By E. Thomas John­son, LA Times

Real recon­struc­tion has yet to begin, while the peo­ple suf­fer in ram­shackle hous­ing in over­crowded camps. Instead of facil­i­tat­ing imports of equip­ment, lead­ers have lapsed into a pat­tern of cor­rup­tion and delay.

Five months after Haiti’s dev­as­tat­ing earth­quake, the emer­gency response has finally secured a toe­hold: No one is lack­ing essen­tial life-preserving ser­vices. But real recov­ery and recon­struc­tion efforts have yet to begin, and there is a sig­nif­i­cant risk of fur­ther disaster.

In more than 10 years of emer­gency relief work, I’ve never seen camps like those in Port-au-Prince. Inter­na­tional stan­dards defin­ing what peo­ple are enti­tled to after a dis­as­ter are in no way being met.

The Hait­ian camps are con­gested beyond imag­i­na­tion, with ram­shackle tents stand­ing edge to edge in every square foot of avail­able space. With the rainy sea­son now begin­ning, the crowded con­di­tions and over­taxed pub­lic toi­lets have raised very real con­cerns about a cholera epidemic.

The tents them­selves are a hodge­podge. Fam­i­lies’ first attempts at fash­ion­ing shel­ters have been aug­mented with plas­tic sheet­ing sup­plied by inter­na­tional agen­cies. But the makeshift hous­ing cer­tainly won’t with­stand a hur­ri­cane. If one were to hit Port-au-Prince, the death toll can only be guessed at. There would be nowhere for dis­placed fam­i­lies to take refuge in a city where most of the hotels, pub­lic build­ings, schools and churches still lie in mas­sive heaps of rubble.

It’s to be expected that clean­ing up the rub­ble will take time. But what is shock­ing is that it hasn’t really started. In four days of dri­ving through this sprawl­ing, heav­ily pop­u­lated city recently, I saw only one back­hoe in oper­a­tion. It was repair­ing a sewer line. The other hand­ful of mod­est cleanup efforts I saw were being done by teams of a dozen peo­ple with shov­els and wheel­bar­rows, tools piti­fully inad­e­quate to the task.

Mas­sive, aggres­sive inter­ven­tion is required. It will take a con­voy of con­struc­tion equip­ment, such as that pos­sessed by the U.S. mil­i­tary camped on the edge of the city, to remove the rub­ble and clear streets that are clogged with piles of con­crete and iron. But the cleanup is just not happening.

Why has so lit­tle been accom­plished? Why hasn’t heavy equip­ment been brought in? Why hasn’t the gov­ern­ment depop­u­lated at least some of the worst camps, mov­ing res­i­dents to safer loca­tions on the out­skirts of the city where proper set­tle­ments can be planned, and proper shel­ters constructed?

After an ini­tial hon­ey­moon period with the inter­na­tional aid com­mu­nity, the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment has imposed strin­gent con­trols. With more than 600 orga­ni­za­tions present, some cen­tral plan­ning is essen­tial. But the gov­ern­ment in Port-au-Prince has lapsed into the clas­sic pat­tern of cor­rup­tion, inef­fi­ciency and delay that holds the coun­try hostage.

At a recent United Nations-led meet­ing, one inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tion reported that it had 45 vehi­cles wait­ing at Haiti’s bor­der with the Domini­can Repub­lic. They had been there sev­eral weeks because Hait­ian offi­cials had denied them entry. This is not an iso­lated case. Dozens of orga­ni­za­tions involved in the aid effort have had trou­ble import­ing goods and mate­ri­als, and the restric­tions and require­ments on new projects to help the affected fam­i­lies con­tinue to grow.

Though it’s impor­tant that the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment is in the driver’s seat of the recov­ery effort, it has not yet stepped up to the job. The gov­ern­ment needs to aggres­sively facil­i­tate imports of needed goods and equip­ment and allow agen­cies to reset­tle both camp res­i­dents who are most at risk and those whose homes were not dam­aged. The gov­ern­ment says it prefers a solu­tion in which all camp res­i­dents are reset­tled at once.

Mean­while, as ordi­nary Haitians suf­fer, the elite fam­i­lies of Port-au-Prince con­tinue to live in lux­ury in ele­gant homes high above the dusty sprawl. These fam­i­lies have con­trolled the wealth of Haiti for gen­er­a­tions, and many are now prof­it­ing from their county’s lat­est tragedy. The aid agen­cies all need rental cars and trucks, hous­ing, offices, ware­houses and local sup­plies, and Haiti’s elite tend to con­trol access to those things. Expe­ri­enced aid work­ers have seen this phe­nom­e­non before; our efforts to assist the poor­est also end up mak­ing the rich­est even richer.

And of course, Haiti’s wealthy busi­ness­men also have a stake in how the recon­struc­tion takes place. A friend described an absurd moment from a recent meet­ing of a num­ber of aid agen­cies with Pres­i­dent Rene Preval. The pres­i­dent, my friend said, announced that he’d just received a mes­sage on his Black­Berry from the owner of one of Haiti’s pri­vate water com­pa­nies. The man was con­cerned that aid agen­cies were giv­ing out free water to peo­ple in camps and said it would ruin the econ­omy. No one in the room knew how to respond.

The government’s recent estab­lish­ment of a set­tle­ment com­mis­sion is a pos­i­tive sign, as is its change in rhetoric from talk­ing about tem­po­rary shel­ter to more per­ma­nent hous­ing. But more aggres­sive cleanup is urgently needed, as are efforts to start reset­tling some of the dis­placed. U.S. and Euro­pean donors need to exert more diplo­matic pres­sure on the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment to remove obstruc­tions, most notably those for import­ing cap­i­tal items. A hur­ri­cane con­tin­gency plan is urgently needed.

Mean­while, the view from the rain-soaked tents in Port-au-Prince is bleak. Graf­fiti call­ing for Preval’s ouster has started appear­ing every­where, but with endemic cor­rup­tion and a frac­tious, weak oppo­si­tion, a clear alter­na­tive has yet to appear. Until earth­movers arrive and the rub­ble clear­ance oper­a­tion begins in earnest, the hun­dreds of thou­sands of dis­placed fam­i­lies can do no bet­ter than pray that another dis­as­ter doesn’t come before reconstruction.

E. Thomas John­son is human­i­tar­ian response coor­di­na­tor for the Dan­ish relief orga­ni­za­tion DanChurchAid.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-johnson-haiti-20100625,0,4494526.story