Haiti
IN THIS REPORT:
- Haitian Refugees Come Ashore in the Bahamas
- Bus Accident Near Petit Goave
- Obama Six Months in and Still No TPS for Haitians
- Coast Guard Searches for Survivors
- Improvements in Haiti
- Troop Reinforcement at the Border
- Debt Cancellation for Haiti Finally Comes Through!
- Six People Dead From Southeastern Ferry Capsizing
- Haitian Police Say Demonstrator Was Killed by Bullet During Clash with UN
- Haiti has found success in its fight against AIDS
- Clinton Points to Lack of Cooperation as Hindering Help for Haiti
- UN appeal for Haiti has failed to raise sufficient funds to rehabilitate the hurricane-hit agriculture sector
- Haiti Support Group on Haiti Debt Cancellation
Haitian Refugees Come Ashore in the Bahamas:
More than two hundred Haitian economic refugees who came ashore [in the Bahamas] in three separate groups last week are believed to be a part of a smuggling ring. According to a source in the Royal Bahamas Defence Force, officials believe that a Bahamian may have assisted the migrants to enter The Bahamas. Officials believe that migrants are coming to The Bahamas because the economic situation is worsening in the region, particularly in northern Haiti. Despite the government?s best efforts to reduce the number of migrants coming to The Bahamas, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) confirmed that they apprehended 172 Haitian migrants on Saturday ? the third apprehension exercise in a week. Officials apprehended 172 Haitians ? 130 men and 42 women ? in Central Bahamas. Officials did not reveal whether any children were found on board at the time of discovery. According to the Defence Force, officials received reports that a Haitian sloop had been spotted a half mile east of Hawksbill Rock in the Exuma Cays. The department also reported Friday that 162 Haitian nationals ? 130 men and 32 women ? were apprehended on Green Cay off Andros on July 15.
The immigrants were spotted by the Defence Force. Meanwhile, the Department of Immigration said a recent repatriation exercise was conducted on July 16th and 110 Haitians ? one Dominican and one American were repatriated. (JonesBahamas.com, 7/20)
Bus Accident Near Petit Goave:
At least eleven people have been killed and dozens more injured, many seriously, in a bus accident in southern Haiti, a police source said on Monday. The accident occurred after midday on the country's Highway Two while the bus was traveling down a hill towards the town of Petit- Goave, according to police commissioner Pierre-Nonchamp Beauzile. The vehicle had been experiencing mechanical difficulties and it appears that part of it broke off, causing it to crash in the middle of the highway, Mr Beauzile said. Rescue teams and ambulances rushed to the scene to help the injured, some of whom were transferred to regional hospitals and others to facilities in the capital Port-au-Prince.
(AFP, 7/21)
Obama Six Months in and Still No TPS for Haitians:
President Barack Obama is six months into his presidency and a Haitian advocacy organization cannot help but wonder where is the Temporary Protected Status for desperate Haitians? Steven Forester, of Stop Deportations Now and the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, says 28,000 Haitians with final orders of removal urgently need TPS, which is granted to eligible nationals of designated countries who are temporarily unable to safely return to their home country because of ongoing armed conflict, an environmental disaster, or other extraordinary and temporary conditions. Forester argues that when Hurricane Mitch struck Nicaragua and Honduras and earthquakes hit El Salvador, their nationals got TPS, so why not Haitians. Haiti had to cope with four storms or hurricanes in one month last year that wiped out 15 percent of Haiti`s GDP, said Forester and caused widespread
flooding of major cities and death and $1 billion in damages.
Haitians need work permits now, added the head of the Institute in Haiti. "TPS would enable them to work and send remittances to an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 people in Haiti," he said.
So far several lawmakers, including NY Senators Chuck Schumer and Kristin Gilliibrand; House Ways and Means Chair Charles Rangel and House Western Hemisphere subcommittee Chair, Eliot Engel, have all written President Obama urging him to grant Haitians TPS.
While the editorial boards of the New York Times, twice in the last year, the Washington Post, The Sun Sentinel, the Miami Herald and Newsday among others have recently editorialized for TPS. The South Florida congressional delegation also supports TPS with Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart as well as Reps. Alcee Hastings and Kendrick Meek urging for TPS through a bi- partisan supported bill. But while the White House has heard from several sides on the issue, it has yet to budge, even though it`s so far halted deportation for those affected. For now, the Haitian nationals in desperate need of some form of immigration relief remain in limbo. (CaribWorldNews, 7/22)
Coast Guard Searches for Survivors:
Helicopter rescue teams from the United States Coast Guard continued to search Tuesday for possible survivors from a boat that capsized in the Atlantic with as many as 200 Haitian migrants aboard. Coast Guard officials in Miami said about 70 of the migrants were stranded on a reef after their boat sank Monday off the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British territory about 70 miles north of Haiti and 700 miles southeast of Miami. Most of the others on the vessel were missing and feared drowned. Two American helicopters and small boats deployed by island authorities ferried the survivors from the reef to Providenciales, the easternmost island in the chain. A Coast Guard cutter, the Valiant, also was en route, the guard said.
A survivor told The Associated Press that the boat had been at sea for three days when it spotted a police boat and tried to hide behind a reef. The migrants? vessel apparently foundered when it struck the reef. Desperate Haitians seeking work in the Bahamas or the United States often set forth in unsafe boats, sometimes paying smugglers thousands of dollars for their passage. The Coast Guard says it has stopped more than 1,500 migrants since October, an increase of about 20 percent over the same period in the previous year. In the waters north of Cuba last week, the Valiant picked up 124 Haitians aboard what it said was a ?grossly overloaded? 60-foot sailboat. The migrants, presumably bound for Florida, were returned to Cap-Haitien, Haiti, on Monday. In May, at least nine Haitians died when their boat sank about 15 miles off the Florida coast. (NYT, 7/29)
Improvements in Haiti:
Having traded his designer suits for jeans and a T-shirt, the Washington-based international lender surveyed the fruits of a $50 million loan, peppering his Haitian hosts with questions in his quick- study French. Luis Alberto Moreno, Colombian diplomat turned Inter- American Development Bank head, looked out of place to the Haitians tracking his every move as he toured the new yellow and mint-green market complex. He passed bathrooms with gleaming flush toilets, a rest area for workers, clinic, a kids playground -- and a slaughterhouse to prepare fresh meat for the market.
In a country where promises are broken and donor contracts take years to execute, the $1.2 million Mariani Market on the outskirts of Port- au-Prince illustrates the steady pockets of progress being made in this fragile Caribbean nation. "There is some momentum,' Moreno mused. "It still has a long way to go. But at least there is a sense that the security situation is better, which means a lot of things can start to happen.' Tentatively, cautiously, a mood of optimism is replacing a sense of endless chaos and uncertainty in places like Carrefour, a city buffeted by natural disaster, hunger riots and decades of political turmoil. Its streets are still clogged with mind- numbing, horn-honking traffic. But, look around Haiti and you can see new schools being built in once-gang-ridden slums, paved streets replacing rutted roads and crops growing in once storm-wrecked fields.
As Moreno and countless Haitians know, nothing is irreversible here.
The country is a modern-day Sisphyus, a Greek tragedy plagued by ups and downs as it struggles with grinding poverty and volatile politics.
Even now there are concerns that upcoming elections, political disagreements within the government and debates over revising the constitution and increasing the minimum wage could derail the momentum. But if there is cause for optimism these days in Haiti, it is because of the arrival of some good news.
? In the last three weeks alone, $1.2 billion in foreign debt, including $511 million from the IDB, have been forgiven, saving the country $50 million a year in repayments.
? Canada and the United States both revised their travel advisories and no longer warn citizens to avoid ``nonessential travel' to Haiti.
