January 18, 2010
Haiti Earthquake, #7 - ELDERLY AWAIT DEATH AT NURSING HOME
Please read and re-distribute these Haiti Earthquake reports and encourage people to make donations to Rights Action and/or groups listed below.
BELOW
Article:  “Elderly await death at nursing home”
Article:  “Haiti quake toll ‘may be 200,000'”
Article:  “The west’s role in haiti’s plight”
“U.S. General Keen, running the US military relief effort, when asked about death toll estimates of between 150,000 and 200,000 people, said: "I think the international community is looking at those figures, and I think that's a start point. Clearly, this is a disaster of epic proportions, and we've got a lot of work ahead of us." – BBC report
“Haiti is routinely described as the "poorest country in the western hemisphere". This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression. The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce.” – Peter Hallward

For more information: Grahame Russell, co-director, info@rightsaction.org, 860-352-2448
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ELDERLY AWAIT DEATH AT NURSING HOME
By Alfred de Montesquiou, Associated Press, January 17, 2010
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100117/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_haiti_waiting_to_di
e/print
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The old lady crawls in the dirt, wailing for her pills. The elderly man lies motionless as rats pick at his overflowing diaper.
There is no food, water or medicine for the 85 surviving residents of the Port-au-Prince Municipal Nursing Home, barely a mile (1 1/2 kilometers) from the airport where a massive international aid effort is taking shape.
"Help us, help us," 69-year-old Mari-Ange Levee begged Sunday, lying on the ground with a broken leg and ribs. A cluster of flies swarmed the open fracture in her skull.
One man has already died, and administrator Jean Emmanuel said more would follow soon unless water and food arrive immediately.  "I appeal to anybody to bring us anything, or others won't live until tonight," he said, motioning toward five men and women who were having trouble breathing, a sign that the end was near.
The dead man was Joseph Julien, a 70-year-old diabetic who was pulled from the partially collapsed building and passed away Thursday for lack of food. His rotting body lies on a mattress, nearly indistinguishable from the living around him, so skinny and tired they seemed to be simply waiting for death.
With six residents killed in the quake, the institution now has 25 men and 60 women camped outside their former home. Some have a mattress in the dirt to lie on. Others don't. Madeleine Dautriche, 75, said some of the residents had pooled their money to buy three packets of pasta, which the dozens of pensioners shared on Thursday, their last meal. Since there was no drinking water, some didn't touch the noodles because they were cooked in gutter water.
Dautriche noted that many residents wore diapers that hadn't been changed since the quake. "The problem is, rats are coming to it," she said.
Though very little food aid had reached Haitians anywhere by Sunday, Emmanuel said the problem was made worse at the nursing home because it is located near Place de la Paix, an impoverished downtown neighborhood. Thousands of homeless slum dwellers have pitched their makeshift tents on the nursing home's ground, in effect shielding the elderly patients from the outside world with a tense maze of angry people, themselves hungry and thirsty.
"I'm pleading for everyone to understand that there's a truce right now, the streets are free, so you can come through to help us," said Emmanuel, 27, one of the rare officials not to have fled the squalor and mayhem. He insisted that foreign aid workers wouldn't be in danger if they tried to cross through the crowd to reach the elderly group.
Violent scuffles erupted Saturday in the adjacent soccer stadium when U.S. helicopters dropped boxes of military rations and Gatorade. But none of this trickle of help had reached the nursing home residents, who said some refugees have robbed them of what little they had.
Dautriche, who was sitting on the ground because of her broken back, held out an empty blue plastic basin. "My underwear and my money were in there," she said, sobbing. "Children stole it right in front of me and I couldn't move."
The area was an eery corner of silence within the clamor of crying babies and toddlers running naked in the mud. Guarding the little space was Phileas Julien, 78, a blind man in a wheelchair who shouted at anybody approaching to turn back. During moments of lucidity, Julien said he was better off than other pensioners because the medicine he was taking provided sustenance. A moment later, he threw his arms out to hug a passer-by he mistook for his grandson.
Also trying to guard the center was Jacqueline Thermiti, 71, who couldn't stand because of pain but who brandished her walking stick when children approached. "Of all the wars and revolutions and hurricanes, this quake is the worst thing God has ever sent us," Thermiti said. Initially, Thermiti and others believed their relatives would come to feed them, because many live in the slums nearby. "But I don't even know if my children are alive," she said.
