IDPs have been given an evacuation order but nowhere to go! With Tomas on its way NGOs admit that they are not prepared. They do not have anywhere for the IDPs to go and they do not have equipment. Bill Clinton has been silent, not a word about Haiti since the cholera outbreak which the NGOs were also not prepared for.
6700 people have been hospitalized with cholera and 442 deaths-the storm will blow the cholera all over and we are looking at yet another catastrophe.
I posted this on Tuesday and was asked to repost it. I made some minor changes.
UPDATE: 2
Strengthening Hurricane Swipes Haiti
There was a tentative plan to shelter people in churches and sturdy public buildings, but President René Préval made it plain that people were largely on their own, warning them on local radio Thursday, “You have to help yourself.” He encouraged people in the camps to stay with friends or relatives.
But Claudette Pierre, a resident of a camp in Port-au-Prince, had an answer that spoke for many.
“The friends I had to go to died in the earthquake,” Ms. Pierre said. She also lost her husband and a 9-year-old son and now shares a tent with her surviving four children, who sleep on the ground, and another family of five, who share a queen-size bed.
The camp at Corail, however, seemed even more tense and confused. Some residents noted that they had been moved here in the spring to weather the rainy season. Why then, they asked, must they move again?
“We feel they want to move us so they could put other people here,” said Jonathas Metelus, 31, who began to believe that a storm was approaching only after a journalist showed him a satellite picture on a cellphone of the storm nearing Haiti.
Hurricane Tomas: Anticipated Destruction Will Be a Man-Made, Not Natural Disaster
Media Availability
Hurricane Tomas: Anticipated Destruction Will Be a Man-Made, Not Natural Disaster
Although Tomas’ winds and rain are a natural phenomenon, the extreme damage the hurricane will inflict on Haiti is in large part the result of a decades-long series of policies that have left Haitians excessively vulnerable to environmental stresses. Any serious discussion of the storm’s damage – or the damage from cholera or Haiti’s January 12 earthquake – should examine these policies implemented by the Government of Haiti and the international community, both before and after the earthquake, including:
a) A flawed international response to the earthquake, especially a failure to provide safe housing for the approximately 1.3 million people displaced by the earthquake and living in tent cities, and the failure to deliver promised funds;
b) AfailedresponsebytheHaitiangovernmenttotheearthquake,includingafailureto provide safe areas for emergency and transitional housing after the earthquake or effectively implement projects responding to the four hurricanes that struck Haiti in 2008; and
c) International aid, trade, debt and governance policies that have made Haiti dependent on foreign food and materials, forced Haitian farmers off their land and into the low-lying cities, encouraged the deforestation of Haiti’s hillsides and limited the Haitian government’s ability to provide basic services to its citizens, including healthcare, housing and sanitation services.
Contacts
I don't understand how Clinton and the big NGOs can be so heartless. Many internally displaced persons (IDPs) are concerned that if they evacuate they will not be allowed to return. Greedy elite landowners who have continuously and illegally threatened IDPs with eviction may very well use this as an opportunity to take their land (they claim, many do not have verification) back. The landowners have used violence and intimidation on the already homeless and suffering IDPs. This is why it is so infuriating when IDPs are told to evacuate and given no where to go! Do you think they would have tolerated months of not only little food, shelter, protection, water but also been subject to assault and intimidation by landowners.
Bill Clinton has the power to declare eminent domain. And he has been silent.
The NGOs are said to have sprung into action to keep the cholera out of the squalid camps. Why didn't the NGOs spring into action to keep the PEOPLE out of the squalid camps?
Almost ten months after the Haiti earthquake 98% of the people made homeless by the earthquake remain homeless. Rents have skyrocketed due to all the foreign aid workers. NGOs continue to hold on to and collect interest on millions of aid dollars instead of using it for its intended purpose of helping IDPs. When questioned about why they haven't spent the aid money that we donated for Haitians Red Cross and other NGOs tell us that they are "saving the money for longterm projects."
UPDATE:
- Hurricane and Recovery Effort
- Haiti evacuation effort stalls as storm closes in
"We are upset because they have not told us where we are going," said Domarcand Fenel, the head of a committee of camp residents. "People believe they want to expel us."
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Haiti wants major camp evacuated ahead of storm
NGOs and Haiti Government tell Haitians IDPs to evacuate camps and that they are on their own to get through storm!
Aid workers are scrambling to prepare but are badly short of supplies including shelter material because of the responses already under way to deal with the aftermath of the earthquake and an unprecedented cholera outbreak that has killed more than 330 people and hospitalized more than 4,700.
A U.S. Navy vessel, the amphibious warship Iwo Jima, was steaming toward Haiti on Tuesday to provide disaster relief.
Some of the biggest concern is for 1.3 million earthquake survivors still living under tarps and tents nearly 10 months after the disaster. The government said there are some shelters in the capital - a handful have been built in nearby Leogane and several hours north in Gonaives - but basically people will be on their own if Tomas hits.
The lack of urgency that the large NGOs have shown gives me the impression that they do not believe Haitians deserve food, shelter and protection. Do NGOs think that the money is for them to? Now that the storm is coming they jumped into action? Why didn't they jump into action to get people out of the rain, to feed the the orange haired children suffering from malnutrition, to build schools and to protect women and children?
