The number of civilians confirmed killed in the security force operation in West Kingston has reached 44, reports the Jamaica Observer.

Political Ombudsman Herro Blair, speaking on RJR 94 FM, said that he had counted 35 at the morgue with another nine bodies awaiting collection.

Meantime Public Defender Earl Witter is questioning the disparity between numbers killed and the number of firearms seized. Security forces have so far accounted for four firearms seized.

Witter added that he saw no sign of bodies being burned as alleged by persons claiming to be residents who called media houses during the assault on Tivoli Gardens and Denham Town which began Sunday.

One soldier and seven members of the security forces were injured after security forces entered the West Kingston communities to execute a search warrant for reputed local area don Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke.

Meanwhile, Coke still remains at-large.

“To our best information, he (Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke) is still at large,” acting Deputy Commissioner of Police Glenmore Hinds told journalists at a media briefing yesterday afternoon.

Hinds did not say if the police knew the whereabouts of Coke, who is wanted in the United States to answer gun and drugs charges.

“The security forces had previously encouraged the individual (Coke) to surrender himself and, in fact, made known the opportunity to surrender,” National Security Minister Dwight Nelson told the media briefing.

He said the security forces were still determined to execute the arrest warrant on Coke who is facing possible extradition.

But unconfirmed reports yesterday were that Coke had slipped out of the west Kingston enclave of Tivoli Gardens on Monday while Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) soldiers were engaged in a massive firefight with thugs manning barricades at entrances to the community.

The question now is whether Coke is still in Jamaica or has fled abroad.

But… who is Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke?

According to The Guardian’s recent profile, he’s a man who “inspires conflicting emotions.”

To the US government he is one of the world’s most dangerous criminals, responsible for trafficking cannabis and crack cocaine around the Caribbean, North America and the UK in exchange for guns and money.

To the residents of Tivoli Gardens, the poor west side of Kingston where his gang has immense support, he is the benefactor who provides them with food, acts as mediator in disputes and even sends their children to school. They call him Presi, Bossy, Shortman or, most commonly, Dudus.

But, what the US may see as a threat, many poor Jamaicans view Coke’s power as a replacement of the otherwise absent Jamaican state:

One resident in Jamaica, Claudette White said: “People go to school because of him. People who need clothes go to him, so do old people.

“He gave a start to the people who run the food and soda carts. Most people here depend on him for something.”

The editor of Jamaica’s Sunday Herald, Desmond Richards, said: “You could call it a welfare system. hey provide resources and operate what you could call a second-tier justice system. There is no stealing, no rape.”

Read more here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Jamaica Violence: Drug Gangs’ Political Ties Spark Anger (time.com)
• Bloodshed as Jamaica raids drug kingpin’s stronghold (calgaryherald.com)
• Divisive figure (news.bbc.co.uk)
• US warns Jamaica violence could spread outside Kingston (telegraph.co.uk)

Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

Dozens of nations and organizations today pledged almost $10 billion in immediate and long-term aid to help Haiti recover from the recent devastating earthquake, just hours after Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon opened a day-long donors’ conference by calling for the wholesale rebuilding of the country.

Of that amount more than $5 billion has been pledged for the next 18 months, well above the $3.9 billion sought for that period.

“Today, the international community has come together, dramatically, in solidarity with Haiti and its people,” Mr. Ban said in a closing news conference at UN Headquarters in New York.

“Today, the United Nations are united for Haiti,” he said. “Today, we have mobilized to give Haiti and its people what they need most: hope for a new future. We have made a good start, we need now to deliver.”

Haiti’s President René Préval expressed his thanks on behalf of his 9 million countrymen. “The international community has done their part,” he said. “Now it is up to the Haitian people to do theirs.”

Opening the conference earlier today, Mr. Ban appealed to donors to provide $11.5 million over the next 10 years to help the Caribbean nation recover and rebuild after the 12 January quake.

“What we envision, today, is wholesale national renewal… a sweeping exercise in national-building on a scale and scope not seen in generations,” he told delegates from more than 130 nations attending the high-level meeting.

