Speaking up

EPA Impact on Local Prices

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Fri, 14 May 2010 07:14:00 -0400

Everything Bajan may shortly be more expensive

When Barbados signed the EPA with the rest of the Caribbean, one of the conditions was the application of national treatment to all imports from the EU. This means that whatever taxes (or conditions) apply to goods produced in Barbados would equally apply to imports from the EU. It goes vice-versa as well; meaning that whatever taxes are imposed on imports, must also be imposed on locally produced goods.

This is bad news for consumers and disadvantageous to local producers. Already, many goods on the shelves of supermarkets are expired or are about to expire. This is called dumping, where large manufacturers try to get the rid of products before they expire.

This means one of two things. The supplier has excess supply and must get rid of it or, in an attempt to profit at a lower price, our importers buy in excess quantities and find themselves over-stocked. It may very well be both scenarios operating simultaneously.

The worst news is that right now there is an environmental levey on imports and it means that Government must either remove the levy or impose a levy on locally produced goods. Of course, Government has opted to impose the environmental levy on all locally produce goods. It is our understanding that Government is getting ready to implement the tax. What does that mean? What do we produce in Barbados?

This is not an exhaustive list: Bread, cakes, cookies, buscuits, ice cream, chicken, eggs, white flour, whole wheat flour, cream of wheat, pasta, vegetables, seasonings, tomato ketchup, syrups, rum, beer, juices, malt, plus, cement, cement blocks, furniture, solar water heaters, utilities (electricity, telephone, water), school uniforms, clothes, etc.

The businesses that will be affected: Farmers, restaurants, food businesses, bars, shops, supermarkets, hardwares, building suppliers, variety stores, clothing outlets, craft, wholesalers, bakeries, construction, cottage industries; in short, all manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers selling anything made in Barbados.

While it may be true that a reduction in VAT may serve to offset increases, the question is whether of not government sees this as a viable strategy. Either way, the blow will be struck at manufacturers and producers depending on the extent to whic the levy will impact on their ability to be competitive. If this is so, the compound effect of increased prices and diminishing competitiveness, will tend to negatively impact the economy as a whole.

Selective Commendation, Selective Indignation:

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 13:43:00 -0400

Recent Media Coverage of Cuba

By Emily J. Kirk, Cambridge University; John M. Kirk, Dalhousie University; Norman Girvan, University of the West Indies

The January 2010 earthquake in Haiti caused some 230,000 deaths, left 1.5 million homeless, and has directly affected 3 million Haitians, 1/3 of the population. On March 31, representatives of over 50 governments and international organizations gathered at the United Nations Haiti Donor Conference to pledge long-term assistance for the rebuilding of Haiti. At the conference, Cuba made arguably the most ambitious and impressive pledge of all countries to rebuild the entire National Health Service. While the efforts of other government have been praised, those of Cuba, however, have largely been ignored in the media.

The aim of Cuba's contribution is to completely reconstruct the Haitian health care system and to do so in a sustainable manner. The new system will be based on the Cuban model, embracing primary, secondary and tertiary health care, in addition to the training of additional Haitian doctors in Cuba. In summary[1]:

* The primary level will include 101 clinics to treat annually an estimated 2.8 million patients, perform 1.3 million emergency operations, deliver 168,000 babies, and provide 3 million vaccinations.
* The secondary level will be provided through 30 community hospitals. They will have the capacity to treat annually 2.1 million patients, and provide 1 million emergency surgeries, 54,000 operations, 276,000 electro-cardiograms, 107,000 dental exams, 144,000 diagnostic ultrasounds, and 487,000 laboratory tests. In addition, due to the high numbers of poly-traumatized patients, the 30 rehabilitation rooms will be included throughout the country and will provide 2.4 million therapeutic treatments for some 520,000 patients.
* The tertiary level of health care will be delivered by the Haitian Specialties Hospital, staffed by 80 Cuban specialists. It will contain various clinical departments, and will be used for research and teaching, as well as the further training of Haitian professionals who will gradually replace the Cuban professionals.
* Finally, 312 additional medical scholarships are to be provided for Haitian students to study in Cuba.

What is also significant point is that these are not just pledges from Cuba, but rather a development of medical assistance which has been provided over the last eleven years, and dramatically increased since the earthquake. A Cuban medical brigade has been in Haiti since 1999 and has a presence in 127 of the 137 Haitian communes, saved 223,442 lives, treated 14 million people, performed 225,000 operations and delivered 109,000 babies[2]. Furthermore much of the promised programme is already in place, as post-quake, 23 of these primary care health centers, 15 community reference hospitals and 21 rehabilitation rooms are up and running.

The cost of the Cuban programme over a ten-year period is estimated at $690.5 million, using 50 percent of international prices for services of this kind[3]. This is an enormous amount for a small developing country (11.2 million population); and moreover one that has been under a crippling economic blockade from its powerful neighbor for nearly half-a-century. It is even more notable when compared to those of other governments, particularly those of industrialized countries. For example, Cuba's contribution in relation to its GDP is 152 times that of the United States, which pledged $1.15 billion[4]. Among other G-7 countries, France, the former colonial power, pledged $188.93 million, Germany $53.17 million, Japan $75 million, and Canada $375.23 million, while Italy and the United Kingdom, though not specifically listed, were probably included in the $203.19 million pledge that was made in the name of EU Remaining group of countries.[5]

Hence in absolute terms the monetary value of Cuba's contribution is almost 4 times that of France, 12 times that of Germany, and almost twice that of Canada. Indeed, excluding the U.S., Cuba's contribution is more than the rest of the G7 countries combined, as well as 35% more than the contribution of the World Bank ($479 million). In all, 59 pledges were made from governments, regional blocs and financial institutions.

In other words, while other countries are pledging money, Cuba is actively creating an entire sustainable health care system which will treat 75% of the Haitian population,[6] and save hundreds of thousands of lives.

And yet, in spite of the extraordinary value of this commitment, it has been largely ignored by the principal North American media. As we can see from the accompanying Table, of 38 posts on the Haiti Donor Conference in five major U.S. media on the ten days following the Conference, only one mentioned the Cuban contribution, and at that only briefly. Moreover, CNN, New York Times, Boston Globe, and the Washington Post entirely ignored Cuba's contribution. The amount of media coverage is also instructive in indicating the gradual decline in media interest following the disaster. That said, the UN Haiti Donor Conference was clearly worthy of widespread attention, with a major gathering of some of the world's leading decision-makers, yet there was noticeably little published about it, and especially about Cuba's extraordinary contribution.

Table 1. Media Representation of United Nation Haiti Donor Conference, Including Cuba and the United States' Contributions^[7], to April 10, 2010.

News Agency	Number of Posts regarding the UN Haiti Donor Conference	Number of Posts stating US Monetary Contribution following Conference	Number of Posts regarding the UN Haiti Donor Conference that Mention Cuba
CNN	8	3	0
New York Times	4	3	0
Boston Globe	3	1	0
Washington Post	12	7	0
Miami Herald	11	8	1
Total	38	22	1

In addition, our analysis of the first fifty results in Google News for ˜United Nations Haiti Donor Conference' generated only two articles that mentioned Cuba's role. One of these focused on the rarity of Cuban and United States officials working together. By contrast, 31 of the 50 articles discuss the contributions of developed countries at the Donor Conference, and 21 specifically discuss that of the United States"9 of which mention the $1.15 billion pledged by the US government.

Indeed a content analysis of the articles reveals that their main theme was the importance of the role of the United States in helping Haiti. The dollar amount pledged was repeatedly stated, and the U.S. effort was often described as being equally (or more) important than that of the UN. According to one article, the biggest contributions came from the United States and the European Union.^[8] Even if one compares the absolute amounts pledged, this is simply not true, as the Venezuelan pledge was for $2.4 billion^[9]. Another article singles out the United States, explaining Over 140 nations, including the United States, have provided immediate assistance and relief to millions of Haitians^[10] and in media coverage the United States consistently headed the list of contributing countries. Another article lists the United States as having a more important role than the United Nations, noting Haiti's friends, as they are called - including the U.S., France, Brazil, Canada, the UN and the Red Cross.^[11] In sum, while relief efforts in Haiti were/are an international affair, the media have largely focused on contributions made by the United States.

Another common theme in coverage was the lack of assistance from other countries. Hence, when the assistance of the United States was not praised, those of other countries were denigrated. As one article states, The United States pledged $1.15 billion, in addition to the $900 million it has already given... By comparison, China pledged $1.5 million yes, you read it right, million with an "m", in addition to the nearly $14 million it has already given.^[12] Thus, there is a consistent pattern of disproportionately positive representation by the media of the role of the United States, one that both emphasizes the actual pledge and ignores blatantly the significant Cuban pledge.

There is a dramatic contrast between the cover-up of Cuba's extraordinary contribution to Haiti by mainstream US media and the enormous attention by the same media on alleged human rights abuses in that country. Literally dozens of articles on this topic have appeared in recent weeks. Of particular media interest was the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo (a jailed dissident with a criminal record who refused food for 80 days before dying) and the hunger strike of Guillermo Farias. The death of Zapata as a result of the hunger strike continues to be written about and discussed. Indeed it has been used consistently as a springboard to increase criticism of the Cuban government. The table below illustrates the extent of this coverage.

Table 2 Media Coverage of Hunger Strikes in Cuba between February 10 and April 6^[13]

News Agency	Number of Stories about the Hunger Strikers in Cuba
CNN	5
New York Times	7
Washington Post	13
Boston Globe	4
Miami Herald	48
Total	77

In analyzing the coverage of these two Cuba-related stories, the difference in the number of articles is quite striking, and reveals a clear disinterest in providing any positive information on Cuba, while at the same time maintaining a significant appetite to criticize Cuba. The comparison of the two in the following table is telling.

Table 3. Comparison between Media Coverage of Hunger Strikes in Cuba and Cuba's Contribution at the United Nations Haiti Donor Conference

News Agency	Number of Stories About the Hunger Strikes In Cuba February 10 - April 6	Number of Posts Regarding the UN Haiti Donor Conference that Mention Cuba March 31 - April 9
CNN	5	0
New York Times	7	0
Washington Post	13	0
Boston Globe	4	0
Miami Herald	48	1
Total	77	1

As a result, instead of reporting on an enormously important and topical story on a programme aimed at improving the lives of 75% of Haiti's population, the media have chosen to focus on the individual cases of two men who have consciously and deliberately decided to embark on a suicidal course. It does not take much to work out that the aim is to embarrass the Cuban government by following these human interest stories about two individuals who oppose the Cuban government, presenting them as martyrs. It is also obvious that there is a clear media filter, one which seeks to prevent any media coverage that could be construed as being positive of Cuba, in this case seen in the government's commitment to the reconstruction of Haiti.

In examining the media's representation of Cuba's role in Haiti's development and the stories of two dissidents, it is clear that politically biased infotainment has won out. Sadly (but perhaps predictably), in their coverage of Cuba, the media in the developed world have focused on the latter while ignoring Cuba's remarkable offer that will surely and significantly improve the lives of millions of Haitians, (while at the same time highlighting the role and contribution of the United States). Yet again we have an example of selective commendation and selective indignation in the North American media's presentation of Cuba.

April 14, 2010

^[1] Details from the Statement by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez to the Haiti Donor Conference, available at Pledge Statements; United Nations International Donors' Conference Towards A New Future For Haiti. 2010. Retrieved 6 April, 2010 from <http://www.haiticonference.org/pledges-statements.html>

^[2] From the Pledge Statement by Foreign Minister Rodriguez.

^[3] The total includes the medical services provided, calculated at 50% of international prices; the sustainability of these services and the personnel providing them; and the training of a further 312 Haitian doctors in Cuba. Whereas the Official Text of the Cuban Statement published on the UN website refers to this cost over four years (https://undp.box.net/file/412916690/encoded/39769548/be988a3663eeb8775a5e73766a4be61a), the text of Foreign Minister's Bruno Rodriguez's speech as published by Granma International refers to this cost over ten years (see Overseas Territories Review, http://overseasreview.blogspot.com/2010/04/statement-of-cuban-foreign-minister-at.html)

^[4] Cuba's contribution of $690.6 million is the equivalent of 1.22 percent of its annual GDP ($56.52 billion in 2009); the U.S. pledge of $1.15 billion is the equivalent of 0.008096 percent of its annual GDP (14,204 of billion in 2008). Source of the Cuban GDP estimate is the CIA Fact book figure at official rates of exchange; that of the US is the World Bank's World Development Indicators.

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] See search results for United Nations Haiti Donor Conference. Retrieved 10 April, 2010 from <www.miami.com>, See search results for United Nations Haiti Donor Conference. Retrieved 10 April, 2010 from <www.thestar.com>, See search results for United Nations Haiti Donor Conference. Retrieved 10 April, 2010 from <www.washingtonpost.com>, See search results for United Nations Haiti Donor Conference. Retrieved 10 April, 2010 from <www.boston.com>, See search results for United Nations Haiti Donor Conference. Retrieved 10 April, 2010 from <www.nytimes.com>, See search results for United Nations Haiti Donor Conference. Retrieved 10 April, 2010 from <www.cnn.com>

^[8] UN Haiti Donor Pledges Surpass Target of Almost $10 Billion. BBC. 1 April, 2010. Retrieved 10 April, 2010 from <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8596080.stm>

^[9] The Venezuelan pledge, which has also been largely ignored by the U.S. media, consists of $1,431 million via the PetroCaribe Oil Facility for infrastructure and social spending, $409 million via PetroCaribe for direct budgetary support to the Government of Haiti, $395 million in debt forgiveness (announced shortly after the earthquake), $100 million through the ALBA Bank, $37.2 million towards the Union of South American States' $200 million pledge, $2.3 million for emergency supplies via CITGO, and unspecified support for food and education; for a total of $2,420 million. Source: Venezuelan Pledge Statement retrieved 13 April, 2010 from <http://www.haiticonference.org/pledges-statements.html>

^[10] Esther Brimmer. Rebuilding Haiti: A Global Response to a Global Crisis. The Huntington Post. 12 April, 2010. Retrieved 12 April, 2010 from <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/esther-brimmer/rebuilding-haiti-a-global_b_528790.html>

^[11] Wilnetz, Amy. Renew Haiti From The Ground Up. NY Daily News. 12 April, 2010. Retrieved 12 April, 2010 from <http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/04/12/2010-04-12_renew_haiti_from_the_ground_up.html>

^[12] Andres Oppenheimer. China Should Be Ashamed of Its Aid to Haiti. Miami Herald. 3 April, 2010. Retrieved 10 April, 2010 from <http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/03/1562417/china-should-be-ashamed-of-its.html#ixzz0ktnhldAK>

^[13] See search results for Hunger Strike, Cuba. Retrieved 6 April, 2010 from <www.miami.com>, See search results for Hunger Strike, Cuba. Retrieved 6 April, 2010 from <www.thestar.com>, See search results for Hunger Strike, Cuba. Retrieved 6 April, 2010 from <www.washingtonpost.com>, See search results for Hunger Strike, Cuba. Retrieved 6 April, 2010 from <www.boston.com>, See search results for Hunger Strike, Cuba. Retrieved 6 April, 2010 from <www.nytimes.com>, See search results for Hunger Strike, Cuba. Retrieved 6 April, 2010 from <www.cnn.com>

[URL for this commentary at at http://www.normangirvan.info/selective-commendation-indignation-cuba-kirks-girvan/]

CARICOM's Immunity Claim

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 13:33:00 -0400

Recent reports of a case filed in the High Court involves CARICOM’s purported use of patented software. The interesting point about this case is the legal defense of CARICOM; it seems to be claiming immunity from prosecution.

