Meet Hamda Yusuf: She’s 19, she’s a local slam poetry champion, and she wants to be the US ambassador to Somalia.

At the Youth Speaks! Poetry Grand Slam last month, most of the poems performed on stage were punctuated by supportive hoots and shouts of, “Youth speaks!” from the packed crowd, culminating in rowdy choruses of applause. But only a few poets earned multiple sets of straight 10s from the judges.

One of them was Hamda Yusuf.

Incredibly, only ten years ago she didn’t speak English. Her family had just migrated from Somalia.

Today she’s a 19-year-old UW freshman pursuing a degree in international studies. But she already has a wealth of global experience under her belt, having lived on three continents.

After advancing through the preliminaries, Yusuf took the opportunity at the Grand Slam final to evoke ancient Somali traditions and stoke the crowd’s indignation at Islamophobia. What set her apart, though, was the earnest humor and moments of mundane Americaness mixed into her poetry—all delivered with a sublime confidence.

Read the rest on the Seattle Globalist »

Women protest insecurity and living conditions at a tent camp in central Port-au-Prince, January 2011.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 7 2013 (IPS) – Haiti is poised to enact major reforms to its penal code to make it easier for victims of rape to prosecute their attackers.

The amendments to the penal code would precisely define sexual assault in accordance with international law, legalise certain types of post-rape abortions, and criminalise marital rape.

The changes also mandate state-funded legal aid to victims who cannot pay for counsel. Discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation” would be banned in limited circumstances, in a first for Haitian law.

“I think it’s an exciting time,” Rashida Manjoo, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, said in February at a conference on the reforms. “It’s a small start with the penal code, but it’s a good start.”

Lawyers and activists at the conference pored over a three-page draft of the reforms. They’re optimistic that Haiti’s parliament will approve them within the year. Haiti’s prime minister and the ministry of justice have indicated they support the amendments. But Manjoo warned that the law won’t be fully implemented or enforced without adequate funding from donors and participation by the public.

In the three years since the 2010 earthquake, the issue of sexual violence has gained an increasingly high profile. Foreign media reports referred to a “rape epidemic” in the tent camps scattered throughout Port-au-Prince.

A January 2012 study by a coalition of legal and women’s groups found that at least one member of 14 percent of all households displaced by the quake had been sexually assaulted.

Some experts, notably anthropologist and author Timothy Schwartz, cite a lack of independent data and question whether the prevalence of rape has been exaggerated by some of the advocacy organisations mentioned in this report.

But even Schwartz applauds the effort to reform the penal code by these same groups. He said it represents a welcome departure from the usual approach to structural problems in Haiti, where non-governmental organisations stage piecemeal interventions instead of bolstering the state.

Improvements at the grassroots

In the meantime, Haitian citizens, the police, and lawyers have attempted to address the violence at the grassroots.

In some tent camps, internally displaced Haitians formed brigades to safeguard against criminal threats, including rapists. A report by Poto Fanm+Fi found that these brigades, because of their strong community bonds, were usually more effective than patrols by United Nations peacekeeping troops at stopping sexual violence.

At police stations throughout the capital city, there are now officers trained to receive and assist female victims, Marie Gauthier, the Haitian National Police’s Coordinator for Women’s Affairs, told IPS.

“Carrefour, Fort National, Kenscoff, Port-au-Prince, Cite Soleil, Delmas, Croix de Bouquet. . .” Gauthier listed off the different stations in city districts. Still, “now we need vehicles,” she said, “to go quickly and arrest the perpetrator.”

Survivors of sexual violence often turn to KOFAVIV, a Haitian women’s group, for moral and humanitarian support. The quake destroyed the group’s headquarters, displacing its founders into a tent camp.

But the group secured funding from international donors, including the U.S. government, allowing it to move from the camp into a two-storey office and expand its programmes. Women come from every corner of Port-au-Prince for bi-weekly gatherings where survivors can bond and share information with one another.

In the courts, significantly more rape cases are going to trial, according to lawyers for Bureaus des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), a prominent Haitian law firm. Nearly a third of criminal trials during last summer’s court session in Port-au-Prince were for rape charges.

Thirteen convicted rapists were sentenced – a majority of those to maximum jail time. More prosecutions followed in the fall.

“It’s extremely significant, considering that a mere 10 years ago, barely any cases were being prosecuted,” Nicole Phillips, an attorney with the BAI, told IPS. She called the prosecutions and reforms to the penal code “a massive step forward.”

In the past, judges would demand victims present medical certificates obtained within 48 to 72 hours demonstrating they were raped. But it was difficult or impossible to get them, due to stigma, trauma, and prohibitive costs.

“The trials are getting more sophisticated,” Phillips said. The courts now rely more on expert witness testimony from medical professionals. She praised judges and the police in Port-au-Prince for taking rape accusations more seriously.

More work to be done

But Haiti’s progress in combating violence against women faced a high-profile test at the beginning of the year, and arguably failed.

When Marie-Danielle Bernadin first told her close friends she was sexually assaulted by her boss, the president of Haiti’s electoral council, their advice was simple: Leave Haiti.

“Where are you going to find justice here? Don’t file a complaint,” she remembers them saying. “Just go.”

After all, “normally one wouldn’t waste time” pressing charges against a high-ranking official, she said.

“But for me, I can’t keep something like this inside,” she told IPS in an exclusive interview. “When someone beats you, rapes you, and it’s all over – you just keep it inside you? That would make me crazy.”

Bernadin went to the police in November, shortly after the incident. She alleged that the official, Josue Pierre-Louis, had violently raped her after she confronted him about pictures of naked women on his cell phone.

She had been his assistant for two months. Pierre-Louis strenuously denied the charges and accused her of “espionage”, but the case went to trial.

