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.
I will update diary frequently.
Dominique Esser (follow on twitter @dominique_e_) has excellent list of Haiti news and history: Haiti Links
UPDATE: Cholera returns to Haiti and NGOs Are Out of Money
Cholera has sickened at least 370,000 people and killed more than 5,500 since the outbreak started in October, according to the Health Ministry. The precise total is unknowable since many Haitians live in remote areas with no access to health care. The disease is relatively easy to treat if people can get help in time....
There are signs of a growing problem in Carrefour, a large and crowded city on the right at the western edge of the capital. Treatment centres there were reporting more than 300 new cases a day in early June, more than twice what they were seeing back in November, according to the aid group Oxfam.
An emergency latrine built in Carrefour collapsed as heavy rains fell and the waste spilled into a camp, according to a June report by the U.N.'s shelter cluster.
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....
his month, an article in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention journal said evidence "strongly suggests" that a Nepalese peacekeeping mission, based in Mirebalais, inadvertently imported the disease. The article points to "an exact correlation" in time and place between the arrival of a Nepalese battalion from an area of its South Asian homeland that was experiencing a cholera outbreak and the appearance of the first cases in a river a few days later.
- Thousands of Displaced People Still at Risk of Eviction Haiti Between the Storms By MARK SCHULLER and MARK SNYDER
Having already lost her belongings and her sense of security, Sabina risked even further retaliation by speaking out at a June 8 press conference organized by FRAKKA, the Reflection and Action Force on the Housing Cause, and deposited a petition with over 90 signatories to the Parliament at a FRAKKA march held on June 10. As Sabina told journalists on the 10th,
- Ask Haitians whether voters or big business chose their singing president
Two years later, during presidential elections, the US was back, interfering even as it preached democracy and good governance. The country's main party, Fanmi Lavalas, was excluded and turnout was only 24%. The former singer Michel Martelly – who has previously allied himself with coup leaders and a convicted human rights abuser – was elected with the help of a Spanish marketing company.
Martelly's "victory" crudely illustrates the broader nature of electoral politics in a period in which the outcome has little relationship to who wields power. For without that basic connection two key questions arise. Why vote if real power resides beyond democratic control? And why stand if you won't be able to do anything? The first is answered in the low turnouts. But the second answer comes by way of the transformation of a singer into a politician by way of marketing
We already know that one of the first things that the post-coup prime minister Gérard Latortue did was arrange a public meeting in Gonaives, on 21 March 2004, to applaud Tatoune and Buteur, along with Guy Philippe and an assortment of ex-army rebels, as patriotic "freedom fighters."One of the people standing at Latortue's side that day was his newly appointed minister of justice, Bernard Gousse. Shortly after Métayer's death in September 2003, while a distraught Aristide was trying to comfort Amiot's relatives at a meeting in Port au Prince, the IFES dispatched Bernard Gousse to Govaives. According to IFES officials, Gousse wanted to "be with the rebels" during this time of violence and uncertainty. Although in 2004-05 the new justice Minister Gousse went to considerable lengths to track Lavalassians accused of the most improbable crimes, he never so much as began the process to return the already convicted murderer Tatoune to his prison cell. In a move that struck even NCHR and Human Rights Watch as scandalous, in early April 2004 Gousse suggested that Tatoune should be pardoned for his participation in Raboteau massacre and raised the prospect of a new trial for fellow convict Chamblain. Sure enough, the following year, in perhaps the most pectatcualr perversion of justice in Haitian history, Jodel Chamblain and his FRAPH collegues had their convictions overturned. Tatoune is livin gas a free man in Gonaives to this day, though like some other pawns in the destablization campaign, he has found himself excluded from the post-Aristide order that he helped create. (Damming The Flood, P. 207)
Brian Concannon, Director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, talks about the successful Raboteau trial and the 2004 coup against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.