Hope still a challenge in Haitian tent camps

Amputee’s plight emblematic in devastated nation

 

By Stephen Smith

Globe Staff / December 20, 2010

 

Haiti quake coverage

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — For weeks now, the rumors have leapt from tent to tent, passed from one bedraggled survivor of the earthquake to the next. They would be expelled, driven into the streets by tractors. When, nobody knew for sure. But it would be soon.

Worry and resignation are plain in the misty eyes and slumped shoulders. Haitians have endured a hurricane, election upheaval, the threat of cholera — and now this.

So far none of it has broken Reginette Cinelien, 14, but this feels as if it could. She has spent more than 300 nights on this rutted soccer field, making do in one of the dozens of tents turned drab and limp by the alternating punishment of rain and sun. She lost her left leg to the quake, crushed by a cascading wall. A small mission from an artificial limb company in New Hampshire made her a prosthetic leg in March, optimistic they could spare her the ostracism that befalls amputees in this country.

The leg’s not such a good fit anymore, but that hasn’t kept her from using it all day long. It is the prospect of being forced from the camp — first broached by leaders of the soccer field — that seems too much.

“I don’t sleep at night, thinking about where I will go,’’ she said, dainty fingers knit pensively. “I’m not an animal, to ship me out of the camp like this.’’

Eleven months since calamity laid waste to this impoverished capital city, the story of Reginette Cinelien is the story of Haiti. More than 1 million of the dispossessed remain mired in tent camps, big and small. The horrifying novelty of catastrophe — and, with it, the global spotlight and legion of volunteers — has ebbed, replaced by a grim grind.

There are few signs of progress to match the billions in international aid. Good intentions have proved hard to sustain: The Manchester, N.H., prosthetics team, pinched by the demands of work at home and the tribulations of working in Haiti, made limbs for Reginette and 11 other amputees, but none since the spring.

“Failure is easy in Haiti,’’ said Dennis Acton, whose wife’s family owns New England Brace Co., the company that built the legs. “Everywhere you look, people are having difficulty trying to get things done.’’

Forced to leave

Pierre Michel Tanis, the wiry, canny president of the neighborhood soccer club, founded the camp where Reginette lives. He paid for water from his own pocket in the hours after the quake. He scoured the streets for medicine to save lives.

It has fallen to him to execute the dismantling of the refuge, now that the owners of the field want the land back and soccer teams clamor to resume play.

“The land doesn’t belong to me,’’ he explained one day in November. “The last meeting I had with the owner, four or five months ago, he said we have to move out.’’

“We have an obligation to kick them out,’’ he said.

The camp’s population has already shrunk from well above 1,000 to barely 700, and conditions have deteriorated. A hillock of rotting garbage rises at the entrance.

There used to be a camp doctor. There used to be help for Reginette and the other amputees with new legs. There used to be parties to keep spirits up.

“Those things disappeared,’’ said Reginette’s mother, Rosemaine Cius.

Her right foot was swollen, the smallest toe nearly the size of the biggest. She was hauling debris for a US government agency when she stepped in fetid water. She thinks something bit her foot. It had been like this for weeks.

“We survive,’’ her mother said.

On weekends, Reginette reclines listlessly on a cot, marking time by the sun. Marking time until 8 a.m. Monday, when she returns to the place she values most, to school.

School as a haven

One morning last month, Reginette and 28 other students crammed into a classroom made from plastic and tin and two-by-fours, which sits behind a guesthouse for Catholic missionaries next to the soccer field. Tanis and other leaders of the tent camp started the school, which now has more than 250 students, in late spring. For Reginette, it is both haven and beacon.

“I can learn something,’’ she said. “I will have a better life.’’

In Reginette’s class, children sang: “We have dreams. Dreams so beautiful. Up there on the hill. The hill with birds.’’

There was something different about Reginette’s eyes that morning. They had turned from vacant and remote to intense, steely. She shared a bench with six other girls, attending to a geometry lesson. The eraser on her pencil was worn to nothing. She appropriated the nub that remained on a classmate’s pencil.