At a pretrial hearing in January, supporters of Pierre-Louis – one of the most powerful men in the country – muscled their way into the hallway outside the courtroom, brandishing signs and chanting in his support. It took 15 minutes for police to arrive before they removed the protesters.

Five days later, Bernadin asked her lawyers to withdraw the charges. She issued a written statement to the press, saying: “I’ve decided to abandon the charges… but I reaffirm that I was beaten and raped by Josue Pierre-Louis.”

She described the previous months as some of the most difficult in her life. Supporters of Pierre-Louis attempted to shut her up using various methods, she said: her father was offered a job overseas, violent threats were phoned in to her family members in New Jersey, and a fake image of her was circulated online.

Her lawyers asked reporters not to take her photo, but they tried anyway every time she left the courthouse. She tried in vain to cover her head with a lawyer’s vest. The reporters ripped it before she could get to the car.

In her written statement, Bernadin denounced the threats made against her, judicial corruption, and described the tumult at the courthouse as “a horrible scene”.

Prior to the experience, she didn’t know that groups supporting victims of sexual violence existed in Haiti. She told IPS the justice system should prosecute Pierre-Louis of its own volition and “shine a light on the issue.”

“This way, if someone is raped, she could feel proud,” she said. “She could feel courageous enough to press charges. And rapists would be more afraid to commit these acts.”

President Martelly and officials commemorate the third anniversary of the quake on January 12, 2013.

Saturday marked the third anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake. UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton flew in for a brief, somber ceremony held with Haiti’s President, Michel Martelly, at a mass grave outside the capital city. FSRN’s Ansel Herz brings us the voices of Haitians who lost their homes in the quake, who still languish in makeshift tent camps.

AMBIENT SOUND TENT CAMPS

Walking through the Carradeux camp in Port-au-Prince, it’s easy to get lost. 10,000 families live here. At the entrance, there are neat rows of transitional shelters – wooden one-room shacks.

Then comes a maze of tents and tarp coverings crowding together on the dusty hillside. This area is called “Refuge,” and it predates the official, front section of the camp.

An international NGO once provided Refuge with potable water, but has long since left. Now people trek to the edge of the camp to purchase water for 8 centers a bucket. This task usually falls to the children.

In front of one tarp shelter, Guerdy Charles sits on the ground as a friend combs her hair. She said she lost her SISTER, aunt, uncle, and home in the quake.

She’s been here three years. But she manages, she says.

FEMALE V/O CHARLES: “You can find a person who lets you borrow a little money, you go in the street to sell something when you can, and you feed your kids, try to keep them in school.”

MANY DISPLACED PEOPLE QUESTION how much longer will they be ABLE TO STAY here. Two years ago, Port-au-Prince’s camp population was at its peak – nearly 2 million people. Today, there are still an estimated 360,000 people in the camps.

Aid groups point to the removal of over a 1 million people from the camps as a sign of success. But many were forcibly evicted, or chose to leave the camps as conditions deteriorated. Only 25% of that reduction has come from official relocation efforts.

The International Federation of the Red Cross says it’s moved 10,000 families out of the camps since the earthquake. The Red Cross offered rental subsidies plus livelihood grants, including facilitating moves out to Haiti’s rural provinces. Its goal for the coming year is resettle another 5,000 families across 15 camps.

Martinez Ascuncion, a community coordinator with the organization, said the program has been so successful that all the other major aid groups have adopted it.

But she acknowledged that in the Refuge section of Carradeux, a majori ty of earthquake victims rejected the Red Cross’ offers for resettlement. It’s been almost a year since the Red Cross completely withdrew from the camp, after many families did move out.

ASCUNCION: “I can show you how many families we’ve moved from Refuge. The thing was, what happened there – and this is the truth – people kept moving into the camp as people vacated, because the committees asked for money. You know, you pay rent to move in here and you can be an IDP.”

She said the camp’s Haitian representatives, who formed a committee, had been exploitative and abusive.

Back in the camp, FSRN spoke to nearly a dozen residents. Their ire was directed squarely at the Red Cross. Guerdy Charles said the organization’s offer was too cheap for them to take seriously.

FEMALE V/O CHARLES: “They did not offer us housing. They offered people a little bit of money to go rent a place. Those of us who stayed here, we saw that that’s not good for us… The Red Cross has nothing to do with us any more. We’ve been obliged to stay here. It would be great if they provided us housing! The tarps are terrible for us. We could work and manage, but we don’t have housing.

ALTHOUGH CONDITIONS IN THE CAMPS ARE DIRE, Analyst Jake Johnston from the Center for Economic and Policy Research says THINGS AREN’T NECESSARILY BETTER FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE LEFT.

“Those that have been given relocation options, and that’s generally more recently been the one-year rental subsidy, you know, that started a year ago. And now you have people whose one year is up. And I think there’s a large question as to now, what happens to them. So we’ve seen the relocation part starting, but nothing starting on the revitalization programs. And it creates a big disconnect between what people expect when people move out of camps, and how it actually ends up for people in the future.”

ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE IS Claudy Charles. Over a year ago, Catholic Relief Services linked her with a one-time rental subsidy and an additional grant totaling several hundred dollars. But she doesn’t have a job. They were evicted. Charles and her five children moved to a dirt clearing with other quake victims six months ago. The camp was once serviced by the NGO World Vision.

Before the rental subsidy the family lived in a white burlap tent that lasted for over a year. Now they sleep under a patchwork of graying USAID tarps propped up by sticks.

Charles is not eating as well as she used to. She’s become much skinnier. But SHE’S STILL PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE. With some bricks, she’s laid the foundation for a house, built way up on a hillside amidst foraging goats. When she saves up enough money, she says she’ll finish it.