Mr. Ban said reconstruction work must move in tandem with emergency relief and urged donors to provide further support to the revised humanitarian appeal for Haiti. That appeal is calling for $1.4 billion, but is currently only 50 per cent funded.

“The rainy season is fast approaching. Some camps for displaced persons are at risk of flooding. Heath and sanitation issues are growing more serious,” Mr. Ban said.

Mr. Préval, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and UN Special Envoy for Haiti Bill Clinton co-hosted the conference, entitled Towards a New Future in Haiti.

They noted the courage and solidarity shown by the Haitians in the midst of the unprecedented suffering resulting from the quake and the outpouring of generosity and support from the country’s international partners. At the same time, they underscored that Haiti’s road to recovery will be a long one and one which will require continued global support.

The conference was co-chaired by Brazil, Canada, the European Union, France, and Spain as leading donors to Haiti, which was already the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere before the disaster.

Read more here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Clinton to Co-Chair Haiti Rebuilding Authority (abcnews.go.com)
• Haiti Asking For Billions At UN Donor Conference (huffingtonpost.com)
• Skepticism on Pledges for Haiti (nytimes.com)

The “smart” rebuilding of Haiti after January’s earthquake will require some $11.5 billion of spending over the next 10 years, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today ahead of Wednesday’s international donor meeting on the way ahead for the Caribbean country.

“That is our challenge in New York – not to rebuild but to ‘build back better,’ to create a new Haiti,” the Secretary-General said.

More than 100 countries will take part in the International Donors Conference Towards a New Future for Haiti to be held at the UN Headquarters in New York. The meeting will be led by Haitian President René Préval, with the Secretary-General and Hillary Clinton, United States Secretary of State, as co-hosts, and UN Special Envoy for Haiti, former President Bill Clinton.

The conference will be co-chaired by Brazil, Canada, the European Union, France and Spain, as the leading donors to Haiti.

Under the yet to be detailed plan, an Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission would channel nearly $4 billion into specific projects and programmes during the next 18 months, with the remaining funds spread over the next decade.

“This assistance must be well-spent and well-coordinated,” Mr. Ban said, noting that emergency relief, such as food and sanitation, must continue.

The UN and its partners have provided tents and tarpaulins to 1 million people so far, roughly 75 per cent of those in need, and will distribute some 300,000 more in the coming weeks.

The Haitian Government is now finalizing plans to relocate people from camp sites vulnerable to flooding to more secure ground, hopefully ahead of the full thrust of the rainy season.

Read more here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Haiti seeking $3.8 billion to rebuild country (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Thirteen dead. Submerged houses. Fields and banana plantations waterlogged. Drowned livestock. Impassable roads. Fresh trauma for quake-displaced thousands. This is the plight of Les Cayes, a city on Haiti’s south coast, after an unseasonal deluge. And hurricane season is not far off.

Trucks loaded with 4,030 meals left Port-au-Prince on 2 March for emergency distribution in and around Les Cayes. Food has also been sent to Nippes region, north of Les Cayes, which has experienced bad flooding.

The UN World Food Programme, with local authorities and NGOs, plans to supply 10-day rations to affected populations, including some 3,000 people evacuated from their homes.

“The poor state of the sewers caused flooding in every [district] of the city,” said the regional president of the Haitian National Red Cross Society, Jean-Yves Placide.

“In some places the waters rose to ceiling level in people’s houses,” he said. “The situation will be really worrying if it continues to rain. The sun is out now, but the storm clouds come and go.”

“People are used to dealing with floods, just not this early,” one aid worker in Les Cayes told IRIN.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Haiti: 8 dead, 2 missing after heavy rain (msnbc.msn.com)
• Bill Clinton calls for better shelter for Haiti (telegraph.co.uk)
• Rain triggers deadly Haiti floods (news.bbc.co.uk)

What went through your mind the moment the earthquake struck?

‘Nothing. I tried to save myself. That’s all.’

