It is an exercise in futility to go to the perpetrators and executioners of
human rights crimes in Haiti in hopes of getting justice for our people.–Ezili Dantò of HLLN, Haiti: Jan 1, 2013: Another Independence Day Under Occupation

For whose entertainment shall we sing our agony? To the destroyers, aspiring to extinguish us, reveling in their own fantastic success? The last imbecile to dream such dreams is dead, killed by the saviors of his dreams.” –Ezili Dantò of HLLN, Haiti: Jan 1, 2013: Another Independence Day Under Occupation

Stop NGO pillage of Haiti – London Protest, May 1, 2012. Women of Colour and Global Women’s Strike campaigners gathered outside the British Red Cross in the capital in solidarity with the people of Haiti. See, Haiti by the Numbers, Three Years Later

HLLN open letter regarding “Haiti Among the Safest Destinations in the Americas”

Dear Mr. Jean Pierre
(press@primature.ht)

Re: “Haiti Among the Safest Destinations in the Americas”

In article titled “Haiti Among the Safest Destinations in the Americas, you wrote that:

“In 2012 according to the UNODC, Haiti’s violent death rate of 6.9 out of every hundred thousand Haitians is among the lowest rates in the Americas, and the same as Long Beach, California. This is mainly attributable to a strong focus on the strengthening and modernization of its security forces.”

Ezili Dantò of HLLN, 2010: 14-Points for Rebuilding with Human Rights, Healing and Dignity

“Though Haiti violence towards foreigners is rare, foreign excruciating and harrowing violence towards Haiti is practically and historically the norm”

You write that “While the rest of the region experiences difficulty in
containing violent crime rates, Haiti shows positive trends largely as a result of the strengthening of the Haitian National Police, the incorporation of human resources and new technologies into its anti-crime strategies, and, the establishment of a welcoming political and economic climate.”

As a pro-democracy, anti-US occupation Haiti advocacy organization we take the time to point out that Haiti has one of the lowest rates of violence in the Americas because the Haiti masses have always been a naturally peaceful people who endure senseless oppression and state sponsored violence.

The comparably lower rate of violence in Haiti is NOT because of the US occupation behind UN front, nor because of the disenfranchising political and economic climate for the masses that’s welcoming for the foreigner, nor the US/Euro training of the coup d’etat security forces in Haiti. On the contrary, there was even less violence in Haiti according to international sources BEFORE the 2004 bicentennial occupation when Haiti only had about 3000 police in its National Police Force.

The disenfranchising of Haiti’s peoples since 2004 and the US occupation behind the UN front, the impunity of the paramilitary coup d’etat death squads, the repeal of basic rights under the revised constitution along with the organize Ninja and foreign troop kidnapping sprees, increased the instability, crime and violence of a naturally peaceful Haiti.

Since the February 29, 2004 regime change by US special forces with the complicity of Canada and French military forces and its attendant further local militarization of Haiti, the violence rate in Haiti, though still the lowest in the Western Hemisphere fluctuates towards increased organized violence, more foreign pollution, more foreign environmental devastation, more Clorox hunger, and the UN-imported cholera deaths, foreigner and charity workers’ molesting Haiti women and children has significantly increased.

Though the UNODC doesn’t note the pedophilia increases, the poisoning/ pollution deaths in Haiti since the occupation, it does show, as you mention, the murder rate today is 6.9 per 100,000. But we encourage you to note that back in 2007, the UNODC reported the violence rate in Haiti at 5.6 homicide per 100,000. (See HLLN coverage from 2007 at: Pointing Guns at Starving Haitians: Violent Haiti is a myth and Comparing crime, poverty and violence in the rest of the Hemisphere to Haiti.)

Nonetheless, HLLN does wish to take this moment to congratulate the Haitian police for its many positive efforts to protect the disenfranchized public, including its work that helped take down Douglas Perlitz, the American charity worker molesting Haiti boys at an orphanage in Cap Haitian, the national police taking down the largest kidnapping ring – part of the Haiti oligarch – kidnapping ring in the country and paving the way for a stop to the racists penchant that criminalizes the poor in Haiti for political purposes.

We wish to also congratulate and encourage the Haiti official and his police team who designed and used the advanced software that helped to track the Brandt kidnapping ring. We are confident such initiatives will help Haiti free itself from the international complicity that is founded on the lie that Haitians are not competent to govern themselves without foreign advisers.

Finally, though the facts don’t bare out your assertions as to the reasons why Haiti is one of the safest destinations in the Americas, we agree with you sir that “Haiti is one of the safest destinations; not just in the Caribbean, but throughout all the Americas…Haitian citizens are generally more concerned with economic issues such as the cost of living, than with crime. The notice issued by the U.S. State Department warning US citizens about the persistent danger of violent crime does not take into account .. kidnapping and murder of U.S. citizens is extremely rare in.. Haiti.”

But, for the suffering masses, HLLN also herein notes that though Haiti violence towards foreigners is rare, foreign excruciating and harrowing violence towards Haiti is practically and historically the norm.

Stop building luxury hotels with money meant for homeless people! – London Protest, May 1, 2012

Today, the organized violence of the US, UN, Canada, France and their foreign MINUSTAH troops and of the money laundering international NGOs in Haiti is not rare. Since the earthquake, $7.5 billion in so-called aid to Haiti, which is actually aid to the NGOs and the US-Euro elites, has basically left no meaningful footprint, exacerbating Haiti misery, grief and sustainable development. Yet, the US and Canada rush to put out special advisories against travel to Haiti when Haiti has less violence than the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Brazil, Bahamas and parts of the US. Canada announces “freezing aid” as if its money transfers to its NGOs

US/UN false benevolence and the NGO pillage in Haiti

was actually aid to Haiti. These combined actions by Canada and the US, just days before the 3rd anniversary of the earthquake seems to be nothing less than attempts to deflect from the failure of their intervention in Haiti and a racist attempt to turn public scrutiny on the “violent, corrupt and incompetent Haitians unable to absorb the beautiful Westerners’ aid and godly benevolence.” These sorts of international violence and stark racism, including the kidnapping and trafficking of our defenseless children by foreigners, the cholera deaths, and open pit mining in an already environmentally devastated Haiti, all evidences the genocidal rampage of the anti-democratic, US/Canada/France/OAS/UN policy orchestrators for Haiti.

Ezili Dantò
President, Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN)
January 6, 2013
For Haiti: Bouquet of Tears & Light
Foreign violence against Haiti is the norm. Haiti struggles on, paying an untenable price, lighting a path for justice with its soul intact.
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Watch: Al Jazeera video: Interview on UN repackaging its fictitious, non-existent cholera aid to Haiti

“..Haitians and those still blind or in denial and who are participating in the International crime and travesty going on in Haiti right now are urged to recall the Ottawa Initiative .

What is the Ottawa Initiative? Why is there a UN, Chapter 7 peace enforcement mission in Haiti for 8 years? A country not at war, without a peace agreement to enforce and with less violence than most countries in the Western Hemisphere? (See the UN’s own Global Study on Homicide at page 93).

What is the Ottawa Initiative? In 2002, high level Western officials secretly got together in Ottawa, Canada and made plans for Haiti because Haiti with popular democracy was a “threat to North American countries. “The expressed and reported concern was that “Haiti might have, by some estimates, a population of 20 million by 2019…It is a time bomb, the high level Canadian diplomat said, ‘which must be defused immediately.’” (The Ottawa Initiative; and Transcending the 2002 Ottawa Initiative.) Go to – Haiti: A time bomb which must be defused immediately

Ottawa, Canada took the Initiative to murder Haiti democracy in 2004, force back dictatorship behind sham elections that would serve Canada and US open pit mining plans . Today, days before the 3rd anniversary of the earthquake, with its international crimes revealed, its false benevolence and aid money laundering starkly exposed, Canada attempts to distract from its brutal crimes by freezing “aid?” to the Haiti puppet government it set up to serve its US-Euro corporatocracy greed while disenfranchizing the population. (Ezili Dantò – Haiti violence towards foreigners is rare, foreign violence against Haiti is practically and historically the norm. See, Haiti: A time bomb which must be defused immediately ,  Corruption uninterrupted and the The Plantation Called Haiti: Feudal Pillage Masking as Humanitarian Aid.)

*

“We are the Haitians – from the womb to the tomb our lives is about struggle – n ap lite – against Western oppression and re-colonization. Nou La! – We are here! Still. After two centuries of struggle. No force has taken us down, none shall.” –Ezili’s HLLN

Ezili Dantò Vodun Remembrance

To Honor Quake Victims

Ezili Dantò rememberances for the quake victims, Feb. 2010

“Over 300,000 Haitians gone in 33 seconds at 4:53 on the 12th of January. Pour libation. Beat the drums, beat the drums. Louder please. Louder for those alive and living under sheets, tarps, tents and old cardboard. Suffering still. Endlessly before January 12th. Unimaginably after. Our blood and suffering waters the Haitian soil, 517-years still…Never felt so much pain…Si kriye te leve lanmò, manman nou tout t ap la – If crying could raise the dead, every mother would still be alive...Jete dlo, jete dlo, jete dlo. Into the Ancestors’ hands we place all our souls… Legba ouvri baryè a pou nou. Pitit Ginen, the next part is left to us. Gade byen wa wè. Nou la. Zanset yo e Timoun yo vini. Our love is stronger and survives every energy transformation. We Are The Haitians. Nou fè yon sèl kò.” – Ezili Dantò of HLLN, February 2010

“Haiti has been a reflection of Euro/US inhumanity towards the poor and African since their “New World” and updated feudal social order began. It’s still an international crime scene hidden behind false benevolence, false brotherhood, false charity, false aid. Those billed as the “do-gooders” are about initiating or exacerbating catastrophe then capitalizing on catastrophe. That’s the profitable, parasitic formula. The privately-owned relief groups, the UN and US/Euro military, they’re mostly protecting the Montana Hotel and the like, tourism, resource extraction monopolies and other profitable industries, not the human rights of the majority to shelter, medicine, food, water, justice, inclusion, dignity and living-wage jobs. Duplicity and hypocrisy is hard to absorb, especially as the media coverage mostly trumpets, ad nausea, the private world relief organizations’, large NGOs and UN/US policymakers’ “good intentions” in Haiti in comparison, that is, to Haiti’s always corrupt and presumably evil-intended governments. Don’t take the path of least resistance. Mare vent nou byen rèd – face the evil, the malice and bottomless avarice directly my people. No matter how hard it is to absorb, how disemboweling, how marginalizing, how unpopular, how science-fiction it is to believe. Believe it. The paradoxical is yours to use. Ginen poze. No one can give you what’s yours naturally. Only a Haiti-led force shall mobilize the people-to-people international tsunami torrents to lift up the ugly colonial truth and sweep away Haiti’s containment-in-poverty, dependency, debt and domination.” –Ezili Dantò Vodun Remembrance  To Honor Quake Victims and The Plantation Called Haiti: Feudal Pillage Masking as Humanitarian Aid.

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Judge Arterton, a US District Court judge that sentenced US charity worker Douglas Perlitz for molesting homeless Haiti boys nightly for the 10-years he was in Haiti running an orphanage to “help” put it this way: “If one digs a well to supply water to those who have never had water, and then that person poisons the water, was building that well a good deed?”

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“An analysis of all that money — at least $7.5 billion disbursed so far…chief accomplishment is to have finally cleared away most of the rubble…no permanent footprint… only a portion went to earthquake reconstruction..much of the so-called recovery aid was devoted to costly current programs, like highway building, H.I.V. prevention, and to projects far outside the disaster zone, like an industrial park in the north and a teaching hospital in the central plateau. Meanwhile, just a sliver of the total disbursement — $215 million — has been allocated to the most obvious and pressing need: safe, permanent housing… Bill Clinton …“build back better” mantra … came to be undercut by the enormousness of the task, the weakness and volatility of the Haitian government, the continuation of aid business as usual and the limited effectiveness of the now-defunct recovery commission that had Mr. Clinton as co-chairman. ” —Rebuilding in Haiti Lags After Billions in Post-Quake Aid  http://nyti.ms/U5Zco1

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” — Lily Watson

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MORE BACKGROUND INFORMATION
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‘Most everything went wrong’: Three years after an earthquake devastated Haiti, the reconstruction has barely begun

How the International Community Failed Haiti, Jan 7, 2013
Hundreds of Thousands Homeless in Haiti Three Years After the Earthquake Despite Billions in Aid Funneled to NGOs, Contractors and Internationals

Haitians won’t play Baseball in the time of cholera

“Stop NGO pillage of Haiti” – protest, London

Read HLLN legal position on filing a UN cholera lawsuit — do a find for “HLLN legal position”

Haiti Still waiting for recovery http://econ.st/VzuSDv

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Haiti Among the Safest Destinations in the Americas

Haiti Prime Minister: Country is safe

By Jacqueline Charles, Miami Herald, Mon, Jan. 07, 2013

Collin Reid / AP file

Julian Fantino

Haiti’s Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe is pushing back at suggestions that his nation is unsafe.“We would like to reassure the tourists, the diaspora, people who want to visit….Haiti is one of the safest destinations that they could visit,” Lamothe said Monday at a press conference in Port-au-Prince, quoting U.N. crime statistics.

The latest figures from U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime show that in 2010 Haiti had a recorded murder rate of 6.9 for every 100,000 persons. The rate is close to one-quarter that of Jamaica and less than half of the neighboring Dominican Republic. Still, U.N. officials note that statistics are always subject to “under-reporting and under-recording.”

Lamothe’s declaration comes after the United States issued a strongly-worded travel warning and Canada modified its advisory. Last week, Canada further irked Haitian officials after new International Co-operation Minister Julian Fantino was quoted in a Montreal newspaper as saying that future aid had been put “on ice” because Ottawa wasn’t satisfied with the pace of progress.

“We are not getting the results that Canadians have a right to expect,” said Fantino, who visited Haiti in November where he met with President Michel Martelly.

Lamothe did not address Fantino’s comments, but Haitian officials have said that all Canadian aid goes to non-governmental organizations, not the Haitian government. The warnings come as the country prepares to mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 12, 2012 earthquake.

A spokesperson for the Canadian International Development Agency, which Fantino heads, said previously committed projects remain unchanged. Still, Canada continues to be concerned “with the slow progress of development in Haiti due to its weak governing institutions and corruption.”

“Canada is reviewing long-term engagement strategy with Haiti to maximize Canadian taxpayer dollars to improve the results achieved and better address the needs and priorities of the Haitian people,” the spokesperson said.

Fantino’s statements have raised concerns about whether other donors would also follow suit.

“The U.S. government is NOT going to stop aid to Haiti and has no intention to slow down assistance,” an official with the U.S. Agency for International Development said in an email. The United States is the largest of Haiti’s donors.

But just days after Christmas, the U.S. government made its own headlines when it warned against travel to Haiti.

A U.S. State Department official told The Miami Herald that protecting U.S. citizens overseas is one of the U.S. government’s highest priorities and that travel warnings “do not reflect the nature of our bilateral relations with a country.”

The travel advisory warned that travelers arriving from the U.S. “were attacked and robbed shortly after departing the airport,” and at least two U.S. citizens were shot and killed in robbery and kidnapping incidents in 2012.

“U.S. citizens have been victims of violent crime, including murder and kidnapping, predominantly in the Port-au-Prince area. No one is safe from kidnapping, regardless of occupation, nationality, race, gender, or age.”

On Jan. 2, Canada updated its Haiti travel advisory, saying Canadians “should exercise a high degree of caution due to high crime rates,” especially in certain slum neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. However, a spokeswoman for Canada’s Foreign Affairs and International Trade Office said that “Canada has not revised its travel report to any significant degree.”

Haiti observers accuse the U.S. and Canada of sending mixed messages. In October, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, visited the country to inaugurate the Caracol Industrial Park that is touted as evidence of the international community’s commitment to rebuilding Haiti.

U.S. Ambassador Pamela White also has publicly lauded Haiti’s progress.

“Both Clintons went to Caracol and hailed the thing as the ‘New Haiti,’ ” said Robert Fatton, a Haiti expert and professor of political science at the University of Virginia. “The secretary of state says, ‘Go to Haiti,’ and they present it to us as the ‘Great breakthrough’ that will change the country and then two months after, you have a warning that you shouldn’t go to Haiti? If you tell tourists they shouldn’t go, why would businessmen go to Haiti?”

“I don’t understand what is the policy of the international community vis-a-vis Haiti,” said Fatton. “I don’t think they know what to do with the country. They are kind of reckless with Haiti.”

Albert Ramdin, assistant secretary general for the Organization of American States, said “generally when we look at the whole hemisphere, the security situation in Haiti is far less than in other countries.

“We have to be careful that by taking certain action we are not becoming counterproductive to what we want to achieve,’’ he said. “Haiti needs tourists, Haiti needs investors and anything that can limit or become a deterrent is going to be a negative.”

Ramdin said members of the international community also need to reevaluate their own efforts to help Haiti, which also must do its part.

“I have found a lack of willingness on the part of the international community to coordinate better in Haiti because everybody wants to plant their flags. They want to be recognized,” Ramdin said. “Haiti’s government, despite its goodwill, has been distracted by domestic issues and also by financial disaster.”

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Haitian officials say U.S. travel advisory unwarranted

(Reuters) – A recent advisory by the Obama administration warning that Americans were victims of murder and kidnappings in Haiti could unfairly hurt efforts to get the earthquake-crippled nation back on its feet, Haiti’s government officials said on Monday.

“Haiti is one of the safest destinations, not only in the Caribbean, but in all of Latin America,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe said in a press conference, flanked by several other cabinet members.

The State Department advisory issued on December 28 said: “U.S. citizens have been victims of violent crime, including murder and kidnapping, predominantly in the Port-au-Prince area. No one is safe from kidnapping, regardless of occupation, nationality, race, gender or age.”

This stern warning came at a time when violent crime for the year, especially murder and kidnapping, had in fact begun to decline, Haitian officials said.

The most violent month in Haiti last year was July, when 136 murders were reported by the Haitian National Police. That number sharply declined in the following months. The highest number of kidnappings for 2012 came in October, with 21 reported cases, but it fell to only 9 cases in December.

The U.S. State Department travel advisory undermined Haiti’s attempts to rebuild its tourism industry and lure foreign investment in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake that decimated the capital city, Lamothe complained.

“With the meager resources that the state has, we’re investing in tourism,” he said, suggesting that Haiti had been unfairly singled out by the Obama administration. “Other countries have problems, too,” he said.

Though it has long endured a reputation as a dangerous, lawless place, Haiti is in fact safer than its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, in terms of homicide. Haiti’s murder rate in 2011 of 6.9 per 100,000 residents was dwarfed by that of neighboring Dominican Republic, which had a rate of 24.9 for the same period. Jamaica had a murder rate of 40.9 for 2011.

Arnaldo Arbesu, a spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, said that the State Department’s travel warning was not meant to discourage visitors and was part of a periodic series of updates.

“We do want people to come, but it’s the Embassy’s job to tell people to take precautions,” said Arbesu.

In a statement issued last week, the U.S. Embassy noted that crime rates had fallen over the course of the year, and that “the government is on the right track and serious about addressing these issues,” he noted.

Haiti does have the highest number of kidnappings in the region. Some 162 cases of kidnapping were reported in 2012, three fewer than the previous year, according to Haiti’s police.

This past December, which usually sees a heightened number of abduction cases, only nine kidnappings were reported. When kidnapping was at its peak in 2005, more than 240 cases were reported that December alone.

Members of the Haitian diaspora, including those with American citizenship, have been targeted in the past by kidnappers. At least eight foreign nationals were briefly taken in a series of abductions in mid-2012, but no further abductions of foreign nationals have been reported since then.

Canada’s ambassador to Haiti, Henri-Paul Normandin, dismissed rumors on Monday that his embassy had upped their warning to travelers as well.

“We haven’t substantially changed our advisory in several months,” Normandin said on a leading Haitian radio station.

(Editing by David Adams and Lisa Shumaker)

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‘Most everything went wrong’: Three years after an earthquake devastated Haiti, the reconstruction has barely begun

New York Times, National Post Wire Services | Dec 28, 2012 11:19 PM ET | Last Updated: Dec 29, 2012,  Source: National Post Services

DISBURSED SO FAR

At least $7.5-billion in aid has been disbursed. More than half has gone to relief aid, which saves lives and alleviates misery, but carries high costs and has no permanent effect — tents shred; emergency food and water are consumed; short-term jobs expire; transitional shelters, clinics and schools are not built to last. Only a portion went to earthquake reconstruction strictly defined. Instead, much of the recovery aid was spent on costly programs, like new highways and HIV prevention, and projects far from the disaster zone, like an industrial park in the north and a teaching hospital in the central plateau. Meanwhile, just a sliver of the total disbursement — $215-million — has been allocated to the most obvious and pressing need: safe, permanent housing. “Housing is difficult and messy, and donors have shied away from it,” said Josef Leitmann, manager of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund (HRF).

DISBURSED, BUT NOT SPENT

Disbursed does not necessarily meant spent. Sometimes, the money has simply been shifted from one bank account to another as projects have bogged down. That is the case for nearly half the money for housing. The U.S., for instance, long ago disbursed $65-million to the HRF for the largest housing project planned for Port-au-Prince. The fund, which issued a January 2011 news release promising houses for 50,000 people, transferred the money to the World Bank, which is executing the project. And there almost all of it still sits, with contracts just signed. The U.S. still has more than $1-billion allocated for Haiti sitting in the Treasury, and the global Red Cross movement has more than $500-million. Spain has disbursed $100-million to Haiti’s water authority for infrastructure desperately needed during the continuing cholera epidemic, but only $15-million has been spent so far. Millions have been allocated to build and renovate 21 schools, but only one has been completed.

ADMIN COSTS

Almost all contracts have been awarded to foreign agencies, nonprofit groups and private contractors who, in turn, subcontract. Each layer adds 7% to 10% in administrative costs, says a paper by the Center for Global Development. “All the money that went to pay the salaries of foreigners and to rent expensive apartments and cars for foreigners while the situation of the country was degrading — there was something revolting about it,” Ms. Pierre Louis said. In a sentiment many Haitians share, Reginald Boulos, who runs a car dealership in the capital, said foreigners in Haiti “do everything at a cost five times higher.” Oxfam spent $96-million over two years, and devoted a third to management and logistics. Doctors Without Borders spent 58% of its $135-million in 2010 on staff and transportation.

BUILDING FLAWS

More than two years ago, Hillary Clinton, the U.S. Secretary of State, and Bernard Kouchner, the then-French foreign minister, signed an agreement to reconstruct Haiti’s largest medical centre in the capital. The shattered General Hospital, with some temporary renovations keeping it functional, still awaits its $70-million overhaul. Meanwhile, Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) is spearheading a multi-year school rebuilding program being carried out by a Haitian public institution. The bank was hoping up to 21 new schools would open this fall. But a bank inspection last spring detected serious design flaws and construction errors. A fuller audit found the schools, despite being built after the earthquake, did not comply with anti-seismic or anti-hurricane standards. How much beyond the $15.4-million cost it will take to make them safe has yet to be determined, said Pablo Bachelet, a bank spokesman.

FOREIGNERS TAKE OVER

In the months after the earthquake, foreigners, arriving by the planeload, took over. They did not mean to; nobody in the humanitarian world wanted to sharpen Haiti’s dependency on foreign help. But Haiti’s government was as shattered as its people, and old patterns of interaction are hard to break. Co-ordinating the disaster response, foreign humanitarians met on the isolated, gated United Nations logistics base and divided into clusters dealing with issues like shelter and health. Something was missing, though: “In the initial confusion and loss of life after the earthquake, the clusters effectively excluded their Haitian counterparts,” said Nigel Fisher, the UN’s humanitarian co-ordinator. “Little by little, we brought them in.” Still, many locals never shook off the feeling they were an afterthought and their institutions and businesses were being bypassed and undermined. Many of the best-educated Haitians were lured away from government and private-sector jobs by higher salaries offered by foreigners. “We called it the second earthquake,” said Jean-Yves Jason, mayor of Port-au-Prince at the time.

