New Haiti Diary series: I have been posting Haiti news Updates in Black Kos comments since Haiti's devastating Earthquake. After may suggestions to make diary,
Haiti News Updates on Fridays at 3:00 Pacific time and Wednesday 5:00.
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- MUST READS
- Disaster Capitalism: The Shelters That Clinton Built| The Nation
The project was announced by Clinton as his foundation's first contribution to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, which the former president co-chairs. The foundation described the project as "hurricane-proof...emergency shelters that can also serve as schools...to ensure the safety of vulnerable populations in high risk areas during the hurricane season," while also providing Haitian schoolchildren "a decent place to learn" and creating local jobs. The facilities, according to the foundation, would be equipped with power generators, restrooms, water and sanitary storage. They became one of the IHRC's first projects.
However, when Nation reporters visited the "hurricane-proof" shelters in June, six to eight months after they'd been installed, we found them to consist of twenty imported prefab trailers beset by a host of problems, from mold to sweltering heat to shoddy construction. Most disturbing, they were manufactured by the same company, Clayton Homes, that is being sued in the United States for providing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with formaldehyde-laced trailers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Air samples collected from twelve Haiti trailers detected worrying levels of this carcinogen in one, according to laboratory results obtained as part of a joint investigation by The Nation and The Nation Institute's Investigative Fund
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- Martelly nominates 2004 coup regimes ministre or [In] justice, Gousse, for Haiti's next prime minister: WikiLeakCables Testify to PM Nominee’s Repressive PastAnsel Herz & Kim Ives
“Gousse has been the strongest single force behind the persecution of political prisoners in Haiti,” said Brian Concannon, Jr., director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, who worked to free Jean-Juste and Neptune. “He personally (and illegally) countermanded release orders by judges and even his own prosecutors.”
While hounding democracy activists, Gousse has defended some of Haiti’s most notorious human rights violators. When former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, currently under investigation and house arrest, returned to Haiti this January, Gousse argued against his prosecution in an op-ed for Le Nouvelliste, writing that “the notion of a crime against humanity cannot be used in Haitian courts.”
As Justice Minister, Gousse also helped clear the landmark 2000 Raboteau trial conviction (in absentia) of right-wing FRAPH death-squad leader Louis Jodel Chamblain, who had returned to Haiti as a leader of the “rebels” that helped overthrow Aristide in February 2004.
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- Press Release: Human Rights Lawyers File Petition Against President Martelly’s Pick for Prime Minister
Prime Minister Gerard Latortue’s dictatorship following the 2004 coup d’état murdered thousands and illegally detained hundreds of political dissidents. Mr. Gousse served as the architect of the campaign of political repression, whose victims included Catholic priest and political activist, Father Gerard Jean-Juste. When Judge Jean-Sénat Fleury threw out the false charges against Father Jean-Juste, Mr. Gousse forced Judge Fleury off the bench, flagrantly disrespecting Haiti’s separation of powers.
The BAI is requesting the Senate to seize the High Court of Justice on the assassinations committed by Prime Minister Gerard Latortue’s regime including those of: Abdias Jean, a journalist, who was killed in a slum called the “Village of God” on January 14, 2005; Ederson Joseph, a school child, who was killed by a hooded police officer in the yard of his home on Rue Estimé at Fort National on January 17, 2005; and Jimmy Charles, an employee of the state-operated telecommunications company, Teleco, and member of Fanmi Lavalas, whose family found his body in the morgue of the General Hospital on January 13, 2005, 8 days after he was illegally arrested and taken to a holding cell in Antigang.
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- Haitian Times - Say What: Bernard Gousse as Prime Minister
- CHOLERA: returns to Haiti and NGOs Are Out of Money: More articles here; Cholera links
- Cholera returns to rural Haiti amid fears that relief funds to contain it are running dry
UNICEF's Mark Henderson, head of the U.N.'s water and sanitation response, said many non-governmental organizations tapped into earthquake-related funds in the fall in a desperate effort for treatment and prevention. That money is no longer available.
"The initial funding that everybody received has come to an end," Henderson said....