The story of survival in Haiti is always the same. In those 37 interminable seconds of destruction, there was no time to think. But the real emergency in what was once called the Pearl of the Caribbean is only now beginning as emotion gives way to realization. And, however generous the global community’s aid efforts are, they are now confronted with the worst natural disaster to hit the Americas since the time of Columbus.

With 230,000 dead, 300,000 injured, and 12 percent of a population of 8.3 million left homeless, the Haiti disaster has taken on a tragic toll, proportionally similar to the amount of casualties suffered by Germany, the UK, France or Italy in World War II.

The Haiti tragedy, however, was not an unforeseeable calamity. It was the result of chaotic development, poor building, unregulated growth, and the suffocation of its tropical vegetation under endless flows of cement. Today, Port-au-Prince is a city of 4 million inhabitants surrounded by pancaked shopping centers and shameful slums. Shrouded by dust rising up from its ruins and its permanent traffic jams, it literally risks death by suffocation.

“Il y avait l’embouteillage.” Bottleneck traffic. The most common explanation for why it takes two hours to travel 5 kilometers in this Third World country.

And yet the geologists had issued ample warnings. The 10 km-deep fault line located near Port-au-Prince sooner or later would have unleashed a devastating earthquake. They just didn’t know when.

Thus, the only solutions for avoiding a catastrophe would have been either to move the Haitian capital elsewhere or rebuild it according to antiseismic criteria. In other words, due to Haiti’s economic plight, averting the disaster would have been a utopian impossibility.

Port-au-Prince now resembles a torn-up anthill. Arrogant edifices, government buildings and apartment blocks, built quickly and poorly, now lie in frantic ruins along with churches and hovels, trapping tens of thousands of people beneath them.

Since the days of ‘Papa Doc’, little has changed. According to a recent UN inquiry, Haiti ranks 149^th out of 182 countries in terms of quality of life. The devastating earthquake has now delivered Haiti’s coup de grace. The brutal tremors that brought Port-au-Prince to ruin has reduced 30 percent of its buildings to rubble and left one million people homeless. Areas outside the capital, though sparsely populated, suffered even greater levels of devastation. 60 percent of the coastal city of Pétit Gouave, for example, crumbled. The hospital is severely damaged, the dead still line the streets, and there is no electricity.

So, how are the rescue efforts taking place?

In front of the Presidential Palace, flattened like a layer cake, an extreme free-for-all is underway. At the Place des Heroes de l’Independence, where all the ministerial buildings collapsed, documents flutter about the square carried by the slightest breeze. One of them, signed by Health Minister Hénri-Claude Voltaire, confirms the receipt of a donation of 14 million condoms from the UN. In the city’s park, thousands of people have camped out under trees with plastic sheets. A naked woman washes herself, then reuses the water to wash a young boy as an elderly woman waits her turn nearby. At the cemetery, a sign written in Creole reads “Tou o plen, nou pakà pran ankò.” The cemetery is full; we can’t take any more bodies. But someone has knocked down a wall in order to dump the naked, swollen corpse of a woman by a small mound of earth and refuse. Not far away, the decomposed bodies of two children are covered by a swarm of flies.

One can feel indignation for the treatment of the dead, abandoned like trash on the streets. But the real problem remains the thousands of sick and injured who desperately await urgent treatment. In the chaos of the General Hospital, where US Marines do everything from keeping order to improvising as nurses, doctors operate in open-air surgeries, swatting flies away with their free hands.

“We came here from all over the world as volunteers, full of enthusiasm and the desire to help. We brought the best teams, the best medicines and the best equipment,” says a young doctor from New York University. “But there is little coordination. This is a Noah’s Ark where everyone makes tremendous efforts but each group works separately: French, Norwegians, Swiss, Americans, Cubans, Chinese, Russians, Italians, even the Sisters of Mother Theresa and the Church of Scientology. More often than not, our equipment is rendered useless because it’s not compatible or the generators don’t work. When we amputate, we frequently use morphine as an anesthetic, as was done in the 1800s.”

It is obvious to all that Haiti will never be able to recover without foreign assistance. To understand this, one need only go to Port-au-Prince’s port, closed to sea traffic, except for the flotilla of military ships arriving from around the world. There is the US aircraft carrier Vinson and the Italian aircraft carrier Cavour with their fleet of helicopters, water purification systems, and field hospitals.