THE OLD IDEALS

Idealistic discussions were not just about building back better. Former president René Préval wanted to use the initial exodus to the countryside to decongest Port-au-Prince permanently. Decentralization became the second mantra, guiding early commitments to spend significant reconstruction money outside the disaster zone. “There were all sorts of fantasies about shutting down the mess that is Port-au-Prince before people started to understand that there is a huge amount of capital built up in the city and, chaotic as it is, you don’t throw it out,” said Mr. Leitmann. The largest new settlement under construction is a $48-million Haitian government initiative on a barren, isolated site 16 kilometres east of Port-au-Prince in Morne à Cabri. Ms. Pierre-Louis says the houses look like “little tombs in the desert.” Critics also questioned the location of the U.S.-subsidized settlement in rural Caracol, far from the disaster, as well as the high cost of its one-bedroom homes. They are being built by a Minnesota company on a site prepared by a Maryland firm for $31,400 a house. A small one-family house in Port-au-Prince can be built for $6,000. Although the Caracol houses were supposed to be occupied by December, only 70 of 750 had been finished by November because of bad weather and logistical problems.

A NEW PRAGMATISM

New president Michel Martelly won international help to close six highly visible tent camps, repair 16 neighbourhoods and shut down the Champ de Mars settlement in downtown Port-au-Prince. Some Haitians felt he was trying to sweep the homelessness problem from view without resolving it — the neighbourhood repairs have lagged the camp closings . Others expressed relief he was taking action because a temporary solution was better than none at all. From the start, grand ambition had got in the way of tackling what was doable. “Early on, it seemed fairly clear that the only viable approach was to rebuild existing neighbourhoods,” said Priscilla Phelps, a U.S. consultant who advised the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) on housing. “But it took six to eight months to get the government used to that, and another four to six months to make the donors comfortable. Nobody wanted to think reconstruction might be a giant slum-upgrading project. They wanted little pastel houses and kids with ribbons in their hair to put on the cover of their annual report.” Mr. Boulos said, “I told the head of the American Red Cross, in front of Bill Clinton, ‘Let’s put the entire money in housing construction. Let’s repair the houses.’ But they had all kinds of reasons why not.”

BILL CLINTON STEPS IN

In April 2010, Mr. Clinton was named co-president of the IHRC. Two months later, at a luxury hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince, the commission had its first meeting. It would hold only six more, though, before the Haitian Parliament declined to renew its mandate and it faded into history, its website decommissioned and its public records erased. “As a tool for Bill Clinton, the commission was good; it helped him attract attention to Haiti,” said Mr. Boulos, a commission member. “As a tool to effectively coordinate assistance and manage the reconstruction, it was a failure.” Alexandre Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, disagreed: “Everybody badmouths it, but I miss it. It created a level of co-ordination, with everybody around the same table, which you find in few countries. I think people had unreasonable expectations that it would be an implementing agency.” But Ms. Phelps said, “It was like in a play — the facade of a reconstruction project. We never took a pro-active role in deciding what the country needed to get back on its feet and then asking the donors to finance those priorities instead of doing their own thing.”

A COSTLY EXPOSITION

Initially, Mr. Clinton and Haitian leaders thought the private sector would play a larger role in rebuilding Haiti’s devastated housing. One relic of those aspirations is the abandoned site of a 2011 exposition in Zoranje, where scores of colourful prototype homes now sit empty, some padlocked, others plundered and used as toilets. Dreamed up at a meeting at Mr. Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, N.Y., the expo cost millions in public and private money. By the time the exposition took place, the thinking about housing had changed and most contracts were going to be awarded for urban fix-it work instead. Next to the expo site is the only large new housing project completed. With $8.3-million in financing, mostly from IADB, most of its 400 small houses remained unoccupied for half a year, except in some cases by squatters, because authorities could not figure out how to connect the complex to water.

THE FUTURE

Mr. Fisher, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator, said current projections are 200,000 Haitians will still be living in camps a year from now, on the fourth anniversary of the earthquake.

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Rebuilding in Haiti Lags After Billions in Post-Quake Aid

By DEBORAH SONTAG

New York Times, December 23, 2012

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A few days after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, Reginald Boulos opened the gates of his destroyed car dealership to some 14,000 displaced people who settled on the expansive property. Seven months later, eager to rebuild his business, he paid the families $400 each to leave Camp Boulos and return to their devastated neighborhoods.

At the time, Dr. Boulos, a physician and business magnate, was much maligned for what was portrayed as bribing the homeless to participate in their own eviction. But eventually, desperate to rid public plazas of squalid camps, the Haitian government and the international authorities adopted his approach themselves: “return cash grants” have become the primary resettlement tool.

This represents a marked deflation of the lofty ambitions that followed the disaster, when the world aspired not only to repair Haiti but to remake it completely. The new pragmatism signals an acknowledgment that despite billions of dollars spent — and billions more allocated for Haiti but unspent — rebuilding has barely begun and 357,785 Haitians still languish in 496 tent camps.

“When you look at things, you say, ‘Hell, almost three years later, where is the reconstruction?’ ” said Michèle Pierre-Louis, a former prime minister of Haiti. “If you ask what went right and what went wrong, the answer is, most everything went wrong. There needs to be some accountability for all that money.”

An analysis of all that money — at least $7.5 billion disbursed so far — helps explain why such a seeming bounty is not more palpable here in the eviscerated capital city, where the world’s chief accomplishment is to have finally cleared away most of the rubble.

More than half of the money has gone to relief aid, which saves lives and alleviates misery but carries high costs and leaves no permanent footprint — tents shred; emergency food and water gets consumed; short-term jobs expire; transitional shelters, clinics and schools are not built to last.

Of the rest, only a portion went to earthquake reconstruction strictly defined. Instead, much of the so-called recovery aid was devoted to costly current programs, like highway building and H.I.V. prevention, and to new projects far outside the disaster zone, like an industrial park in the north and a teaching hospital in the central plateau.

Meanwhile, just a sliver of the total disbursement — $215 million — has been allocated to the most obvious and pressing need: safe, permanent housing. By comparison, an estimated minimum of $1.2 billion has been eaten up by short-term solutions — the tent camps, temporary shelters and cash grants that pay a year’s rent.

“Housing is difficult and messy, and donors have shied away from it,” said Josef Leitmann, manager of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund.

Benefactors and Dysfunction

Beyond the numbers, the sluggish reconstruction has been the latest dispiriting chapter in the chronically dysfunctional relationship between Haiti and its benefactors.

After the earthquake, with good will and money pouring into Haiti, international officials were determined to use the disaster as a catalyst for transforming not only the intractably poor country but the world’s ineffectual strategies for helping it.

Bill Clinton, the United Nations special envoy for Haiti, invoked the “build back better” mantra he had imported from his similar role in South Asia after the tsunami. And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton cautioned donors to stop working around the government and instead work with it, and to stop financing “a scattered array of well-meaning projects” rather than making “deeper, long-term investments.”

But an examination by The New York Times shows that such post-disaster idealism came to be undercut by the enormousness of the task, the weakness and volatility of the Haitian government, the continuation of aid business as usual and the limited effectiveness of the now-defunct recovery commission that had Mr. Clinton as co-chairman.

With no detailed financial plan ordering reconstruction priorities, donors invested most heavily in the sectors that they had favored before the earthquake — transportation, health, education, water and sanitation — and half their financing for those areas went to projects begun before 2010.

“One area where the reconstruction money didn’t go is into actual reconstruction,” said Jessica Faieta, senior country director of the United Nations Development Program in Haiti from 2010 through this fall.

Moreover, while at least $7.5 billion in official aid and private contributions have indeed been disbursed — as calculated by Mr. Clinton’s United Nations office and by The Times — disbursed does not necessarily meant spent. Sometimes, it simply means the money has been shifted from one bank account to another as projects have gotten bogged down.

That is the case for nearly half the money for housing.

The United States, for instance, long ago disbursed $65 million to the Haiti Reconstruction Fund for the largest housing project planned for this devastated city. The fund, which issued a January 2011 news release promising houses for 50,000 people, then transferred the money to the World Bank, which is executing the project. And there almost all of it still sits, with contracts just signed.

“Building takes time; it’s destruction that’s rapid,” said President Michel Martelly at a recent end-of-construction ceremony for the new teaching hospital. But building is only half the battle; the gleaming white structure, erected by the nonprofit Partners in Health in the provincial city of Mirebalais, has not yet secured its first-year operating budget of $12.5 million to $13 million.

In contrast, here in the disaster zone, where the devastated National Palace has only just been demolished and destroyed federal buildings have yet to be replaced, the country’s largest medical center remains in a strikingly dilapidated state. More than two years ago, Mrs. Clinton and Bernard Kouchner, then the French foreign minister, signed an agreement to reconstruct it, but the shattered General Hospital, with some temporary renovations keeping it functional, still awaits its $70 million overhaul. Like that hospital, many recovery projects have lingered on the drawing board or gotten delayed by land and ideological disputes, logistical and contracting problems, staffing shortages and even weather. The United States still has more than $1 billion allocated for Haiti sitting in the Treasury, and the global Red Cross movement has more than $500 million in its coffers.

“It’s not a problem of the availability of money but of the capacity to spend it,” said Rafael Ruipérez Palmero, a Spanish development official in Haiti.

Spain has disbursed $100 million to Haiti’s water authority for infrastructure desperately needed during the continuing cholera epidemic, but the authority has only spent $15 million of it thus far. It has disbursed millions to build and renovate 21 schools but only one has been completed.

In the minority of cases where donors let the Haitian government take the lead, the volume and complexity of new projects has strained the resources of the agencies that they are working to strengthen. This sometimes causes frustrating problems.

The Inter-American Development Bank, for instance, is spearheading a multiyear school rebuilding program that a Haitian public institution is executing. The bank was hoping that as many as 21 new schools, which are being built by Haitian firms, would open this fall.

But a bank inspection last spring detected serious design flaws and construction errors. A fuller audit then found that the schools, despite being bankrolled after the earthquake, did not comply with anti-seismic or anti-hurricane standards.

How much beyond the $15.4 million cost it will take to make them safe has yet to be determined, said Pablo Bachelet, a bank spokesman. But construction has been halted.

In the mountain town of Furcy, meanwhile, the children study in a couple of plywood structures without plumbing or electricity planted in the midst of one of the construction sites. Surrounded by half-built cinder-block walls, jutting rebar and piles of stone and sand, some 480 students cram into 10 makeshift classrooms illuminated only by the natural light that seeps through the gap between the partial walls and the tin roofs.

Then, no strangers to life’s setbacks, they trudge miles home over muddy, treacherous mountain roads as darkness descends.

Foreigners Take Over

In the months after the earthquake, foreigners, arriving by the planeload, took over. They did not mean to; nobody in the humanitarian world wanted to sharpen Haiti’s dependency on foreign assistance. But Haiti’s government was as shattered as its people, and old patterns of interaction are hard to break.

Coordinating the disaster response, foreign humanitarians met on the isolated, gated United Nations logistics base and divided into clusters dealing with issues like shelter and health. Something was missing, though: “In the initial confusion and loss of life after the earthquake, the clusters effectively excluded their Haitian counterparts,” Nigel Fisher, humanitarian coordinator for the United Nations, said. “Little by little, we brought them in.”

Still, many Haitians never shook the feeling that they were an afterthought and that their institutions and businesses were being bypassed and undermined. Many of the best-educated Haitians were lured away from government and private-sector jobs by the far higher salaries offered by foreigners.

“We called it the second earthquake,” said Jean-Yves Jason, mayor of Port-au-Prince at the time.

In retrospect, the numbers tell the story: Donors provided $2.2 billion of humanitarian aid in response to the earthquake. The United States Department of Defense got nearly a fifth of that aid to carry out its relief operation, which involved 22,000 troops. The Haitian government got less than 1 percent.

More of the recovery aid — 15 percent — has been channeled through the Haitian government, and the United States ambassador to Haiti, Pamela A. White, says that a shift in approach has led international donors to align “our investments with Haiti’s priorities in a truly country-led manner.”

But thus far almost all contracts have been awarded to foreign agencies, nonprofit groups and private contractors who, in turn, subcontract to others, with each layer in the process adding 7 to 10 percent in administrative costs, as noted in a paper published by the Center for Global Development.

“All the money that went to pay the salaries of foreigners and to rent expensive apartments and cars for foreigners while the situation of the country was degrading — there was something revolting about it,” Ms. Pierre Louis said.

In a sentiment that many Haitians share, Dr. Boulos said that foreigners in Haiti “do everything at a cost five times higher.”

Dr. Boulos said he spent $780,000 to close Camp Boulos and 6 percent went to administrative costs — essentially the salary of a pastor who oversaw the resettlement. Following in his footsteps more than a year later, international groups have done things more carefully, inspecting apartments before handing out rental subsidies and conducting follow-up visits. But they are ringing up operational costs of about 35 percent.

It is difficult to ascertain precisely what the hundreds of nongovernment groups in Haiti spent on their response to the earthquake — at least $1.5 billion, probably much more — and how they spent it.

Among the more visible and transparent groups, Oxfam, its name emblazoned on thousands of latrines, provided water and sanitation to the camps and Doctors Without Borders ran field hospitals, mobile clinics and cholera treatment centers.

The services they provided were vital, but, as both groups make clear in their public reporting, they were costly, too. Oxfam spent $96 million over two years and devoted a third to management and logistics. Doctors Without Borders spent 58 percent of its $135 million in 2010 on staff and transportation costs.

Not all costly foreign initiatives were equally valuable — or appreciated.

One American taxpayer-financed program, scrutinized by the Agency for International Development’s inspector general, was intended to provide short-term jobs for Haitians and to remove significant rubble. But the program, and in particular the work carried out by two Beltway-based firms, was less than successful on both fronts, the inspector general said: It generated only a third of the jobs anticipated and it appeared to demonstrate that using manual labor to clear debris was so inefficient as to slow the rebuilding effort.

One of the firms, Chemonics International, which was awarded $150 million in post-earthquake contracts, built a $1.9 million temporary home for the Haitian Parliament. The American ambassador presented it as a gift to Haitian democracy, but many legislators were more irked than thankful because the building was delivered devoid of interior walls and furnishings, as The Global Post reported, and it took almost half a year to scrounge together the money to finish it.

Occasionally toward the end of that first year after the earthquake, the Haitian government succeeded in pushing back against internationally imposed agendas it did not like.

The American Red Cross had pledged to spend $200 million of the nearly $500 million raised for Haiti by the first anniversary of the disaster. That presented a real challenge for an organization with limited experience in the country. So it operated primarily as a financier, issuing grants to other organizations with greater capacity here.

But a linchpin of its own programming was a plan to dispense $50 million in cash, no strings attached, to 400,000 household heads in the camps.

Other humanitarian leaders considered the idea of a broad, unconditional cash distribution misguided. But it was not until the Haitian government formalized its opposition in a letter — “It would unfortunately encourage a massive exodus from the provinces, thus increasing the number of people living in the camps and making conditions even worse” — that the Red Cross dropped the plan.

Dr. Boulos said he proposed an alternative. “I told the head of the American Red Cross, in front of Bill Clinton, ‘Let’s put the entire money in housing construction. Let’s repair the houses.’ But they had all kinds of reasons why not.” Shortly after the earthquake, international advisers proposed different ways that Haiti could manage its reconstruction, including a Haitian-owned recovery agency embedded in the government. But a United States proposal to establish a stand-alone commission jointly led by the Haitian prime minister and “a distinguished senior international figure engaged in the recovery effort” won out.

Bill Clinton Steps In

In April 2010, Mr. Clinton was named co-president of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, referred to as the I.H.R.C. Two months later, at a luxury hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince, the commission held its first meeting. It would hold only six more, though, before the Haitian Parliament declined to renew its mandate and it faded into history, its Web site decommissioned and its public records erased with it.

“As a tool for Bill Clinton, the commission was good; it helped him attract attention to Haiti,” said Dr. Boulos, a commission member. “As a tool to effectively coordinate assistance and manage the reconstruction, it was a failure.”

Alexandre V. Abrantes, the World Bank’s special envoy to Haiti, disagreed. “Everybody badmouths it, but I miss it,” he said. “It created a level of coordination, with everybody around the same table, which you find in few countries. I think people had unreasonable expectations that it would be an implementing agency.”

Given that so much time and money was invested in creating it, people did, in fact, expect that the commission would take charge of the reconstruction process and deliver tangible results. But by the end many believed it had been little more than an exercise in assembling and then dismantling what one United Nations official called a pseudo-institution. “It was like in a play — the facade of a reconstruction project,” said Priscilla Phelps, an American consultant who served as the commission’s housing expert.

“We never took a proactive role in deciding what the country needed to get back on its feet and then asking the donors to finance those priorities instead of doing their own thing,” she said. “The way reconstruction money got spent was totally chaotic, and the I.H.R.C. was emblematic of that.”

From the start, the commission faced two major challenges. First, President René Préval did not really support it, seeing it as a usurpation of power, several former commission members said. Second, it had no money of its own to hand out — although the separate Haiti Reconstruction Fund, a pot containing 14 percent of the reconstruction dollars, could not make grants without its approval.

The commission’s secretariat worked out of a giant white inflatable tent on the grounds of the old United States Embassy compound, crisply air-conditioned and lined with banks of desktop computers. For a long while, the spacious tent was almost eerily empty because the commission, with a budget of $8.79 million its first year, got off to a slow start.

The commission did not engage an executive director until five months into its 18-month existence. The director, Gabriel Verret, moved haltingly to hire other key employees. The vacuum, meanwhile, was filled by William J. Clinton Foundation staff members and volunteer consultants from McKinsey & Company and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

As pro bono consultants to the commission, PricewaterhouseCoopers designed a performance and anticorruption office, and the firm subsequently won a $2.4 million contract to run it over the objections of France’s board member, who called it “a pure conflict of interest which damages the integrity of the office.”

Their first — and last — monitoring report was the only real record of the commission’s work. It summarized the 75 projects valued at over $3 billion that had been approved. The numbers themselves are not very meaningful because they included projects without any or enough money — a $1 billion “funding gap” existed, an international official said.

Still, the report indicated just how broadly recovery was being defined. At least $1.4 billion represented big-ticket, multiyear projects that were not directly related to the earthquake, among them improving the education system, developing agriculture in central Haiti and building roads all over the country

Katherine Gilbert, aid policy adviser in Mr. Clinton’s United Nations office, said, “The argument for those activities being recovery is that the whole country was affected economically and every initiative is in a sense helping the country rebuild.”

But, she added, “Another definition of recovery would be assisting those affected by the earthquake.” Although the commission’s bylaws called for it to “conduct strategic planning, establish investment priorities and sequence implementation of plans and projects,” its mode of operation was to respond, project by project, to those who sought the commission’s approval.

The large board consisted of foreign diplomats and representatives of the Haitian government and society. Early on, the Haitian members felt excluded when they learned about Mr. Verret’s appointment from the media. Their frustration deepened, culminating in a confrontation with Mr. Clinton and Jean-Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister, at their December 2010 meeting.

An account was pieced together from the meeting’s minutes and interviews with participants.

When Mr. Clinton was delayed in arriving at the Santo Domingo Hilton, where the meeting was taking place because of post-electoral violence in Haiti, a dozen Haitian board members crowded into a hotel room to prepare a written statement.

Rising to read it at the meeting, Suze Percy Fillipini, an elegant former diplomat, described how the Haitian members felt like “bit players” and “tokens” who were called on to “rubber stamp” a hodgepodge of projects that “collectively do not respond to the urgency of the situation or provide the foundation for the sustainable rebuilding of Haiti.”

Attending by Skype, Mr. Bellerive appeared livid and said the board members were merely “individuals,” which, in a Haitian context, meant they were nobodies, according to several members. Ms. Fillipini, her eyes flashing with tears, defended herself and the other appointees. Another member, Jean-Marie Bourjolly, a Haitian-Canadian business professor, complained that the executive director and chairmen did not respond to e-mails, saying it was neither good manners nor good governance.

After the meeting, Professor Bourjolly recounted, Mr. Clinton approached him, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You embarrassed me.”

“It was really tough,” said the professor, summarizing the commission’s work as “such a waste.”

Again, Dr. Abrantes disagreed. “They created a formal mechanism to receive proposals, and a vetting system that was important. Eventually, they developed sector strategies, some sketchy but others well-developed, that guide us to this day.”

When the recovery commission died, the Haiti Reconstruction Fund was paralyzed, unable to make new grants. The fund, created to set aside at least some money to support the Haitian government, had “ended up significantly focused on two areas where the donors don’t have standing expertise — debris removal and housing,” Ms. Gilbert said.

“No one wanted to do debris removal,” Mr. Leitmann, the fund’s manager, said. “It’s not sexy. There are no ribbons to cut. The results disappear. So we filled that niche. Housing is another example. Half our resources are going there.”

Though as much as $104 million remains available for allocation, it has taken the Haitian government more than a year to create and convene a successor entity to the commission. The group, in Mr. Martelly’s words, will “restore to Haiti its sovereignty in aid management and especially its priorities.”

By late last week, its priorities for the remaining funds had yet to be established.

In the summer of 2011, when President Martelly, a Haitian musical star with no political experience, was struggling to put together a government, he was also grappling with the unavoidable fact that a smattering of housing reconstruction projects existed only on paper while a humanitarian crisis lay at his doorstep in the form of a huge, wretched tent camp in the central Champ de Mars.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers report, then just released, contained a telling if understated aside: “The ‘build back better’ approach does not always align with the objective of quickly finding housing solutions for camp residents.”

A New Pragmatism

The new pragmatism was born. Mr. Martelly secured international assistance to close six highly visible tent camps and repair 16 neighborhoods and to shut down the Champ de Mars settlement. Some Haitians felt he was just trying to sweep the homelessness problem from view without resolving it — indeed the neighborhood repairs have lagged far behind the camp closings — but others expressed relief that he was taking action because a temporary solution was better than none at all.

From the start, grand ambition had gotten in the way of tackling what was doable.

“Early on, it seemed fairly clear that the only viable approach was to rebuild existing neighborhoods,” Ms. Phelps said. “But it took six to eight months to get the government used to that, and another four to six months to make the donors comfortable. Nobody wanted to think reconstruction might be a giant slum-upgrading project. They wanted little pastel houses and kids with ribbons in their hair to put on the cover of their annual report.”

Idealistic discussions after the disaster were not just about building back better. President Préval expressed a keen interest in using the initial exodus to the countryside to decongest Port-au-Prince permanently, and decentralization became the second mantra, guiding early commitments to spend significant reconstruction money outside the disaster zone.

“There were all sorts of fantasies about shutting down the mess that is Port-au-Prince before people started to understand that there is a huge amount of capital built up in the city and chaotic as it is you don’t throw it out,” Mr. Leitmann of the Haiti Reconstruction Fund said. “Another fantasy was, ‘Oh, we’ll just invest in export processing zones and that will keep people from migrating back to Port-au-Prince.’ ”

That first year, the United States government and the Inter-American Development Bank set aside $220 million to finance the new Caracol Industrial Park, which is 175 miles north of the disaster area, and to build a power plant, port and housing development nearby.

Mr. Clinton, who joined Mrs. Clinton at the Caracol inaugural ceremony this fall in a rare public fusion of their diplomatic roles, has long emphasized Haiti’s need for jobs. Some here applaud his support for subsidies to private companies; others, though, question what they see as a trickle-down theory of development, pointing skeptically to decisions like those of the private Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund to make a $2 million equity investment in a new luxury hotel, the Royal Oasis.