It is hard to imagine that CARICOM would want to claim immunity from prosecution in order to avoid presenting arguments in a court for a purported contract with a CARICOM company.

The question is – why would this regional entity, a representative of CARICOM Member States, invoke such a defense in light of seeming adherence and promotion of Fair Trading and Competition Laws?

What will surely be put to the test by this case is the extent to which a sovereign entity can invoke immunity while engaging in a commercial transaction. It certainly will bring to the forefront the degree to which patents, copyrights, etc. are adequate protection while conducting business in CARICOM Member States.

We are constantly being told that these IP assets represent property. We were also being encouraged to patent our inventions as they are a means of generating income and creating wealth.

This border crossing solution was an indigenous solution, under pinning the politicians/government chant that our greatest resource is our people.

Governments, of which CARICOM is composed, constantly speak to our (lack of) natural resources and suggest that intellectual property is a critical component to competitiveness as regional nation states.

It will be a sad day in the halls of Customary International Law if this defense; CARICOM’s immunity from prosecution, is upheld in a court of law.

What message would this send to our inventors, young entrepreneurs, regional businesses and international investors?

Below is an excerpt from a report on the matter which is in circulation.

***********************************************

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Colleagues,

The following presents the classic case of small business being trampled by big business.

The implications in this case are far more serious since the “big-business” is purported to be the trusted bona-fide broker of regional interest – CARICOM.

Below are links for some background reading:

·        http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20070210/business/business1.html
·        http://cananews.net/news/131/ARTICLE/7115/2007-02-09.html
·        http://www.nationnews.com/story/caricom-to-court-FRONT-PAGE-LEAD

In mid 2006, after effecting several non-disclosure and confidential agreements, DW&A et al (the plaintiffs) contend that the entity known as CARICOM misappropriated their trade secrets and proceeded to practice a method claimed in their U.S. patent, at nine or more locations in the Caribbean CARICOM member states.

The plaintiffs further allege that CARICOM hired a company named 3M to help implement the plaintiffs’ patented solution and paid 3M a reported US$20.9 million fee.

CARICOM Member States are alleged to have spent US$145 million to facilitate CWC 2007 and, at one of its Heads of Government meetings in Belize late in 2007, decided, post World Cup, to make the plaintiffs’ border crossing solution its permanent border crossing solution.

It is of note that IMPACS, the CARICOM sub-agency and implementer of the plaintiffs’ solution, is purported to continue to use the said solution from their new HQ in Trinidad under the CARIPASS logo! (see http://www.caricom.org/jsp/community_news/caripass_system.jsp )

The plaintiffs sought representation on this patent infringement matter all through the West Indies. The only lawyer who has had the intestinal fortitude to take the matter is Douglas Trotman.

The crux of this CARICOM issue, to be resolved by the Barbados Court on March 30^th , is whether the plaintiffs should be paid for the use of their patented solution granted in 2006, for which patent was pending from 2004, well before CWC2007. (see http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7147155/description.html ).

It should be noted that CARICOM as its defense has claimed that it is “immune from suit”. This reminds us a similar claim of immunity by a former Caribbean diplomat to the UN in 1975 who claimed that his German Shepherd, a canine disposed to biting neighbours, had diplomatic immunity. It would seem like Caribbean people and organizations are prone to this immunity defense!

As "trusted broker" of regional sovereign governments", a major player in development and economic assistance interventions for regional Member States, CARICOM now claims an 'immunity from prosecution" privilege.

Customary International Law prescribes how governments and sovereign entities secure resources for trade and commerce as well as the legal obligations related to contracts. CARICOM’s immunity defence, hypothetically presents an untenable position where, for example, CARICOM (or any sovereign entity) in the course of business, after, for example, engaging a construction company to repair CARICOM’s HQ building, could unilaterally renege on that contract, refuse to pay the building contractor and claim immunity from any suit arising therefrom.

Regards

Haiti: Genocide by Omission

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Mon, 8 Feb 2010 14:03:00 -0400

By Flavia Cherry

If ever there was genocide - this is it! People who are very sick are being left in camps where no help is available (see a piicture of one of the camp sites, made only of bed sheets hang up by flimsy sticks).

I interviewed thirty eight women and every single one of them was hungry. One lady who gave me her phone number, said that supplies were only distributed once and since there was pushing and shoving, they never came back to her area. She said that some of the bags of supplies were being diverted to private warehouses, re-packaged and then re-sold to them. She explained how some of this is being done by the elites. She gave me her phone number and asked me to please help them.

See picture of how women and children are living in the camps - those who are lucky enough to at least have a bed-sheet covering over their heads. Some had not seen any supplies for days. Pregnant women are having miracle babies on the bare ground in tents where there is no running water, no chances of getting emergency help, if there are complications. The most painful part is to see sick children and disabled people forced to live on the sidewalks. One of the pictures shows the way people are living on the sidewalks with no shelter. The only place for a desperately sick child (in the same picture) is for him to be slumped over a bucket, with the middle part of his body hanging into the bucket.

I tried hard not to be overcome by the agony of sight in the many areas where human suffering is most severe. A Human Rights activist in Haiti told me about a French newspaper report (in France) regarding French doctors chopping off limbs when it was totally unnecessary, so someone should check this out.

So many people are starving and hungry.

Haitians are demonstrating because too many of them are left without food for extended periods. One must really ask why, when so much has been donated and so much is available for distribution? I have seen people carrying American labelled bags of rice and other goods. There are distributions in some places and I did see areas where there were lines for women only, but the bottle necks continue. If something is not done, there will be more demonstrations and eventually, riots for food. Is that the intention? Is this being done to justify the need for millitary intervention? People are being pushed to an unacceptable, unconscionable limit. I am very worried about the way people are living, because when the rainy season starts, the genocide by omission will be multiplied many times over.

Haitians are the most resilient, most creative people on the planet! I cannot begin to explain here, the way people are organizing and helping each other in this tragic situation. One woman made a stove/grill, with material from the rubble and it is being shared by the other women in her camp. She proudly showed me her invention (see photo).

I believe that Haitians will overcome, but we must reach out to them. CARICOM can make use of so many of us in the region who speak French and Creole. It is very clear that the international agencies cannot handle the scale of the problem, so CARICOM should ask them to collaborate and provide some of those resources (especially as Caribbean citizens have been donating) so that Caribbean citizens can assist wherever possible.
I think there is a lesson in this for us in the Caribbean.

We need to be more organized for disasters which can happen to any island because the same things which are happening to Haiti, could happen to any of the islands where we live. And if international agencies do not cooperate with CARICOM, then we should have a campaign to advise Caribbean citizens not to donate to any of those institutions, but rather to a Caribbean Disaster Fund.

I see the hope in the children of Haiti. All is not lost. I have a beautiful photo of the baby who was born to a double amputee, thanks to our intervention and support. In some areas people are beginning to hustle for survival and organize their lives in whatever way the can; all things considered. Some women vendors are already selling produce by the roadside. We can learn a lot from the creativity and tenacity of our Haitian brothers and sisters.

Haiti Still Starving 23 Days later

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Sat, 6 Feb 2010 18:31:00 -0400

http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley02052010.html

February 5 - 7, 2010

"No Milk, No Clothing for the Baby, Nothing!"

By BILL QUIGLEY

You can walk down many of the streets of Port au Prince and see absolutely no evidence that the world community has helped Haiti. Twenty three days after the earthquake jolted Haiti and killed over 200,000 people, as many as a million people have still not received any international food assistance.

On February 4, the UN World Food Program reported they had given at least some food, mostly 55 pound bags of rice, to over a million people. The UN acknowledges that it still needs to reach another one million people. The 55 pounds of rice are expected to provide a two week food ration for a family. Beans and cooking oil are scheduled to come later.

The Associated Press reported that people in Haiti at small protests were holding up banners reading “Help us, we’re starving.”

Over a million people are displaced. About 10,000 families are in tents, the rest are living under sheets, blankets and tarps.

One of the people living under a sheet is a brand new mother with her one day old baby. The New York Times reports that Rosalie Antoine, 33, and her one day old baby were living in a neighbor’s yard with puppies and chickens under a sheet in the Bel-Air neighborhood of Port au Prince.

Haiti and the United Nations estimate 250,000 children under the age of 7 are living in temporary housing. Most need vaccinations.

Flavia Cherry, of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action, this week witnessed a pregnant double amputee give birth on the ground in one of the tent camps without any medical assistance at all. “This poor mother had nothing, no milk, no clothing for the baby, nothing!”

Even people who can afford to purchase food are having a difficult time. A 55 pound bag of rice costs 40 percent more today than it did before the earthquake. Dr. Louise Ivers, a Partners in Health physician in Port au Prince, reports a 25 kg (55 pounds) bag of rice that sold for $30 US dollars (1,207 Haitian Gourdes) before the quake, now costs $42 US dollars (1,690 Haitian Gourdes).

The World Food Program reports prices are still rising and people outside the earthquake zone are having difficulty meeting their basic food needs. twenty three days after the quake.

Bill Quigley is Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He is a Katrina survivor and has been active in human rights in Haiti for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. He can be reached at: duprestars@yahoo.com.

Hell in Haiti

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Fri, 5 Feb 2010 09:13:00 -0400

A story from an Australian woman working in Haiti

PHOTO: Alison Thompson

Dear Friends:

What is happening in Haiti is truly exposing the clandestine relationship between international aid agencies and western powers. After so many weeks of raising billions of dollars, the most basic relief is barely trickling down to the people who need it most. It is like they want to see Haitians who are already on their knees, fall flat on their backs. The email from Alison gives an accurate picture of the situation and it had to take a celebrity from Hollywood to release the bottleneck. International aid agencies have so much experience in dealing with disasters and there is no excuse for what is happening in Haiti.

Something needs to be done urgently before the rainy season, because more people will die in those camps which are only covered by bed sheets. I am especially concerned about the children and those who are already sick, in those camps. There is so much land in areas that have not been affected by the earhquake. If there was genuine goodwill, they would have used some of that money (by now) to begin moving people to more decent shelter on the outskirts and in the suburbs.

It is unbearable to see what is happening.

Regards,

Flavia Cherry
------------------------------------------------

Australia Day Honours: Haiti worker is honoured

BY MONICA HEARY

26 Jan, 2010 11:34 AM

IN THE middle of the rubble and human misery of Haiti there could be a little pocket of celebration when Cronulla aid worker Alison Thompson officially receives her Order of Australia Medal (OAM).

The medal is for the former teacher's humanitarian aid work, particularly in the Peraliya region of Sri Lanka, in the post-tsunami trauma of late 2004.

Now her proud parents are understandably worried about their daughter's presence in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

"All our children are free spirits, and we pray for her every day,'' father Keith Thompson said.

In Haiti Ms Thompson is working hand-in-hand with actor Sean Penn, whom she met as a result of her directing a documentary, The Third Wave, about Sri Lanka post-tsunami.

In a letter to her parents from Haiti this week she says: "Dante would describe it as hell here. There is no food and water and hundreds are dying daily.

"The other day I assisted with an amputation with no pain killers, holding down a young boy while they used a saw to cut his leg off .''

Ms Thompson has continued living in Sri Lanka for the past five years, where she has been working in a community tsunami early-warning centre, which she founded. The centre is the only one in Sri Lanka, and setting it up was a continuation of her assistance to the country. She has also helped rebuild a village, start a medical centre, 80 businesses, and a school.

_____________________________________________
via PACWIN

Email from Alison Thompson sent to her parents in Sutherland Shire (Sydney) on 24 January 2010.

Subject: Hell in Haiti

Hi mum and dad - I won't be around when they announce my award on January 26th. I am with Sean Penn, diana jenkins, Oscar and 15 doctors embedded in the 82 airbourne ( USA) Dante would describe it as hell here. There is no food and wAter and hundreds dying daily. The aid is all bottlenecked and not reaching here . The other day i assisted with amputation ( holding them down) while they used a saw to cut a young boys leg off with no pain killers. Today I went with a strike force and army patrol in hummers into the streets and walked 5 miles through the camps set up on every street corner ..sewage and bodies stench is everywhere. As i attend to a patient 30 people crowd around me and it's hard to breath. I nearly fainted today as the sewage smell went straight down my throat. I went white and dizzy but couldn't sit down as sewage is running through the streets. There is much infection and it feels like the job is too big. No antibiotics anywhere.

Good news, today our new york doctors evacuated 18 patients with spinal injuries out to miami and we're all so excited. Our mash unit is in the 82 air base overlooking a refugee camp of over 50000 people. The refugees start singing Christian songs at 4 am and line up for food until the army hands it out at 8 am ( thats if there is any food) On the first night I was in the nearby jungle camping under the stars with my team and woke up to the beautiful music drawing me to them. I thought it was a church and we went to find it and came across the 82 airbourne camp and the refugee camp.( that's how we ended up here) as it wasn't safe to stay where we were even though we had our own security force.