- Haiti: ‘We’ve been forgotten’
‘Right to Food. 75% of families had someone go an entire day without eating in the past week and over 50% indicated that their children did not eat for an entire day
- Right to Clean Water. 44% of families primarily drank untreated water
- Right to a Sanitary Environment. 27% of families defecated in a container, a plastic bag, or on open ground in the camps
- Right to Housing. 78% of families lived without enclosed shelter
- Right to Health. There were 245 independently listed health problems among 45 families
- Right to Protection From and During Displacement. 94% of families felt they could not return home while 48% had been threatened with forced eviction since the earthquake.’
- Bill Clinton's Neglect The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission has the power to seize land for rebuilding! The Clinton Bush fund spent only 8% of the money donated for Haiti. Bill Clinton shamelessly admits he wants to help the elite business class while 1.5 million people sleep in the mud. Clinton has also devoted a good amount of time to building sweatshops for Haitians.
- Kim Ives, Land Ownership at the Crux of Haiti's Stalled Reconstruction
the principal fault-line in Haiti is not geological but one of class. A small handful of rich families own large tracts of land in suburban Port-au-Prince which would be ideal for resettling the displaced thousands [...]. However, these same families control the Haitian government and, more importantly, have great influence in the newly formed 26-member Interim Commission to Reconstruct Haiti (IHRC) [...]. The IHRC is empowered for the next 18 months under a "State of Emergency Law" to seize land for rebuilding as it sees fit [...], but the elite families on this body in charge of expropriations are not volunteering their own well-situated land to benefit Haiti's homeless. As a result, only one major displaced person camp, Corail-Cesselesse, has been built, about 10 miles north of the capital, on a forbidding strip of sun-baked desert situated between Titayen and Morne Cabrit, two desolate zones where death-squads dumped their victims during the anti-Aristide coups.100
- Insult to injury: Cholera has Haiti reeling, and Bill Clinton & Anderson Cooper haven't done enough
For example, the Clinton-Bush Haiti fund, inaugurated by President Obama with both former Presidents at his side, is still running Web advertisements that say "100% of donations go directly to relief efforts." That's a cruel lie, considering the quake victims living in flood zones under withered plastic tarps. Only 8% of its $50 million had been spent by this summer, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
- 'Focusing on Long-term Development' in Times of Cholera and Crisis Clinton Bush Fund only spent 8% of donations and has no Haitian employees. They claim that they are saving money for longterm development. Bush devastated Haiti by blocking aid. Clinton devastated Haiti by forcing it to reduce rice tariffs. They are both largely responsible for Haiti's dire poverty. In utter arrogance Clinton admits focus on Haiti's business class-the elites that don't need help.
Within hours of my op-ed being published in the New York Daily News today, the $50 million Clinton Bush Haiti Fund posted an update on its Facebook page called “Cholera Concern,” which includes this sentence: “While other organizations in Haiti are using their resources to deliver immediate humanitarian aid, we are using our resources to focus on long-term development so that these crises are prevented.”
Look at the screen shot of an Oct. 25 article about Haiti on Fox News. The advertisement for the fund is doubly deceitful: “100% of donations go directly to relief efforts,” it says. That is a lie, period. Relief is what earthquake victims desperately need right now to protect them from an oncoming hurricane. It’s what they’ve needed for the past ten months to make tent camps more livable.
Relief is not the same as long-term development, especially the fund’s chosen brand focusing on Haiti’s business class. I thought planning and executing long-term development was the Haitian government’s job. There are no Haitians on the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund’s board of directors.
- Haiti 2010: Exploiting Disaster1 By Peter Hallward (PDF)
The following essay is adapted from the Afterword of the 2010 printing of Hallward's 2008 book, ‘Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment’. (Verso).
This is a MUST READ but it isn't good. According to Hallward the FL movement is more of a idea or memory than an organization at this point.
Incredibly, 98% of the 1.5 million people made homeless continue to live in more than a thousand desperately inadequate camps, alternately baked by the tropical sun and flooded by torrential rains. Most of these people still lack a waterproof tent, let alone a transitional shelter capable of withstanding the hurricane winds that batter Haiti most summers, often with devastating effect.92
- Water, NGOs and Cholera
- Inside Story - Haiti's cholera epidemic 10-25-10 Al Jazeera 25 minutes-showed interview with Red Cross driver that said with no shame they distribute no drinkable water. When asked why he said it was hard (what does he think he is getting paid for) and he said IDPs have to buy water? When asked he admitted that was impossible.
- Haiti: Cholera Outbreak Highlights Clean Water Crisis 10-28-10 CRS has no plans of installing water filter in camp. These large NGOs are unbelievable. Do there employees drink camp water? or would they even wash their feet with the water?
The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported in July that Catholic Relief Services had spent $30 million out of $140 million raised for earthquake relief in Haiti. Some $21 million came from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), designated specifically for water and sanitation services in Port-au-Prince’s displacement camps.