Initially, Mr. Clinton and Haitian leaders thought the private sector would play a larger role in rebuilding Haiti’s devastated housing stock, and they were courting international firms to design innovative tract housing for tracts of land that never materialized.

One relic of those aspirations is the abandoned site of a 2011 housing exposition held in Zoranje, where scores of colorful prototype homes now sit empty, some padlocked, others plundered and used as toilets.

Dreamed up at a meeting at Mr. Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, the expo cost millions in public and private money. Competing firms spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in the hopes of winning sizable contracts. But by the time the exposition took place, the thinking about housing had already shifted and most contracts were going to be awarded for urban fix-it work instead.

Adjacent to the expo site in Zoranje is the only large new housing project completed so far. With $8.3 million in financing, mostly from the Inter-American Development Bank, most of its 400 small pastel houses remained unoccupied for half a year, except in some cases by squatters, because the authorities could not figure out how to connect the complex to water. Eventually, the beneficiaries were allowed to move in anyway.

Fertilia Bien-Aimé, a wiry, scrappy, 65-year-old, said she won the keys to her house by accosting President Martelly during a public event in October. “I went up to him and said, ‘Mr. President, I’m too old for a tent. What are you going to do for me?’ ”

Squatters had ripped out the electrical wiring, sinks and toilets, she said, and rain leaks into her house as into others. Some homes lost their roofs during Tropical Storm Isaac, and the complex has had unreliable electricity since Hurricane Sandy.

“But even with all the problems here,” she said, “it’s still so much better than being a displaced person.”

The largest new settlement under construction takes the same exurban approach. A $48 million Haitian government initiative, located about 10 miles east of Port-au-Prince in Morne à Cabri, the project’s thousands of houses are rising on a barren, isolated site. Ms. Pierre-Louis, the former prime minister, described it as looking like “little tombs in the desert.”

Critics have also questioned the location of the American-subsidized new housing settlement in rural Caracol, far from the disaster, as well as the high cost of its one-bedroom homes. They are being built by a Minnesota company on a site prepared by a Maryland firm for $31,400 a house.

That includes site preparation, internal wiring, individual water hookups and flush toilets. But current thinking among humanitarian officials is that those are all extras. A small, simple one-family house in Port-au-Prince can be built for $6,000, they say, and more people can be helped.

Although the Caracol houses were supposed to be occupied by December, only 70 of 750 had been finished by the end of November because of severe weather and logistical problems, an American aid official said.

Progress has been even slower on the other American-built settlement, which is on a large, flat swath of gravel in Cabaret. Only about a dozen of the 156 houses there had a completed structure, minus doors and windows, in early December.

“Lots of money, few results,” said the deputy mayor of Cabaret, Pierre Justinvil. “Look, I personally, with my own hands, have just built a whole school for less than the cost of one of those houses and more quickly. I think we Haitians need to take the wheel.”

In the earthquake-ravaged slum neighborhood of Campeche in Port-au-Prince, Dieudonne Zidor, an elected official, agreed. Gliding gracefully up a rocky pathway, she pointed out the anarchic jumble of condemned homes, makeshift shanties and corroding shelter boxes. “As you can see, conditions are calamitous,” she said. But it is not rocket science to figure out what is needed, she added: houses, streets, electricity, water, health clinics, schools, women’s centers.

Yet, though the local authorities have already approved an urban plan for the neighborhood, the American Red Cross has engaged in a lengthy process to determine how best to spend its $20 million budget to improve Campeche.

Sandrine Capelle Manuel, the organization’s representative in Haiti, said it had been a productive process. “We prioritized all the issues and created a consultative group that is representative of the community fabric,” she said. “We did a strong and deep assessment, and now we need to do a master plan with the community.”

But Ms. Zidor said: “All they do is hold meetings and hand out juice. In the end, they will have spent the whole $20 million giving juice to the people.”

Many other neighborhood reconstruction projects have gotten stuck in the planning stages, too. The reconstruction adviser to President Martelly, in fact, recently asked a World Bank official if millions of dollars could be diverted from that slow-moving $65 million reconstruction program to pay for additional return cash grants.

“He said, ‘Can you help us because we don’t want to go to the third anniversary with so many people still in camps?’ ” Dr. Abrantes said.

Although so much money allocated for reconstruction languishes in the bank, humanitarian financing for Haiti has all but dried up while needs remain acute, said Mr. Fisher, the United Nations’ humanitarian coordinator.

“The donors have made it clear that they feel the humanitarian crisis is over and that development is their focus,” Mr. Fisher said. “But it’s a false dichotomy. Of course, the country needs long-term solutions but until they are in place we still need resources to deal with the problems at hand.”

Current projections, he added, are that 200,000 Haitians will still be living in camps a year from now, on the fourth anniversary of the earthquake.

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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:Correction: December 25, 2012An article on Monday about the slow pace of reconstruction in Haiti since the massive earthquake in 2010 misstated the date of the quake. It was Jan. 12, not Jan. 10. The article also misstated the name of a new teaching hospital in Mirebalais. It is Partners in Health, not Partners for Health.
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Watch: Al Jazeera video: Interview on UN repackaging its fictitious, non-existent cholera aid to Haiti

Haiti : Still waiting for recovery

Three years after a devastating earthquake, the “Republic of NGOs” has become the country of the unemployed

Jan 5th 2013 |Source: The Economist
PORT-AU-PRINCE

HAITI is open for business”, Michel Martelly, the country’s president since May 2011, likes to proclaim. His government has backed up this talk by making it easier for foreigners to own property and by setting as a goal that Haiti climb into the top 50 countries in the World Bank’s ranking for ease of doing business (it now comes 174th out of 185). In November the president opened a gleaming arrivals hall at Toussaint Louverture airport. Mr Martelly himself is in such constant motion abroad—courting donors and investors, he says—that his peregrinations and the per diemsalleged to be associated with them have become a source of mordant jokes.

But gangbuster growth, hoped for as the country rebuilds itself after the earthquake of January 12th 2010 that wrecked the capital, Port-au-Prince, and killed tens of thousands of people, has failed to materialise. In the 12 months to the end of September the economy expanded by a modest 2.5%. It was the second year of dashed expectations: the IMF had forecast growth of 8% in both 2011 and 2012.

Haiti and the Clintons, Can Obama afford not to act?

By Jean Yves Point-du-Jour, Haiti Perspectives, Special Op-Ed, September 12, 2012

Watching the Democratic National Convention (DNC) held last week in Charlotte, North Carolina was an eye opener. On Wednesday night, former US President Bill Clinton said during his well awaited speech that “President Barack Obama in the spirit of cooperation has hired Hillary’ Staff and also Hillary herself”.

It was the defining moment for me as a Haitian. It clarified that in return for the Clintons’ support, Barack Obama handed over the State Department.

The January 2010 earthquake which destroyed various parts of Haiti especially the Capital Port-au-Prince, causing hundreds of thousands of Haitians deaths provided the opening that the Clintons needed to completely dominate Haiti politically and economically.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, the incompetency of the Haiti leaders to deal with the reconstruction effort was apparent. Unfortunately, many of our Haitian brothers and sisters still harbor the slave mentality. Some Haitians always want the international community to validate their actions and credentials. As a result, we lose faith in our own ability to deal with our own issues and missed a great opportunity to take control of the destiny of Haiti. When someone else decides for us, that individual is not going to make decisions based on Haiti’s interests. They will always act on what is in their best interests. This is exactly what has happened and continues to occur in Haiti.

First, Bill Clinton took over the Haiti reconstruction effort as Chair of the Haiti Interim Reconstruction Commission. Billions of dollars in aid were promised by the international community and millions more were collected in the name of helping Haitians rebuild their country.

Two years later, the result has been disastrous. Hundreds of Haitians are still living under tents. Yet, according to the New-York Times, more than a quarter of the $412 million allocated for reconstruction has instead been used to build an industrial park in an area not touched by the earthquake. In a July 5th, 2012 article, the New-York Times questioned the building of the Caracol industrial Park. Contracts were awarded to firms, individuals associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign when she ran for president of the United States in 2008.

Second, the results are no different politically. First, a sham “election” was organized under the leadership of Hillary Clinton to select a demagogue as president, someone who can best apply and protect the interests of the Clinton’s vision of sweatshops, business opportunities for Clinton Associates, etc. in Haiti. Serious candidates were eliminated and once again the destiny of Haiti has been compromised. Clinton’s fingerprint can be found in almost every key nomination of the Martelly’ s administration, from Prime Minister to Ambassador of the United States, even among government Consultants.

Haitians are currently witnessing the effects and dealing with the impacts of past and present policies of the Clintons.  There is a political malaise settling in Haiti. A climate of fear and intimidation prevails in the society especially in the political class and now the business sector.

Cap-Haitien Wednesday September 12, 2012 / Haiti: Anti-government protests growing throughout the country

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There is no clear strategy for development. There has been no respect for the fragile institutions of the country. Natural resources of the country are being pillaged. Signs and evidences of corruption are everywhere.

Symptoms of political persecution and repression are appearing. Cholera brought to Haiti by UN soldiers continues to kill Haitians. Hunger and insecurity are rampant in the society. Hope and change have been transformed into despair, frustration, and anger. Human rights and freedom of speech are being threatened.

Since Michel Martelly became President, Haiti has seen crisis after crisis, beginning with the arrest of Deputy Arnel Belizaire to the publication of the so-called amended constitution and the current formation of a council to organize legislative and municipal elections.

One thing for sure, each time an important decision is to be taken, Cheryl Mills, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton key Deputy always makes a one day trip to Haiti.

We are witnessing the development of another election debacle in the Caribbean country. Michel Martelly has unlawfully hijacked the formation of the electoral council. He makes sure that he has total control of the process so that he can handpick Mayors, Senators, and Communal Representatives.  The political class, Civil Society, many Popular Organizations are visibly upset and are calling for a credible council to organize the elections. President Michel Martelly has clearly exhibited his intentions.

Can anyone imagine a Jean Bertrand Aristide or a Rene Preval making such a move? There would have been a firestorm in the US press.  So far, the international press has been silent. It seems that the Miami Herald’s Jacqueline Charles pen has been stolen or has run out of ink. Likewise for the American lady supervisor of the Haiti news section at the Voice of America in Washington DC who always removes objectionable items regarding the Martelly administration in their news broadcast. But an important question remains: can the Obama administration afford another election breakdown in Haiti?

Haitians are upset with the Obama administration. They realize that progress in democracy is being thwarted. The country has once again fallen victim of the Clintons. They blame Washington for the policy that lead to the current status quo. Nothing has been done regarding the reconstruction as promised.

The political situation is very precarious. President Obama needs every vote he can obtain, especially in Florida where a large Haitian community exists. Hillary Clinton is due to make another visit to Haiti to inaugurate the Caracol industrial Park. (Refer also to HLLN review of New York Times investigation)  Bill Clinton has already destroyed the Haiti rice production. He has apologized for what he has done. But the damage has been done and Haiti has yet to recover. Now we are witnessing another set of policy that is bringing irreparable damages to the country once again headed by the Clintons.

It is not too late. But a short window of time and opportunity is available. The time to act is now. The Haitian people are not dumb and stupid. Their silence and patience up to now cannot be translated as a sign of weakness or obedience. The Obama administration ought to understand the seriousness of the situation. Otherwise, once again, Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton’s apology will be too little and too late.

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Transportation Engineer Manager, better known as “Yves Dayiti” was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He lives in Maryland USA and works as a transportation engineer manager. He is a broadcaster and has produced and hosted the Haiti radio program, “Konbit Lakay” in Washington, D.C.  for over 28  years. Contact email: youri44@hotmail.com.

(c) 2012 Haiti Perspectives, ezilidanto.com/zili

Permission to republish and circulate is granted provided all reprints are a verbatim copy of the article in its entirety, respecting its integrity as it appears on this website. Reprints must cite Jean Yves Point-du-Jour as the author and the site ezilidanto.com/zili as the original source including a “live link” to the article.

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Background information

“Effective Evil” or Progressives’ Best Hope? Glen Ford vs. Michael Eric Dyson on Obama Presidency

- Glen Ford Speaks at the Eritrean Festival about US Intervention and Militarization of Africa

- Under Obama Administration – Bill Clinton has more power in Haiti than Haiti’s president: The Holocaust Continues

“Barrack Obama abdicated the easiest country to dominate to his democratic rival, the Clintons, accomplishing many things, including squashing internal party dissension, making the UN useful for the world oligarchy and US exceptionalism while deflecting charges of racism and imperialism in Haiti…” — Ezili Danto, Bill Clinton has more power in Haiti than Haiti’s president – The Holocaust Continues

“At a time when Haiti should be declared in a state of national emergency for the death of 8,000 and infection of 600,000 (and counting) with UN-imported cholera. There’s a tourist boom with quake dollars. No one takes seriously the death and desperation of the poor and Black in Haiti? Least of all Bill Clinton who presided during the Rwanda genocide and now presides over using donation dollars to build tourist hotels in Haiti while quake victims stay homeless in the time of cholera.” (Haiti:They don’t have bread? Give ‘em Carnival )

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Haiti: Foreign Investment means Death and Repression: A Historical Perspective

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Corruption uninterrupted in Haiti

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I pay this price for you: Haiti is open for business

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Caracol, SHADA: Hoax masking foreign appropriation of fertile Haiti lands

US control of Haiti and other little republics’ vote at the UN is not new

Ezili Dantò

I found an August 10, 2012 George Will opinion piece relevant to UN/US occupied Haiti today for reasons that would probably not occur to Mr. Will. The piece discusses and juxtaposes other US candidates’ “indelicate claims” to Democrat Obama’s current campaign obfuscations that have caused consternation.

Whether intended or not, the opinion piece made a point we’ve made in several articles and commentaries about the key players in Haiti’s containment in poverty and misery today: the Barack Obama administration, Dr. Paul Farmer, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, USAID, Congress, World Bank and the tiny big business corporatocracy they all serve.

See, for instance “Foreign investment means death & repression,  Part 1 and Part 2” ;  “US False Benevolence: Failure of Foreign “AID” is Structural“; Not voting for Obama: We’re not even buying a voting ticket to the show or, “Haiti: Time to remember Kandyo, the Malfini and Mongoose” where I wrote:

“Stop being so CONFUSED folks by the rebranding of the same old fascists. The good cop/bad cop play-acting of the Democrats and Republicans or that of the “progressives” and the “right wingers…don’t be confused about the power plays between the malfini and the mongoose. Between Democrats and Republicans (Between Obama and Bush.) Or, ‘between Wilson and Harding,’ to quote (Kandyo) one of Haiti’s most favorite satirist” in the time of the first US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934.

Maybe Mr. Wills intended to make the point that the Republicans and Democrats (the US duopoly) as well as the Left and Right wingers in Congress and elsewhere, mostly serve the same global oligarchs and their profit-over-people interests, especially in the realm of US foreign policy. But I doubt it.

Speaking about US presidential campaigns and an Obama current public faux pas (“private sector is doing fine…the economy is not doing fine”) in an opinion piece titled “It’s a question of context,” George Wills wrote, in part:

“On Aug. 18, 1920, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), campaigning in Butte, Mont., said that it would be fine for the United States to join the League of Nations because our nation would have multiple votes. He assured listeners that “the votes of Cuba, Haiti, San Domingo, Panama, Nicaragua and of the other Central American states” would not be cast “differently from the vote of the United States,” which is “the big brother of these little republics.”

Then, (Franklin Delano Roosevelt) referring to his days as assistant secretary of the Navy, the vice presidential candidate said: “You know I have had something to do with running a couple of little republics. The facts are that I wrote Haiti’s constitution myself and, if I do say so, I think it a pretty good constitution.” He added: “Why, I have been running Haiti or San Domingo for the past seven years.”

Maybe Mr. Wills intended to make the point that the US empire’s control of Haiti and other little republics’ vote at the UN is not new.  Or, say that both Democratic and Republican candidates are ruled by big business (the tiny monopolistic “private sector is doing fine…the economy is not doing fine), support US imperialism and spin their own admissions of this reality onto “the public’s inability to parse plain English.”

Maybe Mr. Wills intended to make the point that Haitians often make, in Haitian folkloric peasant parlance. That is, Haiti and other US dominated client states, and their huddled masses are like small chickens. Both the malfini (ie. the birds of prey – the Republicans, neocons or Right wingers) and the mongoose (ie. the small carnivores – the progressives or Left wingers) are just fighting over which of them will either swoop down from the sky (the malfini – birds of prey) or crawl up from the ground (the destructive terrestrial mongoose) to eat – plunder, pillage, exploit Haiti or the world’s poor masses (the chickens preyed upon by both these predators)! That’s probably not what George Will intended to point out with the FDR/Haiti and other anecdotes in his opinion piece. Nonetheless, he did. FDR and the US did rewrite Haiti’s Constitution, controlled its (League of Nation)/UN vote, just as the current US occupying powers in Haiti today control Haiti, the UN military mission there, help select its president, are rewriting Haiti’s current Constitution as well as Haiti’s mining laws.

(The entire Georges Will’s opinion piece is copied below as well as an Ezili Network reader commentary on this note. )

Ezili Dantò
HLLN
August 14, 2012

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Forwarded by Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network
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An Ezili Network comment on this note: [ezilidanto] US control of the Haiti vote and the other little
republics’ vote at the UN is not new

From: PB
Subject: [ezilidanto] US control of the Haiti vote and the other little
republics’ vote at the UN is not new
To: erzilidanto@yahoo.com
Date: Tuesday, August 14, 2012, 4:06 PM

Dear Ezili,

(George) Will irritates me, always has.

While the School of the Americas or whatever the torture college is called now
is turning out thugs, and the twin organizations funded by both parties (IRI
and NDI) are still putting dark money where it will be most insidious, and
while oil and corporate profit are the sole measure of US foreign policy
success, and while the wars go on and on and on, Will feeds the pseudo-
intellectual appetite for justification of policies that are only nominally
relevant to what is actually going on anyway.

He runs interference and muddies waters and pollutes the wells when voices of
reason and compassion struggle to be heard above the din of prattling think-
tank wonks. While he’s at it, he builds an ornate edifice of phony history
that he things will kill a few other birds along the way.

But it makes no difference what he says, not really. It only adds to the
confusion, and that is his purpose. While everybody is trying to see, he
shouts ”This way! Follow the sound of my voice!” But he isn’t going anywhere.
It’s just childish self-importance that he never got over. And the worst is
that any mention of him in any context only feeds his already overblown image.
Like an old blues musician that nobody listened to, eventually he will be
billed as one of the last remaining authentic voices; but he will still only
have two cords and one lick, and his inability to tune his instrument or sing
on key will be held up as tradition.

Love
Peter

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It’s a question of context

By George F. Will, Washington Post, August 10, 2012
wapo.st/N14YF4

Barack Obama claims only that his legislative and foreign policy achievements in his first two years matched those of “any president — with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln” in “modern history.” Some Obama enthusiasts are less restrained.

They suggest that among presidents, he ranks as the most learned since John Quincy Adams, the most profound since James Madison and the most visionary since Thomas Jefferson. And he is, of course, the most rhetorically gifted politician since Pericles.

Yet, remarkably, he is frequently misunderstood. How can this be?

After the June 8 news conference in which he said “the private sector is
doing fine,” he, responding to the public’s strange inability to parse
plain English, held another news conference in which he said: “It’s
absolutely clear the economy is not doing fine; that’s the reason I had a
press conference.”

That clarified everything, but then on July 13 the public, which Obama really must regard as a disappointment, again failed to comprehend him. In Roanoke, Va., he gave what any reasonable person must admit was an admirably pithy and entirely clear distillation of his political philosophy: “You didn’t build that.” The public’s obtuseness forced his campaign to run an ad saying “my words about small business” had been taken “out of context.” Ah, context.

In late October 1980, as Ronald Reagan prepared for his one debate with
President Jimmy Carter, Reagan’s aides worried that Carter might unearth some of the inconveniently colorful things Reagan had said over the years, such as when Patty Hearst’s kidnappers demanded the distribution of free food, including canned goods, Reagan reportedly said something like: This would be a good time for a botulism epidemic. When an aide wondered how Reagan could explain that quip, there was a long pause, and then another aide impishly suggested: “Say it was taken out of context.”

As Obama tries to cope with the public’s peculiar inability to discern his
meanings, perhaps he can take comfort from very similar difficulties of another candidate for national office. On Aug. 18, 1920, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, campaigning in Butte, Mont., said that it would be fine for the United States to join the League of Nations because our nation would have multiple votes. He assured listeners that “the votes of Cuba, Haiti, San Domingo, Panama, Nicaragua and of the other Central American states” would not be cast “differently from the vote of the United States,” which is “the big brother of these little republics.”

Then, referring to his days as assistant secretary of the Navy, the vice
presidential candidate said: “You know I have had something to do with
running a couple of little republics. The facts are that I wrote Haiti’s constitution myself and, if I do say so, I think it a pretty good constitution.” He added: “Why, I have been running Haiti or San Domingo for the past seven years.”

As David Pietrusza writes in “1920: The Year of Six Presidents,” Haiti and
the Dominican Republic had been U.S. protectorates since July 1915 and May 1916, respectively, but the boastful candidate had not written any
constitution. Nevertheless, he repeated his indelicate claim — U.S. Marines had recently been involved in some Haitian bloodshed — at three more Montana stops and then in San Francisco.

When, inevitably, the candidate’s words caused consternation here and there, he insisted he never said them, adding magnanimously, “I feel certain that the misquotation was entirely unintentional.” But the controversy continued, so on Sept. 2, in Maine, he added: “I should think that it would be obvious that one who has been so largely in touch with foreign relations through the Navy Department during the last seven years could not have made a deliberate false statement of this kind.”

Idaho’s Republican Sen. William Borah dryly said: “I am willing to admit
that he didn’t say it, though I was there and heard him say it at the
time.” Thirty-one witnesses of the Butte speech signed an affidavit attesting that the candidate had said what he was reported to have said, but public attention had wandered and the issue faded.

Far from being badly injured by this episode, the vice presidential candidate went on to become one of the three presidents in “modern history” — Obama includes Lincoln — whose achievements in their first two years are, Obama says, “possible” to compare to his. The candidate was one of liberalism’s saints, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Ezili Dantò of HLLN

July 25, 2012 interview
Jeff Blankfort host of Takes on the World interviews Ezili Dantò on Haiti’s Exploitation / Radio Project MP3 KZYX Public Radio Interview

Summary: Ezili Dantò talks about her review, titled “Foreign investment means death & repression“(Part 1 and Part 2) of  New York Times July 6, 2012 article detailing how foreign investment at Caracol, Haiti raises bait and switch issues, worker abuse and environmental devastation concerns; tells how Obama, through the Clintons, pushed opening of South Korea sweatshop with US tax dollars and earthquake donations dollars requiring eviction of Haitian farmers instead of rebuilding after earthquake; of corporations, Newmont mining, VCS mining, etc., stealing Haiti’s (20bn) gold and oil companies waiting to plunder oil and destroy environment; of history of US-Haitian relations and occupation by Marines; of UN doing US dirty work; of Haiti being earlier robbed of its gold; of Haiti over $22billion independence debt to pay “reparations” to France for throwing it out of Haiti in 1804; of current Haitian government taxing remittances to Haiti from Haitian-Americans; of racism, race and gender as tools of empire; of five-star hotels built on donation dollars while the quake victims and Haiti peasants countrywide get evicted off fertile lands to make way for tourism in the time of cholera.