We are totally self suffient with food gas and medicines and have a private donor (Diana Jenkins who was a refugee in camps in Bosnia as a child - her family died of starvation in the camps. ) Sean Penn is here purely as a volunteer and is cutting through bureaucracy to get aid moving and food water and medicines to the people. There is no agenda but to save lives. Helicopters fly over head and it feels like vietnam. That night 50,000 people sung me to sleep and they sing every night for the world to save them. There is always hope but she's not here right now.

Alison xxx

My writing is a mess as it's on iPhone and keeps changing my words and the generator is on for a few hours but I know it's important to tell the world. Please send to any press who may call or family and friends.

And for those who want to read more about Alison and her award, here's an article from the St George & Sutherland Leader:

http://www.theleader.com.au/news/local/news/general/australia-day-honours-haiti-worker-is-honoured/1734194.aspx

Haiti from The Front Line

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Mon, 1 Feb 2010 15:59:00 -0400

Sharing some correspondence from Haiti - ROK

By Flavia Cherry

It is good to see that some efforts are being made to reach women in desperate need, but those of us on the ground are yet to see this happen in many of the areas where there is desperate need for food and relief. AID agencies MUST find a more humane way to reach out to the women and children who are most vulnerable and desperate. I know that the need is great, there is no excuse for what is the reality on the ground here in Haiti as Caribbean citizens offered help and many have even been denied entry. It is obvious that the aid agencies, (well intentioned as they may be) are unable to handle the scale of the problem here in Haiti. So why are they not being inclusive and involving more Haitian and Caribbean institutions in the relief and recovery efforts? Something is very wrong about the picture here in Haiti because while international agencies are dropping the ball in an attempt to monopolize aid efforts, Haitians are dying. Apart from lines for women, there is an urgent need for volunteers to go into the camps to reach women, children, disabled and elderly people who are unable to move.

It is a disgrace for so much money to be circling around to all kinds of aid groups and every single day I see so many people hungry, desperate. This situation is simply not acceptable. There are women in camps who have not had anything to eat for days. There are many available Haitians who are willing to assist as volunteers to get the aid to those who need it and CARICOM was willing to send help, but something seems to be really wrong. Why are Caribbean Goernments not allowed to play a more pivotal role, especially as there are many CARICOM citizens and regional security officers who speak creole and would be able to communicate better with the people of Haiti.

What I see on the ground is lots of big fancy air conditioned vehicles moving up and down with foreigners, creating more dust and pollution on the roads. Thousands of military officers everywhere, heavily armed like they are in some kind of battle zone. The girl guides and boy scouts of Haiti are also out in their uniforms, but unlike the army of troops, they are up and about, assisting in many ways. I saw of group of the boy scouts and girl guides directing traffic today, Sunday!

From the very beginning, I have been asking why aid agencies did not arrange separate lines for women, children and disabled people. It is obvious that if you leave people hungry for 5 to 8 days without food, they will be desperate and when food finally arrives, it will be survival of the fittest. The international agencies allowed confusion to reign supreme for more than two weeks while sensational and racist media people were merrily portraying images of hungry people fighting for food. At least now that they have suddenly realized the need for separate lines, I hope that this happens at every single distribution point, because as I am writing this email, that certainly is NOT the case.

I would like to share two separate events which I witnessed yesterday.

The first one is what I call a miracle birth. A young lay who had both legs amputated delivered a healthy baby on the ground, under a bed sheet. Not only were both legs amputated, but she had bandages all over her hips. Because of her condition, this expectant mother should never have been left out there on the streets at that advanced stage of her pregnancy because the chances of having a normal delivery in her physical condition were very slim. At the time of the delivery, people were everywhere, men, women, children, all huddled together under those sheets, for shelter from the sun. If there were complications, both mother and baby could very easily have passed, as no one in the camp had any transport or means of getting the mother to a medical facility. Other mothers were there with their newborns. This poor mother had nothing, no milk, no clothing for the baby, nothing! A doctor eventually came, but the mother was left there, with her baby, so we brought milk and supplies, including a sleeping bag. I know these are not normal times, but it is exactly for this reason, international aid agencies should be more inclusive and engage all those who are willing and capable of providing support.

The second incident happened in the heart of Port Au Prince yesterday where the largest number of people are living under the most inhumane conditions. I was taking pictures, when suddenly everyone started to run towards the Palace gates. I stood on top of a vehicle and realized that it was President Preval who had ventured onto the lawn and people starting shouting out to him, saying that they were hungry. President Preval came to the fence and hundreds of people kept running towards the fence. Many of them were shouting ¨Lavalas, Aristide, Lavalas, Aristide¨. Several others were asking President Preval why he had not addressed his people and told them what was happening. One woman put it this way: (I have not had anything to eat for four days and no one is hearing anything from the President, we have no idea what our Government is doing). I am using brackets because I cannot find quotation marks on this french keyboard.

President Preval spoke to those who were closest to the fence, but the large number of people who were pushing and shoving to get a glimpse of him, obviously heard nothing. At least I got a picture of the whole scene, including President Preval behind the fence with hundreds of people right next to him on the other side. Something about that scene convinced me even more, that there is really no need for such a heavy military presence in Haiti. What Haiti needs is an army of medical, civilian and specialist volunteers who will work with the people of Haiti to rebuild their nation - not a heavily armed military of more than 50,000 standing guard over them.

Regards,

Flavia

PS: I must express appreciation for the many volunteers from various countries who are giving very genuine assistance to the people of Haiti, but my comments remain relevant because of the reality on the ground

CARICOM's False Start

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:25:00 -0400

TRINIDAD & TOBAGO EXPRESS

CCN senior journalist Andy Johnson

Sunday, January 24th 2010

PHOTO: New home: Refugees from earthquake-ravaged Haiti unload from a military transport plane Friday afternoon, at Orlando-Sanford International Airport, in Sanford, Florida, USA. -Photo: AP

CCN senior journalist Andy Johnson spent five days last week in Haiti, embedded with a contingent of the members of the Jamaica Defence Force. This is the first part of a series on his journey into Haiti.

Port-au-prince, Saturday
VELDIA V Coleby, is the Second Secretary and Vice Consul at the Bahamas Embassy in Haiti. The Bahamas is one of a few of the Member States of Caricom with diplomatic missions resident in Haiti. Barbados is another one of those few.

At dusk on Friday, Ms Coleby was not clear about what was the Caribbean Community’s effective response to the latest tragedy in Haiti caused by the earthquake on January 12, which registered 7.0 on the Richter scale.

She was aware, however, that her embassy was supposed to have been used as the base for an official Caricom mission to Haiti, ostensibly to undertake its own assessment of the damage and to decide on a co-ordinated regionwide response.

No meetings had taken place at the embassy thus far. Ms Coleby was aware, though, that executive director of the Barbados-based Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA), Jeremy Collymore, was to arrive in Haiti yesterday. She also understood that the region had decided to undertake a project in Lougane, a town some considerable distance away from the capital. On what basis that decision had been taken, she was also not clear.

The story of Caricom and its efforts to join in the international relief efforts in the wake of the earthquake disaster has itself been dismal thus far, mired in a deep, dark atmosphere of lack of co-ordination, and an embarrassing absence of independence.

Whereas the Bahamian diplomat confessed to knowing Colin Granderson, she had not seen nor heard from him in the ten days since January 12. A crippling breakdown in most areas of telecommunications inside Haiti had made contact near impossible for most people operating in the middle of the earthquake-induced crisis.

Granderson, a Trinidadian diplomat who is a deputy Secretary General of Caricom, had twice endeavoured to make it into Haiti in the wake of the crisis. The first time he was part of a mission which was frustrated by its inability to land. He had planned to make it in from the Dominican Republic after an emergency meeting there on January 18.

In the wake of the current crisis, the government of Jamaica rushed a 150-member contingent of the Jamaica Defence Force, to establish what has been described as ’the Caricom footprint’ amid the jungle of international military, disciplined forces, aid workers, humanitarian agencies and non-governmental organisations scampering in.

So swift was the action of the Jamaican Government that a portion of those troops was on the ground at Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport when Jamaica’s Prime Minister Bruce Golding and Opposition Leader Portia Simpson-Miller arrived there in a joint mission on January 14. This was less than 48 hours after the devastating earthquake. The JDF barge had been ordered to sail overnight, the night before, leaving behind hundreds of pounds of vital cargo and equipment for the troops.

In the days between January 14 and 22, the Jamaican contingent representing the Caribbean, has had to suffer, silently, the indignity, frustration and the embarrassment arising from its total dependence on a foreign ’partner’.

The Canadian Defence Force has been the agency moving people, supplies and equipment between Kingston and Port-au-Prince. Those operations have been hampered by the decision of the Canadians to place their own needs and requirements entirely above those of the Caribbean’s.

For three days last week, Major Jamie Ogilvie, the Commanding Officer of the JDF forces in Haiti, waited for definitive word from the Canadians on the availability of an aircraft, to transport personnel and equipment, as well as the tonnes of relief supplies transported to Kingston from other Caricom destinations, for distribution in Haiti.

On Wednesday the aircraft was ’likely to come’. That advisory looked ’more likely’ for Thursday, only to have been called off by mid-morning that day. One of the ’problems’ given was that ’permission to land’ was not forthcoming, because of what was described as an absence of space at the airport tarmac.

Resentment was developing over what was being reported as ’the American takeover’ of the operations at the airport. Quite possibly as a result of this, the Canadians decided to move the base of their own operations from Port-au-Prince to the town of Jacqmel, on the other side of Haiti.

The Caricom initiative, or what presented itself as such, was suffering considerably.

Comments: Caricom's false start



This just goes to show Caricom has always been third world and will always be		Posted: 2010-01-23 9:59:00 PM
This article just goes to show the Caricom as a whole will always be classified as a third world community which nobody pays attention to until they get their act together.....
False Start		Posted: 2010-01-23 10:01:00 PM
There will always be a false start with Caricom mainly because there really is no unity amongst its members and also amongst the populations of the member states.When Mr. Manning postulates some ideas what is the natural reaction in T&T.....negativity. Regardless of how many nationals are suffering certain actions must still be taken to develop a brotherhood, but we continue to miss this point yet when tragedy strikes we all want to look good. Sacrifice is what is required to achieve a well oiled an functioning caricom that can rise to the occasion at a moments notice, until we all understand this....Haiti i'm sorry.
Where are our true leaders		Posted: 2010-01-24 00:17:00 AM
The issue is not lack of communication. The issue is what are we going to do about out incompetent leaders. Is it the system of government we inherited from our former colonizers that makes us so incapable and lackadaisical? The Caribbean produces many intelligent people, when will we begin to purge the incompetents and issue in the brilliant minds?

Jacmel and Rural Districts Overlooked

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 03:26:00 -0400

There is no longer a major search-and-rescue effort in the town of Jacmel

Haitians show fortitude in face of disaster

By Christian Fraser
BBC News, Jacmel

The remote mountain road to Jacmel took us past landslides, around boulders to the southern-most edge of the island.
They had told us the route was impassable, but we made it in three hours. No aid has come this way. Only the rugged vehicles can get through.
Jacmel, a former colonial coffee town, is desperate for help. Perhaps one in three buildings in the old town now lies in ruins - more than 100 years of history, shattered in a few catastrophic seconds.
At the Saint Michele hospital the patients are lying in the garden, baking in the heat, without enough doctors to help.
The hospital buildings are too unstable to use.
In the operating theatre, nurses swat flies as the surgeons do what they can. Outside, the injured scream for painkillers.

'Emotional experience'

On the day we visited, an expeditionary team of Canadian doctors had just arrived to lend a hand. But with only basic supplies, they could only perform what resembled battlefield triage.

The aid operation is finally beginning to reach the more remote parts of Haiti

Ted Alexander, an orthopaedic surgeon from Washington DC, was almost in tears when we interviewed him.
He has been forced to remove limbs he knows he might have saved.
One patient, Marie Laurie, was trapped by falling masonry and has lost her arm beneath the shoulder.
"When I got here she had been sitting here for days because there was no surgeon available. Her arm had gone black. It was too late to save it," Dr Alexander said.
"It has been such an emotional experience for us all," he added. "I guess I am getting kind of tired... but, there's no place I would rather be. This is where it is happening. This is what you've got to do."

Grateful

There is no longer a major search-and-rescue effort in Jacmel.
The Colombians who were here have long gone. It is the smell that signposts the dead.

Ninety percent of the people in Jacmel are living out in the open

Romarie has already buried her sister - but somewhere beneath a pile of stinking rubble is her two-year-old niece.
"We have not seen anyone here, no-one has come to help us," she says. "We are on our own."
But then she thanked us for coming. She seemed genuinely pleased that the world might be interested.
I could not help but wonder why she was so grateful, because help has not come fast enough here.

Extraordinary fortitude

In the past few days, a Canadian team has at last opened up a tiny airfield, a vital second front in the relief operation.
The need is great. The football stadium is a sea of plastic sheeting home to some 6,000 people and growing. Ninety percent of the people in Jacmel are living out in the open, too afraid to sleep indoors.
And yet, despite the fact they are surviving in sweltering conditions, they show some extraordinary fortitude.
But then they have experienced disaster before. Two years ago, this town was hit by an enormous hurricane, from which they had barely recovered.
The UN World Food Programme was distributing basic supplies here within 24 hours of the disaster. They are now feeding 14,000 people and are very well organised.
They can provide rice and beans for people to cook for themselves. They have divided the people into teams, each of them responsible for their own cooking. They choose the cooks, someone to set the fires and someone to serve the rice.

The people of Jacmel experienced another natural disaster in 2008

But the logistics of moving everything into this town by air for the moment prevents them from doing much more.
Hazem el-Zein, the head of the south-east division for the WFP, is working flat out and like everyone else he is frustrated.
I asked him why, after 10 days, the UN had still not mobilised diggers to clear the mountain road and open up the south-eastern corner of Haiti. It would not be a big job.
"We ask the same questions to the people in charge," he responded.
"They promise rapid response. To be honest, I don't know why it hasn't been done. I can only think that their priority must be somewhere else."
We left Jacmel on the US Black Hawk helicopters now flying aid on repeated shuttles from Port-au-Prince. For this town, they are at least a lifeline.
But on the way home - barely a 10-minute journey to the capital - we crossed miles of the most remote and mountainous terrain.
How many other people did we fly over who are still cut off without any help at all?