Many of the girls wore ribbons in their hair. Reginette had a different fashion concern. She made sure to wear long pants to conceal her prosthetic leg. That way, maybe children who came to the school from outside the camp wouldn’t know her secret.

At first when she received the leg, she was tentative, regarding the plastic and metal device as alien. But moxie trumped doubt, and now Reginette wears the leg nearly all the time.

She tries to walk fluidly. A stutter step betrays her. During recess, she hovers in the shadows, watching as other children skip rope and whack soccer balls.

Acton said from New Hampshire that he’s working on getting her a new, better-fitting limb by collaborating with an aid agency. He has visited Haiti nine times, with his efforts now focused on trying to create jobs for the amputees.

On one trip, he brought a chunk of foam to create a cosmetic covering for the exposed metal pylon of Reginette’s leg. Reginette had been distressed by its metallic appearance, so Acton used a hacksaw and sandpaper to make the covering.

“We knew how self-conscious Reginette was about it. We understood that,’’ Acton said. “Any teenager would be.’’

In school the subject at 10:30 was Haitian history. The instructor was a lean, handsome man of stern countenance named Joseph Josué. Students were summoned to recite history they had been required to memorize from texts published in 1942, with only nominal updates.

Reginette’s answers were confident, correct. Other students, not so assiduous, cowered as the teacher ordered them to turn their faces toward the wall in shame. Some he dismissed entirely.

Classes continued until 1 p.m. Then tutoring began. Some days, Reginette attends three tutoring sessions, extending past 5.

Tuition at the school is a few dollars a year, but tutoring costs extra. Josué, who lives in a tent near Reginette’s, told her mother not to worry about paying, to give him money when she can.

“Reginette,’’ he said, “wants to go to school to help her family come out of poverty.’’

1.3 million displaced

That family — Reginette, her mother, and 5-year-old sister Francesca — has no apartment to return to, no relatives to provide shelter in Port-au-Prince. Reginette’s father, last seen by her the morning of the quake, is presumed among the more than 200,000 who died. Her 9-year-old sister also perished.

It was in October, Reginette’s mother remembered, when they first were told their departure from the camp was imminent. Someone came to each tent, she said, telling them the owner wanted the land back.

Tanis, the soccer club president, provided the Globe with a phone number for a man he said represents the owners. That man agreed twice to meet a reporter at a Port-au-Prince hotel but failed to appear. He did not respond to e-mailed questions.

Acton said late last week that he is trying to broker a deal for a small patch of land where houses could be built for Reginette and other amputees.

Sister Mary Finnick, the sprightly nun who runs the guesthouse abutting the soccer field, vowed that the tent dwellers — especially the disabled — will not be cast out on the streets. Donors, she said, are eager to construct houses.

“They just can’t get through the bureaucracy,’’ said Finnick, deep in her 70s. “It’s like an onion.’’

Government and aid agencies, which have already built some temporary housing, have ambitious plans to build much more — if they can find the land. First, rubble must be cleared. It has been estimated by engineers that there’s enough detritus in Port-au-Prince to fill dump trucks stretching half way around the world. Removal is painstaking: Heavy equipment can’t travel down twisting, pocked streets, and work must proceed gingerly, given the human remains and personal valuables that remain entombed.

There are issues, too, with structures that weren’t destroyed. The earthquake, and consequent housing shortage, exposed weaknesses in Haiti’s land system decades in the making. Port-au-Prince is a city of renters, but there’s often no certainty the person you rented from actually owned the property. That complicates resettlement.

So striking the tent camps will be a daunting proposition. To an outsider, life in an encampment seems a shambling existence. And, in many respects, it is. But in post-earthquake Haiti, some camps — even those more wretched than Reginette’s — offer amenities previously scarce here: free education, free meals, free medical care. They have become communities unto themselves, with beauty shops and food stalls and even discos — and no rent.

