Survivors of January’s huge earthquake camping outside the damaged National Palace in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

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

PORT-AU-PRINCE — They’ve been forced to swap school books for pistols, homework for hold-ups and drug-dealing: with no parents, some of Haiti’s earthquake orphans have turned to slum gangs as ersatz family in a hard-scrabble bid to survive.

Square meals and the comforts of home are part of the past for thousands of youngsters who lost their mothers, fathers and other relatives in the January 12 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and traumatized the country.

And for some orphans in the capital’s desperately poor shantytowns, roving gangs are filling the void.

In the notorious Cite Soleil, or Sun City, a clutch of youngsters trail behind a scruffy gang leader named “Toutou Soleil 19″ and members of his band, darting around makeshift huts and clotheslines strung across filthy alleyways in the capital’s biggest slum.

Toutou, a 31-year-old who still carries knives but says he gave up his guns in a 2006 amnesty, stops and points across a sewer to a crude sheet-metal cabin on a mound of trash at the seafront.

“There are eight or nine orphans who have been sleeping here since the quake,” Toutou told AFP, eager to show off the deplorable conditions on his home turf where he says “no one has come to help”.

Outside the hut’s door, the children crouch around a radio held by Jef, a 14-year-old boy with angelic eyes and a checkered shirt. Toutou hands him a can of condensed milk, which he quickly shares with the others.

“There are a lot of kids like them, they are all throughout Cite Soleil,” said Toutou. Though he couldn’t give a figure, he said they were “many” and rattled off their most urgent needs — “a soup kitchen, a mobile clinic and water”.

In the absence of any non-governmental organizations or local officials in this slum of at least 300,000 residents, the gangs hold de facto authority. So after the catastrophe, the new orphans turned to the gang lords.

“They come to us because they have no one else. We try to help, but there is nothing here,” said Toutou, a wool cap pulled down on his head.

Jef said his parents were killed when their house collapsed in the earthquake, which claimed 250,000 to 300,000 lives in all. He now carries out “hold-ups” and burglarizes homes at night to survive.

– ‘We live here like we’re in prison’ –

“We do that with other children,” he admitted, saying he stopped going to school after the quake. “I would like to go, but I don’t have the money,” he said, lowering his eyes.

“At any rate, all the schools in Cite Soleil have collapsed,” added Jimis, 25, a rapper and member of Toutou’s gang.

Ads for rum and automatic rifles and pornographic photos cover the walls of the orphans’ cabin, where they sleep in old boxes placed over a floor of rubble.

Throughout Toutou’s tour of the slum, children come up to salute their “godfather”.

Many of these youngsters have been caught committing offenses since losing their parents. “Some of them sell drugs, a lot of them have pistols the gangs give them,” said one social worker with years of experience in the shantytown.

The United Nations recently started investigating the plight of these slum orphans, but a UN worker in charge of the project who asked not to be named said “at this stage, we have no information”.

Ironically, it’s the Cite’s gang leaders and criminals who now find themselves in the role of savior and spokesmen, pleading for aid.

“We need help so that these children don’t become like us, so that they don’t become a danger to society,” said a convict named Ea who said he escaped from Port-au-Prince prison during the earthquake, as did some 4,500 prisoners.

A bastion of violent gangs, Cite Soleil was virtually in a state of war from 2004 to 2007. An intervention by UN troops and a disarmament program have calmed matters somewhat, and a curfew remains in place.

At a hospital run by the international aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), there has been a recent spike in the number of gunshot victims “but not enough to worry about… yet,” said the facility’s director Karel Janssens.

Gang leaders, however, are unhappy. “If aid does not arrive, we will prepare a revolt,” said one named Patrick.

Toutou echoed the call.

“We will fight until the end — until we receive some support, until we receive justice,” he said. “We live here like we’re in prison.”

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gV04s7vQYfbITT2t_YKym-ePvYaw

Despite the twists and turns of what residents describe as several foreign interventions, members of the community still recount with pride how they served as a launching site for former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s first election campaign in 1990.

Yannick Jean, a frail 70 year-old woman whose longevity itself is a testament to hope, spoke in hushed tones as she washed her clothes in a ditch of dirty water, “We were the ones who presented Aristide to Haiti when he ran for president. He was our greatest hope. I am waiting for him again.”

A controversial figure, Jean-Bertrand Aristide is a former Catholic priest who was overthrown twice in Haiti’s turbulent political history. His first ouster was at the hands of Haiti’s former brutal military with the support of the traditional economic elite who live fabulously wealthy lives as compared to Haiti’s average citizens.