Haiti rescuers pull man alive from rubble after 11 days

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 02:40:00 -0400

Search for Survivors Ends

A 24-year-old man has been rescued alive from the rubble of a ruined hotel in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince, 11 days after the earthquake.

It came hours after Haiti's government declared a formal end to the search for survivors.

Onlookers cheered as Wismond Exantus - smiling and apparently in a good condition - emerged on a stretcher from what remains of the Napoli Inn Hotel.

He later told reporters that soft drinks and snacks had kept him going.

"I survived by drinking Coca-Cola and I ate some little tiny things," Mr Exantus, who worked in the hotel's grocery store, told news agency AFP from his bed in a French field hospital.

"Every night I thought about the revelation that I would survive," he was quoted as saying by the Associated Press agency.

Greek, French and US rescue teams were involved in the two-and-a-half-hour operation to bring him out of the remains of the hotel.

A French rescue worker, Lt Col Christophe Renou, described his survival as "a miracle".

He said rescuers - who had been alerted by the man's family - had managed to get water to him while they worked to dig him out.

Lt Col Renou said the man had probably been helped by the fact that the 5-6m (16-20ft) of debris above him was largely wood, rather than concrete.

He said the man had told his rescuers that another four people were trapped with him but that they had stopped moving a couple of days ago.

The BBC's Adam Mynott, in Port-au-Prince, says some Haitians have questioned the announcement that search-and-rescue operations are to end - and the discovery of Mr Exantus will have lent weight to their argument.

Drank his own urine

Speaking before Mr Exantus's rescue, UN spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs in Geneva said the decision to end the search for survivors was "heartbreaking" but that it had been taken on the advice of experts.

She said most search-and-rescue teams would now be leaving Haiti, although some with heavy lifting equipment might stay to help with the clean-up operation and with aid distribution.

Two people, an 84-year-old woman and a 21-year-old man, were pulled alive from the rubble in Port-au-Prince on Friday.

The woman, who was found in the wreckage of her home seriously injured and severely dehydrated, was taken to the main city hospital for treatment.

The 21-year-old man, Emmannuel Buso, was rescued by an Israeli search team and is said to be in a stable condition.

Speaking from his hospital bed, he described how he had had no food, and had drunk his own urine to keep thirst at bay.

An estimated 1.5 million people were left homeless by the 7.0-magnitude quake, which some have estimated has killed as many as 200,000 people.

AT THE SCENE

By Adam Mynott, Port-au-Prince
It took two-and-a-half hours for the rescue of Wismond Exantus to take place.

It might never happened, had not a member of his family approached a Greek journalist on the street and said they had heard noises coming from underneath a building.

The Greek journalist said he also heard the noises, and approached a Greek rescue team. They then went into operation in combination with French and American teams, and pulled the man free from the rubble.

As he was gingerly put on a stretcher and carried towards a waiting ambulance, Wismond Exantus smiled. He didn't say anything but he was, if not totally unharmed, clearly in a very good state of health.

VIDEO

'Miracle' rescue from under the rubble

Haiti Relief Update

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 09:11:00 -0400

The Militarisation of Haitian Relief

Jagdeo slams US handling of aid efforts in Haiti

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:52:00 -0400

JAMAICA OBSERVER

Thursday, January 21, 2010

PHOTO: Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and President Bharrat Jagdeo, proceed along the red carpet flanked by one of Iran's elite military units (Courtesy of Iran Republic News Agency)

GEORGETOWN, Guyana — President Bharrat Jagdeo believes the United States (US) is creating obstacles to the involvement of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) and other countries in earthquake-devastated Haiti.

During a meeting with the Iranian Vice President Veep Rahimi yesterday in the Islamic Republic, Jagdeo said he was informed that a delegation comprised of Latin American leaders who were seeking to visit Port au Prince faced objection from the US government and therefore could not make the humanitarian move.

In the wake of the disaster and the decision of the Haitian authorities to hand over control of the airport to the US, Rahimi also raised objection, saying the presence of US forces in Haiti was seriously affecting efforts by other countries to provide assistance to the country in its hour of need.

“I am agreed with the entire axis of your comments,” Jagdeo told the Iranian official. He added that Guyana has always pursued independent policies. “Although we live in the vicinity of the United States, we are not in agreement with their entire stance, and we do express our dissatisfaction with lots of their policies and viewpoints now and then,” the Guyanese leader said, stressing that “many of the moves of the Americans around the globe are against the norms and merely ensure their own interests”.

Jagdeo referred to the economic advancement of Asian countries, saying “today the Americans openly declare that they are concerned about some developing countries’ rapid advancement, such as China, towards becoming developed economic poles, since those countries can leave behind the United States economically in the future”.

He reiterated, “there are many countries and nations in the world today that do not seek salvation through attachment to the United States, having chosen other paths”.

A high level Caricom mission to Haiti, comprising heads of government and leading technical officials, had to be aborted last Friday after it was refused to permission to land in Haiti following the impact of the massive 7.0 earthquake on January 12.

On Friday afternoon, the US State Department confirmed signing two Memoranda of Understanding with the Government of Haiti that made “official that the United States is in charge of all inbound and outbound flights and aid offloading”.

Further, according to the agreements signed, US medical personnel “now have the authority to operate on Haitian citizens and otherwise render medical assistance without having to wait for licences from Haiti’s government”.

HLLN will not tolerate the maligning of the Haitian people.

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:11:00 -0400

Ezili Dantò's Note:

HLLN will not tolerate the maligning of the Haitian people. We urge all in this Network please use some of these points made below to send letters to MSNBC, Foxnews, Reuters, AP, CNN et al. Let them know you won't tolerate the criminalizing of the good people of Haiti. Please send us a letter we could circulate. Many hands make light a heavy load.

*****************************

To the Mr. Champagne

Re: Mr. Champagne's Haitian Lawyers Association letter dated Jan. 19 2010 and copied below and made a part herein

Sir, in your letter dated January 19, 2019 to President Obama, you write, on behalf of the Haitian Lawyers Association, inter alia, that your organization, the Haitian Lawyers Association in Miami, Florida:

"urge the administration to address the rising lawlessness, created by the criminals who have escaped Haiti's broken penitentiary. Not only does it threaten the current humanitarian relief efforts, but it also unacceptably increases the vulnerability of women and children, many of whom now orphans. More should be done to curtail the lawlessness before it becomes uncontrollable."

Point one: As lawyers and advocates who represented many of the detainees who were in the National Penitentiary, we find your statements criminally negligent, odious, irresponsible and not based on any verifiable facts. It is a well-known fact, that most of those detainees you are depicting as "criminals who escaped from the National Penitentiary were poor Haitians from poor neighbourhoods who were summarily rounded up into preventive or indefinite detention during the 2004 Bush/Bicentennial coup d'etat without ever being charged, tried or convicted of any crime. As of 2008, it is reported that there were 8,204 prisoners in Haiti and of this only 1,764 have been convicted of a crime. Of the 8,204, 3900 were warehoused at the National Penitentiary.

The majority awaiting charge and a hearing, some suffering five years of prolonged detention, without ever having been charged, tried or convicted of any crime. These prison population statistics come from the 2008 US State Department Human Rights Report on Haiti and do "not include the large number of persons held in police stations around the country in 'preventive detention' (without a hearing or filed charges)."

For your legal association to call them "criminals" is unethical. For most were indefinitely detained without any charges, hearing or trial and have never been charged with a crime.

Point two: It is reported that when the earthquake hit, the wall of the National Penitentiary collapse on these men, most of whom have suffered tremendous injustice of indefinite incarceration without charge, and whose wives, children, mothers and families lost valuable time they could have had with their love one but for their unjust and illegal incarceration. Their "escape" Mr. Champagne was when concrete fell on their heads!

There is NO EVIDENCE that these men are either criminals or committing crimes right now.

We don't know how injured they were when the Penitentiary collapsed on them or how many perished and for you to repeat, like a parrot, what you are hearing from CNN, Fox news and MSNBS is unprofessional. As a legal organization you are charged with knowing the law and speaking factually. This depiction is objectionable also, especially as most reporters and even the general on the ground have said there is no significant violence amongst the earthquake wounded, thirsty and hungry. This idea of POTENTIAL violence, or as you put it "the rising lawlessness, created by the criminals who have escaped Haiti's broken penitentiary" is defamation and libel against people who are not here to defend themselves but HLLN is and we demand a retraction.

Point three: HLLN runs the Ezili Danto Witness Project and we have people on the ground in Haiti. Their first hand account of the current situation is that a natural disaster of epic proportion has hit the poorest of the poor and they are wounded, hungry, hurt, traumatized and most without food, clean water and medical treatment since last Tuesday. For you Mr. Richard to criminalize and vilified these people at such a time is repugnant. The people of Haiti are not violent or naturally prone to lawlessness. The US is statistically more violent than Haiti and the only times, in the past 20 years, that the violence in Haiti increases is when the US supports death squads and regime change that massacre the poor.

Point four: Haiti needs conscious disaster relief with human rights and dignity, it does not need your propaganda Mr. Champagne alleging the innate violence of people who were not ever committed of any crimes. Medical relief, food, shelter and water are its priority right now, not 12,000-pentagon gun, to, as you write "curtail the lawlessness before it becomes uncontrollable." This projection of fear is arbitrary and capricious Mr. Champagne.

Here are two reports that contradict your irresponsible assertions about the current situation in Haiti:

1. Doctor: Misinformation and Racism Have Frozen Recovery Effort at General Hospital in Port-au-Prince | http://bit.ly/7zZ4gu “There are no security issues,” says Dr. Evan Lyon of Partners in Health, reporting from the General Hospital in Port-Au-Prince in Haiti, where 1,000 people are in need of operations. Lyon said the reports of violence in the city have been overblown by the media and have affected the delivery of aid and medical services. http://bit.ly/7zZ4gu

2. Tell CNN to stop hyping fears of violence in Haiti. For shame at http://bit.ly/6bXnPz

HLLN is working at over capacity right now. But, we are prepared to provide testimony, including from some who were held indefinitely, detained without ever having been convicted or charged with a crime, and who are now seriously injured and dying and who you are maligning. Their survivors are ready for a class action suit against the media and you and your organization, Mr. Richard, to take all to court for this vilification/defamation. As HLLN is working over capacity, we are prepared to make a general call to human rights attorneys who wish to assist should your organization not make a retraction IMMEDIATELY.

This letter will go public - on facebook, twitter, our blogs and all the social networks and to the Ezili Listserve. We are hereby asking civil rights and human rights lawyers who would like to assist the earthquake victims to help HLLN stop the maligning and criminalization of the people of Haiti and anticipate your retraction within the next 3 days.

Very Truly Yours,
Ezili Dantò
Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network

Gordon Brown 'to face Iraq Inquiry before election'

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:17:00 -0400

PHOTO: Mr. Gordon Brown, chancellor

at the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion

BBC NEWS

Gordon Brown will be called to give evidence to the Iraq Inquiry before the general election, the BBC understands.

The prime minister had been due to appear before Sir John Chilcot's inquiry after the election - due by June at the latest. But he has been under pressure from opposition parties to explain his role before voters go to the polls.

Mr Brown was chancellor at the time of the 2003 invasion and has said he will be "happy" to appear whenever called. BBC deputy political editor James Landale said it was not yet known if whether it was Mr Brown or Sir John who had decided to call for an earlier appearance.

'Signed the cheques'
But he said Labour would be keen not to let the potentially damaging row rumble on up until the General Election. Last week Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg had told Mr Brown people were entitled to know what his role had been before they voted as he had "signed the cheques".

At prime minister's questions on Wednesday, Mr Brown told MPs he had written to Sir John saying he was happy to appear "at any time" before the committee - but it was up to the independent panel to decide.
In his letter to Sir John Chilcot, Mr Brown wrote: "I am clear that it is a matter for you how you conduct the inquiry and that it is, and must remain, entirely independent of government.

"In undertaking this, you have rightly chosen the order you wish to receive evidence. For my part, I want to make it absolutely clear I am prepared to give evidence whenever you see fit. I remain happy to take your advice on this matter."

Mr. Clegg had said that was not enough and Mr Brown should "insist" on giving evidence before the election - widely expected to be called on 6 May. Inquiry chairman Sir John had indicated that hearings would not be held in the run-up to the election to allow the inquiry to remain outside party politics.

Villagers in Haiti Try to Stay Stoic as Aftershock Hits

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:33:00 -0400

Wednesday 20th January 2010

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

People sheltered from the rotor wash of an American helicopter carrying food and water in Léogâne, Haiti on Wednesday.

By RAY RIVERA and MARC LACEY

Published: January 20, 2010

LÉOGÂNE, Haiti — A strong aftershock struck near the Haitian capital on Wednesday morning, shaking buildings and spreading terror through the thousands of survivors who have been living outdoors since last week’s devastating earthquake.