But this is not enough to solve Haiti’s historic ills.

Matieu Derisse, the author of a comment posted the day of the earthquake on Haitian President René Preval’s blog, appears to concur. “For 206 years,” he writes, “the mulatres [the mulatto caste] have dedicated themselves to the sacking the country, and through Haiti’s Chamber of Commerce, otherwise know as the Chambre des Grands Dons Mulatres, they have managed to seize all the political and administrative power in the country. It’s our slave mentality that is the sole culprit for our social ills.”

Renzo Cianfanelli is a journalist and international contributor who has worked for Corriere della Sera, Il Secolo XIX, and the BBC.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi on Tuesday praised the United States’ leadership of the relief effort in quake-hit Haiti in an attempt to soothe anger over riticism levelled by the Italian special envoy this weekend.

”In critical situations like the one in Haiti, organizational difficulties are inevitable,” Berlusconi warranted.

”But without the US’s intervention, managing the situation would have been much more difficult”.

”Everyone is doing their best in Haiti and right now, we need to stop being critical and focus our energies on the enormous task at hand,” he said.

Regarding remarks by Civil Protection Chief Guido Bertolaso who, during a Sunday telecast direct from Haiti, bemoaned a lack of central coordination, Berlusconi said that ”at times like these, it’s best to avoid making statements that could lead to misunderstandings”.

He added that Foreign Minister Franco Frattini had clarified the government’s position on Monday during talks in Washington with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Despite playing down criticism as ”armchair quarterbacking” during a joint press conference with Frattini, Clinton said Tuesday that she ”deeply resented” insinuations that the US had done less than it could.

”We have scrambled as quick as we could to do everything needed in the past two weeks,” she said.

While Clinton did not single out any detractors in particular, she did point out that the troops sent to Haiti were there to distribute food and medicine, a possible response to a remark by Bertolaso who accused the US of sending ”too many soldiers and not enough aid personnel”.

The Secretary of State added that she had nothing against ”constructive criticism”, but that the US had been judged unfairly by many voices abroad.

Read more here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Italy Distances Self From Criticism Of US In Haiti (huffingtonpost.com)
• Italy distances self from criticism of US in Haiti (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Italian Civil Protection chief Guido Bertolaso

The Italian government on Monday distanced itself from remarks by its special envoy to Haiti, Civil Protection chief Guido Bertolaso, who described the international earthquake relief effort there as ”pathetic”.

On a state visit to Washington to meet with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini underlined that ”the Italian government does not stand by that assessment”.

Frattini granted that ”Bertolaso has made some important recommendations to the Haitian government regarding sheltering orphans and conducting evacuations”. But he stressed that Bertolaso was not speaking for the Italian government when he slammed the international aid machine at work in Haiti, which is largely being directed by the United States.

During an Italian TV broadcast from Port-au-Prince on Sunday, Bertolaso was asked to describe the situation there two weeks after the Caribbean nation was devastated by an earthquake estimated to have claimed as many as 350,000 lives.

The civil protection chief, who headed up the relief effort after the April 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila, responded with a broadside against the lack of central coordination among the various relief agencies present.

”A lot of them are more interested in parading in front of the cameras than rolling up their sleeves and going to work to find survivors,” he said.

”It’s like the bonfire of the vanities”. Bertolaso also said the US had done a poor job of spearheading the relief effort, sending too many troops and not enough people trained in disaster management.

”What’s really needed here is a person like (President Barack) Obama to come and take charge of the emergency”. ”Instead, they sent in a bunch of starlets,” he said in an apparent reference to a handful of celebrities, such as actor Sean Penn, who have made their way to the island over the past week.

Read more here.

US soldiers stand guard at a Port-au-Prince hospital (Picture: AFP/GETTY)

The temporary yet indefinite re-colonization of Haiti began last Wednesday morning when the first CNN crews landed in Port-au-Prince, led by their ‘general’ Anderson Cooper and the ubiquitous medical reporter Sanjay Gupta.

