Re : Earthquake Atermath:L'aide a Haiti est prisonniere de l'influence geopolitique entre les grandes puissances
Emmanuelle Gilles
France, Brazil and Italy were said to be upset, and the Red Cross said one of its planes was diverted to Santo Domingo, the capital of neighboring Dominican Republic.
The French government became so annoyed when a plane with an emergency field hospital was turned back Friday that foreign minister Bernard Kouchner lodged a protest with the State Department, according to the French ambassador to Haiti, Didier Le Bret.
Le Bret said that the Port-au-Prince airport has become "not an airport for the international community. It is an annex of Washington."
De : Moss M. Jack <moss...@yahoo.com>
À : grands...@yahoogroups.com; haitico...@yahoogroups.com
Envoyé le : Dim 17 Janvier 2010, 14 h 59 min 25 s
Objet : [GrandsDébats] Earthquake Atermath:L'aide a Haiti est prisonniere de l'influence geopolitique entre les grandes puissances
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Click to disallow
Ariel Charles
Sois forte et courageuse en meme temps.
Il faudra attendre l'intervention de l'Arbitre Supreme,
Entre temps, toi et moi, nous n'y pouvons rien!!!
Crois moi.
Ariel
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:52:11 -0800
From: manu...@yahoo.fr
Subject: [Haïti-Nation:17895] Re : Earthquake Atermath:L'aide a Haiti est prisonniere de l'influence geopolitique entre les grandes puissances
To: grands...@yahoogroups.com; haitico...@yahoogroups.com; haitiant...@yahoogroups.com; haitian-...@yahoogroups.com; forumc...@googlegroups.com; haiti-...@googlegroups.com; VIN...@yahoogroupes.fr
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Pfa100
Monday, January 18, 2010
PETIONVILLE, HAITI -- Through decades of coups, hurricanes, embargoes and economic collapse, the wily and powerful business elite of Haiti
have learned the art of survival in one of the most chaotic countries on Earth -- and they might come out on top again.
Although Tuesday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake destroyed many buildings in Port-au-Prince, it mostly spared homes and businesses up the mountain in the cool, green suburb of Petionville, home to former presidents and senators.
A palace built atop a mountain by the man who runs one of Haiti's biggest lottery games is still standing. New-car dealers, the big importers, the families that control the port -- they all drove through town with their drivers and security men this past weekend. Only a few homes here were destroyed.
"All the nation is feeling this earthquake -- the poor, the middle class and the richest ones," said Erwin Berthold, owner of the Big Star Market in Petionville. "But we did okay here. We have everything cleaned up inside. We are ready to open. We just need some security. So send in the Marines, okay?"
As Berthold stood outside his two-story market, stocked with fine wines and imported food from Miami and Paris, his customers cruised by and asked when he would reopen. "Maybe Monday!" he shouted, then held up his hand to his ear, for his customers to call his cellphone.
So little aid has been distributed that there is not much difference between what the rich have received and what the poor have received. The poor started with little and now have less; the elites simply have supplies to last.
But search-and-rescue operations have been intensely focused on buildings with international aid workers, such as the crushed U.N. headquarters, and on large hotels with international clientele. Some international rescue workers said they are being sent to find foreign nationals first.
There is an extreme, almost feudal divide between rich and poor in Haiti. In Port-au-Prince, up in the mountains, the gated and privately guarded neighborhoods resemble a Haitian version of Beverly Hills, but with razor wire.
Elias Abraham opened the door of his pretty walled compound, a semiautomatic pistol on his right hip and his family's passports in his back pocket.
His extended family's fleet of four-wheel-drive sport-utility vehicles are filled with gas. He has a generator big enough to power a small hotel. And even if his kids are sleeping in the courtyard because they are afraid of the continuing aftershocks, his maids are dressed in crisp, blue uniforms and his hospitable wife is able to welcome visitors with fresh-brewed coffee.
Abraham has not been unaffected by the quake. His Twins Market grocery store collapsed Tuesday and fell prey to looters Wednesday.
"They took everything," said Abraham, the Haitian-born son of a Syrian Christian merchant family. "I don't care. God bless them. If they need the food, take it. Just don't take it and sell it for a hundred times what it is worth.
"This is not the time to think about making money," he added. "We need security. We need calm."
Up in the mountains, there are flower vendors selling day-old roses across the street from refugees in tents. There are beauty salons, fitness gyms and French restaurants. All of them are shuttered but mostly undamaged.
Few buildings collapsed in Petionville and the surrounding area, but a drive through the hillsides found only three or four spilling into ravines.
"Thank God for the mountain," said Wesley Belizaire, who escaped to the hills above Petionville with 15 friends and family members to camp out in a sprawling stucco. "It is so safe, safe, safe." The house belongs to his boss, the owner of a travel agency, who was visiting the Bahamas when the quake struck.
The police are operating out of a well-supplied station in Petionville, where the parking lot was filled with idle police trucks. There have been few reports of looting here, even though the town has banks on every corner. Hervé Delorme, executive marketing director of Sogebank, stood outside a branch and said the building was safe and sound. "Only because of the electricity and communications we do not have the technology available to open," he said.
Across the street, one of the few pharmacies in the area was open. It was guarded by three Haitian police officers with rifles who let one customer in at a time. Down at the General Hospital, families wandered through the courtyard filled with patients with amputated limbs and open wounds, begging foreigners for medicine.
