Rebuilding in Haiti: View from the ground
11:57 GMT, Sunday, 4 April 2010 12:57 UK
--bbc.co.uk--


A UN donor conference on Wednesday received pledges of $9.9bn (£6.5bn) in immediate and long-term aid for Haiti. The money is badly needed to help the country after the devastation of January's earthquake. But what is happening on the ground now as Haitians and aid groups try to rebuild lives and buidlings?

- Rebuilding Houses
- Pumping Clean Water
- Rehabilitating Spinal Injuries
- Cash Distribution
- Creation of Small Businesses
- Field Trauma Hospitals

(cont.)

US halts Haiti victim evacuations in 'medical bill row'
Page last updated at 21:19 GMT, Saturday, 30 January 2010

Hundreds of quake victims have been flown to the US for treatment

The US military has stopped evacuating Haitian earthquake victims to the US in a reported dispute over medical costs. Flights stopped on Wednesday because some hospitals were reluctant to take patients from Haiti, a US military official told the New York Times. A doctor in the quake zone warned 100 of his patients would die in the next 48 hours unless they were airlifted.

Meanwhile, only women will be allowed to collect food from new UN distribution sites in Haiti's capital. Hundreds of patients with spinal injuries, burns and other wounds have been evacuated to the US since the 12 January quake that killed up to 200,000 people.

'Reaching saturation'

We have 100 patients who will die in the next day or two if we don't Medevac them
Dr Barth Green
Doctor in Haiti

Confirming the flights had stopped, US Transportation Command spokesman Capt Kevin Aandahl said on Saturday: "Apparently, some states were unwilling to accept the entry of Haitian patients for follow-on critical care. "We manage air evacuation missions, but without a destination to fly to we can't move anybody. If we don't have permission to bring them, or they won't take them in, we can't fly the mission. It's pretty simple."

He declined to say which states did not want to accept patients. A spokesman for Florida Governor Charlie Crist said he was not aware of any hospital in his state refusing patients. More than 500 quake victims have been treated so far in Florida hospitals, according to the New York Times. In a letter on Tuesday to US Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Mr Crist asked the federal government to activate the National Disaster Medical System, which usually pays for victims' care in domestic disasters.

He warned: "Florida's healthcare system is quickly reaching saturation, especially in the area of high-level trauma care."

Women-only

The Republican governor's letter noted the system was already under strain because of the winter influx of elderly people. Dr Barth Green, who is involved in the relief effort in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince, warned that his patients needed to get to better hospitals. "We have 100 critically ill patients who will die in the next day or two if we don't med-evac them," Dr Green, chairman of the University of Miami's Global Institute for Community Health and Development, told AP news agency.

Among the patients was a five-year-old girl suffering from tetanus in a small leg wound. She would die within a day unless evacuated, Dr David Pitcher, a medic at the institute's temporary field hospital at Haiti's international airport, told AP. Meanwhile, the UN World Food Programme said it had set up 16 distribution points in Port-au-Prince which would open on Sunday and reach many more hungry Haitians.

But only women will be allowed in to collect rations, because, the WFP says, this has proved that's the best way to get food to the people who need it. Men will be encouraged wait outside the distribution centres to accompany women after they have been given rations, because lone women would be more vulnerable to attack. The World Food Programme is also starting to hand out food coupons entitling each family to collect 25kg (55lb) of rice rations, designed to last two weeks.

Indicted (in the United States) paramilitary leader holds meeting in Haiti
by Kevin Pina

HaitiAction.net


Port au Prince, Haiti - HIP — Haitian activists in Port au Prince are accusing the Obama administration of turning a blind-eye to the political activities of alleged criminal bosses in Haiti while backing a ruling to exclude the widely popular Fanmi Lavalas party. The party of ousted president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, known as Fanmi Lavalas, was barred by current Haitian president Rene Preval's handpicked election council from participating in parliamentary elections scheduled for Feb. 2010.

The accusations made against the Obama administration by community leaders in Haiti stems from a recent meeting of the Front for National Reconstruction (FRN) held at the Hotel Olofson in downtown Port au Prince on Dec. 19. The FRN gathering of former paramilitary commanders who helped oust former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in a bloody takeover in 2004 was officiated by their party leader Guy Philippe. He was indicted on Nov. 22, 2005 for conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and money laundering. Lawyers contacted in Miami confirmed that the indictment is still open and that Philippe remains on a wanted list of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) of the United States.

Philippe escaped from a high-profile DEA raid that was supported by the Haitian government in July 2007. According to the Miami Herald, "The raid's failure angered Haitian President René Préval, who had to work hard to persuade his minister of justice to allow the U.S. agents to capture Philippe and other drug suspects on Haitian territory, according to well-informed U.S. and foreign officials who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record about the case."