? And within a span of 10 days, the country that couldn't raise $100 million in foreign aid after last summer's back-to-back storms, hosted three of the world's most highly sought-after development pitchmen:
former President Bill Clinton, now U.N. special envoy to Haiti; renowned Columbia University anti-poverty economist Jeffrey Sachs; and the IDB's Moreno.
"We all want to be here and help,' Sachs told Haitian Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis during a dinner toast, calling this a "singular moment' for her nation. The IDB, which is celebrating 50 years since its founding, chose Haiti as one of four countries to mark its anniversary, bringing its highly influential board of directors here this month along with the prime ministers of the Bahamas and Barbados, and the assistant secretary general of the Organization of American States.
Two days of meetings ended with a tour of several long-delayed IDB- financed projects including the market, a $46 million rehabilitation of an irrigation canal to put an additional 19,768 acres of agricultural land back in production in the Artibonite Valley and National Route 1, the 155-mile stretch linking the capital in the south with Cap-Haitien in the north. At a cost of almost $2 million per mile, only 31 miles of the originally envisioned 49 miles, from Port-au-Prince to St. Marc, have been able to get a makeover. The Haitian government and the IDB are still searching for financing for the last 18 miles, which Moreno's 12-car convoy experienced as they bounced and zig-zagged their way around potholes en route from the city of St. Marc to the western Arcadins Coast.
"When you look at things from a distance, you think you're doing a lot,' Moreno says, noting that the IDB will triple its grants to Haiti next year to $128 million. "But when you come here and see on the ground the huge amount of need, you think you are putting only a little drop in the bucket. That's the contrast you feel.' Last week, a Washington-based team of the U.S. Agency for International Development visited Port-au-Prince -- making good on a promise by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who visited in April, to evaluate how U.S. taxpayers' money and other foreign aid is being spent in Haiti. Last Wednesday, Haitian businessmen finally broke ground on a
$56 million, 30-megawatt heavy fuel power plant. The project, conceived in 2005, is expected to save the Haitian treasury at least
$2.5 million a month, but will still only meet a fraction of the country's energy needs.
But the fact that a group of Korean investors has agreed to pump $3 million into the project -- Haitian investors and banks are already putting in $20 million -- is a sign of progress, Haitians say. "It says Haiti is open for business. Foreigners are starting to believe in the country again,' said Haitian investor Daniel Rouzier. "The limelight being put on Haiti right now means we have a strategic window of opportunity to get this country moving again.' The new power plant is not the only investment taking shape around a calmer Cit? Soleil, where a new U.S.-government-financed police station recently opened. In addition, newly constructed streets and parks, financed by $6 million in U.S. assistance and built by the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration, offer children and residents respite from their slum.
Recently, the Haitian-owned West Indies Group began clearing a nearby lot for the construction of a new $40 million, 1-million-square-foot industrial park. With its 40 buildings, the park will be able to employ 25,000 textile workers as part of the duty-free HOPE II legislation approved by the U.S. Congress. Among those interested in possibly investing in the project is billionaire George Soros'
foundation. "It's time for Haitians to take responsibility for their future,' Rouzier, the Haitian businessman, said. ``We have to come up with internationally competitive projects. We have to be willing to compete with the outside world. We can't just rely on U.S. trade advantages to make Haiti competitive. It has to come from the inside. Rebuild infrastructure and make it available at rates available in other countries.' (Miami Herald, 7/29)
Troop Reinforcement at the Border:
Haiti and the Dominican Republic reinforced troops at their shared border after violence broke out at a protest in the Dominican Republic demanding extradition of a Haitian man accused of murder in both countries, Haiti's foreign minister said on Monday. Foreign Minister Alrich Nicolas said the two governments met to try to resolve the problem on Saturday, a day after the violence in the border town of Dajabon. "We have sent more troops on the border and the Dominican government has done the same," Nicolas told Reuters. The Haitian consul in the Dominican province of Dajabon, Jean-Baptiste Bien-Aime, said Wilson Destine had killed a young woman in Haiti then fled to the Dominican Republic. Destine, whom the diplomat called a notorious bandit, then gunned down a Dominican man on July 17 and fled back across the border to Haiti, Bien-Aime said.
"The Haitian bandit shot (the Dominican) in the neck, took away his motorcycle and crossed the border to the Haitian city of Ouanaminthe,"
Bien-Aime told Reuters. Destine is jailed in Haiti, police said.
Violence broke out on Friday in a marketplace in Dajabon, where vendors from both nations sell their goods. Dominican protesters demanded Destine's immediate extradition and used machetes, batons and rocks to chase out the Haitian vendors, forcing them to leave behind their wares, Bien-Aime said. Dominican authorities used tear gas to break up the protest and later blocked Haitian vendors from entering the country.
The Haitian police chief in Ouanaminthe, Jean-Claude Jean, said Destine was being held at police headquarters in Fort-Liberte, but that police lacked authority to extradite anyone and the issue had to be negotiated at top levels of both governments. "We had been looking for Wilson Destine for a while because he was involved in other criminal activities here in Ouanaminthe," Jean said. "I understand that he committed a crime other there, but he also committed crimes here too. So we have to keep him and hand him over to Haitian judicial authorities for prosecution." (Reuters, 7/28)
Debt Cancellation for Haiti Finally Comes Through!
The representatives of the Paris Club creditor countries and of the Republic of Haiti agreed on 8 July 2009 on a debt cancellation following Haiti's having reached its Completion Point under the enhanced initiative for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (enhanced HIPC Initiative) on 30 June 2009. As a contribution to restoring the Republic of Haiti's debt sustainability, Paris Club creditors decided to cancel USD 62.73 million, which represents the Paris Club's share of the effort in the framework of the enhanced HIPC Initiative.
Creditors welcome and support the Republic of Haiti's commitment to seek comparable treatment from all their other external creditors (including other creditor countries). Paris Club creditors also committed on a bilateral and voluntary basis to cancel an additional USD 152 million. As a result of this agreement and additional bilateral efforts, the Republic of Haiti's debt to Paris Club creditors will be entirely cancelled. Paris Club creditors welcomed the Republic of Haiti's determination to implement a comprehensive poverty reduction strategy and an ambitious economic programme providing the basis for sustainable economic growth in the context of a difficult global economic environment. The Republic of Haiti committed to allocate the resources freed by the present debt cancellation to priority areas identified in the country's poverty reduction strategy.
Background notes
1. The Paris Club was formed in 1956. It is an informal group of creditor governments from major industrialized countries. It meets on a monthly basis in Paris with debtor countries in order to agree with them on restructuring their debts.
2. The members of the Paris Club which participated in the restructuring of the Republic of Haiti's debt were representatives of the Governments of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
Observers at the meeting were representatives of the Governments of Japan and the Russian Federation as well as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Development Association (IDA) and the Inter-American Development Bank. The delegation of the Republic of Haiti was headed by Mr Daniel DORSAINVIL, Minister of Economy and Finance. The meeting was chaired by Mr Julien RENCKI, Vice Chairman of the Paris Club, Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Treasury and Economic Policy Department of the French Ministry of Economy, Industry and Employment.
Technical notes
1. The Republic of Haiti's economic program is supported by an arrangement under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) approved in November 2006.
2. The Republic of Haiti's public external debt was estimated to be USD 1885 million in nominal value at end September 2008 (source: IMF and IDA documents). At the same date, the Republic of Haiti's public external debt due to Paris Club creditors was estimated to be USD
214.8 million (source : Paris Club).