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Francisco Herrera sings ‘Look at Haiti’

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Video: Ezili Dantò Bwa Kayiman Ceremony

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Excerpt from Excerpt from Dantò’s Haiti: Foreign investment means death & repression, Part 1:

“This writing reviews, in two parts, the consequences of US investment in Haiti. It looks at the New York Times investigation into the Caracol industrial park, its anchor tenant, the South Korea’s Sae-A Trading, giving Haiti context with the Bitter Cane documentary on industrial parks in Haiti 40-years ago. The piece illustrates that Washington’s bait and switch use of donation dollars and US taxpayer aid for private profit is a colonial blueprint in Haiti. US intervention is not intended, even when called “Haiti reconstruction” to provide sustainable jobs and infrastructure for Haitians. Caracol itself is window dressing covering the infrastructure the US is building for the mineral and vast oil reserves the US occupies Haiti to exploit.”

Excerpt from Dantò’s Haiti: Foreign investment means death & repression, Part 2:

“Mostly, Haitian infrastructure improvements are allowed to stand in Haiti only if they serve foreigners or their local subcontractors. The roads and ports were built for foreign business use.

In the period of the first US occupation, HASCO controlled the electric company, the railroad company and the Port au Prince wharf. The Haiti railroad and train cars only carried HASCO sugarcane from the plantations to refineries to port for export while Haitians had no way to improve domestic agriculture by getting their produce to local markets before it rotted. This has been the case since neocolonialism began with the first foreign-supported Haiti coup d’etat in 1806 that killed Haiti’s founding father and put the assimilated sons of France in power. (Haiti a time bomb which must be defused immediately; Haiti: The soul of Africa, not for sale ; Obama’s offered HOPE is sweatshop slavery; Caracol, SHADA: Hoax masking foreign appropriation of fertile Haiti lands.)

The US legislative conditions (HOPE ACT II) imposed upon Haiti for hosting non-tax paying foreign companies such as the Caracol industrial park, which make duty free garments and goods for the export market, COMPELS Haiti to agree NOT TO INVEST in needed public services – clean water, sanitation and waste management, public roads, health care, et al. Imposes controls, rules out Haiti government ownership of economic assets. (See, Statement of Haitian Activists on the HOPE legislation passed by Congress, December 16, 2006: Enriching the few at expense of the many is not “HOPE” but fueling more despair.)

Haiti is in dire need of public services, clean water, sanitation, infrastructure, local manufacturing, local food production, local agriculture and for the government to invest in this and be accountable to its citizens for these services.”

(Haiti: Foreign investment means death & repression, Part 2)

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Forwarded by Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network
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Haiti: Where Did the Money Go? What the American Red Cross Does Not Want You to Know by Center for Economic and Policy Research

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Recommended HLLN Links
(to share and circulate widely)

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Recommended HLLN Link:
Haiti 2012: Where Has All the Money ($6 billion collected earthquake dollars) Gone? http://bit.ly/LDrRgZ

Haiti 2012: Humanitarian Aid for Earthquake Victims Used to Build Five Star Hotels http://bit.ly/L6Oiye

2012- Reasons 4 US-UN occupy #Haiti=vast oil reserves,20 bn gold,strategic location (2counter Cuba/Venezuela) $6bn donation$ http://bit.ly/OpM1OR

Haiti 2012: Foreign investment means death & repression, Part 2
http://bit.ly/Mlz06y

Haiti: Foreign investment means death & repression, Part 1
http://bit.ly/NhilyS

Ezili Dantò grassroots #Haiti news part 1 of 4 on Radio Rezistans
(The Maroon Voice) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqxVfHqXH5U

Gold Rush in Haiti: Mining Investment Good for Whom?
http://bit.ly/OdItge

Disaster Capitalism in Haiti, New Orleans, Congo & Pakistan
w/ Ezili Danto  -  http://www.ezilidanto.com/zili/

Haiti: Where Did the Money Go? What the American Red Cross Does Not Want You to Know http://cbsloc.al/MbBKr8

Haiti: Where Did the Money Go? An Interview with Michele Mitchell

http://cbsloc.al/MbBKr8

You gave $1.4B to help Haitians after the earthquake–we know what happened to that money http://bit.ly/n4VzHF

Faiza Ahmed reviews the film “Haiti: Where did the money go?” Directed by Michele Mitchell/ PressTV http://bit.ly/LUwgky
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“This Caracol “jobs-for-Haiti” is bait. Window-dressing to provide infrastructure and housing for the Denver-based miner Newmont(Eurasian/Marien Mining), Canada’s Majesco/VCS Mining and other foreign companies mining Haiti for gold, silver, copper, worth more than $20 billion dollars.

During the first US occupation, both HASCO (the Haitian-American Sugar Company) and SHADA (Haitian-American Society for Agricultural Development) were foreign controlled, but used Haiti figureheads to circumvent Haiti Constitution prohibiting foreign land ownership. For the SHADA and HASCO similarities with the looting Haiti-American collaborators of today, see on our website, Caracol, SHADA: Hoax masking foreign appropriation of fertile Haiti lands. ( Haiti: Foreign investment means death & repression, Part 1 – http://bit.ly/NhilyS )

South Korean stranglehold in Haiti keeps multiplying
“The South Korean stranglehold in Haiti keeps multiplying and the correlations brings the picture of tyranny and power-holders over disenfranchised poor Haiti very clear.  The UN-MINUSTAH troops in Haiti are led by South Korean, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Paul Farmer is the Deputy UN Special Envoy to Haiti and his partner at Partners & Health is South Korean, Dr. Jim Yong Kim who is the US-dominated World Bank’s newly elected Korean born President. For the first time in UN history the World Bank, not the UNDP are bankers for Bill Clinton’s funds raised for Haiti. They gather together destroying Haiti as their latest excursion in their proposed Korean operated factory slave labor jobs in Northern part of the country on the burial ground of Haiti’s revered liberator, Charlemagne Peralte.” ( Haiti: Foreign investment means death & repression, Part 1 – http://bit.ly/NhilyS )

“Washington swapped Haiti lives and lands to get a South Korean Maquilas into Haiti but not a Brazilian Maquila? The geopolitical maneuverings fills a few US imperial agendas: cements Haiti poverty; sends a message to all dissenters in the region about US elites’ dirtier capacity for maintaining their world looting system despite the horrors of the quake in Haiti; underlies efforts that contains Brazil’s economic ascendancy in the Hemisphere; promotes a servile and useful South Korean client state; makes no apology for using charity donation dollars and US taxpayer dollars to support unfair labor practices, corporate welfare for giant US manufacturers, worldwide low-wages or to feed the WalMart-ilk’s appetite for closing down small local businesses.”( Haiti: Foreign investment means death & repression, Part 1 – http://bit.ly/NhilyS )

Economic fascism against Haiti poor
“Caracol capitalist vultures pay no taxes, tariffs or custom duties, get free land, free factory, luxurious gated communities but see NO PROBLEM with their money changers taxing Haiti Diaspora remittances, the only direct aid that keeps the poor alive. Under the US-supported Martelly government, Haitians overseas pay an extra $1.50 per transfer and .05cents extra per phone call to Haiti. No other nationality in the world are paying these in-country transfer taxes.” ( Haiti: Foreign investment means death & repression, Part 1 – http://bit.ly/NhilyS )

HLLN on Haiti Riches

July 25, 2012: Ezili Dantò with Jeff Blankfort – KZYX Interview on US occupation of Haiti behind UN mercenary guns, New York Times report on using donation dollars where Haiti isn’t broken

This post is dedicated to all the
Emmanuel Drèd Wilmè and Janjak Desalins’ RISING!

Emmanuel Drèd Wilmè, the most hunted Black man in Haiti stood up against the US occupation behind UN mercenary guns in 2004 for 17-months until he was assassinated by UN multinational guns on July 6, 2005.  HLLN honors the life of the Haiti hero for the 21st century, Emmanuel Drèd Wilmè (See info below). HLLN also remembers with honor and maximum respect, Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, Haiti human rights icon, disappeared in UN occupied Haiti, August 12, 2008. Ayisyen kote nou ye?

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If Ezili HLLN could reach CNN’s audience on the 4th of July

^{“Clinton was wrong. Obama took that 3:00am call alright, but then he stayed on the phone for four years.”}

On this July 4th, if HLLN could reach CNN’s audience, I’d explain how slavery continues for most of the global south through unfettered capitalism’s neoliberal globalization, humanitarian aid and wars to bring democracy and “help.”

I’d outline how the current US occupation under cover of UN mercenary guns brought deregulation/privatization guru, Bill Clinton, into Haiti as humanitarian to privatize (open) Haiti for Newmont gold mining, Monsanto death seeds, NGO false charity, big oil, big agribusiness and big pharma. Show how Bill Clinton and US policymakers, from the Left and Right duopoly, helped destroy Haiti food sovereignty, fledgling democracy, already inadequate state-owned Haiti enterprises with Bill Clinton privatization, then brought in their NGO charitable industry to provide more inadequate public service to Haitians as the solution. I’d detail how the two Clinton administrations, along with the two Bush administrations, set the stage, forced privatization conditions onto Haiti and then Bill Clinton used Aristide’s return in 1994 to more earnestly privatize as well as re-image the old Duvalierists as civil society. They even tried re-imaging bloody Toto Constant-FRAPH as civil society.

I’d document how the former enslaving white settler nation’s systematically destroyed Haiti’s fledgling participatory democracy only to bring in US occupation behind UN guns and de-legitimized US-money-runned election/auctions as the solution. (See “More background, tweets and facebook posts” below ;  Royalty rate (2.5%) on Haiti gold – worth an estimated $20bn – negotiated by US-selected Haiti president is the lowest in hemisphere ; The real pirates of the Caribbean: Haiti oil is so large that it’s as an Olympic pool while Venezuela oil is but a glass of water and We’ve become what we hate: Why I left America.)

I’d explain that the media is owned and dominated by the ruling elite bringing back feudalism and selling exclusive clientele-patronage as the height of worldwide democracy and human development. That’s why the majority of the world’s citizens are not clued in, simply don’t know that the reasons for the current US occupation of Haiti behind the cover of UN mercenary guns are Haiti’s riches. It’s vast oil reserves, over 20 billion in mineral wealth, its important territorial waters, deep water ports, lands -strategic resource and geographic location (to counter Cuba/Venezuela), along with the (over $6 billion) use of Haiti misery and poverty to enrich and bolster the global corporatocracy, NGOs and the white-supremacist narrative.

I’d use this 1852 speech by Frederick Douglass attacking US hypocrisy and false benevolence in the time of chattel slavery. Point out why the hypocrisy continues with more Black men incarcerated in the US than anywhere else in the world. Explain how the US has one of the largest prison population in the world and that the huge economic, schooling, housing, health disparities for the majority of African Americans continues unabated. I would quote this Douglas paragraph when speaking of the “swelling vanity” of the US/Clinton/Obama/Bush/Paul Farmer/UN/the NGOs and their gross injustice, cruelty and status quo crimes to which Haiti and the global south are constant victims as they profit and celebrate themselves at Harvard, the White House, et al:

“O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced…”

To the US “free trade” policymakers and neoliberalism sustainers, to
Clinton/Obama/Bush/Paul Farmer/UN and their NGOs in Haiti and elsewhere masturbating on their imposed system’s pain placed on the poor and Black in their societies and abroad, we would say, as Frederick Douglass said centuries ago of the same sort of wretched, self-serving mindsets:

“What, to (Haiti), the American slave is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals…more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which (Haiti) is the constant victim. To (Haiti), your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to (Haiti and the global south), mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.” – The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro by Frederick Douglass

I write this note in memory of Haiti’s hero of the 21st century, Emmanuel Drèd Wilmè assassinated by 1,440 UN guns on July 6, 2005 and for Haiti’s human rights icon, Lovinsky Pierre Antoine, disappeared in UN occupied Haiti, on August 12, 2008. I write this note for all the true hearts and worldwide dissenting voices to neoliberal globalization (aka global slavery) who’ve paid and are paying the price for independence, liberty, economic and social justice for all on this planet.

Ezili Dantò of HLLN
July 4, 2012

“I believe that in Haiti we see capitalism/imperialism in all its nakedness. It is the extreme of ugliness, filth, and disease.” –Dady Chery

“Haiti death and poverty is too lucrative for the Clinton corporatocracy vampires to give up without a revolutionary, impossible-to-ignore-world-demand” –Ezili Dantò

Haiti: Until she spoke, “no Christian nation had abolished Negro slavery…Until she spoke, the slave ship, followed by hungry sharks, greedy to devour the dead and dying slaves flung overboard to feed them, ploughed in peace the South Atlantic, painting the sea with the Negro’s blood. Until she spoke, the slave trade was sanctioned by all the Christian nations of the world, and our land of liberty and light included.” –Frederick Douglass

“End the US occupation of Haiti behind UN guns, NOW!
The Haitian parliament must void the illegal status of force (SOFA) agreement immediately. The SOFA agreement allowing UN/MINUSTAH into Haiti was signed by defacto Gerald Latortue in 2004, a career UN-employee, binding a Haitian nation that did not elect him.” –Ezili Dantò

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Forwarded by Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network
Join the Ezili Network Listserve
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MORE BACKGROUND INFO, TWEETS AND FACEBOOK posts

Emmanuel Drèd Wilmè

Emmanuel Drèd Wilmè, the most hunted Black man in Haiti stood up against the US occupation behind UN mercenary guns in 2004 for 17-months. He was assassinated when the new Rochambeau/US troops -the UN multinational guns – sent in 1,440 troops, drop bombs from the sky and pumped in 22,000 bullets into the sleeping shanty town of Site Solèy on the night of July 6, 2005.

This July, Ezili HLLN remembers and honors the life of the Haiti hero for the 21st century, Emmanuel Drèd Wilmè.

Before he was assassinated, Ezili’s HLLN sounded the alarm, to stop the summary execution of this outgunned lone Black man by the most powerful super-army on planet earth. We were the only international human rights voice consistently urging, on behalf of Emmanuel Drèd Wilmè, that all human beings have a right to self-defense and justice. In the end, this lone Black Haitian man, leading his community of 450,000 poor residents of the 33 sections of Site Solèy fell under a hail of UN bullets. No one put a stop to the western crucifixion of Drèd Wilmè.

As usual the terrified schooled Haitians, could not utter his name without
parroting their colonial masters’ vilification of Drèd Wilmè as a chimère
or bandit, just as they did during the first occupation to Charlemagne
Peralte.

On April 21, 2005 before Drèd Wilmè’s execution by UN troops, we wrote:

“Every time the U.S. enters Haiti militarily, whether in 1915, 1994, or 2004, the public pretext for intervention has generally been to bring stability, democracy and development.

Most of the bourgeoisie and schooled Haitians, I say “schooled” Haitians
because it’s an insult to people with wisdom to label the bulk of the Haitian bourgeoisie or schooled Haitians as intellectuals. The point is, most of the bourgeoisie and schooled Haitians always swallow and adapt to foreign intervention because, they argue, the U.S./UN or Western powers will bring development – electricity, schools, roads, communications, – for instance as in 2004, $1 billion dollars – money to Haiti that would benefit the nation as a whole.

It didn’t happen between 1915 through 1934; it didn’t happen in 1994, and, U.N./U.S. presence in Haiti in 2004 have certainly not brought Haiti
electricity, a living wage, more schools, jobs, or an improvement with the
multinational corporate monopolies unfairly affecting indigenous Haitian
businesses. The first thing the U.S. soldiers did when they got to Haiti on
February 29, 2004 was to take over a medical school and turn it into army
barracks and a prison and allow the demobilized soldiers to enter
Port-au-Prince, release all the prisoners at the National Penitentiary and
start the wholesale slaughter of all supporters of the ousted Constitutional
government.” –Ezili Dantò of HLLN, The Crucifixion of Emmanuel “Drèd” Wilmè by U.N. Troops: A historical perspective, April 21, 2005

The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro by Frederick Douglass

HLLN Recommended Links to honor Drèd Wilmè on July 6 (FreeHaitiMovement)

Ask Haitians whether voters or big business chose their singing president
Multinationals, not nation states, now rule

“The Problem is Exclusion: the Solution is Inclusion” – Haiti: the Next
Round

“Addicted to power and white privilege in poor countries, the large NGOs are funded mostly to make way for the imperialist and global corporatocracy stealing natural resources, destroying , for instance, Haiti’s food sovereignty, water, public health, democratic governance. All, the better to make a market and jobs for foreigners, their vaccines, fertilizers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals behind the mask of development.” (Haiti: A time bomb which must be defused immediately )

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” —- Lilla Watson,  Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s

Haiti oil, mineral wealth, use of Haiti lands (to counter Cuba/Venezuela), use of Haiti misery & poverty to enrich NGOs and US corporatocracy, along w/strategic resource and geographic location, are the economic and political reason for the US occupation behind UN mercenary guns.–Ezili Dantò

Follow Ezili Dantò on twitter and Facebook

Ezili Facebook post and tweets this week:

Destroy Haiti fledgling participatory democracy then bring in US occupation behind UN guns and de-legitimized US-run elections as solution –Ezili Dantò

Destroy Haiti agriculture, then bring in Monsanto death seeds and more
subsidized US food imports as solution –Ezili Dantò

Destroy fertile land up north to build sweatshop factories that will pollute
the Trou du Nord river along with one of the few remaining mangrove areas of the country as a solution. –Herman Duquerronette

Destroy Haiti already fragile clean water system with UN-cholera, then bring in 10-year international privatization solution headed by US, UN, PAHO, WB, IMF and IDB  –Ezili Dantò

Destroy already fragile #Haiti clean water with UN-cholera, then bring in Paul Farmer big-pharmaceutical (ineffective vaccines) as solution –Ezili Dantò

Destroy state-owned Haiti enterprises with Bill Clinton privatization, then
bring NGO charitable industry to provide more inadequate public service to Haitians –Ezili Dantò

Haiti privatization and return to legal disenfranchisement of the masses began in earnest with Bill Clinton government’s privatization conditions for Aristide’s one-year return in 1994 –Ezili Dantò

US occupation under UN mercenary guns brought deregulation/ privatization guru, Bill Clinton, as humanitarian to privatize (open) Haiti for mining, Monsanto, NGOs, big oil.–Ezili Dantò

Bill Clinton returned Aristide for one year to more quickly privatize and
re-image the bloody Duvalierists as legitimate representatives of masses in Haiti.–Ezili Dantò

Western use of the international corporate media and respected human rights organizations, helped to demonize Haiti’s Constitutional government from 1994 to 2004. This Clinton-Bush-US/Euro cooptation led to the bicentennial coup d’etat and current US occupation behind UN guns. Total deregulation/privatization, on all fronts, ensued. Haiti is most privatized country in the world. No public service nor the one-person-one-vote is deemed a human right for Haitians. Haiti’s re-enslavement is hidden behind the new Haiti Affranchis (Haitian American/Diaspora collaborators), the UN’s reputation as human rights icons and Hollywood celebrity colonialism brainwash.

Shock-Doctrine Schooling in Haiti: Neoliberalism Off the Richter Scale

NGOs make way 4 imperialist 2steal natural resources,destroy #Haiti food sovereignty,water,public health,democratic gov http://bit.ly/GTBHao

#Haiti gold worth estimated $20bn.US-installed Martelly gov recently negotiated royalty rate 2.5% on Haiti gold,lowest rate in hemisphere

Haiti gold – Royalty rate (2.5) on Haiti gold, worth an estimated $20bn, is the lowest in hemisphere. http://bit.ly/Nn47fl

Destroy state-owned enterprises w/Clinton privatization then bring
NGOcharitable industry 2 provide more inadequate public service 2 #Haiti

Clinton administration used Aristide’s return 2 re-image Duvalierists (they even tried re-imaging bloody Toto Constant-FRAPH )as civil society–Ezili Dantò

US-UN occupation brought deregulation/privatization guru,BillClinton, as humanitarian 2 privatize(open) #Haiti 4mining,Monsanto,NGOs,big oil

We’ve become what we hate:Why I left America:here=a multi-party parliament,not just Tweedle-dum &Tweedle-dee http://bit.ly/LQjQ6z

“It’s one thing to be proud of an accomplishment, such as reducing the amount of homelessness by constructing homes—but it is irresponsible and criminal to attack, forcefully evict, and destroy thousands of shelters consisting of battered tents and tarps, then brag internationally about seeing a reduction in the levels of visible homelessness. Yet this is exactly what is happening right now in Haiti.” ( Behind the Numbers: Haiti’s Homeless Population Drops)

Haiti: Where Has All the Money ($6 billion collected earthquake dollars) Gone?

Haiti: Humanitarian Aid for Earthquake Victims Used to Build Five Star Hotels

Published on Apr 12, 2012 by frantzetienne1

Mouvman Pou Libète Ak Egalite Tout Ayisyen , ( MOLEGHAF) Etranje yo ak doub nasyonalite pran yo peyi a ann otaj , koripsyon , trafik dwog , ensekirite , nèg ame k ap taye banda yo nan peyi a, Pandan plizyè milye moun kontinye ap viv nan kondisyon kote bèt pa ta dwe ap viv , nan kan yo ak nan katye popilè yo .

Negosyasyon , konpwomisyon , magouy ap fèt adwat agoch sou do mas yo , kote plizyè milyon dola ap brase e y ap toufe pèp la ak manti , blòf elatriye .

MOLEGHAF ap makonmen vwa l ak tout lòt òganizasyon popilè , pwogresis ak pèp ayisyen an pou Declare anbasadè Etazini an , Kenneth Merten pèsona non grata .

Fòk Kenneth Merten rache manyòk li bay bout tè papa Dessaline te mouri kite pou nou an blanch

Fòk tout etranje ki nan tèt peyi a retounen lakay yo . Konstitisyon 1987 la klèsous a , etranje pa ladan l .

Pou n mete etranje yo deyò nan tèt peyi a , pou kenneth Merten al fè wout li , bay ayisyen lape l . MOLEGHAF ak plizyè lòt òganizaasyon konsekan pra l òganize yon sitin devan anbasad Etazini , ki chita nan taba , pou n al Declare Kenneth Merten pèsona non grata ak katon wouj . N ap tann tout militant konsekan yo

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Forwarded by Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network
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17-months later… The best that can be done by the NGO/UN/USAID plunderers, thieves and demons feeding on Haiti’s pains.

UN-Paul Farmer’s new Tuskeegee cholera experiment in Haiti begins 17-months later…http://n.pr/Irx7qD

Paul Farmer begins his vaccinations in Haiti- cholera victims as laboratory rats for Farmers’ Partners in Death, WHO and UN #Haiti rather than sustainable change in form of clean water and sanitation infrastructure…just perpetual NGO/Paul Farmer dependency continuing. Testing new products for Farmer’s next Tracey Kidder Tarzan narrative. (See below “Vaccination Against Cholera Finally Begins In Haiti : NPR”)

Ezili Dantò
Without the pen of Thomas Paine (‘Common Sense’), the sword of George Washington would have been raised in vain. –John Adams

“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” ― Malcolm X

“Recall everything I have sacrificed to fly to your defense – relatives, children, wealth, so that now the only riches I possess is your freedom. Recall that my name horrifies all those who are slavers, and that tyrants and despots everywhere only bring themselves to utter it when they curse the day I was born. Remember, if you should ever discard or forget the law that the God who watches over your well being has dictated to me for your happiness, you will deserve the fate that inures to ungrateful peoples. ” —Jean Jacques Dessalines, Haitian Act of Independence, January 1, 1804.

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Haiti: The Handwriting on the Wall for Martelly and the US

by  Jean Yves Point-du-Jour, Haiti Perspectives, Special Op-Ed written for Ezili’s HLLN, March 21, 2012

Those of us who are following daily what is happening in Haiti are deeply concerned for the future of our country. Things are going from bad to worst with a lot of signs pointing to a very bleak future.

The light after the 2010 earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince was that rebuilding would be an opportunity to change the country for good; at least that’s what many of us in the Diaspora thought was going to happen.  We were disappointed. The quake further exposed the many socio-political and economic ills ravaging the Haitian society for years.