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- Cholera Treatment Funding Lags Far Behind New Infections:
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At the time of OCHA’s warning, the UN’s cholera appeal was 46 percent funded. Three months later, with a drastic increase in the number of cases, the appeal remains just 53 percent funded; an increase of just over $10 million. It costs $1 million to operate a CTC for three months. Since March, over 800 people have died from the cholera epidemic, according to MSPP data.
A recent Al Jazeera video report, also notes the initial underestimate of how bad the epidemic would be:
- How We Helped Pave Haiti's Road to Cholera Hell Canada and the UN have committed public health malpractice on a very large scale.
First cholera in Haiti in 100 years
Ever since 2004, when the U.S. and Canada encouraged the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the nominal government of Haiti has been ineffective, especially the Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP). Haiti has been run by MINUSTAH and thousands of non-governmental organizations. They range from the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and Medecins Sans Frontieres to religious groups.
When cholera arrived last October, Haiti had not seen it in a century, if ever. It had started along the Meille River in a rural area, downstream from a MINUSTAH peacekeepers' camp that had just received a contingent of Nepali soldiers, and suspicion fell on them at once.
- Cholera situation remains serious: three articles | Canada #Haiti Action Network
- Dominican Republic and Haiti: Immigration, Deportations, Exploitation
- Dominican Republic Intensifies Targeting of Haitians
The sugar-producing East, from which the buses came, is a hub for thousands of Haitian migrants working under brutal conditions cutting cane. As was reported by Dominican Today, “When inspectors entered the buses and asked the Haitians for their ID, if they were in order, they weren’t bothered, but dozens of them that didn’t [have appropriate documentation] were escorted onto buses to clearing centers.”
This description gives a good idea as to how Dominican authorities ascertain whether or not one is in the country illegally—by targeting those who appear to be Haitian. Summary detentions and mass deportations of Haitians amount to a longstanding and ubiquitous dynamic in Dominican law enforcement. The seemingly straightforward protocol of asking for proper identification quickly becomes an exercise in discrimination, as many Dominican nationals also have difficulty obtaining valid documentation. A 2006 survey by the Dominican government’s National Office of Statistics found that 22% of children born during the previous five years did not have birth certificates, “and thus,” Unicef noted, “legally, did not exist.” The crackdown against illegal immigration is closely linked to efforts to remove those of Haitian descent from the country....
In April, PBS’s Need to Know interviewed a Dominican human rights activist of Haitian descent, Sonia Pierre, who founded the organization MUDHA--El Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitianas. She refutes claims that deportations are focused solely on Haitians with no documentation who’ve only recently arrived:
- Stranded: The stateless Haitians - Witness - Al Jazeera English
For many Haitians fleeing dictators and poverty at home and looking for work in the cane fields, the Dominican Republic has long been a refuge. However, possibly a million Haitians or people of Haitian ancestry are now being affected by the adoption of a new law concerning citizenship in the Dominican Republic. Many descendants of Haitian workers living in the Dominican Republic could face deportation to Haiti or be forced to live outside the law, with no legal status in the country.
- US Haiti Priorites: Sweatshops:
- Haiti: fertile land seized for new sweatshop zone
Residents of Caracol, a village in Haiti's Northeast department, say they were never consulted or even warned about plans to build a huge new "free trade zone" (FTZ, a complex of assembly plants) on land where many of them have been farming for some 20 years. "It's the most fertile area we have at Caracol," resident Renel Pierre told journalist Sylvestre Fils Dorcilus. "It's inconceivable and unacceptable that the government could choose this part of the land to set up an industrial park." ...