3. IDA-administered EU loans are included in this treatment. (Paris Club, 7/8)
Canceling Haiti's debts will free up about $50 million a year for spending over the next 10 to 15 years to reduce poverty in the Caribbean nation, an IMF official said on Wednesday. The country won $1.2. billion in debt relief from the World Bank, IMF and other creditors earlier on Wednesday under a program by rich nations to ease the debt burdens of the world's poorest countries. "It is a very important milestone for Haiti," Corinne Delechat, IMF mission chief for Haiti, told Reuters. "It is a recognition of the reform efforts the government has made since 2004 and 2005 when there was some return to political stability and democracy," she said. Delechat said the government's program to stabilize the fragile economy has reduced inflation, brought the budget deficit under control, improved management of public finances and increased reserves in Haiti. Finance Minister Daniel Dorsainvil hailed the debt relief as "good news" for the Caribbean nation, where most people live on less than $2 a day.
Writing off the debts will allow the government to increase spending on anti-poverty programs that focus on job creation and projects that limit damage from natural disasters, such as hurricanes, which pummeled the country last year and killed 800 people. Delechat said Haiti was expected to request a new IMF financing program when the current one expires at the end of the year, which will encourage budget support from donors. "The IMF program is the anchor for other donors to come and also commit to multi-year budget support," she added. "With that anchor, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank and the European Commission will start budget support operations." The largest share of Haiti's foreign debt is owed to the Inter-American Development Bank (41 percent of total external debt), the World Bank (27 percent), and bilateral creditors (24 percent).
Helped by 9,000 U.N. peacekeepers, Haiti appears to be on a slow recovery from its troubled past of dictatorship and political violence. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who has been appointed special U.N. envoy to the country, has declared this is Haiti's turning point. Delechat said debt relief offered the government an opportunity to rebuild. "We are cautiously optimistic," Delechat said.
"It is a turning point for Haiti and it is up to the government to use the opportunity well. "The security situation is much improved and it is a land of opportunity if you're an entrepreneur and an investor,"
she added. "It is a golden moment for Haiti to start investing in export capacity, particularly in textiles," Delechat said. (Reuters,
7/1)
Six People Dead From Southeastern Ferry Capsizing:
Six people died when a boat capsized off the coast of Haiti yesterday
- and dozens more were missing, authorities said. Sixteen passengers were rescued from the vessel, which had as many as 60 people onboard when it overturned en route from Anse a Pitre, near the Dominican border, to the southern peninsula city of Jacmel. "Six bodies have been recovered," said Alta Jean-Baptiste, director of Haiti's civil protection agency. Rescuers were frantically searching for more survivors and had requested local fishermen help them scan the seas.
The cause of the accident was unknown and it's unclear what kind of boat was involved. (AP, 7/11)
Haitian Police Say Demonstrator Was Killed by Bullet During Clash with
UN:
Haitian police say a demonstrator found slain after a clash with U.N.
peacekeepers during a funeral procession was killed by a bullet, and not by a rock as peacekeepers initially reported. But the police inspector who shared details of the autopsy report on Monday said ballistics tests are needed to determine who fired the fatal shot. The inspector who viewed the autopsy report spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the autopsy. He did not offer any additional details. Opponents of the 9,000-member U.N.
force are using the death to inflame passions against international troops stationed in Haiti since 2004.
The demonstrator, who remains unidentified, was killed June 18 as about 2,000 people marched with the casket of the Rev. Gerard Jean- Juste, an advocate for the poor who died in May after years of health problems. He was closely allied with ousted former President Jean- Bertrand Aristide. At least five Brazilian soldiers with the 9,000- member U.N. peacekeeping mission entered the back of the procession near Port-au-Prince's Notre Dame cathedral on foot to arrest a marcher, who was later released. Other demonstrators threw rocks at the soldiers, who responded by firing at least eight shots into the air before leaving in a jeep.
U.N. peacekeeping spokeswoman Sophie Boutaud de la Combe said Monday that the Brazilian soldiers had some weapons loaded with rubber bullets and others with 7.62-milimeter caliber live ammunition. In television footage of the clash at least eight shots can be heard. It is not clear if all were fired by the soldiers. No one else is seen holding a firearm. "We are confident that the autopsy reconfirmed that our troops were not responsible for this death," Boutaud de la Combe said. She noted that preliminary information that the protester had been killed by a rock or other blunt instrument were incorrect. Both the death and the clash that preceded it have only added to growing tension surrounding the U.N. troops. The day before the funeral other protesters also calling for their departure burned a U.N. police vehicle, one of a series of anti-U.N. demonstrations this year. The U.N. and other diplomats have defended the soldiers' decision to enter the funeral procession on the belief that they were arresting a wanted criminal. (AP, 6/29)
Haiti has found success in its fight against AIDS:
When Micheline Leon was diagnosed with HIV, her parents told her they would fit her for a coffin. Fifteen years later, she walks around her two-room concrete house on Haiti's central plateau, watching her four children play under the plantain trees. She looks healthy, her belly amply filling a gray, secondhand T-shirt. Her three sons and one daughter were born after she was diagnosed. None has the virus. "I'm not sick," she explained patiently on a recent afternoon. "People call me sick but I'm not. I'm infected."In many ways the 35-year-old mother's story is Haiti's too. In the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up in the U.S. among migrants who had escaped Haiti's dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country's population.
Instead, Haiti's HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted. In a wide range of interviews with doctors, patients, public health experts and others, The Associated Press found that Haiti's success in the face of chronic political and social turmoil came because organizations cooperated and tailored programs to the country's specific challenges. Much of the credit went to two pioneering nonprofit groups, Boston-based Partners in Health and Port- au-Prince's GHESKIO, widely considered to be the world's oldest AIDS clinic. "The Haitian AIDS community feels like they're out in front of everyone else on this, and pretty much they are," said Judith Timyan, senior HIV/AIDS adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Haiti. "They really do some of the best work in the world." Researchers say the number of suffers was initially lessened by closing private blood banks, and statistically by high mortality rates ? an untreated AIDS sufferer in Haiti lives eight fewer years than an untreated American.
Well-coordinated use of AIDS drugs, education and behavioral changes such as increased condom use have kept the disease from surging back, at least for now. Statistics are notoriously unreliable in this country of poverty and lack of infrastructure. The most telling data would be the number of new infections in a given year, but researchers say such a precise count is impossible. Next best is to estimate the infected as a percentage of the population. From 1993 to 2003, only pregnant women were tested, and their rate of infection dropped from
6.2 percent to 3.1 percent, according to GHESKIO and national health surveys. Researchers now test men and women aged 15 to 49, and the official rate is 2.2 percent, according to UNAIDS. That's still far higher than in the developed world, but it's lower than the Bahamas, Guyana and Suriname, and much lower than sub-Saharan Africa, where the rate averages about 5 percent but spikes to 24 percent in Botswana and
33 percent in Swaziland.
But the crisis is far from over. In the Artibonite Valley, where Boston-based Partners in Health is just now setting up two clinics, the estimated infection rate is 4.5 percent. Some in these remote regions still look for care from Voodoo priests, who ask for large sums of money or goods and use treatments doctors say can be poisonous. Thanks in large part to UNAIDS, which awarded Haiti its first grant in 2002, and $420 million from the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, an estimated 18,000 people are on AIDS drugs, most of them administered free through GHESKIO and PIH. That population represents 40 percent of those whose white blood cell count is low enough for them to need the drugs. It is a high percentage for the developing world, but still fails to help many too remote to reach medical care or those at for-pay public clinics.
