“Where you stand,” goes an old Haitian proverb, “depends on where you sit.” This article, the second in a series, will examine aid workers’ stereotypes and prejudices about residents of displacement camps in post-earthquake Haiti, stemming from acute disconnect between NGOs and the people they are there to work with. We explore how these misperceptions have perpetuated deliberate decisions to deny water and sanitation services to desperate survivors.

The context is complicated by the transnational flow of both bacteria and aid dollars. Scientists have shown that the cholera pathogen came to Haiti in the bodies of foreign UN troops whose military base was dumping its sewage into a nearby river. The imported disease has claimed more than 7,000 lives and continues to ravage communities across Haiti. Two and a half years since the 2010 earthquake, the country still faces a severe dearth of water and sanitation services, further fueling the epidemic. The crisis is playing out among the nearly 400,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) still living in makeshift camps under tarps or torn tents, an ideal environment for cholera. The situation raises serious questions: why, with billions of dollars in post-earthquake aid and hundreds of humanitarian NGOs in the country, do so many people still lack the most basic of services? What factors are guiding NGOs’ decisions to provide or withhold them?

The first article of this series described how NGOs in Haiti decided to relax humanitarian standards for provision of water and sanitation and to deliberately withhold these essential services in IDP camps, in the middle of the epidemic. By spring of 2011, the WASH cluster (the UN-run group of NGOs coordinating water and sanitation response) had decided to terminate water provision. It had also decided to abandon the international minimum requirement of 20 people per toilet, instead setting a goal of 100 people per toilet. Predictably, cholera surged, as it has done again in the rainy season of 2012. What were NGO officials’ underlying perceptions and attitudes that could lead them to such decisions? Here, we describe more results from a study I conducted in 2011, based on 52 interviews with officials from NGOs and residents of displacement camps.

“Everyone Stopped Waiting for Aid”

• A camp resident empties one of many cups collecting leaking rainwater in her shelter. Photo: Benn Depp, www.bendepp.com •

People in camp after camp used nearly the same words in describing day-to-day life. While IDP camps have been the main locale for earthquake-affected Haitians to rebuild their lives and communities, this rebuilding has been fraught with suffering. The majority of camp residents I interviewed said they were skeptical they’d ever receive more services from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), but they stayed in the camps because the scraps of tents and the fragile communities of interdependence that had emerged were their last resort – their only option for survival. “As of six months ago people stopped waiting for aid and left,” said one camp resident in early 2011. “Those that are here are those who can’t return home, who don’t have anything.”

During the rainy season, most of the homes I sat in leaked water through the makeshift roof and gushed water through muddy gaps between ground and plastic. Many had to be re-hoisted, re-tied, re-sewed, re-hammered after every storm. Although families kept the areas outside their homes tidy, nearby drainage ditches brought all manners of trash and debris as daily gifts. In the majority of camps, respondents stated they had nowhere else to go, and an International Organization for Migration (IOM, a coordinating agency) survey of more than 15,000 camp dwellers concluded the same, stating “94 per cent of people living in camps would leave if they had alternative accommodation.” Part of the difficulty is that 80% of camp residents were renting homes before the earthquake, which made return extremely difficult given the massive post-earthquake surge in rental prices and the bleak job market.

But how did NGO officials perceive the situation?

“Waiting for Houses, Cars, Helicopters”

In their interviews, foreign officials from NGOs and IOM expressed the belief that Haitians could handle the camp conditions and were simply waiting for handouts. Many officials stated that they viewed signs of day-to-day survival in the camps – such as women selling coffee on the street and families scrounging up building materials from friends – as proof that life was back to normal. Where these efforts may have provided the coffee vendor with enough money to purchase some water for her kids or bought the family an extra week before their shelter collapsed for the fourth time, many NGO officials touted them as “coping mechanisms” which indicated that camp residents were doing fine on their own. One official evoked the racist hypothesis that Haitians were “genetically strong” given the “horrendous conditions” such as “slavery and torture” they had endured over centuries. “You or I would not survive one month in one of those camps,” she said.

IOM officials suggested that a large percentage of displaced people actually had the means to return to their former homes, but remained in camps waiting for NGOs to bestow miracles. They were “waiting for houses, cars, helicopters,” complained one, and “visas to Canada” quipped another. One senior IOM official enthusiastically but incorrectly asserted that only 30% of IDPs were renting homes before the quake, that the majority had land they could return to. Another high-level IOM official, somehow missing the fact that the job market was devastated and rental costs drastically inflated, commented, “We have to be careful because if they had the money to rent before, why now they don’t have it?” Suspicion often won out, with worries that camp residents were systematically conning the system. Many officials I interviewed expressed a fear that camps would persist indefinitely. Since no one has offered residents an alternative, this could be a realistic fear, but one officials responded to by retracting services so people would disperse, rather than pushing more vehemently for comprehensive housing solutions.

Officials actually worried about overprovision of services as a “pull factor” into camps. Services “are like a magnet to keep people there,” said one aid worker. Another went as far as saying, “In truth, if you scratch the surface, people find a way to obtain new lodging.” Many officials I interviewed expressed the same opinion, and a few all but stopped short of explicitly labeling camp residents conniving and conspiratorial. This is alarming for a number of reasons. For one, it paints the camps as some sort of cornucopia of services, when in reality most residents continue to struggle for the most basic of needs. It also minimizes the experiences of earthquake survivors living outside camps in conditions desperate enough that they might move to a camp just for a bucket of water every once in a while. In allowing “pull factor” mentality to dilute their commitment to providing services, NGOs could keep water and sanitation out of reach of both camp residents and their desperate neighbors.

In an unfortunately common case of reverse psychology, a management-level official argued that WASH services were sufficient in the camps since “people didn’t riot and there wasn’t mass outbreak of diarrheal disease.” When my research partner raised an eyebrow and brought up cholera, he responded, “Well, that one didn’t happen in the camps, and it hasn’t wiped out camps either.” Although the official admitted that he hadn’t talked to any camp residents, he said, “I think they’re pretty pleased.” Meanwhile, not only have cases been documented in which entire camps dispersed specifically due to cholera, but this should hardly be the minimum qualifier for concern. Another like-minded IOM official’s observation that “When you go to a camp during daytime almost no one is there,” led him to conclude, “they all take back their work they had before.” Although they do not represent the majority, it is telling that such opinions openly exist among key decision-makers in the WASH response who are clearly placing their presumptions above real knowledge of camp conditions.

Mistrust and the idea that camp residents are doing fine have made it all the easier to neglect humanitarian standards and human rights. It’s another iteration of how the resilience of a people can be used against them. If they’re somehow surviving, the logic goes, they can take more, and make do with less.