Where Yannick Jean washes her clothes probably speaks more to Haiti’s current reality and the contradictions of the current United Nation’s mission than any expert on development possibly could. Rising above her and creating shadows over her dirty laundry is a huge edifice of new construction that bears the mark GB. It is a new building that covers several acres and is home to the business of Haiti’s wealthiest man, Gilbert Bigio.

While the surrounding residents of Cite Soleil are forced to literally eat dirt to stave off hunger, Bigio is a billionaire whose family supported the first coup against Aristide and reportedly helped to back the movement that forced his second ouster in 2004.

One need not look very far to see where Gilbert Bigio’s interests lie in relation to Cite Soleil. According to his own company’s web site

The Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US government blocked all of the Bigio family’s holdings in US banks following the brutal military coup against Aristide in 1991. Since Aristide’s second ousting in 2004, the financial wealth of the Bigio family along with those of other well off Haitian clans such as the Mevs, Brandts, Acras and Madsens have nearly doubled according to a confidential source at a private accounting firm.

Not to be forgotten is the fact that Aristide’s forced departure in 2004 was legitimized and enforced by a UN authorized mission during the term of former Secretary General Kofi Annan. The fact that a few families of Haiti’s traditional elite continue to exact exorbitant profits, while residents of Cite Soleil are forced to eat mud pies and bathe in ditches, has shaken confidence in the non-governmental sector working with the poor in Haiti.

Protestors burned tires in front of the Cite Soleil mayor’s office earlier this month to protest a Pentagon financed pacification program. The US Department of Defense targeted $20 million in Cite Soleil for the Haiti Stabilization Mission with the stated objective, “to improve access to police and justice, strengthen local governance, provide vocational training and to create jobs through infrastructure and public works projects.” Protestors complained that rather than creating jobs and improving living conditions, it represents another heavy-handed attempt by the US to control residents through corrupt local politicos in the mayor’s office.

In another corner of this community and trying not to draw attention amidst the children with bloated bellies and the flow of traffic, is a representative of Aristide’s Lavalas movement. Mr. Jean– Marie Samedi was brutally beaten and tortured after Aristide’s ouster in 2004. He is the leader of a movement called the Base of Lavalas Reflection and gave another view to the already disfigured politics of suffering in this community.

Mr. Samedi commented, “At least the people they called bandits and gangsters shared what they had with the community when they were here. People could eat. They had food and had running water. They didn’t have to eat dirt to live or have to wash their clothes and their bodies in ditches of dirty running water.”

As if to punctuate Mr. Samedi’s point, several children run by with almost blondish hair, a clear sign of malnutrition amongst blacks in this Caribbean nation of 8.5 million people. He continued, “They told us that everything would change after they got rid of the bandits and yet people cannot feed their children. You see them forced to wash in this dirty water. What did the promise of the Bush administration and the UN really mean to the people of Cite Soleil? They have merely continued politics as usual in Haiti. The rich get richer while the majorities are forced to continue to suffer in poverty. I challenge anyone to show me the difference they have made for the majority of the poor in Haiti.” Growing visibly angry and bitter Mr. Samedi concluded, “The UN came in here and slaughtered residents who supported Lavalas on July 6, 2005 and again on December 22, 2006. And for what we have to ask? So that Bigio and the Haitian Chamber of Commerce could force us back into accepting this level of poverty? Nothing has changed for the poor in Haiti.”

Photos:

The Haiti Information Project (HIP) is a non-profit alternative news service providing coverage and analysis of breaking developments in Haiti. Winner of the CENSORED 2008 REAL NEWS AWARD for Outstanding Investigative Journalism

Residents of Cite Soleil wash clothes in a dirty ditch next to Bigio’s plant Acierie d’Haiti.

Charred front of the mayor’s office in Cite Soleil after demonstrators burned tires to protest the Pentagon’s $20 million Haiti Stabilization Mission.

Jean-Cyril Pressoir for NPR

Jean-Cyril Pressoir for NPR

Jean-Cyril Pressoir for NPR

A young man laughs as children swim next to a pier in Cite Soleil.

Jean-Cyril Pressoir for NPR

Fishermen sing as they mend a fishing net in Cite Soleil.

August 1, 2007

Haiti has long been associated with political turmoil, kidnapping and violence. But with the election last year of Rene Preval and a new robust mandate by the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country has been experiencing a much-needed respite from insecurity and violence.

Take the Port-au-Prince area of Cite Soleil, for example. It was once the most violent neighborhood in Haiti. But now, residents say there is no more fighting.