Still, Haiti has been sufficiently ahead in prevention, diagnosis and treatment for some of its programs to serve as models for PEPFAR, the program launched by President George W. Bush in 2003 and praised for its work in Africa. GHESKIO co-founder Dr. Jean W. Pape was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his work, and PIH's Paul Farmer was recently named chairman of Harvard Medical School's global health department. In May, Haiti was honored as the host of the opening ceremony of the 2009 International AIDS Candlelight Memorial. In a country suffering from political upheaval and natural disasters, where three-quarters of the people can neither afford nor access private clinics or fee-based public hospitals, few could have imagined at the dawn of the AIDS crisis how far Haiti would come. (AP, 7/5)
Clinton Points to Lack of Cooperation as Hindering Help for Haiti:
Former US President Bill Clinton said on Wednesday a lack of cooperation between Haitian politicians, aid groups and business leaders was hurting efforts to help the impoverished Caribbean nation.
Clinton, on his first visit since being named UN special envoy to Haiti, said he was optimistic about its future but surprised by the continuing divide between the private and public sectors and the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Haiti. "The most surprising thing to me ... is how little the investor community, all the elements of the government, including the legislative branch and the NGO community seem to have taught and absorbed each others'
lessons," Clinton told reporters at the end of a two-day fact-finding mission. The poorest country in the Americas, Haiti has struggled to establish democratic institutions and a stable investment climate following decades of dictatorship and military rule. Most of its 9 million people live on less than $2 a day.
But the appointment of Clinton by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in May, hundreds of millions of dollars in recent donor pledges and the granting of $1.2 billion in debt relief by the World Bank, IMF and other creditors this month has raised hopes in Haiti. The Paris Club of sovereign creditors said on Wednesday it had decided to cancel
$62.73 million of Haiti's debt and committed to canceling an additional $152 million. Clinton met on Wednesday with business leaders, heads of the executive and legislative branches of the government and NGOs and civil society groups, after a tour on Tuesday of the mud-stained city of Gonaives, where floods last year killed hundreds of people. He promised to do all he can to collect the money Haiti needs to address some of its crucial infrastructure, education and healthcare problems but urged Haitians to solve their internal differences. "If it is a question of money that's my problem, but if it is not about money, that's something Haitians need to resolve among themselves," he said. "That's a little surprising to me. But everybody
is eager to do it." (Reuters, 7/9)
Bill Clinton on Tuesday took his Haiti relief effort to this battered seaside city that was nearly destroyed last year by tropical storms, finding a mud-caked maze of partially rebuilt homes and shops.
Clinton, the new special U.N. envoy to Haiti, visited a hospital and school in Gonaives that served as emergency shelters during the four tropical storms, which killed nearly 800 people and caused $1 billion in damage to irrigation, bridges and roads. The former president praised reconstruction efforts but said much more needs to be done. He said Haiti needs more money and better coordination among aid groups and the government to rebuild and spur development. 'I'm just trying to organize this process and drive it faster,' Clinton said during a break in the tour along the city's craggy roads.
Aid has poured into the Gonaives region but many homes and shops remain damaged, and the area remains vulnerable to flooding because the surrounding hills have been stripped of trees to produce charcoal.
It was Clinton's first trip to Gonaives, but he was greeted like a returning hero. Shrieking girls clamored to have their photo taken with the former president; men pushed their elderly mothers through the crowd for a chance to shake his hand. Haitians stood on piles of rubble to catch a glimpse of Clinton's motorcade as it wove through the rocky streets of Gonaives, one of the poorest cities in a chronically troubled country considered the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. Clinton, who came to Gonaives with Haitian President Ren?
Pr?val, said the Haitian government and its international backers hope to create 150,000 to 200,000 jobs nationwide over the next two years.
Many of those jobs will come from projects to rebuild roads and shore up erosion-prone hillsides. 'It will be hard, but I think it's important,' Clinton said of his mission later after returning to the capital, Port-au-Prince. (AP, 7/8)
UN appeal for Haiti has failed to raise sufficient funds to rehabilitate the hurricane-hit agriculture sector:
Following the devastating series of hurricanes that hit Haiti in August and September 2008, the UN issued an emergency flash appeal. In November the advocacy platform composed of British development agencies and solidarity organizations wrote to the United Nations to express its concern about the poor international response to the appeal, and in particular to the very poor response to the part of the flash appeal concerning the rehabilitation of Haiti's vital agricultural sector. (http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/VDUX-7LLSQ8?OpenDocument
). At that time, only US$828,000 - just 8% of the allocation of US $10.5m requested to help the agricultural sector by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had been raised.
By the end of January 2009 - by which time the appeal had been reissued and the amount requested for agriculture had been increased to U$11..5m - the amount donated to the agriculture section had increased US$1,450,610 (13% of the total requested). -http://www.haitisupport.gn.apc.org/FlashAppealUpdate.html
Now, according to the UN's OCHA, as of 8 July 2009 a total of US $4.42m had been donated for agriculture - 38% of the total requested.
While this amount is not insignificant, the Haiti Support Group is disturbed that two of the four programmes that the FAO wants to implement in response to the hurricane damage to the agricultural sector have hardly received any financial support.
As part of the flash appeal the FAO had requested US$2m to for a programme entitled, 'Rehabilitation of the irrigation network in the main areas affected by the natural disasters in 2008'. By July 2009, only US$201,393 or 10% of the total had been donated (by Canada). A second FAO programme entitled, 'Fertility restoration of arable lands and erosion control" requires US$1.5m but by July 2009 only US$255,775 or 17% of the total had been donated (by the European Commission). In light of such a pathetic response, and with presumably no further donations in the offing, the Haiti Support Group can only repeat this conclusion - The fact that the response to the agriculture section of the UN flash appeal has been so disappointing suggests that once again that the international aid machine remains wedded to the short-term and has scant regard for lasting solutions to Haiti's problems. (Haiti Support Group, 7/8)
Haiti Support Group on Haiti Debt Cancellation:
Like when a wrongly-convicted prisoner is released after years of incarceration, there can only be mixed feelings about yesterday's announcement of the cancellation of US$1.2 billion of Haiti's US$1.9 billion debt. Yes, it is good news that over 60% of Haiti's debt has been cancelled under the terms of the HIPC. But, on the other hand, it is a scandal that it took so long for the international finance institutions (IFIs) to take this step. Just think what could have been done with the money wasted on debt repayments over the last years?
Part of the debt that has now been cancelled was composed of loans made to the Duvalier regimes in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. These loans were never used to develop the country and much of the amount was stolen by the Duvaliers and their clique. It remains an outrage that the Haitian people had to continue paying interest on these amounts until June 2009!
The HIPC debt cancellation announced by the IMF and World Bank is good news indeed, but what about those wasted years when the debt was being repaid and Haiti's economy went from bad to worse?
The debt cancellation means that the US$1m per week that the Haitian people have until now been paying to service the debt can instead be used for other purposes. The HSG would hope that this would mean more state support for national production for national consumption.
However all the indications are that - under heavy pressure from the IFIs - the Haitian government will instead pursue a development strategy based on the deeply-flawed garment assembly export sector.
Without ever providing a convincing argument, the IFIs have been pushing for decades for this sector to be the motor of Haiti's economic development. Despite the fact that this sector exists in a virtual vacuum with only minimal impact on the wider Haitian economy, only a few months ago UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and British economist Paul Collier made yet another proposal for international aid to fund garment assembly production in new Free Trade Zones.
Indeed, Corinne Delechat, IMF mission chief for Haiti, commenting on the debt cancellation, told Reuters that Haiti is a 'land of opportunity if you're an entrepreneur and an investor," adding, "It is a golden moment for Haiti to start investing in export capacity, particularly in textiles." It looks like the IFIs' interventions will result in the HIPC debt cancellation being a matter of Haiti taking one step forward, while their focus on garment assembly for export will take the country two steps back. (Haiti Support Group press release - 2 July 2009)
- Haitian Refugees Come Ashore in the Bahamas
- Bus Accident Near Petit Goave
- Obama Six Months in and Still No TPS for Haitians
- Coast Guard Searches for Survivors
- Improvements in Haiti
- Troop Reinforcement at the Border
- Debt Cancellation for Haiti Finally Comes Through!