FEMALE V/O “I don’t have money left to pay for the apartment. Now, I’m in a camp. I found a friend who helped me come here. So that I could live. I’m with my five children. I’m living. When you’re in front of those NGOs and you ask them for something, they don’t really help you. Eventually, they don’t bother with you any more. You have problems, but you remain alone. ”

It’s projected that there will be least 230,000 people still living in tent camps a year from now. Ansel Herz, Port-au-Prince, FSRN.

Photo credit: Reuters

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
– Martin Luther King Jr.

PORT-AU-PRINCE – Dr. Paul Farmer stood alone in a corner of Hotel Karibe conference room, watching the spectacle.

Reporters buzzed around Bill Clinton, jostling with one another and yelling out questions. The former president was the newly-minted United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti.

It was September 2009, just a few months before the earthquake.

Farmer had been appointed as the Deputy Envoy. But it seemed perverse that the reporters would ignore him.

“Dokte Paul,” as his patients here call him, has been a true friend to Haiti.

A Harvard-educated doctor and public health expert, Farmer co-founded Partners In Health. As a tiny clinic in rural Haiti has grown into a medical complex and now a hospital, he’s innovated and delivered top-class healthcare to the poorest Haitians for three decades.

His accomplishments are profiled in Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains, which is taught in classrooms across the country. I was reading it at the time.

As a recent college graduate and a newcomer to Haiti, I wasn’t going to miss this chance to interview a personal hero of mine. So I ran over.

We talked about Haiti’s challenges. He folded his arms and leaned in, peering through round wire-rimmed glasses. His answers were thoughtful. Farmer had always been a sharp critic of the international community’s treatment of Haiti.

Eventually I asked him a blunt question: “Do you think the administration here was under pressure from international forces to fight the increase in the minimum wage?”

I’d seen graffiti calling for bump in wages in Port-au-Prince earlier that day. In the preceding months, as the government stalled on enacting the wage hike from $3 to a mere $5 per day, protests had engulfed the downtown area.

Farmer stammered a little bit, said he didn’t know, and subtly changed the subject.

One reader left an ominous comment on the interview. “No disrespect to Dr. Farmer, as I believe he is sincere,” he wrote, “but he is now a part of the ‘machine’ that essentially drives Haiti.”

***

Two years later, WikiLeaks provided me and two colleagues with a window into that machine: 1,918 secret diplomatic cables from the US Embassy in Haiti.

The cables proved beyond any doubt what had seemed obvious. Behind the scenes, American officials had mounted a full-scale assault on the minimum wage increase, financing studies against it and pressuring the president to oppose it.

If Farmer had “engaged in the hard process of discernment” – an idea he promotes in his book Haiti After the Earthquake – the answer to my question would have been “Yes, of course.”

It was strange. In the past, Farmer wrote disapprovingly of plans to give Haitians low-paying jobs in textile factories – what many consider to be sweatshops. Either he had changed his mind or was holding his tongue.

In 2004, Farmer hadn’t shrunk from castigating the United States and the Haitian elite for the coup d’etat they carried out against Haiti’s then-president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

To this day, he remains a board member of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), which is a strong defender of Aristide and his political party, Fanmi Lavalas.

But when Fanmi Lavalas was banned from entering candidates in the first post-earthquake election, Farmer’s response was tepid.

I ran into Farmer at a meeting of the now-defunct reconstruction commission (co-chaired by Clinton) just before the runoff round, in March of 2011.

I asked if he was worried about the Lavalas party’s exclusion from the ballot. “Of course I’m worried,” he said, “because if you have scant participation or exclude anyone from engagement. . .that’s a formula for instability.”

At the time, IJDH and most progressive advocates took the position that the election was unfair, fraudulent, and should be annulled. I followed up by email asking if he agreed with IJDH. Farmer wrote back:

“Good to see you. Sorry to have missed your deadline. But am on the board of ijdh so you are really asking questions for other reasons?”

I responded seeking to clarify what that meant, but received no reply.

***

The next time I saw Farmer, he warmly greeted me in the hall of a huge mansion.

I managed to evade the minimum $250 donation for a fundraiser being held in Austin, Texas, where I was visiting family. I wore some of my best clothes but still looked underdressed. The opulence on display seemed shameless.

Turns out the mansion belonged to Roy Spence, chief executive of a big marketing agency. He was Hillary Clinton’s “messaging guru” during her 2008 campaign.

Farmer humored the crowd with an engaging speech calling for accompaniment with, rather than mere charity to, the poor.

Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, stood next to him, beaming. Mills had just taken a shellacking in a Rolling Stone investigation of Haiti’s faltering reconstruction effort.

But this wasn’t a fundraiser for Partners In Health, Farmer’s highly-respected health organization. It was for an obscure group called Students of the World, which is run by Roy Spence’s daughter, Courtney.

A documentary filmmaker friend of mine went to the second fundraiser in East Austin – the one for the non-rich – the following night. Unprompted by me, he complained a few days later about how bad it was.  He said it seems like they “parachute in” and produce “bad promo videos” about charities in Haiti and other poor countries.

And yet that night, there was Farmer wrapping up his speech. He urged the assembled guests – influential Texas politicians and businessmen among them – to donate to Students of the World.

Before I left, Farmer autographed a copy of his book for me. He said he’d flown all the way from Rwanda for the event.

In the book, Farmer argues that humanitarian funding should be directed to Haiti’s public sector – the government – instead of to foreign charities. Groups like Students for the World are lambasted as haphazard and unaccountable to Haitians.

***

“Oh, he adores Clinton,” a senior member of Partner in Health, told me as our plane approached the Haitian coastline. “I don’t get it.”