Aid agencies predict some camps — especially the big ones — may turn into permanent urban slums akin to the city’s Cite Soleil shantytown. Even if people do leave, there’s no guarantee they will find a place to live.

“This is the largest urban displacement ever,’’ said Paul Weisenfeld, a senior executive at the US Agency for International Development. Even if 200,000 or 300,000 people are resettled, he said, “when you have 1.3 million displaced . . . you don’t even notice it.’’

In Reginette’s tent, where the floor is dirt and the cots are shared by more than a dozen adults and children, the future is regarded with trepidation.

At this time of year, dusk descends swiftly. There are no lights on the soccer field, save for the ruby glow of charcoal grills. By 6 p.m., most of the people of the tents have returned to them.

But Reginette was not in hers one recent night. A boy inside said he would help find her.

Down a row of orderly tents, a solitary figure sat hunched over a borrowed school book, bathed in the halo of a street lamp pointed toward the road.

Reginette Cinelien made do, grasping any light she could find.

Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

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Who is calling the shots in Haiti?

Winsome Trudy

Sunday, December 19, 2010

IF there was any doubt about who is calling the shots in terms of the direction of Haiti's recovery plans and programmes, last Tuesday's meeting of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) would have removed such lingering uncertainty.

In recent weeks, several social and political commentators have been implying that Caricom leaders in general and especially the special representative on Haiti, PJ Patterson, could be doing much more to advance the plans and programmes for Haiti's recovery. Co-chair Bill Clinton, however, made it very clear, when the Caricom special representative pointed out, among several other things, that there were members of the commission who still did not know how and on what basis projects were submitted and accepted.

Mr Clinton was pellucid in explaining that the projects submitted were by the big donors, mainly the multilateral and bilateral entities. So much for those of us who felt that the IHRC was structured to ensure that the process would be Haitian-led and globally transparent. Tuesday's meeting reportedly approved some $430 million in projects.

Given the civil unrest in Haiti, the meeting was held in Santo Domingo. The first thing that would have caught the attention of participants was that co-chair, Haiti's Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, was a no-show because of a meeting of the Haiti Electoral Commission or Conseil Electoral Provisoire (CEP), which was also convened on Tuesday in Haiti.

He had to be there in his capacity as head of security/defence. The idea was for him to participate via teleconference, but this too did not really work and had to be abandoned. Naturally, in his absence co-chair Bill Clinton officiated. Initially scheduled to begin at 1:30 pm and so facilitate movement of members in and out of the country, the meeting was instead rescheduled to start at 5:00 pm. Obviously, some of the participants would have been forced to miss chunks of the proceedings.

However, several interesting things emerged, especially from the perspective of the Caribbean Community (Caricom). As reported in the Florida-based US press the following morning, Mr Patterson apparently got the attention of the commission. In recent weeks, the former Jamaica prime minister had been showing signs of growing frustration with the slow progress of the development plans and the worsening plight of the Haitians.

It must have been especially irritating to Mr Patterson to be seen to be part of the foot-dragging that has appeared to characterise Haiti's rebuilding programme. I recall hearing and/or reading in sections of the media suggestions and assertions by some of our analysts that Patterson should "take charge" if things were not moving as they should in Haiti.

PJ Patterson

In addition, Patterson's advice and guidance are constantly sought by many in our region and the general Diaspora who have their eye on investment projects in Haiti. Supreme diplomat that he is, he would have tried direct consultation with the IHRC and Haitian leaders before the meeting on Tuesday, seeking answers to some of the burning questions about several areas of concern regarding progress in Haiti and decisions by the IHRC.

Assuming he did, and I have good reason to believe that that was the case, he most likely would have been left in the dark like the rest of the leadership in Caricom. As the information which emerged on Tuesday suggests, those in the Caribbean Community were not the only ones in the dark.