A senior member of another relief group, who requested anonymity, told IPS that CRS does not intend to install water purification systems in the camps until next year. “That seems like a long time for someone living in the camps,” the aid worker said.
The water and sanitation coordinator for CRS confirmed it has no plans to install water purification systems in camps at this time, but is delivering extra-chlorinated water to some camps by truck. A joint report in September by the City University of New York’s Haiti Initiative and Haiti’s Faculty of Ethnology found that 40 percent of camps don’t have access to water and 30 percent have no toilets.
- starts 16 minutes into it. Interview with -- @BENatDAP Summary: Cholera shouldn't have happened. Some NGOs LET it Happen. Some NGOs raised money for Haiti but left 1/2 in the bank (gathering interest) and let this happen. Living conditions deteriorating it is ridiculous with the billions of dollars our there the organizations that raised money should not have let it happen. He said 16 billion raised for Haiti Some NGOs did not/are not delivering and lack transparency. They cannot coordinate because do not report where they are and what they are doing. We have pictures of babies. Some NGOs that raised money based on the urgency of need have not acted with urgency. The NGOs did not invest in systems to relieve these problems. Here is his website Disaster Accountability
- The US' Culpability-Cholera
The US illegally blocked humanitarian loans already agreed to by IFIs to Haiti in 2000. The loans were specifically designated to upgrade Haiti's water system including the area that Cholera started.
- PIH MUST READ
US withheld humanitarian AID that was going to be used to upgrade water system!
While Haiti has not had a documented case of cholera since the 1960s, the conditions in the lower Artibonite placed the region at high-risk for epidemics of cholera and other water-borne diseases even before the earthquake of January 12, 2010. In 2008, Partners In Health working with partners at the Robert Kennedy Center for Human Rights released a report of the denial of water security as a basic right in Haiti. In 2000, a set of loans from the Inter American Development Bank to the government of Haiti for water, sanitation and health were blocked for political reasons. The city of St. Marc (population 220,000) and region of the lower Artibonite (population 600,000) were among the areas slated for upgrading of the public water supply. This project was delayed more than a decade and has not yet been completed.
- MINUSTAH and Cholera
- Haiti 2010: Exploiting Disaster1 By Peter Hallward (PDF) Background information
In and after 2004, the only way to persuade these voters to accept the coup and its consequences – the systematic and explicit reassertion of foreign and elite domination of their country – has been to ram it down their throats. Ever since the coup, Haiti has been under international military occupation. Year after year, from 2004 through to 2010, at an annual cost (around $600m) larger than the entire national budget during the pre-coup years, thousands of foreign troops have patrolled the country and obliged its people to accept the end of the Lavalas sequence.
AID & CHOLERA infected 6700 and 442 deaths-it will blow all over and we are looking at catastrophe
- Experts: Did UN troops infect Haiti? UN & CDC claim it is not possible to determine source of cholera with what they have and further investigation would slow down efforts to combat disease-Paul Farmer say's sounds like politics not science.
"That sounds like politics to me, not science," Dr. Paul Farmer, a U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti and a noted expert on poverty and medicine, said of the reluctance to delve further into what caused the outbreak. "Knowing where the point source is - or source, or sources - would seem to be a good enterprise in terms of public health."
The suspicion that a Nepalese U.N. peacekeeping base on a tributary to the infected Artibonite River could have been a source of the infection fueled a protest last week during which hundreds of Haitians denounced the peacekeepers.
- MINUSTAH aim gun at Ansel Herz an unarmed journalist 10-15-10 MINUSTAH is in Haiti to protect the elite and the elites property and to keep the poor docile while the elite and IC exploit them.
The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and Partners in Health are two excellent NGOs because they help Haiti with immediate need but also work on structural changes to make Haiti more equal and less dependent on NGOs and foreign aid. Haiti is not hopeless; we, the US, need to change our oppressive and unjust Haiti policy.
These NGOs do good work!
The Aristide Foundation for Democracy (AFD) was created in 1996 by former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (the first democratically elected president of Haiti) with a simple principle in mind: "The promise of democracy can only be fulfilled if all sectors of Haitian society are able to actively participate in the democratic life of the nation." |
Haiti Emergency Relief Foundation (HERF):
Haiti’s grassroots movement – including labor unions, women’s groups, educators and human rights activists, support committees for political prisoners, and agricultural cooperatives – are funneling needed aid to those most hit by the earthquake. They are doing what they can – with the most limited of funds – to make a difference. Please take this chance to lend them your support. All donations to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund will be forwarded to our partners on the ground to help them rebuild what has been destroyed.
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Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti:
Mission
We strive to work with the people of Haiti in their non-violent struggle for the consolidation of constitutional democracy, jus tice and human rights, by distributing objective and accurate information on human rights conditions in Haiti, pursuing legal cases, and cooperating with human rights and solidarity groups in Haiti and abroad.
IJDH draws on its founders’ internationally-acclaimed success accompanying Haiti’s poor majority in the fields of law, medicine and social justice activism. We seek the restoration of the rule of law and democracy in the short term, and work for the long-term sustainable change necessary to avert Haiti’s next crisis.
"IJDH is simply the most reliable source for information and analysis on human rights in
Haiti." — Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) |
Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti:
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