It was March 2012. By chance, our seats on the flight to Port-au-Prince happened to be next to each other. We’d struck up a conversation.

She said Paul had changed over the years and that now she represents the “left-wing of PIH.” But the organization had taken a decidedly non-political turn.

I told her how disappointing it was when PIH had refused to sign on to a petition to protect Haiti’s displaced from forced evictions not long after the quake. She wasn’t surprised.

The petition was addressed to Bill Clinton, the UN Envoy to Haiti, among other authorities. And Clinton is “close to Paul,” the petitioners were told by Donna Barry, PIH’s Advocacy and Policy Director.

A week later, I found myself facing Clinton at a press conference at PIH’s new hospital in Mirebalais. I asked a pointed question about the UN’s responsibility for Haiti’s cholera outbreak.

His frank response, in which he stated that cholera had arrived in Haiti via the fecal waste of a UN peacekeeping soldier, was a welcome surprise.

Farmer got up after him and delivered a boilerplate call for improved water and sanitation in Haiti. Clinton put his arm around Farmer’s back when he sat back down.

“I think he knows what he’s doing, and I trust his judgment and his integrity,” political analyst Noam Chomsky told an interviewer who asked about Farmer’s involvement with Clinton and the UN.

“Paul Farmer, that is. I’m not talking about Clinton,” he added, with a derisive laugh.

As Chomsky explained, by any objective measure, Clinton has severely damaged Haiti.

After the quake, he admitted to destroying the livelihoods of Haitian farmers during his presidency when he pressured Aristide to lower tariffs on imported rice. It was a “devil’s bargain,” he said, that was beneficial for “some of my farmers in Arkansas.”

In October, both Clintons inaugurated a sprawling, scandal-ridden industrial park in Haiti’s north, where thousands of Haitians will sew garments for Wal-Mart and other US retail giants for meager wages.

Farmer, meanwhile, has been awfully quiet when it comes to public advocacy on Haiti’s behalf. His name last popped up in the news when the UN, in a slick PR move, appointed him a special advisor for a brand new $2.2 billion cholera initiative.

In fact, the initiative is anything but new. It’s been around for years, unfunded, and the UN itself has only contributed 1% of the overall funding goal.

The epidemic continues apace. Cholera killed 27 Haitians in the first week of January.

Farmer is still on the board of IJDH, which is suing the UN to accept responsibility for the outbreak and pay reparations to the victims. He’s made no public comment about the lawsuit. Neither has the UN, except to say it’s studying the claims.

“He’s been bought off by people who acknowledge that his critiques had merit and gave him a position, meaning Clinton and the UN,” one longtime Haiti aid worker told me.

A Washington insider who works on Haiti policy called him “their useful idiot,” he said. “We see the same problems. Haiti needs a voice of reason to stand up to these powerful players. He could be that voice.”

“It’s sad, really.”

***

Sadder still are the dusty, bleak encampments where thousands of Haitians displaced by the quake eke out an existence each day.

At a huge camp called Carradeux, withered tents flap listlessly in the wind on a crowded hillside. Aid agencies have long since left most camps, leaving clogged and overflowing latrines in their wake.

“Haiti’s reconstruction? It began in [Clinton’s] mouth, but it never materialized on the terrain. I don’t see it,” Bemès Bellevue, a 31-year-old taxi driver whose worn features make him look much older, told me on Thursday.

It was the 1090th day Bellevue has lived under a tent with his wife and two girls, aged 5 and 7. Human beings are not supposed to live like this, let alone for three years.

I’ve never met a camp resident who knows about Farmer. They haven’t heard his talk of “building back better.”

I asked Samuel Maxime, editor of Defend Haiti, an online news magazine popular with the Haitian diaspora, what he thinks of Farmer today.

He said it’s hard to criticize anyone working on health in Haiti because lives are at stake.

Indeed, this makes it difficult to subject Farmer or any humanitarian to critique. But meaningful accountability is precisely what’s been missing from the aid sector. Farmer himself made the point in our first interview.

“Nonetheless, I think Farmer is a large part of the machine that enables corruption in Haiti,” Maxime continued. “In the grand scheme of things I believe someone like Farmer, who knows right from wrong, integrity from corruption, and looks the other way as he does – he enables it, in fact, like MLK Jr. would say – they are complicit in it.”

Maxime said he’s especially disappointed Farmer hasn’t stepped up and stated clearly that all the evidence shows the UN brought cholera to Haiti.

“I don’t think that’s becoming of a Harvard man.”

***

After several unanswered emails, Dr. Farmer responded just before this went to publication. He called me on the way to the airport, where he was to catch a flight to China for a meeting on tuberculosis.

We spoke cordially for two hours. Farmer said he hoped his words would give me pause. But they haven’t.

I found him to be defensive, wishy-washy and self-contradictory.

“I chuckled at that because I think it’s good to be useful,” he said, taking particular umbrage at the phrase “useful idiot.”

He asked repeatedly whether I agreed with that. I said he was being silenced and used.

Farmer eventually disclaimed any leadership role, saying, “I’m really not a UN official. I don’t have any obligations.”

“On the second year anniversary [of the quake] I wrote what I had to say and I don’t really have any more to say.”

When I said he had lost the razor-sharp critical voice from Uses of Haiti, he said, “I hope you’re wrong about that.”

I asked several times whether the UN brought cholera to Haiti. He talked around the question, never answering it directly. Isn’t it important to identify the source of the outbreak?

“I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it was true with the [past] HIV or cholera outbreaks…If I were to rank the top 5 interventions, to slow cholera…I would not put legal action before building a water system or treating Haitians.”

Do you believe in IJDH’s advocacy work? “Yeah, I do! I would never disassociate myself from IJDH.”

But later, “I’ve never worked in any social justice organization where there aren’t serious disagreements inside.”