- Six People Dead From Southeastern Ferry Capsizing
- Haitian Police Say Demonstrator Was Killed by Bullet During Clash with UN
- Haiti has found success in its fight against AIDS
- Clinton Points to Lack of Cooperation as Hindering Help for Haiti
- UN appeal for Haiti has failed to raise sufficient funds to rehabilitate the hurricane-hit agriculture sector
- Haiti Support Group on Haiti Debt Cancellation
Haitian Refugees Come Ashore in the Bahamas:
More than two hundred Haitian economic refugees who came ashore [in the Bahamas] in three separate groups last week are believed to be a part of a smuggling ring. According to a source in the Royal Bahamas Defence Force, officials believe that a Bahamian may have assisted the migrants to enter The Bahamas. Officials believe that migrants are coming to The Bahamas because the economic situation is worsening in the region, particularly in northern Haiti. Despite the government?s best efforts to reduce the number of migrants coming to The Bahamas, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) confirmed that they apprehended 172 Haitian migrants on Saturday ? the third apprehension exercise in a week. Officials apprehended 172 Haitians ? 130 men and 42 women ? in Central Bahamas. Officials did not reveal whether any children were found on board at the time of discovery. According to the Defence Force, officials received reports that a Haitian sloop had been spotted a half mile east of Hawksbill Rock in the Exuma Cays. The department also reported Friday that 162 Haitian nationals ? 130 men and 32 women ? were apprehended on Green Cay off Andros on July 15.
The immigrants were spotted by the Defence Force. Meanwhile, the Department of Immigration said a recent repatriation exercise was conducted on July 16th and 110 Haitians ? one Dominican and one American were repatriated. (JonesBahamas.com, 7/20)
Bus Accident Near Petit Goave:
At least eleven people have been killed and dozens more injured, many seriously, in a bus accident in southern Haiti, a police source said on Monday. The accident occurred after midday on the country's Highway Two while the bus was traveling down a hill towards the town of Petit- Goave, according to police commissioner Pierre-Nonchamp Beauzile. The vehicle had been experiencing mechanical difficulties and it appears that part of it broke off, causing it to crash in the middle of the highway, Mr Beauzile said. Rescue teams and ambulances rushed to the scene to help the injured, some of whom were transferred to regional hospitals and others to facilities in the capital Port-au-Prince.
(AFP, 7/21)
Obama Six Months in and Still No TPS for Haitians:
President Barack Obama is six months into his presidency and a Haitian advocacy organization cannot help but wonder where is the Temporary Protected Status for desperate Haitians? Steven Forester, of Stop Deportations Now and the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, says 28,000 Haitians with final orders of removal urgently need TPS, which is granted to eligible nationals of designated countries who are temporarily unable to safely return to their home country because of ongoing armed conflict, an environmental disaster, or other extraordinary and temporary conditions. Forester argues that when Hurricane Mitch struck Nicaragua and Honduras and earthquakes hit El Salvador, their nationals got TPS, so why not Haitians. Haiti had to cope with four storms or hurricanes in one month last year that wiped out 15 percent of Haiti`s GDP, said Forester and caused widespread
flooding of major cities and death and $1 billion in damages.
Haitians need work permits now, added the head of the Institute in Haiti. "TPS would enable them to work and send remittances to an estimated 150,000 to 300,000 people in Haiti," he said.
So far several lawmakers, including NY Senators Chuck Schumer and Kristin Gilliibrand; House Ways and Means Chair Charles Rangel and House Western Hemisphere subcommittee Chair, Eliot Engel, have all written President Obama urging him to grant Haitians TPS.
While the editorial boards of the New York Times, twice in the last year, the Washington Post, The Sun Sentinel, the Miami Herald and Newsday among others have recently editorialized for TPS. The South Florida congressional delegation also supports TPS with Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart as well as Reps. Alcee Hastings and Kendrick Meek urging for TPS through a bi- partisan supported bill. But while the White House has heard from several sides on the issue, it has yet to budge, even though it`s so far halted deportation for those affected. For now, the Haitian nationals in desperate need of some form of immigration relief remain in limbo. (CaribWorldNews, 7/22)
Coast Guard Searches for Survivors:
Helicopter rescue teams from the United States Coast Guard continued to search Tuesday for possible survivors from a boat that capsized in the Atlantic with as many as 200 Haitian migrants aboard. Coast Guard officials in Miami said about 70 of the migrants were stranded on a reef after their boat sank Monday off the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British territory about 70 miles north of Haiti and 700 miles southeast of Miami. Most of the others on the vessel were missing and feared drowned. Two American helicopters and small boats deployed by island authorities ferried the survivors from the reef to Providenciales, the easternmost island in the chain. A Coast Guard cutter, the Valiant, also was en route, the guard said.
A survivor told The Associated Press that the boat had been at sea for three days when it spotted a police boat and tried to hide behind a reef. The migrants? vessel apparently foundered when it struck the reef. Desperate Haitians seeking work in the Bahamas or the United States often set forth in unsafe boats, sometimes paying smugglers thousands of dollars for their passage. The Coast Guard says it has stopped more than 1,500 migrants since October, an increase of about 20 percent over the same period in the previous year. In the waters north of Cuba last week, the Valiant picked up 124 Haitians aboard what it said was a ?grossly overloaded? 60-foot sailboat. The migrants, presumably bound for Florida, were returned to Cap-Haitien, Haiti, on Monday. In May, at least nine Haitians died when their boat sank about 15 miles off the Florida coast. (NYT, 7/29)
Improvements in Haiti:
Having traded his designer suits for jeans and a T-shirt, the Washington-based international lender surveyed the fruits of a $50 million loan, peppering his Haitian hosts with questions in his quick- study French. Luis Alberto Moreno, Colombian diplomat turned Inter- American Development Bank head, looked out of place to the Haitians tracking his every move as he toured the new yellow and mint-green market complex. He passed bathrooms with gleaming flush toilets, a rest area for workers, clinic, a kids playground -- and a slaughterhouse to prepare fresh meat for the market.
In a country where promises are broken and donor contracts take years to execute, the $1.2 million Mariani Market on the outskirts of Port- au-Prince illustrates the steady pockets of progress being made in this fragile Caribbean nation. "There is some momentum,' Moreno mused. "It still has a long way to go. But at least there is a sense that the security situation is better, which means a lot of things can start to happen.' Tentatively, cautiously, a mood of optimism is replacing a sense of endless chaos and uncertainty in places like Carrefour, a city buffeted by natural disaster, hunger riots and decades of political turmoil. Its streets are still clogged with mind- numbing, horn-honking traffic. But, look around Haiti and you can see new schools being built in once-gang-ridden slums, paved streets replacing rutted roads and crops growing in once storm-wrecked fields.
As Moreno and countless Haitians know, nothing is irreversible here.
The country is a modern-day Sisphyus, a Greek tragedy plagued by ups and downs as it struggles with grinding poverty and volatile politics.
Even now there are concerns that upcoming elections, political disagreements within the government and debates over revising the constitution and increasing the minimum wage could derail the momentum. But if there is cause for optimism these days in Haiti, it is because of the arrival of some good news.
? In the last three weeks alone, $1.2 billion in foreign debt, including $511 million from the IDB, have been forgiven, saving the country $50 million a year in repayments.
? Canada and the United States both revised their travel advisories and no longer warn citizens to avoid ``nonessential travel' to Haiti.
