By Alice Speri, Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Monitor

Six months on, the gov­ern­ment has yet to secure ade­quate shel­ter for many of the 2.1 mil­lion peo­ple made home­less by the Haiti earth­quake. Some landown­ers are now try­ing to evict the refugee camps.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti - Tens of thou­sands of Haitians risk becom­ing home­less for a sec­ond time, as weary landown­ers clear their prop­er­ties of makeshift refugee camps in order to build new homes or sell their land on Haiti’s boom­ing real-estate market.

Of 1,241 refugee camps here, only 206 are offi­cially rec­og­nized, accord­ing to the UN Office for the Coor­di­na­tion of Human­i­tar­ian Affairs (OCHA). Only the offi­cial camps are mon­i­tored by NGOs, mean­ing that the major­ity lack protection.

Earthquake-displaced peo­ple wait in line to receive sup­plies at the Cana­han 2 camp, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, June 30. Some landown­ers are try­ing to evict dis­placed peo­ple from Haiti earth­quake refugee camps. Alexandre Meneghini/AP Photo

“Nobody is really watch­ing,” says Deepa Pachang, a vol­un­teer with Inter­na­tional Action Ties, a non­profit orga­ni­za­tion mon­i­tor­ing ille­gal evic­tions. “Some­times author­i­ties show up at a camp and all the peo­ple are already gone.”

This past spring, the gov­ern­ment Com­mis­sion of Dam­age Assess­ment, Tem­po­rary Shel­ter, Demo­li­tion and Recon­struc­tion report­edly iden­ti­fied sev­eral sites total­ing 6 mil­lion square meters (some 1,500 acres) for relo­cat­ing peo­ple to the perime­ters of the cap­i­tal. Lengthy nego­ti­a­tions to secure the land have yet to secure relo­ca­tion options for the 2.1 mil­lion peo­ple left home­less from the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Now, forced evic­tions from refugee camps are on the rise, offi­cials say. With landown­ers exas­per­ated by the slow pace, some are tak­ing mat­ters into their own hands.

Landown­ers want prop­erty back

Ralph Stevens Stephen, god­son of the landowner of a prop­erty in the Del­mas 60 neigh­bor­hood of Port-au-Prince, which has been used as an unof­fi­cial refugee camp since Jan­u­ary, recently vis­ited the camp with 10 armed men in police uni­forms to coerce the 178 home­less peo­ple here to leave.

“This is pri­vate land, these peo­ple have to take off,” Mr. Stephen says. He says he has been telling res­i­dents to leave since April, and he is con­vinced that most squat­ters would go home if they weren’t try­ing to get com­pen­sa­tion from the gov­ern­ment. “The gov­ern­ment doesn’t owe any­thing to these peo­ple,” he says.

Res­i­dent Oxeana Ismael remem­bers the day that the armed men showed up – with no offi­cial iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and dri­ving unmarked cars – and threat­ened to return with tear gas if the home­less did not leave within 15 days. That was in early June.

“They asked me if I live here, and told me that I have to take down my tent and go,” says the middle-aged woman, who since Jan­u­ary has shared a makeshift shel­ter here with five rel­a­tives, includ­ing her men­tally dis­abled brother. She and sev­eral other res­i­dents say the men pointed their weapons at those present and asked for their names.

Sub­se­quently, Haiti’s Min­istry of Jus­tice and Pub­lic Secu­rity issued a report that said a num­ber of the Del­mas camp res­i­dents “declared they were ready to leave the prop­erty by June 22,” accord­ing to a copy obtained by the Monitor.

Many build­ings still not safe

But res­i­dents say they never vol­un­teered to leave, as they have nowhere to go. The camp com­mit­tee says only 14 of the camps’ 44 fam­i­lies were home­own­ers before the earth­quake, and all their houses were either dam­aged or destroyed. Of the 188,383 destroyed or dam­aged homes, only 66,967 have been assessed for safety so far, accord­ing to OCHA. Of these, 42 per­cent have been deemed safe for reoc­cu­pa­tion, but only half of those have actu­ally been reoc­cu­pied, mainly because peo­ple no longer have money to rent.

As episodes of vio­lent evic­tion have been reported at some refugee camps, the Inter­na­tional Orga­ni­za­tion for Migra­tion (IOM), the UN’s mon­i­tor on hous­ing issues, has played medi­a­tor between landown­ers and camp residents.

“If we are aware of one, we try to reach a com­pro­mise with the own­ers,” says IOM spokesman Leonard Doyle, cit­ing one suc­cess­ful case.

Mr. Doyle says he is cur­rently aware of about 30 camps that have been forcibly evicted or are at risk of immi­nent evic­tion, though he says details are sketchy.

“We haven’t heard of vio­lence, but we did hear of armed groups enter­ing camps,” he says. “I can’t say how that’s related to evic­tions, but I can make an edu­cated guess.”

Hait­ian National Police spokesman Franz Koloeur says he has not heard of a vio­lent expul­sion in a “long” time and that most cases of threats and com­plaints are reported as sim­ple “argu­ments” and dealt with by local police precincts. He says all expul­sions must be first autho­rized by a court, although even a three-week gov­ern­ment mora­to­rium on forced evic­tions in April did lit­tle, if any­thing, to slow the problem.

“Peo­ple can’t make their own jus­tice, peo­ple can’t expel other peo­ple them­selves,” he says. “If an owner uses weapons or threats, they will have prob­lems with the police themselves.”

Haiti’s Min­istry of Inte­rior declined to comment.

‘We have no homes’

At the refugee camp in the Del­mas 60 neigh­bor­hood, 10 fam­i­lies have already left due to intim­i­da­tion, but most res­i­dents don’t know where to go.

“They told us to go back to our homes, but we have no homes,” says Jireau Museau, a mem­ber of the camp com­mit­tee, who lost his house and gro­cery store in the earth­quake. He and other res­i­dents must use toi­lets in a nearby set­tle­ment because nearby home­own­ers pre­vented NGOs from build­ing latrines on the prop­erty. “If we had another place to go, we would have left already,” he says.

As of Fri­day, camp res­i­dents were still on the prop­erty, but many say this won’t last long. The prop­erty owner threat­ened to evict them this week.

Stand­ing by her tent as the daily rain started, Ms. Ismael says she is just waiting.

“If they come back,” she says, “I’ll just move right out of the camp and stay on the road.”

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2010/0702/Still-homeless-from-Haiti-earthquake-thousands-fight-forced-evictions