On the failed reconstruction commission, he said,  “I didn’t have a dog in that fight other than wishing it well…I hope there will be many other iterations of trying to coordinate aid. I didn’t assert that it would work.”

He agreed that Rwanda, which he has often held up as a model, would not have accepted the commission.

I asked if he has been successful in encouraging aid to flow directly to the Haitian government. Farmer admitted, “The answer is no, not much success.”

“I definitely care most about Haiti of all the places I’ve worked, but I don’t claim omniscience,” he said.

–

Additional thoughts for the blog: I was pleasantly surprised by the universally positive (late-night, who knows what the morning will bring) reaction to this piece on social media. The venerable infectious disease blogger Crawford Killian took the big picture view: “The silence of Paul Farmer is itself an instructive memo: If you want to do any good at all in Haiti, don’t criticize the bosses.”

That said, I respect Dr. Farmer as well as those who still believe in him. And I want to offer my take on one point that’s been made a few times. Matt Vecere wrote on Facebook:

Another great article by Ansel Herz. As for Farmer, I asked him at a talk in LA about the UN and their role in cholera. He said his position at the UN does not allow him to say everything he wants to say and followed by pulling up a photo of a UN truck dumping sewage into a river, as well as photos of the Nepalese base with broken sewage pipes. I think it’s pretty clear what Farmer is doing: compromising his ability to spout off the way he’d like to so that he can hopefully influence the big players and affect large scale change. It may work, it may not. But I still believe in him.

Twitter user Janiebt echoed that view, asking, “Bravo, but how does one not compromise integrity while making major political allies and receiving support from major funders?”

A portrait of Dr. Farmer from the series “Americans Who Tell the Truth.”

I addressed this exact question in a much earlier draft of this piece, using Farmer’s own words from his book Haiti After the Earthquake. Here’s what I wrote:

Farmer says he rejects the notion of “currying favor with power qua power” in a long footnote in the book.  He quotes Dr. Martin Luther King’s response to someone urging him not to criticize the Vietnam war: “What you’re saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won’t get you into the kingdom of truth.”

I submit that a book on Haiti that scarcely mentions the $850 million military peacekeeping force occupying the country will not get its author into the kingdom of truth.  I submit it is disingenuous to praise Haiti’s popular movement, as Farmer does in the book, without discussing how it has been suppressed in recent years.

Some speculate that Farmer took the UN position as a quid pro quo wherein he lent his good name out but gained the influence to direct resources to worthwhile projects in Haiti.  But Farmer concludes the footnote, “It wasn’t as if we didn’t need foundation grants to respond effectively…But we didn’t need to sell our souls to get them.”

Indeed, Farmer reveals in the book that funding was already in place for his largest and most promising project in Haiti when the quake struck.  Next time one of my Haitian friends in Port-au-Prince is looking in vain for decent medical treatment, I’ll be able to tell her to go to a brand new $15 million hospital under construction in Mirebalais instead of out to PIH in remote Cange.  It’s his leadership of projects like this that earned him a reputation as one of the most effective do-gooders in the world.

  Photo credit: Dieu Nalio Chery/Associated Press

I wrote a guest post for the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s excellent Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch:

1.  How would you describe the situation in Haiti today?

“Peyi a vin kraze.” As Haiti enters a new year, I’ve heard this phrase several times from different Haitians over the past week. It’s usually said with a resigned, slight shake of the head.

In English, this means “The country has completely crashed.”

Last week, the U.S. Coast Guard repatriated 168 people fleeing Haiti by boat. At least 360,000 people displaced by the earthquake live in appalling conditions in tent camps throughout the capital city, three years after the earthquake. The cholera epidemic killed 27 more people in the first week of January, bringing the total number of casualties to nearly 8,000.

So the situation is dire. And while I don’t want to add to Haiti’s bad press, this really should not be understated. It’s hard to take the government’s ubiquitous new slogan, “Haiti is Open for Business,” seriously.

At the same time, it’s important to point out that in the minds of outsiders, Haiti often comes packaged with a set of spurious assumptions.

Haiti is simultaneously romanticized and demeaned as so unique, poor and chaotic that it becomes a category unto itself. It’s the land of zombies and vodou (usually this word is spelled pejoratively as voodoo). Haitians are amazingly “resilient” – code for inhuman, able to go on suffering indignities that others could not.

In fact, Haiti is more like the United States than one might think. The country is afflicted with vast wealth inequality and an influential power elite. Many young people can’t find jobs. The healthcare system is a mess. Farmers are struggling to maintain their livelihoods amidst environmental destruction.

Of course, Haiti suffers from all of this to a more extreme degree, along with other crises.

More on this below.

2.   What’s been the biggest success in terms of the aid response? The biggest failure?

As I search my memory, I’m looking out on a restaurant parking lot full of SUVs belonging to wealthy Haitians and aid workers.

The only meaningful success that comes to mind is the construction and opening of a government-run sewage treatment plant outside Port-au-Prince. There is an urgent need for improved sanitation in Haiti.

Aid groups have long since left most of the tent camps, leaving clogged and overflowing latrines in their wake. Before, the toilets were desludged by trucks that would empty the contents on a massive, unregulated dump site not far from where people live.

The foul stink in the camps and the bubbling shit ponds are vivid examples of an aid response that has proved to be fleeting, haphazard, negligent and disrespectful to Haiti and her people.

I never thought that the understated, utilitarian look of a sewage treatment plant could be attractive. But in the dust of a barren area called Titanyen, gleaming in the sun, it looks rather beautiful. Not far away are mass graves of the quake dead.

For months after the temblor, one of the country’s wealthiest families claimed to own the land and held up construction of the plant. Finally, the government seized the land. With direct financing from the Spanish government and other donors, the structures went up.

