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</font><font size=4><b>Haiti: Hunger Sparks Growing Protests<br><br>
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<a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/hait-f09.shtml" eudora="autourl">
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/hait-f09.shtml<br>
</a><b>By Bill Van Auken <br><br>
</b>09 February, 2010<br>
<b><a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/hait-f09.shtml">
WSWS.org</a><br><br>
</b>On Sunday, Haiti saw one of its largest protests since the January 12
earthquake, as four weeks after the disaster, frustration with continuing
hunger and homelessness mount.<br><br>
Thousands of demonstrators, most of them women, marched through the
streets of Petionville, a Port-au-Prince suburb, denouncing the local
mayor, Lydie Parent, for hoarding food for resale and not distributing it
to the hungry.<br><br>
A significant amount of food aid has been channeled into Haiti’s informal
markets, sold at elevated prices and clearly yielding a profit for some
officials who are in charge of its distribution.<br><br>
Congregating in front of the local municipal building, the demonstrators
chanted “if the police shoot at us, we will burn everything,” Reuters
reported.<br><br>
“I am hungry, I am dying of hunger,” one of the marchers told the news
agency. “Lydie Parent keeps the rice and doesn’t give us anything. They
never go distribute where we live.”<br><br>
Petionville, up the mountain from the capital, has traditionally been the
preserve of Haiti’s economic elite. Shanty towns sprung up around the
walled mansions of the country’s businessmen and politicians, however.
Since January 12, one of the principal watering holes of the well-heeled,
the Petionville Club, has been transformed into the capital’s biggest
homeless encampment, where more than 40,000 quake victims have sought
refuge on the club’s nine-hole golf course.<br><br>
Sent in to police this yawning social divide are 360 US combat troops
from the 82nd Airborne Division, who have set up camp around the club’s
swimming pool and restaurant.<br><br>
Last Friday, former US President Bill Clinton was also met by protests
upon his return to Haiti. Hundreds gathered outside the judicial police
headquarters, the makeshift headquarters of the Haitian government,
during Clinton’s visit there with the country’s President Réne
Préval.<br><br>
“Our children are burning in the sun. We have a right to tents. We have a
right to shelter,” one of the protesters, Mentor Natacha, 30, a mother of
two, told Agence France Presse.<br><br>
Hundreds of others demonstrated outside the US embassy.<br><br>
Clinton, who was named the United Nations special envoy to Haiti last
May, was forced to acknowledge the failure of sufficient aid to reach the
majority of the Haitian people nearly a month after the earthquake. “I’m
sorry it’s taken this long,” he said. “I’m trying to get to what the
bottlenecks are.”<br><br>
Clinton also visited the Gheskio medical clinic in Port-au-Prince,
announcing the donation of various supplies by his foundation. However,
the clinic’s director, Jean William Pape, told AFP that the facility is
overwhelmed and has not received adequate aid.<br><br>
“It has been huge on us because in addition to providing the care to our
HIV/AIDS patients, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases, we have to
take care of around 6,000 refugees,” said Pape. “We don’t have enough
supplies. We don’t have tents for them and the rainy season is coming and
we live in a flood area.”<br><br>
According to press reports, barely 10,000 tents of the 200,000 requested
by the Haitian government have arrived in the country. Clinton said that
another 27,000 would come in the next week, still grossly inadequate to
meet the massive need.<br><br>
The ex-US president felt compelled to deny that he had been sent in as a
de facto colonial governor of the devastated Caribbean nation. “What I
don’t want to be is the governor of Haiti,” said Clinton. “I want to
build the capacity of the country to chart its own course. They can trust
me not to be a neocolonialist, I’m too old.”<br><br>
Whatever Clinton’s personal role, his attempt at self-deprecating humor
cannot hide the fact that Washington is playing precisely the role of a
neocolonial power in Haiti. Within hours of the earthquake, the Pentagon
launched an operation that has thus far seen the deployment of some
16,000 troops and the assumption of US military control over the
country’s airports and port facilities. US naval warships and Coast Guard
vessels have imposed a blockade off Haiti’s shores, ensuring that any of
the earthquake’s victims seeking to escape to the US will be swiftly
repatriated.<br><br>
Colonel Gregory Kane, the operations officer for US Task Force Haiti,
said that US troops would remain in Haiti as long as necessary. “We are
in Haiti as long as needed and are welcomed by the government of Haiti,”
he said.<br><br>
Aid groups and government officials in Europe and Latin America have
sharply questioned the US militarization of the response to the Haitian
disaster. Many blame Washington’s making the deployment of US
troopsrather than the provision of desperately needed aidthe top
priority in the first critical days following the earthquake for
increasing the death toll.<br><br>
The militarization of aid and obsession with security remain clearly in