Esaie Jean Jules of the Solino Neighborhood Assembly, a grassroots group involved in cholera response, didn’t mince words in putting the pieces together: “One measure NGOs have taken to get people to leave the camps is to take away provision of water and sanitation,” he said this past April. “It’s been almost six months since anyone has come to de-sludge the latrines, but people are still using them. People don’t have access to any other option. There are almost 2,000 people, all who lost their homes in the earthquake, in one of the camps in Solino. They share 4 toilets. There’s no dignity in that, and when it comes to cholera, it’s a danger.”

“An Agenda, a Plan, a Program”

There are reasons why NGO officials don’t really take to heart the experiences of those living in displacement camps. There’s very little dedicated time and space for honest contact and discussion between the two parties. As if in a war zone, NGO rules often restrict their employees from walking on the street, barricading them in offices or air-conditioned SUVs. This is based largely on perceptions rather than reality: Haiti actually has among the lowest homicide rates in the region. Camp residents, in their interviews, often decried these measures as a sign of disrespect and distrust.

Camp residents also told me they have little to no input in the decisions made regarding their own camps. I used a checklist to ask camp committee leaders about their involvement in many steps of the project process. Of these, the only actual role residents were usually allowed in sanitation projects was cleaning the toilets and determining where toilets would be placed. While this seems more like NGOs pawning off the most undesirable or mundane tasks onto camp residents, aid workers described this to us as community “participation.” More active aspects of the project process, such as deciding how to carry out the project or follow-up, designing a system for maintenance, or even deciding how many toilets and what kind, were not up for input by camp residents. While NGO officials described meetings they held to discuss these issues, camp residents countered that they had little actual say in these meetings. They were “obliged” to take whatever they got, however they got it. They had opinions on the way toilets were being installed and maintained in their own camps, and on the system as a whole. They wanted information on how and why the system worked the way it did. But, beyond informing the NGO representative - assuming such a representative showed up, understood them, and relayed the message - camp residents had little means to convey their opinions.

One camp resident summed up the sentiments the majority of residents expressed to me: “[NGO officials] come with an agenda, a plan, a program. They can always find people who are clients for them who help execute the plan. But they don’t meet with the majority of the committee to identify needs.”

“The Meetings Are Almost Always in English…”

If displaced people have little say in programs being run in their camps, they have even less at the level of aid coordination and management. I asked if camp residents knew about the cluster system, the UN-run meetings where NGOs made decisions regarding not only water and sanitation but also provision of all basic post-quake services. None of the camp residents interviewed from any of the 16 camps knew what the cluster system was. The vast majority of residents reported that they do not receive information about how the UN and NGOs make decisions regarding them.

From our observations, the classic cluster meeting, for at least a year after the earthquake, looked like this: 20 to 30 people crowded around a few tables, some 80% from the US or Europe, speaking in a mix of English and French, communicating through powerpoint presentations and humanitarian aid jargon. The clusters’ exclusion of local people and groups drew criticism in the weeks following the earthquake, as it has after previous disasters elsewhere in the world. Yet this exclusion was so consistent, and the meetings so culturally comfortable to them, that aid workers came to see it as the norm. Several agency officials, in fact, explained that the cluster was not designed for camp residents to be present, that clusters were meetings for NGOs to speak with each other. A few wondered aloud how camp residents could be invited to participate given that the meetings could turn unwieldy, and some argued that the camp residents are in fact represented, since the NGOs speak on their behalf. Only three respondents stated that lack of participation was a real concern for them.

The result is that displaced people are simply not present to express the challenges they face and to advocate for solutions of their own creation. This exclusion was replicated at a number of other levels in post-earthquake decision-making and planning (more on this in the next article).

For most NGO officials, suspicion and misperceptions are not due to ill intentions – many work long hours and aspire to help those in need – but to the extreme disconnect between their institutions and Haitians’ reality on the ground. This, combined with the fact that management-level officials can hold prejudiced, sometimes downright racist beliefs, inevitably spills over into agencies’ decision-making in the form of denial of services and exclusion.

NGOs may claim that they cannot continue providing services indefinitely. Notwithstanding the fact that many are still sitting on (some even making interest on) the funds they raised for Haiti, this is understandable in the long term. But instead of responding by abandoning the people they’ve assumed responsibility for, they could step up in their role as advocates, pushing for long-term reconstruction and housing policies, for the changes in foreign policy that Haitians are demanding, and for the international community’s follow-through on its pledges. Some groups, such as Doctors without Borders and Partners in Health, have been doing this all along.

What are the solutions that Haitians are asking for? And how can NGOs adopt models that are driven by these demands? The next article will take a look at some of the inspiring examples of community engagement that Haitian grassroots groups are promoting, as well as the exceptional international NGOs that have followed their lead. We also look at how the dynamics I describe here are the continuation of historic trends that often implicate our government, here in the US – down to the reason why cholera was able to gain a foothold in Haiti in the first place.

Sign these petitions telling the UN to take responsibility for introducing cholera into Haiti and to help stop the epidemic: Just Foreign Policy Petition & Baseball in the Time of Cholera Petition.

Respondents’ names are not given as interviews for the study were conducted anonymously. Esaie Jean Jules was interviewed separately by Alexis Erkert. The study described was part of a Master’s thesis at the Harvard School of Public Health. For a copy of the full paper, contact deepa.otherworlds@gmail.com. Special thanks to Professor Stephen Marks and Silvan Vesenbeckh at the Harvard School of Public Health, Professor Mark Schuller at the City University of New York, and Ben Depp for sharing his remarkable photography.

[i] Financial Edge. (2011, April 29). Where's The Next Housing Bubble? and Sasser, B. (2011, March 18). Haiti's housing bubble, more pressing to some than election or Aristide. Christian Science Monitor .

[ii] Schuller, M. (2011). “Met Ko Veye Ko”: Foreign Responsibility in the Failure to Protect Against Cholera and Other Man-made Disasters. Retrieved April 17, 2011 from IJDH: http://ijdh.org/archives/16896

[iii] Lindsay, R. (2010, March 29). Haiti's Excluded. Retrieved April 17, 2011 from The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/article/haitis-excluded
Deepa Panchang is the Education and Outreach Coordinator for Other Worlds. She has worked in advocacy for human rights in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. You can access all of Other Worlds' past articles regarding post-earthquake Haiti here.

Copyleft Other Worlds. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Deepa Panchang, Other Worlds.

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“Cholera is something they sent,” says graffiti on Port-au-Prince walls, “to finish killing off the rest of us.”

