This is the 200th diary since the earthquake in Haiti. The first diary was by Dallasdoc and previous diaries are linked below. This is the Justice, Not Charity! edition of the diary.
- Haiti’s elections won’t relieve misery
The Autonomous Federation of Haitian Unions on Aug. 23 denounced the increased exploitation of the small number of workers who still have jobs. Employers are ignoring labor laws that regulate overtime, hours and minimum rates of pay and are supposed to protect the rights of laid-off workers. (Haïti-Liberté, Aug. 25-31)
The major new problem for the people in camps, according to a number of Haitian community groups, is that private landlords, claiming they own the land on which the camps are built, are forcibly evicting them. About one-fifth of camp residents have been evicted. The landlord’s thugs often give no notice and demand people leave in a few hours.
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The IHRC is calling for hurricane shelters for 400,000 people — about one-quarter of the people in the camps — to be built by November. That’s when the hurricane season will be over.
The power that the U.S. has over the IHRC and Haiti’s finances has led many Haitian progressives and radicals to say that the U.S. has established a neocolony in Haiti.
With the country occupied by U.N. forces and the people facing chaos, the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) has disqualified 15 of the 34 candidates running for president. The CEP still won’t even accept an application from Fanmi Lavalas, the party of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the most popular in Haiti.
- Haiti: did UN "peacekeepers" kill a teenager?
MINUSTAH was one of the targets of a demonstration by hundreds of people in Haiti's second largest city, Cap-Haïtien in the north, on the weekend of Aug. 21. In addition to accusing the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) of partiality in the upcoming Nov. 28 general elections, the protesters raised suspicions that MINUSTAH elements were responsible for the death of 16-year-old Gérald Jean Gilles, whose body was found inside MINUSTAH's Formed Police Units (FPU) base in Cap-Haïtien on Aug. 17.
MINUSTAH spokespeople said the youth, who did odd jobs for the Nepalese soldiers at the base in exchange for food and money, had hanged himself. But people who live near the base reportedly saw a soldier assaulting Gilles, and officials at the nearby Roi Henri Christophe hotel they had heard someone shouting: "They're strangling me." Senate president Kélly Bastien has demanded a thorough investigation of the case.
MINUSTAH units have been charged with serious crimes in the past, including a case involving statutory rape of a teenage girl by members of a Nepalese unit.
- A real threat, Storm GASTON should arrive over Haiti by Thursday
Haiti Action.net - Port au Prince, Haiti —Even though Tropical Cylone GASTON is officially a "remnant low" it's quick development into a tropical cyclone or hurricane, at any moment, over the warm seas — now at 85.5º F — remains a strong likelihood. In the last few years we have seen several surprising weather events where weather systems were nominally rated as "tropical waves" without a cyclonic formation quickly spin up into a major storm within a few hours over the 80 miles of the Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. It appears that GASTON will track into the Caribbean Sea and meander just along the southern edge of Puerto Rico and the DR before Thursday afternoon.
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Since the Coup d'État of February 29, 2004, the nation's weather bureau is largely a neglected affair. Most of the qualified staff were ousted — or worse — shortly after the coup by the US-installed Coup Government who insisted that anyone who had a working relationship with the Aristide government had to be fired and isolated. Many former employees were forced into hiding or killed.
In the video, a meteorologist claims that the main equipment used for weather forecast hasn't even been working since the Coup Government and they depend on extrapolating most of their analysis second-hand from internet sources that are creating reports for other countries, mainly the USA military. Since the Coup no other country has seen the devastation caused by tropical cyclones than Haiti.
Even in 2008, there was a massive outpouring of relief money as a response to the devastation caused by three major storms, most of that money has been diverted to foreign NGO's and USAID, virtually none went to rebuilding the civil defense infrastructure that has the primary responsibility to protect the People of Haiti. In September of 2004, the floods after Tropical Storm Jeanne killed over 3,000 in Gonaive alone. USAID took over two years to come up with a public relations plan to assist in "hurricane awareness." Even that anemic diversion of the public interest was never implemented. Just a small portion of the money given by well-meaning donors in 2008 could have funded, revamped and expanded the vital hurricane response capacity of the country — well beyond anything that Haiti has ever seen.
- Sean Penn calls Aristide a "narco-trafficker" on Charlie Rose w/o proof...reaps what he sows
Penn’s best lines: 1. “The rest of the world live like this. America is the fringe.” 2. “A prominent Haitian said to me, ‘When the apocalypse comes, the survivors will be roaches, rats and Haitians.’ The Haitians will survive” (no matter what).