Instead of taking action for real sustainable change, many Haitians, as well as the so-called “International Friends of Haiti,” took the  opportunity not only to conduct business as usual but to immensely take advantage of the situation.

Some enriched themselves while others cemented their influence at the expense of the people of Haiti.  Once again, due to the incompetence, the selfishness and lack of leadership of the previous Preval Administration, coupled with the economic sector, the civil society, the current vision-less political class, and a ruthless international community, particularly the Unites States, Haiti is dying slowly.

After the earthquake hit, the international community jumped into Haiti like a pack of lions attacking and devouring a zebra.  When it comes to US-Haiti relations, the Obama administration has turned over control of Haiti to U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Each time an important vote or an election is to be held, Assistant Secretary of State to Mrs Clinton, Cheryl Mills makes a one-day trip to Haiti.

Billions of dollars of aid were promised. Many donor conferences were held. A conference on reconstruction took place at the office of the Organization of American States ( OAS)  in Washington DC. Even some in the Diaspora joined the cavalry.

In order to better control the interests of the “International Friends of Haiti,” former U.S. president William Jefferson Clinton headed the international reconstruction commission. To date, millions of dollars have been spent. But the result is astonishing to everyone: over 500,ooo  earthquake victims are still living under tents, nothing has been built.

It is clear that the reconstruction commission is a total failure.

This week, it was revealed that the audit commission created by outgoing Prime Minister Gary Conille has found many irregularities in the way contracts were awarded. It must be noted that not all the pledged monies were collected.  But for every dollar the US allocated as aid to Haiti, the Haitian government received barely a penny. The majority of the money went back to the United States. Many of the other donor countries also made sure  their dollars were spent by non-governmental organizations they fund.

The United States has only one concern in Haiti: to stop the Lavalas political party from regaining political power in Haiti.

Former president, Rene Preval played the game very well for the United States. This was why Preval was so confident that Jude Celestin was going to be selected as his successor.  He managed to put aside the Fanmi Lavalas party in every election held by his government. However, his cockiness led to Michel Martelly being picked as President.

Knowing the baggage and liabilities that Martelly carries with him, it was easier for the US to settle for Martelly as opposed to Mrs. Mirlande Hyppolite Manigat whom they labeled a “nationalist”, after having eliminated all the potentially serious candidates for president.  Crippling Fanmi Lavalas is thus far the driving force behind US policy towards Haiti.

It was easy for Rene Preval to outplay Lavalas while Jean Bertrand Aritisde was not in Haiti. But since his return, things have become more complicated for United States. So, there has to be a way to get Aristide out of Haiti. That is why the issue of corruption in Teleco under the Aristide government keeps popping up.

There are even rumors circulating in the Diaspora that there are presently in Haiti, a group of special US forces developing a plan to arrest Aristide and bring him to Miami to be tried for corruption.

Do Haitians really think the US is interested in fighting corruption in Haiti? The answer is clearly “No”.  If Haitians could investigate corruption in Haiti, they would go ask Bill Clinton for an audit of the reconstruction fund that he headed; go ask Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier how the money from Teleco was used. Go ask the US why is General Proper Avril , Louis Jodel Chamblain and others roaming free in Haiti. Wasn’t Prosper Avril Baby Doc’s bagman for Teleco pillaging? Go ask the international community, especially the US through USAID, to account for how aid monies were used to destabilize the Lavalas government. Go ask those construction companies in the Dominican Republic how they have obtained millions of dollars in contracts for reconstruction.  Go ask the US Red Cross the fate of millions of dollars collected to help Haiti. Go ask USAID to perform an audit on billions of dollars given to non-governmental organizations in Haiti.

The US and the international community have no interest in a thorough, deliberate, and just review of the facts. The idea is to have democracy without the participation of the masses in order to consolidate their agenda and their grip on the country. Those who stand in the way are targeted for elimination and blackmail.

Now, comes Martelly and his Duvalierist gang.  The election of Martelly as president was a shock to many Haitians. From what his administration has done after almost one year in power, it is easy to see the development of a dictatorship in the country. The Haitian legislature is currently the only institution in the country stopping Martelly’s gang from trying to institute a dictatorship project in the country.  Martelly and his gang have no respect for any institutions in the country, especially the current legislature. Their project has been slowed down thus far by the Senate investigation of the alleged dual citizenship of Martelly.

Two weeks ago, the US Ambassador, Merten made a jerk of himself when he declared that Martelly is Haitian.

Martelly was hoping that his -tonton blan- white uncle’s words would be enough to save him and to convince Haitians that he never renounced his Haitian nationality. But each time they try to stop the issue, they add more fuel to the fire.

No one knows what the final outcome of this issue will be, nor the impact it will have on the country. What’s clear is the extent to which US policymakers will go to safeguard their interests. With the writing on the wall for Martelly – the real possibility of the re-emergence of Lavalas if elections were held again – it’s in the interests of the US to counter with the Damocles sword of prosecuting former president Aristide for corruption.  If it is in their advantage. The law can be violated, facts manufactured.

The international community did their research too on the mentality of many Haitians who firmly believe that if tonton blan says it, it must be right. For example, remember that the UN denied that soldiers from the Nepalese contingent brought the cholera in Haiti? They hired a team of researchers to refute previous findings by a team of experts.  But, two weeks ago, Bill Clinton finally admitted the Nepalese soldiers brought the epidemic to Haiti. Still, no one from MINUSTAH or  the United Nations reacted by accepting legal responsibility.  This is another testimony of the way the people of Haiti are viewed by some in the international arena.

In order for the international community, mainly the United States, to advance their agenda and maintain their iron grip on Haiti, they have to organize sham elections, have puppets everywhere in the legislature and as president.  They are getting ready to organize another sham election – an election without participation.  If things go wrong, they can always count on the OAS to come to the rescue.

Their hope is to have a legislature with Senators and Deputies that they can count on in order to maintain their agenda and not to give the president a majority in the Parliament.  There must also be a semblance of democracy by sharing the seats among many political parties.

If Famni Lavalas is in the game, there is ample fear that things may not go as planned.

So a climate of terror, fear and insecurity must be established and maintained.  Some people must be stopped from running. If they are not physically eliminated, there must be some other ways to keep them out of the race using, for example, the justice system. Or, by manipulating the  issue of the demobilized soldiers. The killings to come require a Haitian face pulling the trigger to justify the “peacekeeping” and “order” the internationals use to maintain their grip on Haiti.

How can a group of armed men invade those old barracks with uniforms and weapons without the consent and duplicity of those in power in Haiti?  Attempts to distance the US puppet Martelly government from the armed men at the barracks is an international ruse. Meanwhile, the people of Haiti continue to live in abject misery.

Each time the masses take action to come out of utter oppression, they are betrayed and pay a heavy price for the struggle to establish real and participatory democracy in the country.  But the only hope is that they never give up and come up with a counter plan to stop this madness, regain the independence of our country. Independence is the only way for real democracy to come to fruition and to be peacefully developed for all to enjoy. Haiti is not moving forward and it looks like the summer is going to be real hot.

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Jean Yves Point-du-Jour, better known as “Yves Dayiti” was born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He lives in Maryland USA and works as a transportation engineer manager. He is a broadcaster and has produced and hosted the Haiti radio program, “Konbit Lakay” in Washington, D.C.  for over 28  years.

(c) 2012 Haiti Perspectives, ezilidanto.com/zili

Permission to republish and circulate is granted provided all reprints are a verbatim copy of the article in its entirety, respecting its integrity as it appears on this website. Reprints must cite Jean Yves Point-du-Jour as the author and the site ezilidanto.com/zili as the original source including a “live link” to the article.

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Background information

The tip of the iceberg. This video gives some hint on what foreign governments upholding Martelly could use to blackmail Haiti further into denying its people’s own  interests: Duvalierist Michel Martelly explains his career as an outlaw and crack addict.

Michel Martelly: “Once you go Crack, I hear you don’t come back”

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“Photo Credit – OAS”

The year 2012 began with a degree of promise and optimism that Jean Claude Duvalier would finally stand trial for his role in committing crimes against humanity and for embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from Haiti’s treasury. Such a trial would be the most significant human rights proceeding in Haitian history. It has the potential to end a long era of impunity, improve the performance of Haiti’s judiciary, and deliver justice to the hundreds of thousands who were victims of the former “President-for-life.” Nearly four months later, the pursuit of Duvalier for human rights abuses has stalled and the media spotlight has shifted, notwithstanding piles of documentary evidence, direct testimony of victims, and forensic financial audits submitted to the Haitian courts.

Haiti has an obligation under numerous international treaties it has signed to try Duvalier for crimes against humanity. But in late January, Judge Carves Jean announced that Duvalier will only face trial for charges of embezzlement. According to the January 25 Miami Herald, “lawyers estimated that Haiti’s former dictator embezzled at least a half-billion dollars through an elaborate scheme of false companies, phony charities, and transfers in the name of friends and family.”

While this miscarriage of justice is currently occurring in Haiti, the United States is busy resuscitating its worn and failed case against another former Haitian President. On March 13, the Miami Herald ran an article titled “Miami Bribery Probe Zeroes in on Haiti’s Ex-Leader Aristide.” The emergence of this latest case is significant, as it is a key step in the revival of a long and failed history of attempting to frame Jean Bertrand Aristide. It also raises the question why the United States is all but silent on Duvalier, yet wastes hardly any time in bringing charges against Aristide?

The truth is that the United States has never stopped trying to go after Aristide, and on the other hand has never applied any pressure for Duvalier to face trial for his numerous abuses. This most recent attempt comes after a long series of failed attempts of bringing charges against Aristide in relation to human rights abuses, drug trafficking, and embezzlement.

For example, in November 2005, 21 months after the second coup d’état against Aristide, the illegal regime of Gérard Latortue presented a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) lawsuit in a U.S. court, accusing Aristide of corruption and the embezzlement of tens of millions of dollars. The case was later withdrawn, but it succeeded in damaging the reputation of Aristide.

Aristide’s former security chief, Oriel Jean, has also revealed to the weekly newspaper Haiti Liberté that during his brief detainment in Canada in mid 2004 for travelling to the country without a visa, “the U.S. government offered him many incentives to testify against Aristide, to say that Aristide was somehow involved in drug trafficking.”

Aristide’s present accuser is Patrick Joseph, the former director of TELECO, the former state telephone company. The Miami Herald reported that “According to the indictment, Official B and senior officials of Haiti Teleco, the telecommunications company owned by Haiti’s Central Bank, allegedly received payments totaling about $2.3 million from Miami businesses Cinergy Telecommunications and Uniplex Telecom Technologies.”
“Photo Credit – Wall Street Journal”

In June 2003, Aristide fired Joseph from his position due to issues of corruption within TELECO. Last month Joseph negotiated a guilty plea with U.S. federal prosecutors for accepting $2.3 million in bribes from U.S. companies which fell under the Haitian anti-bribery laws and the statute of U.S. wire fraud. He currently faces a maximum sentence of 20 years. It has come as no surprise that he agreed to co-operate with the Department of Justice in order to receive a lesser sentence. Joseph’s plea deal can be accessed here.

According to Miami laywer David Weintsein, the current chief of narcotics in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, “There is no doubt that Official B is Aristide based on the language in the indictment.”

Aristide’s lawyer, Ira Kurzban, told the Herald, “In the end, there is not a shred of evidence in the indictment that Aristide did anything corrupt except uncorroborated testimony of a person who is an admitted corrupter and criminal.”

In addition to bringing another well U.S.-funded case against Aristide, such a movement shifts attention away from the important embezzlement case against Duvalier and accompanying calls for the charges of crimes against humanity to be reintroduced. It also reveals the dangerous double standard that the United States has in its relentless pursuit of Aristide, on the one hand, and its blatant disinterest in Duvalier, on the other.

In response to the new case against Aristide, Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote on March 13 that “The U.S. government has spent millions and possibly tens of millions of dollars trying to railroad Haiti’s former president. On behalf of U.S. taxpayers, we could use a Congressional inquiry into this abuse of our tax dollars. It also erodes what we have left of an independent judiciary to have federal courts in Florida used as an instrument of foreign policy skullduggery.”

As previously stated, the trial of Duva­lier has the potential to be the most sig­nif­i­cant human rights case in Hait­ian his­tory—but the total absence of U.S. and other international assistance to the Haitian judiciary in prosecuting a case is damning. The U.S. obsession to contain Aristide in exile, or incarcerate him in the United States on corruption charges speaks volumes about their unease with him physically being in Haiti. Even Aristide’s lack of involvement in politics constitutes a threat to the interests of the United States. He has since reopened his University of the Aristide Foundation—which was shut down after the 2004 coup—and will continue to train medical doctors at no cost. In comparison, Jean Claude Duvalier has left a long trail of Swiss bank accounts, Ferraris, Miami condos, and jewellery abroad, and is now routinely breaking his house arrest and dining in expensive restaurants in Pétionville, an upscale suburb of Port-au-Prince. It is because of such flagrant abuse of human rights and interference in internal Haitian affairs that Aristide remains a powerful symbol for the broader fight for social justice in Haiti, and thus remains a thorn in the side of the United States and others who wish to profit off of Haiti’s status quo.

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Posted on Sat, Mar. 03, 2012

Miami bribery probe zeroes in on Haiti’s ex-leader Aristide

BY JACQUELINE CHARLES AND JAY WEAVER
jweaver@MiamiHerald.com

AP

In this Jan. 15, 2010 file photo former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is seen during a press conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. Aristide says he is planning to return from exile soon, sparking trepidition and joy in his homeland.

Former Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is once again in the cross hairs of the U.S. government, this time for allegedly pocketing millions of dollars in bribes from Miami businesses that brokered long-distance phone deals with Haiti’s government-owned telecommunications company, according to court records and legal sources.Aristide is not identified by name in a recent federal indictment charging four South Florida business people and two former Haitian government officials. But defense attorneys say “Official B” referenced in the corruption- and money-laundering indictment is indeed the ex-president.

According to the indictment, Official B and senior officials of Haiti Teleco, the telecommunications company owned by Haiti’s Central Bank, allegedly received payments totaling about $2.3 million from Miami businesses Cinergy Telecommunications and Uniplex Telecom Technologies. The businesses are accused of using “shell” companies to kick back the money to those officials.

Aristide’s lawyer, Ira Kurzban, declined to comment about the Justice Department’s investigation because the ex-president hasn’t been charged with any crime. But, Kurzban said: “I view this as part of the same smear campaign that the United States has orchestrated against Aristide since he was first elected in 1990.”

The indictment alleges that the bribes were passed to Aristide via “Company A,” a reference to Digitek, a suspected front owned by Aristide’s brother-in-law, Lesly Lavelanet. He could not be reached for comment at his Coral Springs home.

Since an earlier related indictment was returned by a federal grand jury in 2009, a dozen South Florida business people and Haitian officials have been charged in the high-profile case, alleging the payment of kickbacks in exchange for discounted long-distance phone rates. Profits from those lower rates were pocketed by the Haitian officials — not the government’s phone company. So far, seven of those defendants have been convicted of corruption or money laundering, including Patrick Joseph, who pleaded guilty in February to accepting bribes. Joseph is cooperating with Justice Department lawyers and is a crucial witness in the investigation of Aristide, according to sources familiar with the case.

Joseph, who served as Aristide’s director general of Haiti Teleco in March 2001 to June 2003, has told U.S. authorities that he shared some of those kickbacks with the former president, the sources said. Joseph’s father, Venel Joseph, appointed by Aristide, was the governor of the Bank of Haiti, the central bank, during that period and is referenced in the indictment as “Official A.’’

The Central Bank was used to distribute the kickbacks paid by the Miami businesses, the indictment says.

Patrick Joseph’s Miami attorneys, Guy Lewis and Richard Dansoh, declined to comment. Justice Department officials also would not comment.

At Joseph’s plea hearing last month, a prosecutor said “half” — or $1 million — of the alleged kickbacks were “intended” for “Official B, an official in the executive branch of the Haitian government.”

“In exchange for these bribes, Official B and Joseph provided Uniplex and Cinergy with various business advantages, including an exclusive agreement to market certain calling cards at a favorable rate,” Justice Department lawyer James Koukios said in court.

“In addition, Joseph was aware of and agreed that additional bribe payments to Official B would be laundered through Company A,” Koukios said, without mentioning Digitek by name.

The revelation that federal officials are still pursuing Aristide, years after a U.S. grand jury investigation failed to nab him on drug-trafficking and money-laundering allegations, comes at a politically charged time in Haiti.

Haitian media reported last week that President Michel Martelly’s government had indicted Aristide for corruption and drug trafficking during his rule, immediately triggering anger among his supporters. Haiti’s justice minister told The Miami Herald the reports were false.

Still, thousands marched through the streets of Haiti’s capital Wednesday, singing pro-Aristide slogans while bashing Martelly, to mark the eighth anniversary of Aristide’s ouster from power on Feb. 29, 2004. The demonstration — the biggest anti-Martelly protest since he came to power in May — showed that Aristide still enjoys a measure of popularity. He returned to Haiti from South Africa last March over the strong objections of the Obama administration.

Before it was privatized last year at the behest of the U.S. government, Haiti Teleco was a corruption-plagued, money-losing company that fueled the bank accounts of its executives. Fewer than 2 percent of Haitians had service from its landline monopoly, but it had a lucrative long-distance business. After the January 2010 earthquake, the company finally got a lifeline when a firm named Viettel, run by Vietnam’s military, bought a major stake in the entity, reducing Haiti’s shares to 40 percent.

The controversy over Haiti Teleco’s corrupt past will play out again Monday, when a former senior executive, Jean René Duperval, faces trial on money-laundering charges in Miami federal court as part of the initial indictment. He is accused of receiving bribes from the same Miami businesses.

The trial of Duperval, Haiti Teleco’s former director of international relations, highlights the Justice Department’s persistence in pursuing the bribery case and Aristide.

Some question the zeal. But Alex Dupuy, a sociology professor at Wesleyan University who has written about the two-time ex-president, said “if they have solid evidence of his involvement in bribery or other criminal activities, they should indict him and bring him to justice.”

The U.S. government may be sending a signal to Aristide, called Titid by his admirers, to think twice about trying to re-enter the political scene, observers said.

“The display of popular support for Aristide is very worrisome to the U.S., so indicting Titid before a potential comeback makes perfect sense,” said Robert Fatton, a Haiti expert at the University of Virginia.

Still, unless the Justice Department has an air-tight case, arresting Aristide could have volatile consequences, observers said.

Corruption and drug-trafficking charges have long dogged Aristide.

Haiti’s interim government produced four blistering reports from two government investigative commissions, alleging he had embezzled more than $20 million of his country’s meager public funds.

But the Haitian government’s financial watchdog agency could not prove the allegations. Also, a civil lawsuit filed in Miami by the interim government, gained no traction.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors investigated Aristide for allegedly accepting bribes from drug traffickers. But they could not make their case because of a lack of financial documents to back up convicted cocaine kingpin Jacques Ketant’s accusations, according to sources familiar with that probe.

Now, the mere mention of Aristide as Official B in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act indictment filed by the Justice Department in January marks the first time he has been implicated in the U.S. bribery investigation into Haiti’s state-owned telecommunications company.

From 2001 to 2004, “Official B was an official in the executive branch of the Haitian government,” says the indictment, describing the exact period of Aristide’s second term as president.“I am led to believe that Official B is the former president of Haiti, Aristide,” said veteran Miami criminal defense attorney Joel Hirschhorn, who represents Cinergy and two of its executives in the case.

“There is no doubt that Official B is Aristide based on the language in the indictment,” said Miami lawyer David Weinstein, who was the chief of narcotics in the U.S. Attorney’s Office during the past decade. He and other prosecutors won convictions against several Haitian government and police officials for accepting payoffs from drug traffickers, who used the country to ship cocaine to the United States.

But Weinstein cautioned that the Justice Department will face daunting challenges in making a money-laundering case against Aristide, even if the cooperating witness, Joseph, points investigators in the right direction.

There is a looming deadline in the probe because of the statute of limitations. Also crucial: Internal Revenue Service agents must find bank or financial records to show that Aristide received payments, if he did.

“Without someone producing a picture of him taking the money or agents uncovering a bank account directly linking him to payments, they are going to have a hard time building a case to win a conviction,” Weinstein said.

Last week, Hirschhorn succeeded in getting Cinergy dismissed as a defendant before Monday’s trial.

“My clients’ dealings with Haiti Teleco were perfectly legitimate,” said Hirschhorn, who added that Cinergy’s top executives, now fugitives in Brazil, only met Aristide once for a brief moment. “They helped Haiti Teleco get through some very difficult and trying times.”

The slaying of a former director of the Haitian Central Bank in Port-au-Prince last week might at first seem like a random event in a violent country. But the shooting of Venel Joseph at the wheel of his car looks more like a hit job. It comes just days after the Miami Herald reported that Joseph’s son, Patrick Joseph, is a key witness in a federal bribery case in Miami involving alleged kickbacks paid by American telecom companies to Haitian officials. The younger Joseph, according to Herald sources, has fingered former Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide as one of those officials.

The indictment doesn’t name Mr. Aristide. But the Herald reported that lawyers familiar with the case said that an unnamed individual in the document—”Official B”—is “indeed the ex-president.” The Justice Department alleged in court that “Official B” and Patrick Joseph, who is a former director general of the government telecom monopoly Haiti Teleco, received kickbacks from U.S. companies in exchange for favorable pricing when terminating calls in Haiti. Mr. Joseph has pleaded guilty to taking bribes and is cooperating with Justice, according to the Herald article.

It is a case that ought to interest Americans, and not only because it means Mr. Aristide—who was, according to a detailed lawsuit filed by Haiti in civil court in South Florida in 2005, a notoriously corrupt strongman—might be brought to justice. That would be a step toward ending impunity in Haiti, which in turn would be good for political stability and for U.S. security interests in the hemisphere. Mr. Aristide’s American lawyer, Ira Kurzban, told the Herald that there is “not one shred of evidence” against his client in the indictment.

Associated Press

Jean Bertrand Aristide

But for Americans there may be another even more important reason to pay attention: It is possible that by getting to the bottom of how Haiti Teleco operated during the Aristide years, investigators will finally uncover the details of the arrangement that Fusion Telecommunications—run by former Democratic Party Finance Chairman Marvin Rosen with Joseph P. Kennedy II and numerous influential Democrats on the board—had in Haiti during the Clinton years. That would be edifying, given how Bill Clinton inexplicably tolerated Mr. Aristide’s despotism even after the U.S. had restored him to power in 1994.

Back in those days, Haitians working for Teleco whispered to me of an alleged kickback scheme. Teleco was one of the few sources of hard currency for the country and they charged that the deal between Fusion and Mr. Aristide meant that the company was being looted. They claimed that Fusion had an office inside Teleco, was getting access to the Teleco network at a big discount, and was paying Mr. Aristide in return.

But there was no transparency at Teleco, and these brave patriots were afraid to go public with what they knew. It was only after Mr. Aristide was pushed from power by a popular revolt in February 2004 that the interim government could confirm that the company had been cleaned out.

In the fall of 2004 I was approached by Michael Jewett, a former telecom executive at New Jersey-based IDT. He alleged that he had been fired from the company for objecting to a bribery scheme similar to the one that had been described to me by Haitians regarding Fusion. He had filed a wrongful dismissal case that alleged that he was told to put payments in an offshore account for the benefit of Mr. Aristide. Federal Communications Commission records proved that Teleco had indeed given IDT a 66% discount to the official rate, but Mr. Jewett was never able to prove that Mr. Aristide was the beneficiary of the offshore account. IDT denied wrongdoing and eventually settled with him out of court.

