By Isabeau Doucet, Green Left

On July 12, six months to the day after January’s earth­quake, the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment held a cer­e­mony behind the crum­bled National Palace.

Before assem­bled dig­ni­taries from embassies, NGOs, and Haiti’s elite, Pres­i­dent Rene Preval and Prime Min­is­ter Jean-Max Bel­lerive draped medals of honor on promi­nent fig­ures rang­ing from CNN celebrity jour­nal­ist Ander­son Cooper and Hol­ly­wood actor Sean Penn to retired Colonel Himm­ler Rebu and retired Gen­eral Her­ard Abra­ham, offi­cers who have enforced dic­ta­tor­ships and par­tic­i­pated in coups over the past 30 years.

Mean­while, the hun­gry, home­less res­i­dents of a post-quake spon­ta­neous set­tle­ment in Cite Soleil fret­ted about whether they would spend another sleep­less night and where.

Camp Immac­ulee was a clus­ter of pre­car­i­ously erected tarps and lop­sided sleep­ing cubi­cles made up of rot­ting bed sheets and sod­den card­board box mat­tresses in a com­mu­nity park.

It had been home to about 200 inter­nally dis­placed peo­ple since Jan­u­ary 12. But on July 12, after a month of harass­ment and by uniden­ti­fied armed men, the camp’s res­i­dents aban­doned their piti­ful set­tle­ment to set up an equally pre­car­i­ous camp up the road.

For­mer US pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton — now UN spe­cial envoy to Haiti and co-chair with Bel­lerive of the Interim Com­mis­sion to Recon­struct Haiti (CIRH) — gave the keynote speech at the Palace event.

“We want Haiti to have a strong mid­dle class, and we want poor peo­ple to own more prop­erty and believe they can work them­selves into the mid­dle class”, he said. But the dis­placed peo­ple of Camp Immac­ulee were find­ing it impos­si­ble to find a place to squat, much less own.

The trau­matic uproot­ing of Camp Immac­ulee is being repro­duced all around Port-au-Prince. Nonethe­less, Clin­ton stood four-square behind Preval and Bel­lerive, whom large demon­stra­tions in recent months have accused of pro­vid­ing weak lead­er­ship at best or, worse, becom­ing a cor­rupt dictatorship.

“Nei­ther the pres­i­dent or the prime min­is­ter has even one time refused any request to make all dona­tions of pub­lic and pri­vate money com­pletely trans­par­ent on the inter­net and have per­for­mance audits done to make sure the work was accom­plished”, Clin­ton asserted.

How­ever, the Hait­ian relief and recon­struc­tion efforts have pro­ceeded with a “shock­ing lack of trans­parency”, accord­ing to a report pub­lished that day by the Dis­as­ter Account­abil­ity Project, an inves­tiga­tive audit­ing organ­i­sa­tion founded after Hur­ri­cane Katrina.

The group con­ducted a five-month inves­ti­ga­tion to deter­mine whether the non-profit groups and NGOs that solicited dona­tions for Hait­ian dis­as­ter relief had pro­duced com­pre­hen­sive and pub­licly acces­si­ble sit­u­a­tion reports on their activities.

Of 197 organ­i­sa­tions, only six have pro­vided reports itemis­ing their activities.

“The vast major­ity, 128, did not have fac­tual sit­u­a­tion reports avail­able on their web­sites,” the report found, “rely­ing instead upon anec­do­tal descrip­tions of activ­i­ties or emo­tional appeals.”

Even Clin­ton urged NGOs to make evi­dence of their work more avail­able, com­plain­ing later that he couldn’t find evi­dence of it online. The res­i­dents of Camp Immac­ulee claim they have yet to receive any aid whatsoever.

Many NGOs refuse to enter Cite Soleil, unlike Medecins Sans Fron­tieres, which largely runs the main hos­pi­tal there.

An archi­tect work­ing for the Clin­ton Foun­da­tion and the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment to deal with recon­struc­tion and the hous­ing cri­sis claims his insur­ance bars him from even enter­ing Cite Soleil.

The van­ish­ing camps reveal a larger prob­lem of land rights. Between Hait­ian prop­erty and inher­i­tance law, inter­na­tional human rights law, and the April 15 State of Emer­gency law, there is wide­spread legal con­fu­sion which con­tributes to a lack of polit­i­cal will to ensure the basic human rights of inter­nally dis­placed people.

Mere legal tech­ni­cal­i­ties become insur­mount­able obsta­cles. Might becomes the only right, where dis­placed peo­ple end up either plead­ing with or flee­ing from vig­i­lante landowners.

Camp Immaculee’s num­bers dwin­dled to 20 after weeks of fre­quent night-time raids by about a dozen masked men who stormed through the encamp­ment, throw­ing rocks and wield­ing machetes, bro­ken glass bot­tles and pistols.

They ter­rorised and brow­beat fam­i­lies, many with orphaned and maimed chil­dren, into mov­ing else­where. Four women reported being molested. Many relo­cated to sleep unshel­tered on the asphalt of nearby cul-de-sacs.