The aftershock, which had a magnitude 6.1, came around 6 a.m. and was centered on Gressier, a village west of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The most powerful to hit Haiti since the initial earthquake eight days ago, it caused some additional damage to the ravaged capital; the United Nations said it was trying to assess how much.
On the road to Léogâne, the badly damaged town that was the epicenter of the Jan. 12 earthquake and close to the heart of the Wednesday aftershock, it was hard to tell the new damage from the old. Some cracks on the paved, two-lane road from Port-Au-Prince were wider and deeper than they had been when a reporter drove them the day before. People put cinder blocks on the new fissures to warn drivers.
In Gressier, a small village outside the town that was said to be the epicenter, men worked on the rubble piles of their destroyed homes. They said there was little new damage, but weakened walls had finally given way.
“Most have been leaning,” said Ely Annaud, 42, a Gressier villager. “After this morning, they are totally gone.”
Asked if they were scared, a crowd of men around Mr. Annaud shout “oui, oui.”
“It was just so fast and so strong,” said Pierre Chermami, 47.
Speaking through an interpreter, he said matter-of-factly that he lost his wife and 22-year-old daughter here. The interpreter, who grew up nearby, said the calm was a kind of contract; if one cried, all would break down. “It is how they try to support each other, not to cry,” the interpreter said.
In the capital, Josette Lilas, a 25-year-old beautician, said she felt as if her heart had leaped into her throat when the shaking began. The shaking lasted several seconds, and the ground continued to move for at least a minute after — a calm swaying as if the capital were a ship in gentle swells.
“I thought this time, my good God, it was the end of the world,” said Josette Lilas, a 25-year-old beautician who has been sleeping in the street, bathing by the curb, hiding her disheveled hair beneath a shocking pink scarf. “I screamed and screamed. Then I realized it was over. I was still alive. Hallelujah.”
Survivors’ resilience remained undimmed.
Squatting on the sidewalk in central Port-au-Prince, her thigh bandaged from an injury suffered during the main quake, Ange Toussaint, 55, smiled broadly. “I’m here,” she said. “It happened again and I’m still here. Wow!”
Jean Michel Petithomme, 45, stood in the middle of Capois Street near downtown pointing to the cracks on his masonry home above an abandoned store-front pharmacy. He has not stayed in the house since the earthquake but returns daily to see if still stands, he said.
“That was one of the biggest aftershocks since the earthquake, but there have been many like it,” he said. “Those cracks are wider. I thought it would fall at last, but it is still there.”
Manno Dorsmond, a police officer who sleeps in his car, was bathing by the curb when the shaking broke a fissured wall, dropping a block of concrete on his shoulder.
“After 8 days, we thought it was over, and suddenly it was happening again,” said Mr. Dorsmond, 30. “Should we leave this land, say adios, bye bye, sayonara Haiti?”
He said he was more angry than afraid.
“I am not afraid because the foreigners are calm,” Mr. Dorsmond said. “My people are screaming. But the foreigners who are risking their lives to help us are not scared. I will be like them.”
The village of Léogâne was bustling, with people walking in from surrounding villages because they heard that the Marines who arrived Tuesday had food to give. In fact, the Marines were helping Catholic Relief Services distribute lentils, oil and bulgar supplied by the United States Agency for International Development.
The villagers walked off with hundred-pound sacks of the bulgar, not quite sure what to do with the unfamiliar grain. Sergio August, 25, walked from the town of Binola Point about 20 minutes away with a group of 25 people to find the Marines.
“You guys need to know it’s not just here that is damaged, the town back there is badly damaged,” he said, pointing back to Binola, a town that he estimated at 15,000 people.
“We have gotten no help,” he said. “No one visits us.”
Every so often, a bus or truck hurried by loaded with people fleeing to the hoped-for safety of the country side.
On Wednesday, the United States ordered another 2,000 Marines and 2,000 sailors to Haiti as expected, diverting an amphibious group of three ships. Some 11,500 U.S. military personal are in Haiti or offshore and 16,000 are expected by week’s end, according to a Pentagon spokesman, The Associated Press reported.
Signs of the international relief operation building here, underscoring the rising complaints that the Haitian government had all but disappeared in the week since a huge earthquake struck.
Haiti’s long history of foreign intervention, including an American occupation, normally makes the influx of foreigners a delicate issue.
But with the government of President René Préval largely out of public view and the needs so huge, many Haitians are shunting aside their concerns about sovereignty and welcoming anybody willing to help — in camouflage or not.

“It is not ideal to have a foreign army here, but look at the situation,” said Énide Edoword, 24, a waitress who was standing Tuesday in a camp of displaced people. “We are living amid filth and hunger and thirst after a catastrophe.”

Mr. Préval, an aloof leader even in the best of times, has been huddling with advisers at a compact police station that has become the government’s de-facto headquarters. Aides described him as being as traumatized by the recent events as every other Haitian but still fully engaged in the nation’s recovery.
They said he and his ministers were engaged in a furious effort to organize all the outside aid, find refuge for the hundreds of thousands of people living in the streets and bury bodies, thousands and thousands of which have been collected and put in mass graves. There is still no widely accepted death toll.
They said the president would soon address the nation for the first time since the quake struck on Jan. 12.
But the international effort has far outpaced anything Haiti could manage: supply flights from around the world continued to arrive in numbers, though aid groups complained of being turned away.
In Port-au-Prince, , foreign rescue teams continued to scour buildings for survivors under the rubble.. Foreign doctors were providing medical care and carrying out scores of life-saving amputations.
But the demand for medical care far outstripped the supply of doctors. Debarati Guha-Sapir, a professor of epidemiology and the director of the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Louvain in Belgium, said in an interview on Tuesday that deaths in large earthquakes generally declined after the first day or two.
“Haiti, I think, is going to be a little different,” she said. “They will die simply because there is no care. People will die of wounds. They will die of lack of surgical care. They will die of simple trauma that in almost any other country would not lead to death.”
Elisabeth Delatour Préval, Haiti’s first lady, insisted that the country’s sovereignty remained intact, although she acknowledged that there was widespread concern among the population about whether the government was functioning, especially given the heavy damage sustained by the palace and other highly visible government buildings.
“Visually, people can’t see what they used to recognize as the symbols of the state,” she said in an interview on Tuesday. “That has generated some kind of panic. ‘Are they there or aren’t they there?’ ”
The American military, patrolled in Humvees up and down Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the capital’s main commercial strip, took pains to reassure Haitians that the United States was in the country in a support role.
Meanwhile, 125 Marines arrived in helicopters on Tuesday in the damaged farming town of Léogâne, south of the capital, delivering cases of water and food.
At the same time, Col. Gregory Kane of the United States Army told reporters at the Port-au-Prince airport that the Haitian government remained in charge. He said that United States forces were on the ground only to assist with the relief efforts.
“There have been some reports and news stories out there that the U.S. is invading Haiti,” Colonel Kane said. “We’re not invading Haiti. That’s ludicrous. This is humanitarian relief.”
Most Haitians seemed to see it that way, despite deep historic concerns about American troops in particular.
President Woodrow Wilson sent American Marines to Haiti in 1915 to restore public order after six different leaders ruled the country in quick succession, each killed or forced into exile. Opposition was intense, but it would be nearly two decades before the Marines would leave, in 1934.
When President Bill Clinton ordered troops into the country in 1994 to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted as president by a group of former soldiers, Haitian critics raised that earlier intervention.
A decade later, Mr. Aristide was forced out of office, and he accused the United States of orchestrating his ouster.
But as the American troops in combat fatigues bounded out of the helicopters and moved across the palace grounds, hundreds of Haitians who had gathered at the white-and-green palace gates erupted in cheers and called out in Creole for food and water.
“We can’t do it without them,” said Ms. Pierre-Louis, the former prime minister. “This country has been mismanaged for the last 50 years, and if we can’t run the country well in normal times how can we do it now?”
So far, violence has been scattered in Port-au-Prince. But senior United Nations officials said it might boil over at any moment as the difficulties of living without water, food and shelter mounted.
Mrs. Préval said that she and the president were about to enter their private residence when the earthquake struck. They stepped back from the home, she said, and it collapsed before them. For hours, rumors circulated around the capital that she had been killed.
She said that Mr. Préval quickly jumped onto the back of a motorcycle taxi to tour hospitals and damaged areas with top aides, and that he had been in nonstop emergency meetings ever since. Government ministers, she added, initially held meetings in the yard of the president’s home.

No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:17:00 -0400

JAMAICA OBSERVER

Sunday, January 17, 2010

PHOTO: John Maxwell

If you shared my pain you would not continue to make me suffer, to torture me, to deny me my dignity and my rights, especially my rights to self-determination and self-expression.

Six years ago you sent your Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to perform an action illegal under the laws of your country, my country and of the international community of nations.

It was an act so outrageous, so bestially vile and wicked that your journalists and news agencies, your diplomats and politicians to this day cannot bring themselves to truthfully describe or own up to the crime that was committed when US Ambassador James Foley, a career diplomat, arrived at the house of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide with a bunch of CIA thugs and US Marines to kidnap the president of Haiti and his wife.

1/1

One of the survivors of Tuesday's devastating earthquake in Haiti.

The Aristides were stowed aboard a CIA plane normally used for 'renditions' of suspected terrorists to the worldwide US gulag of dungeons and torture chambers.

The plane, on which the Aristides are listed as "cargo", flew to Antigua - an hour away - and remained on the ground in Antigua while Colin Powell's State Department and the CIA tried to blackmail and bribe various African countries to accept ("give asylum to") the kidnapped president and his wife.

The Central African Republic - one of George W Bush's 'Dark Corners of the World' - agreed for an undisclosed sum, to give the Aristides temporary asylum.

Before any credible plot can be designed and paid for - for the disappearance of the Aristides - they are rescued by friends, flown to temporary asylum in Jamaica where the Government cravenly yielded to the blackmail of Condoleezza Rice to deny them the permanent asylum to which they were entitled and which most Jamaicans had hoped for.

Meanwhile, in Haiti, the US Marines protected an undisciplined ragbag of rapists and murderers to allow them entry to the capital. The Marines chased the medical students out of the new Medical School established by Aristide with Cuban help and teachers. The Marines bivouac in the school, going out on nightly raids, trailed by fleets of ambulances with body bags, hunting down Fanmi Lavalas activists described as 'chimeres' - terrorists.

The real terrorists, led by two convicted murderers, Chamblain and Philippe, assisted the Marines in the eradication of 'chimeres' until the Marines were replaced by foreign troops, paid by the United Nations, who took up the hunt on behalf of the civilised world - France, Canada, the US and Brazil.

The terrorists and the remains of the Duvalier tontons and the CIA-bred FRAPF declared open season on the remnants of Aristide's programmes to build democracy. They burnt down the new museum of Haitian culture, destroyed the children's television station and generally laid waste to anything and everything which could remind Haitians of their glorious history.

Haitians don't know that without their help Latin America might still be part of the Spanish Empire and Simon Bolivar a brief historical footnote.

Imagine, Niggers Speaking French!

About 90 years ago when Professor Woodrow Wilson was president of the USA, his secretary of state was a fundamentalist lawyer named William Jennings Bryan who had three times run unsuccessfully for president.

The Americans had decided to invade Haiti to collect debts owed by Haiti to Citibank.

General Smedley Butler, the only American soldier to have twice won the Congressional Medal of Honour, described his role in the US Army:

"I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half-a-dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long.

General Butler said: "I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. ... My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical in the military service." Butler compared himself unfavourably to Al Capone. He said his official racketeering made Capone look like an amateur.

Secretary Bryan was dumbfounded by the Haitians. "Imagine," he said, "Niggers speaking French!"

Smedley Butler and Bryan were involved in Haiti because of something that happened nearly a hundred years before. The French slave-masters, expelled from Haiti and defeated again when they tried to re-enslave the Haitians, connived with the Americans to starve them into submission by a trade embargo. With no sale for Haitian sugar, the country was weak and run-down when a French fleet arrived bearing a demand for reparations. Having bought their freedom in blood, the Haitians were to purchase it again in gold.

The French demanded, essentially, that the Haitians pay France an amount equivalent to 90 per cent of the entire Haitian budget for the foreseeable future. When this commitment proved too arduous to honour, the City Bank offered the Haitians a 'debt exchange", paying off the French in exchange for a lower-interest, longer-term debt. The terms may have seemed better but were just as usurious and it was not paid off until 1947.

Because of the debt the Americans invaded Haiti, seized the Treasury, exiled the president, their Jim Crow policies were used to divide the society, to harass the poor and finally provoked a second struggle for freedom which was one of the most brutal episodes in colonial history.

Long before Franco bombed Guernica, exciting the horror and revulsion of civilised people, the Americans perfected their dive-bombing techniques against unarmed Haitian peasants, many of whom had never seen aircraft before.

The Americans set up a Haitian Army in the image of their Jim Crow Marines, and it was these people, the alien and alienated Élite who, with some conscripted blacks like the Duvaliers, have ruled Haiti for most of the last century.

When I flew over Haiti for the first time in 1959 en route from New York to San Juan, Puerto Rico, I saw for the first time the border between the green Dominican Republic and brown Haiti.

First-world journalists interpret the absence of trees on the Haitian side to the predations of the poor, disregarding the fact that Western religion and American capitalism were mainly responsible.

Why is it that nowhere else in the Caribbean is there similar deforestation?

Haiti's Dessalines constitution offered sanctuary to every escaped slave of any colour. All such people of whatever colour were deemed 'black' and entitled to citizenship. Only officially certified 'blacks' could own land in Haiti.

The American occupation, anticipating Hayek, Freedman and Greenspan, decided that such a rule was a hindrance to development. The assistant secretary of the US Navy, one Franklin D Roosevelt, was given the job of writing a new, modern constitution for Haiti.

This constitution meant foreigners could own land. Within a very short time the lumberjacks were busy, felling old growth Mahogany and Caribbean Pine for carved doors for the rich and mahogany speedboats, boardroom tables seating 40, etc. The devastated land was put to produce rubber, sisal for ropes and all sorts of pie in the sky plantations.

When President Paul Magloire came to Jamaica 50 years ago Haitians were still speaking of an Artibonite dam for electricity and irrigation. But the ravages of the recent past were too much to recover.

As Marguerite Laurent (EziliDanto) writes: Don't expect to learn how a people with a Vodun culture that reveres nature and especially the Mapou (oak-like or ceiba pendantra/bombax) trees, and other such big trees as the abode of living entities and therefore as sacred things, were forced to watch the Catholic Church, during Rejete - the violent anti-Vodun crusade - gather whole communities at gunpoint into public squares, and forced them to watch their agents burn Haitian trees in order to teach Haitians their Vodun Gods were not in nature, that the trees were the "houses of Satan".

In partnership with the US, the mulatto President Elie Lescot (1941-45) summarily expelled peasants from more than 100,000 hectares of land, razing their homes and destroying more than a million fruit trees in the vain effort to cultivate rubber on a large plantation scale. Also, under the pretext of the Rejete campaign, thousands of acres of peasant lands were cleared of sacred trees so that the US could take their lands for agribusiness.

After the Flood

Norman Manley used to say "River Come Down" when his party seemed likely to prevail. The Kreyol word Lavalas conveys the same meaning.

Since the Haitian people's decisive rejection of the Duvalier dictatorships in the early 90s, their spark and leader has been Jean-Bertrand Aristide whose bona fides may be assessed from the fact that the CIA and conservative Americans have been trying to discredit him almost from the word go.

As he put it in one of his books, his intention has been to build a paradise on the garbage heap bequeathed to Haiti by the US and the Elite.