Scientists have shown that the cholera pathogen came to Haiti with foreign UN troops who carried the bacteria in their bodies, and whose military base was dumping its sewage into a nearby river. The imported disease has claimed more than 7,000 lives and continues to ravage communities across Haiti. Despite billions in post-earthquake aid dollars and hundreds of humanitarian NGOs, the country still faces a dearth of water and sanitation services, further fueling the epidemic. Nearly half a million internally displaced people (IDPs) still live since the 2010 earthquake in makeshift camps under tarps, torn tents, and pieces of old fabric and cardboard, an ideal environment for cholera. The situation raises serious questions about the humanitarian mechanism and its priorities. Why do so many people still lack the most basic of services? What factors are guiding humanitarian agencies’ decisions to provide or withhold them?

Read more about the results of a study answering these questions in this multi-part series. The first article focuses on how neglect of humanitarian standards and lack of commitment to human rights led to deliberate decisions to cut services that left hundreds of thousands without water and sanitation, thus allowing cholera to spike. In the next article, we will examine NGO personnel’s negative perceptions about residents of the displacement camps, and how these perceptions abetted their decisions to deny services. The final piece takes a step back to look at the political dynamics that have historically left large gaps in water and sanitation infrastructure in Haiti, and how these trends continue. Throughout, we highlight grassroots groups that are working towards Haitian-driven alternatives.

• Bathing in a drainage ditch – too frequently the only option. Photo: Ben Depp •

These groups were driven by the belief that all people deserve to be cholera-free. Now, a year and a half after this first-line response and even the first protests demanding accountability from the UN, recorded cholera deaths have surpassed 7,000, with almost 550,000 people infected.[1] Actual numbers could be much, much higher.

The conditions allowing for this epidemic are human-made. The poor humanitarian response has aggravated the spread of the imported pathogen. We’ve known since 1854 - when the physician John Snow discovered the source of a London cholera epidemic and put a stop to it – that clean water is all it takes to sever the fecal-oral route on which the bacteria depends. However, few of the people still living in hundreds of internal displacement camps have access to clean drinking water. There are more than 4,000 camp residents for every one water source (i.e. a tank or other receptacle) and only 30% of those have an adequate level of chlorination, according to the most recent data. As for sanitation, which is important for keeping fecal matter away from water sources, there are more than 110 camp residents for every toilet.[ii]

The Pan-American Health Organization has stated that cholera could infect 200,000-250,000 this year in Haiti.[iii] In a recent alert, the organization Partners in Health warns us, “When the rains came last year, the number of cholera cases nearly tripled from 18,908 in April to 50,405 in June. This year could be worse, but it doesn't need to be.” This fear has already become truth, however: with another rainy season drenching the country, cholera is again on the rise.

How could the same pattern – vast under-provision of water and sanitation leading to a rainy-season surge in cholera cases – be repeating itself? To begin answering this question, we must look at the organizations in charge of the humanitarian response and why they have failed to provide the necessary services. Although government is normally, and ideally, the final party responsible for providing services like water and sanitation, circumstances made it virtually impossible for the Haitian government to assume this responsibility. It has long been grossly underfunded, particularly for provision of public services, due in part to a history of debt and requirements on foreign aid that included the slashing of social sector budgets. The situation has deteriorated with the earthquake which battered the Haitian government, damaging or destroying every high-level government building, killing thousands of employees, and obliterating infrastructure and records. Exacerbating the government’s current incapacity has been the fact that earthquake relief dollars have overwhelmingly bypassed it. While $6 billion have been disbursed to Haiti, including private donations from more than one in two US households, only one percent has gone to the Haitian government.[iv] Instead, almost all donations have gone straight to large non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These are agencies such as the Red Cross, Save the Children, and CARE, typically headquartered in capital cities of industrialized nations, that one commonly thinks of when donating to crisis-relief.

NGOs were thus the only ones endowed with the funding and capacity to carry out the needed relief. And they took on a responsibility towards Haitians to provide services, known in the jargon of the aid world as “the humanitarian imperative.” They also took on a responsibility to the taxpayers in the US and elsewhere who have paid much of their bill. In fact, ‘non-governmental’ is actually a misnomer since many of the agencies, like Save the Children and Catholic Relief Services, get at least half of their funding from the US government.[v]

In assuming these responsibilities, NGOs began coordinating among themselves through the UN humanitarian system, which hosts what are dubbed “cluster meetings.” The group of NGOs involved in water and sanitation meets as a “WASH [water, sanitation, and hygiene] cluster,” which divided the city up into slices of NGO turf, with each NGO agreeing to take responsibility for water and sanitation in certain camps. Although the governmental water agency, DINEPA, co-coordinates the cluster, it’s those with the resources and capacity – the NGOs – that really make the who, what, and where decisions. If they decide not to provide services to particular camps, those camps simply do not receive services. So, as a body vested with authority by the UN, acknowledged by the Haitian government, and run by well-financed NGOs, we can legitimately ask: why did they not deliver? Why were interventions that could have stopped or at least slowed cholera in its tracks not implemented on a mass scale?

Hoping to answer some of these questions through research I was doing as a graduate student of public health, I conducted a study of IDP camps and foreign NGO officials in Port-au-Prince to gauge attitudes towards the humanitarian work being done in the WASH sector in 2011. My research partner, Silvan Vesenbeckh, and I interviewed internally displaced people (IDPs) in 16 camps, 52 individuals working for major NGOs doing WASH work in these camps, and relevant officials with the International Organization for Migration and UN agencies. I analyzed the transcripts of all these interviews, categorizing respondents by type (NGO official, UN official, camp resident, etc.), and used qualitative analysis techniques to identify trends in themes and opinions among each type of respondent. What I’m sharing here are the results of that analysis.*

Overall, the interviews pointed to a lack of commitment to human rights and humanitarian standards that led to NGOs’ deliberate decisions not to provide aid. And, as will be discussed more in the next article, the negative perceptions about camp residents prevalent among the NGO community were significant factors leading to the relaxation of standards and negligence of human rights. They reflect what is destructive about the overarching ways NGOs interact with recipients of aid and with Haitian society more broadly.

Rights? “Virtually no mention of it”

A commitment to human rights in post-disaster work is important for at least two basic reasons. First, all human beings, particularly in times of catastrophe and extreme poverty, deserve a certain level of basic necessities – such as water, shelter, freedom from violence. Second, people’s poverty and need should not subject them to aid provision that is disrespectful, culturally inappropriate, insufficient, or without their input. In other words, the process of providing aid is just as important as the aid itself. (To translate this to an example we can more likely relate to: it’s not okay for a physician to offer lower quality treatment to her Medicaid or Medicare patients than to her privately insured ones.) A human rights approach requires NGOs to implement policies that make their programs more sensitive to vulnerable groups – such as ensuring that latrines are not set up in a way that aggravates gender-based violence, setting basic standards of quality and quantity in how much water people get, and ensuring that the camp committees they partner with are gender-representative. Human rights also introduces accountability, meaning that although international human rights treaties are usually legally binding only for governments, they also constitute a set of guidelines that NGOs often use as guidance, and that aid recipients can use to hold NGOs to their word.