“Back then, we would be going out, and we could get shot. It wasn’t good for us. Now things are better, and we thank God. There’s no more shooting,” says Jacques Sonny Simea, a 33-year-old fisherman.

‘Special Moment’ in History

U.N. peacekeeping troops have been in Haiti since the ouster of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Under the interim government, the troops were ineffectual at best, negligent at worst. Crime and violence raged unchecked.

The 2006 election of President Rene Preval marked a turning point.

Mulet says it was difficult for the U.N. to confront the problems of violence during the interim government, which he says didn’t have a “legitimate voice.”

Now, the U.N. has managed to control security because of Preval, whom Mulet describes as a private man who is trying to be a uniting figure in a country that has experienced decades of political turmoil.

New President Tackles Violence

One of Preval’s first goals upon taking office was to control the violence. He opened up negotiations with the gangs in Cite Soleil, but they demanded money and passports so that they could leave the country.

The president lost patience and asked the U.N. forces now under Brazilian military commander Carlos Alberto Dos Santos Cruz to take them on. And Santos Cruz says they did.

“The situation changed because we controlled all the neighborhoods,” Santos Cruz says, adding that many gang leaders were arrested and are now jailed.

Figures provided by the U.N. show the dramatic downward trend in the violence nationwide. In January 2006, there were 240 attacks on U.N. troops. Over the past four months, there have been only 12. Kidnappings are down as well: six in June, compared to 162 in December 2005.

Despite Deaths, U.N. Troops Welcomed in Slum

Still, the success hasn’t come without cost. U.N. troops have been accused of killing innocent civilians during their operations.

Human rights lawyer Mario Joseph, who is associated with the former party of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, says he has the death certificates of 22 people whom he says were killed by U.N. forces in December when they made their first big assault into Cite Soleil.

The seaside slum has historically been a bastion of support for Aristide, and Joseph contends that the raids were punitive. Santos Cruz, the head of the U.N. forces, denies the charge.

While the scars of the fighting are everywhere in Cite Soleil, the residents say they trust these troops more.

Part of the reason is that they are Brazilian: Haiti is a soccer-mad country, and Brazil is their favorite team.

Resident Ingado Pierre, 17, says that the people of Cite Soleil have also begun to take more responsibility, too.

“We want peace and to live well,” he says.

Despite Gains, Poverty Remains

Furious building is going on at city hall, another sign of improving times. But while everyone concurs that security has improved, Haiti is still a place of abject poverty. There is no fighting, but there also is still no work.

Jacques Sonny Simea, the fisherman, says he can now walk to the market without fear, but he has no money with which to buy food.

“We’re still in misery and hunger over here,” Simea says. “What happened before doesn’t happen anymore, but we’re still hungry.”

In Haiti, UN recovers 2 high-powered weapons taken during attack
The Associated Press

Friday, January 12, 2007

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

Residents of a gang-controlled slum surrendered two high-powered rifles Friday, three weeks after the weapons were removed from a U.N. armored personnel carrier that came under attack.

U.N. peacekeepers were driving through the seaside Cite Soleil slum on Dec. 21 when their vehicle broke down. The troops tried to fix it but came under heavy fire from unknown assailants and fled in another armored vehicle.

U.N. troops and Haitian police raided the slum the next day in a previously planned operation and killed at least six people. They found the abandoned armored vehicle burned and stripped of its M-50 assault rifle and another large caliber firearm.

In a brief hand-over Friday, the 4-foot-long (1.2-meter-long) weapons were loaded onto a pickup truck and taken to a U.N. base under escort by Filipino peacekeepers as AP journalists and dozens of onlookers watched.

“We’re turning over the guns, so now we want peace,” said Frantz Mar Guerrier of the Cite Soleil Development Committee, which said it organized the weapons hand over. “We always intended to return them, as that was the will of the community.”

A U.N. spokeswoman declined to comment Friday evening, saying she had not independently confirmed the hand over.

Guerrier said the weapons were taken “out of frustration over the killings of our people by Minustah,” using the acronym for the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti.

The United Nations said the six people killed in the Dec. 22 raid were later identified as gang members wanted for a string of recent kidnappings. However, Cite Soleil residents said 10 people were killed and that all were civilians.

U.N. peacekeepers had no casualties.

The U.N. weapons can only be fired when connected to the armored vehicle. Their loss was an embarrassment for the 8,800-strong U.N. force, which has struggled to rout armed gangs that flourished in the aftermath of a February 2004 revolt that toppled former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

U.N. troops and gangs wage frequent gunbattles in Cite Soleil, a bullet-scarred slum of 200,000 people who live mostly in squalid, dirt-floor hovels or scrap-metal shacks.