12602: NYT: 8 Years After, Squalor Worsens (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JD Lemieux <lxhaiti@yahoo.com>

New York Times

July 30, 2002
8 Years After Invasion, Haiti Squalor Worsens
By DAVID GONZALEZ


ORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Sonia Jean-Pierre's life is one
of
apocalyptic misery. With hardly any food or work, her
only
refuge is a concrete cell. The searing sun is blotted
out
by cardboard pasted over the windows. On the wall by
her
bed, she has scrawled, "Jesus Christ is coming soon,"
like
a promise of salvation to greet her every morning.

Ms. Jean-Pierre and hundreds of neighbors live as
squatters
inside the old Fort Dimanche Prison, once the brutally
efficient killing chamber of the Duvalier
dictatorships. A
prison no longer, it has been renamed, hopefully,
Village
Democratie.

The poor cram themselves into the dingy cells and even
inside the old sentry towers that look out over the
surrounding shanties, where 2,000 more souls live
without
water, schools or electricity. Some are so desperate
they
eat pancakelike disks of bouillon-flavored clay.
Poverty is
the only jailer.

"We are free prisoners," said Ms. Jean-Pierre, who
rested
one recent afternoon on the cool concrete floor. "We
are
still living like prisoners."

Nearly eight years after the United States led an
invasion
of Haiti to oust a military junta and restore
President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, Village Democratie is
just
one measure of this country's despairing slide.

Increasingly exasperated with Mr. Aristide's
government,
which has yet to resolve a two-year-old deadlock with
its
opposition, the United States and European countries
have
blocked some $500 million in aid, hoping to encourage
greater democracy. Critics say the decision has merely
eroded the hopes and deepened the poverty of this
country's
seven million or so people.

For a nation as poor as Haiti, withholding the money
has
become both carrot and stick. Haiti still lingers near
the
bottom of the United Nations' annual survey of living
conditions. Life expectancy is less than 53 years.
Preventable diseases go untreated. The yearly income
of the
average family is less than is needed to sustain a
single
person.

Mr. Aristide calls the withholding of the aid an
"embargo."
His American supporters, including the Congressional
Black
Caucus and well-paid lobbyists, say it is immoral to
withhold the aid and punish the Haitian people, as
government agencies go without budgets, plans or
projects
to provide water, health care and schools. Some $150
million from the United States, they note, might not
only
improve roads, water and health but also create jobs.

Still, diplomats and aid officials say, Mr. Aristide's
use
of the term "embargo" reflects calculated rhetoric
more
than reality. Trade and travel continue, and relief,
including contributions from the United States, flows
into
Haiti through nongovernmental groups.

Solving Haiti's problems, they argue, will take more
than
just an infusion of aid. Most important, they say, Mr.
Aristide has yet to prove that his government has
escaped
the corruption and destructive self-interest of
governments
past.

Meanwhile, the political stalemate, which arose over a
disputed election, and the international response to
it,
have stalled what little functioning government
democracy
might have brought.

"The situation is getting worse for the majority of
the
people," said the Rev. Jan Hanssens, a Roman Catholic
priest who sits on the Justice and Peace Commission of
the
Bishops' Conference. "There is certainly no hope
unless
there is a drastic reassessment of Haitian society
itself.
If things simply go on as now, there is no chance."

Along the streets of Village Democratie, faith in
politicians is as elusive as a decent job. Faded
posters of
Mr. Aristide, wearing the presidential sash and with
his
arms outstretched, are his only presence.

Laughing young men crouched at the entrance to the
former
prison and gambled a few wrinkled gourde notes, the
country's currency. Inside, past corridors whose
crumbled
walls reveal a weed-choked courtyard, people walked
home
after church clutching hymnals titled "Songs of Hope."

Inside tiny rooms with cardboard walls, slim shafts of
sunlight cut through the haze of charcoal smoke from
braziers where pots of rice boiled. There are no
sewers or
running water anywhere in the neighborhood, and when
the
rains come, they leave fetid puddles where
malaria-carrying
mosquitoes breed.