The bill of particulars is too long to go into here, but the destruction of the new museum of Culture, the breaking up of the medical school, the destruction of the children's television station gives you the flavour. But the essence is captured in the brutal attempt to obliterate the spirit of Haitian community; the attempt to destroy Lavalas by murdering its men and raping its women, the American-directed subversion of a real police force, the attacks on education and the obliteration of the community self-help systems which meant that when Hurricane Jeanne and all the other weather systems since have struck Haiti, many more have died than in any other country similarly stricken. In an earthquake, totally unpredictable, every bad factor is multiplied.

The American blocking of international aid means that there is no modern water supply anywhere, no town planning, no safe roads, none of the ordinary infrastructure of any other Caribbean state. There are no building standards, no emergency shelters, no parks.

So, when I write about mothers unwittingly walking on dead babies in the mud, when I write about people so poor they must eat patties made of clay and shortening, when I write about people with their faces 'chopped off' or about any of eight million horror stories from the crime scene that is Haiti, please don't tell me you share their pain or mine.

Tell me, where is Lovinsky Pierre Antoine and ten thousand like him?

If you share my pain and their pain, why don't you stop causing it? Why don't you stop the torture?

If you want to understand me, look at the woman in the picture (above), and the children half-buried with her. You cannot hear their screams because they know there is no point in screaming. It will do no more good than voting.

What is she thinking: perhaps it is something like this - No, mister! You cannot share my pain!

Some time, perhaps after the camera is gone, people will return to dig us out with their bare hands. But not you.

The Politics of Humanitarian Aid

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:29:00 -0400

France bridles at US Haiti take-over

It did not take long for France to start quarrelling with the United States over Haiti. The American take-over of the relief operation has not gone down well with Paris. Media cover over the past two days has depicted a virtual American invasion, with heavy-handed military pushing around French agencies. The words domination and even occupation were used on radio news reports this morning.
Alain Joyandet, the Minister supervising the French operation, said that he had requested a formal protest to Washington after US controllers refused landing permission to a French Airbus with a field hospital on Saturday. The role of the US needs to be clarified, Joyandet said on Europe1 radio this morning. "It's a matter of helping Haiti, not occupying Haiti." [watch interview here]
French evacuation flights have been delayed while priority is being given to the US military, Joyandet said. He argued with US commanders on the airfield and at one stage grabbed a radio microphone to talk to the Airbus pilots, he added.
The Elysée palace and Foreign Ministry are trying to calm the fuss, but the annoyance is palpable. Haiti may be in the US back yard, but France, the former colonial power, sees it as part of its overseas family. The Pearl of the Caribbean, as the colony was known, is part of la Francophonie, the French-speaking commonwealth that is run and financed from Paris. Haiti's writers, artists and musicians have close links to la Metropole and some 70,000 immigrants live in France. [picture: Alain Joyandet in Haiti]

Listening to the press review on France-Inter radio this morning, you might have got the impression that Uncle Sam had occupied Haiti. They quoted L'Alsace newspaper saying that the United Nations, not the United States, should be running Haiti now. "The take-over of Port-au-Prince airport by the American military is a bad signal which indicates that the big guys are once again preparing to impose their law," said L'Alsace. The newspaper also recalled that occupying Americans "killed thousands" of Haitiens in the years after their intervention there in 1915.
The state radio quoted an article from Haiti Liberté weekly which accuses un-named powers of imposing themselves on the devastated nation. "The capitalist countries, exploiters of the riches of the Haitian soil, are going to come hypocritically to our assistance. Not that we should slap it away. But we want it disinterested." The article may have been talking about the west in general, but America was the implied target. France-Inter did not bother to point out that the weekly in question is a small leftist journal run by expatriate Haitians from New York.
Three national radio stations also highlighted the London Guardian's front page picture of Americans frolicking in the water by their cruise liner at Labadee, a heavily-protected beach in northern Haiti.
Media commentators have also been discerning ulterior motives behind President Obama's huge relief operation -- showing that the US military can do more than wage war and scoring some peace credentials to justify his Nobel Prize. That, at least, was how Europe1 news put it.
L'Humanité, the Communist Party daily, is naturally accusing Obama of reverting to "the old imperialist imperative" and establishing a new permanent US military foothold in the Caribbean. On the other side, Le Figaro, the conservative daily, says that it is the wrong time to criticise the Americans.
Judging by the public chatter on French news sites today, public feeling is split on similar lines. There is a lot of admiration for Obama's action as well as complaining about Yankee excess.
France says the European Union has asked it to lead the continent's Haiti evacuation operations. President Sarkozy is also planning to assert the French role there by dropping in for a visit in the next couple of weeks or so. The President is proposing sending 1,000 European gendarmes to Haiti and he is also trying to organise a world conference to co-ordinate relief.
[Alain Joyandet's ministerial blog here]

Doctors Without Borders Cargo Plane Blocked From Landing in Port-au-Prince

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:28:00 -0400

Doctors Without Borders Cargo Plane With Full Hospital and Staff Blocked From Landing in Port-au-Prince

Demands Deployment of Lifesaving Medical Equipment Given Priority

UPDATE: January 18, 2010

The Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) plane filled with supplies needed to establish an inflatable tent field hospital landed at approximately 11 am local time, Sunday, January 17, in Port-au-Prince.

However, another MSF cargo plane carrying vital medical supplies to replenish stocks for Choscal hospital, where an MSF team is working on a backlog of patients needing surgery, was not allowed to land in Port-au-Prince on Sunday, January 17, and was forced to re-route to the Dominican Republic, where it landed. Choscal hospital will run out of medical supplies in less than 24 hours and its cold chain system for preserving medicines and vaccines at the proper temperatures could be compromised if this cargo plane is not able to fly into Port-au-Prince immediately.

More than 500 patients in need of surgery have been transferred from Martissant to Choscal hospital in Cite Soleil. MSF teams are focusing on lifesaving surgery (open wounds, fractures, burns, amputations, and emergency obstetrics). They’ve been working around the clock and have done more than 90 surgeries since the operating theater became functional. Priority is given to lifesaving interventions, such as amputations carried out on patients with gangrene triggered by infected wounds.

How many cargo flights has MSF successfully flown into Port-au-Prince? 4
What is their total tonnage? 135
How many cargo flights has MSF successfully flown into the Dominican Republic? 2
What is their total tonnage? 65
How many cargo flights are planned for the rest of this week? 6
What is their total tonnage? 195

Port-au-Prince/Paris /New York, 17 January 2009
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) urges that its cargo planes carrying essential medical and surgical material be allowed to land in Port-au-Prince in order to treat thousands of wounded waiting for vital surgical operations. Priority must be given immediately to planes carrying lifesaving equipment and medical personnel.

Despite guarantees, given by the United Nations and the US Defense Department, an MSF cargo plane carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was blocked from landing in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, and was re-routed to Samana, in Dominican Republic. All material from the cargo is now being sent by truck from Samana, but this has added a 24-hour delay for the arrival of the hospital.

A second MSF plane is currently on its way and scheduled to land today in Port- au-Prince at around 10 am local time with additional lifesaving medical material and the rest of the equipment for the hospital. If this plane is also rerouted then the installation of the hospital will be further delayed, in a situation where thousands of wounded are still in need of life saving treatment.

The inflatable hospital includes 2 operating theaters, an intensive care unit, 100-bed hospitalization capacity, an emergency room and all the necessary equipment needed for sterilizing material.

MSF teams are currently working around the clock in 5 different hospitals in Port-au-Prince, but only 2 operating theaters are fully functional, while a third operating theater has been improvised for minor surgery due to the massive influx of wounded and lack of functional referral structures.

Caribbean at risk of more large quakes like Haiti mega earthquake: Report

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:56:00 -0400

London: Earthquake experts have warned that the devastating quake that struck Haiti on January 12 could be the first of several in the region, which means the region is at risk of more large tremblors.

According to a report in New Scientist, historical records suggest that not all the energy that has built up in the faults running through the Caribbean region was released in the Haiti quake.

Their fear is that enough energy remains in the fault system to trigger another earthquake of the same scale as the one on January 12.

The last time Haiti was struck by earthquakes of this scale was in 1751 and 1770, when three large earthquakes hit within the space of 20 years.

They ruptured the same fault segment as the one that slipped on Jan. 12, as well as segments lying further to the east, in Haiti and the neighbouring Dominican Republic.

"Last time round there was a sequence of earthquakes," said Uri ten Brink, an expert on earthquakes in the region from the US Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

"I'm worried, as we might expect the eastern side of the fault to rupture next," according to other geologists.

"Stress transfer along the fault is likely to trigger a chain of quakes," said Bill McGuire from University College London.

Another, larger earthquake could affect surrounding nations as well.

The fault that was responsible for the Haiti quake extends west through Jamaica. Another runs parallel to it in the north, along the southern edge of Cuba and the northern side of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Historical records suggest that both these faults produce large and destructive earthquakes every few centuries.

"They are dangerous especially when large population centres like Port-au-Prince, Kingston in Jamaica or Santiago in the Dominican Republic are so close to them," said Paul Mann from the University of Texas at Austin.

The region harbours a third fault to the east, which is a further cause for concern.

Measurements over several decades show that the sum of all earthquakes that strike on "splinter faults" on the Caribbean plate have accounted for around half of the energy associated with this movement, leaving the other half stored up in the system.

McGuire and his colleagues are concerned that much of the stress may be accumulating on the undersea thrust fault to the east.

If that stress were to be released on the submarine fault, it could trigger a catastrophic tsunami of the scale of the 26 December 2004 Indian Ocean disaster.

Source: Click to go to source

Haiti Update: Still No Relief

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:07:00 -0400

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, January 18, 2010 – Millions of dollars in aid are pouring into Haiti. Another head of state visits each day. But as of yesterday, the United Nations reported that humanitarian relief is still being bottlenecked at the main airport and roads remain blocked with debris.

Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) said that one of its planes carrying essential medical supplies was not permitted to land at the airport.
"Despite guarantees, given by the United Nations and the US Defense Department, an MSF cargo plane carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was blocked from landing in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, and was re-routed to Samana, in Dominican Republic," the group said in a statement yesterday. "All material from the cargo is now being sent by truck from Samana, but this has added a 24-hour delay for the arrival of the hospital."

The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is also working with Haitian authorities to set up a land corridor to bring in relief from the Dominican town of Barahona 130 kilometres away.

With the dead still being counted, and thousands missing, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has said that 100,000 deaths "would seem a minimum". The country's interior minister reported that some 50,000 bodies have already been recovered.

European Union ministers called an emergency meeting for today to determine the costs of the massive reconstruction that will needed in coming months. The United Nations has already issued an appeal for US$562 million to aid Haiti which, even before the earthquake, was the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.

That money would target the estimated three million Haitians affected for a period of six months, with half of the funds being earmarked for emergency food aid, and the rest for health, water, sanitation, nutrition, early recovery, emergency education and other key needs.

But in many parts of the devastated capital, there was little evidence of outside assistance.

In the suburb of Santo, dozens of Haitian men organised a digging and rescue operation on a pile of rubble. A huge orange Caterpillar bulldozer sat nearby, stationary. Heavy equipment from the Haitian construction company CNE is all over the city.

In the absence of any visible relief effort in the city, help came from small groups of Haitians working together. Citizens turned into aid workers and rescuers. Lone doctors roamed the streets, offering assistance.

At the crumbling national cathedral, a dozen men and women crowded around a man swinging a pickaxe to pry open the space for a dusty, near-dead looking woman to squeeze through and escape.

The night of the quake, a group of friends pulled bricks out from under a collapsed home, clearing a narrow zig-zagging path towards the sound of a child crying out beneath the rubble.

Two buildings over, Joseph Matherenne cried as he directed the faint light of his cell phone's screen over the bloody corpse of his 23-year-old brother. His body was draped over the rubble of the office where he worked as a video technician. Unlike most of the bodies in the street, there was no blanket to cover his face.

Central Port-Au-Prince resembles a war zone. Some buildings are standing, unharmed. Those that were damaged tended to collapse completely, spilling into the street on top of cars and telephone poles.

In the day following the quake, there was no widespread violence. Guns, knives and theft weren't seen on the streets, lined only with family after family carrying their belongings. They voiced their anger and frustration with sad songs that echoed throughout the night, not their fists.

"Only in the movies have I seen this," said 33-year-old Jacques Nicholas, who jumped over a wall as the house where he was playing dominoes tumbled. "When Americans send missiles to Iraq, that's what I see. When Israel do that to Gaza, that's what I see here."

Nobody knows what to expect. Some people said Haiti needs a strong international intervention - a coordinated aid effort from all the big countries. But there was no evidence on the streets of any immediate cavalry of rescue workers from the United States and other nations.

"My situation is not that bad," said Nicholas, "but overall the other people's situation is worse than mine. So it affects me. Everybody wants to help out, but we can't do nothing."

Haitians are doing only what they can. Helping each other with their hands and the few tools they can find, they lack the resources to coordinate a multi-faceted reconstruction effort.

UN agencies and humanitarian organisations on the ground are struggling to help survivors of the quake, but many are hindered by large-scale damage to their own facilities, as well as lack of heavy equipment to clear rubble.

Logistics remained the main obstacle, with damage to the main airport, impassable roads and problems at the docks continuing to bottleneck the outpouring of international relief workers and basic supplies. (Adapted from IPS)

Caricom blocked from landing in Haiti

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:46:00 -0400

Haiti We are Sorry!

BY RICKEY SINGH Observer Caribbean correspondent

Sunday, January 17, 2010

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados -- The Caribbean Community's emergency aid mission to Haiti, comprising heads of government and leading technical officials, failed to secure permission Friday to land at that devastated country's airport, now under the control of the USA.

Consequently, the Caricom "assessment mission" that was to determine priority humanitarian needs resulting from the mind-boggling earthquake disaster last Tuesday had to travel back from Jamaica to their respective home destinations.

On Friday afternoon, the US State Department confirmed signing two Memoranda of Understanding with the Government of Haiti that made "official that the United States is in charge of all inbound and outbound flights and aid offloading".

Further, according to the agreements signed, US medical personnel "now have the authority to operate on Haitian citizens and otherwise render medical assistance without having to wait for licences from Haiti's Government".

Prior to the US taking control of Haiti's airport, a batch of some 30 Cuban doctors had left Havana, following the earthquake, to join more than 300 of their colleagues who have been working there for more than a year.