“This was a pioneering step,” one Haitian official told me. “It’s the first time the country has ever had a plant like this. In terms of sanitation, this is revolutionary for Haiti.”

The Titanyen sewage treatment plant represents a planned, durable, and modern solution to a serious humanitarian issue. It’s a triumph of Haitian political will. It’s everything that the aid response should have been.

Some might point out that rubble from the quake throughout Port-au-Prince has been cleared. This was done inefficiently and at high cost by a for-profit company contracted by USAID, however.

A bunch of the SUVs are leaving now, probably to make their way up the hill to Petionville, the well-off part of the capital city where most aid workers live. Traffic will be bad.

The fact that despite $10 billion was pledged to Haiti’s reconstruction effort and I can think of no other big successes, says enough about the endless litany of failures, don’t you think?

But one failure that stands out is the CIRH, a reconstruction commission co-chaired by Bill Clinton and the Haitian Prime Minister. Representatives from all the big donor countries (and a few tokenized Haitians) sat around a table trying to decide where to spend money. The body was stunningly slow and ineffective, until the Haitian legislature unceremoniously declined to renew its mandate, having protested its creation in the first place.

This is to say nothing of the cholera, which was brought to Haiti by the United Nations, according to scientific studies.

3.   What should the humanitarian community do differently? What have we learned?

I mentioned that Haiti is more like other countries, including our own, than commonly thought. Across the board, we face a similar set of issues.

But in the U.S., the idea is to solve these problems through political discussion and negotiation among ourselves. Elected officials listen to the citizenry, take action and implement programs. At least, that’s what we expect.

Now imagine something else. Imagine that in our midst, we have a foreign humanitarian community trying to help us solve our problems. Imagine that their combined budget dwarfs that of our government at every level.

Imagine that members of this community – Canadians, Venezuelans, Jordanians, the French, or Nigerians from hundreds of separate organizations – drive the best cars and occupy the largest houses. They eat at the most expensive restaurants because they are afraid to eat what the rest of us buy in the market. Most of them don’t speak English. They mainly hire American staff from the tiny, most educated and privileged sector of society.

And imagine that all of these groups claim they are supporting, rather than exercising any undue influence, over our government.

On top of all that, imagine that a foreign “peacekeeping” army larger than our own police force patrols the streets. Imagine that President Obama had asked the army to trade its tanks for bulldozers and its guns for shovels, but that his call had been completely ignored.

This is Haiti today, shed of its sovereignty. This has been the situation ever since it earned the nickname “The Republic of NGOs,” amidst a set of neoliberal economic reforms foisted upon it in the late 1980s.

What should the humanitarian community do differently? Two things:

In the short-term, be more inclusive of Haitians at every level. This point was urgently made by Refugees International shortly after the earthquake, when, to take one of many examples, a Haitian mayor could not access the military base where aid workers held meetings, often in English.

Over the medium- and long-term, the humanitarian community should transition all of its resources into Haitian hands. Frankly, it smacks of racism to pretend that the Haitian government is more prone to corruption than outside aid groups. In many ways, we’ve simply legalized it.

As U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton asked a conference of development workers after the quake, “Are we serious about working ourselves out of a job?”

If the humanitarians can’t do that, then they are not actually humanitarians. And they should leave.

There’s another option: Haitians have kicked out exploitative foreigners before. They can surely do it again.

–

Additional thoughts: Of course, not all NGOs are exploitative by definition and not all of their programs were failures. There are rare exceptions. Doctors Without Borders’ response to the quake was a success. They set out to provide free healthcare with staffed hospitals and clinics. They did. I’ve never heard a Haitian speak ill of MSF. However, it’s not a lasting solution. MSF pulled out of the only government-run hospital in Cite Soleil last year. The facility has returned to its dismal state because the Ministry of Health is underfunded.

The construction of a hospital in Mirebalais by Partners in Health is also a big success. However, it’s not clear where the funding to operate it next year will come from and it doesn’t directly address the earthquake. In fact, the planning and financing for its construction predates the disaster.

Neither of these contributions represents reconstruction from the quake’s destruction. Neither holds the symbolic value of the sewage treatment plant, which can process the waste from the latrines that were installed (and abandoned) in the tent camps, but should serve the Haitian people generally for the foreseeable future.

 
It’s about time I publish this interview I conducted last year with Georges Sassine, President of The Association of Industries of Haiti and Executive Director of CTMO-HOPE. Under the US law of the same name, the HOPE commission is charged with maintaining labor standards in Haitian factories that receive tariff-exemptions and trade privileges for garments they export United States.

I found his blunt honesty to be refreshing. Sassine lays out his entire argument, projecting 12 years into the future, for how garment manufacturing can alleviate Haiti’s poverty in the long run. He’s a man on a mission.

He also responds to charges made last year by union activists that bosses were firing workers for organizing in Port-au-Prince’s textile factories. I quoted in him my report for Inter-Press News on the controversy. The Better Work Haiti labor monitoring program later backed up the allegations and the workers were ultimately reinstated.

I introduced myself as a journalist trying to learn more about the alleged worker firings, as we sat down at a table at the Hotel Montana:

Georges Sassine. Photo credit: Le Nouvelliste

Georges Sassine: The incidents were not about organizing anything.  The incidents were: One of them was a guy who wanted to make something, and the other was someone distributing leaflets and they asked him to stop doing it and he started to yell.