Penn’s worst line: Recycling unfounded charges against President Aristide, he says that Aristide’s “rising personal power issue gave in to narco-trafficking, if not personally, CERTAINLY indirectly, … that gave into violence, so you didn’t have the basic security in the country, trust in the police in Haiti!” (go to 33:15). He goes on to parrot USAID-State Department about what a wonderful job Preval was doing before the earthquake. Presumably he was “decentralizing” power!
- Haiti's Humanitarian Crisis Ignored as Media Focuses on Failed WyClef Bid
WyClef' Jean's candidacy dies with a wimper.
August 19, the night of the expected announcement from the Provisional Electoral Council (SEC), heavily armed United Nations blue helmets patrolled the streets in armored cars on the alert for a riot that never came. However, about 300 of WyClef's supporters did march through heavy rain to protest outside Haiti's electoral office in Port-au-Prince.
- Breaking silence by SMS
After the earthquake, Marie Sofonie fled the camp where she found refuge for fear of being raped. She now works on the Ayiti SMS SOS project to fight violence against women and other forms of human rights abuses in Haiti.
In Haiti, gender-based violence was common already before the 12 January. The earthquake has made things worse: lack of security in the thousands of tent camps scattered in the capital city, and an increased incidence of abuse crimes. We recently documented some touching stories in our Solidar’IT report “Women: the box of grief”. We could say that Ayiti SMS SOS too has a box of grief that contains SMS messages instead of anonymous, handwritten letters, but the two methods stem from the same wish to fight gender-based violence, human trafficking and other crimes against the most vulnerable.
- Beginning of the End
“The mother came back, got her daughter and checked her daughter and she said, ‘her inside was so’ –she emphasized– ‘opened.’ And then she asked the daughter, ‘what happened to you?’ And the daughter said, ‘while I went to the bathroom there was this man that held me and had sex with me’.”
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...She is a 10-year-old girl who has been sexually assaulted three times in the camp where she lived with her mother.
- Haiti Liberté editorial on political situation, upcoming election
The occupation explains a great deal about the uncertainties that weigh over the future of the country. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake we were accorded humanitarian aid from the International Community that proved to be more of a show than a real financial commitment, especially on the part of the United States, the leading imperialist country. That aid, tied to reconstruction promises, remains desperately unfulfilled. In reality, the promises of humanitarian and financial assistance simply serve to reinforce the military occupation. To illustrate the burdensome nature of this assistance, we need only scrutinize the role of Bill Clinton — linked, incredibly, with his buddy George Bush through the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund (CBHF). The fund was created on President Obama’s advice and we haven’t seen a single dime from it.
- Wyclef Jean: Sean Penn 'too busy sniffing cocaine' to see me in Haiti
RELIABLE SOURCE ARTICLES:
Any articles that we missed? Please leave comment. Will revise the list soon. Any recommendations?
ELECTION
History
Aristide,
Agriculture,
Immigration,
Trade Policy,
Vulture Capitalism,
(will add more articles).
Video:
Brian Concannon and Paul Farmer Video, Change Haiti Can Believe In: here;
Haiti Dreaming for More Than $3 a day Watch, here; Life and Debt here;
Edwidge Danticat on US immigration detentions 60 minutes, here: Jeremy Scahill on Democracy Now! responds to Clinton being appointed as UN envoy to Haiti, here: Reuters, here;
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AID-CHANGE?
Haitian history didn't begin after the earthquake. Kevin Pina/Latin Waves, here.
IJDH, “We Became Garbage to Them,” here.
Haiti Liberté editorial on political situation, upcoming election, here.
Nicole Lee, "Haiti: An Opportunity For A New Model," here.
Mark Schuller, "Falling through the cracks or unstable foundations?" here
IJDH, “Haitians in IDP Camps are living better now than before the earthquake? Are you kidding me?” here
Kim Ives, "Land Ownership at the Crux of Haiti's Stalled Reconstruction," here.
CIRH, Interim Haiti Recovery Commission here, Clinton & Bellerive co-chairs, 26 members 13 foreigners and 13 of Haiti's elite business people. One of which Reginald Boulos was a backer of both coups. Another memberGarry Lissade, the former lawyer for Cedras during the 1993 Governor's Island post-coup negotiations.
Mark Schuller, "Tectonic Shifts? The upcoming donors' conference for Haiti" here,
CounterPunch, "How NGOs are Profiting Off a Grave Situation: Haiti and the Aid Racket" here,
More Articles, here..
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