That case prompted me to ask the FCC for copies of Fusion’s contracts. I was told that the file had disappeared from its record room. When the FCC asked carriers to send duplicates, Fusion said hurricanes had destroyed many of its records, and it produced only one document. Then it went to court to block me from seeing it. I used the Freedom of Information Act to prevail and learned that in 1999 Teleco had given Fusion a rate of 12 cents per minute when the official rate was 50 cents.

Joseph P. Kennedy II wrote in a letter published by the Journal that he was “not aware” of any wrongdoing on the part of Fusion. The company has long maintained its innocence, and it has not been charged. But the Justice Department now alleges in its indictment that other companies that received discounts paid kickbacks to get them.

Patrick Joseph could be the best hope that Haitians have of getting to the truth about Mr. Aristide and his American business partners. But sources say the former Teleco executive still has relatives in Haiti. If he fears for them, he could clam up. That would be one explanation for his father’s murder.

Write to O’Grady@wsj.com

“Generals, officers, soldiers: differing from him by whom I was preceded, the ex-general Toussaint L’Ouverture, I have been faithful to the promise which I made you when I took up arms against tyranny, and as long as I live I will keep my oath. Never shall a colonist or a European set foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor. This resolution shall henceforth form the fundamental basis of our Constitution...” – Jean Jacques Dessalines (Janjak Desalin), Haiti’s founding father, Declaration of Independence,  January 1, 1804

Bill Clinton – Slick Willy’s – recent and sudden admission that a UN soldier brought cholera to Haiti and the UN’s apparent strategic denial

:::::::: Bill Clinton admits UN brought cholera to Haiti. Sidesteps UN accountability, blaming the disease on Haiti. Haiti raped again. It went from zero cholera cases to highest cholera rate in the world as the “charitable” foreign NGOs flourish behind guarded high gates. Poverty pimps living off the blood, gore and suffering. Lol, lol, lol — they laugh on. Almost every other week, there’s a report of a UN “peacekeeper” sodomizing Haiti boys. ::::::::

On March 7, 2012 Aljazeera uploaded a video where Al Jazeera’s Kristen Saloomey interviews one of the UN-commissioned scientists from the UN independent panel who  investigated the source of the cholera outbreak. Their report was issued May 5, 2011. But one of the authors, Danielle Lantagne of the UN panel of experts, told Aljazeera that new information has since come to light.  Lantagne said, “based on the summation of the circumstantial and scientific evidence, the most likely scenario is that someone associated with the  UN-MINUSTAH facility was the person responsible.”

Also, on March 7, 2012, via twitter, independent journalist, Ansel Herz, reported that United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, acknowledged the role U.N. peacekeepers played in importing the deadly outbreak of cholera to Haiti. Anzel Herz  caught the Clinton admission on tape. Local Haiti journalists and radio was also abuzz with the news.

Clinton was asked after a hospital tour in Haiti if he agreed with a statement by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, about holding accountable those who brought cholera to Haiti

Citing Herz’s reporting, ABC news wrote that Bill Clinton said, “I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the U.N. peacekeeper, or [U.N.] soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus… it was the proximate cause of cholera. That is, he was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians.”

UN Imported Cholera in Mirebalais: The hard reality of ill and discombobulated adults reduced to infancy

^{Ezili Dantò visiting cholera patients. Mirebalais, Haiti. August 11, 2011. Photo credits: Jean Ristil Jean Baptise, HLLN}

^{The indignity of the illness is almost, if not more horrible, than the physical pain. Family members do not get their love ones’ bodies back from the morgue. The dead are buried in mass graves in special plastic cholera body bags. USAID ordered 200,000 body bags at the beginning of the outbreak, spending more monies with US firms providing these death bags than in providing purified clean drinking water or guaranteeing the UN troops disease carriers. (More photos on HLLN delegation visit.)
**********************************************}

Shifting blame off the UN, Clinton went on to say that, “what really caused it is that you don’t have a sanitation system, you don’t have a comprehensive water system…”

The ABC article, quotes U.N. spokesperson Kieran Dwyer sidestepping from the Clinton admission saying that “President Clinton… emphasized the importance of focusing on improving Haiti’s sanitation system and the fact that the United Nations and others are working hard to do this.”

Since these reports surfaced certain foreign pundits, have jumped to proclaim essentially that progress is being made toward the Haiti cholera victim getting justice, applauding Bill Clinton for his admissions, not inquiring about the “new information” referred to by Danielle Lantagne of the UN panel of experts, or relied upon by Clinton. When and how did it become available? Doesn’t the Haitian public have a right to all the facts about this contagious disease infecting over 5% of the Haitian population?

It’s like watching an accident happen in slow motion.

Like when the earthquake happened and battle-worn Haitians knew the US-UN and their “charitable” industry would take the opportunity to keep the billions collected, let the poor die, while clearing the land the slave-making Western countries been coveting for centuries in Haiti (for adding more dependency, more foreign hotels, resorts, one or two hospitals and schools and such, not accountable to the island people of Haiti). The earthquake is an opportunity, like the imported UN-cholera to pass through tyrannical US privatization policies and profit-over-people cruelties beyond imagination that they’ve been unable to get through for decades since the first US occupation of Haiti (1915 to 1934).

The grasping institutions, left after the 19-year US first occupation to carry through neocolonialism in Haiti finally broke with demobilization of the Haitian army and popular election of Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1990.

A US-supported coup d’etat under Bush the father, took out Aristide months later. Former President Bill Clinton returned Aristide in 1994 to further stop the Lavalas popular movement, stop the flow of refugees, and most importantly to help re-image the Duvalierist thugs, thieves, local repugnant Oligarchs, suited tonton macoutes and neocolonial opportunists as “civil society” and/or impartial US trained “technocrats.”

On the second anniversary of the earthquake, commenting on the rape of Haiti since Bush-the-son completed his father’s return of the Duvalierist with the 2004 Bush regime change that took down the second term in office of President Aristide and deported him to Africa, Glen Ford from the Black Agenda Report, wrote:

“The horrific squandering of Haitian lives and earthquake relief and aid dollars by the occupying powers over the past two years are direct consequences of previous imperial crimes. ‘Since 2004, Haiti has been methodically stripped of its sovereignty, made into a protectorate of the United Nations,’ which is merely a front for the United States. ‘The earthquake of January 2010 was a natural phenomenon that happened to take place while a rape was in progress.’” (Haiti, Raped by the U.S. Since 2004, and Still Bleeding by Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report.)

Paul Farmer and Bill Clinton as UN Special Envoys to Haiti

With US key stakeholders like Paul Farmer and Bill Clinton as UN Special Envoys to Haiti (coming on board in 2009 shortly after the devastating Gonaives hurricanes and floods), another layer of US authority in Haiti was added that served the multiple purposes of: 1) putting a U.S. public face to the UN mission in Haiti, 2) using the international reputations of Farmer and Clinton to temper widespread Haiti criticism, claims against the UN peacekeepers for the sexual abuse of minors and public executions of unarmed civilians,  4) supplanting the spokesperson role of the Brazilian command in Haiti,  as well as 5)  hoodwinking the easily fooled, paid-to-lose-US-progressives. Add UN criminal negligence for  importing the most virulent cholera bacteria to the Western Hemisphere into Haiti and the destruction of Haitian lives since 2004 has reached genocidal proportions.

As in the days of Western slavery on the Island and the first US occupation, Haitians are again disposable, prohibited the rights and obligations of self-defense and no rights the UN, US and their NGOs and private sectors will respect. White privilege, apartheid and racism reigns. The former slave-holding powers in the West and the UN Security Council that serves them are the biggest purveyors of impunity, violence, poverty, Clorox hunger, disease, human rights abuses, dictatorship, drug trafficking, human trafficking and apartheid in Haiti.

In just one year-and-a-half, more Haitians have been infected (526,000) with the deadly  foreign bio-germ than were killed (30,000 to 100,000) under the combined thirty-year rule of Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier (1957 to 1986).

The largest political party has been excluded from the polls since the 2004 US regime change in Haiti. (Haiti, Raped by the U.S. Since 2004, and Still Bleeding.)

But hey, it’s like that old Kreyòl saying about Jews – se lan jwèt ou batize yon Jwif – it’s only in jest you’ll manage to convert a Jew. That’s dark Kreyòl humor about how hard it is to convert a Jew to Christianity – one has to make it a game, fool the person so that submersion in the waters of Christianity happens before the person really knows what’s going on. Meaning, in this context,  Haitians would never so easily or consciously allow what’s happening today in Haiti, if it wasn’t hidden behind the abominable gleeful music of Michel (or is it Michael?) Martelly’s porn presidency and UN/Bill Clinton/Paul Farmer’s slick false international benevolence chords, strummed heavily in donor aid dollars, mixed with the heady cocktail of Washington’s approval.

Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, the OAS and even CARICOM, decreed the court jester, Michel Martelly as Haiti’s true president. Lawlessness under an election facade, band music, celebrity adrenaline – no veil needed. The US Ambassador recently decreed Michel Martelly is Haitian to stop a Parliamentary commission investigating strong evidence of his alleged American citizenship.

“Li se Ayisyen, li pa Meriken” said the US Ambassador Merten, despite eyewitnesses testifying to seeing Martelly in the US passport line upon landing at the Haitian airport. Of course, one wonders where the Haiti electoral commission charged with vetting candidates was when Martelly was a running for office and why these Senators didn’t object then?

Then again, nothing has been Constitutional in Haiti since the US-UN occupation began in 2004.

This passport fury is mostly theater. Distracting from the pillage of Haiti oil, natural resources, wealth and lands that goes on unabated, the billions in donor dollars to international NGOs for Haiti relief and recovery, unaccounted for.

Photo by Kesler Pierre

Guns rule behind Santa Clinton’s white hairs and skinny Paul Farmers’ all pervasive praying mantis NGOs. Haiti swarmed and stung to death, again and again. It’s the NGO republic of the world. Haiti’s reality is what they and their USAID NGOs say it is. Indigenous Haitians who refuse to be pimped-out by the right or left wing missionaries from abroad are simply stepped over, co-opted, marginalized or destroyed.

Meanwhile, distasteful Haitian men and ridiculous Haiti women laugh and party at the palace with bad-boy Sean Penn, raunchy socialite Kim Kardashian or on luxurious cruise ships at carnival in Au Cayes. More than 500,000 earthquake victims remain homeless, the national palace still, tilting over, left in disrepair. Garbage mix with earthquake rubble on the Port au Prince streets, Clorox hunger ravages empty stomachs, the rainy season overflow rivers contaminated with UN cholera, blows tents and tart shelters into mud, people still drinking UN feces-laced river and ground water, dying, dying.

Haiti went from having zero cholera cases to the highest cholera rate in the world as the “charitable” foreign NGOs flourish behind guarded high gates. Poverty pimps living off the blood, gore and suffering. Lol, lol, lol – they laugh on. Practically every other week, there’s an international report of UN peacekeepers molesting and raping Haiti boys.

More notably, there’s no Haiti Parliamentary commission outraged and investigating, attempting to prioritize or protect Haiti’s most valuable treasure -  its women and children.

This wrenching travesty, crushing anguish and horrific darkness visited upon a defenseless and humble Haiti peasantry and abandoned city residents with no antibodies to combat such demonic imported and local carnage is led forth behind two UN-US spokesmen and their reputed worldwide “good works.”

Truth, in a time of universal deceit

When Haitians give the coming retribution, I’d like to be alive when that justice day arrives.

To paraphrase George Orwell, in this time before justice comes, in this time when Haitians like me with passports but little institutional power  and no financial support, in this “time of  universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

The truth is that in this most difficult of Avatar times for Haiti, a celebrated Harvard doctor (the ultimate Jake Sully of our times) and a Yale lawyer known in his US administration for authoring “plausible deniability” – like “I did not sleep with that woman” helped to bring back US Duvalierist agents to power, helped to cover the pillage of Haiti’s natural resources irrespective of environmental harms behind UN/international guns, continues his Arkansas cronies’ greed with unfair trades. Tossed in a bio-germ that’s killing in genocidal waves in Haiti, all, off course, under a Barack Obama and UN veil.

These insects invading Haiti are reprobates, racist and narcissistic, analogous to the rich and high-born serial killers conducting their depravity at private clubs – gated compounds left alone by police because of the pathology of power, respect for old money and Ivy League reputations.

Their shameless reign is called Western civilization, hope for Haiti and the ultimate in technology-transfer and US democracy when its nothing if not high classed criminals disemboweling their defenseless preys in  Haiti with everyone’s eyes wide open. Refusing to see.   (Avatar Haiti part 2; Did Harvard scientists cover-up UN source of Haiti cholera? and Going Shopping in Haiti.)

US and Bill Clinton’s credibility

After the news about Clinton’s admission that a UN soldiers was responsible for bringing cholera to Haiti appeared, a woman with good conscience, wrote on my Facebook page:

“Why is Clinton’s admission news when Cuban medical services in Haiti made this same determination months ago?”

I add, the Clinton admission popped up right after the UN Security Council visited Haiti and notably after Ambassador Susan Rice,  the U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN, made a similar statement, sort of foreshadowing Clinton’s admission.

What’s going on? What non-public information is Clinton relying on, that’s not in the UN investigative report, which now identifies the particular “person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the U.N.  peacekeeper, or [U.N.] soldier from South Asia was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians?”

Recall that Bill Clinton is a Rhode scholar, a Yale graduate, a former US president and a member of Mensa. Nothing he does is not thoroughly thought-out with multiple contingencies foreseen and planned for. Nothing. Expect that there are several escape routes being mapped out and prepared by the wrongdoers in Haiti and it’s definitely not for the benefit of Haiti cholera victims.

The question indeed is why would he, a UN official – the Special UN envoy to Haiti, suddenly, more than a year-and-a-half after the UN cholera outbreak and 10-months after the UN “independent” panel came out with their official findings, go to Haiti and make a seemingly haphazard public statement that it was a UN soldiers who likely brought the deadly cholera bacteria to Haiti, unleashing the outbreak? It’s not like Clinton has to answer a reporter’s questions. He’s managed not to address the UN liability for over a year now.

Just days before his statement, U.S. Permanent Representative to the UN, Susan Rice, called on the UN to take responsibility for the outbreak, urging it to “redouble its efforts to prevent any further incidents of this kind and to ensure that those responsible are held accountable.”

Those who are actually applauding either Susan Rice or Bill Clinton recent statements willingly fail to factor in  the obvious fact that this UN occupation is a cover for the illegal US occupation of Haiti.

Said pundits’ credulity willingly help delay Haiti’s recovery of its sovereignty and willingly ignore the fact that nothing the UN does is not first approved by the US. That’s a period, no comma.

As Susan Rice herself said in an official statement before the World Affairs Council of Oregon,”(t)he truth is:  the UN Security Council can’t even issue a press release without America’s blessing.”

Need I say more? OK, perhaps the entire Susan Rice statement  is worth quoting. Susan Rice, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, stated, inter alia, that:

“Some Americans believe the UN infringes on American sovereignty.  Frankly, I am baffled by this concern.  The fact is: the UN can’t tax us.  It can’t override U.S. law.  The UN can’t order our soldiers into battle. It can’t take away our Second Amendment rights. The UN can’t impose social norms on us. And it doesn’t begin to have any much-hyped fleet of secret black helicopters.  The truth is:  the UN Security Council can’t even issue a press release without America’s blessing.  The UN depends entirely on its member states, not the other way around. When the UN stumbles, it’s usually because its members stumble—because big powers duck tough issues in the Security Council or spoilers grandstand in the General Assembly. As one of my predecessors, the late Richard Holbrooke, was fond of saying, “Blaming the UN when things go wrong is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the Knicks play badly.”” -Remarks by Ambassador Susan E. Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, at the World Affairs Council of Oregon, Portland, Oregon, February 11, 2011.

Self-styled foreign experts or even native Haitians who applaud Clinton’s “admission” are hurting effective recovery. They willingly ignore there’s mostly no benevolence, no unselfish motives in US governmental actions towards the poor Haiti majority. None. Period, no comma.

“The United States has flexed every superpower muscle to prolong Haiti’s agony.”

*

In Haiti today we have the internal fight between the Haiti robbers of the peoples’ democracy – the lawless Martelly/Duvalier click, currently ruling solo, without Bill Clinton’s chosen Haiti Prime Minister – Gary Conille, who resigned. The Martelly newcomers are pushing to wrestle more trickle down pennies away from the equally repugnant internationally-imposed, Washington/UN-US Haiti technocrats. This tussle is evidenced most publicly with the issue raging in Parliament about the legitimacy of the Martelly presidency – if he is in fact a US or an Italian citizen. More particularly the question seemed centered on whether Michel Martelly ever used a US passport. Dual citizenship is not recognize in Haiti. (Haiti president denies dual citizenship.)

While the US plays its power game at the UN -  through the Bill Clinton and Susan Rice statements on cholera and accountability – nowhere in any of these tussles between thieves of Haiti’s democracy, sovereignty and dignity are the best interests of the Haitian people or simple justice a factor.

Bill Clinton isn’t some hero in Haiti, nor is experimental-vaccine-pusher, Paul Farmer. (See,  Paul Farmer, a total sell-out: Uses Haiti to sell Ineffective Cholera Vaccines.)

Bill Clinton is the UN envoy to Haiti, the Obama-appointed co-chair of the US earthquake relief fund, the effective head of the Haiti Reconstruction Commission at the UN in charge of donor country funds and how to use the monies for Haiti reconstruction. He is not separate from the UN or US officials running Haiti. No Associated Press or other embedded media spin will successfully separate Clinton from the officials responsible for the UN-MINUSTAH presence in Haiti no matter how many times they lead with titles such as, “Clinton Urges Officials to Stem Cholera in Haiti.”

Over 7,000 Haitians have been killed with cholera since October 2010. Where was Susan Rice and her Obama/Clinton State Department as the peasants’ meager harvest was destroyed by the cholera outbreak?

UN Ambassador Susan Rice, like Bill Clinton are well versed in the US role in causing famine in Haiti.

Was the US – “a big power”, as she says – “ducking the tough issues” of the US regime change purveyors’ responsibility for bringing in the UN soldiers that brought cholera to Haiti?

Did Rice ask USAID to stop dumping Monsanto hybrid super seeds on Haiti’s farmers, stop unfair trade, provide some long term help for Haiti’s domestic agriculture? Are Rice, Farmer, Hillary and Bill Clinton or Obama urging repeal of the Bumper Amendment or a stop to tied-aid in Haiti. Is this thinking even on the table at the UN Security Council led by the US via Ambassador Susan Rice or at USAID led by Bill Clinton’s wife? (See, The U.S. is known for its policy of returning development assistance money back to itself.)

Why is the US distancing itself from its UN mission responsibilities in Haiti?

Wasn’t it Colin Powell, Condi Rice and the George W. Bush US administration that helped bring a Chapter VII, UN peace enforcement mission to Haiti in 2004? Then finagled to have a career UN employee living in Florida, USA – Gerarld Latortue – sign for the government of Haiti the Status of Force Agreement (SOFA) authorizing the UN-MINUSTAH mission and handing it sweeping, across-the-board immunity for all wrongdoing in Haiti? Was any of this lawful?

Why is there a UN Chapter 7 peace enforcement mission in Haiti for 8 years – a country not at war, without a peace agreement to enforce and with less violence than most countries in the Western Hemisphere? (See the UN’s own Global Study on Homicide at page 93. )

Shouldn’t both Susan Rice and Bill Clinton’s recent Haiti statements – seemingly pointing to the UN and urging the UN to take responsibility for bringing cholera to Haiti  -  also be subject to Rice’s insights as expressed before the World Affairs Council of Oregon. That is, the US, the controlling “big power authority” over the UN is ultimately responsible for the Haiti’s consequences of the UN mission. No? Why not? Didn’t Ambassador Rice say that “(b)laming the UN when things go wrong is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the Knicks play badly.”

So why did they make these statements? Who are they trying to confuse, set-up or cater to? The paid-to-lose-Haiti-Jake-Sully-progressives perhaps and embedded corporate media? Only they seem to believe the UN, – that is, the US government which in fact runs the UN Haiti mission-  is capable of a modicum of conscience in Black Haiti without massive public outrage and/or a US federal court order as was the case for Blacks in America struggling against Jim crow apartheid in the 1960s.

Why did Clinton suddenly say the a UN soldier brought cholera to Haiti and caused the outbreak but Haiti lacked infrastructure anyways so cholera was predictable? Before then, Clinton had left it to Paul Farmer, his deputy, to harangue on and on about “cholera was waiting to happen” to Haiti. (Paul Farmer relieves himself on Haiti’s dying cholera victims; Paul Farmer, a total sell-out: Uses Haiti to sell Ineffective Cholera Vaccines; Paul Farmer is not a God but the face of the UN/USAID/World Bank; A message to Paul Farmer, the Senate, Dobbins & Francois.)

It requires an evil mind to truly absorb what the immoral and malevolent creatures auctioning Haiti and feeding off the blood of others would find logical and morally conceivable.  Peasant Haitians well versed in beating back the elite’s rabid rage and with a firm knowledge of “Kandyo, the malfini and the mongoose,” fear there are probably more sinister possibilities but here are a few to think about.

Maybe Bill Clinton is admitting UN liability the better to sell his cholera insurance to Haiti impoverished market women? Or, most likely Bill Clinton is garnering some plausible deniability, or some shadow of impartiality for when a real Haiti law suits names him, a high ranking UN official and another layer of US authority after US regime change, as a defendant in the cholera case.  After all,  I choose to believe there is some truth to Rice’s observation that the UN can’t override U.S. law. (Haiti, Cholera and the United Nations: Negligence and the Rule of Law.)

Or, is this a slick way to lessen or perhaps try to discount the acknowledged UN unsanitary conditions at the Mirebalais camp. Push the blame off the UN brass by pointing to a single Nepalese soldier infected with cholera who defecated in the river, whose “waste stream(ed) into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians?” – Wouldn’t put it pass them…

Or, maybe Clinton chose to admit UN liability as a set up to continue his worthless strings of  world apologies – like the ones he made for lack of action under his administration during the Rwanda genocide, or his empty apology for the US destroying Haiti’s food sovereignty, domestic agriculture  while USAID, which is under the authority of his wife at the State Department, pushes forth the same destructive unfair trade policies, still dumping US subsidized goods and even bringing in Monsanto hybrid seeds after the earthquake?

Or, maybe its because his deputy UN envoy, Paul Farmer, racking up on useless cholera vaccines and the paid-to-lose-progressives whose board he’s on are about to sell out, auction off, the Haitian people’s cholera case with some counterproductive UN mea culpa settlement as worthless as former President Bill Clinton’s cumulative admissions? No shocker whatsoever.

The Haiti Reconstruction Commission is known in Washington circles as the “Bill and Hillary fund.” Its collected nearly 2.3 billion dollars, deposited at the World Bank, and presided over pretty much by Bill Clinton without any UN oversight. Normally, UN monies go into the UNDB. But this is strictly a US financial pillaging with the UN as servant to Washington, paying its dues for initially protesting the Iraq war. Swapping, monstrously auctioning off Haiti lives, so Washington will keep the UN a viable organization and their career diplomats in a job. Since 2004, the US has built the largest US embassy in the Western Hemisphere in tiny Haiti.

Poverty pimps masturbating on Black pain

Haiti crisis and suffering is but a bottomless ATM for the narcissistic vampires cashing in on the poverty, imported diseases, manufactured conflicts, blood and sweatshop labor in Haiti. USAID ordered 200,000 body bags at the start of the outbreak in 2010 rather than spend that money on the simple cure – Haiti-run public sanitation infrastructure and clean water. (For example, see Haiti’s Zili Dlo: Free clean water for everyone; the Zili Dlo photo report.)