The Inter­na­tional Organ­i­sa­tion on Migra­tion (IOM), a UN-affiliated inter­gov­ern­men­tal agency that works on man­ag­ing inter­nally dis­placed peo­ple (IDP), first misiden­ti­fied the prob­lem, blam­ing the vio­lence on the victims.

The IOM iden­ti­fied the “prob­lem” as the “need of [Cite Soleil’s] pop­u­la­tion and the PNH [Hait­ian National Police] to expel IDPs of Camp Imac­ulee who are believed to have attacked a PNH patrol.”

Then the IOM told camp res­i­dents it could not directly help with secu­rity and did not work week­ends. On July 13, the IOM pub­lished a report stat­ing that Camp Immac­ulee had moved, imply­ing they had facil­i­tated the move. “The IOM is a com­plete liar,” said one of the camp res­i­dents, a vic­tim of IOM neglect. “I don’t trust them for anything.”

Mem­bers of Inter­na­tional Action Ties (IAT), an inde­pen­dent human rights organ­i­sa­tion focused on forced camp evic­tions, have been closely mon­i­tor­ing the camp since late June. They received mul­ti­ple night-time phone calls while the camp was under attack.

Both the mon­i­tor­ing team and camp mem­bers repeat­edly called hot­line num­bers (113 and 114) for the UN Mis­sion to Sta­bilise Haiti (Minus­tah) as well as per­sonal con­tact num­bers for Minus­tah offi­cers and the police.

The IAT’s calls never suc­ceeded in get­ting pro­tec­tion for the camp, but were lost in a maze of bureau­cracy, deferred respon­si­bil­ity, and inep­ti­tude. Mean­while, camp res­i­dents say their cell-phones were stolen by the attack­ers after they tried to call the hotlines.

The IAT went to the Minus­tah base with a com­mit­tee rep­re­sent­ing the camp. The UN police told the del­e­ga­tion that they don’t patrol after 10pm. The police claimed they had no staff to sta­tion any­one near the camp at night.

Both Minus­tah and the police have bases two blocks away from where the camp was. Minus­tah offi­cials also said they are unable to enter the camp unless they directly wit­nessed an attack.

After attacks on three con­sec­u­tive nights in early July, IAT mem­bers spent a night in the camp to doc­u­ment the sit­u­a­tion and found that no Minus­tah or police patrols passed between 1am and 5am, the hours in which the attack­ers usu­ally came. Minus­tah claimed they would try to increase patrols but said it wouldn’t pre­vent attacks.

“Every means of pro­tec­tions that we have pur­sued or been informed of through pro­tec­tion clus­ter meet­ings with Minus­tah, UN police, and the PNH were not suf­fi­cient to pre­vent the attacks that were hap­pen­ing on a nightly basis”, said the IAT’s Mark Snyder.

Dis­traught and at an impasse, remain­ing camp res­i­dents finally fled and relo­cated, only to be attacked at their new site.

This is just one recent and well-documented case of a wider sys­tem­atic fail­ure on the part of the human­i­tar­ian relief and recon­struc­tion com­plex to pro­tect the basic human rights of inter­nally dis­placed people.

In the face of this dra­mat­i­cally dete­ri­o­rat­ing sit­u­a­tion, Clin­ton con­tin­ued to be disin­gen­u­ously upbeat and unre­al­is­tic about the options avail­able to the aver­age Haitian.

He said: “To all the Haitians who are not on this Com­mis­sion [the CIRH], you should feel free to talk to the Hait­ian mem­bers and to the rest of us. This should be an excit­ing period for this country.

“We’re going to give you the first time in his­tory when all your chil­dren are going to school. If you choose, we can give Haiti the first time in your his­tory when you’ll be able to pro­vide all your own energy; and you don’t have to send the money overseas.

“If you choose, you can have the first finan­cial sys­tem with rapidly grow­ing pri­vate businesses.”

The real ben­e­fi­cia­ries are the busi­nesses and NGOs using Haiti’s human­i­tar­ian cri­sis as a cash cow. Peo­ple in the camps know that they are vic­tims of an earth­quake, but also increas­ingly sus­pect they are vic­tims of a mas­sive, inter­na­tion­ally sanc­tioned fraud.

“These are choices; I want you to enjoy this process”, Clin­ton added. “But all of you have to feel you own a part of it.”

It is strange to speak of choices, own­er­ship and enjoy­ing a process to peo­ple who have noth­ing, whose choices are all dead-ends, and who are com­pletely alien­ated from the process that is decid­ing their future.

After never see­ing post-earthquake aid, pro­tec­tion against vio­lent aggres­sors, or help relo­cat­ing their camp, despite count­less phone calls, meet­ings and reports by out­side observers, Camp Immac­ulee res­i­dents, like most Haitians, have no con­fi­dence in the prospects of free and fair elec­tions, por­tend­ing tur­bu­lent times ahead.

[Repub­lished from Haiti Lib­erte. An account of the IAT’s efforts can be found in their July 14 report “Van­ish­ing Camps at Gun­point: Fail­ing to Pro­tect Haiti’s Inter­nally Dis­placed” avail­able here.]

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/45008