However, the absence of human rights commitments was evident at all levels of NGO operations in Haiti, beginning with formal project mission statements and plans. My review of the Haiti coverage on the NGOs’ websites, as well as their Haiti progress reports published one year after the earthquake (in the cases where such existed), revealed that only one out of the 14 explicitly mention the right to water or sanitation. Only two of them had any mention of human rights at all.

What about NGO officials? Were they talking about human rights, like the right to water or the right to health? The WASH cluster – composed of NGO representatives discussing water and sanitation – was the perfect place to examine this. When asked about human rights, one aid worker put it bluntly, saying, “There’s virtually no mention of it in the WASH cluster.” The majority of NGO officials we interviewed had the same assessment. Corroborating this, a text search of the WASH cluster mailing list dialogue (which scanned 791 email messages between NGOs from 2010 and 2011), turned up only one message with a mention of “human rights,” and it did not relate to water or sanitation. Given that the cluster is where NGOs coordinate most water and sanitation decisions, the lack of human rights commitments in cluster discourse and NGO consciousness bodes poorly.

“Sphere Standards are not applicable in Haiti”

One way to measure agencies’ commitment to the principles of human rights, even if they are not using the language, is through their adherence to the “Sphere Minimum Standards in Disaster Response.” Commonly known as “Sphere Standards,” these are widely recognized guidelines for provision of basic needs in disaster settings. The Sphere Standards are well-known among the international humanitarian community and often talked about in cluster meetings. They require, for example, that aid-givers provide a minimum of 15 liters of water daily per person, and at least one toilet per every 20 people. While these numbers certainly do not represent achievement of rights, they at least set a floor in moving towards them.

Although the Sphere Standards are used as guidance in humanitarian settings around the world, of the 17 NGO officials in Haiti who discussed Sphere Standards in their interviews, all of them stated that these standards were not applicable or realistic in Haiti. In particular, they said, they would not aim to build one toilet for every 20 people. Why not? Camps are too crowded for toilets, said some. Camp residents have access to toilets in neighborhoods, said others. Camp residents we spoke to disputed both of these claims, with the overwhelming majority saying more toilets were vital, often pointing to spots in the camp where they’d like to see facilities installed. Yes, camps were crowded, they said, but that made proper sanitation all the more necessary.

According to other officials, Sphere Standards “don’t apply in urban settings.” This is patently false according to Sphere’s own published guidance and a Sphere Standards expert we consulted. Moreover, it has not been standard practice in other countries to change the rules in urban areas. No one cited examples of the standard being changed in this way anywhere else.

Regardless, the WASH cluster took these officials’ opinions to heart, and, in mid-2010 adopted a modified standard for toilet provision, declaring that 100, instead of 20, people per toilet was an acceptable goal for NGOs. That’s one port-a-potty for 100 people to use as their primary bathroom, and an overfilled, under-maintained one at that. In actuality, the average number of people per toilet among the camps I sampled was 177.

Moreover, a few months after the cholera outbreak, the WASH cluster announced the termination of free water distribution to camps by the end of March 2011 – just as cholera cases were making a resurgence with the rainy season.[vi] Free provision of water was simply “not sustainable,” wrote the cluster in its announcement.

Today, as a result of these intentional decisions on the part of foreign NGO and UN officials, the overwhelming majority of camps have no water or sanitation. As of March 2012, two percent of IDPs had access to water trucked into the camps (down from 48% in March 2011). There were 3991 functional latrines for the camp population of nearly half a million.[vii] With the deluge of new rain in 2012, camp residents trudge through often ankle-deep mud and water that snakes its way into the plastic shelters worn down from more than two years of facing the elements. According to the most recent statistics from the WASH cluster, in half of all camps people are forced to defecate in open air. This means people often tie up human waste in plastic bags and toss it into a nearby drainage ditch. Children, being children, don’t always bother with the plastic.

These ingredients for a renewed upsurge in cholera have already proved their potency. Doctors Without Borders issued urgent appeals this April, reporting that admissions to its cholera treatment centers in Port-au-Prince and a neighboring city tripled in less than a month. Yet treatment is hard to come by. Half the NGOs working in the Artibonite region, where the disease was introduced, have now reportedly left. A letter is circulating in the US Congress demanding that the UN and international community step up the response.

At the end of a typical day in a camp, residents scrape up what food they have been lucky enough to find that day while aid workers retire to leafy restaurants to shake off the heat over a fish filet or cocktail. One has to wonder whether this is the kind of disconnect that makes conceivable the decision to cut off water to a camp, or to treat bathrooms as optional luxury items. But what do officials themselves have to say about this? Why the neglect of humanitarian standards and human rights guidance? In the next article, you’ll hear quotes from NGO officials suggesting that their detachment from local populations and skepticism of camp conditions led to beliefs that IDPs were exaggerating their desperation, systematically trying to con the system. This often overtook officials’ genuine concern for IDPs’ well-being. We’ll also get a glimpse of Haitian groups working towards the health and leadership of their fellow Haitians and in particular, the most vulnerable, driven by their underlying belief in human rights.

* Respondents’ names are not given as interviews for the study were conducted anonymously.

Sign these petitions telling the UN to take responsibility for introducing cholera into Haiti and to help stop the epidemic: Just Foreign Policy Petition & Baseball in the Time of Cholera Petition.

The study described was part of a Master’s thesis at the Harvard School of Public Health. For a copy of the full paper, contact deepa.otherworlds@gmail.com. Special thanks to Professor Stephen Marks and Silvan Vesenbeckh at the Harvard School of Public Health, Professor Mark Schuller at the City University of New York, and Ben Depp for sharing his remarkable photography.

[i] Just Foreign Policy, “Haiti Cholera Counter,” May 30, 2012, http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/haiti-cholera-counter.
[ii] DINEPA, “Présentation des résultats Enquête EPAH / WASH,” April 2012.
[iii] “Haiti’s Cholera Crisis,” New York Times, May 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/haitis-cholera-crisis.h...
[iv] Vijaya Ramachandran and Julie Walz, “Haiti: Where Has All the Money Gone?” Center for Global Development, Policy Paper 004, May 2012, http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/1426185.
[v] Including grants, contracts, and in-kind donations such as commodities and services from the US government. KPMG, LLP, Save the Children Federation, Inc Financial Statements (December 31, 2010), 3, http://www.savethechildren.org/atf/cf/%7B9def2ebe-10ae-432c-9bd0-df91d2eba74a%7D/FINANCIAL%20STATEMENT%2012.31.2010.PDF; and Catholic Relief Services, 2010 Annual Report (2010), 40, http://crs.org/2010-annual-report/.
[vi] WASH Cluster Situation Report, Haïti. March 23, 2011.
[vii] DINEPA, “Présentation des résultats Enquête EPAH / WASH,” April 2012.

Deepa Panchang is the Education and Outreach Coordinator for Other Worlds. She has worked in advocacy for human rights in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. You can access all of Other Worlds' past articles regarding post-earthquake Haiti here.

Copyleft Other Worlds. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Deepa Panchang, Other Worlds.

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by Deepa Panchang and Beverly Bell

“I am optimistic that in 18 months, yes, we will be autonomous in our decisions. But right now I have to assume... that we are not.”[i] With these words, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive watched a swath of his government’s decision-making power shift into foreign hands in early 2010.

• Sign from a Port-au-Prince protest in October 2011, declaring “IHRC = Occupation. Long live a sovereign Haiti.” Photo: Ansel Herz. •

The IHRC was created by the Haitian parliament in April 2010 to direct post-earthquake reconstruction. Its mandate was to oversee rebuilding efforts through the $11 billion in pledges of international aid, including approving policies, projects, and budgeting. The World Bank was to manage the money. In creating and investing this body with its broad power, Parliament conducted a constitutional coup on April 15. Whereas the constitution mandates shared governance by an executive, a parliament, and a judiciary, the IHRC shifted it to the executive and the international community. The Parliament voted to give the IHRC the power to do, effectively, whatever it wanted. The only oversight measure left the Haitian government was veto power by the president.[ii]

Given the corporate philosophies of the firms that designed it, the resultant features of the IHRC were hardly surprising. The IHRC’s 26 board members were elected by no one and were accountable to no one. Half were foreign, including representatives of other governments, multilateral financial institutions, and non-governmental organizations. An international development consultant contracted by the IHRC, speaking with the Haiti Support Group, said, “Look, you have to realize the IHRC was not intended to work as a structure or entity for Haiti or Haitians. It was simply designed as a vehicle for donors to funnel multinationals’ and NGOs’ project contracts.”[iii]

McKinsey and Company, a US management consulting firm, was one of the firms that came in to help "design" and "launch" the IHRC.[iv] A background interview with an official very close to the process showed the Haitian government at the beck and call of McKinsey as it structured the commission and determined membership and decision-making processes. (All these aspects later received vehement criticism from Haitian civil society.) At the very first meeting, according to official minutes, it was McKinsey’s lead consultants who “made a presentation to the Board regarding the mission, mandate, structure, and operations of the IHRC.”[v] The consultants sat in on subsequent meetings as well.[vi]

McKinsey & Co. performed its services pro bono. Whether paid or not, the post was a lucrative one; it well-positioned the firm both to influence future contracts and to shape a climate favorable to business. A 2010 World Economic Forum document explicitly stated that “McKinsey helps coordinate with partners to channel interest from the private sector and connect would-be donors and investors to opportunities in Haiti.”[vii]

McKinsey was a natural choice for the job because of its former managing director’s long-time personal and political ties to Bill Clinton, who serves as UN Special Envoy to Haiti and was co-chair of the IHRC board. The firm was also a prime candidate because it advances the paradigm of ‘government as business,’ serving many governments around the world.[viii] As one example, McKinsey played a key role in developing the framework for the reconstruction commissions in Indonesia and Sri Lanka after the Indian Ocean tsunami which, as with the IHRC, involved infusing foreign private sector individuals into policy-making. This was another case in which the local population was excluded from having a say in its own future following another disaster; civil society groups denounced the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency (BRR in Bahasa) for being extremely centralized and discounting civil society voices.[ix]

McKinsey came under fire again after Hurricane Katrina and the flood of New Orleans for work it had done prior to the storm. McKinsey helped major insurance companies develop tactics that stalled court proceedings and delayed payments that, in practice, allowed them to avoid paying out claims to their clients who suffered in natural disasters or accidents. Lawsuits against insurance companies asserted that McKinsey’s pre-Katrina advice, particularly to Allstate, effectively helped insurers cheat their customers.[x]

Another US firm, Korn/Ferry International, came on board to head-hunt the executive director of the IHRC. This was to replace the initial staffing that had been provided by the Clinton Foundation, International Development Bank, and the governments of the US and Canada.[xi] Korn/Ferry circulated a job announcement, in English, through politically connected circles in the US and Haiti, as though it were hiring for any profit-oriented business instead of for a team that was making major decisions in the name of a nation and its well-being. The announcement noted that, “Leadership experience in highly efficient and structured organizations, such as the military, is an advantage.”

Korn/Ferry provides recruitment services for both corporate and government positions, and keeps its finger on the pulse of the increasing overlap of the two. It even published a report encouraging companies to hire leadership with government and policy backgrounds and vice versa, in what it called a "new marriage between business and government.”[xii]

Vesting foreign enterprises with political power is fundamentally anti-democratic. If US firms’ performance in post-earthquake governance is any example, it is a frightening indicator of what might emerge with even greater participation in decision-making, as mandated by the redevelopment blueprint published in March 2010 by the Haitian government and international community.

As ineffectual as the Haitian government may be, its functions can’t be outsourced. Haiti needs a government with responsibility to the citizenry who elected it and the ability to protect their rights. The pursuits of foreign firms – making governance decisions about rebuilding, paving the way for other firms’ Haitian debuts, racking up humanitarian clout – have been at the expense of Haitians still struggling for basic needs and democratic power.
The public good requires a public sector which can guarantee health, education, adequate food, water, housing, employment, agriculture, and civil liberties. It requires more than unaccountable foreign agencies and private business that can and do pull out when they like.

Deepa Panchang is the Education and Outreach Coordinator for Other Worlds. She has worked in advocacy for human rights in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake.

Copyleft Other Worlds. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Deepa Panchang and Beverly Bell, Other Worlds.

[i] Martin Kaste, “After Quake In Haiti, Who’s The Boss?” NPR, March 31, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125328026

[ii] Order by Réné Préval, President (Republic of Haiti, 2010), en.cirh.ht/files/pdf/ihrc_decree_20100421.pdf.

[iii] Haiti Support Group, "Deconstructing the IHRC's Reconstruction: Beyond Relief, Beyond Belief," The Haiti Support Group Briefing, no. 69, January 2012, 1.

[iv] Mary Bridges, et al., Innovations in Corporate Global Citizenship: Responding to the Haiti Earthquake, (World Economic Forum, July 2010), 16-17, www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_HaitiResponse_Report_2010.pdf.

[v] “Minutes of the Board Meeting of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC),” Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, Hotel Karibe, Pétionville, Haiti, June 17, 2010, en.cirh.ht/files/pdf/ihrc_board_minutes_june_17_2010.pdf.

[vi] Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, “IHRC Board Meeting Minutes,” accessed October 31, 2011, http://en.cirh.ht/board-meeting-minutes.html.

[vii] “Innovations in Corporate Global Citizenship: Responding to the Haiti Earthquake,” World Economic Forum, July 2010, www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_HaitiResponse_Report_2010.pdf.

[viii] Ian Davis, Government as Business (The McKinsey Quarterly, October 2007), http://www.mckinsey.com/locations/UK_Ireland/~/media/Reports/UKI/Ian_Davis_government_as_a_business_the_times.ashx.

[ix] Risma Umar et al., Tsunami Aftermath: Violations of Women’s Human Rights in Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, Indonesia (Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law, and Development, 2006), www.apwld.org/pdf/tsumai_vwhr.pdf.

[x] David Dietz and Darrell Preston, “The Insurance Hoax,” Bloomberg, September 2007, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=nw&pname=mm_0907_story1.html.

[xi] “Interim Haiti Recovery Commission Announces Over $1. 6 Billion in New Project Proposals, Outlines Priorities,” PR Newswire online, August 17, 2010, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/interim-haiti-recovery-commission-announces-over-1-6-billion-in-new-project-proposals-outlines-priorities-100918189.html.

[xii] Nels Olsen, A New Breed of Director Emerges as Public Policy Enters the Boardroom (Korn/Ferry Institute 2009), 7, http://www.kornferryinstitute.com/files/pdf1/ANewBreedofDirector_whtppr_FINAL_0309.pdf.

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Crossposted from Other Worlds.

In a 2011 Forum on the Crisis of Housing in Haiti, a group of camp residents and advocates asked “grassroots organizations and all other movements to mobilize with us on the housing issue so that we can achieve this dream of justice and liberty.” Today, with more than 500,000 people still living under sun-scorched tarps two years after the earthquake of January, 2010, the Haitian housing rights movement continues to gain urgency. Demanding comprehensive housing policy in the long term and decent, secure housing in the short term, the groups that comprise the movement have created detailed prescriptions for how to resolve the crisis. They are up against a lot, however, since most entities in charge of housing have not sought to “mobilize with” the movement; rather, they have come in with their own ideas.

• Photo caption: Displaced Haitians march through a camp during a protest demanding better housing policy. Photo by Ben Depp. •

The Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission, the group mandated with directing reconstruction and co-led by Bill Clinton, failed to develop a plan for large-scale housing provision before its mandate ran out this past October. Of the housing plans the group did approve, the most prominent were turned over to a bevy of foreign, private entities. The troubling flaw of this contracting and consulting scheme is that it is entirely unaccountable to the Haitian people. The parties are not monitored by Haitians. Only rarely do they involve Haitians in determining priorities, planning or implementing. Foreigners decide what will be built or sold or given, and under what development model. And in many cases, the crisis provides fodder for private entities, like universities, to jump on a chance to engage academics in one country in designing essential elements of life for another, while working hand-in-hand with the private sector.

One of the first proposals passed by the Interim Commission was a $2.4 million effort to “Highlight Best Practices for Housing.” Public and private funding sources included the Clinton Foundation, Inter-American Development Bank, the telephone company Digicel, the large investment bank Deutsche Bank, and a Canadian NGO called OneX1.

The planners allocated the majority of the funding to the first of two project components, a housing exposition for participants to “test and demonstrate innovative housing ideas.” After delays, the expo transpired in June 2011, when Haitians had already spent a year and a half under tarps waiting for new homes or assistance in fixing their old homes or even better temporary shelter. Actual shelter for homeless people would have come many steps, and many months or years, down the line from the expo. In the end, it didn’t matter anyway, because no houses were built. As of this writing, the units that were built for the expo remain on the site, with no plan for their utilization.[i]

In fact, according to news reports and our interviews, there had been no plan for how designs would be chosen from the model homes and provided on a large scale (or on any scale) to destitute people. The default assumption was that families would purchase their own housing, most probably with subsidized bank loans. In the country with the lowest per capita income in the hemisphere, the homes were to sell for upward of $5,000, with many ranging higher than $10,000 and a few even more than $20,000.[ii] A 12-foot-by-12-foot blue plastic box, not unlike many of the shelters seen in some of the camps, sold for $7,500.[iii] One of the Clinton Foundation officials bluntly said, “This is a private sector exposition, you’re seeing people here who are hopeful to make some money.”[iv]

A government engineer estimated that fully half of the model homes at the expo were not resistant to earthquakes and hurricanes. One of the company reps said they do not need to be tested for resistance to strong winds.[v]

A second component of the “Highlight Best Practices for Housing” project was the creation of a model “exemplar” community with 125 units and a community center in Zoranje, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Deutsche Bank, in addition to providing funding for the project, assisted in developing “new mortgage instruments” for future housing via “experts from the Bank’s residential mortgage backed securities group.” Essentially, Deutsche Bank has been developing strategies that make it easier for Haitian banks to offer loans to potential home-buyers. Even with low interest rates, requiring Haitian families to take out loans to purchase homes is predatory and, for most, would guarantee a life of debt. The prospect sounds eerily familiar to the predatory lending that took place in the US in the lead-up to the subprime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s, when low-income families were trapped by housing loans they could never pay back and were essentially set up for foreclosure – a phenomenon in which Deutsche Bank was a key player. In fact, the bank was popularly dubbed “America’s Foreclosure King,” given its position as a major financier of corporations such as Countrywide pushing high-risk mortgages. Deutsche Bank is currently being sued by the US Federal Housing Finance Agency for selling mis-valued mortgage-backed securities which helped precipitate the financial crisis in the US.[vi]

Deutsche Bank and the Clinton Foundation brought on board a joint team from Harvard University and MIT to help design housing strategy for the ‘exemplar’ project. John McAslan & Partners, a British architecture firm, was engaged to help design a “comprehensive community development strategy.”[vii] Yet there was no community; the Harvard-MIT design team was designing according to its own ideas, in a vacuum, from Cambridge, Massachusetts. As of October 2011, the team had spent exactly one afternoon meeting with existing residents in Zoranje. (Their project process document contained multiple photographs of this same meeting – Americans and Haitians sitting together in a circle – with speech bubbles extending from Haitians’ heads with tokenistic phrases such as “We need running water!” and “We need a church!”) According to an interview with a team member, one of the main insights they gained from this conversation was that job creation was a necessary addition to the community planning. One page in their planning document read, “If the new Zoranje community is not offered jobs or job training, crime and violence are pre-programmed,” followed by a photograph (with no source or caption) of black adolescent boys holding rifles.[viii] Viewers are not told whether the photo was taken in Zoranje, or even in Haiti. While members of the actual community had their ideas thus essentialized, the Haitians represented on the “Exemplar Community Foundation” include the former Tourism Secretary for Haiti and official at a major cruise line, a notorious landowner from one of Haiti’s most powerful families, and a former CEO of a large Haitian bank.

To add to the “community-in-a-box” type solutions, the design team came up with an idea called “community pairing,” by which neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince would be selected to move to designated locations outside the city. The idea came not from local residents, our interview revealed, but from research being done at the design team’s respective American institutions on urban redevelopment and slum upgrading. (Furthermore, the “silver bullet” solution of moving neighborhoods out to the provinces fails to recognize the larger economic forces at play, including the role of US foreign policy in harming Haitian agriculture, which has driven thousands of Haitian peasants to seek a better life in Port-au-Prince.) The same design team intended to provide recommendations to the government on how its strategies can be incorporated into national housing policies. Collaboration with the Haitian housing rights movement did not feature in this process.

The joint contract embodied a core problem of the foreign business-led redevelopment model: the targets of the projects were objects, not subjects, in planning and design. In this case, the proposal did not elaborate plans for how the Haitians who were to live in the “model community” would determine what kind of houses they wanted, or what kind of community center would serve their families, or what their vision of community development was. An added problem is the inherent lack of accountability in giving power to outside companies and institutions with no history in Haiti, no understanding of the country, and no commitment to Haitians. Designing a product for people without any consultation with them is unethical, especially when the product involves dangerously subpar safety standards, inaccessible pricing, and cultural ignorance. And foreign groups have gone about their work with blinders to the energetic Haitian movement that does exist, that is struggling to promote its recommendations on topics ranging from eminent domain to housing structures to evictions.

With the 60-some model units still remaining, uninhabited, at the site of the housing expo, “Highlight best practices for housing” has done anything but that.

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[i] Phone interview with team member of MIT/Harvard University design team for Exemplar Community Pilot Project, October 28, 2011.
[ii] Phone interview with team member of MIT/Harvard University design team for Exemplar Community Pilot Project, October 28, 2011.
[iii] Isabel Macdonald, “Disaster Capitalism in Haiti Leaves Displaced With Few Good Choices,” Colorlines, June 20, 2011, http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/06/disaster_capitalism_in_haiti_leaves_displaced_with_few_good_choices.html.
[iv] “Housing / Haiti / 2011,” Al Jazeera, June 27, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg5S-FiX8e4&feature=player_embedded
[v] Isabel Macdonald, “Disaster Capitalism in Haiti Leaves Displaced With Few Good Choices.”
[vi] “News Release: FHFA Sues 17 Firms to Recover Losses to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” Federal Housing Finance Agency, September 2, 2011, www.fhfa.gov/webfiles/22599/PLSLitigation_final_090211.pdf.
[vii] Interim Commission for Haiti’s Reconstruction, Highlight Best Practices for Housing, May 2011, en.cirh.ht/reports/000035.pdf.
[viii] Designing Process: Exemplar Community Project, Zoranje, Port-au-Prince, Haiti (Harvard University, MIT, July 2011), http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/images/content/5/1/519286/proj_designing_process.pdf.

Deepa Panchang is the Education and Outreach Coordinator for Other Worlds. She has worked in advocacy for human rights in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. You can access all of Other Worlds' past articles regarding post-earthquake Haiti here.

Copyleft Other Worlds. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Deepa Panchang, Other Worlds.

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Nou dwe sèl mèt bout tè sa a: We should be the only owners of this land.

This was Haitian protesters’ message at a demonstration last month against the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, known by its French acronym, MINUSTAH. October marks an upswing in press coverage and anti-MINUSTAH activity in Haiti in anticipation of Friday’s UN Security Council meeting, during which officials will vote on renewing the mission’s term for another year. Protests against the 7-year-old force have intensified since fall 2010, with heightened mobilization by grassroots groups calling for the withdrawal of the foreign troops from Haiti. Meanwhile, Brazil’s foreign minister, representing the country that contributes the largest troop contingent to MINUSTAH, has publicly announced a reduction in the number of troops amid mounting discussion in diplomatic circles about downsizing the force.

• Photo: Ansel Herz. From an anti-MINUSTAH protest last month. •

The negligence that led to this outbreak and the UN’s failure to assume responsibility for it were the latest affronts in a string of problems with MINUSTAH’s presence in the country. These include documented human rights violations. MINUSTAH has been ineffective in protecting Haitians from day-to-day insecurity, gender-based violence, and forced evictions from displacement camps. Furthermore, its troops have been active perpetrators of human rights offenses. Sexual exploitation and rape of Haitians, violent retaliations against peaceful popular protest, and failure to investigate charges of murder by its own members have tainted the force’s record. Crackdowns on demonstrations, besides violating protesters’ rights, serve to suppress the grassroots and civil society groups that are struggling to make their voices and vision a part of national dialogue on rebuilding. And MINUSTAH’s public statements of support for recent fraudulent elections – in which the majority of the electorate did not participate – further erode the democratic process.

To take action on this issue and join Haitian groups demanding MINUSTAH’s withdrawal from Haiti, sign onto this open letter.

A white paper co-authored by Other Worlds staff Deepa Panchang and released by HealthRoots Student Organization at the Harvard School of Public Health on October 4, “MINUSTAH: Keeping the peace, or conspiring against it?” enumerates in detail MINUSTAH’s post-earthquake human rights record. It also explains the political context behind the force’s presence in Haiti. Excerpts from the white paper’s executive summary follow.

Excerpts, Executive Summary: “MINUSTAH: Keeping the peace, or conspiring against it?”

In the year and a half since the earthquake in Haiti, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH by its French acronym) has expanded its role in the name of security, stability, and relief. However, since its establishment in 2004, multiple independent human rights organizations have documented myriad violations of the human rights of Haitians. These transgressions have continued unchecked since the earthquake, positioning MINUSTAH as a threat to Haitian stability and security instead of a safeguard.

Accompanying these abuses are domestic and international voices of protest, bolstered by human rights reports and leaked documents and cables demonstrating that the motivations of MINUSTAH and its members are not focused on Haiti. Further, permission for MINUSTAH’s presence was granted by an unconstitutional, unelected government after the democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted from office in an internationally-backed coup. When MINUSTAH is understood as part of a geopolitical strategy rather than a humanitarian peace mission, it is clear why such an unsuccessful and unpopular operation continues to be renewed year after year.