At Tuesday's meeting, Mr Patterson used the opportunity to outline some of his concerns about the way the IHRC was operating. Among the several issues he highlighted were the lack of information being provided to IHRC members about projects, the submission and acceptance process, the general lack of visible progress, the continued existence of mountains of rubble deposited by the earthquake, the plight of the persons in tents, response to the outbreak of cholera and the general lack of urgency in addressing key issues.

It seems that Patterson opened the proverbial Pandora's Box as, following his remarks, Suze Percy Filippine from President Rene Preval's office spoke passionately on behalf of the 12 Haitian members on the IHRC. She said they felt like mannequins, also unappreciated and at times disrespected. She referred to their attendance at a meeting in September where there were no seats provided for them at the table!!

They, too, expressed concern about the lack of information and the slow progress on the ground. The IHRC executive was called on to respond to some of the latter charges, but the day was closing fast and my sources had to catch a flight out of Santo Domingo; so too it seems did several other participants seen in the airport departure lounge. However, last week the Miami Herald reported that the 12 representatives signed a letter that aired their frustrations with the recovery process. "The Haitian members don't even know the names of the firms that are working for the [commission] and what they are doing," said Suze Filippine. "We are just figureheads to rubber-stamp decisions when they are taken by the commission."

Meanwhile, back in Haiti, nothing has changed fundamentally. However, there has been some resumption of commercial life since December 11. The weekend calm appears to be holding, albeit uneasily. In the meantime there have been several negotiations and initiatives in an effort to resolve the election stalemate, but nothing has so far gained traction.

________________________________________

Haiti: We Must Kill the Bandits (Broadband pay-per-view & DVD available)

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Before the cholera epidemic...
Before the earthquake...

...it was one of the greatest human rights cover-ups in history.

Haiti: We Must Kill the Bandits

Embedded journalism in Haiti

Review of Haiti: We Must Kill the Bandits (Dir: Kevin Pina, 2010)

By Isabel Macdonald

In the pre-dawn hours of July 6, 2005, 350 UN troops stormed Haiti’s largest slum, Cite Soleil, which has been a site of strong opposition to the 2004 coup d’etat backed by Canada, the US and France against popular Lavalas president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The UN later claimed the raid to be a success as they had killed five ‘bandits’. However, according to the Cite Soleil residents interviewed in Kevin Pina’s new film Haiti: We Must Kill the Bandits (2010), the raid was a massacre by which the UN murdered dozens of innocent civilians in a poor neighbourhood. The foreign officialdom that supported the coup against Aristide has dismissed Cite Soleil residents’ account of this massacre as ‘propaganda’[1]—as it has with other documentation based on interviews with Haiti’s poor black majority who comprise Lavalas’ base of support. The international press has overwhelmingly reiterated this official position of disregard for the accounts provided by ordinary Haitians. We Must Kill the Bandits provides a rare account from the other side of the vast racialized class divide that separates the international press from Lavalas’ base of support.

The forcible removal of the elected Haitian president in a coup d’etat in 2004 was justified by the governments of the US, Canada and France as a humanitarian intervention to protect human rights.[2] This intervention brought to power a regime under which, according to several academic reports based on interviews with the Haitian population, there have been significant levels of state sponsored violence.[3] However, this reality has been consistently denied by officials. Confronted with media queries about a report published by the University of Miami law school, based on extensive interviews with residents of poor neighbourhoods in Haiti, the Canadian state’s response has been unanimously dismissive: the report is “total propaganda”[4]. While totally disregarding the accounts expressed by ordinary Haitians, the US, Canada and France  have preferred to advance their own self-serving human rights discourse by financing selected ‘human rights’ groups closely tied to Haiti’s tiny elite, who oppose Lavalas.[5]  In the lead up to the coup, the French embassy had even circulated to the international press pictures of confrontations between the Haitian police and anti-Aristide student groups supported by US and French agencies.[6]Meanwhile, the Canadian International Development Agency provided funding to the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, a group that, with very little evidence, accused Haiti’s constitutional prime minister of instigating a massacre. We must kill the bandits highlights the baselessness of many of these foreign embassy-endorsed claims of human rights abuses by Lavalas. Most prominently, the film casts light on the dubious nature of the claims made by the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, which were used to imprison Neptune and others.[7]