For better or worse, it will likely be the residents of Petionville who through their government connections, trading companies and interconnected family businesses will receive a large portion of U.S. and international aid and reconstruction money.
After a service at St. Louis Catholic Church in Port-au-Prince early Sunday, Yva Souriac was warning fellow parishioners what would come next with international assistance. "They only give the aid money to the same big families, over and over. So I ask, what is the point? They have given money to these families to help Haiti for 50 years, and look at Haiti. I say the Americans need to make up a new list."
Pfa100
Monday, January 18, 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- As foreign aid and troops flow into this ruined capital, a Haitian government led by a diffident president has been overwhelmed, making it largely invisible since the earthquake throttled the country six days ago.
An aloof politician who was educated abroad, President René Préval has spoken far more to foreign audiences through satellite television than to his own people. Over consecutive days this weekend, Préval, 67, met with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. But he has yet to visit the vast refugee camp that has risen in the city center alongside the crumbled National Palace, where he once lived.
The U.S. government views Préval, an agronomist by training, as a technocrat largely free of the sharp political ideologies that have divided Haiti for decades. But at a time when tragedy is forcing the country essentially to begin again, Préval's aversion to the public stage has left millions of Haitians wondering whether there is a government at all.
"Clearly, we have not spent enough time with the people," Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, Préval's right-hand man, said in an interview. "But we are overwhelmed. We just can't step back and have a vision for this country. Soon, we hope, the operations will be matched with a strategy for the future." Bellerive, who has been in office less than two months, acknowledged that "we are not only ourselves victims of the disaster, but also do not have the capacity to do this on our own."
Since the ouster of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, Haiti's elected government has been weak. Largely mistrusted by its people, the government has been unable to lift the country from severe poverty despite billions of dollars in annual international aid.
Préval and his ministers are sitting now at the volatile intersection of a sputtering aid effort and the rising demands of millions of Haitians traumatized by the quake and desperate for basic assistance. The emergency-triage stage will soon give way to long-term planning for how to rebuild a country virtually from scratch.
With most government buildings in precarious condition, Préval and his ministers have decamped to the one-story Judicial Police headquarters on the outskirts of the city. On Sunday morning, a throng of Canadian generals, Spanish aid workers and other foreigners waited there for a turn to see government officials.
Beyond the guards and gates, though, anger among Haitians displaced by the 7.0-magnitude quake is rising quickly. It is directed primarily at Préval's administration. "We're living here with God alone," said student Dalromy Guerrier, 19, who has moved with his family into a shelter on the sideline at the national soccer stadium, where substitutes usually wait to enter a game. "Is there anyone coming to help?"
Although he has served at the highest ranks of government for nearly two decades, Préval has been known more as a surrogate than as a powerful politician in his own right. The son of a former Haitian agriculture minister forced to flee the Duvalier regime, Préval grew up outside his country. He studied business and biology in Belgium and Italy and even worked as a waiter in Brooklyn before returning to Haiti in the early 1980s to work in the government.
He also opened a bakery here in the capital. Through his charitable bread donations, Préval came to know Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a spellbinding liberation priest who preached against the Duvalier dictatorship.
In 1990, Aristide became Haiti's first elected leader, and he named Préval prime minister. Over the next 14 years, Aristide was ousted by a military coup, returned to power, reelected and then ousted again in 2004.
Préval was along for much of the rocky ride, following Aristide as president in 1996 and again in 2006. But he has distanced himself from Aristide's Lavalas party, which in Creole means "a cleansing flood," and he has governed more moderately -- to the frustration of much of his mentor's impoverished constituency.
He imposed economic austerity measures in his first term, including the privatization of some government services, which drew criticism for primarily benefiting Haiti's elite. But unemployment fell. Préval also championed the trials of military and police officials accused of human rights violations, a first in Haiti.
Many of Haiti's poor supported his reelection in 2006, mostly because they thought it would lead to Aristide's return from South African exile. A day after the earthquake, Aristide reiterated his desire to come back. His return would give the country a highly visible leader but would also inject a divisive political element into recovery efforts, making it unlikely that Préval would welcome him.
Rich and poor alike say Préval's administration is riddled with corruption. Many Haitians now express the conflicting impulse to see their government in action at a time of crisis while wanting to make sure it is denied access to international aid for fear it will be stolen.
Mario Viau, the owner of Signal FM, a major radio station based in the wealthy hillside community of Petionville, said he sent his employees out into the city to search for a government official to speak on the air. None could be found. He then appealed over the radio for an official to visit his station and deliver public service announcements, ranging from how to find a missing relative to how to dispose of a dead body. What he received was a representative from Préval's office, who delivered a taped message from the president urging calm.
"We didn't feel like we had a government," Viau said. "But I wanted to put some kind of government on the radio. We have a president who doesn't like to talk at all."
Along Camus Street, a strip of cinder-block houses that begins at a school and ends at the cemetery, Alberthe Gordard gathered her bedding from the street one recent morning.
"My house," she said, pointing to a gingerbread façade listing far to the left.
Like her neighbors, Gordard and her two young children are sleeping head-to-toe in the street, blocked off by rubble and piles of trash. She gathers water from an open spigot in a plastic jug that once contained antifreeze, but it is not clean enough to drink.
"I'm hungry," she said. "We haven't seen anyone from the government. They have left us to this."
Correspondent William Booth contributed to this report from Petionville, Haiti.