evidence nearly a month after the earthquake. This was reflected in a
report by the AFP on food distributions over the weekend. “Surrounded by
dozens of heavily-armed US soldiers, old ladies and even young men
struggled under the burning tropical sun to carry away sacks of rice,”
the news agency reported. “In another part of the city a detachment of
around a dozen Argentine troops, some enclosed in an armored personnel
carrier equipped with a turret gun, escorted a small flat-bed truck laden
with food to its destination.”<br><br>
For its part, the Haitian government has appeared largely powerless and
has grown increasingly unpopular with the Haitian people. Graffiti
reading “Down with Préval,” the Haitian president, has begun appearing
with increasing frequency on walls in the capital.<br><br>
President Préval, who has been virtually unseen by the population since
the quake hit, announced over the weekend, while meeting with officials
from the neighboring Dominican Republic, that the estimate of the number
of people killed in the earthquake has risen to a quarter of a million,
while 250,000 homes have been destroyed and more than a million people
are facing an urgent need for temporary shelter with the rainy season
fast approaching.<br><br>
Speaking with the media on Saturday, he urged the Haitian population to
remain calm. “We understand the difficulties faced by the people who
sleep outside, homeless, we understand the frustration about food and
water distribution being difficult,” he said. “But it is in discipline,
in solidarity, in patience that we will be able to solve the problems
that confront us.”<br><br>
The real class position of the Haitian regime was evident in an interview
given by the country’s Prime Minister to the Colombian daily País. “The
ones who lost the most in Haiti on January 12 weren’t the poor, it was
what was left of the middle class,” he said. “Because the poor didn’t
have houses before, and they still don’t have houses. The middle class,
which had stayed in Haiti, which had made some effort to build a house, a
small business, lost everything.”<br><br>
The fact that the poor “didn’t have houses” has been cited by relief
organizations as a significant factor in the present crisis, in that they
have no means of rebuilding and nowhere to go. According to the Catholic
relief group Caritas International, 70 percent of those displaced by the
earthquake in the capital did not own their own homes before the disaster
struck.<br><br>
More than half a million of these people have left Port-au-Prince, with
the encouragement of the government, to return to rural areas from which
many of the capital’s poorer layers had migrated and where they still
have relatives.<br><br>
The reason that people had migrated to the capital in the first place,
however, was that they could not sustain themselves through agriculture.
Now these areas have seen a massive influx of hungry people for which
there is little or no food. Relief supplies have yet to arrive in the
rural areas, and there is growing fear that farmers will begin using
their seed supplies for food, endangering next year’s harvest and leaving
even greater hunger.<br><br>
Meanwhile, the Miami Herald reported Saturday that there is a new crisis
with the emergency medical flights that bring severely injured Haitian
children to US hospitals for treatment, and that once again it is costing
lives.<br><br>
Last month, the military suspended the flights after Florida Governor
Charlie Crist sent a letter to the Obama administration questioning
whether the federal government would assume responsibility for the costs
being incurred at the state’s hospitals, where most of the young Haitian
victims had been brought.<br><br>
After a growing public outcry over the suspension, the Obama
administration agreed to foot the bill through the US Department of
Health and Human Services.<br><br>
But now, the department has imposed such stringent eligibility
requirements for the medical flights that few patients qualify, and those
who don’t are dying in Haiti.<br><br>
“They want paperwork. We don’t have paperwork,” Miami Children’s Hospital
Dr. William Muinos, who heads the pediatric unit of a field hospital in
Port-au-Prince told the Herald. “They don’t have passports. They don’t
have IDs. They don’t have homes. They don’t have anything.”<br><br>
The paper cited the case of a 15-year-old girl, Whitney Constant, who was
told she would be taken to Florida for treatment, but then was stopped by
the government requirements. Three days after she was to have been flown
out, she contracted gangrene, forcing doctors to amputate the lower half
of one leg and the foot of the other.<br><br>
Another 14-year-old child died of a pulmonary embolism last Tuesday.
Doctors said she would have survived had she been evacuated. “She was
told she would leave,” said Dr. Muinos. “Within 24 hours, that promise
was denied.”<br><br>
“The Department of Health and Human Services lifted the embargo on
flights but made the criteria so strict that you can’t get anybody in,”
said Elizabeth Grieg, director of the field hospital. She told the Herald
that since the flights resumed only nine of the hospitals’ patients have
been accepted, six of whom had been scheduled to go out before the
military suspended them last month<br><br>
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