In 2009 when Clinton first became UN Special Envoy to Haiti,  he attended a donors conference in Washington that resulted in pledges of $324 million for Haiti to help the Gonaives hurricane and flood victims. No one knows for sure how that money was spent. We do know the people of Gonaives are still living in mud from the 2008 back-to-back hurricanes.

The “humanitarian” cloak and racist narrative about the white saviors of Haiti, the Jake Sullys come to civilize the incompetent Blacks, allows it. Surprise is willful ignorance.

Larouze fe banda toutan solèy pa leve.

HLLN  legal position

It’s our legal position at Ezili’s HLLN that the UN is not a superstate that’s above the law. It cannot admit (as it did in the “independent” panel report) that it brought cholera to Haiti through its Nepalese soldiers; that cholera was spread through its negligent oversight of waste disposal at the Mirebalais barracks, but then say  it’s not responsible for the injuries because Haiti’s water was polluted already.

As I’ve written elsewhere that’s like saying “I shot the policeman but I’m not responsible for his death. He only died because he wasn’t wearing a bullet-proof vest.” One does not need a law degree to see the ridiculousness of this UN defense repeated by Mensa member, Bill Clinton recently, and Paul Farmer and the UN Special Representative for Ban Ki Moon since the beginning of the outbreak.

As Ezili’s HLLN has said from the beginning, this is a simple tort case. The tort involve is a wrong that violates international law and treaties. The wrongdoing of the UN in Haiti is a wrong of mutual concern to all the nations of the world. The defined, universal and international prohibition against the spread of a contagious disease are expressed in international accords. The UN failed to adhere to their own  declarations on human rights. The UN must take Haiti infrastructure as it found it and not poison it. Haitians have the right to be free from a contagious disease imported on the Island by UN soldiers and spread through their multiple negligent sanitary practices and failures to properly dispose contaminated human waste. Period, no comma.

Haiti’s people did not have a single case of cholera before the UN negligence, if ever. The UN reps are perfectly aware that it was not Haiti pollution – an indigenous Haiti bacteria – that caused the cholera outbreak, but a UN South Asian pollutant.

A whole genome study shows the Nepal cholera strain is the exact strain in Haiti. UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, UN Deputy envoy Paul Farmer, UN Special Envoy Bill Clinton, the Nepalese Commander, the UN Special Representative all, highly literate people,  know better than to blame Haiti for the cholera outbreak. The great authority wielded by these powerful people gave undo credence to their absurd defense, caused irreparably further damage to Haiti, delayed the recovery, is fraudulent concealment, caused more deaths, more Haiti suffering, more Haiti defamation, more Haiti economic loss, more cruel and degrading treatment. (See also, Ezili’s HLLN denounces massacres of Haiti Vodouist, holds UN responsible.)

The wrongdoers, pretending to be civil, have stood idly by watching expulsions, for instance, of Haiti athletes from world competitions; the death of Haiti deportees from cholera, the expulsion of innocent Haitians from Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Bahamas and increase sufferings of Haitians throughout the world because the US/UN allowed the fault for the cholera outbreak to be squarely placed on Haiti. This lack of accountability violates the right to safety, health, life and dignity of Haitians. (HLLN urges President Obama, stop deportations to quake and cholera-ravage Haiti.)

The UN, as the forming organization of the 2005 International Health Convention against the spread of contagious diseases cannot defend itself by essentially claiming it only lowered its standards to that used by the natives MINUSTAH arrived to provide human rights to, nor can it claim organizational immunity for the private action related to its soldiers personal hygiene and health.

The magnitude of this harm requires extraordinary relief not covered by the UN’s six month statutes of limitation for bringing personal injury claims to its non-existent and never formed Claims Commission.

Besides, the clearly partisan UN is not a neutral party for too many reasons to exhaust in further detail in this essay. The Claims Commission provide for in SOFA for personal injury cases, even if it were set up, would be suspect and essentially amount to a denial of adequate legal redress and fair and impartial adjudication for the Haiti cholera victims.

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^{Human rights lawyer, Ezili Dantò, of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, leaves the Richard C. Lee United States Courthouse in downtown New Haven, Conn. during a break in the sentencing hearing for Douglas Perlitz on Tuesday December 21, 2010. Photo: Christian Abraham / Connecticut Post}

I was in Federal District Court in New Haven, advocating for the abused Haiti children in December 2010, when Judge Arterton sentencing US pedophile and Haiti charity worker, Douglas Perlitz to nearly twenty years prison and ten years probation, said:

“If one digs a well to supply water to those who have never had water, and then that person poisons the water, was building that well a good deed?” — (Judge Arterton statement at the sentencing of Haiti charity worker Douglas Perlitz)

Retribution, recovery and justice would find a beginning for Haitians if and when Haiti’s cholera case against US-UN and their high ranking reps and special envoys is successfully brought before a Federal US District Court judge like a US Judge Arterton. It’s possible.

Ezili Dantò Jazzoetry – Ayiti:Tankou Isit/So Much like here ******************************************************* The meaning of charitable giving was long ago personified by Haiti’s Pierre Toussaint. Farmer, Clinton, USAID’s  NGO executives, none can top the example of Haiti’s icon of benevolence and selflessness, not possible. Pierre Toussaint was born into Western enslavement in Haiti. Pierre Toussaint, the most venerated Black Catholic in the world was a Haitian who helped found the first orphanage in New York city for homeless boys, back when Black folks were still enslaved in the United States. At the height of slavery in the US, Pierre Toussaint used his own monies to take care of his silly widowed “master.” He was a philanthropist who EARNED, through his own labor, the money he did his charitable works with. He was piety incarnate. He was humble, loving, patient, kind, generous, self-sacrificing. He lived the Gospel of Christ. (Justice for Haiti prevailed: Perlitz going away for a long time.)

Human rights lawyer, writer and performance poet, Ezili Dantò, President of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, talks to the media. Sharing the real meaning of giving as personified in the works of Haiti famous philanthropist, Catholic charitable works icon, the venerable Pierre Toussaint. Ezili Dantò explains how US charity worker Doug Perlitz named his school after the saintly Pierre Toussaint – but like many others in the NGO industry in Haiti, failed to honor the importance of existing and historic Haiti examples of courage, honor and the good Samaritan. Photo taken while outside the Richard C. Lee United States Courthouse in downtown New Haven, Conn. during a recess in the sentencing hearing for Perlitz on December 21, 2010. Photo Credit: Christian Abraham / Connecticut Post.

I would not wish these writings to be the only chance we get to state the Haiti case on behalf of the cholera victims.

It’s like watching an accident happen in slow motion.

Kindly take the road less traveled. Help Ezili’s HLLN, a Haiti-led, Haiti-capacity  building organizations – the very first to publicly advocate for the cholera victims and push for recognition of UN culpability. Help us bring the Haiti cholera case to court to give voice to the voiceless and make a real, lasting and important difference.

We cannot get this done without support from conscious folks  around the world, who understand this simple statement, made by an indigenous group in Australia:

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” — Lily Watson

If you’d like to help with our clean water project and with HLLN’s filings against the UN in Federal District Court in New York, please write us at erzilidanto@yahoo.

Volunteer or donate to support Ezili Dantò/HLLN work : standing on truth living without fear.

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Haitians broke their own chains in combat. Our liberty wasn’t a charitable gift from the white settlers. Free Haitians – Ayisyen – still live. Rebels for liberty. Living in a hostile New World Mediterranean.  For centuries, attacked and invaded from one generation to the next. Forced to battle for our independence over and over again. Proudly not becoming what the Ancestors’ fought against.

Throughout the centuries, evil often found a way to survive. (See petition demanding France pay back the $22 billion Independence Debt.)

Don’t permit the wrongdoers, not this time, to re-image or project responsibility for their foul and filth onto the Haiti cholera victims.

Ezili Dantò
Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN)
March, 2012

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BACKGROUND INFORMATION
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1 Year in Jail for UN Rapists of 14-Year Old, Ban Has Nothing to Say

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Dady Chery:  Did Harvard scientists cover-up UN source of Haiti cholera?

““The only reason it took so long to discover that Haiti’s cholera came from Nepal is because scientists had until now not bothered to compare the cholera from Haiti to cholera from Nepal.”

“Without exaggerating, one might say, for example, that the cholera study by Harvard was analogous to using the most sensitive instruments and best-trained scientists to test for Fukushima radiation everywhere in the globe except Japan, reporting that the meltdowns had probably happened somewhere in Asia, and then proposing that a commission from the nuclear-power companies finish the investigation.”

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Bill Clinton, UN Envoy, Admits Peacekeepers as Source of Haiti Cholera

By MATTHEW MOSK (@mattmosk)

March 9, 2012 | Source -abc news

The United Nations Special Envoy for Haiti, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, offered the strongest statements to date acknowledging the role U.N. peacekeepers are believed to have played in the deadly outbreak of cholera in quake-ravaged Haiti.

During a tour of a hospital there this week, Clinton was pressed on the U.N.’s role in an outbreak that has killed more than 7,000 Haitians — a politically-charged topic for more than a year now, with the U.N. repeatedly refusing to accept responsibility for the outbreak despite mounting scientific evidence that international peacekeepers were the most likely culprits.

“I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the U.N. peacekeeper, or [U.N.] soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus,” Clinton said, adding that “it was the proximate cause of cholera. That is, he was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians.”

Clinton went on to say that he believes what “really caused” the outbreak was the country’s dismal sanitary conditions. “Unless we know that he knew or that they knew, the people that sent him, that he was carrying that virus and therefore that he could cause the amount of death and misery and sickness, I think it’s better to focus on fixing it.”

Clinton’s comments came in response to a question from Ansel Herz, a freelance journalist working on behalf of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

In a statement to ABC News, U.N. spokesperson Kieran Dwyer said, “In relation to former President Clinton’s reported remarks to the press this week in Haiti, we note that he emphasized the importance of focusing on improving Haiti’s sanitation system and the fact that the United Nations and others are working hard to do this.” Dwyer added that in 2011, over three million people received water supplies, water treatment products, water filtering systems and sanitation materials from United Nations agencies and its humanitarian partners.

UN Soldiers in ‘Sex Assault’ Video Freed For Now Watch Video

In January, ABC News reported on compelling scientific evidence suggesting a United Nations peacekeeper from Nepal carried the virulent strain of cholera to a remote village in October 2010, and dumping of raw sewage from the UN encampment sent the disease into a key water supply for Haitians. In addition to killing 7,000 people, more than 500,000 Haitians have been infected in Haiti.

READ: UN Peacekeepers Caused Cholera Epidemic in Haiti, Report Says

Leading researchers from Harvard Medical School and elsewhere told ABC News that they felt confident they had traced the strain back to Nepal, and that they believe it was carried to Haiti by Nepalese soldiers who came to Haiti to serve as U.N. peacekeepers after the earthquake that ravaged the country on Jan. 12, 2010. Haiti had never seen a case of cholera until the arrival of the peacekeepers, who allegedly failed to maintain sanitary conditions at their base.

“What scares me is that the strain from South Asia has been recognized as more virulent, more capable of causing severe disease, and more transmissible,” said John Mekalanos, who chairs the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. “These strains are nasty. So far there has been no secondary outbreak. But Haiti now represents a foothold for a particularly dangerous variety of this deadly disease.”

READ: Scientists Say UN Soldiers Brought Deadly Superbug to Americas

The U.N. had previously repeatedly said there exists no conclusive evidence fingering peacekeepers for the outbreak. The international organization has already faced hostility from Haitians who believe peacekeeping troops have abused local residents without consequence. They now face legal action from relatives of victims who have petitioned the U.N. for restitution. And the cholera charge could further hamper the U.N.’s ability to work effectively there, two years after the country was hobbled by the earthquake.

Over the summer, Assistant Secretary General Anthony Banbury told ABC News that the U.N. sincerely wanted to know if it played a part in the outbreak, but independent efforts to answer that question had not succeeded. He said the disease could have just as easily been carried by a backpacker or civilian aid worker.

Banbury said the U.N., through both its peacekeeping mission and its civilian organizations “are working very hard … to combat the spread of the disease and bring assistance to the people. And that’s what’s important now.”

“The scientists say it can’t be determined for certainty where it came from,” Banbury said. “So we don’t know if it was the U.N. troops or not. That’s the bottom line.”

Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research called Clinton’s comments an important first step toward accountability.

“President Clinton’s acknowledgement, as a U.N. official, should bring us one step closer to the U.N. taking responsibility for what it has done, and fixing it.” Weisbrot said.

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Clinton Urges Officials to Stem Cholera in Haiti

By TRENTON DANIEL , Source: Associated Press

MIREBALAIS, Haiti March 8, 2012 (AP)

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said Wednesday that a U.N. peacekeeper was responsible for bringing cholera to Haiti but may not have known that he was doing so, and efforts need to focus on stemming the outbreak.

Clinton was asked after a hospital tour if he agreed with a statement by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, about holding accountable those who brought cholera to Haiti. Studies have suggested that peacekeepers from Nepal likely introduced the disease to Haiti for the first time, months after the January 2010 earthquake.

“First of all, the United Nations has spent a great deal of money in Haiti,” Clinton told reporters. “Secondly, I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera in Haiti, the U.N. peacekeeper, or soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus.”

Clinton added: “It was the proximate cause of cholera. That is, he was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waterways of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians.”

But Clinton added that what “really caused” the cholera outbreak was the country’s lack of proper sanitation.

“Unless we know that he knew or that they knew, the people that sent him, that he was carrying that virus and therefore that he could cause the amount of death and misery and sickness, I think it’s better to focus on fixing it,” Clinton said.

Clinton, the U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti, made the remarks after he toured a brand-new public teaching hospital in the Central Plateau that was built by the Boston-based Partners in Health. PIH Co-founder Paul Farmer, a public health expert who serves as Clinton’s deputy at the U.N., hosted Clinton as the two toured the hospital, a fish farm and a smaller hospital to study ways solar energy can power remote facilities.

An international panel appointed by the United Nations produced a report that blamed the outbreak on a “confluence of circumstances” that included bad sanitation.

The cholera outbreak prompted a Haitian law firm and its international partner to file a complaint against the United Nations last year on behalf of the victims, which is under review by the world body’s legal office.

Cholera has killed more than 7,000 people and sickened more than 526,000 others since it was introduced to Haiti in 2010, according to Haitian health officials.

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Bill Clinton acknowledges UN’s role in deadly Haitian cholera outbreak
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As Cholera Season Bears Down On Haiti, Vaccination Program Stalls

by Richard Knox | Source – NPR , March 13, 2012  (See also, The uses of Haiti’s poor children: Guinea pigs for cholera vaccines ; Oral Cholera Vaccines Cannot Control Haiti Cholera: Rebuttal to an Article in Scientific American ;  Pioneering Cholera Scientist Gives Thumbs Down to Oral Vaccines Promoted for Haiti .)

John Poole/NPRThousands of doses of cholera vaccine sit in a refrigerated trailer in a United Nations compound in Saint-Marc, Haiti. Vaccination was supposed to begin last week, but bureaucratic problems have delayed the start. April is the beginning of Haiti’s rainy season, which will likely intensify Haiti’s cholera outbreak.

The vaccine — $417,000 worth of it — is stacked high in refrigerated containers to protect it from the Haitian heat.

Hundreds of health workers are trained and ready to give the vaccine. They’re armed with programmed smartphones and tablet computers to keep track of who has been vaccinated and who needs a second dose.

And 100,000 eager Haitians, from the teeming slums of Port-au-Prince to tiny hamlets in Haiti’s rice bowl, have signed up to get the vaccine.

But everything is on hold. A long-planned project to find out whether vaccination is feasible in the midst of an ongoing cholera outbreak in Haiti has been stymied — temporarily, its proponents insist — by the kind of glitch that bedevils many projects in Haiti, large and small.

Vaccination was supposed to begin this week in two carefully selected target populations.

One is in a densely packed slum called Cite de Dieu along Port-au-Prince’s waterfront, where raw sewage snakes its way from countless gutters into a garbage-clogged canal and into the sea.

The other target area is in a rice-growing area bordering the Artibonite River about 50 miles north of the capital. This was the initial epicenter of Haiti’s cholera outbreak in October 2010.

But the campaign was abruptly halted when a Port-au-Prince radio station reported that the impending vaccination effort was actually a “medical experiment on the Haitian people” — a potentially incendiary charge.

The Haitian Ministry of Health scrambled to counter that report, which apparently arose from a mix-up that occurred during last year’s change of government.

The previous government opposed cholera vaccination. It would distract from cholera treatment, officials said, and might spark dangerous resentments because there is only enough cholera vaccine in the world to protect 2 percent of the Haitian population.

But the government of Haiti’s new president, Michel Martelly, supports a cholera-vaccination demonstration project. His health ministry gave the go-ahead in December.

The problem is, the two sponsoring medical groups — Partners in Health and GHESKIO — submitted their proposals last year to the previous government at a time when the World Health Organization hadn’t yet certified the vaccine they were going to use.

That government judged the vaccine to be “experimental” because it lacked WHO’s imprimatur. So it referred the proposals to the National Ethics Committee. There they sat, apparently ignored, until the recent radio report woke everyone up.

The committee has called for revised proposals, which were submitted Monday. It usually requires four weeks to review and decide, but proponents hope that can be accelerated.

The rush is for meteorological reasons. Haiti’s heaviest rains start in April. Those rains send the contaminated Artibonite over its banks and into villages in the low-lying river delta.

The rainy season also floods the low-lying slums of Port-au-Prince, sometimes carrying sewage into people’s crowded homes.

Haiti’s biggest spike of cholera cases and deaths occurred last May.

Since Haiti’s cholera outbreak began in October 2010, it has sickened more than 500,000 people and killed more than 7,000. Before then, there had never been a recorded cholera outbreak in Haiti.

All evidence suggests the disease was introduced accidentally by United Nations peacekeeping forces from Nepal, a cholera-endemic country, when a latrine spilled sewage into a tributary of the Artibonite, 60 miles upstream from the rice-growing villages. President Bill Clinton, now the U.N.’s special envoy to Haiti, acknowledged that was the “proximate cause” of cholera in Haiti during a visit here last week.

Villagers in the Artibonite delta are well aware of the cholera risk, and anxious to get the vaccine.

Last Saturday, Alexi Rochnel pulled out blue vaccination cards for himself, his wife and his children. They live in a rice-growing village that pulls its drinking water from the Artibonite River.

“Lately we have been facing this cholera disease that we didn’t have before, so it’s good to be vaccinated,” Rochnel says. A year ago, during Haiti’s rainy season, his wife fell ill with cholera. “It was very bad,” he says, but she survived with hospital care.

Jonathan Lascher of Partners in Health says the organization is confident the vaccination campaign will go ahead later this month. So are officials at GHESKIO in Port-au-Prince.

If they succeed in showing that cholera vaccination is feasible, the next debate will be whether and how it can be scaled up to a much bigger proportion of the population in time for next year’s rainy season.

“A study on cholera risk factors conducted in Haiti found that not treating the drinking water was the main risk component…

“Elimination of the threat of epidemic cholera is still possible for Haiti, and the key ingredient for that will be clean, chlorinated water and latrines.” (–Scott F. Dowell, MD, MPH, during presentation to infectious diseases (ID) experts at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Sunday in Boston. )

Paul – the god – Farmer relieves himself on Haiti’s dying cholera victims

It’s been one year since the UN imported cholera to Haiti. Nearly 500,000 Haitians have been infected and over 6, 500 have been killed. But UN representative, Paul Farmer, is obviously the “impartial one” the Associated Press is going to as “expert” to speak on the situation.  ( AP Interview: Expert says Haiti has worst cholera, By TRENTON DANIEL, Associated Press October 18, 2011.)

Of course said UN representative is telling all and sundry that Haiti is dirty and that’s why the outbreak is so ‘freaking’ severe. Not that lives would have been saved if clean water and sanitation, which the UN says is a human right, had been a funded relief priority perhaps as soon as the outbreak began, or maybe even seven years ago when the UN “peacekeepers” came to “help” Haitians? Or, maybe sometime before when President Aristide tried to bring desperately needed water and sanitation to Haiti but first the Clinton Administration and then the George W. Bush Administration forced the already approved Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) loans to Haiti to be blocked.

Saying, in effect, if US rulers don’t approve of  who Haitians vote in as President and his public health initiatives that would service the general public welfare, then monies from the Haiti government ought to only be used to pay down old Western Duvalierist debts, not Haiti public welfare health projects and infrastructure. More than most, Paul Farmer is well versed in these Haiti truths, well-versed. ( C.I.A Operation in Haiti Before the Earthquake .)

We won’t learn any of this from the AP’s interview of Paul Farmer, the total sellout. We only learn that “the spread of the disease” is due to what Paul Farmer,  uhmm, describes as Haiti’s status as the “most water insecure” country in the world, which, the article states, “means people have insufficient access to clean water.”  Trenton Daniels then is all set to selectively opine, in his article, that “Cholera then spread through Haiti’s biggest river because a Haitian contractor failed to ensure proper sanitation at the U.N. base.”

There’s no mention in the article about the permanent solution to cholera, only an emphasis on taking pills – eradicating cholera with pharmaceuticals.

Oh yes, Haitians could defend Haiti from the embedded AP and Paul Farmer’s condescension, insulting paternalism, selective blindness and stinking hypocrisy if only this was a rational world, interested in truth and justice.

If the Associated Press had come to a Haitian like me, I would have spoken on behalf of the 500,000 infected and 6,500 dead and said Haiti suffers from the foreign cholera outrage because the UN came to Haiti. Before this, Haitians indeed had insufficient access to clean water but no cholera fatalities. The Nepalese soldiers dumped their raw, untreated feces, directly from their toilets into Haiti’s waterways, contaminating Haiti with the most virulent form of the germ.

The truth, though, is incidental. Ever since Columbus. No one in power wants to know that Haiti suffers from the worst cholera outbreak in the world because the UN came to Haiti, as military US imperial proxy to institutionalize Martelly-type cholera democracy, disenfranchising 10 million Blacks and delegitimizing authentic elections. Au contraire, what’s lifted as truth, though the lifters are mostly in total denial, is the “insane imperial narrative and custom of honoring rapists, murderers, torturers, degenerate pedophile maniacs, pillagers, plunderers, enslavers and poverty pimps.”

The negative attractor field that animates the Paul Farmers of this world is up to those who see it to transform. There is always the higher energetic field above lies, subterfuge, colonial paternalism and these self-serving masking of slaughter and containment-in-poverty in Haiti by the depraved and tyrannical powers-that-be. But humanity seems possessed by the imitation of goodness these lousy devils project. Worst, the white man and his black collaborators, totally unconscious of their own wretchedness despite the facts of history, spend lots of time rationalizing their own falsehoods. Their mind, in its identity with the mythical goodness of themselves, cannot, by definition comprehend reality.

Westerners are told and trained in schools that their “schooled minds” shall be a great instrument of  planetary progress. But yet that instrument refuses to act upon the reality that Haiti doesn’t need an export-led economy, wage earners as opposed to entrepreneurs, sweatshops in the information technology age, the NGO invasion, foreign investment(?), Hillary Clinton’s Monsanto hybrid seeds, Bill Clinton Foundation’s cholera insurance, the UN military acting as military proxy for the world’s one superpower to prevent dissent and deny the masses economic justice.

The minds at these schools are not trained to see the limitation of Western rationale, since few professors at Officialdom schools would get teaching positions if they taught their students about the limitations of the mind, how to elevate consciousness and see their own ego blindness and incapacity. Schooled minds are mostly taught about Western civilizations’ mythical benevolence and superiority.

Thus, we have the world and soul terrors they’ve created for over 519 years of genocide and constant Euro/US warmongering upon humankind.  (I hear New Orleans’s school privatization guru, Paul Vallas, along with the UN’s Bill Clinton are about to bring that entire Pèpè curriculum to Haiti along with Farmer’s lucrative but useless cholera vaccines and Martelly’s taxation-without-representation education reforms.)

