By Ansel Herz

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50965

PORT-AU-PRINCE  (IPS) — For decades, the Saint Louis de Gon­zague school has groomed some of Haiti’s most elite polit­i­cal play­ers. Fran­cois Duva­lier, the iron-fisted dic­ta­tor who ruled Haiti for 14 years, sent his son to the school. About 1,500 chil­dren of Haiti’s wealth­i­est class attend each year.

Within days of the Jan­u­ary earth­quake, the sparse con­crete grounds of the Gonazague sec­ondary school became home to nearly 11,000 Hait­ian fam­i­lies, dri­ven out of destroyed neigh­bour­hoods in cen­tral Port-Au-Prince.

Now the school’s direc­tor wants to reopen the school. The gov­ern­ment encour­aged schools to resume classes on Mon­day, call­ing it another small step towards normalcy.

The poten­tial reopen­ing of the school has inspired any­thing but calm among inter­nally dis­placed peo­ple at Saint Louis de Gon­zague. They have been threat­ened with expul­sion by force.

“Every­one is ner­vous right now. If they force us to leave it will be sec­ond cat­a­stro­phe,” said Elivre Con­stant, smok­ing a cig­a­rette in the mid­dle of the crowded camp. “A lot of peo­ple here don’t have any­where to go. They have kids. They won’t be safe.”

Con­stant, a mem­ber of the camp’s organ­is­ing com­mit­tee, said she heard police would come within days to move peo­ple out. “The head­mas­ter threat­ened us with tear gas,” she said.

The Huff­in­g­ton Post reports that Father Patrick Belanger, the direc­tor of the school, has destroyed latrines built by the camp’s com­mit­tee and pre­vented aid agen­cies from dis­trib­ut­ing food inside the camp for the past month.

But life has set­tled in here.

At night, ven­dors sell can­dies, drinks and meats in a mar­ket near the camp’s entrance. A few men wait beside a big white tent to have their hair cut by a bar­ber inside. Motor­cy­cle taxis ferry peo­ple in and out of the camp’s inner areas.

Dco­tors With­out Bor­ders oper­ates a huge field hos­pi­tal and ware­house sit­u­ated near the rear of the camp. Orderly lines queue out­side the gate each morn­ing for med­ical care.

“We agree that a coun­try with­out edu­ca­tion is unac­cept­able, but if they push us out they need to move us to a place where the con­di­tions exist to live, a nor­mal place,” Bernard Saint-Fleur told IPS. His fam­ily came to Gon­zague the day after the quake destroyed their nearby home.

Father Belanger and Mayor Wil­son Jeudy of Port-au-Prince’s Del­mas dis­trict have report­edly offered new land for the camp’s res­i­dents. But camp-dwellers say the area only has enough space for 500 people.

A volunteer-run school for chil­dren inside the camp has formed. A state­ment cir­cu­lated by Inter­na­tional Action Ties, a small U.S.-based NGO oper­at­ing in the Del­mas area, asked, “Why shut down one school serv­ing many for free, to reopen one that is pri­vate, and only ser­vices far fewer students?”

In March, IPS reported on the forcible removal of a smaller camp by a Catholic priest from the gar­den of Villa Man­rese. The gar­den, once crowded with makeshift shel­ters, is now empty but for three grey UNICEF tents. A free school serv­ing dozens of stu­dents has been erected.

For­mer occu­pants of the camp moved their makeshift shel­ters into the sur­round­ing hill­side amidst the rub­ble. They said that food dis­tri­b­u­tions were being well-coordinated by the priest and local organ­is­ers. But they fear the heavy rains ahead.

Haiti’s con­sti­tu­tion recog­nises rights for every cit­i­zen to “decent hous­ing, edu­ca­tion, food and social security”.

And the United Nations guid­ing prin­ci­ples on the rights of inter­nally dis­placed peo­ple include “the right to be pro­tected against forcible return to or reset­tle­ment in any place where their life, safety, lib­erty and/or health would be at risk.”

But there are fur­ther uncon­firmed reports emerg­ing each week from the dis­as­ter zone of IDP camps being torn down by pri­vate landholders.

A U.N. donors’ con­fer­ence last week pledged some 10 bil­lion dol­lar in aid to Haiti, but many NGOs and activists are now ques­tion­ing both the recon­struc­tion plan and the like­li­hood that nations will fol­low through on their finan­cial commitments.