After only a few hours, the network that made the 24-hour news cycle possible began beaming a stream of pain and misery back to the United States. An infinite series of images, painful and shocking, left CNN’s viewers with the urge to express their solidarity… at all costs.

From that moment on, Haiti became a ‘real’ event within the American imaginary. It had metamorphosed into a ‘cause celebre,’ persuading Barack Obama, a president already consumed with healthcare reform, the war in Afghanistan, terrorism in Yemen, etc., to publicly address the Haiti disaster three times in one day, promising $100 million in aid and the arrival of the US Army to coordinate the relief efforts.

US Ambassador to Haiti Ken Marten began coordinating the logistics for the US military’s arrival. Meanwhile, Google’s detailed satellite images were updated, showing the access routes from Port-au-Prince’s port and airport to the most afflicted disaster areas completely obstructed by rubble.

In Washington, D.C., Obama assembled a task force 250-strong of men and women representing all facets of the relief effort, from the Marines to the Red Cross.

Yet, the relief and rescue operations were delayed a half-day while Obama sought to reach Haitian President Rene Preval, whose residence and office were also ‘pancaked’ by the 7.0 tremors. Then, on Friday, upon finally reaching President Preval, Obama asked him to sign a document which conferred total control of Port-au-Prince’s airport to the US military and conceded permission for America’s relief efforts to get underway.

This, at least, is what the public was told. But the document exchanged between Presidents Obama and Preval must have contained several more details that have been withheld from public view; clauses regarding the rules of engagement of the Marines, sent in by the hundreds, to protect the engineers who are, to this moment, busy clearing roads and digging through the rubble.

The Marines, once called upon, shoot. This is their only task. During their 2004 intervention in Haiti, after the fall of the populist priest President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Marines set up and manned roadblocks throughout the country. Upon approaching the checkpoints, the Haitians attempted to back up and search for another, less obtrusive access point to their destination. And the Marines, unused to the local predilection for anarchy, duly shot at them. After the first 4 casualties, the Haitians learned their lesson and waited patiently in line at each checkpoint.

A few days ago, the first US Coast Guard ship reached Haiti from the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba. An aircraft carrier is also expected, along with 6,000 Navy personnel, and 50 helicopters, and, of course, a hospital ship. Everything that we are used to seeing since D-Day and beyond is expected from the formidable logistical machine that is the US military.

The history of relations between the US and Haiti dates back to the American Revolution, when Haiti was a French colony and was thus an ally of the American revolutionaries. But when Haiti eventually declared its independence on January 1^st, 1804, Thomas Jefferson, fearing that the Haitian uprising would inspire American slaves, issued an embargo on the country that lasted until 1867.

In 1915, during the throes of the Great War, in which the European powers slaughtered each other while racking up enormous debts with the USA, Washington, D.C. took advantage of its role as nascent power and expanded its sphere of influence in the Caribbean by occupying Haiti. With the excuse that German submarines would find refuge in Haiti’s ports and would be assisted by Haiti’s merchant class (which was largely of German origin), the American government established a military government ruled by the US Marines that lasted 17 years.

But the United States militaristic obsession with Haiti did not stop there. In 1994, a second US ‘invasion’ of the island took place under then-President Bill Clinton’s watch. Clinton’s intervention was to ostensibly return the democratically elected President Aristide back to power after he was ousted in a coup.

Now, the United States is once again brought into the Haitian ‘theater of tragedy’ whereby it can directly appeal to the Haitian people without involving the impotent, corrupt, and disarrayed Preval government.  In the past 10 years we have seen over $3 billion in international aid reach Haiti without one job being created, without the country’s infrastructure being reinforced, without any coherent development plan being established. Everything remained as it was before and the earthquake served only to expose the failure of Haiti’s 206 years of independence. Following the Haiti’s impressive revolt, its liberation from the chains of European domination, its newfound leaders cast the population into a system of income inequality that pervades up until today. While Europe fumes at America’s logistical ‘invasion’ of the island, declares America’s relief effort an attack on Haiti’s sovereignty, the European’s have ultimately demonstrated the total inefficiency of their political correctness. With its institutional infrastructure in tatters and the Presidential Palace in ruins, Haiti finally has a chance to change course. And it can only be with America’s help.