The DEA raid was launched after Philippe revealed on a local Haitian radio station that Andre Apaid and members of his Group 184 had provided funding to paramilitary forces in the neighboring Dominican Republic to oust Aristide. The Group 184 led the opposition movement to Aristide and mounted an international public relations campaign seeking his resignation. Apaid and the Group 184 claimed that they were a peaceful civil society organization with no relationship to Philippe as his forces entered Haiti on a killing spree of Lavalas supporters in early Feb. 2004. During a broadcast on radio Signal FM, Philippe claimed that the Group 184 and business leaders that included Apaid had sent money to buy arms and provided logistical support to their invasion from the Dominican Republic. Apaid owns Alpha Industries that is one of the largest garment assembly factories in Haiti. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited one of Apaid's factories last April to tout his partnership with Canadian apparel giant Gildan Activewear as an example for economic development in Haiti.

A leader of one of the many community organizations affiliated with Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas and who spoke on condition of anonymity stated, "It's clear to us that Obama and Preval never really intended to arrest Philippe but only wanted to send him a message to shut his mouth. While Fanmi Lavalas has been barred from the next elections in 2010, Philippe's party has been accepted to run by Preval's election council. Now Philippe openly holds an FRN meeting in the capital...where's the DEA? He's right here if they really want him. Obama and Preval are hypocrites."

While Fanmi Lavalas, which is still recognized as Haiti's most popular political party is barred from participation in the upcoming parliamentary contest in Feb. 2010, Philippe's Front for National Reconstruction was approved to run in the elections by Preval's election council.

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Battle of Ravine-à-Couleuvres, Toussaint Louverture, in addressing his soldiers before the battle of Battle of Ravine-à-Couleuvres (on February 23, 1802) speaks of his adversary Leclerc and the French invasion forces:

"You are going to fight against enemies who have neither faith, law, nor religion. They promise you liberty, they intend your servitude. Why have so many ships traversed the ocean, if not to throw you again into chains? They disdain to recognise in you submissive children, and if you are not their slaves, you are rebels. The mother country , misled by the Consul , is no longer anything for you but a step-mother. Was there ever a defence more just than yours? Uncover your breasts, you will see them branded by the iron of slavery."

from --wiki-- The Louverture Project

Harvery Wish uses a quote from a "Lady of Charleston" circa 1822 to assist with his opening paragraph. The woman is speaking to an associate about the Denmark Vesey attempted slave revolt. The lady of Charleston writes "Last evening, twenty-five hundred of our citizens were under arms to guard our property and our lives. But it is a subject not to be mentioned; and unless you hear of it, elsewhere, say nothing about it." Mr. Wish acknowledges that the fear and trepidation that held most slave owners in perpetual fear, now have become an obstacle in the proper documentation of the historical slave insurrections. Mr. Vesey was a slave brought from the Caribbean to the United States, he was able to purchase his freedom. Knowing that no man was truly free as long as slavery existed, he began to form a plot for a slave insurrection that preceded Nat Turners ambitious rebellion by nine years.

The American Slave industry was no stranger to the horrors of the slave acting on his natural desire for freedom. The entire island of Haiti became the first slave free state in the Caribbean when Toussaint L'ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines successfully lead their fellow enslaved men and women in the Haitian Revolution. The Hatian Revolution would be the tip of the iceberg for most slave run plantations. Virginia being one of the primary states for the slave trade industry saw more than any other state before the 1800's. By the time the United States outlawed the importation of news slaves in 1808, the South was in the full grips of slave rebellion paranoia.

Most plots and insurrections ended violently for the participants: poor whites, clergy, abolitionist and most unfortunate, the slaves themselves. By 1859, the United States was at the brink of Civil War and Slavery was a primary issue. John Browns raid on Harpers Ferry was the final straw. The relations between Northerners and Southerners on the issue of slavery was an all out war even prior to the Civil War itself.

It is interesting to note the irony of the situation that the white slave owners subjected themselves to. To say that the average slave owner became one hundred percent reliant on the slaves themselves is an understatement. Unfortunately the image that many southerners attempted to paint in regards to the character of the black man and woman are based on the same sociopath based fear that engulfed half of the United States land mass. We now know that African slaves and their offspring new freedom and justice from the very beginning. "No doubt many blacks made the adjustments to slavery but the romantic picture of careless abandon and contentment fails to be convincing". Mr Wish would add "The struggle of the black man and woman for liberty, beginning in those dark days on the slave ship, was far from sporadic in nature, but an ever-recurrent battle waged everywhere with desperate courage against the bonds of his and her master"

An interesting book to read on the idea of the slave rebellions is titled "The Confessions of Nat Turner" by William Syron.


American Slave Insurrections Before 1861 an essay by Harvey Wish. published in The Journal of Negro History (July 1937).