The Med­ical News

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20100318/Haiti-should-have-final-say-over-rebuilding-Preval-says.aspx

In an inter­view with Reuters, Hait­ian Pres­i­dent Rene Preval on Tues­day said that the U.S. State Depart­ment Human Rights report, which says cor­rup­tion is “wide­spread in all … lev­els of gov­ern­ment” in Haiti, is “arro­gant” and that Haiti should have the final say in approv­ing plans to rebuild the coun­try after the Jan­u­ary earthquake, the news agency reports.

Preval’s reac­tion to the State Depart­ment report, which was pre­pared before the quake and is part of a yearly batch of reports about many coun­tries, “threat­ened to sour Haiti’s ties with its main relief part­ner as the Caribbean state’s gov­ern­ment and for­eign donors drafted a plan for the country’s recov­ery and long-term recon­struc­tion,” accord­ing to the news ser­vice. “There is noth­ing to reject or accept. It is an arbi­trary judg­ment to which we won’t respond,” Preval said of how the report char­ac­ter­ized Haiti (Delva, 3/17).

On Mon­day, the U.S. said that four Amer­i­cans had been mur­dered in Haiti since the quake and announced it would update guide­lines for Amer­i­cans trav­el­ing to Haiti after two Euro­pean aid work­ers were kid­napped, Agence France-Presse reports. “U.S. cit­i­zens trav­el­ing to and resid­ing in Haiti despite this warn­ing are reminded that there remains a per­sis­tent dan­ger of vio­lent crime, includ­ing homi­cides and kid­nap­pings,” the State Depart­ment said in a travel advice doc­u­ment. “Most kid­nap­pings are crim­i­nal in nature, and the kid­nap­pers make no dis­tinc­tions of nation­al­ity, race, gen­der, or age. Some kid­nap vic­tims have been killed, shot, sex­u­ally assaulted, or phys­i­cally abused,” the warn­ing continued (3/16).

Ahead Of Rainy, Hur­ri­cane Sea­sons, Ongo­ing Efforts Deal With Haiti’s Homeless

Haiti and the U.N. “are poised to begin an intense pub­lic aware­ness cam­paign in the cap­i­tal city, part of an urgent effort to move hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple left home­less by the Jan. 12 earth­quake out of harm’s way before the rain and flood sea­son begins next month,” accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post.

Aid work­ers are attempt­ing to iden­tify the 700,000 Haitians who have been liv­ing in tents and are then try­ing to deter­mine whether they can return to their homes. As the rainy sea­son approaches and threat­ens to exac­er­bate the spread of dis­ease, mes­sages will be sent through “radio, text mes­sages, tele­vi­sion news and even a tele­vi­sion soap opera to drive home the point that masses of peo­ple must be relo­cated,” the news­pa­per writes (Romano, 3/17).

“The Red Cross fed­er­a­tion says it is impos­si­ble to give all of Haiti’s earth­quake sur­vivors hurricane-proof dwellings before the storm sea­son starts in June,” the Asso­ci­ated Press reports. On Tues­day, Pablo Med­ina, of the Inter­na­tional Fed­er­a­tion of the Red Cross, said aid work­ers would erect shel­ters capa­ble of with­stand­ing hur­ri­canes. Accord­ing to Med­ina, about half of Haiti’s 1.3 mil­lion home­less earth­quake sur­vivors have received tents, but those would not sur­vive a hur­ri­cane (3/16).

In related news, the New York Times exam­ines the chal­lenges Haitians are expe­ri­enc­ing as they move to rural areas, away from Port-au-Prince. “Life has come full cir­cle for many Haitians who orig­i­nally migrated to escape the grind­ing poverty of the coun­try­side. Since the early 1980s, rural Haitians have moved at a steady clip to Port-au-Prince in search of schools, jobs and gov­ern­ment ser­vices. After the earth­quake, more than 600,000 returned to the coun­try­side, accord­ing to the gov­ern­ment, putting a seri­ous strain on des­per­ately poor com­mu­ni­ties that have received lit­tle emer­gency assis­tance,” the news­pa­per writes.

Some Haitians “have already returned to the cap­i­tal seek­ing the inter­na­tional aid that is con­cen­trated there. But if the reverse flow con­tin­ues, it could under­mine a pri­mary goal of the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment and the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity: to use the earth­quake as a cat­a­lyst to decen­tral­ize Haiti and resus­ci­tate its agri­cul­tural econ­omy, said Nancy Dorsinville, a spe­cial adviser to for­mer Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton, the United Nations spe­cial envoy to Haiti,” the New York Times writes (Son­tag, 3/16).

Other news out­lets report on rape and vio­lence against women in Haiti’s tent cities.

AP: “Women and chil­dren as young as 2, already trau­ma­tized by the loss of homes and loved ones in the Jan. 12 cat­a­stro­phe, are now falling vic­tim to rapists in the sprawl­ing tent cities that have become home to hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple. … Sex­ual assaults are daily occur­rences in the biggest camps, aid work­ers say - and most attacks go unre­ported because of the shame, social stigma and fear of reprisals from attack­ers” (Faul, 3/16).

CNN: “Before the earth­quake, Haiti was in the midst of imple­ment­ing what the United Nations Pop­u­la­tion Fund (UNFPA) called an impres­sive five-year plan to curb vio­lence against women and change the cul­ture.” But Lina Abi­rafeh, the UNFPA gender-based vio­lence coor­di­na­tor in Haiti, “says the quake destroyed many of the ser­vices for women, such as rape coun­sel­ing cen­ters and Haiti’s Min­istry for Women’s Affairs. It also took the lives of three of Haiti’s most revered female lead­ers.” The arti­cle also notes the efforts to pro­tect women in the tent cities (Sid­ner, 3/16).