Last evening, the frustration suffered by the Caricom mission to get landing permission was expected to be raised in a scheduled meeting at Jamaica's Norman Manley International Airport between Jamaica's Prime Minister Bruce Golding and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Golding, who was making arrangements for the meeting with Clinton, following her visit earlier in the day to witness the devastation of the capital Port-au-Prince, said he could not comment on details to be discussed.

He, however, told this correspondent: "I appreciate the chaos and confusion at Haiti's airport, where there is just one operational runway. But Haiti is a member of Caricom and we simply have to be facilitated and the truth is there is hardly a functioning government in Haiti."

Asked whether the difficulties encountered by the Caricom mission may be related to reports that US authorities were not anxious to facilitate landing of aircraft from Cuba and Venezuela, Prime Minister Golding said he could "only hope that there is no truth to such immature thinking in the face of the horrific scale of Haiti's tragedy".

Golding, who has lead portfolio responsibility among Caricom leaders for external economic relations, got a first-hand assessment of the damage when he flew to Haiti on Thursday. A contingent of some 150 members of the Jamaica Defence Force has since established a camp with medical facilities in the vicinity of Haiti's airport.

Ahead of last evening's scheduled meeting with Clinton, Prime Minister Golding had discussed on Friday in Kingston some of the problems to be overcome at a meeting with the prime ministers of Barbados and Dominica and the Community's secretary general Edwin Carrington.

Carrington explained that proper use of the Norman Manley Airport would be consistent with a decision last week for Jamaica to serve as the Sub-regional Operational Focal Point for responses to the Haitian humanitarian crisis.

Caricom blocked from landing in Haiti

Mob justice on Haiti's streets of blood as looter is lynched and police shoot rioters

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 03:13:00 -0400

Without aid reaching Haiti fast, there will be much more of this

By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 11:57 PM on 17th January 2010

The naked body of a hanged suspected looter is dragged through the devastated streets of Port-au-Prince.Children watch as the corpse is battered with pieces of wood.
This is street justice Haiti style as the capital city of the earthquake-devastated country teeters on the brink of anarchy.
Alongside the desperate worldwide aid effort there are chaotic scenes in the blighted island as looters armed with knives and guns pillage stores.

Street justice: Lynched then dragged through the streets of Port-au-Prince, the looter's body is battered with staves

Foreign aid agencies say they can operate only with the protection of United Nations soldiers and are awaiting the arrival of thousands of U.S. troops.
While most of the capital's 3million people are focused on finding food and water, clearing debris and pulling bodies from the rubble, there are pockets of violence and reports of looting and ransacking of shops.
The lynching came after police brought a man to Petionville, a once wealthy area of the capital, and told a crowd he had been arrested for looting.

Vigilante justice took over and he was hanged before his body was dragged through the streets and set on fire under a heap of rubbish.
In another incident, police opened fire on hundreds of rioters yesterday, killing at least one of them as they ransacked a market.
A man in his 30s was shot in the head as he grabbed food. Witnesses said another looter quickly snatched the rucksack off the dead man's back as clashes continued and police reinforcements descended on the area armed with pump-action shotguns and assault rifles.

Daggers drawn: One looter demands another's booty

Gun guard: A policeman protects stores against looters in a business district of the capital

There have also been reports of attacks on aid workers attempting to distribute the hundreds of tons of supplies arriving in the city.

And heavily armed gang members who once ran Haiti's largest slum like warlords have returned with a vengeance since Tuesday's earthquake damaged the National Penitentiary, allowing 3,000 inmates to break out.

More...

After wife's anguished plea on Facebook for news, Briton is found dead in Haiti horror

An official with the World Food Programme said aid trucks were using armed guards and security had been posted at food distribution locations to protect staff. Some 10,000 U.S. troops are on the way to try to restore order.
Amid the death and destruction, survivors were still being found. One woman was plucked from the rubble of the university, 97 hours after being buried.

Tied up: A policeman restrains a looter suspected of stealing a tin of milk

At war: A policeman opens fire on the streets of Haiti. At least one rioter has been shot dead

British rescue workers from the Rapid UK team pulled another woman, aged 39, from the ruins of her home yesterday and members of Kent Fire and Rescue Service said they had reached a man after seven hours of tunnelling.
Other stories of hope also emerged with a man and teenage girl found alive under the collapsed remains of a grocery store.
A two-month-old baby who was brought to the UN hospital alive after four days was airlifted to Florida for emergency treatment.
The girl, named Jeanne, was found by a U.S. TV news reporter. Her mother, who feared her daughter had died, was also found alive and U.S. authorities are making plans for them to be reunited.

On the run: Looters grab what they can and flee during a police assault near the Hypolite Market in Port-au-Prince

Surrender: Looters keep the hands up after seeing the police

Despite these tiny pieces of good news, the overall picture is apocalyptic, with the death toll expected to reach 200,000. More than 30 rescue teams from around the world are now working in harsh conditions of heat and humidity in Haiti.
Many people with relatives in the city have been using Facebook and Twitter to seek information about loved ones.
Thousands of messages and photographs have been posted on the social networking sites.
Port-au-Prince's main hospital reopened yesterday but with few doctors and even fewer medical supplies. Despite the aid pouring into the city, tens of thousands of people are living in the streets without access to food and water.

The UN has described the disaster as being 'worse than the tsunami'.
Officials co-coordinating the UK relief efforts said water, food and hygiene supplies had been distributed to 2,000 people.

Anarchy: A man tries to keep crowds away from a woman injured during scuffles among people taking goods from quake-damaged stores

Desperation: Haitian people gather in the streets trying to get supplies

A British Red Cross convoy reached Haiti after an overland crossing from the neighbouring Dominican Republic with trucks loaded with medical supplies and equipment to help in search and rescue.
A spokesman for the Disaster Emergency Committee, made up of the UK's main relief aid charities, said a 300-bed field hospital was being set up over the weekend. The distribution of aid has been hampered by the small airport in Port-au-Prince becoming jammed with flights.
With the ships unable to dock in the port and many roads blocked by debris the airport has been the main lifeline for supplies.
The U.S. navy is using helicopters to drop supplies of bottled water and the UN also has distribution points handing out high-energy bars to the hungry. But demand is outstripping supply - with food and water being taken faster than they can pass it out.
UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon said the quake was the worst humanitarian crisis for decades.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Port-au-Prince to pledge continued and lasting support. 'As President Obama has said, we will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead,' she said standing beside President Rene Preval, whose palace was destroyed in Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude quake.
Despite the chaos President Preval has made no broadcast address to his nation, nor has he been seen at any disaster site.
Instead he has met Cabinet ministers and foreign visitors at a police station which serves as his base following the collapse of the National Palace.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1244034/Haiti-earthquake-disaster-Mob-justice-Haitis-streets-blood-looter-lynched-police-shoot-rioters.html#ixzz0cwfblA92

ACP Civil Society Forum: STATEMENT FROM THE CHAIRPERSON

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:16:00 -0400

DISTURBING DEVELOPMENTS... BUT KEEP WORKING

PHOTO: Lawman Lynch, Chair of the ACP Civil Society Forum

The Civil Society Forum of the ACP States is totally disturbed about the slowness with which needed aid is getting to the Haitian people. We are well aware that tremendous financial aid is presently being committed to the cause, with the EU contributing approximately three million Euros to the relief efforts.

There is clearly a problem with coordination, and frankly, the United States of America has taken control of the airport and borders, thus having under its management all ports of entry into Haiti. This has been apparently accepted by CARICOM, but Jamaica has been designated and confirmed the hub of all relief efforts heading to Haiti, as such, it is our firm belief that the ACP Civil Society prepares itself to offer meaningful and organized aid for the Haitian people.

There is another crisis on hand : in a couple of days many Haitians will flood the borders of Jamaica and other Caribbean countries in boats. The Caribbean countries, already facing serious economic crises, will shelter the refugees.

It is imperative that we are funded to carry out a strategic and proactive response programme that will see to the sustained development of the State in crisis. ACP Civil Society Forum is therefore proposing:

1. Since there seems to be a problem with logistics, we need to partner with agencies such as the Salvation Army and the Red Cross to transport resources that have already been collected across the Caribbean region, so that shipment can be arranged and delivered in an orderly and timely manner.
2. ACP Civil Society must ensure that there is a team dispatched to Haiti, to assist with recovery, but most importantly, rebuilding. We are not interested in being put up in hotels etc, the main interest is to get there and help, this is pivotal.
3. We have identified a Salvation Army owned property in Port-au-Prince that could house volunteers; as such we need help with securing tents for volunteers.
4. Of greater importance is the sustainable rebuilding and development exercise. The ACP Civil Society Forum therefore needs to meet and implement an extensive youth and community development exercise that would incorporate issues relating to the affected.

Lawman Lynch
Chairman
ACP Civil Society Forum

The Militarisation of Humanitarian Aid

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 09:12:00 -0400

The Militarization of Emergency Aid to Haiti: Is it a Humanitarian Operation or an Invasion?

Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research
Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:54 EST

Haiti has a longstanding history of US military intervention and occupation going back to the beginning of the 20th Century. US interventionism has contributed to the destruction of Haiti's national economy and the impoverishment of its population.

The devastating earthquake is presented to World public opinion as the sole cause of the country's predicament.

A country has been destroyed, its infrastructure demolished. Its people precipitated into abysmal poverty and despair.

Haiti's history, its colonial past have been erased.

The US military has come to the rescue of an impoverished Nation. What is its Mandate?

Is it a Humanitarian Operation or an Invasion?

The main actors in America's "humanitarian operation" are the Department of Defense, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). (See USAID Speeches: On-The-Record Briefing on the Situation in Haiti, 01/13/10). USAID has also been entrusted in channelling food aid to Haiti, which is distributed by the World Food Program. (See USAID Press Release: USAID to Provide Emergency Food Aid for Haiti Earthquake Victims, January 13, 2010)

The military component of the US mission, however, tends to overshadow the civilian functions of rescuing a desperate and impoverished population. The overall humanitarian operation is not being led by civilian governmental agencies such as FEMA or USAID, but by the Pentagon.

The dominant decision making role has been entrusted to US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM).

A massive deployment of military hardware personnel is contemplated. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen has confirmed that the US will be sending nine to ten thousand troops to Haiti, including 2000 marines. (American Forces Press Service, January 14, 2010)

Aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson and its complement of supporting ships has already arrived in Port au Prince. (January 15, 2010). The 2,000-member Marine Amphibious Unit as well as and soldiers from the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne division "are trained in a wide variety of missions including security and riot-control in addition to humanitarian tasks."

In contrast to rescue and relief teams dispatched by various civilian teams and organizations, the humanitarian mandate of the US military is not clearly defined:

"Marines are definitely warriors first, and that is what the world knows the Marines for,... [but] we're equally as compassionate when we need to be, and this is a role that we'd like to show -- that compassionate warrior, reaching out with a helping hand for those who need it. We are very excited about this." (Marines' Spokesman, Marines Embark on Haiti Response Mission, Army Forces Press Services, January 14, 2010)

While presidents Obama and Préval spoke on the phone, there were no reports of negotiations between the two governments regarding the entry and deployment of US troops on Haitian soil. The decision was taken and imposed unilaterally by Washington. The total lack of a functioning government in Haiti was used to legitimize, on humanitarian grounds, the sending in of a powerful military force, which has de facto taken over several governmental functions.

Table 1

US Military Assets to be Sent to Haiti. (according to official announcements)

The amphibious assault ship USS Bataan (LHD 5) and amphibious dock landing ships USS Fort McHenry (LSD 43) and USS Carter Hall (LSD 50).

A 2,000-member Marine Amphibious Unit from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and soldiers from the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne division. 900 soldiers are slated to arrive in Haiti by January 15th.

Aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson and its complement of supporting ships. (arrived in Port au Prince on January 15, 2010): USS Carl Vinson CVN 70

The hospital ship USNS Comfort

Several U.S. Coast Guard vessels and helicopters

The three amphibious ships will join aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy and guided-missile frigate USS Underwood.

Leading Role of US Southern Command

US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) with headquarters in Miami is the "lead agency" in Haiti. Its mandate as a regional military command is to carry out modern warfare. Its stated mission in Latin America and the Caribbean is "to conduct military operations and promote security cooperation to achieve U.S. strategic objectives." (Our Mission - U.S. Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) The commanding officers are trained to oversee theater operations, military policing as well "counterinsurgency" in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the recent establishment of new US military bases in Colombia, within proximity of the Venezuelan border.

General Douglas Fraser, commander of U.S. Southern Command has defined the Haiti emergency operation as a Command, Control, Communications operation (C3). US Southern Command is to oversee a massive deployment of military hardware, including several warships, an aircraft carrier, airborne combat divisions, etc:

"So we're focused on getting command and control and communications there so that we can really get a better understanding of what's going on. MINUSTAH [United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti], as their headquarters partially collapsed, lost a lot of their communication, and so we're looking to robust that communication, also.

We're also sending in assessment teams in conjunction with USAID, supporting their efforts, as well as putting in some of our own to support their efforts.

We're moving various ships that we had in the region -- they're small ships, Coast Guard cutters, destroyers -- in that direction, to provide whatever immediate assistance that we can on the ground.

We also have a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, moving in that direction. It was at sea off of Norfolk, and so it's going to take a couple of days for it to get there. We need to also just resupply it and give it the provisions it needs to support the effort as we look at Haiti. And then we're looking across the international agencies to figure out how we support their efforts as well as our efforts.

We also are looking at a large-deck amphibious ship with an embarked Marine Expeditionary Unit on it that will be a couple of days behind the USS Vinson.

And that gives us a broader range of capability to move supplies around, to have lift capability to help support the effort there also.

So bottom line to it is, we don't have a clear assessment right now of what the situation on the ground is, what the needs within Port-au-Prince are, how extensive the situation is.

We also, finally, have a team that's headed in to the airport. From my understanding -- because my deputy commander just happened to be in Haiti when this situation happened, on a previously scheduled visit. He has been to the airport. He says the runway is functional but the tower doesn't have communications capability. The passenger terminal -- has structural damage to it, so we don't know what the status of it is.

So we have a group going in to make sure we can gain and secure the airfield and operate from it, because that's one of those locations we think we're going to have a lot of the immediate effort from an international basis going into.