? And within a span of 10 days, the country that couldn't raise $100 million in foreign aid after last summer's back-to-back storms, hosted three of the world's most highly sought-after development pitchmen:
former President Bill Clinton, now U.N. special envoy to Haiti; renowned Columbia University anti-poverty economist Jeffrey Sachs; and the IDB's Moreno.
"We all want to be here and help,' Sachs told Haitian Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis during a dinner toast, calling this a "singular moment' for her nation. The IDB, which is celebrating 50 years since its founding, chose Haiti as one of four countries to mark its anniversary, bringing its highly influential board of directors here this month along with the prime ministers of the Bahamas and Barbados, and the assistant secretary general of the Organization of American States.
Two days of meetings ended with a tour of several long-delayed IDB- financed projects including the market, a $46 million rehabilitation of an irrigation canal to put an additional 19,768 acres of agricultural land back in production in the Artibonite Valley and National Route 1, the 155-mile stretch linking the capital in the south with Cap-Haitien in the north. At a cost of almost $2 million per mile, only 31 miles of the originally envisioned 49 miles, from Port-au-Prince to St. Marc, have been able to get a makeover. The Haitian government and the IDB are still searching for financing for the last 18 miles, which Moreno's 12-car convoy experienced as they bounced and zig-zagged their way around potholes en route from the city of St. Marc to the western Arcadins Coast.
"When you look at things from a distance, you think you're doing a lot,' Moreno says, noting that the IDB will triple its grants to Haiti next year to $128 million. "But when you come here and see on the ground the huge amount of need, you think you are putting only a little drop in the bucket. That's the contrast you feel.' Last week, a Washington-based team of the U.S. Agency for International Development visited Port-au-Prince -- making good on a promise by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who visited in April, to evaluate how U.S. taxpayers' money and other foreign aid is being spent in Haiti. Last Wednesday, Haitian businessmen finally broke ground on a
$56 million, 30-megawatt heavy fuel power plant. The project, conceived in 2005, is expected to save the Haitian treasury at least
$2.5 million a month, but will still only meet a fraction of the country's energy needs.
But the fact that a group of Korean investors has agreed to pump $3 million into the project -- Haitian investors and banks are already putting in $20 million -- is a sign of progress, Haitians say. "It says Haiti is open for business. Foreigners are starting to believe in the country again,' said Haitian investor Daniel Rouzier. "The limelight being put on Haiti right now means we have a strategic window of opportunity to get this country moving again.' The new power plant is not the only investment taking shape around a calmer Cit? Soleil, where a new U.S.-government-financed police station recently opened. In addition, newly constructed streets and parks, financed by $6 million in U.S. assistance and built by the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration, offer children and residents respite from their slum.
Recently, the Haitian-owned West Indies Group began clearing a nearby lot for the construction of a new $40 million, 1-million-square-foot industrial park. With its 40 buildings, the park will be able to employ 25,000 textile workers as part of the duty-free HOPE II legislation approved by the U.S. Congress. Among those interested in possibly investing in the project is billionaire George Soros'
foundation. "It's time for Haitians to take responsibility for their future,' Rouzier, the Haitian businessman, said. ``We have to come up with internationally competitive projects. We have to be willing to compete with the outside world. We can't just rely on U.S. trade advantages to make Haiti competitive. It has to come from the inside. Rebuild infrastructure and make it available at rates available in other countries.' (Miami Herald, 7/29)
Troop Reinforcement at the Border:
Haiti and the Dominican Republic reinforced troops at their shared border after violence broke out at a protest in the Dominican Republic demanding extradition of a Haitian man accused of murder in both countries, Haiti's foreign minister said on Monday. Foreign Minister Alrich Nicolas said the two governments met to try to resolve the problem on Saturday, a day after the violence in the border town of Dajabon. "We have sent more troops on the border and the Dominican government has done the same," Nicolas told Reuters. The Haitian consul in the Dominican province of Dajabon, Jean-Baptiste Bien-Aime, said Wilson Destine had killed a young woman in Haiti then fled to the Dominican Republic. Destine, whom the diplomat called a notorious bandit, then gunned down a Dominican man on July 17 and fled back across the border to Haiti, Bien-Aime said.
"The Haitian bandit shot (the Dominican) in the neck, took away his motorcycle and crossed the border to the Haitian city of Ouanaminthe,"
Bien-Aime told Reuters. Destine is jailed in Haiti, police said.
Violence broke out on Friday in a marketplace in Dajabon, where vendors from both nations sell their goods. Dominican protesters demanded Destine's immediate extradition and used machetes, batons and rocks to chase out the Haitian vendors, forcing them to leave behind their wares, Bien-Aime said. Dominican authorities used tear gas to break up the protest and later blocked Haitian vendors from entering the country.
The Haitian police chief in Ouanaminthe, Jean-Claude Jean, said Destine was being held at police headquarters in Fort-Liberte, but that police lacked authority to extradite anyone and the issue had to be negotiated at top levels of both governments. "We had been looking for Wilson Destine for a while because he was involved in other criminal activities here in Ouanaminthe," Jean said. "I understand that he committed a crime other there, but he also committed crimes here too. So we have to keep him and hand him over to Haitian judicial authorities for prosecution." (Reuters, 7/28)
Debt Cancellation for Haiti Finally Comes Through!
The representatives of the Paris Club creditor countries and of the Republic of Haiti agreed on 8 July 2009 on a debt cancellation following Haiti's having reached its Completion Point under the enhanced initiative for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (enhanced HIPC Initiative) on 30 June 2009. As a contribution to restoring the Republic of Haiti's debt sustainability, Paris Club creditors decided to cancel USD 62.73 million, which represents the Paris Club's share of the effort in the framework of the enhanced HIPC Initiative.
Creditors welcome and support the Republic of Haiti's commitment to seek comparable treatment from all their other external creditors (including other creditor countries). Paris Club creditors also committed on a bilateral and voluntary basis to cancel an additional USD 152 million. As a result of this agreement and additional bilateral efforts, the Republic of Haiti's debt to Paris Club creditors will be entirely cancelled. Paris Club creditors welcomed the Republic of Haiti's determination to implement a comprehensive poverty reduction strategy and an ambitious economic programme providing the basis for sustainable economic growth in the context of a difficult global economic environment. The Republic of Haiti committed to allocate the resources freed by the present debt cancellation to priority areas identified in the country's poverty reduction strategy.
Background notes
1. The Paris Club was formed in 1956. It is an informal group of creditor governments from major industrialized countries. It meets on a monthly basis in Paris with debtor countries in order to agree with them on restructuring their debts.
2. The members of the Paris Club which participated in the restructuring of the Republic of Haiti's debt were representatives of the Governments of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
Observers at the meeting were representatives of the Governments of Japan and the Russian Federation as well as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Development Association (IDA) and the Inter-American Development Bank. The delegation of the Republic of Haiti was headed by Mr Daniel DORSAINVIL, Minister of Economy and Finance. The meeting was chaired by Mr Julien RENCKI, Vice Chairman of the Paris Club, Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Treasury and Economic Policy Department of the French Ministry of Economy, Industry and Employment.
Technical notes
1. The Republic of Haiti's economic program is supported by an arrangement under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF) approved in November 2006.
2. The Republic of Haiti's public external debt was estimated to be USD 1885 million in nominal value at end September 2008 (source: IMF and IDA documents). At the same date, the Republic of Haiti's public external debt due to Paris Club creditors was estimated to be USD
214.8 million (source : Paris Club).