What I find very strange is that at the same time this is happening inside the factories in Port-au-Prince, you guys in Washington, in Brazil, in London – everything is happening at the same time…

Ansel Herz: No listen, listen…

Let me finish, because I’m very tired of all this.  When I lobbied the US Congress to receive an advantage for Haiti, when we went from 180,000 workers to less than 9,000 workers, and then that gave us the HOPE legislation – three times HOPE, HOPE II, and HELP.  Today we are about 28,000, we were 30,000 but we lost a few thousand because of contract changes and stuff.  And this is all starting all over again.  When I made sure!  So that these kinds of activities do not restart, I am the one who asked the ILO – the US Congress to finance the ILO – to have Better Work in Haiti.  Just so that these kinds of accusations do not start all over again.   So I am very tired.

But I read the Better Work report – the last one – and it talks about a lot of different factories that are not in compliance.

No, but you have to see the last one as compared to the one last year.  There’s a brand new one.  And there is significant progress.

That’s why I came to talk to you, to hear this side…

I would rather have Better Work themselves talk.  I remember three years ago, right here, I met some guy like you.  Exactly same kind of situation.  I’m talking to him and I have my cigar.  So he writes, “Georges Sassine, a big fat capitalist in the swankiest hotel, overlooking the poverty and dire misery,” blah blah blah… I’m 62-years-old.  I am very tired, ok?

I’m not into that kind of journalism. 

But you see?  You told me you want to find out about issues on labor relations.  When, there is no issue! Four people were fired for different reasons.  And I’ve asked Better Work to come and investigate, along with the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs.  Please, come and investigate this because I know the true story.

I’d like to talk to the factory owners.  I tried calling Mr. Baker and Mr. Apaid but I can’t get through -

You see I’m pissed?  They are even more pissed than I am.

But the thing is, no one is going to use their point of view if they don’t express it.  And if you’re not willing to talk to the press -

Look, at the end of the day, the objective is to close down the factories.  That’s the objective.  And you are being used as part of that policy.

There are allegations just that they are not being allowed to form a union.  So you’re saying there is no problem for anybody in those factories to form a union and represent the workers.

No no.  If we’re talking about these incidents, they have nothing to do with people trying to form a union.

Why was he distributing leaflets?  Do you know? 

Leaflets about the revolution of workers?  And they asked him to go out for lunch, then you can distribute them, but you cannot stop people from working.  This is a factory.  It has to produce!  And you have to be producing also, I’m paying you to produce, not to walk around the factory.  You want to continue? Then I fire you.

What about all the non-compliance questions that were raised in the last report?

There will always be non-compliance.  Keep in mind these are non-compliance reports.  There will always be non-compliance.  Where it is encouraging is that in the four core non-compliance issues, today there is only one factory that is non-compliant.  It’s a small factory, about 60 people.

That’s going to come out in the new report?  There’s only one factory out of all 28 that are non-compliant? 

What are the four core issues?  Child labor, forced labor, freedom of association, and discrimination.  Then you have the OCHA standards, and before that you have the wage standards.  Over time being paid according to the law, blah blah blah.  So those are the second-tier and then there’s the third tier.

So you will see in the first, the most important one, only one factory.  And then the lower you go in standards, the more factories are noncompliant.  And this is normal.  It will always be, because no one can ever reach 100%.

What for you is the target to reach in terms of the number of factories that are non-compliant?

For me, the target is that every six months, there are less and less non-compliance issues.  And in the four core ones, there should always be 100% zero [non-compliance].  That is unacceptable.   Then there is the second-tier.

Well, there were also things about wages not being paid, factories doing things like rounding down, occupational safety – that was a big one in the last report.

Yes, but there is progress.

Have you seen the new report already?

Yes, of course.

But you’re saying there is a clear improvement since the last one?

Yes, you have my word on that.

As a factory owner and a member of the industry association, are you all collectively working to address all of those –

Yes!  Again, I am the one who came with Better Work.  Only because it’s good for business that you have a certain standard.  And the factories do work better when they have those standards.  But it takes time for people to understand.

So again, you’re saying right now there’s no attempt by Mr. Apaid, or Mr. Baker, or people you know who own factories, to block unions from forming?

There is not one incident where someone came to them to ask to organize a committee or syndicate.  No one has been approached like this.  Two different issues.  None of them have to do with this.

Distributing leaflets about Batay Ouvriye is not a demonstration of you trying to organize.  If you do it while they’re having lunch, ok, and then you go see the owner and you say, “Ok, here are the three of us.  We want to organize.  How do we do this?”

This is, in my school of thought, how it’s done.  Not trying to break down the factory.  And then, suddenly, the whole international community is on my back telling me I’m against people organizing.

Have you heard from a lot of groups? 

Brazil, London, all the altermondialiste [anti-globalization] people.  NGOs, human rights, whatever… That we are violating…

So I’ll just give you an example of a worker who I spoke to.  She wasn’t part of the demonstration that took place a couple of days ago, I didn’t even meet her through Batay Ouvriye or anything like that.  I actually just met her son a long time ago in a camp and gave him some money for school.  Anyway, she works in a factory.  What she told me is that she’s going to secret meetings to organize a union, because she says if the bosses know that she’s trying to organize, she will be fired.

[Laughs.]  That’s another myth.  Why do they have to meet secretly?  When unions are not illegal.  This HOPE commission has three union leaders in it.  I take them around.

So you don’t see any reason for a worker to be scared or worried about penalizing for trying to organize?

If they’re doing it, in the normal fashion like it’s supposed to be done.  It’s not a seditious activity, is it?

Well, that’s what she told me.  The other thing she said – her personal story – is that she’s not going to work in the factory any more.  After two years, in January she’s going to start selling on the street again, because her family tells her that her health is getting worse, she feels she’s being overworked.  Those are her words.  She think she can make as much if not more in the street.