The often-quoted prophets of old say to not fight or fear evil. This Black woman is sometimes confounded as to how to recognize evil and transform it without confronting, fighting to exterminate it. Thankfully, Janjak Desalin is my history teacher. I bow this October 2011, on the 205th anniversary of your assassination, Desalin, to the energy field you emanate. The only successfully energy field, codified in the Bwa Kayiman call, that met these vampires outrage for outrage and the only one the collective Western psyche cannot forgive or stop trying to reverse. (Bill Clinton has more power in Haiti than Haiti’s president: The Holocaust Continues.)

Are we Haitians simply not supposed to notice the stark reality that it’s not the white population, the tourists nor the UN folks who are suffering a mass loss of life due to the imported cholera germ to Haiti? But the poorest Black woman’s children, that is, the masses in Haiti?

In the October 18, AP Interview , after Paul –the god – Farmer relieves himself on Haiti’s dying cholera victims, Trenton Daniels of the AP continues in the same vein, to say, that the negligence of the UN contractor (Haitian, of course) caused the contamination of the Meye River. Just for kicks, I figure I’ll take the time and point out the Nepalese soldiers crap was leaking STRAIGHT from their toilets into the Meye River. (See the UN Final Report, May 5, 2011.)

And while I am at it, for those dying of Farmer’s UN cholera in Port au Prince right now, why not also point out that the Nepalese contingent, never quarantined or punished, continued this year to poison Haiti’s waterways as seen in these pictures and video:

Video by Mediahacker:  MINUSTAH still continuing to foul up Haiti: Haitians Upset With UN Base Runoff into Foul-Smelling Pool .

Pictures by Gaetantguevara:  Waste water from the UN battalion is dumped right by the beach in Port Salut, Haiti.

Obviously, the UN will pull Paul Farmer out to tell the world to discount Haitian eyewitnesses and the evidence of continued UN germ poisoning going on in Haiti right now. It’s the raison d’etre for his powerful UN position as the UN is proxy for the US imperialism and godly narrative, Paul Farmer and his cohorts ultimately give their life force to uphold. And the old Dixie planter and enslavers’ negative energetic field possessing their minds keep these vultures and vampires in power, prestige and projecting humanity into this unmitigated profit-over-people-and-the-environment nightmare.

“If you have come here to help me then you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine then let us work together.” — Lila Watson

Vaccines are not Haiti’s top health priority. Clean water and sanitation is.

In the article Farmer, says to “eradicate cholera we’re going to have to vaccinate huge numbers of people. It’s going to require a massive campaign like polio.” If cholera vaccines eradicated cholera, there would not be 100,000 to 300,000 cholera cases documented annually in Bangladesh each year. Someone please send Farmer there. When did Haiti or any single place elsewhere in the world have over 500,000 polio cases, similar to Haiti’s 500,000 cholera cases that were wiped out by vaccines? Was it not just last year the CDC and other such health experts, including the World Health Organization, were saying cholera vaccines are not effective and not the solution for Haiti?

Instead of advocating for something that would help make Haitians sovereign and healthy, the real answer to cholera like institutionalizing sanitation and clean water infrastructure for all, Paul Farmer proposes to distract Haiti with HIS MISSION to go raise funds for 100,000 controversial cholera vaccines at $1.85 per dose, or $3.70 per person when there are 10million Haitians in Haiti. Will these Haitians be drinking down the oral vaccines with cholera infected water, or will Farmer also import bottled water just for the momentous occasion of swallowing the two required vaccine doses, which provides 70 per cent effectiveness, last for about two years?

The last cholera wave started in 1961, 50-years ago and the Nepalese strain that’s in Haiti is the most virulent strain and part of that wave. Thus, this disease will remain in Haiti unless actions are taken immediately to stop it from being endemic. So far the UN has made no attempts at mitigating its damages. Cholera will lift up in Haiti EVERYTIME there is rain, the rainy season or no sun in Haiti, which is predictable and quantifiable. Why isn’t what Haitians want, that is, justice for the cholera victims, acknowledgement the UN brought it to Haiti, the permanent solution to stopping cholera, environmental clean up, a settlement fund for all cholera medical care and no more foreigners dumping foreign germs and contaminable diseases into Haiti, not being argued? What? Paul Farmer gets to decide what justice and Haiti health care is? And this, the temporary, ineffective cholera vaccines is Farmer’s decided prioritizing choice for Haitians?

As usual the poverty pimps are about keeping themselves in the Haiti picture, about DEPENDENCY, constant NGO profit/involvement in Haiti, poverty pimping, and disaster capitalism. They offer no sustainable solution. Farmer is not accountable to the Haitian people but to his partners and health industry in Haiti and the UN. This move he’s made in the name of Haiti cholera victims is not about institutionalizing domestic Haiti PUBLIC health care run by Haitians, financing clean water and sanitation projects.

In fact, Haiti’s last government REFUSED cholera vaccines for good reason. But now that the Duvalierist puppet Martelly is in office, Farmer and Clinton can rule Haiti through their UN pulpit, getting their useless cholera vaccines and cholera insurance as Haiti “relief.” Farmer, as usual, violates principle for expediency, loses power and credibility, honor and valor.  (Paul Farmer, a total sell-out: Uses Haiti to sell Ineffective Cholera Vaccines ; Support a clean water program for Haiti – Photo report: Support Zili Dlo.)

At HLLN we’ve inherited the problem with foreigners “saving” us since 1806. We know what it is about – whether its the coup d’etat instigator (ie. Fire starters who create chaos to divide and conquer and always have a need to stay in Haiti FOREVER) or the Paul Farmers of this world (the self-styled fire extinguishers who empathize with the burnt victims and try to put out the fires while building themselves to stay in Haiti FOREVER.). We say to both, out, out, out. Get out of Haiti. Take the nasty UN and the NGO invasion with you.

Ezili Dantò of HLLN
October, 2011

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Support a clean water program for Haiti – Photo report: Support Zili Dlo

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“A study on cholera risk factors conducted in Haiti found that not treating the drinking water was the main risk component…

“Elimination of the threat of epidemic cholera is still possible for Haiti, and the key ingredient for that will be clean, chlorinated water and latrines.” (–Scott F. Dowell, MD, MPH, during presentation to infectious diseases (ID) experts at the 49^th Annual Meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America Sunday in Boston.   )

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“If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. ” — Frederick Douglass, (1857)

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The “rational” does not include all that is “the possible.” –Ezili Dantò

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AP Interview: Expert says Haiti has worst cholera

By TRENTON DANIEL,
Associated Press, October 18, 2011,  Source: San Francisco Chronicle

http://bit.ly/nip5s1

(10-18) 17:49 PDT PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) –

Haiti has the highest rate of cholera in the world, according to one of the Caribbean nation’s most prominent health experts.

Dr. Paul Farmer told The Associated Press that cholera has sickened more than 450,000 people in a nation of 10 million, or nearly 5 percent of the population, and killed more than 6,000.

Farmer says cholera is also on the verge of becoming the leading cause of death by infectious disease in Haiti.

“It’s freakin’ incredible,” Farmer, one of the founders of the medical group Partners in Health and U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, said by telephone. “In 365 days, you go from no cases to the largest number in the world.”

That’s significantly more than the 100,000 to 300,000 cases documented annually in Bangladesh, Farmer said.

He also said that cholera is likely to become endemic in Haiti, meaning it will become “native” to the country.

“It’s going to be with us for a long time,” he said.

Farmer attributes the spread of the disease to what he describes as Haiti’s status as the “most water insecure” country in the world, which means people have insufficient access to clean water.

There were no documented cholera cases in Haiti prior to the start of the outbreak a year ago this month.

Evidence suggests that the disease inadvertently arrived in Haiti by U.N. peacekeeping troops from Nepal. Cholera then spread through Haiti’s biggest river because a Haitian contractor failed to ensure proper sanitation at the U.N. base.

Despite the spread of cholera, Farmer said it was possible to wipe out the disease by improving Haiti’s water system and sanitation. The use of education and oral vaccines is also important, he added.

“To eradicate cholera we’re going to have to vaccinate huge numbers of people,” Farmer said. “It’s going to require a massive campaign like polio.”

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Forwarded by Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network
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Bill Clinton has more power in Haiti than Haiti’s president: The Holocaust Continues -http://bit.ly/oEmeIQ
“The holocaust in Ayiti continues. The insane imperial narrative and custom of honoring rapists, murderers, torturers, degenerate pedophile maniacs, pillagers, plunderers, enslavers and poverty pimps, starting with Christopher Columbus, who set forth the most prolonged genocides and horrific terrors in recorded human history, continues today. Officialdom honors the UN and UN envoys to Haiti as “humanitarians” or “God” bringing security, stability, peace, law, Christian ethos and “Western civilization.” Too many have jobs, egos, power and prestige invested in the profit-over-people system to see that the current saviors of Haiti extend mostly the same narcissistic, cultural blindness and denials as the initial “missionaries/humanitarians” brought to Haiti in 1492.

Until the lies that bolsters the current US takeover of Haiti is as recognized as Columbus himself ought to be recognize as a cannibal, terrorist and barbarian, Haiti will continue to be an evidence that must be annihilated. A nation the “discoverers” occupying Ayiti (Haiti) today must try to eradicate, or as they euphemistically put it, “save.”

…[T]he Haitian people want the UN occupation to be over, therefore the people can’t ask the United Nations to leave without also requesting Bill Clinton, the UN Special Envoy and his UN Deputy Envoy (Paul ‘the god’ Farmer) to also get out of Haiti, take their NGO/UN tutelage, sham elections and their World Bank/IMF death plans with them.”–Ezili Dantò of HLLN, Oct. 10 2011

“October is not too far away, and those Haitians who are not slaves know only one God beneath the almighty Bondye. The spirit of all omnipresent good and beauty is neither Paul Farmer, Bill Clinton nor cholera-MINUSTAH.” – Ezili Dantò of HLLN, August 27, 2011

Paul Farmer is not a God but the face of the UN/USAID/World Bank

October is not too far away, and those Haitians who are not mentally enslaved or integrated into the unjust Eurocentic dominion holding the world hostage, know only one God beneath the almighty Bondye. The spirit of all omnipresent good and beauty is neither Paul Farmer, Bill Clinton nor cholera-MINUSTAH. To those worthy of the name Ayisyen, only one man took action that is the embodiment of Bondye’s divine courage and warrior essence as expressed on earth and his name is – Jean Jacques Dessalines. Lafanmi sanble! Nou fè yon sèl kò depi lè marasa, lè mò e lè mistè. Ginen poze. Janjak’s humanitarian achievements for the world since the white settlers’ “New World”-era began, remain unmatched.

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Desalin’s Law is the law most recognized by Haitians. After defeating, in combat, the then Euro-superpowers; after 300-years of monarchical Europe’s and the white settlers’ brutal enslavement of Africans, in 1804, the year of Haiti’s Independence, Haiti’s founding father set down Dessalines’ Law for Haiti to prosper and remain sovereign. It is as follows:

“Never shall a colonist or a European set foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor. This resolution shall henceforth form the fundamental basis of our Constitution.”

“…No whiteman of whatever nation he may be, shall put his foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor, neither shall he in future acquire any property therein…”

Folks, the European and colonist didn’t come back to Haiti as just master or proprietor. No sireeee. He/she came back as GOD!

Reading yesterday’s news, as usually, one comes upon the colonial narrative on Haiti. Yesterday I read a Hartford Courant article about God (http://cour.at/oMqdL1). Yes, “GOD” and “saints” cast in the image of white men in Haiti.

What’s in a name? Some names horrify enslavers, tyrants and despots, everywhere… Dessalines’ Law Jean Jacques Dessalines Three ideals of Dessalines ************** I Want the Assets of the Country to be Equitably Divide ******************** Blan Mannan (English translation) *********************** F.M.I., travay Feliks Moriso Lewa *********************** Lewa’s Audio recording of FMI ************ (See also: A message to Paul Farmer, the Senate, Dobbins & Francois by Ezili Dantò, Jan. 30, 2010; Beating back the elite’s rabid rage; Seismic shifts and Avatar Haiti)

Of course, I paid attention. Wasn’t I just in US Federal court just last December with another white God working in Haiti for ten years molesting Haiti boys who the Ezili Network helped get 30-years behind bars? So all Gods working in Haiti claim our attention at the Network.

Unhinged from the actual history of anthropologist (that is, the study of Black and Brown people by mostly white men and women) in Haiti to ensure their Euro-tribes dominance; oblivious to the history of the “benevolent” missionaries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, “God is in Haiti,” blithely reported the Hartford Courant article. No, not the one Michelangelo cast in the image of his male lover and that’s purported to be the image of Jesus and is framed at Catholic Cathedrals and protestant churches all over the world. Another one.

And you thought Haitians were Godless!

But here we are with more than one white God.

Yep, “God” the article explained is in Haiti, living behind foreign military bases and NGO color-coded distribution charts. Well, maybe not explained as blatantly as that, but that’s the coded message nevertheless…

God is in the Haiti where Haitians are dying in droves from not having clean water because it’s been infected with foreign feces. The Haiti where the UN is collecting nearly $1billion per year, has been in Haiti for over seven years and no improvements have been made. Just a nightmare for the masses, one international crime perpetrated after the other without any end in sight, as the Caribbean’s only billionaires, living in Haiti, become richer and while the likes of Paul Farmer consolidate their narcissistic narrative and leverage it to share in the stolen bounty at the World Bank, IMF and with USAID on the backs of suffering Haitians. That Haiti. The one where Bill Clinton’s “better, post-earthquake reconstruction” is about moving FEMA trailers from Katrina fame into Haiti, complete with formaldehyde and all. That Haiti.

Yesterday, when I read this Hartford Courant article on “Author Tracy Kidder To Discuss “Mountains Beyond Mountains” at Trinity.” (http://cour.at/oMqdL1), I thought of Dessalines’ law.

In that article, as usual, the first line was “Paul Farmer is a physician, anthropologist and, as one of his former patients in Haiti put it, a god. Farmer, who has made it his life’s work to transform health care on a global scale by focusing on the poorest and sickest people, is the subject of author Tracy Kidder’s book, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World.”

Farmer has Tracy Kidder writing his press, as he rampages through Haiti, Rwanda, the Congo, doing the old missionary thing, along with his cohorts, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton, leaving behind Black and Brown death, oppression and indignity.

But, hey, he’s a God to a patient in Haiti somewhere. A patient who was most likely suffering from, if not the ravages of US policies of fraudulent “free trade,” containment in poverty for Haiti, then some of the ravages of USAID/Obama/Bill Clinton-like tourism haven initiatives of the past forty or so decades, where HIV-transmitting US/Euro Northern tourists’ impose their neoliberal, death-plan, “development ideas” on Haiti.

It’s been over a decade since Kidder keeps repeating that “God”-line about Farmer, as if time has stood still and Farmer hasn’t sold out to Officialdom; is not now the face of Officialdom – of USAID, the death-squad organizers (which he sought to head) and the UN, the coup-consolidators in Haiti? As if Farmer is not the UN deputy spokesperson for Clinton/Obama’s cholera democracy in Haiti? ( See, Bolivia urges US aid agency expulsion. ED Note- “Uhmmm, are you taking notes Haiti politicos?”)

For those icons who symbolizes Western so-called “civilization,” time mostly freezes at their best face in time. For Blacks, unless you’re servicing their tyranny, time freezes at our worst moments in life. Ezili’s Network corrects the imbalance for Haiti with the counter-colonial narrative. Haiti is smaller than Rhode Island with only 10 million Blacks inheriting a unique revolutionary legacy and beautiful African culture that is in jeopardy of extinction. It is sacred territory, from its inception, a place where a Black woman and man could be free within a sea of US-Euro enslavement, forced assimilation, colonization and neocolonialism. Today, that territory must continue to belong to the sovereign descendants of Dessalines’ revolution as a world heritage place, protected by all right-thinking nations who wish to lift up universal human freedom, not profit-over-people Bourgeoisie Freedom.

“From the viewpoint of the discoverers, terror is only terror when it terrorises them, their descendants or their friends… –.Jacques Depelchin (Africa: In Solidarity with Site Soley). And from the viewpoint of their victims, Lila Watson said it best: “If you have come here to help me then you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine then let us work together.”

Which leads me to the point of this response. Every time I read that the “good doctor” Paul Farmer is a GOD to Haiti, I wonder whose Haiti they are talking about? Cholera-democracy Haiti, NGO-corrupt and UN-occupied Haiti? Or, Dessalines’-Haiti? And thus, I take this moment for the record, and for historical purposes, to speak for the voiceless Haiti and for the defiant, still-whole and uncompromised, un-conflicted Haiti – the Haiti that’s not been rendered sick, docile, subservient, infirmed and more likely to promote the interests of foreigners than itself. No, nix that. I take this moment to recall the words of Haiti’s founding father, Jean Jacques Dessalines:

“…I command a people whose courage repel obstacles and grows by dangers. Let those homicidal cohorts come! I wait for them with a firm foot and a calm eye. I freely resign to them the shores and the spots where towns were; but woe to those who come too near the mountains; better would it have been for them to be swallowed up in the depths of the sea, than to be torn to pieces by the furious hands of the children of Hayti. War against the tyrants –always war— war till death; that is my motto:– Liberty, independence: that is our rallying cry.

Generals, officers, soldiers: differing from him by whom I was preceded, the ex-general Toussaint L’Ouverture, I have been faithful to the promise which I made you when I took up arms against tyranny, and as long as I live I will keep my oath. Never shall a colonist or a European set foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor. This resolution shall henceforth form the fundamental basis of our Constitution.

If other chiefs, after me, in following an entirely opposite course, shall dig their graves, and that of their fellow patriots, then you will have to accuse only the law of that destiny which shall have prevented me from rendering my fellow citizens free and happy. May my successors follow the plan which I have traced for them; it is the best system to consolidate their power; it is the greatest homage they can pay to my memory.” –Jean Jacques Dessalines, April 28, 1804, Head quarters at Cape Haitian, First year of independence.

Ezili Dantò
Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (“HLLN”)
August 27, 2011

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Felipe Luciano interviews Ezili Dantò on WBAI wake-up call, Friday, August 26, 2011 on UN-Cholera in Haiti, their latest denials….

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Forwarded by Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network
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Donate to support Ezili Network and Zili Dlo – Clean water is life and health for Haiti http://bit.ly/7UMx7q

MINUSTAH = CHOLERA

UN still lies but admits to setting water purification systems inside their basis nothing for their victims http://bit.ly/qZZsX3

Bye-Bye MINUSTAH! by Dady Chery

Ezili’s HLLN denounces massacres of Haiti Vodouist, holds UN responsible for
inaction – http://bit.ly/mRLrhf

Zili Dlo website photos

http://bit.ly/qd9Omw

Facebook Zili Dlo photos

http://on.fb.me/o8dEuT

Zili Dlo Photos on Flickr

http://bit.ly/mRLrhf

Ezili HLLN’s 14-Points for the Voiceless in Haiti: For a Return of Haiti’s Sovereignty and for Disaster relief, Rebuilding with Human Rights, Healing and Dignity – http://bit.ly/9lXlRF

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“Transformation is only valid if it is carried out with the people, not for them. Liberation is like a childbirth, and a painful one. The person who emerges is a new person: no longer either oppressor or oppressed, but a person in the process of achieving freedom. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.”– Paulo Freire, from Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Haiti, beloved, are you taking NOTE:

“The expulsion of USAID should be not only an act of sovereignty, but an uncompromising defense of the process of change,” AFP quoted Quintana as saying on Wednesday.

He further pointed out that the expulsion of the American aid agency would show “the same courage” as the 2008 kicking out of the US ambassador to the Latin American country. ( Bolivia urges US aid agency expulsion, August 25, 2011)

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Bolivia urges US aid agency expulsion

Juan Ramon Quintana, the head of Bolivia’s Agency for Development of Regions and Frontiers, said the expulsion of USAID would help “the process of change” in the country.

“The expulsion of USAID should be not only an act of sovereignty, but an uncompromising defense of the process of change,” AFP quoted Quintana as saying on Wednesday.

He further pointed out that the expulsion of the American aid agency would show “the same courage” as the 2008 kicking out of the US ambassador to the Latin American country.

Quintana went on to say that the move should be considered as a “self-defense mechanism” for Bolivia.

The latest row between La Paz and Washington has widened after Bolivian President Evo Morales on Sunday blamed the US for interfering in Bolivia’s domestic affairs and inciting opposition in the country to protest a key highway construction project through a nature preserve.

Morales said that US diplomats in Bolivia had contacts with leaders of the indigenous-led protest. The US embassy, however, denied Morales’ remarks.

Quintana further stated that the contents of letters between USAID — an arm of the State Department involved in economic and humanitarian assistance — and indigenous leaders revealed a plot aimed at disrupting “the judicial process” in the South American country.

Morales expelled the former US ambassador to La Paz, Philip S. Goldberg, and a group of American drug agents from his country in 2008, arguing that they were attempting to undermine the Bolivian government.

In the past years, the US Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have openly backed and promoted opposition movements in Bolivia.

DB/GHN/HRF
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Hartford

Author Tracy Kidder To Discuss “Mountains Beyond Mountains” at Trinity

August 26, 2011, Source: Hartford Courant

On Campus

Submitted by Michele Jacklin, Dir. of Media Relations, Trinity College, on 2011-08-25.

Tracy Kidder.

Paul Farmer is a physician, anthropologist and, as one of his former patients in Haiti put it, a god. Farmer, who has made it his life’s work to transform health care on a global scale by focusing on the poorest and sickest people, is the subject of author Tracy Kidder’s book, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World.”

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Kidder will discuss the book on September 2 at 4 p.m. at the Koeppel Community Sports Center, 175 New Britain Ave. The lecture is free and open to the Trinity community as well as to the public. A book signing will follow Kidder’s presentation.

Kidder’s work of nonfiction has been called “a masterpiece,” “an astonishing book,” “touching, funny and inspiring” and “brilliant, concise and original.”

The book chronicles the life of Farmer, who set out to cure infectious diseases and bring the life-saving tools of modern medicine to desperately poor people. Kidder’s account takes readers from Harvard, where Farmer studied, to Haiti, Peru, Cuba and Russia as Farmer changes minds and practices through his dedication to the philosophy that “the only real nation is humanity.”

In 1987, Farmer helped found a non-profit organization called Partners in Health, which describes its mission as both medical and moral. The group treats roughly 1,000 patients each day for free in the Haitian countryside, and works to cure drug-resistant tuberculosis among prisoners in Siberia and in the slums of Lima, Peru. When Farmer won the MacArthur “genius” award, he turned over the money to Partners in Health.

Kidder trailed along as Farmer toiled at his hospital in Haiti, hiked vast distances to follow up on patients and then “burned the midnight oil” writing grant applications and preparing speeches. Kidder also accompanied Farmer on his many trips to Cuba, Latin America and Russia.

Margaret Lindsey, dean of the First-Year Program, said Kidder and his book were selected for incoming students to read for several reasons. “There were many global paradigms built into the book that we thought that would provide really good conversations for first-year seminars, and that go across every discipline,” said Lindsey. “We wanted a book that has broad-reaching themes so that it can become a topic of universal conversation.”

In addition, Trinity’s advisory committee selected the book at about the time of the Haiti earthquake, a natural disaster that caused people to focus on that Caribbean country, particularly its daunting poverty and public health problems.

“We were fascinated by the degree to which public health issues in Haiti were made so clear by a contemporary world event,” said Lindsey. “Paul Farmer has shown that you can change the world not by being a hero but by creating work that can be reproduced,” said Lindsey. Those are important lessons that Kidder’s book can impart on the first-year students.

Kidder is a graduate of Harvard and the University of Iowa.