3. IDA-administered EU loans are included in this treatment. (Paris Club, 7/8)
Canceling Haiti's debts will free up about $50 million a year for spending over the next 10 to 15 years to reduce poverty in the Caribbean nation, an IMF official said on Wednesday. The country won $1.2. billion in debt relief from the World Bank, IMF and other creditors earlier on Wednesday under a program by rich nations to ease the debt burdens of the world's poorest countries. "It is a very important milestone for Haiti," Corinne Delechat, IMF mission chief for Haiti, told Reuters. "It is a recognition of the reform efforts the government has made since 2004 and 2005 when there was some return to political stability and democracy," she said. Delechat said the government's program to stabilize the fragile economy has reduced inflation, brought the budget deficit under control, improved management of public finances and increased reserves in Haiti. Finance Minister Daniel Dorsainvil hailed the debt relief as "good news" for the Caribbean nation, where most people live on less than $2 a day.
Writing off the debts will allow the government to increase spending on anti-poverty programs that focus on job creation and projects that limit damage from natural disasters, such as hurricanes, which pummeled the country last year and killed 800 people. Delechat said Haiti was expected to request a new IMF financing program when the current one expires at the end of the year, which will encourage budget support from donors. "The IMF program is the anchor for other donors to come and also commit to multi-year budget support," she added. "With that anchor, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank and the European Commission will start budget support operations." The largest share of Haiti's foreign debt is owed to the Inter-American Development Bank (41 percent of total external debt), the World Bank (27 percent), and bilateral creditors (24 percent).
Helped by 9,000 U.N. peacekeepers, Haiti appears to be on a slow recovery from its troubled past of dictatorship and political violence. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who has been appointed special U.N. envoy to the country, has declared this is Haiti's turning point. Delechat said debt relief offered the government an opportunity to rebuild. "We are cautiously optimistic," Delechat said.
"It is a turning point for Haiti and it is up to the government to use the opportunity well. "The security situation is much improved and it is a land of opportunity if you're an entrepreneur and an investor,"
she added. "It is a golden moment for Haiti to start investing in export capacity, particularly in textiles," Delechat said. (Reuters,
7/1)
Six People Dead From Southeastern Ferry Capsizing:
Six people died when a boat capsized off the coast of Haiti yesterday
- and dozens more were missing, authorities said. Sixteen passengers were rescued from the vessel, which had as many as 60 people onboard when it overturned en route from Anse a Pitre, near the Dominican border, to the southern peninsula city of Jacmel. "Six bodies have been recovered," said Alta Jean-Baptiste, director of Haiti's civil protection agency. Rescuers were frantically searching for more survivors and had requested local fishermen help them scan the seas.
The cause of the accident was unknown and it's unclear what kind of boat was involved. (AP, 7/11)
Haitian Police Say Demonstrator Was Killed by Bullet During Clash with
UN:
Haitian police say a demonstrator found slain after a clash with U.N.
peacekeepers during a funeral procession was killed by a bullet, and not by a rock as peacekeepers initially reported. But the police inspector who shared details of the autopsy report on Monday said ballistics tests are needed to determine who fired the fatal shot. The inspector who viewed the autopsy report spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the autopsy. He did not offer any additional details. Opponents of the 9,000-member U.N.
force are using the death to inflame passions against international troops stationed in Haiti since 2004.
The demonstrator, who remains unidentified, was killed June 18 as about 2,000 people marched with the casket of the Rev. Gerard Jean- Juste, an advocate for the poor who died in May after years of health problems. He was closely allied with ousted former President Jean- Bertrand Aristide. At least five Brazilian soldiers with the 9,000- member U.N. peacekeeping mission entered the back of the procession near Port-au-Prince's Notre Dame cathedral on foot to arrest a marcher, who was later released. Other demonstrators threw rocks at the soldiers, who responded by firing at least eight shots into the air before leaving in a jeep.
U.N. peacekeeping spokeswoman Sophie Boutaud de la Combe said Monday that the Brazilian soldiers had some weapons loaded with rubber bullets and others with 7.62-milimeter caliber live ammunition. In television footage of the clash at least eight shots can be heard. It is not clear if all were fired by the soldiers. No one else is seen holding a firearm. "We are confident that the autopsy reconfirmed that our troops were not responsible for this death," Boutaud de la Combe said. She noted that preliminary information that the protester had been killed by a rock or other blunt instrument were incorrect. Both the death and the clash that preceded it have only added to growing tension surrounding the U.N. troops. The day before the funeral other protesters also calling for their departure burned a U.N. police vehicle, one of a series of anti-U.N. demonstrations this year. The U.N. and other diplomats have defended the soldiers' decision to enter the funeral procession on the belief that they were arresting a wanted criminal. (AP, 6/29)
Haiti has found success in its fight against AIDS:
When Micheline Leon was diagnosed with HIV, her parents told her they would fit her for a coffin. Fifteen years later, she walks around her two-room concrete house on Haiti's central plateau, watching her four children play under the plantain trees. She looks healthy, her belly amply filling a gray, secondhand T-shirt. Her three sons and one daughter were born after she was diagnosed. None has the virus. "I'm not sick," she explained patiently on a recent afternoon. "People call me sick but I'm not. I'm infected."In many ways the 35-year-old mother's story is Haiti's too. In the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up in the U.S. among migrants who had escaped Haiti's dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country's population.
Instead, Haiti's HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted. In a wide range of interviews with doctors, patients, public health experts and others, The Associated Press found that Haiti's success in the face of chronic political and social turmoil came because organizations cooperated and tailored programs to the country's specific challenges. Much of the credit went to two pioneering nonprofit groups, Boston-based Partners in Health and Port- au-Prince's GHESKIO, widely considered to be the world's oldest AIDS clinic. "The Haitian AIDS community feels like they're out in front of everyone else on this, and pretty much they are," said Judith Timyan, senior HIV/AIDS adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Haiti. "They really do some of the best work in the world." Researchers say the number of suffers was initially lessened by closing private blood banks, and statistically by high mortality rates ? an untreated AIDS sufferer in Haiti lives eight fewer years than an untreated American.
Well-coordinated use of AIDS drugs, education and behavioral changes such as increased condom use have kept the disease from surging back, at least for now. Statistics are notoriously unreliable in this country of poverty and lack of infrastructure. The most telling data would be the number of new infections in a given year, but researchers say such a precise count is impossible. Next best is to estimate the infected as a percentage of the population. From 1993 to 2003, only pregnant women were tested, and their rate of infection dropped from
6.2 percent to 3.1 percent, according to GHESKIO and national health surveys. Researchers now test men and women aged 15 to 49, and the official rate is 2.2 percent, according to UNAIDS. That's still far higher than in the developed world, but it's lower than the Bahamas, Guyana and Suriname, and much lower than sub-Saharan Africa, where the rate averages about 5 percent but spikes to 24 percent in Botswana and
33 percent in Swaziland.
But the crisis is far from over. In the Artibonite Valley, where Boston-based Partners in Health is just now setting up two clinics, the estimated infection rate is 4.5 percent. Some in these remote regions still look for care from Voodoo priests, who ask for large sums of money or goods and use treatments doctors say can be poisonous. Thanks in large part to UNAIDS, which awarded Haiti its first grant in 2002, and $420 million from the U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, an estimated 18,000 people are on AIDS drugs, most of them administered free through GHESKIO and PIH. That population represents 40 percent of those whose white blood cell count is low enough for them to need the drugs. It is a high percentage for the developing world, but still fails to help many too remote to reach medical care or those at for-pay public clinics.