Sadly, the international press has largely reinforced the US, Canada and France’s self serving human rights discourse in Haiti.  The mainstream US and Canadian media have all but ignored the crimes of the US-backed regime against the Lavalas base.[8]  Meanwhile, as Pina’s film demonstrates, a completely unsubstantiated rumour painting Lavalas demonstrators as a dangerous national security threat, which was initially articulated by an organization funded by the US, Canadian and French governments, was reiterated uncritically in international newswires.[9] Thus have the international media been complicit in privileging the claims of certain actors, tied to the US, Canadian and French governments, over the perspectives of ordinary Haitians, and constructing a skewered discourse of human rights which has paradoxically been used to persecute Lavalas.

We Must Kill the Bandits presents a welcome antidote to the mainstream media’s silence on the repression against Lavalas in the wake of the coup. The film presents compelling evidence that Lavalas activists and supporters faced harsh repression at the hands of the Haitian police and the UN under Latortue’s rule. The film juxtaposes footage of lethal police and UN operations with interviews with witnesses of the raids and with families of the victims. Some of these shots proved so disturbing that they were greeted at a 2005 screening in Montreal with screams and wails by audience members. In this latest version, a diffusion filter has been added over the more graphic footage.

While those who lack background knowledge of recent Haitian politics may initially find the documentary’s simultaneous discussion of events from the first and second coups against Aristide, and criticism of media treatment of these events, confusing, Pina succeeds in making a compelling argument that touches on a range of complex historical issues. Drawing on footage from his first film about Haiti (Haiti: Harvest of Hope) which covers Aristide’s election as Haiti’s first democratically elected president in 1990, and the murderous CIA-backed 1991 coup against Aristide, We Must Kill the Bandits presents the 2004 coup as part of a legacy of US imperialism in Haiti. The film opens with a powerful juxtaposition between archival footage of US marines rounding up “bandits” (as the young Haitian men who resisted the 19 year American military occupation of their country were known by the marines) in 1915, and footage of a contemporary raid by UN soldiers in a Haitian slum. The historical parallel is framed by a quote from the commander of the UN force in Haiti, who explains the contemporary raid in terms eerily reminiscent of the marines: “we must kill the bandits”. Pina draws a direct line of continuity between the US-backed puppet regime imposed on Haitians under marine occupation, and the unelected US-backed regime headed by Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue that ruled Haiti between March 2004 and May 2006.

The film features several poignant interviews with the families of Lavalas political prisoners, as well as with some of the prisoners prior to their illegal arrests. Haiti’s Prime Minister, Yvon Neptune, is interviewed the day after the coup, and describes, with alarm, how he has been made a prisoner in his own office. Shortly afterwards, Neptune would be locked in a prison for over two years without charge. In a similarly alarming scene, another prominent Fanmi Lavalas figure, Father Jean Juste, is filmed laughing and joking as he serves free lunches to children in his parish, before the image suddenly freezes and we hear the priest’s voice on the Pacifica radio station KPFA’s Flashpoints show, describing how his wrists are bleeding as a result of the handcuffs that have been placed on him following his illegal arrest.

