Port-au-Prince/Bogotá/Brussels, 31 March 2010: As a crit­i­cal strat­egy con­fer­ence con­venes today at the UN, a Haitian-owned and led process, based on broad con­sen­sus among Haitians and with res­olute inter­na­tional sup­port, is needed to build the coun­try back bet­ter after the dev­as­tat­ing earthquake.

Haiti: Sta­bil­i­sa­tion and Recon­struc­tion after the Quake,* the new report from the Inter­na­tional Cri­sis Group, analy­ses how long-standing insti­tu­tional and gov­er­nance weak­nesses, as well as deep poverty, com­pound the major human­i­tar­ian cri­sis. The sit­u­a­tion could become very dif­fi­cult to con­trol if the secu­rity envi­ron­ment dete­ri­o­rates fur­ther in the approach­ing rainy and hur­ri­cane sea­sons. Urgent action is required to main­tain polit­i­cal and socio-economic sta­bil­ity and restore secu­rity and the rule of law so as to cre­ate an enabling envi­ron­ment for reconstruction.

“To make recon­struc­tion work, the process must uphold democ­racy, restore secu­rity and sup­port rule of law”, says Ber­nice Robert­son, Cri­sis Group’s Senior Ana­lyst. “Long-term plan­ning needs to be accom­pa­nied by robust con­sen­sus among all Haiti’s civil, polit­i­cal and eco­nomic con­stituen­cies, includ­ing the dias­pora, on the recov­ery and recon­struc­tion process”.

More than two and a half months after the quake struck, hun­dreds of thou­sands of Haitians con­tinue to expe­ri­ence severe hard­ship and increas­ing crime, vio­lence and sex­ual abuse. The dis­as­ter prompted post­pone­ment of leg­isla­tive elec­tions and casts uncer­tainty over whether pres­i­den­tial elec­tions can be held at year’s end as planned. After mid-May, the leg­is­la­ture will have left office, and the coun­try will be miss­ing crit­i­cal parts of its insti­tu­tional anatomy.

Suc­cess­ful recov­ery and recon­struc­tion requires an inte­grated, long-term strat­egy based on a very broad polit­i­cal and social con­sen­sus that also takes into account a num­ber of press­ing polit­i­cal and sta­bil­i­sa­tion issues. A trans­par­ent and account­able multi-donor fund­ing mech­a­nism and an effi­cient Hait­ian government-led imple­ment­ing struc­ture have to be created.

“The out­come of the New York con­fer­ence should be a joint com­mit­ment to recon­struc­tion equiv­a­lent to the unpar­al­leled nature of the dis­as­ter and accep­tance that this will take at least a decade”, says Mark Schnei­der, Cri­sis Group’s Senior Vice President.

Markus Schultze-Kraft, Cri­sis Group’s Latin Amer­ica Pro­gram Direc­tor, says, “Now is the moment to lift Haiti from under the dust and rub­ble and trans­form it into a less vul­ner­a­ble and more equi­table and pros­per­ous nation. The oppor­tu­nity must not be lost”.

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The Inter­na­tional Cri­sis Group (Cri­sis Group) is an inde­pen­dent, non-profit, non-governmental organ­i­sa­tion cov­er­ing some 60 crisis-affected coun­tries and ter­ri­to­ries across four con­ti­nents, work­ing through field-based analy­sis and high-level advo­cacy to pre­vent and resolve deadly conflict.