And then we're out conducting all the other assessments that you would consider appropriate as we go in and work this effort.

We're also coordinating on the ground with MINUSTAH, with the folks who are there. The commander for MINUSTAH happened to be in Miami when this situation happened, so he's right now traveling back through and should be arriving in Port-au-Prince any time now. So that will help us coordinate our efforts there also, because again, obviously the United Nations suffered a significant loss there with the collapse -- at least partial collapse of their headquarters.

So that's -- those are the initial efforts that we have ongoing And as we get the assessments of what's coming next, then we'll adjust as required.

The secretary of Defense, the president, have all stipulated that this is a significant effort, and we're corralling all the resources within the Department of Defense to support this effort." (Defense.gov News Transcript: DOD News Briefing with Gen. Fraser from the Pentagon, January 13, 2010)

A Heritage Foundation report summarizes the substance of America's mission in Haiti: "The earthquake has both humanitarian and U.S. national security implications [requiring] a rapid response that is not only bold but decisive, mobilizing U.S. military, governmental, and civilian capabilities for both a short-term rescue and relief effort and a longer-term recovery and reform program in Haiti." (James M. Roberts and Ray Walser, American Leadership Necessary to Assist Haiti After Devastating Earthquake, Heritage Foundation, January 14, 2010).

At the outset, the military mission will be involved in first aid and emergency as well as public security and police activities.

US Air Force Controls the Airport

The US Air Force has taken over air traffic control functions as well as the management of Port au Prince airport. In other words, the US military regulates the flow of emergency aid and relief supplies which are being brought into the country in civilian planes. The US Air Force is not working under the instructions of Haitian Airport officials. These officials have been displaced. The airport is run by the US Military (Interview with Haitian Ambassador to the US R. Joseph, PBS News, January 15, 2010)

"The FAA's team is working with DOD combat controllers to improve the flow of air traffic moving in and out of the airport. The US Air Force reopened the airport on 14 January, and on 15 January its contingency response group was granted senior airfield authority ... Senior airfield authority enables the Air Force to prioritise, schedule and control the airspace at the airport, ..." (flightglobal.com, January 16, 2010, emphasis added)

The 1,000-bed U.S. Navy hospital ship, USNS Comfort, which includes more than 1,000 medical and support personnel has been sent to Haiti under the jurisdiction of Southern Command. (See Navy hospital ship with 1,000 beds readies for Haiti quake relief, Digital Journal, January 14, 2010). There were, at the time of the Earthquake, some 7100 military personnel and over 2000 police, namely a foreign force of over 9000. In contrast, the international civilian personnel of MINUSTAH is less than 500. MINUSTAH Facts and Figures - United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti

Table 2

United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH)

Current strength (30 November 2009)

9,065 total uniformed personnel

7,031 troops
2,034 police 488 international civilian personnel
1,212 local civilian staff
214 United Nations Volunteers

MINUSTAH Facts and Figures - United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti Estimated combined SOUTHCOM and MINUSTAH forces; 19,095*

*Excluding commitments by France (unconfirmed) and Canada (confirmed 800 troops). The US, France and Canada were "partners" in the February 29, 2004 Coup d'État.

Haiti has been under foreign military occupation since the US instigated February 2004 Coup d'Etat. The contingent of US forces under SOUTHCOM combined with those of MINUSTAH brings foreign military presence in Haiti to close to 20,000 in a country of 9 million people. In comparison in Afghanistan, prior to Obama's military surge, combined US and NATO forces were of the order of 70,000 for a population of 28 million. In other words, on a per capita basis there will be more troops in Haiti than in Afghanistan.

Recent US Military Interventions in Haiti

There have been several US sponsored military interventions in recent history. In 1994, following three years of military rule, a force of 20,000 occupation troops and "peace-keepers" was sent to Haiti. The 1994 US military intervention "was not intended to restore democracy. Quite the contrary: it was carried out to prevent a popular insurrection against the military Junta and its neoliberal cohorts." (Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Haiti, Global Research, February 28, 2004)

US and allied troops remained in the country until 1999. The Haitian armed forces were disbanded and the US State Department hired a mercenary company DynCorp to provide "technical advice" in restructuring the Haitian National Police (HNP). (Ibid).

The February 2004 Coup d'État

In the months leading up to the 2004 Coup d'Etat, US special forces and the CIA were training death squadrons composed of the former tonton macoute of the Duvalier era. The Rebel paramilitary army crossed the border from the Dominican Republic in early February 2004. "It was a well armed, trained and equipped paramilitary unit integrated by former members of Le Front pour l'avancement et le progrès d'Haiti (FRAPH), the "plain clothes" death squadrons, involved in mass killings of civilians and political assassinations during the CIA sponsored 1991 military coup, which led to the overthrow of the democratically elected government of President Jean Bertrand Aristide." (see Michel Chossudovsky, The Destabilization of Haiti: Global Research. February 28, 2004)

Foreign troops were sent into Haiti. MINUSTAH was set up in the wake of the US sponsored coup d'Etat in February 2004 and the kidnapping and deportation of the democratically elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide. The coup was instigated by the US with the support of France and Canada.

The FRAPH units subsequently integrated the country's police force, which was under the supervision of MINUSTAH. In the political and social disarray triggered by the earthquake, the former armed militia and Ton Ton macoute will be playing a new role.

Hidden Agenda

The unspoken mission of US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) with headquarters in Miami and US military installations throughout Latin America is to ensure the maintenance of subservient national regimes, namely US proxy governments, committed to the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal policy agenda. While US military personnel will at the outset be actively involved in emergency and disaster relief, this renewed US military presence in Haiti will be used to establish a foothold in the country as well pursue America's strategic and geopolitical objectives in the Caribbean basin, which are largely directed against Cuba and Venezuela.

The objective is not to work towards the rehabilitation of the national government, the presidency, the parliament, all of which has been decimated by the earthquake. Since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, America's design has been to gradually dismantle the Haitian State, restore colonial patterns and obstruct the functioning of a democratic government. In the present context, the objective is not only to do away with the government but also to revamp the mandate of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), of which the headquarters have been destroyed.

"The role of heading the relief effort and managing the crisis quickly fell to the United States, for lack -- in the short term, at least -- of any other capable entity." ( US Takes Charge in Haiti _ With Troops, Rescue Aid - NYTimes.com, January 14, 2009)

Prior to the earthquake, there were, according to US military sources, some 60 US military personnel in Haiti. From one day to the next, an outright military surge has occurred: 10,000 troops, marines, special forces, intelligence operatives, etc., not to mention private mercenary forces on contract to the Pentagon.

In all likelihood the humanitarian operation will be used as a pretext and justification to establish a more permanent US military presence in Haiti.

We are dealing with a massive deployment, a "surge" of military personnel assigned to emergency relief.

The first mission of SOUTHCOM will be to take control of what remains of the country's communications, transport and energy infrastructure. Already, the airport is under de facto US control. In all likelihood, the activities of MINUSTAH which from the outset in 2004 have served US foreign policy interests, will be coordinated with those of SOUTHCOM, namely the UN mission will be put under de facto control of the US military.

The Militarization of Civil Society Relief Organizations

The US military in Haiti seeks to oversee the activities of approved humanitarian organizations. It also purports to encroach upon the humanitarian activities of Venezuela and Cuba:

"The government under President René Préval is weak and literally now in shambles. Cuba and Venezuela, already intent on minimizing U.S. influence in the region, are likely to seize this opportunity to raise their profile and influence..." (James M. Roberts and Ray Walser, American Leadership Necessary to Assist Haiti After Devastating Earthquake, Heritage Foundation, January 14, 2010).

In the US, the militarization of emergency relief operations was instigated during the Katrina crisis, when the US military was called in to play a lead role.

The model of emergency intervention for SOUTHCOM is patterned on the role of NORTHCOM, which was granted a mandate as "the lead agency" in US domestic emergency procedures.

During Hurricane Rita in 2005, the detailed groundwork for the "militarization of emergency relief" involving a leading role for NORTHCOM was established. In this regard, Bush had hinted to the central role of the military in emergency relief: "Is there a natural disaster--of a certain size--that would then enable the Defense Department to become the lead agency in coordinating and leading the response effort? That's going to be a very important consideration for Congress to think about." (Statement of President Bush at a press conference, Bush Urges Shift in Relief Responsibilities - washingtonpost.com, September 26, 2005).

"The response to the national disaster is not being coordinated by the civilian government out of Texas, but from a remote location and in accordance with military criteria. US Northern Command Headquarters will directly control the movement of military personnel and hardware in the Gulf of Mexico. As in the case of Katrina, it will override the actions of civilian bodies. Yet in this case, the entire operation is under the jurisdiction of the military rather than under that of FEMA." (Michel Chossudovsky, US Northern Command and Hurricane Rita, Global Research, September 24, 2005)

Concluding Remarks

Haiti is a country under military occupation since the US instigated Coup d'Etat of February 2004.

The entry of ten thousand heavily armed US troops, coupled with the activities of local militia could potentially precipitate the country into social chaos.

These foreign forces have entered the country to reinforce MINUSTAH "peacekeepers" and Haitian police forces (integrated by former Tonton Macoute), which since 2004, have been responsible for war crimes directed against the Haitian people, including the indiscriminate killing of civilians.

These troups reinforce the existing occupation forces under UN mandate.

Twenty thousand foreign troops under SOUTHCOM and MINUSTAH commands will be present in the country. In all likelihood, there will be an integration or coordination of the command structures of SOUTHCOM and MINUSTAH.

The Haitian people have exhibited a high degree of solidarity, courage and social commitment.

Helping one another and acting with consciousness: under very difficult conditions, in the immediate wake of the disaster, citizens rescue teams were set up spontaneously.

The militarization of relief operations will weaken the organizational capabilities of Haitians to rebuild and reinstate the institutions of civilian government which have been destroyed. It will also encroach upon the efforts of the international medical teams and civilian relief organisations.

It is absolutely essential that the Haitian people continue to forcefully oppose the presence of foreign troops in their country, particularly in public security operations.

It is essential that Americans across the land forcefully oppose the decision of the Obama adminstration to send US combat troops to Haiti.

There can be no real reconstruction or development under foreign military occupation.

Consumer Alert: Product Recalls

noreply@blogger.com (ROK) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:51:00 -0400

The year has barely begun and the number of product recalls are alarming. See list below.

Rockler Companies Recalls LED Light Kits Due to Burn and Fire Hazards

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Rockler Companies Inc., of Medina, Minn., is voluntarily recalling about 2,200 LED light kits. Defective wiring in the light kits can cause the battery pack to overheat and explode, posing a risk of burn and fire hazards to consumers.

Bicycles and Framesets Recalled By Seattle Bike Supply Due to Fall Hazard

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Seattle Bike Supply, of Kent, Wash., is voluntarily recalling about 350 2010 Redline Conquest Pro Bicycles and Framesets. The bicycle’s fork legs can separate from the fork crown and cause the rider to lose control, posing a risk of serious injury if the rider falls.

Lenmar Enterprises Recalls Rechargeable Batteries Sold for Cordless Phones Due to Fire and Burn Hazards

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Lenmar Enterprises, of Camarillo, Calif., is voluntarily recalling about 1,400 Rechargeable Batteries for Cordless Phones. The rechargeable batteries can overheat, posing a fire and burn hazard to consumers.

CPSC Approves Final Rule on Guidelines for Mandatory Recall Notices

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) unanimously approved a new rule setting guidelines and requirements for information in mandatory recall notices. A mandatory recall can be ordered by the Commission or a U.S. District Court.

Children’s “Big Rex and Friends” Cloth Books Recalled Due to Risk of Lead Exposure

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), St. Martin’s Press LLC, of New York, N.Y., is voluntarily recalling about 204,000 "Big Rex and Friends" Cloth Books. A red plastic dot sewn in the book contains high levels of lead. Lead is toxic if ingested by young children and can cause adverse health effects.

Home Improvement Books Recalled by Oxmoor House Due to Faulty Wiring Instructions; Shock or Fire Hazard to Consumers

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Oxmoor House, Inc., of Birmingham, Ala., is voluntarily recalling about 951,000 Home Improvement Books. The books contain errors in the technical diagrams and wiring instructions that could lead consumers to incorrectly install or repair electrical wiring, posing an electrical shock or fire hazard to consumers.

Acer Recalls Notebook Computers Due to Burn Hazard

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Acer America Corporation, of San Jose, Calif., is voluntarily recalling about 22,000 Acer Aspire-series Notebook Computers. An internal microphone wire under the palm rest can short circuit and overheat. This poses a potential burn hazard to consumers.

Gas Cans Recalled by No-Spill; Containers Can Leak and Create Fire Hazard

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), No-Spill LLC, of Lenexa, Kan., is voluntarily recalling about 7,500 No-Spill 5-gallon Gasoline Cans. The gas containers can leak fuel at the black plastic collar where the spout connects to the can, posing fire and burn hazards to consumers.

Primal Vantage Recalls Plastic Tree Steps Due to Fall Hazard

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Primal Vantage Co., Inc., of Randolph, N.J., is voluntarily recalling about 16,000 Ameristep Plastic Strap-On Tree Step. Primal Vantage has received five complaints of step breakage, including two reports of consumers being bruised and cut.

Ammonia Recalled by OnLine Packaging Due to Chemical Hazard

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), OnLine Packaging Inc., of Plover, Wis., is voluntarily recalling 75 bottles of Food Club Supreme Clean Clear Ammonia. The bottle, which is labeled as containing ammonia, actually contains household bleach. The mislabeling of the bottles can pose a chemical hazard to consumers. If bleach is accidentally mixed with ammonia or acid, irritating or toxic gases could be produced.

Sagittarius Sporting Goods Recalls Gas Grills Sold at Lowe’s Stores Due to Fire and Burn Hazards

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Sagittarius Sporting Goods, of China, is voluntarily recalling about 10,000 Master Forge Five-Burner Gas Grills. The flexible rubber hose on the LP gas tank can come into contact with burner box, causing the hose to melt and rupture when the grill is lit. This poses a fire and burn hazard to consumers.

Jide Trading Recalls Toy Military Figure Due to Violation of Lead Paint Standard

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Jide Trading, Inc., of Commerce, Calif., is voluntarily recalling 2100 Military toy figures. The surface paint on the toy contains excessive levels of lead violating the federal lead paint standard.