Thermiti was surprisingly feisty for someone who hadn't eaten since Tuesday. She attributed that to experience with hunger during earlier hardships. "But I was younger, and now there's no water either," she said. She predicted that unlike other pensioners, she could still hold out for at least another day. "Then if the foreigners don't come (with aid)," she said, "it will be up to baby Jesus."
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HAITI QUAKE TOLL 'MAY BE 200,000'
BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8465137.stm)
The leading US general in Haiti has said it is a "reasonable assumption" that up to 200,000 people may have died in last Tuesday's earthquake. Lt Gen Ken Keen said the disaster was of "epic proportions", but it was "too early to know" the full human cost.
Rescuers pulled more people alive from the rubble at the weekend, but at least 70,000 people have already had burials.  Relief efforts are being slowed by bottlenecks, and many thousands of survivors are fending for themselves. Many Haitians are trying to leave the devastated capital city of Port-au-Prince, and there are security concerns amid reports of looting and violence.
U.S. General Keen, running the US military relief effort, when asked about death toll estimates of between 150,000 and 200,000 people, said: "I think the international community is looking at those figures, and I think that's a start point. Clearly, this is a disaster of epic proportions, and we've got a lot of work ahead of us."
HOPE FOR MORE RESCUES
Amid the chaos and destruction, a number of people were rescued from collapsed buildings at the weekend. Among the lucky ones was a seven-year-old girl pulled alive from the ruins of a supermarket. At the UN headquarters destroyed in the earthquake, rescuers lifted a Danish staff member alive from the ruins, just 15 minutes after the secretary general visited the site. And US teams with search dogs also found and rescued a 16-year-old Dominican girl trapped for five days in a small, three-storey hotel.
While hopes dim with every passing day, a South African rescue official, Colin Diner, told the BBC he hoped there would be more. "What we are seeing is that the buildings have a whole lot of openings, collapsed voids and things, and that always gives you a better opportunity. "We've got so many people killed and so many people trapped, the chances of some of them still being alive is pretty good."
HOMELESS THRONG STREETS
Correspondents say there is a sense of movement at last with the relief effort, although the amount of supplies getting through is still small. The BBC's David Loyn says the streets of the capital are thronged with homeless people, sleeping in the open and walking for hours for what food and water is available.
Most of the food and water being given out is being distributed informally by local people, correspondents say. Several agencies complained about not being able to get aid through at the airport, which is heavily congested and has been taken over by the US military.
Medecins Sans Frontieres urged commanders to speed up the landing of aeroplanes carrying medical supplies, after one carrying an inflatable field hospital was turned away on Saturday night. The head of the US operation at the airport, Col Buck Elton, said there had been 600 take-offs and landings since the US took control on Wednesday, and 50 flights had been diverted.
US troops also said they had set up their first foothold outside the airport to deliver aid carried in by helicopters. Speaking in Port-au-Prince on Sunday, Mr Ban called the situation in Haiti "one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades".
UN LOSSES IN HAITI
37 UN staff confirmed dead, more than 300 missing
Includes Special Representative Hedi Annabi, deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa and acting police commissioner Doug Coates
UN HQ in the Christopher Hotel and other buildings collapsed in the quake
Believed to be the biggest single loss of life in the UN's history
Mr Ban said he understood people's frustration, but that he did not want to see violence among desperate survivors. "I appeal to the Haitian people to be more patient," he said. He said providing daily food to two million people, as the UN has pledged, would be a "huge challenge". "We need to make sure our help is getting to people who need it as fast as possible," Mr Ban added. The UN has launched an appeal for $562m (£346m) intended to help three million people for six months, most of whom are thought to need emergency relief.
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THE WEST’S ROLE IN HAITI’S PLIGHT
By Peter Hallward, January 14, 2010, http://links.org.au/node/1462
[An earlier version of this article first appeared in the British Guardian. This updated version appears in Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with Peter Hallward's permission.]
If we are serious about assisting this devastated land we must stop trying to control and exploit it.
Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti's capital city on the afternoon of January 13, but it's no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly manmade outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.
The country has faced more than its fair share of catastrophes. Hundreds died in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the huge earthquake of May 7, 1842, may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of Cap Haitien alone. Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, most recently in 2004 and again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the town of Gonaïves and swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more than a thousand people and destroying many thousands of homes.
The full scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several weeks. Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term impact is incalculable.
COLONIAL EXPLOITATION
What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the "poorest country in the western hemisphere". This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.
Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment.
The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.
POVERTY
Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day". Decades of neoliberal "adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today.
Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately substandard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.
As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), points out: "Those people got there because they or their parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake resistant houses."