If the portrait of post-coup Haiti represented by We Must Kill the Bandits is miles away from the story that we have been fed by the US press, it is in no small part due to the fact that Pina has taken a radically different approach from that of his counterparts in the commercial media. The film is produced by the alternative media organization Haiti Information Project (HIP) that Pina founded, which includes several local Haitian journalist collaborators. Originally from Oakland, California, Pina has lived in Haiti on and off for 15 years, and has close contacts in the Lavalas movement, while some of his local collaborators live in the popular pro-Lavalas neighbourhoods. The journalists for the commercial media organizations typically lack such local contacts. On the rare occasions that Haiti is deemed newsworthy in the international media, international journalists are temporarily stationed at one or two luxury hotels, where they rub elbows with foreign diplomats, and foreign aid agency financed NGOs.[10] While they may only geographically be a few miles from Cite Soleil, in terms of the barriers of class and language, which are deeply racialized in Haiti, they are actually a world away. When international journalists temporarily stationed in Haiti have been spotted in the poor black neighbourhoods such as Cite Soleil, they have sometimes been embedded with the UN troops, seeing the neighbourhood from within the armoured personnel carriers with which the international community occupies the popular neighbourhoods.[11] Pina’s film provides an important counterpoint to the media accounts that have resulted from such limited perspectives. It is a scrupulously documented account from an international journalist who has chosen to embed on the other side of the vast racialized class divide that separates the international press from Lavalas’ base of support.

Isabel Macdonald is a doctoral student in the Communication and Culture programme at York University (Toronto). She conducted field research on international journalists’ practices in Haiti for her MA thesis, ‘Covering the coup: Canadian journalists, media sources and the 2004 crisis in Haiti’ (2006).

Notes

1In the fall of 2005, at a ceremony commemorating the arrival of a new contingent of UN troops to support the UN Security Council mandated force to stabilize post-coup Haiti, I enquired about the UN’s response to the documentation of the July 6 killings. The site of this military ceremony could not have more clearly embodied the imperialist character of the recent foreign intervention in Haiti; the ceremony took place at the university that president Aristide had built for Haiti’s historic bicentennial commemoration of 200 years of independence from slavery and from French imperialist rule—a building which has, in the wake of the coup, been transformed into a base of operations for the UN military officers. A UN communications officer’s answer to my question was instructive in highlighting the power of imperialist forces, versus ordinary Haitians, in shaping dominant discourses about human rights. That is ‘propaganda’, the UN communications officer replied matter-of-factly.

2 See Bush, 2004; Villepin, 2004.

3 See for instance Griffin, 2005, Kolbe and Hutson, 2006.

4 Pierre Pettigrew, cited in Haiti Action Montreal, June 23, 2005. These were the specific words of Canada’s former Foreign Affairs minister, however, Canadian officials have denounced the report as ‘propaganda’ to journalists with such consistency that observers have noted that there must be an official memo (J. Podur, personal correspondence, April 6, 2007).

5 See Pina, 2003, 2004; Engler and Fenton, 2004; and Hallward, forthcoming, 2007.

6 Eric Bosque (Political Analyst at the Embassy of France in Haiti), interview with author, Port-au-Prince, February 2006.

7 For more on this organization’s role, see Skerrett, 2005.

8 Sprague, 2006.

9 Jean-Claude Bajeux, who serves on the Steering Committee of the Group of 184, which is funded by the International Republican Institute, the EU and the Canadian International Development Agency, accused Lavalas demonstrators of instigating an armed campaign called “Operation Baghdad”. The Associated Press, one of the premier uncritically republished this claim.

10 Such were the author’s observations during her field research in Haiti during the 2006 Presidential elections, however it should be noted that this is by no means unique to Haiti. In an age in which global news flows are largely dominated by a few corporate giants based in North America and Western Europe, there are increasingly few foreign correspondents permanently stationed in Third World countries. Rather, media organizations rely during crises and elections on “parachute” journalists, who typically lack local contacts and knowledge, and this distance is exacerbated by the fact that they are stationed at hotels that are extremely inaccessible to all but the elites of the host country (Hamilton and Jenner, 2004, p. 313; Pedelty, 1995, p. 117).

11 Haiti Information Project, 2005.

  

Filmmaker Kevin Pina taking video testimony of victims of violent assaults by the police and United Nations forces in Cite Soleil ©2010 HIP

>via: http://haitiinformationproject.blogspot.com/2010/11/haiti-we-must-kill-bandit...