The new FTZ is clearly a priority for the US government. In early June Cheryl Mills, chief of staff for US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, paid her second visit to the site, accompanied by a high-level delegation that included US ambassador Kenneth Merten, US Agency for International Development (USAID) deputy mission director Anthony Chan and Mark D'Sa, an executive from the US retailer GAP who is "on loan" to the State Department. (Haïti Libre, Haiti, June15)
According to Koios Associates, Oxford University economist Paul Collier, who wrote a United Nations "development plan" for Haiti in 2009, calls the project "development as it should be done." "This will be a match that strikes a fire and gets things going," former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) predicts. (Koios Associates website, accessed July 10)
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- Post Earthquake Update on Poto Mitan
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- Video is from Feb 2010 but as relevent today to understand why Haiti is poor and why aid is not working The politics of rebuilding
EVICTIONS: More article on evictions here:Evictions
The Delmas evictions took place in broad daylight at the hands of Wilson Jeudy’s Street Control Brigade, supported, crucially, by heavily armed national police. At one site shots were fired into the air. As for negotiation: “We do not evict people by agreement,” insisted Mayor Jeudy. It would not stop there, he promised. “These were public spaces.… they can’t be privatized by just any– one,” he told the daily Le Nouvel– liste, co-opting, broadening and redefining the neo-liberal economic jargon of the new government. Others occupying such spaces would be “chased away” the mayor said. Public spaces would be “cleansed.”
With glorious irony, Jeudy asserted that the camps housed brothels, thieves and street thugs. There was no mention of his responsibility for their arrest, if true. For 18 months now, residents of IDP camps have suffered an epidemic of rape, sexual assault and theft as a result of the failure of the authorities to patrol the camps and investigate reported crimes.
- AID, Shoddy Housing and Disaster Capitalism
- DemocracyNow! TheNation IsabelMacdo & Isabeau Doucet on Haiti & "The Shelters That Clinton Built" additional information here: Inside Haiti’s “Hurricane Proof” Shelters
Bill Clinton is stealing from Haiti Eq victims
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- Slide Show: Inside the Clinton Foundation's Shoddily-Built, Searingly Hot and Toxic Haiti Trailers..
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- Housing situation still desperate as Haitians hunker down
But, with the reconstruction effort stalled, tens of thousands of quake survivors throughout the capital Port-au-Prince and its outskirts are resigning themselves to staying in the flimsy shelters for the long haul, even though most of the structures are hardly adequate to withstand an unforgiving Caribbean storm season.
“It's like being right back in a tent,” the 28-year-old Sylvain said of her shelter, a one-room structure on a concrete slab that she, her husband, and two children rent from a local landowner for $63 every six months. “The rain comes down the hills and into the shelter,” she said....
The precarious nature of the transitional shelters was apparent earlier this month when a slow-moving storm battered Haiti and killed at least 28 people in mudslides and floods. Two children died in a Port-au-Prince slum when floodwaters toppled a cinderblock wall that crashed through the wooden side of a transitional shelter built by Catholic Relief Services (CRS).
Ricot Charles lost his daughter Medgine, 4, and son Jerry, 1. He survived but with psychological and physical scars. “I can show you: I have a big gash,” Charles said as he unbuttoned his striped shirt to reveal the parallel scrapes and scars on his bony shoulder. “This is where the rocks fell.”
CRS spokeswoman Robyn Fieser wrote in an email that the charity was trying to help the Charles family and had offered counseling services. CRS will build another transitional shelter should they ask for one, she added.
- Discussion on Haiti Earthquake Death Toll
The most important result of the study is the finding that persons displaced by the earthquake have moved back into app. 75% of the buildings found to be requiring demolition and 90% of the buildings requiring major structural repairs
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- Piercing new report on shelter/housing crisis in Haiti by International Crisis Group |
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- Rebuilding Haiti: Houses for Haiti's homeless | Canada #Haiti Action Network
Reliable Haiti Sources
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Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti:
IJDH Does amazing work in Haiti. I donate to them whenever I can. Please support IJDH's work.
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.
"For friends of Haiti who seek to support a progressive and principled human rights organization that gets its facts right and does not erase history, look no further than the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti."
— Paul Farmer, Co-Founder, Partners in Health
Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti:
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Twitter AP Reporter:
@KatzOnEarth Jonathan M. Katz
Danticat: To make a difference support grassroots women's organizations ... that deal with gender violence including FAVILEK & @IJDH
6 Jul via web Unfavorite Undo Retweet Reply
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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."
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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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Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods(SOIL)
Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL) is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting soil resources, empowering communities and transforming wastes into resources in Haiti. We believe that the path to sustainability is through transformation, of both disempowered people and discarded materials, turning apathy and pollution into valuable resources. |
NEWS ORGANIZATIONS: