UNITED NATIONS – President Jovenel Moise has called on the international community to provide the funding needed to help the French-speaking Caribbean Community (CARICOM) country deal with the cholera epidemic.Addressing a round table discussion at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Moise said that while significant progress had been made since the epidemic was first reported in 2010, the disease continues to claim victims in Haiti.He said much funds are needed if the country is to eradicate the disease completely by 2022.“I am advocating to the UN General Assembly to remind the urgency of continuing international funding to defeat cholera. We will need an estimated US$390 million if we really want to end this epidemic by 2022,” he said, adding that Haiti had a plan that is already operational to eradicate cholera.
“If the resources provided are available to us, the elimination of the disease will be within our reach,’ Moise said, recalling that the US$390 million request corresponds to the United Nations multi-partner trust fund for cholera in Haiti, which was launched in December 2016 by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.But Moise told the meeting that despite the repeated calls of the former secretary general and his successor, Antonio Guterres, only two per cent of the promises made by international donors have been met.The fund has two main components including establishing a new strategy to develop a programme of material assistance and support to Haitians most directly affected by cholera as well as reducing the incidence of cholera, while addressing short- and long-term water, sanitation and health system improving access to care and treatment.The cholera outbreak here is being blamed on United Nations peacekeepers deployed from Nepal.The authorities have said more than 10 000 people have died since the first case was reported in October 2010 and several hundred thousand others have been sickened by the disease. (CMC)
(CNN) - Haiti's government officially banned Oxfam Great Britain from operating in its country on Wednesday, following the sex scandal that rocked the British charity earlier this year.
Oxfam's right to operate in Haiti had already been revoked in February following allegations that staff members, including the country director, hired prostitutes at Oxfam properties while working in Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake.
Oxfam responded to the decision in a statement on Wednesday, apologizing again to the Haitian government and its people.
"Oxfam is disappointed but understands the Haiti Government's decision to withdraw Oxfam Great Britain's permission to work in Haiti," the statement read. "The behavior of some former Oxfam staff working in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake was completely unacceptable."
The statement also noted that since stronger measures have since been implemented to prevent abuse, including a hotline and safeguarding team.
The allegations first emerged in 2011, prompting an internal investigation, but Oxfam didn't make the report public until this February. According to the report, four staff members were dismissed for "gross misconduct" and three others resigned after the investigation, including Haiti country director Roland van Hauwermeiren.
The report also described three staff members who "physically threatened and intimidated" a witness during the investigation, leading to accusations that Oxfam had deliberately covered up the scandal.
The report didn't address claims that van Hauwermeiren and his team had been previously reported for alleged sexual misconduct while working in the African nation of Chad, but no action was taken at the time.
Global outrage ensued. 7,000 people canceled their regular donations in just 10 days, Oxfam chief executive Mark Goldring told British lawmakers in February.
Several ambassadors and donors pulled their support. Oxfam's deputy chief stepped down, and in May, Goldring followed suit.
This is about abuse of power," Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of Oxfam International, told Parliament in February. "Whether they have given them some money from an Oxfam program or from their pocket as their salary, it's still abhorrent, and we are ashamed and upset about it, and we're going to root it out of our organization."
The staff members were deployed to Haiti in response to the devastating earthquake in 2010, which killed between 200,000 and 300,000 people.
Wesley Laîné MAIPS ’14 has spoken at the Clinton Global Initiative, delivered the graduation speech at the Sciences Po Law School in Paris, and appeared on the front page of the New York Times with his classmates when he participated in Harvard’s first commencement for black graduate students. But if you are to ask him what place or moment in his life matters most, he will always return to his native Haiti.
In the fall of 2012, a student turned a class exercise about a love triangle and alligators into a passionate but playful debate on the morals of intervention and neutrality. The student was Wesley Laîné, and it was his very first day at the Institute; the exercise was a part of new student orientation. Despite the weighty direction of the conversation, the debate never got hostile or contentious, but felt meaningful and open.Laîné lived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, until he was 12 years old and his family moved to Oklahoma City. His father, a minister who had put himself through law school in the evenings, had deep ties in the community, and the family decision to leave was not an easy one. “He bet on us,” Laîné says. “Like most parents in Haiti, my parents dreamed their kids would have it better than they did.” He says that his family had “crawled” its way to the middle class by the time they left, but violence was increasing, and going to school was a daily struggle, if there was school at all, because of frequent strikes. In many ways, he says, it was the typical immigrant story once they got to the United States: his dad worked lots of odd jobs to make ends meet and made ambitious plans for the children to get quality educations and make better lives for themselves. “My dad worked so much I used to hide his shoes so he wouldn’t have to go.”
Like most parents in Haiti, my parents dreamed their kids would have it better than they did.
Returning to Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010, Laîné worked there for two years before enrolling at the Institute. His foundation, Haiti Philanthropy, became heavily involved with clean water projects in the Southeast Department of Haiti as a response to the outbreak of cholera brought by UN peacekeepers from Nepal. The foundation has expanded to include a rainwater harvesting reservoir and projects to help women and children. Last summer he visited many villages where the foundation serves beneficiaries and spent time “bearing witness to the daily struggles.” He adds: “Anyone who aspires to political work has to be aware of what life is really like. It is so easy to get out of touch with what is happening on the ground.”He credits his love of history, politics, and historical figures such as James Baldwin for inspiring him to go to Paris through Middlebury Schools Abroad while he was a student at the Institute. Like the author, he felt the City of Light offered him the chance to “just be a person, anonymous. There is a degree of liberation in anonymity that I craved during this part of my journey.” In the U.S. most of the time, he says, the daily injustices that American society levies on black citizens does not allow for that. “The U.S. is also my home, and I love it, which is why I have strong feelings about the current state of American society. The sad fact is that many of the things Baldwin talked about are still true today.” He particularly hates when people use him as an example in order to turn a blind eye to the systemic injustice that exists today. “In many ways, I am the exception. I feel very fortunate. America’s promises are not available to everyone. If two or three things had gone differently, I would not be here. Many of my friends are stalked by the justice system.”
The U.S. is also my home, and I love it, which is why I have strong feelings about the current state of American society.
Laine lives in Paris now, where he is a lawyer with a top firm. The distance between his home and Oklahoma City, where his family still lives, can seem great, both literally (4,820 miles) and figuratively, the distance traveled reflected in his achievements. Laîné earned two law degrees; his classmates at Sciences Po elected him to give the commencement address, and he was part of the inaugural black commencement at Harvard.“It was truly an affirmation of everything we and our families had gone through to help us get there.” He feels strongly that the only way forward is to face the past.He says that every action, degree, career choice he takes is to lay the groundwork for a political career in Haiti, where he wants to shepherd transformative change for the impoverished country. All of the character traits that served him well that first day at the Institute—a quick wit, nimble intellect, and warm demeanor—are sure to be an asset to him as a politician promoting progress. “Like all Haitian parents, mine are strict and hard to please,” Laîné says with a chuckle, “but this visit my dad told me that I would probably accomplish what I want to do in Haiti.”
(A relative drip-feeds Louis Rosu Marcelle (R) in the Cholera Treatment Center of Diquini in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, September 7, 2016. Picture taken September 7, 2016. REUTERS/Andres Martinez Casares)
Haiti was free of cholera until 2010 when peacekeepers helping after a devastating earthquake accidentally dumped infected sewage into a riverBOGOTA, April 30 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Haitians battling cholera blamed on United Nations peacekeepers are getting little support with only two percent of promised funds materialising, according to campaigners accusing the global community of again failing the Caribbean nation.Haiti was free of cholera until 2010 when peacekeepers helping after a devastating earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people accidentally dumped infected sewage into a river.Since then about 9,750 Haitians have died of the waterborne disease that has infected more than 800,000 people, with the epidemic continuing to affect dozens of people every week.The United Nations has not accepted legal responsibility for the outbreak but in late 2016 outgoing U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon apologised to Haiti for the organisation's role and announced a $400 million fund to help affected Haitians.But to date - almost halfway through the fund's expected three-year term - the U.N. Haiti Cholera Response Multi-Partner Trust Fund has only raised $8.7 million or 2.2 percent of the total - and less than half has been spent, U.N. figures show.Sienna Merope-Synge, a human rights lawyer at the U.S.-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), said this showed "a failure by the U.N. system to honour that promise"."The U.N. promises, in particular to create a package of assistance that would provide redress to victims, (have) not been moved forward," she said.The IJDH previously filed a lawsuit against the U.N. on behalf of cholera victims, including a demand for financial compensation, but in 2016 a U.S. federal appeals court upheld the organisation's immunity from damages.
SLOW PROGRESS
The spotlight on the failure to eradicate cholera comes after the United Nations and aid organisations have faced criticism for slow reconstruction efforts in Haiti due to a lack of coordination and bypassing the government and businesses.The behaviour of aid workers in Haiti after the earthquake has also come under scrutiny with Oxfam rocked by allegations that staff, including a former Haiti country director, used prostitutes during the relief mission.Eight years after the disaster Haiti remains the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. World Bank figures show only one in four rural Haitians has access to a toilet, and less than half to clean water.Experts said improving the country's water and sanitation systems is vital to overcome Haiti's vulnerability to new cholera outbreaks, particularly after hurricanes.In emailed comments, the U.N. Special Envoy for Haiti, Josette Sheeran, said nearly $700 million had been spent by the U.N. and global community on fighting cholera in Haiti since 2010 but funding for the Multi-Partner Trust Fund was lacking.The office said Sheeran was working on "new innovative financing mechanisms" to raise funds but gave no details."There is still a big funding gap, and we urgently need $80 million to complete the next phase of cholera reduction, and community support," Sheeran said by email.Cholera is currently infecting about 74 more people each week although this is down from 18,500 at the outbreak's peak.Cholera expert Louise Ivers, executive director of the Centre for Global Health at the Massachusetts General Hospital said it was not enough to say things had improved since 2010."This has been one the biggest cholera epidemics in recent history and we are into the eighth year," said Ivers, a doctor who led cholera response efforts during the outbreak in Haiti as head of mission for medical charity Partners In Health."Epidemics go down because people have had the disease, they have some natural immunity now."
NO COMPENSATION
The U.N. fund envisions a two-track process.The first track would focus on eradicating cholera and building infrastructure for sanitation and clean water.The second is described as "a package of material assistance and support to those most affected by the disease" which Ban described as a "concrete expression of the regret of our organisation for the suffering so many Haitians have endured".But Merope-Synge said so far no one has received any type of financial compensation, and projects to help rebuild affected communities - such as constructing markets and clinics - were virtually non-existent.Ivers said working out which families could receive support is "daunting" because it is now hard to prove who died of what but that this should not account for the slow progress made."What's happened over the last year is a real reluctance by the U.N. system, including the donor states, to support direct payment to households," Merope-Synge said."There's a fear among the donors and within the U.N. system that it could set a precedent, that if the U.N. does something bad in the future it might have to compensate."In response to emails from the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy for Haiti did not confirm whether the U.N. had provided any direct financial assistance to individual cholera victims or families, or plans to do so.The U.N. office also did not provide requested details about any development projects that are up and running.It did say Sheeran and Haitian government officials met some cholera victims in February to discuss proposed pilot projects.Following consultations with four communities in the central town of Mirebalais, the first set of projects had been chosen, and will start next week, with $1.1 million disbursed, the U.N. office said.The United Nations did not provide details about what this would entail or look like on the ground but said it planned to carry out similar work in at about 140 more communities.However Ivers said some Haitians feel they have been excluded from the U.N. consultation process which had led to street protests over the past year.Merope-Synge said the cholera outbreak had left thousands of families struggling to rebuild their lives with little support."Families lost breadwinners that have plunged them further into poverty, people took on debt to buried loved ones. All these very real financial consequences," she said. (Reporting by Anastasia Moloney @anastasiabogota, Editing by Robert Carmichael and Belinda Goldsmith. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit http://news.trust.org)By: Anastasia Moloney for Thomson Reuters Foundation News| April 30, 2018
Port-au-Prince (AFP) - Haitian Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant, a political novice just over a year into governing the impoverished Caribbean country, has made his first cabinet shuffle after pressure from legislators.
Following his appointment in February 2017, Lafontant, a doctor by profession, nominated his first cabinet of 18 ministers overnight Monday, including five women.
They lack political experience except for a few technocrats.
On Thursday, a lawmaker who backs President Jovenel Moise -- a banana exporter who is also a newcomer to politics -- issued a 72-hour ultimatum for him to make ministerial changes.
The demand came after more than a month of pressure from lawmakers who publicly support the president.
Moise's spokesman had said Friday that the president was not acting "under either pressure or threat from another power," but in the end a shuffle took place.
State television overnight broadcast a recorded message from Lafontant announcing the cabinet changes, but there was no official explanation as to why the reshuffle occurred.
The changes are:
- Jean-Marie Reynaldo Brunet named minister of interior and territorial community. Until 2016, he was an acting mayor appointed by former president Michel Martelly in the absence of local elections.
- Jean Roody Aly appointed justice minister. He was previously the ministry's director general.
- Joubert Angrand, who was coordinator of the national coffee institute, became agriculture minister.
- Guy Andre Junior Francois was named minister responsible for Haitians abroad. He is a former consul in Miami, which is home to most of the diaspora.
- Guyler C. Delva, a journalist, will head the Ministry of Culture and Communication, where he served as secretary of state for communication between 2012 and 2013.
Haiti is still recovering from Hurricane Matthew, which struck in 2016, and almost 40,000 people remain in makeshift camps eight years after an earthquake killed more than 200,000 people.
Since 2010, about 10,000 people have died from a cholera epidemic in Haiti.
“I am a woman first. And then a strong Haitian woman.”
“I’m very comfortable with my femininity and my assertiveness. In Haitian culture, women are the center of the household; providers and caretakers. Just because I can cook at home doesn’t mean I can’t run a multimillion dollar business. Feminism, to me, is the freedom to be a complex, multidimensional individual without living my life in silos."
Guelmana Rochelin
Guelmana Rochelin, Founder & CEO of Mana S.A.
Johaida Jean-Franois
Johaida Jean-Franois, Labor & Delivery RN at Boston Medical Center
From government officials to late night comedy hosts, there has been a lot of conversation around Haiti. But, hearing from those who know it best may offer other narratives on Haiti and on identity. Meet Guelmana Rochelin and Johaida Jean-Franois. One is a Haitian immigrant who returned home to build a company, Mana S.A., in Port-Au-Prince. Another is a first-generation Haitian-American who deftly weaves her values into the work she does as a Labor and Delivery Registered Nurse at Boston Medical Center.A Tale of Two LivesGuelmana tells a story of growing up in an idyllic community in Côteaux, Haiti. “…Tranquil, warm, and family-oriented…My great-grandmother lived with us and the entire extended family all lived a stone’s throw from one another.” Even after her family immigrated to the United States and put down roots in Philadelphia, her passion and love for Haiti never abated. In fact, she was so certain of her future, upon becoming a naturalized citizen, she told her parents, “You guys are taking something from me. I can never be President of any country now.” Luckily, she had other ideas of how to impact Haiti. After attending Villanova University and Harvard Business School, she worked at Goldman Sachs and co-founded a healthcare company with her sister, Affinity Healthcare Solutions. But the lure of Haiti always beckoned. Eventually, on a visit back to Haiti, she realized it was time to return and began to build a venture that would provide economic opportunity to the Haitian community, Mana S.A. The idea came from Guelmana’s realization that the small purchasing power of most Haitians made it hard for many to buy a box of cereal. She also observed some very enterprising merchants buy a box of cereal and then sell individual servings of cereal on the side of the road. And with that, Mana S.A. was born. Guelmana imported machines from around the world, built her own production line, created the cornflakes at the facility, and began to make individual servings of cornflakes. And as we learned on Conan O’Brien, many find the cornflakes pretty tasty. Guelmana’s hope is that by providing employees a living wage – one that enables them to not only feed their family, but also invest in their children's education, she will help lay the foundation of Haiti’s future.Johaida’s story begins in Everett, Massachusetts with deep roots firmly entrenched in Haiti. Her mother worked in the telecommunications industry in Haiti and upon immigrating to the U.S., transitioned into healthcare. As the matriarch of the family, her mother served as a spiritual pillar, as well as a constant source of inspiration. According to Johaida, “I have never seen her struggles, but I have always seen the result of her struggles. And they were always good.” Growing up, Johaida was reminded in ways glaring and subtle that she was different. Sometimes it was the bottle of Malta in her lunch as opposed to her fellow students’ Capri juice pouches. Or the incredulous remark when a person with long hair and light skin was discovered to be of Haitian descent. She channeled her frustration and anger in those experiences towards her education. Johaida graduated from Rivier University, successfully passed the NCLEX-RN, her nursing boards, upon first attempt, and following her mother’s footsteps, entered the healthcare industry. She wanted a community focused on the care of others, not dissimilar to the community her mother experienced in Haiti. Johaida chose to work at Boston Medical Center because as the largest safety net hospital in New England, BMC serves a very diverse population. According to their website, 57% of patients are from under-served populations and 32% of patients do not speak English as a primary language. Despite the numerous languages heard throughout the halls of BMC, as Johaida says, she speaks a universal language: comfort in holding a patient’s hand, care in rubbing a patient’s back, and safety in reassuring eye contact.
Being Haitian, Being a WomanI am always curious to see how women live their multifaceted identities. And it was not surprising to see that Johaida and Guelmana had differing views on how to live their complex identities.For Johaida, she emphatically said, “I am a woman first. And then a strong Haitian woman.” Much of our conversation centered around her work caring for so many new women and newborns. Being surrounded by such diverse women going through a common experience drives her strong gender identity.Guelmana’s answer was more complicated. “I’m very comfortable with my femininity and my assertiveness. In Haitian culture, women are the center of the household; providers and caretakers. Just because I can cook at home doesn’t mean I can’t run a multimillion dollar business. Feminism, to me, is the freedom to be a complex, multidimensional individual without living my life in silos."Both emphasize the importance of choices and the refusal to be categorized and put into a box. And despite their different professional paths, both live lives infused with passion, surrounded by community, and guided by family. Johaida and Guelmana approach their multifaceted identities differently, but one common aspect of their narratives holds true – they have a lot of pride in the strength and resilience of the first black republic, Haiti.By: Peggy Yu for Forbes.com | February 1, 2018
In this op-ed, writer Fabienne Josaphat explains the history of Haiti, and how it has been mistreated by politicians long before President Donald Trump's recent remarks.President Donald Trump’s ignorance of Haitian contributions and history continues to mislead the American people. On January 11, the President of the United States met with officials on immigration and allegedly said, regarding Haitians and Africans, “Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?” The Washington Post first reported the news.These statements made on the eve of the anniversary of the January 12, 2010 earthquake that killed up to 300,000 Haitians. As a Haitian immigrant living in South Florida — where, in 2015, an estimated 127,189 people of Haitian ancestry lived in Miami-Dade County alone — I could feel the indignation broiling beneath my people’s skin. Locally, councilman Alix Desulme, who represents District 4 in the City of North Miami, called the alleged comments “divisive and racist,” and demanded an apology.“Sadly, we have a president who continues to show America how great we can become through his destructive selfishness,” the councilman said. The mayor of North Miami himself, Dr. Smith Joseph, chimed in with his own statement, saying, “Our nation should not tolerate this overt racism from a president who is sworn to protect us.” Haitian-American Congresswoman Mia Love, a Republican from the state of Utah, said, “The President must apologize to both the American people and the nations he so wantonly maligned.”Instead, what came hours after the news of the reported comments broke, was a tweet from the president in which he denied making the comments, calling Haiti “poor and troubled.” He claimed to have wonderful relationships with Haitians, but failed to acknowledge a single one by name. None of this, again, is surprising.Fox News host Tucker Carlson affirmed that the president was merely voicing what his base was already thinking, casually asking, “Why can’t you say that?” on air. Many Trump supporters disagree with the notion that Trump is a racist, despite his allegedly saying “We should have more people from Norway” after his “sh*thole” comment was made.Describing a person’s country as a “sh*thole” shows an absence of critical thinking, and is a display of ignorance. It echoes an existing sentiment of xenophobia in this country from Trump voters, most of them white, now referred to as “the forgotten men and women.” They are being misled by a man who knows nothing about the Haitian people and their history. Yes, the U.S. should respect the Haitian people simply because of their humanity. But Haiti also deserves respect because it spent its entire existence as a nation contributing to the enrichment and greatness of superpowers like America.Historically, Haiti has always offered its best to the world and is proud of its accomplishments. It was the first to lead a successful slave-led rebellion to topple French slave owners, claiming its freedom in 1804. Without Haiti, there would be no Louisiana Purchase, a treaty that earned the United States the entire Louisiana territory and more than doubled the country’s size. New Orleans’ vibrant culture would not be the same without the influence of integrated Haitians. In Illinois, what would later become the city of Chicago was founded by a Haitian-born pioneer named Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable. In addition to liberating slaves in other countries, Haitians helped America fight its Revolutionary War, and when World War II drove countries to form urgent alliances, Haitian pilots joined the Tuskeegee Airmen as part of the U.S. Army Air Force.Our decision in 1804 to live free or to die was heroic, but the U.S. did not officially recognize this independence until 1862. France put the nation in the humiliating position of having to pay reparations at an annual rate for the slaves they lost, so Haiti was forced to borrow money to repay their oppressors, and borrowed from banks in France and the U.S.. Several initiatives have been launched to cancel Haiti’s debt, but pressure to repay debtors initiated further borrowing, keeping Haiti in constant crushing debt.The U.S. profited off Haiti during the American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, suppressing riots and killing rebels. Initially led by then-President Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. military imposed racist soldiers onto the Haitian people, introducing a new strain of cruelty that led to the decapitation and dehumanization of insurgents.The dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which lasted in Haiti from 1957 to 1971, was able to endure because of American complicity. Specifically, as Duvalier murdered and brutally oppressed Haitians, the U.S. looked the other way because Duvalier was effective at staving off communism, which the U.S. saw as a threat. When that regime was toppled when Duvalier’s son was overthrown in 1986, the nation was completely impoverished, its funds depleted to line the pockets of tyrants like the Duvaliers. In addition, because of its debts to the U.S., Haiti has been by default constantly subjected to American intervention.Despite our contributions to America, Trump’s language doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise to Haitians, as we too often face this type of disregard from so many in power. Yet, during his presidential campaign, Trump made sure to draw attention to Hillary Clinton’s actions regarding Haiti to discredit the Democratic candidate. In 2009, when she was Secretary of State, Clinton suppressed Haitian minimum wage, at the behest of manufacturers, then after the 2010 earthquake, Bill Clinton became head of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. He enlisted the Clinton Foundation to build shelters, a relief effort considered to be a disaster, called out even by the likes of Oxfam.With more than one million people displaced after the 2010 earthquake, the U.S. poured aid money into Haiti, but years later, investigations have found that very little money actually reached Haitian citizens. Haitians still lack shelter that was promised by the American Red Cross after the humanitarian organization raised almost half a billion dollars from helpful donors. The Clinton Foundation, again, is also implicated in failing in their recovery efforts to aid Haiti with reconstruction projects after the earthquake despite raising more than $30 million.Then, Haiti suffered a devastating cholera outbreak that started at a United Nations peacekeeping camp, and as of November 2017, the Trump administration has refused to assign unspent UN peacekeeping money to help combat the epidemic. Instead, his administration chose to end Temporary Protective Status for 60,000 Haitians sheltered in America as a result of the earthquake.This sent a clear message to Haiti and its diaspora, and now, his comments about them speak volumes. In Trump’s world, there is no room for black and brown people to thrive. Yet, he shows an acceptance of white nationalists, identifying as “very fine people” some of the those protesting to keep Confederate monuments after the deadly Charlottesville rallies.He does not know the history of Haiti, and he doesn’t comprehend the significance of Haiti’s contributions, because he doesn’t care to. His wealth and privilege have allowed him to erase others to the point of invisibility.But Haitians exist as a reminder that the damages of racism and oppression cannot sway self-determination. We are not going anywhere. In fact, Haitians continue to thrive despite adversity. Our ancestry and culture empower and enable us to bounce back and carry on. If the whip of slavery did not break us, the words of an inveterate racist will not kill us. Haitians sacrifice for others even when others don’t sacrifice for them. I see this as the definition of love: the continuous devotion to others with no expectation of reciprocity.As a Haitian immigrant, I am tired of always asking for apologies, so I’m not personally interested in one from Trump. I’m interested in active and constructive repairs to our dignity in the American media, demonstrating an intent to rebrand and respect Haiti, rather than baiting audiences into buying into images of poverty and misery, because one narrative does not define us. Apologies, to me, are futile unless they are backed up by action and determination for change. Until then, we are planting our feet in the ground and waiting for the next insult to fly.By: Fabienne Josaphat for TeenVogue.com | January 16, 2018
“So even if I’m here and I feel good my friends are aware of this I’m still bitter, very bitter.”
“When I say Haiti, you say ‘Rise Up,’” Mathania Toussaint, the PR chair for Haitian American Student Association (HASA), instructed the group of students and allies gathered on the steps of Kimmel Thursday night. Toussaint lead them in the chant, which swelled with each call and response.
This was the scene from the sit-in, organized in response to the Trump administration’s recent decision to strip immigrants of their Temporary Protected Status (TPS). HASA said it was necessary to bring attention to the move, which will affect immigrants from Honduras, Nicaragua, Sudan and Haiti, because they believe the issue has been overlooked in discourse regarding immigrant struggles.
“After we first found out about the decision, HASA was kind of scrambling because we found out about it over Thanksgiving break and had a planned meeting,” Toussaint said. “So we flipped everything because this is more important. We need to talk about TPS. Trump has systematically removed immigrants of color from the U.S., it’s been group by group.”
Initially, Toussaint expressed qualms about the prospect of organizing the demonstration because she hadn’t planned a protest before. But the reaction from students, especially Haitian students like sophomore Fatima Julien, made it abundantly clear her decision to highlight this issue was necessary.
“After finding out about the TPS removal, I was like ‘Shit, what are we going to do…What can I do?’” Julien said. “Then finding out about the sit-in I harassed all my social media followers saying ‘Come: if you’re a social justice type I’m taking attendance.’”
“Being here, especially during the chant,” Julien continued, “I got a little emotional but it was good. It feels nice to be able to say that I was here and that my friends know about it.”
Julien, who immigrated to the U.S. two years ago, has family members who will be directly affected by the decision: a sister will have to return and cousins that were trapped under the rubble of the massive 2010 earthquake, will also be forced out of the U.S. In light of their trauma, Julien expressed trepidation about them returning to Haiti.
Despite those fears, she also made it clear she and her family would continue fighting to ensure everyone remained in the states.
Albert Saint Jean addresses attendees.
The sit-in was planned to operate with the goals of bringing attention to the TPS matter and educating attendees on ways to help those affected going forward. Albert Saint Jean, the New York organizing fellow at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and Ellie Happel an NYU Law graduate, both provided information on the latter.
Saint Jean recommended students reach out to organizations such as Haitian Women for Haitian refugees, Haitian Americans United for Progress and, the one he’s a part of, BAJI. “Because we’re actually in the communities doing work, helping people to get legal access,” he explained.
He added that often the help impacted communities need isn’t complex and can be as simple as assisting a family with filing paperwork.
Similarly, Happel suggested that helping the Haitian community could be very doable right here at NYU — with NYU Law and undergrads collaborating to monitor what’s happening in Congress, in Haitian neighborhoods and responding accordingly.
After the sit-in’s moment of silence for Haitians affected by the cholera epidemic the nation is still recovering from, attendees began to gather their belongings to leave. HASA president, Fabrice Juin, left those gathered with a final message.
“I personally only see things like these — sit-ins — as beneficial and productive if every single one of you leaves the space with more knowledge and ready to help physically and tangibly,” Juin said. “Thank you for showing up but I also want to let you know pay attention and ask yourself ‘What can I do in my own way to help the cause?’”
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AFP) — The United Nations, which last month launched a fresh mission to promote long-term development in Haiti, has had it with nice words: when it comes to corruption and human rights, "the proof is in the pudding.""They have said they want to fight corruption, so they have to take responsibility," insisted Susan Page, who is heading the UN Mission for Justice Support in Haiti (MINUJUSTH)."I'm going to take them at their word, but I'm also going to help them if that is really what they want," the American career diplomat said.Elected president after an electoral crisis that paralyzed the country for two years, Jovenel Moise insists he is going to use his time in office to clean up Haitian politics."Corruption, in all its forms, eats away and atrophies the economy, it profoundly weakens the political foundations and destabilizes society's social tissue: corruption is a crime against development," the president, who took office earlier this year, told the UN general assembly in New York in September.The concern is that his words are taking their time in being translated into action. In late August, a minister was sacked over corruption allegations, but no legal action has yet been taken.The new UN mission starts just as one of the symbols of financial waste in Haiti resurfaces: on Thursday, the Senate will debate a parliamentary report accusing a dozen former ministers, who held office between 2010 and 2016, of "fraud on a grand scale.""We'll see how they react, not just in regard to the report but in general," said Page, pointing to Haitian institutions in charge of fighting corruption and money laundering."Will they strengthen the capabilities of agents in these organizations? Really put investigations in place which they will then pursue to the very end? Will they bring people to justice? We will see."Gnawed away by corruption, the country's justice system is notoriously slow-moving. Its prison population, 400 percent above capacity, is one of the highest in the world.Maintaining the rule of law also demands a real commitment to improving conditions in detention centers, but there, too, MINUJUSTH will not take the lead."It's an age-old problem that the Haitians will have to sort out themselves," said Page. "We are here to support, not to do it for them. They need to have the political will to do it."Restoring the UN's image in Haiti during this new mission will prove almost as big a task as overhauling its justice system.The 13 years of the preceding UN mission, known as MINUSTAH, were blighted by sex crimes perpetrated against Haitian woman and children by UN police and peacekeeping troops, as well as a cholera epidemic sparked by Nepalese peacekeepers that has already claimed 10,000 lives.MINUJUSTH is the UN's sixth peacekeeping mission in Haiti over the past 25 years, a country where there is very little risk of civil war, regional conflict or terrorist attacks. The label "peacekeeping" exasperates many Haitian politicians, who may support the drive against corruption but also want a debate to redefine the UN mandate.Aware of that debate, Page prefers not to take sides: "The UN Security Council considers it necessary to keep a certain level of stability here and to tackle the great challenges which threaten long-term development... that is not a mandate for development – that is to enable a transition between a peacekeeping mission and a lasting development."
United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed and UN Special Envoy for Haiti Josette Sheeran wrapped up a three-day visit to the island on Sunday, pledging more help to defeat cholera and assist the Government in achieving the broader aims of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.“The UN will walk this path with Haiti,” Ms. Mohammed said on Twitter, referring the work under way inside Haiti towards becoming an emergent country by 2030, the finish line agreed by all nations to achieve of the Agenda and its landmark 17 Goals, knows as the SDGs.The high-level delegation was dispatched by Secretary-General António Guterres to reaffirm the commitment of the United Nations to the Haitian people in a “new spirit of partnership.”In an opinion piece late last week in the Miami Herald, the UN chief said the partnership would stretch across the UN's work on the island – including to continue addressing Haiti's cholera challenge and the “unacceptable incidents” of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel – and aims to help Haiti move “from an emergency approach to durable solutions, from assistance to investment support, from handouts to hand-to-hand cooperation for sustainable development, to democracy and dignity for all Haitians.”On Saturday, Ms. Mohammed echoed the “new spirit of partnership” set out by Mr. Guterres, saying: “We come to try to find another way to do things better; because in the past, we have fallen short. We were not able to do what we had planned,” she said in a joint press conference with Haitian President Jovenel Moise in the capital, Port-au-Prince.The visit of the two UN officials comes just after the appointment of Susan Page, of the United States, as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the UN Mission in Support of Justice in Haiti (UNMIJUSTH), which succeeded the UN Stabilization Mission, known as MINUSTAH, on 16 October.The role of the new UN mission is to assist the Haitian Government to strengthen the rule of law institutions, to continue to develop the capacity of the national police and to promote human rights.
UN reaffirms commitment to eradicating cholera
As a key part of the visit, the two UN officials met families affected by cholera and coping with lack of access to water and sanitation.Ms. Mohammed and Ms. Sheeran also co-Chaired a High-Level Cholera Committee meeting (HLCC) alongside Haitian Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant. The Haitian Government and the UN representatives jointly expressed their determination work in partnership to achieve zero transmission of cholera. They further expressed their commitment to achieving the SDGs, including improving access to water, sanitation and healthcare.While cholera transmission has dropped dramatically, from over 18,000 new cases per week at the onset of the epidemic in 2010, to 250 per week this year, success will require more funding to maintain the highly effective work of emergency response teams, and commitment to the fight against cholera in the medium and long-term, the officials jointly agreed.Urging UN Member States and partners to provide comprehensive support, the Deputy Secretary-General emphasized during the meeting that “addressing the root causes of cholera in Haiti is critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Additionally, in the immediate term, we urgently require funding to ensure continued operation of the rapid response teams; failure to do so risks losing the gains achieved to date.”The Deputy Secretary-General and the Special Envoy also witnessed the efforts of the “many heroes” working to eradicate the disease. Their visit was also an opportunity to learn about successful cholera control programmes, including in communities that ended open defecation, mobilized to build toilets, and raised awareness of the importance of sanitation.By: UN News Centre | November 5, 2017
BOSTON (CBS) — A rally in Mattapan on Sunday demonstrated support for the local Haitian community as they wait for the Trump administration to decide if they will be deported.
The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program that allows about 5,000 Haitian locally, and 58,000 nationwide to remain in the country. Overall, 320,000 people from ten different countries live in the United States because of TPS.
A rally in Mattahan to support Haitian who might lose their temporary protected status (WBZ-TV)
President Donald Trump has until November 6 to extend the status to citizens of Nicaragua and Honduras. The deadline for Haitians is November. 23.“I’m a student. I’m graduating in about six months. And getting deported would actually stop me from getting my Bachelor’s degree as an accountant so its a whole lot of things we would be deprived of after we’ve worked so hard to accomplish them,” said Marvens Leconte, who was at the rally.
Marvens Leconte (WBZ-TV)
The program was designed for immigrants from countries where natural disasters, war, or other factors make returning unsafe.Without the extension, those residents would have to leave by January.The State Department says conditions in their homeland has improved enough for them to return.Many at the rally said Haiti is still recovering from an earthquake, a hurricane, and a cholera epidemic.“It won’t be safe for us to send 58,000 people back to Haiti right now with everything that is going on so we want to make our voices heard to say that those people deserve an extension because it will take time for Haiti to rebuild,” explained Geralde Gabeau, a rally organizer.The Haitian community is hoping for an 18-month delay.By: CBS Boston | November 5, 2017
China, France and Russia also among major UN donors resisting appeal to spend $40m of UN money on victims of cholera epidemic, claim lawyers
Human rights lawyers have accused the UK and other large donors of blocking the release of a multimillion-dollar UN fund to provide relief to victims of a cholera epidemic that has killed 10,000 people in Haiti.The outbreak, which affected hundreds of thousands of Haitians, was caused when infected UN peacekeepers from Nepal brought the disease to the country in 2010.
In June, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, asked member states to allow him to repurpose $40.5m (£30m) of leftover money to the Haiti cholera fund, which he said could have an “immediate impact in saving lives”.The appeal to reallocate unspent money designated for Haiti in 2015-16 has met with strong resistance from major donors. None of the five UN security council’s permanent members, which includes the US and the UK, approved the proposed funding reallocation. The UN Haiti cholera multi-partner trust fund, which gathered more than $2m, now lies almost empty.Brian Concannon, executive director of the Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), said: “We have had conversations with the UK about cholera for years. They have been saying, ‘This is a matter of principle and we need to expect the rule of law.’”“Now that the money is on the table, the fact that the UK is not reallocating it is very concerning. No one else is going to step up.”Concannon, who was in the UK this week to meet the all-party parliamentary group on Haiti, said: “We’re asking the UK to take a leadership role in the UN security council. All the [permanent security council members] spend hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars on the UN. But the UN is flouting its legal responsibilities towards the people of Haiti on cholera.”The UN only admitted its role in the outbreak last year. Former UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon issued a carefully worded apology and said that the UN and member states had a “moral obligation” to relieve the Haitian suffering. The agency promised to raise $400m from member states to provide assistance to the Haitian victims. Since the fund was set up, however, only about $2.6m has been collected. The UK has donated $623,000 to this fund. Its share of the unspent $40.5m would be more than double that amount, at $2.3m.The IJDH works with thousands of cholera victims through the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, a Port-au-Prince based human rights law firm. A lawsuit the groups filed on behalf of 5,000 cholera victims in a New York federal court in 2013 was dismissed by a judge, on the basis of UN immunity. After an appeal, the UN second circuit court of appeals in New York upheld the decision in 2016.Concannon is also working with the US Senate, to mobilise support for reallocating the funds. Democratic and Republican lawmakers have in the past criticised the Obama administration and the UN for failing to ensure Haiti’s victims were helped.Concannon said it was “shameful” the UN couldn’t come up with even a tenth of the amount originally promised. “The underspend idea wasn’t supposed to be the end result, but low-hanging fruit.“People in the UK or the US can forget about people in Haiti, but the people in Haiti cannot forget people in the UK or US.”Mario Joseph, a lawyer with BAI, said: “Imagine what would have happened if the Nepalese had brought the disease to the UK? What would be the reaction here – would there be the same disregard as people have shown the people of Haiti? For that reason alone, the UK should take a leadership role.”A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesperson said: “The UK recognises the devastating impact that cholera has had on the Haitian people, and we welcome the crucial role the UN is playing to eradicate it. The UK is the fourth largest donor to the UN trust fund, in addition to other contributions to tackling cholera in Haiti.“It is for each UN member state to decide how to use returned unspent peacekeeping funds. We call on all countries to volunteer contributions to the UN trust fund from whatever source is appropriate for them.”By: Karen McVeigh for TheGuardian.com | November 2, 2017
LOS ANGELES, United States (AFP) — Haiti is still reeling from the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 220,000 people, but from the debris of its devastated towns, a nascent film industry has begun to emerge.
At its forefront is Guetty Felin, whose "Ayiti Mon Amour," a portrait of a post-quake nation mourning its dead, was recently announced as the Caribbean country's first ever entry for the foreign film category at the Oscars.Haitian-born Felin, who journeyed to Port-au-Prince on a relief airplane 10 days after the disaster, recalls the scenes that met her as she landed, images that have stayed with her as she has pursued a career in filmmaking."I had never smelled death before, corpses everywhere. I was just like, 'What is this stench?' All throughout the city, it was just devastating," she told AFP.Laying waste to most of the Caribbean nation's schools, hospitals and infrastructure, the magnitude 7.0 quake injured some 300,000 people and left another 1.5 million homeless in what was already the poorest nation in the Americas.Seven years on, "Ayiti Mon Amour" marks not only the emergence of a distinct new voice in Haitian filmmaking but a milestone in the country's cultural recovery, as the first ever locally-shot narrative feature directed by a woman.Tapping into her past work in documentary, Felin infuses the realities of modern-day Haiti — the power and water shortages, the looming threat of climate change — with a lyricism that plays up its mystical side.
Set in Kabic, a small southeast fishing village where the sea is gaining ground thanks to climate change, Felin's camera shows life moving on, five years after the earthquake.A teenager grieving his father discovers he has developed a literally electrifying superpower while an old fisherman who talks to his cow thinks the cure for his ailing wife can be found only in the sea.Elsewhere, the beautiful, mysterious muse of a struggling novelist and the main character in his book, becomes restless and decides to leave him and pursue her own life.Born in Port-au-Prince, Felin divided her childhood and adolescence between New York and Haiti, although she came of age artistically in Paris, where she studied for a graduate degree in film and ended up staying 20 years.Felin fell in love with cinema at the drive-ins of Port-au-Prince, her escape during the brutal dictatorship of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who was followed by his despotic son Jean-Claude, or "Baby Doc.""I grew up in this space knowing that the dictatorship existed, but at the time it was a space of joy," she said, recalling her childhood home as a place of music and parties."There were moments where you were totally afraid someone might get taken away. So the fragility of life — that dance that my parents had to do all the time — totally inspired me.""Ayiti Mon Amour" — which is looking for a US distributor — stars just one professional actor, while the rest of the cast and much of the crew were culled from the local community and Felin's own family.Her French husband, veteran cinematographer Herve Cohen, was in charge of filming and her oldest son Yeelen acted as her assistant, while his girlfriend performed second camera duties.The real star of the movie, though, is Felin's youngest son, Joakim Ethan Cohen, a 17-year-old beginner at the time of the shoot who has won acclaim for an accomplished debut performance."He knew that what he was doing meant a lot to me. It was like his gift to me," said Felin."I directed him but it was so easy — every take was really good — and I think he knew the story inside out."Haiti's film industry was already struggling before the earthquake. Its last picture house closed the year before amid rampant film piracy, and no movies were publicly screened anywhere for five years after that."It's hard to make films in a place like Haiti because there's always something that happens that's prioritized, whether its political instability or there's a disaster or something like that," Felin said."Filmmaking is really not a priority for the Haitian people.""Ayiti Mon Amour" was born out of the rubble of buildings levelled by the quake but Felin, who lost a close friend and says she feels "survivor's guilt," didn't want her movie to be just about grief."I kind of like to say that it's a love letter to this place, because it's a place at the same time that frustrates me, haunts me and angers me," the director said."But I'm deeply, deeply passionate about it."By: JamaicaObserver.com | November 1, 2017
The year the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) came to the country was a deadly one for my family. In February of 2004, Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced out of office for a second time, having been reinstated, and then reëlected, after a 1991 military coup. This time, Aristide was replaced by Gérard Latortue, a former United Nations official, who called those who took up arms against Aristide “freedom fighters.” (Their leader, Guy Philippe, is serving a nine-year sentence in a U.S. prison after pleading guilty to receiving multimillion-dollar bribes from cocaine traffickers.)
That April, claiming that the situation in Haiti constituted “a threat to international peace and security in the region,” the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1542, establishing the Brazil-led MINUSTAH. The mission, which officially began in June, 2004, lasted thirteen years and five months, and cost more than seven billion dollars, before officially ending this past Sunday.
Part of MINUSTAH’s mandate was to assist the transitional government in insuring “a secure and stable environment.” This is where my loved ones and others came into the mission’s crosshairs.
I spent the first twelve years of my life in an impoverished neighborhood in Port-au-Prince called Bel Air, where many Aristide supporters live. My eighty-one-year-old uncle, a minister, had called this neighborhood home since the nineteen-fifties, and was there on September 30, 2004, when protests began on the thirteenth anniversary of the first coup d’état. In response, the Haitian national police and MINUSTAH soldiers conducted joint raids in Bel Air that led to dozens of mostly unreported injuries and deaths. The following month, U.N. soldiers and Haitian riot police climbed up to the roof of my uncle’s church and killed some of his neighbors below. My uncle was forced to flee to Miami, where he died in the custody of U.S. immigration officials after being denied asylum.
Bel Air was not the only area subjected to these raids. During one of their bloodiest operations in Cité Soleil, another poor and densely populated neighborhood in the capital, MINUSTAH used more than twenty-two thousand bullets and seventy-eight grenades, among other artillery, to kill seven alleged gang members. No other deaths were acknowledged despite further raids until early 2007, when the mission head at the time, Edmond Mulet, brushed off such killings as collateral damage. This combat terminology was not incidental. MINUSTAH was a continuous military operation in a country in which there was no war.
There would be more collateral damage. In October, 2010, nine months after an 7.0-magnitude earthquake nearly flattened Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas and killed more than three hundred thousand people, and while more than a million people were still displaced or living in makeshift tent camps, Nepalese peacekeepers stationed in the north of Haiti allowed raw sewage from their base to leak into one of Haiti’s largest and most intensively used rivers, causing a cholera epidemic. The U.N. at first refused to investigate the source of the outbreak and instead blamed Haiti’s lack of sewerage and water-treatment facilities. More than ten thousand people have died from cholera since 2010, and more than eight hundred thousand have been infected.
It took the U.N. six years to acknowledge its role in the cholera epidemic, and even though the former Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, declared last December that the U.N. needed to “do the right thing”, the U.N. continues to reject victims’ legal claims by citing immunity. The U.N. has also failed to deliver on Ban’s promise of a four-hundred-million-dollar fund to halt the spread of cholera and compensate the “most affected” victims. The fund has only raised $2.7 million, and the current U.N. Secretary General, António Guterres, seems unwilling to provide direct payments to the cholera victims and their families, many of whom have lost their sole breadwinner.
Neither the U.N.’s impunity nor the lack of accountability would surprise the women and boys and girls, many as young as twelve, who have told of being raped—one boy says that he was gang-raped—by MINUSTAH peacekeepers, who, according to the Associated Press, have used sex rings, offers of food, and other methods to trap their victims. Unacknowledged “MINUSTAH babies” and their destitute mothers are treated as though they do not exist. Though MINUSTAH rapes remain underreported, those who have come forward have had to confront the same type of repudiation faced by the initial cholera victims. Their rapists were rarely punished. They were simply sent home.
MINUSTAH has now been replaced by MINUJUSTH, a smaller mission which began on Monday. MINUJUSTH , the United Nations Mission for Justice Support in Haiti, has a mandate to “help the Government of Haiti strengthen rule-of-law institutions, further develop and support the Haitian National Police and engage in human rights monitoring, reporting and analysis.” MINUJUSTH, which will will consist of twelve hundred and seventy-five officers and support personnel, seems like a rebranding effort, an attempt by the U.N. to give itself a clean slate and erase MINUSTAH’s past. But if the U.N. were serious about justice and human rights in Haiti, it would wind down its presence in the country by having MINUJUSTH also investigate the damage done to both individuals and entire communities by MINUSTAH. Or, better yet, assign an independent body to do so, then offer the warranted compensation for the extrajudicial and civilian killings, the sexual assaults, and the introduction of cholera.
Haiti’s current President, Jovenel Moïse, whose two heavily contested election cycles are often touted as a MINUSTAH success, told the Miami Herald in an interview this month that “the conversion of MINUSTAH to MINUJUSTH is the recognition of the progress made by our country in recent years. Today, Haiti is no threat to regional and global peace and security.” To fill in the gap being left by MINUSTAH, Moïse plans to revive the defunct Haitian Army, whose history of human-rights abuses, the coup d’état against Aristide, in 1991, and its subsequent reign of terror led to an earlier United Nations mission, UNMIH, in 1993.
Moïse’s proposed budget for 2017, which calls for new tariffs and increased taxes on goods and services, has been a subject of mounting protests in Haiti. MINUJUSTH, like its predecessors, will likely find itself facing angry Haitians, or training those who do. Why should Haitians trust another group of U.N. “peacekeepers” who claim to promote the same human rights, justice, and rule of law that have been so blatantly violated by their colleagues? The U.N. may want to leave MINUSTAH’s dark chapter behind, but Haitians will have to suffer the consequences of the group’s actions for generations to come. And no new mission, under whatever acronym, will change that.
Edwidge Danticat is the author of many books, including, most recently, “The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story.”
As the controversial 13 year peacekeeping mission in Haiti wraps up, Al Jazeera examines what the mission leaves behind.
A UN peacekeeper argues with a supporters of 2010 presidential candidate Michel Martelly in Port-au-Prince [File: Gulliermo Arias/AP Photo]
PEACEKEEPERS IN HAITI
What will be their legacy?
Why were they there?
What has taken so long?
Why are they leaving now?
What have Haitians said about the mission?
The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti lowered its blue flag on Thursday, 13 years after it began.While the mission has been credited with helping bring stability to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, it has also been mired in controversy.The mission is blamed for bringing cholera to the country, and at least 134 of its peacekeepers have been involved in sexual abuse scandals.As the last of the thousands of peacekeepers who were in the country leave, Al Jazeera answers some of the key questions about why the blue helmets were there and what they are leaving behind.
What will be their legacy?
The presence of UN troops in Haiti has been a point of controversy on the island since the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) mission first began in 2004.UN officials have praised the mission for helping to re-establish law-and-order in the country marred by political unrest and bolster Haiti's democratic institutions. MINUSTAH has also helped recruit and train a new civilian police force, something that was virtually nonexistent before their arrival.However, critics argue the mission's forces have done more harm than good, pointing to the peacekeepers' involvement in the country's 2010 cholera outbreak and sex abuse scandals as evidence.Cholera outbreakThe source of the waterborne disease, which killed more than 9,000 people, was traced to a UN base.Al Jazeera's Fault Lines investigated the outbreak in 2010. The film - Haiti in a Time of Cholera - helped further expose the source of the disease on the island, and put additional pressure on the UN to investigate the allegations, and eventually admit its role in the outbreak.In August 2016, the UN for the first time acknowledged that it played a role in the spread of the disease.The UN at the time promised to respond to the epidemic with a "significant new set of UN actions".
A demonstrator spray paints the message in Creole "We demand justice for all cholera victims" on a building outside the UN headquarters in Haiti [File: Dieu Nalio Chery/AP Photo]
In a report, the then UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, said that "the preponderance of the evidence does lead to the conclusion that personnel associated with [a UN peacekeeping] facility were the most likely source".Ban said the way the UN handled the outbreak "leaves a blemish on the reputation of UN peacekeeping and the organisation worldwide".He added: "For the sake of the Haitian people, but also for the sake of the United Nations itself, we have a moral responsibility to act and a collective responsibility to deliver."Ban created a $400m voluntary trust fund for Haiti's fight against cholera. The fund was also supposed to partially compensate victims of the disease.But earlier this year, The New York Times revealed that the fund only received a few million dollars and was nearly empty.In a statement in June, the UN deputy secretary-general said that "without additional resources, the intensified cholera response and control efforts cannot be sustained through 2017 and 2018".
Rape and other forms of sex abuseUN troops have also been implicated in sexual abuse scandals in Haiti since the MINUSTAH first began.Most recently, a UN report obtained and revealed by The Associated Press in April documented the sexual exploitation of nine children on the island from 2004-2007 at the hands of at least 134 peacekeepers.Al Jazeera later spoke to Maria Kalichi*, who had been raped by a peacekeeper when she was 17 years old. She became pregnant as result of the rape."I want justice by finding the person who did this," she told Al Jazeera."I want to hear what he has to say to me … I am walking around the streets feeling destitute because of the UN."A leaked report in 2015, found that UN peacekeepers in Haiti engaged in "transactional sex". At least 229 women said they traded sex for money and goods likes food and medicine.In 2012, at least two peacekeepers from Pakistan were jailed and fired from the army after raping a 14-year-old boy.Other cases of rape and other instances of sexual abuse have been reported and documented by the UN during the mission's 13-year term.In September, a UN fund to help the survivors of sexual abuse by peacekeepers worldwide grew to $1.5m after more than 10 countries made contributions.
MINUSTAH, running since 2004, was the latest installment in a series of UN peacekeeping missions in the country, which shares a landmass with the Dominican Republic.
After 13 controversial years, the UN's mission in Haiti ends
Peacekeepers first arrived in Haiti, home to 10.8 million people, in September 1993 as part of The United Nations Mission in Haiti (UNMIH).The mission had a mandate to modernise the Haitian army and establish a new national police force two years after Haiti's elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, had been removed from office during a coup d'etat.After Aristide was restored to office in October 1994 following the UN-sanctioned, and US-led, "Operation Uphold Democracy" launched the month before, the mission's mandate was expanded to include helping to stabilise the government.However, UNMIH, which concluded in June 1996, appeared to have failed to deliver long-term stability. A decade later, history repeated itself as Aristide was overthrown for a second time.
Following Aristide's removal, Justice Boniface Alexandre assumed office as acting president.Alexandre appealed to the UN for help in ending the violence that had gripped Haiti in the wake of the political revolt, causing crime and murder rates to spiral.MINUSTAH, launched on June 1, 2004, in response to the crisis, led to the deployment of 6,700 UN-sanctioned troops - and 1,622 UN police - in Haiti.
Why has it taken so long for them to leave?
MINUSTAH was originally set up to support Haiti’s transitional government for a period of six months, with the aim of establishing a stable and secure environment following Aristide's removal.The mission was extended with adjusted mandates in the months and years that followed in order to allow peacekeepers to "adapt to the changing circumstances … and evolving requirements as dictated by the political, security and socioeconomic situation prevailing in the country", according to the UN.By the beginning of 2010, it appeared the mission had achieved its goals as violence had largely been removed from Haiti's politicsand the country was experiencing economic growth.However, a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit the island on January 12, 2010, killing more than 220,000 people.The natural disaster destroyed vast swathes of Haiti's capital city, Port-au-Prince, and decimated the fragile Haitian economy.In response, the UN added additional peacekeepers and police officers to its mission as it sought to support the country in its efforts to rebuild following the earthquake.Force numbers have been gradually reduced in the last seven years, by a series of resolutions.
A UN peacekeeper from Paraguay patrols the streets of Port-au-Prince, 2011. [File: Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo]
Why are they leaving now?
The UN Security Council (UNSC) unanimously adopted a resolution in April of this year, ordering the removal of peacekeepers from Haiti by mid-October.The April 13 resolution sanctioned the gradual withdrawal of the 2,370 peacekeepers stationed in Haiti, according to The Los Angeles Times.The resolution was the result of a US-led review into the cost and effectiveness of the UN's current peacekeeping operations.Nikki Haley, the US representative to the UN, told the UNSC prior to the vote that the political context was right for the withdrawal of a military presence in Haiti.
The "peaceful transition of power" demonstrated by Haiti's November 2016 presidential election showed the country had made an "important step towards stability and democracy", she said.As such, developments warranted an amended approach focused on fostering "the independence and self-sufficiency of the Haitian people".The peacekeeping mission will officially end on October 15 when a new UN mission made up of nearly 1,300 international civilian police officers, and about 350 civilians will begin in an effort to help the country reform its political system.In a recent interview with Al Jazeera, Sandra Honore, head of MINUSTAH, said the UN is winding down the mission because it has achieved its aims."It is a vote of confidence in the Haitian people," she said."It is an indication of the recognition by the Security Council that the stabilisation work which was entrusted to the mission did in fact produce positive results."
What have Haitians said about the mission?
Though February's presidential election seems to demonstrate Haiti is more politically stable now than when MINUSTAH began, a number of Haitians recently told Al Jazeera the mission has done little to improve their lives.Mothers who say they have had children, fathered by peacekeepers, also say they feel abandoned.
"After years of running around and false promises from the UN, nothing has happened," Saintil Benite, a mother, told Al Jazeera."They make us do a lot of stuff but there's no results," she said.Another mother, Roselaine Duperval, added that the mission has failed those people it sought to serve."I am very angry that the UN is leaving as it's left us with nothing," she said."They should take responsibility. They know about the kids. They did DNA tests and they told us they're positive but never give us the results."
Children play in the street while UN peacekeepers from Brazil patrol in Port-au-Prince [File: Dieu Nalio Chery/AP Photo]
As peacekeepers leave, Haiti continues to experience political turbulence.Protests last month over the government's new budget plans brought much of the country to a halt.The government has defended its plans, which include increased taxes on fuel and property, saying the money raised will be invested in improving public services and infrastructure.*Name changed to protect identity
Global health experts don’t worry about if a major infectious disease outbreak will occur; it’s just a matter of when.A daunting barrier in that ongoing fight against infectious diseases—including malaria, dengue fever, Zika and more—is the ability to detect infectious agents in the environment before an outbreak begins.In June, the Vodafone Americas Foundation recognized a technology attempting to tackle exactly that problem in its ninth annual Wireless Innovation Project competition. A Purdue University spin-off called PathVis won first place and $300,000 for a smartphone-based platform designed to enable anyone to rapidly measure the level of a pathogen in an area and report back to health authorities with real-time data of when and where that pathogen was detected.Thanks to the award money, the team will take their prototype to Haiti in November and work with the Emerging Pathogens Institute to test its ability to detect cholera bacterium in water. Cholera is a highly infectious disease marked by watery diarrhea that can kill within hours if left untreated. It is transmitted through contaminated food and water. The World Health Organization estimates that there are up to 143,000 deaths each year due to cholera.The technology stems from work done over the last several years in the biomedical engineering labs of Jacqueline Linnes and Tamara Kinzer-Ursem at Purdue. In collaboration with Purdue mechanical engineer Steven Wereley and his postdoc Katherine Clayton, Kinzer-Ursem developed a method to measure Brownian motion, the erratic and random movement of microscopic particles in a fluid.The team first used the method to measure the presence of proteins in solution: When proteins fall apart in the presence of tiny beads—from 1 micron down to 100 nanometers—in a liquid, it increases the viscosity of the solution, and the researchers were able to detect the slowing motion of the beads.Kinzer-Ursem then enlisted Linnes, an expert in pathogen detection, to apply the same idea to detect DNA in solution. The team perfected their technique under a microscope, but then decided they could shrink the technology.(PathVis from Vodafone Americas Foundation on Vimeo.)“All we needed was a microscope, a camera to capture images, and a computer to crunch the algorithms. And we thought, well, we carry these computers and cameras around in our pockets everyday. Why not make this portable?” recalls Kinzer-Ursem.So they adapted the system for a smartphone. A user puts a sample of liquid, say, potentially contaminated water, into a small microfluidic chip attached to a smartphone. If cholera bacterium DNA is present, a chemical reaction on the chip will copy that DNA over and over, producing many DNA strands that increase the viscosity of the solution. If the bacterium is not present, there is no change in the liquid.
The user then takes a short video of the sample using the phone’s camera equipped with a small microscope. An accompanying app processes and analyzes the video for changes in Brownian motion of the liquid. The app then flags the sample as contaminated or not.Currently, the platform provides results in less than 30 minutes, compared to the five days it normally takes to send a water sample to a lab and get a result, says Kinzer-Ursem. Plus, a GPS tag in the app records the exact location where the sample was taken, so that locations can be compiled in a map for health officials. “The whole idea is that they can use this information to efficiently target where their resources need to go,” she notes.Cholera isn’t the only disease in PathVis’s crosshairs. The team is also adapting the technology to detect malaria in patient blood samples in collaboration with Indiana University’s School of Medicine, and hopes to also apply it to HIV and dengue virus detection.
Haiti (MNN) — When Hurricane Irma was barreling towards the Caribbean as the Atlantic’s strongest Category 5 storm ever recorded, many feared the worst for Haiti — the poorest nation among in the Caribbean Islands.Thankfully, Haiti did not take a direct hit from Irma, but as Josh Ayers with Food for the Hungry explains, “Because of the sheer size of Irma, she dropped quite a bit of rain…along [Haiti’s] northern coast there. There was some localized flooding, particularly along rivers and with storm surge along the coast. We did see quite a bit of flooding.”Nearly 40 percent of the Haitian population faces moderate to severe food insecurity. And now according to Haiti’s agriculture ministry, around 18,000 farming families have lost all their food crops to Hurricane Irma.Additionally, one of the biggest fears now is a resurgence of cholera in the nation. Ayers says, “You may recall after the 2010 earthquake that cholera was introduced to Haiti for the first time. So anytime you have large amounts of water flowing in a country that doesn’t enjoy the same level of infrastructure development that countries like the United States enjoys, you often see waterborne illnesses spike. So with the introduction of cholera in the last ten years there, that has become a key concern going forward in the future.”Cholera is contracted when a person consumes human feces, typically through accidental water contamination. It leads to a severe form of diarrhea and can cause death if not treated. And Haiti is extremely vulnerable to cholera outbreaks in natural disasters.“Our response effort at Food for the Hungry has been focused on those waterborne illnesses; particularly around hygiene promotion and hygiene kits, and so those kits consist of things like soap and basic hygiene materials. We dispatched a shipment from one of our partners in Georgia and those materials are on their way. They may have already arrived and we’ll be distributing those shortly.”FH works through the local church whenever possible, enabling them to be the hands and feet of Christ to their own communities. “Because the local church [in Haiti] is under-resourced, as you might imagine, Food for the Hungry can provide much-needed goods and finances to empower that local church to reach out to its neighbors.”As FH strives to stem an outbreak of waterborne diseases in Haiti following Irma, they’re asking for the Body of Christ to come alongside them in a few ways.First, Ayers says, “Your prayers would be welcomed for the local church as well as the local organizations who are responding, Food for the Hungry being one of those. We’ve been working in Haiti for decades. Most of our staff are local Haitians and so sometimes they’re families are impacted by these things. You can pray for our staff.”And finally, you can be a tangible support through generous giving, and know that your gift is going to resource the Haitian Church acting as the hands and feet of Christ to their neighbors in disaster recovery.By Lyndsey Koh | September 25, 2017
JOVENEL MOISE, President of Haiti, said the mission of the United Nations had never been so important, and thus, it was necessary to adapt the Organization to modern realities on the ground. Expressing support for any initiative that could contain crises and seek the peaceful resolution of conflicts, he encouraged the United Nations to move along the path of conflict prevention. Haiti had always spoken out against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and he condemned States’ blatant desire to acquire and increase nuclear arsenals. He also expressed concern about the ongoing crises in Syria and Venezuela, as well as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.Haiti was deeply committed to the environmental facets of sustainable development, he said, and sought to build resilience against natural disasters that had consistently beleaguered its people and brother countries in the Caribbean. His Government was committed to the Paris Agreement on climate change, and wished to see those countries most responsible for greenhouse gas production contribute the resources necessary for implementing that deal. In the Caribbean, recent climatic events had drawn attention to the ways in which climate affected Haiti. Such weather phenomena were due to the impact of humans on the environment, he stressed. In January 2018, when Haiti assumed the presidency of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), it would organize a regional conference aimed at establishing an inter-State commission that would devise a strategy for addressing climate issues, such as the availability of climate insurance.More broadly, he said Haiti had taken steps to consolidate democracy and the rule of law, having made significant efforts to promote development and political stability. Noting that corruption had “infected” and shrunk Haiti’s economy, and compromised its political situation, he said it was time that official development aid (ODA) and domestic resources upheld the interests of the Haitian nation. Corruption had prevented basic resources from being allocated to citizens, depriving them of adequate energy distribution, quality education, drinking water and socioeconomic opportunities. Haiti’s new leaders were waging an unwavering struggle against such behaviour. Efforts were also under way to guarantee the independence of and increase the effectiveness of the judicial apparatus.While the international community had spent more than a decade supporting security in Haiti, and had provided help when disaster struck, he said Haiti was using all levers available to grow the economy, despite its limited resources. It was striving to create decent jobs for young people, and had made human resources management part of the State reform process. His Government was determined to provide opportunities to the most vulnerable members of society, to ensure they were not tempted to leave the country, many times under life-threatening conditions. Haiti could not allow institutions to be weakened or corruption to widen the distance between citizens and the State. Haitians were acutely aware that they were responsible for their country’s development, he continued.Addressing two phenomena stemming from the United Nations presence in Haiti — the odious sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and United Nations staff, and the cholera epidemic — he said the Organization was morally obliged to provide the recourses to ensure that cholera left the country. Improving Haiti’s health system, including by eradicating cholera, was a priority for his Government. Despite some progress, the number of cholera victims stood at 10,000 people and continued to grow. Further, there were tens of thousands of cholera orphans. The United Nations must live by and give tangible form to its noble ideals, he stressed, by shouldering all its responsibilities to remedy the situation, which had caused grave harm to the Haitian people.
21 September 2017 – Addressing the United Nations General Assembly today, Jovenel Moise, President of Haiti, expressed deep commitment to the environmental targets in the global goals on sustainable development and said his island nation is seeking to build its resilience against the natural disasters and extreme weather events that consistently beleaguer its people and other countries in the Caribbean.“My Government is committed to the Paris Agreement on climate change,” Mr. Moise told delegations gathered for the Assembly’s annual general debate, adding that he wished to see those countries most responsible for greenhouse gas production contribute the resources necessary for implementing that accord.In the Caribbean, recent back-to-back extreme weather events had drawn attention to the ways in which climate affects Haiti. “Such weather phenomena are due to the impact of humans on the environment,” he stressed, and noted that in January 2018, when Haiti assumed the presidency of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), it would organize a regional conference aimed at establishing an inter-State commission that would devise a strategy for addressing climate issues, such as the availability of climate insurance.More broadly, he said Haiti has taken steps to consolidate democracy and the rule of law, having made significant efforts to promote development and political stability. Noting that corruption has “infected” and eroded Haiti’s economy, and compromised its political situation, he said it is time that official development assistance (ODA) and domestic resources upheld the interests of the Haitian nation. In the meantime, Haiti’s new leaders are waging an unwavering struggle against corruption.Addressing two phenomena stemming from the UN presence in Haiti – heinous sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other personnel, and the cholera epidemic – he said the Organization is morally obliged to provide the recourses to ensure that cholera left the country.Improving Haiti’s health system, including by eradicating cholera, is a Government priority for his Despite some progress, the number of cholera victims stood at 10,000 people and continued to grow. Further, there were tens of thousands of cholera orphans. The United Nations must live by and give tangible form to its noble ideals, including the announced ‘new approach’ to dealing with cholera, he stressed, by shouldering all its responsibilities to remedy the situation, which had caused grave harm to the Haitian people.Full statement (in French) available hereBy: UN News Centre | September 21, 2017
Next month marks the seventh anniversary of the cholera outbreak that ravaged Haiti. The disease, which can cause death within hours if left untreated, came less than a year after Haiti was rocked by an enormous earthquake that left hundreds of thousands dead and millions injured, displaced and destitute.
Haiti is prone to earthquakes and tropical storms — the island was spared the worst of Hurricane Irma last week — but the cholera outbreak was an anomaly; the disease had never before struck Haiti. It was brought in, it is widely believed, by United Nations peacekeepers from Nepal. One of the world’s most infectious waterborne diseases, cholera spreads quickly and has proved extremely difficult to contain in Haiti. Over 10,000 have died and nearly a million have been stricken to date.
But one organization has managed to nearly eradicate it in a large slum in Port-au-Prince that lacks clean water and sanitation.
One of the game changers that would surprise most people, including global health experts, was actually a building. It wasn’t just any building, but a very intelligently and beautifully designed one: the Cholera Treatment Center, operated by Les Centres Gheskio, an acronym that stands for the Haitian Group for the Study of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Opportunistic Infections.
Gheskio, founded in 1982 in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, provides primary care services free of charge to people suffering from tuberculosis, malnutrition, and other life threatening conditions in an area of the Haitian capital that is home to 60,000 Haitians. (Gheskio is a less well-known sister organization of Partners in Health, which focuses on Haiti’s rural population.)
After the 2010 earthquake, Gheskio’s multi-acre campus was badly damaged. So the organization erected emergency tents to serve as a makeshift cholera treatment clinic. Once cholera reached Port-au-Prince, patients showed up on foot or were carried in wheelbarrows, around the clock.
Cholera manifests with extreme diarrhea and vomiting. Virtually all liquid is excreted from the body, causing victims to die of dehydration within hours of full manifestation if untreated. It is relatively easy to treat, but patients must be rehydrated immediately. To prevent it from spreading, infected human waste must be managed carefully.
Gheskio’s founder, Jean W. Pape, an infectious disease specialist and native of Haiti, knew that eradicating cholera would take years. So even as the organization struggled to keep up with the influx of patients during the first year of the epidemic, he embarked on a long-term solution: building a permanent treatment center.
Gheskio turned to MASS Design Group, a Boston-based nonprofit organization that specializes in architecture that promotes dignity and justice in resource-limited settings. It has built hospitals, health-worker housing, schools and civic spaces around the world, including a tuberculosis hospital for Gheskio. MASS Design began by studying the conditions inside the tents.
Tents provide relative shade and privacy but offer limited light and poor ventilation, trapping warm air and compounding the smell of bodily waste. The materials become worn by rain, wind and sun, and must be replaced routinely. Because of the nature of cholera, the makeshift beds, fashioned out of old fiberglass school chairs and costly army cots, also didn’t last long.
Most problematic, Gheskio was relying on manual removal of human waste by an outside vendor. This was both costly and risky: The organization couldn’t ensure its disposal would not recontaminate the water table, risking the infection of others.
“We did some back-of-envelope calculations and found that over a 10-year span of time, which was then considered optimistic for how long it would take to get rid of cholera, the tents and manual waste disposal system they were then using would cost Gheskio in excess of $500,000,” according to a co-founder of MASS Design, Alan Ricks.
Ricks estimated that MASS Design could build, for a comparable sum, a permanent structure that could be repurposed once the epidemic was fully contained. So MASS Design and Gheskio joined forces to raise philanthropic funding from the Deutsche Bank Foundation, Barr Foundation and individual donors, and began work.
One important innovation, developed with Fall Creek Engineers, based in Santa Cruz, Calif., was to bring a water-purification technology to Haiti called anaerobic baffled reactors. The reactors are a form of septic system that uses bacteria to treat sewage and contaminated water, turning it into clean water. Reactors, buried under the cholera center, force water through five chambers, each successively increasing the level of purification.
Each week, Pape receives a detailed report on the water quality. The system sanitizes and recycles 250,000 gallons of water annually, ensuring that the water is free enough of bacteria and other pathogens that it can be returned to the water table. This output is supplemented by separate, large cisterns to capture rainwater for drinking.
Many other details incorporated into the center also promote health, as well as comfort, beauty and pride. Above the reactors, for example, is a pavilion structure designed to maximize airflow. Rather than spending money on tents, furniture or waste disposal services — money that leaves the local economy — the organizations enlisted local artisans, whose metalwork is world renowned, to create perforated metal sheets, painted a chorus of blues, to wrap the building exterior. Waffle-like patterns of these sheets can be opened and closed to provide shade and privacy, or sealed completely during storms, as they were when Hurricane Irma neared Port-au-Prince last week.
The airflow is aided by large-diameter fans, like those in gyms and airports. The cement floor is smooth, free of crevices where bacteria can congregate, and sealed with epoxy. MASS Design interviewed many patients and staff members in an effort to design and create prototypes of beds that would be comfortable as well as easily sanitized and reused.
“What I love about MASS is their attention to detail,” Pape said. “They asked us everything that work and everything that doesn’t work. But most importantly, they are problem solvers.”
“The building looks absolutely extraordinary,” said Roger Glass, a cholera expert who is director of the Fogarty International Center for Advancing Science for Global Health at the National Institutes of Health and has visited the Gheskio campus. “For ventilation and coolness, it’s tremendous.”
Before encountering a hospital that MASS Design developed in Rwanda, Glass said, he had not seriously considered the relationship between health outcomes and building design. “If you had called me seven years ago to talk about buildings and health, I would have blown you off,” he said. Today, Glass is eager to see more collaborations with human-centered design firms, like MASS Design, in the field of global health.
Comparing the treatment center to the tents, Pape is blunt: “It was like going from hell to paradise.”
Amie Shao, who helped lead MASS Design’s work in Haiti, reflected: “When we started, our goal was simply to help Gheskio do their work better in treating their patients in a more dignified setting. We realized, however, that architecture could not only help treat these diseases after the fact, but prevent the spread of disease in the first place by controlling recontamination. In all of our work, we seek to proactively challenge many of the underlying risks and issues that global health faces.”
To be sure, the cholera treatment center is not solely responsible for halting the spread in Gheskio’s target area. Gheskio also developed a robust water chlorination program and maintains its own factory to produce chlorine. The organization also supports and participates in broad efforts by the Ministry of Health to raise public awareness about symptoms and the risk of contamination throughout the country.
And Gheskio joined forces with Partners in Health to get cholera vaccines approved in Haiti. Euvichol, a vaccine that can be administered orally and lasts up to 30 days without refrigeration, costs less than $2 per dose. “We would need a budget of less than $50 million for universal coverage for all of Haiti,” Pape estimates.
Gheskio’s Cholera Treatment Center was ultimately built for $750,000. Pape now predicts that the organization will have recouped that cost in just three years. Haiti needs a modern, countrywide water and sanitation system, but it’s unclear where the money will come from. In the meantime, Gheskio’s center has saved many lives.
By uniquely combining patient care with on-site water treatment, Gheskio’s center also holds lessons for other regions struggling to contain cholera or facing it in the future. Globally, the World Health Organization estimates there are between 1.3 million and four million cases of cholera annually in 42 countries, with 21,000 to 143,000 cholera-related deaths each year. This year, Somalia saw a major resurgence of the disease, with over 50,000 people infected. About 1,000 died.
In the three years since Gheskio’s Cholera Treatment Center opened, the facility has remained in constant use because those outside the organization’s target area continue to be exposed to contaminated water. It has admitted over 10,000 patients to date, including over 7,000 who were hospitalized. Eighty-three percent of those patients came from outside of Gheskio’s catchment area.
While cholera reports in Haiti were on the rise in 2015 and 2016 at upward of 25,000 cases annually, the country saw a decrease in 2017, which Pape attributes to higher-than-normal rainfall in the region. Of the 100 beds, no more than a third were occupied at any time this year, with as few as a handful of patients at times. The risk for outbreaks remains high, however, and the disease’s countrywide eradication is still years away.
“Haiti’s recently elected government, and the president particular, is focused on universal oral cholera vaccine as well as home chlorination,” Pape reports. “If we get the vaccines and if we pursue home chlorination, I truly believe we can rid of cholera within four to five years.”
Guelmana Rochelin
The allegations first emerged in 2011, prompting an internal investigation, but Oxfam didn't make the report public until this February. According to the report, four staff members were dismissed for "gross misconduct" and three others resigned after the investigation, including Haiti country director Roland van Hauwermeiren.
This is about abuse of power," Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of Oxfam International, told Parliament in February. "Whether they have given them some money from an Oxfam program or from their pocket as their salary, it's still abhorrent, and we are ashamed and upset about it, and we're going to root it out of our organization."
Johaida Jean-Franois
In this op-ed, writer Fabienne Josaphat explains the history of Haiti, and how it has been mistreated by politicians long before President Donald Trump's recent remarks.President Donald Trump’s ignorance of Haitian contributions and history continues to mislead the American people. On January 11, the President of the United States met with officials on immigration and allegedly said, regarding Haitians and Africans, “Why do we want all these people from shithole countries coming here?” The Washington Post first reported the news.These statements made on the eve of the anniversary of the January 12, 2010 earthquake that killed up to 300,000 Haitians. As a Haitian immigrant living in South Florida — where, in 2015, an estimated 127,189 people of Haitian ancestry lived in Miami-Dade County alone — I could feel the indignation broiling beneath my people’s skin. Locally, councilman Alix Desulme, who represents District 4 in the City of North Miami, called the alleged comments “divisive and racist,” and demanded an apology.“Sadly, we have a president who continues to show America how great we can become through his destructive selfishness,” the councilman said. The mayor of North Miami himself, Dr. Smith Joseph, chimed in with his own statement, saying, “Our nation should not tolerate this overt racism from a president who is sworn to protect us.” Haitian-American Congresswoman Mia Love, a Republican from the state of Utah, said, “The President must apologize to both the American people and the nations he so wantonly maligned.”Instead, what came hours after the news of the reported comments broke, was a tweet from the president in which he denied making the comments, calling Haiti “poor and troubled.” He claimed to have wonderful relationships with Haitians, but failed to acknowledge a single one by name. None of this, again, is surprising.Fox News host Tucker Carlson affirmed that the president was merely voicing what his base was already thinking, casually asking, “Why can’t you say that?” on air. Many Trump supporters disagree with the notion that Trump is a racist, despite his allegedly saying “We should have more people from Norway” after his “sh*thole” comment was made.Describing a person’s country as a “sh*thole” shows an absence of critical thinking, and is a display of ignorance. It echoes an existing sentiment of xenophobia in this country from Trump voters, most of them white, now referred to as “the forgotten men and women.” They are being misled by a man who knows nothing about the Haitian people and their history. Yes, the U.S. should respect the Haitian people simply because of their humanity. But Haiti also deserves respect because it spent its entire existence as a nation contributing to the enrichment and greatness of superpowers like America.Historically, Haiti has always offered its best to the world and is proud of its accomplishments. It was the first to lead a successful slave-led rebellion to topple French slave owners, claiming its freedom in 1804. Without Haiti, there would be no Louisiana Purchase, a treaty that earned the United States the entire Louisiana territory and more than doubled the country’s size. New Orleans’ vibrant culture would not be the same without the influence of integrated Haitians. In Illinois, what would later become the city of Chicago was founded by a Haitian-born pioneer named Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable. In addition to liberating slaves in other countries, Haitians helped America fight its Revolutionary War, and when World War II drove countries to form urgent alliances, Haitian pilots joined the Tuskeegee Airmen as part of the U.S. Army Air Force.Our decision in 1804 to live free or to die was heroic, but the U.S. did not officially recognize this independence until 1862. France put the nation in the humiliating position of having to pay reparations at an annual rate for the slaves they lost, so Haiti was forced to borrow money to repay their oppressors, and borrowed from banks in France and the U.S.. Several initiatives have been launched to cancel Haiti’s debt, but pressure to repay debtors initiated further borrowing, keeping Haiti in constant crushing debt.The U.S. profited off Haiti during the American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, suppressing riots and killing rebels. Initially led by then-President Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. military imposed racist soldiers onto the Haitian people, introducing a new strain of cruelty that led to the decapitation and dehumanization of insurgents.The dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, which lasted in Haiti from 1957 to 1971, was able to endure because of American complicity. Specifically, as Duvalier murdered and brutally oppressed Haitians, the U.S. looked the other way because Duvalier was effective at staving off communism, which the U.S. saw as a threat. When that regime was toppled when Duvalier’s son was overthrown in 1986, the nation was completely impoverished, its funds depleted to line the pockets of tyrants like the Duvaliers. In addition, because of its debts to the U.S., Haiti has been by default constantly subjected to American intervention.Despite our contributions to America, Trump’s language doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise to Haitians, as we too often face this type of disregard from so many in power. Yet, during his presidential campaign, Trump made sure to draw attention to Hillary Clinton’s actions regarding Haiti to discredit the Democratic candidate. In 2009, when she was Secretary of State, Clinton suppressed Haitian minimum wage, at the behest of manufacturers, then after the 2010 earthquake, Bill Clinton became head of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. He enlisted the Clinton Foundation to build shelters, a relief effort considered to be a disaster, called out even by the likes of Oxfam.With more than one million people displaced after the 2010 earthquake, the U.S. poured aid money into Haiti, but years later, investigations have found that very little money actually reached Haitian citizens. Haitians still lack shelter that was promised by the American Red Cross after the humanitarian organization raised almost half a billion dollars from helpful donors. The Clinton Foundation, again, is also implicated in failing in their recovery efforts to aid Haiti with reconstruction projects after the earthquake despite raising more than $30 million.Then, Haiti suffered a devastating cholera outbreak that started at a United Nations peacekeeping camp, and as of November 2017, the Trump administration has refused to assign unspent UN peacekeeping money to help combat the epidemic. Instead, his administration chose to end Temporary Protective Status for 60,000 Haitians sheltered in America as a result of the earthquake.This sent a clear message to Haiti and its diaspora, and now, his comments about them speak volumes. In Trump’s world, there is no room for black and brown people to thrive. Yet, he shows an acceptance of white nationalists, identifying as “very fine people” some of the those protesting to keep Confederate monuments after the deadly Charlottesville rallies.He does not know the history of Haiti, and he doesn’t comprehend the significance of Haiti’s contributions, because he doesn’t care to. His wealth and privilege have allowed him to erase others to the point of invisibility.But Haitians exist as a reminder that the damages of racism and oppression cannot sway self-determination. We are not going anywhere. In fact, Haitians continue to thrive despite adversity. Our ancestry and culture empower and enable us to bounce back and carry on. If the whip of slavery did not break us, the words of an inveterate racist will not kill us. Haitians sacrifice for others even when others don’t sacrifice for them. I see this as the definition of love: the continuous devotion to others with no expectation of reciprocity.As a Haitian immigrant, I am tired of always asking for apologies, so I’m not personally interested in one from Trump. I’m interested in active and constructive repairs to our dignity in the American media, demonstrating an intent to rebrand and respect Haiti, rather than baiting audiences into buying into images of poverty and misery, because one narrative does not define us. Apologies, to me, are futile unless they are backed up by action and determination for change. Until then, we are planting our feet in the ground and waiting for the next insult to fly.By: Fabienne Josaphat for TeenVogue.com | January 16, 2018
![A UN peacekeeper argues with a supporters of 2010 presidential candidate Michel Martelly in Port-au-Prince [File: Gulliermo Arias/AP Photo]](http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2017/10/5/93b587f0214543e6a5c044dc19ff741b_18.jpg "UN peacekeepers leave Haiti: What is their legacy?")
21 September 2017 – Addressing the United Nations General Assembly today, Jovenel Moise, President of Haiti, expressed deep commitment to the environmental targets in the global goals on sustainable development and said his island nation is seeking to build its resilience against the natural disasters and extreme weather events that consistently beleaguer its people and other countries in the Caribbean.“My Government is committed to the Paris Agreement on climate change,” Mr. Moise told delegations gathered for the Assembly’s annual general debate, adding that he wished to see those countries most responsible for greenhouse gas production contribute the resources necessary for implementing that accord.In the Caribbean, recent back-to-back extreme weather events had drawn attention to the ways in which climate affects Haiti. “Such weather phenomena are due to the impact of humans on the environment,” he stressed, and noted that in January 2018, when Haiti assumed the presidency of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), it would organize a regional conference aimed at establishing an inter-State commission that would devise a strategy for addressing climate issues, such as the availability of climate insurance.More broadly, he said Haiti has taken steps to consolidate democracy and the rule of law, having made significant efforts to promote development and political stability. Noting that corruption has “infected” and eroded Haiti’s economy, and compromised its political situation, he said it is time that official development assistance (ODA) and domestic resources upheld the interests of the Haitian nation. In the meantime, Haiti’s new leaders are waging an unwavering struggle against corruption.Addressing two phenomena stemming from the UN presence in Haiti – heinous sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other personnel, and the cholera epidemic – he said the Organization is morally obliged to provide the recourses to ensure that cholera left the country.Improving Haiti’s health system, including by eradicating cholera, is a Government priority for his Despite some progress, the number of cholera victims stood at 10,000 people and continued to grow. Further, there were tens of thousands of cholera orphans. The United Nations must live by and give tangible form to its noble ideals, including the announced ‘new approach’ to dealing with cholera, he stressed, by shouldering all its responsibilities to remedy the situation, which had caused grave harm to the Haitian people.Full statement (in French) available hereBy: UN News Centre | September 21, 2017 