"Aristide said here is the room of the people," said
Dorlis
Ephesans. "But he has never showed his face here."

Some of the residents had tried to leave Haiti during
the
1991 coup that ousted Mr. Aristide. Some made it to
Miami,
some died and others, like Israel Arince, were caught
at
sea and returned.

The same America that sent him back to Haiti and
restored
Mr. Aristide to power in 1994, Mr. Arince said, now
makes
life impossible.

"They have blocked the country from getting aid," he
said.
"We are human beings and we do not like to live like
this.
Only animals should live here."

In La Saline slum, down a busy road near the prison
that is
often choked with carts and traffic, pigs waded
through
streams of human waste and poked their snouts into
mountains of garbage in a drainage canal. Young women
dropped plastic buckets into a sewer and hauled out a
gray
water they would use to wash their floors. Potable
water is
too expensive.

"There is no way to be healthy here," said Elisena
Nicolas,
who spends a third of her income on water. "But you
have to
keep the children clean."

As hard as it is to conceive, people come to La Saline
to
escape rural misery. In the Central Plateau town of
Cange,
doctors with the Zanmi Lasante clinic said children
commonly died from malaria or diarrhea, while
tuberculosis
and AIDS killed their parents. Even polio, once
thought to
have been eradicated, has resurfaced recently.

Although the clinic receives no international aid,
doctors
said they worked with many Haitian government clinics
in
nearby villages where the frozen aid has left them
unable
to cope. In recent years, their volunteer clinic's
patient
load has tripled to 120,000, with patients sometimes
walking five hours for free care.

Dr. Paul Farmer, an American who helped found the
clinic in
the 1980's, said he could not prove that the blocked
aid
resulted in more suffering, but the deteriorating
conditions were evident. International aid, provided
on an
emergency basis to charitable groups, was no
substitute for
a working government, he said.

"One of the world's most powerful countries is taking
on
one of the most impoverished," he said of the United
States
decision to withhold aid. "I object to that on moral
grounds. Anybody who presides over this blockade needs
to
know the impact here already."

But Haiti's record of official corruption and
mismanagement, regardless of who was in power, has
given
pause to many international aid officials. A recent
study
by the World Bank concluded that 15 years of aid
through
2001 had had no discernible impact in reducing
poverty,
since projects were carried out haphazardly and
government
officials did not sustain improvements.

Today, for instance, a maze of rat-infested pipes is
all
that is left of a potable water project after funds
ran out
before the pipes could be connected to the water main.

At the same time, political opponents and diplomats
said,
the government has money to provide cars for
legislators or
pay off neighborhood groups that are its foot soldiers
and
that, the opposition charges, have been used to
intimidate
government opponents.

As a result, diplomats and aid officials said Mr.
Aristide
must not only resolve his political crisis, he must
also
show that he will allow economic and administrative
reforms
to guarantee that any forthcoming aid will be honestly
spent.

"We are saying we want to help you," said a European
diplomat, who noted that the European Union was ready
to
provide $350 million. "But you must help us help you.
You
comply, I'll comply."

Absent any aid or a political pact, people scrape by
as
they have for years, sharing what little they have or
sacrificing themselves for their children. In the
neighborhood of Fort Sinclaire, a dilapidated maze of
shacks, indigent teenagers with tuberculosis sleep on
sheets spread out on hard concrete porches.

A soft carpet of soggy wood chips blankets the
entrance to
the neighborhood, as men carve wooden bowls to sell to
tourists who have yet to return to Haiti. Lionel
Agustain,
a woodworker, sometimes earns two dollars a day, not
enough
to prevent him from losing his home a few years ago.

A friend lets him sleep on a rickety cot inside a gym
where
the weights are improvised from gears and other car
parts.
The walls are tauntingly decorated with wrinkled
posters of
bodybuilders with bulging chests and biceps. Mr.
Agustain
is thin, and he sometimes eats only a bowl of rice.

"We don't know when they are going to fix things," he
said.
"We suffer. And when you suffer enough, you die."



Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company |

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