Less than a year after the first soldiers landed on Haitian soil, independent humanitarian organizations documented cases of robbery, murder, assault, rape, and sexual exploitation of minors.[1] Evidence grew that MINUSTAH ignored extrajudicial, paramilitary killings of civilian groups mobilizing to protect their communities. Worse, it sometimes acted as the guerillas’ personal security force.[2] These missions often cost innocent lives, as entire neighborhoods were assaulted by military strikes involving tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, bombs, and armored vehicles. These offensives, conducted by an occupying military force in a peacetime sovereign nation, violate MINUSTAH’s charter and international law. Nevertheless, MINUSTAH’s mandate allows for judicial immunity from Haitian law for its soldiers. Since its inception, hundreds of soldiers implicated in crimes have escaped prosecution because of this clause.[3]

Since the earthquake, these problems have worsened. MINUSTAH fails to effectively monitor internally displaced people (IDP) camps, often only patrolling outside them. In any case, the forces do not speak the language, and often have not arranged for sufficient translation capacity, despite UN presence in Haiti for almost 20 years. MINUSTAH also fails to engage the many grassroots organizations dedicated to IDPs, gender-based violence, or protection against forced eviction. Hundreds of cases of sexual assault, rape, and gender-based violence by MINUSTAH soldiers were reported in pre-earthquake Haiti. After the earthquake, such abuses, often of children, continue.[4]

Ten months after the earthquake, MINUSTAH troops, failing to take basic sanitation precautions by dumping human feces into a nearby river used for drinking, started a cholera epidemic that, to date, has killed more 6,000 people and crossed into the Dominican Republic. Despite eyewitness reports, and epidemiological and genetic studies proving that MINUSTAH was the source, the UN failed to take responsibility for nearly a year.

In August of 2010, Gérard Jean-Gilles, a sixteen-year-old boy, was found hanging on a base in Cap Haïtien.[5] Despite a post-mortem examination suggesting that he was murdered, and witness accounts suggesting that he was attacked before his death, MINUSTAH has refused to investigate.[6]

Contrary to its mandate to assist in free and fair elections, MINUSTAH played a role in an illegitimate presidential election in fall of 2010 that saw the exclusion of numerous political parties—including one of Haiti’s largest—and a large part of the population.

MINUSTAH’s continued presence is justified by the levels of unrest, or potential for unrest, in Haiti. In fact, the member countries involved in the mission, such as Brazil, have up to more than triple the murders per capita than Haiti. Since the earthquake, the only significant civil discord in the country has targeted MINUSTAH for introducing cholera or failing to respond to IDP camp conditions, or expressed anger over fraudulent elections. MINUSTAH responded to these peaceful protests with violence, including tear gassing students and IDPs, assaulting international journalists, shooting at children and even killing peaceful protestors.[7]

MINUSTAH has been destabilizing Haiti and violating human rights since its arrival, and has continued this trend after the earthquake. In addition to violent abuses, MINUSTAH’s introduction of cholera and failure to accept responsibility for it demonstrate a systemic problem with the entire mission and the way it interacts with Haiti. Just like the earthquake and the subsequent cholera outbreak, MINUSTAH, as a disaster with widespread adverse effects, has brought Haitians together in nonviolent yet persistent solidarity against it. But these outcries are repeatedly violently silenced by MINUSTAH.

MINUSTAH acts against Haitian interests in order to meet the geopolitical or economic needs of foreign nations or those seeking to ingratiate themselves to those nations. Rather than the instability and violence MINUSTAH uses to justify its existence—which has failed to rear its head since the earthquake—it is MINUSTAH itself that threatens security and advancement.

At such a crucial point in Haiti’s history, and with years of failures, inaction, repression, and human rights violations documented, it is time that MINUSTAH respect the Haitian people’s wishes, and the wishes of many of its members’ citizens, and withdraw from Haiti. Arguments of greater instability cannot justify the current abuse and violence against Haitians. Just as no concern of post-MINUSTAH instability can justify a single violation of a Haitian’s rights by an occupying force, no solution to Haiti’s problems can include foreign armed military on its soil. If the UN and its members want to support Haiti, MINUSTAH’s nearly one billion USD yearly budget should be put toward sanitation, shelter, health, infrastructure, and education, not arms and soldiers that result in death, sexual assault, and the subversion of democracy.

Read the entire white paper here.

[1] Pooja Bhatia and Benjamin S. Litman, Keeping the Peace in Haiti? An Assessment of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti Using Compliance with its Prescribed Mandate as a Barometer for Success, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights, 2005).
[2] Bhatia and Litman, Keeping the Peace in Haiti?.
[3] Bri Kouri Nouvèl Gaye et al., Haiti’s Renewal of MINUSTAH’s Mandate in Violation of the Human Rights of the Haitian People, March 24, 2011, submission to the UN Universal Periodic Review (UPR), Twelfth Session of the Working Group on the UPR Human Rights Council, October 3rd - October 13th, 2011.
[4] “Denuncian a Militaires Uruguayos en Haiti”, El Pais, August 14, 2010, http://www.elpais.com.uy/110814/pnacio-586491/nacional/denuncian-a-militares-uruguayos-en-haiti/. Ansel Herz, Matthew Mosk, and Rym Momtaz, “UN Peacekeepers Accused of Sexually Assaulting Haitian Teen,” ABC News, September 2, 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/peacekeepers-accused-sexually-assaulting-haitian-teen/story?id=14437122
[5] Thalles Gomes, “Morte de jovem haitiano gera novos protestos contra a Minustah,” Brasil de Fato, September 24, 2010, http://www.brasildefato.com.br/node/233
[6] “What Happened to Gerard Jean Gilles?”, Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), September 24th, 2010, http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/what-happened-to-gerald-jean-gilles
[7] Kim Ives, “As MINUSTAH Gasses Students, CEP Sets New Elections for November 28th,” Haiti Liberte, May 26, 2010. “MINUSTAH: Securing Stability and Democracy from Journalists, Children, and Other Threats,” CEPR, October 18, 2010, http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/minustah-securing-stability-and-democracy-from-journalists-children-and-other-threats. “Haiti Cholera Protest Turns Violent,” Al-Jazeera, November 16, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/11/20101115165524154228.html

Deepa Panchang is the Another Haiti is Possible Co-Coordinator for Other Worlds. She has engaged in advocacy for human rights in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake.You can access all of Other Worlds’ past articles regarding post-earthquake Haiti here.

Copyleft Other Worlds. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Other Worlds.