A small minority of these migrants are lucky enough to land a job in sweatshops that pay the lowest wages in the hemisphere, around US$1.75 a day.
Meanwhile the city's basic infrastructure – running water, electricity, roads, etc. – remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government's ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil.
The international community has been effectively ruling Haiti since the 2004 coup. The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN mission's mandate beyond its immediate military purpose.
Proposals to divert some of this "investment" towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the distribution of international "aid".
The same storms that killed so many in 2008 hit Cuba just as hard but killed only four people. Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal "reform", and its government retains a capacity to defend its people from disaster.
If we are serious about helping Haiti through this latest crisis then we should take this comparative point on board. Along with sending emergency relief, we should ask what we can do to facilitate the self-empowerment of Haiti's people and public institutions. If we are serious about helping we need to stop trying to control Haiti's government, to pacify its citizens, and to exploit its economy.
And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we've already done.
[Peter Hallward is professor of modern European philosophy at Middlesex University, member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective and author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. London: Verso, 2007.]
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WHAT RIGHTS ACTION DOES WITH “DISASTER” RELIEF FUNDS
In 1998, RA provided hundreds of thousands of dollars of funds and support to Hurricane Mitch victims in Honduras.  In 2004-2005, RA raised and distributed emergency funds to community groups in Haiti in response to the dual crisis of the military coup against the government of President Aristide and a series of hurricanes and tropical storms that devastated Haiti through 2004 and into 2005.  In 2005-2006, RA provided hundreds of thousands of dollars of funds and support to Hurricane Stan victims in Guatemala.
With disaster relief funds, RA funds and supports existing community and shanty-town based organizations

RA does not have staff in Haiti, and will directly fund community and shanty-town based organizations and/or the organizations listed below.
HAITI-FOCUSED GROUPS WE RECOMMEND
Please contact and/or donate to these groups directly:
The ARISTIDE FOUNDATION has established a medical facility at its headquarters in Tabarre and adjoining former medical school of Haiti (the one taken over by U.S. Marines in 2004 and then used by UN troops until just recently).  There are thousands of people gathering there seeking treatment.  Services are being provided by Haitian doctors, students and Cuban doctors.  Aid convoys from Dominican Republic are being organized.  Contributions to this work may be done through the “Haiti Emergency Relief fund”: http://www.haitiaction.net/About/HERF/HERF.html.
Zanmi Lasante (PARTNERS IN HEALTH) and the Cuban medical mission have taken over unused medical buildings in Port au Prince and are expanding services, in cooperation with UN agencies. Zanmi (Partners in Health) is one of the largest health care delivery services in Haiti and its infrastructure was largely undamaged by the quake. It is staffed and managed by Haitians and has a full training program for Haitians to become doctors and other health professionals. Deliveries of equipment and personnel to its teams is seriously hampered by the situation at the Port au Prince airport. To donate to Zanmi Lasante (PIH): http://www.pih.org/home.html.
INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE AND DEMOCRACY IN HAITI:  The IJDH works with the people of Haiti in their non-violent struggle for the return and consolidation of constitutional democracy, justice and human rights, by distributing objective and accurate information on human rights conditions in Haiti, pursuing legal cases, and cooperating with human rights and solidarity groups in Haiti and abroad. (http://www.ijdh.org/brianhaiti@aol.com)
WORKING TOGETHER FOR HAITI:  Konbit Pou Ayiti/ KONPAY (Working Together for Haiti) strengthens existing organizations, builds national networks, creates relationships between individuals and organizations in the U.S. and Haiti, and supports collaboration and the sharing of technology and expertise. KONPAY focuses on Haitian solutions to environmental, social and economic problems and provides training and funding to grassroots and community-based projects. (http://www.konpay.org/melinda@konpay.org)
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TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATIONS FOR RIGHTS ACTION’S "HAITI RELIEF" WORK
Make check payable to "Rights Action" and mail to:
UNITED STATES:  Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887
CANADA:  552 - 351 Queen St. E, Toronto ON, M5A-1T8
Credit card donations: http://rightsaction.org/contributions.htm
Stock donations: Contact Grahame Russell, info@rightsaction.org
Rights Action (with tax-deductible status in Canada and USA) funds and works with community development, environmental justice, human rights and disaster relief organizations in Guatemala and Honduras, and also in El Salvador, Haiti, Oaxaca and Chiapas.  Rights Action educates about and is involved in activism related to the underlying local, national and global causes of poverty and exploitation, environmental destruction, human rights violations and disasters. (www.rightsaction.org / info@rightsaction.org)

 

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