Piero Longo is a former journalist and editor of AmericaOggi. He lives in Haiti.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Haiti’s suffering is a result of calculated impoverishment | Seumas Milne (guardian.co.uk)
• Haiti’s Tragic History Is Entwined with the Story of America – III (teabreak.pk)
• Haitian ‘Whirlpool’ Draws U.S. Back to Country Napoleon Lost (businessweek.com)

Within one week of the earthquake that drove tens of thousands of Haitians out of their homes, its island neighbour, the Dominican Republic, is being transformed into a base for humanitarian efforts, from border soup kitchens to road convoys, warehouses, and visa waivers for humanitarian workers.

Dominican government disaster workers are responding guardedly to the expected influx of Haitian migrants – the two countries share a 78,000 sq km island and a 380km border that demarcates their bloody past and politically sensitive present, speckled with persistent allegations of racial discrimination against Haitians.

“We will be criticized if people see us as throwing out Haitians, but how can we absorb so many? There are thousands now in border hospitals. Will they want to leave? … We cannot provide for all of them,” the disaster relief director, Edwin Luciano, told IRIN in the Dominican capital, Santo Domingo, three days after the earthquake in Haiti.

“We are judged by our past actions and cannot get around that,” said Luciano, who is also head of the government centre for emergency operations. He told IRIN that in his two decades of disaster relief work, the earthquake on 12 January was one of the most complex because of the socio-political sensitivities.

In 1937 President Rafael Trujillo ordered the massacre of more than 15,000 Haitians in the Dominican Republic, in a move to reinforce his rule.

In 2005 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that the Dominican Republic’s system of registration for citizenship was unconstitutional and violated the rights of two children who had been denied birth certificates. Without citizenship papers, the children were not allowed to go to school, as is the case for many Dominican children of Haitian descent, according to rights groups in both countries.

Persons of Haitian descent without residency papers in the Dominican Republic have periodically been repatriated en masse and by force, according to the Support Group for Refugees and Repatriated Persons (GARR), an umbrella body for Haitian NGOs and rights groups. An estimated 800,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent are living in the Dominican Republic.

Yet, today the Dominican Republic is the primary logistics base for humanitarian operations in Haiti.

Read more here.

Last week, the price of a small can of rice cost US$2. Tuesday, it costs Haitian US$3.50. A gallon of cooking oil that cost $10 only days ago now fetches US$20.

What will they cost tomorrow? No one knows.

The price of food staples such as beans, flour, and pasta have skyrocketed since the 7.0 magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti, leaving millions homeless and hungry.

And they are the lucky ones. Haitian government officials put the number of people they have buried at 70,000. Rushed burials by families saying “adieu” to loved ones continue to take place daily, adding untold numbers to the tally.

For the survivors, life here has become extremely difficult and tenebrous. The economy is at a standstill. There is no electricity, no running water, and no functioning business in and out of the capital. It is not known when banks and other businesses will reopen.

As the prices of goods continue to surge, tons of food aid remains in gridlock at the airport — victim of the Haitian government’s ineptness. Almost one week after the earthquake, the majority of people in dire need of food and water have not received any. As they await the distribution, prices skyrocket.

On a visit to several vending stands, merchants were hesitant about telling prices of goods a couple of days ago. Most of them would do so only if a reporter agreed to buy something.

“Who are you, C.I.A,” said one irate vendor. “Why do you want to know theses things?”

The vendor then became somewhat defensive, saying that merchants were only passing down the prices that they had to pay to buy the goods. The dollar’s value has declined by at least 20 percent. Most gasoline stations are closed, selling their reserve with caution. As soon as word spreads that a station is open, a line nearly a mile long is created, chocking traffic.

Read more here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Obama says US not going to take over Haiti (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• US to send 4000 extra troops to Haiti (newstatesman.com)