Still, Haiti has been sufficiently ahead in prevention, diagnosis and treatment for some of its programs to serve as models for PEPFAR, the program launched by President George W. Bush in 2003 and praised for its work in Africa. GHESKIO co-founder Dr. Jean W. Pape was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his work, and PIH's Paul Farmer was recently named chairman of Harvard Medical School's global health department. In May, Haiti was honored as the host of the opening ceremony of the 2009 International AIDS Candlelight Memorial. In a country suffering from political upheaval and natural disasters, where three-quarters of the people can neither afford nor access private clinics or fee-based public hospitals, few could have imagined at the dawn of the AIDS crisis how far Haiti would come. (AP, 7/5)
Clinton Points to Lack of Cooperation as Hindering Help for Haiti:
Former US President Bill Clinton said on Wednesday a lack of cooperation between Haitian politicians, aid groups and business leaders was hurting efforts to help the impoverished Caribbean nation.
Clinton, on his first visit since being named UN special envoy to Haiti, said he was optimistic about its future but surprised by the continuing divide between the private and public sectors and the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in Haiti. "The most surprising thing to me ... is how little the investor community, all the elements of the government, including the legislative branch and the NGO community seem to have taught and absorbed each others'
lessons," Clinton told reporters at the end of a two-day fact-finding mission. The poorest country in the Americas, Haiti has struggled to establish democratic institutions and a stable investment climate following decades of dictatorship and military rule. Most of its 9 million people live on less than $2 a day.
But the appointment of Clinton by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in May, hundreds of millions of dollars in recent donor pledges and the granting of $1.2 billion in debt relief by the World Bank, IMF and other creditors this month has raised hopes in Haiti. The Paris Club of sovereign creditors said on Wednesday it had decided to cancel
$62.73 million of Haiti's debt and committed to canceling an additional $152 million. Clinton met on Wednesday with business leaders, heads of the executive and legislative branches of the government and NGOs and civil society groups, after a tour on Tuesday of the mud-stained city of Gonaives, where floods last year killed hundreds of people. He promised to do all he can to collect the money Haiti needs to address some of its crucial infrastructure, education and healthcare problems but urged Haitians to solve their internal differences. "If it is a question of money that's my problem, but if it is not about money, that's something Haitians need to resolve among themselves," he said. "That's a little surprising to me. But everybody
is eager to do it." (Reuters, 7/9)
Bill Clinton on Tuesday took his Haiti relief effort to this battered seaside city that was nearly destroyed last year by tropical storms, finding a mud-caked maze of partially rebuilt homes and shops.
Clinton, the new special U.N. envoy to Haiti, visited a hospital and school in Gonaives that served as emergency shelters during the four tropical storms, which killed nearly 800 people and caused $1 billion in damage to irrigation, bridges and roads. The former president praised reconstruction efforts but said much more needs to be done. He said Haiti needs more money and better coordination among aid groups and the government to rebuild and spur development. 'I'm just trying to organize this process and drive it faster,' Clinton said during a break in the tour along the city's craggy roads.
Aid has poured into the Gonaives region but many homes and shops remain damaged, and the area remains vulnerable to flooding because the surrounding hills have been stripped of trees to produce charcoal.
It was Clinton's first trip to Gonaives, but he was greeted like a returning hero. Shrieking girls clamored to have their photo taken with the former president; men pushed their elderly mothers through the crowd for a chance to shake his hand. Haitians stood on piles of rubble to catch a glimpse of Clinton's motorcade as it wove through the rocky streets of Gonaives, one of the poorest cities in a chronically troubled country considered the poorest in the Western Hemisphere. Clinton, who came to Gonaives with Haitian President Ren?
Pr?val, said the Haitian government and its international backers hope to create 150,000 to 200,000 jobs nationwide over the next two years.
Many of those jobs will come from projects to rebuild roads and shore up erosion-prone hillsides. 'It will be hard, but I think it's important,' Clinton said of his mission later after returning to the capital, Port-au-Prince. (AP, 7/8)
UN appeal for Haiti has failed to raise sufficient funds to rehabilitate the hurricane-hit agriculture sector:
Following the devastating series of hurricanes that hit Haiti in August and September 2008, the UN issued an emergency flash appeal. In November the advocacy platform composed of British development agencies and solidarity organizations wrote to the United Nations to express its concern about the poor international response to the appeal, and in particular to the very poor response to the part of the flash appeal concerning the rehabilitation of Haiti's vital agricultural sector. (http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/VDUX-7LLSQ8?OpenDocument
). At that time, only US$828,000 - just 8% of the allocation of US $10.5m requested to help the agricultural sector by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had been raised.
By the end of January 2009 - by which time the appeal had been reissued and the amount requested for agriculture had been increased to U$11..5m - the amount donated to the agriculture section had increased US$1,450,610 (13% of the total requested). -http://www.haitisupport.gn.apc.org/FlashAppealUpdate.html
Now, according to the UN's OCHA, as of 8 July 2009 a total of US $4.42m had been donated for agriculture - 38% of the total requested.
While this amount is not insignificant, the Haiti Support Group is disturbed that two of the four programmes that the FAO wants to implement in response to the hurricane damage to the agricultural sector have hardly received any financial support.
As part of the flash appeal the FAO had requested US$2m to for a programme entitled, 'Rehabilitation of the irrigation network in the main areas affected by the natural disasters in 2008'. By July 2009, only US$201,393 or 10% of the total had been donated (by Canada). A second FAO programme entitled, 'Fertility restoration of arable lands and erosion control" requires US$1.5m but by July 2009 only US$255,775 or 17% of the total had been donated (by the European Commission). In light of such a pathetic response, and with presumably no further donations in the offing, the Haiti Support Group can only repeat this conclusion - The fact that the response to the agriculture section of the UN flash appeal has been so disappointing suggests that once again that the international aid machine remains wedded to the short-term and has scant regard for lasting solutions to Haiti's problems. (Haiti Support Group, 7/8)
Haiti Support Group on Haiti Debt Cancellation:
Like when a wrongly-convicted prisoner is released after years of incarceration, there can only be mixed feelings about yesterday's announcement of the cancellation of US$1.2 billion of Haiti's US$1.9 billion debt. Yes, it is good news that over 60% of Haiti's debt has been cancelled under the terms of the HIPC. But, on the other hand, it is a scandal that it took so long for the international finance institutions (IFIs) to take this step. Just think what could have been done with the money wasted on debt repayments over the last years?
Part of the debt that has now been cancelled was composed of loans made to the Duvalier regimes in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. These loans were never used to develop the country and much of the amount was stolen by the Duvaliers and their clique. It remains an outrage that the Haitian people had to continue paying interest on these amounts until June 2009!
The HIPC debt cancellation announced by the IMF and World Bank is good news indeed, but what about those wasted years when the debt was being repaid and Haiti's economy went from bad to worse?
The debt cancellation means that the US$1m per week that the Haitian people have until now been paying to service the debt can instead be used for other purposes. The HSG would hope that this would mean more state support for national production for national consumption.
However all the indications are that - under heavy pressure from the IFIs - the Haitian government will instead pursue a development strategy based on the deeply-flawed garment assembly export sector.
Without ever providing a convincing argument, the IFIs have been pushing for decades for this sector to be the motor of Haiti's economic development. Despite the fact that this sector exists in a virtual vacuum with only minimal impact on the wider Haitian economy, only a few months ago UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and British economist Paul Collier made yet another proposal for international aid to fund garment assembly production in new Free Trade Zones.
Indeed, Corinne Delechat, IMF mission chief for Haiti, commenting on the debt cancellation, told Reuters that Haiti is a 'land of opportunity if you're an entrepreneur and an investor," adding, "It is a golden moment for Haiti to start investing in export capacity, particularly in textiles." It looks like the IFIs' interventions will result in the HIPC debt cancellation being a matter of Haiti taking one step forward, while their focus on garment assembly for export will take the country two steps back. (Haiti Support Group press release - 2 July 2009)
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