-per day 
experts and 20-something NGO middle management 
flown in to run the aid distribution.

The result of this system of NGO patronage and 
lack of respect for local leadership and 
innovation is that many people are left behind.

The food distribution is not by any means the 
only problem in the camps. The proximity of the 
tents to one another, the flies buzzing around 
the mud puddles, and the waste join forces with 
another, more serious, issue to create a public 
health disaster. In Solino there are no latrines 
inside the camp for 6,000 residents, forcing 
people to either hold it and walk some 10 minutes 
away to an overused latrine across the ravine or 
do their business in a bag and throw it in said 
ravine later. When asked who is "in charge" of 
the camp, to whom people could demand necessities 
like latrines, no one could point to an agency. 
Sylvie just remembered it was the U.N. troops, 
MINUSTAH, who forcibly put them there: "They 
destroyed my house. I would have rather stayed 
there where it was at least dry." Her neighbor 
Magalie even preferred sleeping under her 
makeshift shanty of bedsheets on wooden posts 
"because it is too hot in here and the mud is 
trapped under the tent. In addition, my tent ripped, you see?"

In other camps, reskonsab (groups or people in 
charge) offer these basic human needs. Medecins 
Sans Frontières offered several areas a temporary 
set-up of wash water, latrines, and showers, all 
fashioned out of PVC and plastic. They and other 
agencies like French NGO GRET send trucks of 
water to fill the tanks, cisterns, or 4000-gallon storage bags.

In camps and neighborhoods with a grassroots 
social organization, these basic necessities are 
well-managed. Too many other areas have 
"Astroturf" associations created by the large 
distributing NGOs, the government, or the land 
owners themselves. Several camps such as 
Champs-de-Mars or St. Louis de Gonzague have 
committees that charge as much as five gourdes 
(13 cents) per person to use the toilet. KOFAVIV 
director Eramithe Delva who lives in the 
Champs-de-Mars camp with 15,000 others, pointed 
out the obvious: "who has the money to pay for 
that? A woman with three kids would have to pay 
45 gourdes a day! What a story!"

Elvire Constant has another concern: "I wouldn't 
mind so much but there's a long line! You have to 
pray to God that you don't wet yourself while 
waiting in the sun!" She and other committee 
leaders built a latrine near the entrance of the 
camp, and kept a key but Father Patrick Belanger, 
the French director of the school on whose 
grounds they all stood, destroyed it because it 
sat underneath a cement wall that was still 
standing but damaged. "The priest was concerned 
with safety, that's true," said Constant. But he 
could have warned us to move it. Now we don't 
have any other choice. What's worse, someone could have been in there."

Constant and others have been concerned with the 
school director's policy of withholding aid from 
the camp residents. Samuel Rémy, with a group 
called Comité d'Action pour le camp de St. Louis 
(CAS), argued that this withholding was an 
attempt to starve people out. "They know that we 
need food, clean water, latrines, and other 
materials. But we here have no choice but to stay 
here so we find what we need outside." World 
Vision distributed food aid cards only once, 
mid-March. According to several neighborhood 
leaders, including Jean-Manno Paul with 
Regroupment des Victims de 12 Janvier (Network of 
Victims of January 12), the school director kept 
the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontières from 
providing services. On Saturday, a group of Cuban 
doctors sat sheepishly in the entrance, waiting for authorization.

According to the community leaders, this policy 
of starving people wasn't working, so Belanger 
and the school administration stepped up their 
efforts, calling in the mayor and police of 
Delmas to issue an order to vacate. The six 
community organizations intervened on the 11,000 
residents' behalf, and the city government backed down.

Working with the national government who issued 
an order to re-open schools tomorrow, on April 5, 
the day after Easter, school administration 
attempted a "carrot" approach. According to 
government officials who preferred to remain 
anonymous, the government offered each of the six 
groups 20,000 gourdes and promised help finding 
open land. Three of the six groups toured the 
land this past week; instead of 14 hectares the 
dispersed sites only include 3. Leaders estimate 
that 2,500-3,000 people instead of the full 
11,000 can stay there. All tracts of land are 
still unsuitable: none have water sources or latrines.

St. Louis de Gonzague is a long-standing 
institution that educates the children of the 
so-called "political class." The school had a 
meeting with parents yesterday and already 
cleared the entrance to the camp of some 800 
people on either side. The irony of the situation 
is not lost on camp residents. Said CAS's Rémy, 
"We're ready to move if the government provides 
us with a suitable location, which includes 
school. If it's a natural disaster such as 
flooding we understand. But they are moving us so 
that the children of a small minority can have 
education. What about us residents? There are 
3,000 children here. Don't we pèp la ("the 
people," poor majority) have a right to school as well?

A group of youth in Inivèsite Popilè, the 
"Popular University" which includes AVS, Chandèl, 
SAJ-Veye Yo and AVJ who has been doing monthly 
seminars for popular organization leaders, 
visited the camp on Easter Sunday to help 
residents start a school. The Inivèsite Popilè 
representatives, including Etant Dupin - also a 
journalist with Telesur - and Chandèl's Reyneld 
Sanon, pointed to the Constitution, article 32.1 
that requires the state to provide citizens with 
education. According to a flyer Inivèsite Popilè 
passed out, "the state promises that schools will 
re-open, but which schools? Where? For whom?"

The grassroots effort to build a school inside 
the camp continues, as does the discussion 
between the six organizations and community 
regarding resettlement. Some appear more ready to 
leave under whatever conditions and some like CAS 
are more militant, denouncing the situation on 
local radio and promising resistance. A 
persistent rumor is spreading that the school 
will begin forcibly removing people at 1:00 
tomorrow, Monday April 5, the first day of 
school. A grassroots movement of more than 30 
local associations to demand permanent, quality, 
shelter from the government as a right.

At issue is how or even whether the government 
and donors who met last Wednesday in New York 
understand that survivors - and all people - have 
rights to water, food, education, and decent 
shelter. How and when these rights will be 
assured should be a matter of discussion not just 
in New York. True grassroots associations have 
the innovation, the organization, the 
information, the local respect, and the energy to 
find solutions, alternatives to the top-down 
model like the system of giving food cards and 
creating Astroturf groups to manage limited goods 
that excludes the majority of residents.

Specifically:

•The system of distribution needs to be 
overhauled and more inclusive, consulting with 
local residents and true grassroots organizations

•The food distributed should as much as possible include Haitian grown produce

•Decent shelter needs to be built and provided 
for everyone before people are moved from camps

•School needs to be provided for everyone, including children living in camps

Grassroots leaders call upon us to join them in 
denouncing these conditions as what they are, 
violations of human rights. Haiti's resurrection 
demands that the survivors direct this process of 
rebuilding, as many grassroots groups are already 
finding solutions on their own. There is a need 
for greater resources, but those who want to help 
need to be sensitive, careful, and humble. As 
always, focusing on our own governments' role and 
plan is appropriate and necessary.

Mark Schuller is Assistant Professor of African 
American Studies and Anthropology at York 
College, the City University of New York. He 
co-edited 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001E6Q184/counterpunchmaga>Capitalizing 
on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster 
Reconstruction and co-directed documentary Poto 
Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global 
Economy. He is completing a book about foreign aid and NGOs in Haiti.




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