Fine, she is free to leave.  You are as free to work in a factory as you are free you not to.  The only thing is, as President of the Association and as the person responsible for the HOPE thing, I am making sure that all factories are compliant with all the standards – health issues and all that kind of stuff.  As a matter of fact, we now have a clinic inside the industrial park which we did not have for thirty years.

But with occupational health and safety, insurance – those were some of the most serious issues [in the report].

But you have to understand that we have a failed state.  So it’s very hard to spend huge amounts of money for services you do not receive.  And just the fact that you do not receive the services makes you non-compliant.  But you pay.  So what do you do, as a factory owners?

I mean, that’s the thing right?  Those are the standards…

Yeah but, you said insurance.  The insurance is provided by the government.  You pay the insurance, but there is no insurance.  Then you come to inspect my factory and you say, there is no insurance.  So what do I do?  With the retirement fund, ONA, you’ve been paying. Personally, myself, I’ve stopped paying ONA and I leave the money with the workers.  Because [the government] they’re going to steal the money anyway.

Now I know you don’t have a lot of time, so I want to just ask: the question of her quality of life as a worker, I think, is really what’s motivating her to want to stop working in the factory.  So that’s one question.  And the second one is the wages.  I talked to Mr. Benoit, the Senator, recently.  He was very blunt, he called them slave wages.  I’m sure you get this question all the time, so I want to ask you: are these wages sufficient for people to live on?

No, of course.  Let me tell you something.  The factories are the only ones in the country paying 200 gourdes minimum a day.  It was 150, but starting now, it’s 200.  In two years, it’s going to be 250.  That took effect this month.  You go visit any bakery, any dry-cleaning – no one is making 200 gourdes a day.  But it’s those 28 factories who are the big guilty ones.  Why?

But the question for Mr. Benoit – it’s not that they’re guilty, necessarily, it’s where do you set the bar?  And he told me he plans to introduce another –

I told him, he should put it at 1000 gourdes, no problem.  And then, we have no factories.  People will be better off, people will be making 1000 HTG a day, by law.  But by fact, nothing.  So, no problem.

What’s the level then?  Is 200 the maximum then?  If he raises it again, which he says he’s going to do, is that going to force the entire sector to shut down?

He cannot raise it again, because the law he passed is already raising it sequentially.  So I don’t understand, raising it to what?

Let’s not forget, this industry, if you look at history, you’ll see the minimum wage is always around $3.  When it was around Connecticut, sweatshop New York City, when there was no OCHA, when it went down to the South and then overseas – if you follow the wages, you will see it’s never above $5 a day.

So, you put it over $5 a day here, no problem – it leaves!  It goes to Bangladesh, where they pay 63 cents a day, but nobody bothers the Bangladeshis about those issues.  Why, I don’t know.

So you see them staying where they are, not really being raised at all in the next couple years? 

That’s what the law says, it’s not me.  The law says it goes all the way to 300 gourdes.

At what date?

In 2014.

And after that?

After that, we have to look.  When I started this business, when you were not born, it was six and a half gourdes a day.  In those days, that amount was $1.50 a day.  But in those days, you could eat with a quarter, a big meal.  So it’s a question of the value of money.

I keep telling Steven – well, Steven is a politician and he did all of that, and he became Senator on that.  But if you look, really, at the issues like you said, the person making 200 HTG a day can not live with it.  Why?  Is it the factory’s fault?

You would say it’s basically the fault of the global economy –

No!  The country itself does not provide anything.  Where the person has to take 50% of his income to pay for school, and about 30% to eat.  So let’s address the real issues – the real issue is not how much the person is making.  The real issue is how much is that money worth!  Again, when I was paying 6.5 gourdes they were better off than they are now that they’re making 200 gourdes.  Why?

Ok, that’s a good argument.  But in the meantime, what do you say to workers right now who are making 200 and they can’t pay what they need to pay?  You’re saying, it’s tough luck.

What can you say?  You cannot pay more because it’s not your gourdes.  If I was Wal-Mart and I’m making my own garments, yes!  Because I’d turn it onto the customer.  But here, I can’t.  Especially now, the last 10-12 years.

The thing has completely changed.  It’s simple.  I used to make t-shirts for three dollars a dozen.  You know how much Hanes pays now for a dozen?  $1.45.  For the same t-shirts, a dozen.  So tell me, what do I do?  Me personally, I close down my factory.  In 2006, I closed down my factory I said that’s it, I can no longer survive.  That’s what’s going to happen.  That’s life.

But you still believe that these factories are the model for development for Haiti to provide jobs?

No no, I believe these factories give you time to develop other things.  And the HOPE legislation gives me the opportunity to hire – for instance, you go to the Dominican Republic, they’re making Men’s Warehouse, Tommy Hilfiger, they’re making suits.  So they can pay more.  But the t-shirts are a different thing.  It’s not the same cost structure, it’s not the same salary structure.

Now we have the Koreans coming up in the North.  They’re going to be manufacturing their own fabric.  So it gives them the latitude, on the garment assembly side, to do more.

But when today you’re just a CMT operator, you’re totally dependent on what the other guy is giving you.  So if he pays you just 50 cents, what do you do?

Were you under a lot of pressure in 2009 from the people giving you orders to make sure the wages were not increased?

No no.  They say, make this for me and I’ll pay you two dollars a dozen.

Right, but at that time Benoit was trying to raise the wages.  Were all the people giving you orders saying if it’s raised –

Yes yes, no, no – it’s fine.  They raise it, that’s your problem.  I’m not going to pay you more.  So what do you want to do?

But the compromise that was reached? 

There is no compromise.

Wasn’t there a compromise?  Preval came back with a proposal to phase in the increase –

Yes, it was phased in.  But we thought the gourde would be left floating, then we would be able to support that increase.  But now we can’t, because it’s still at 41 gourdes.  Fortunately, what is happening because of the HOPE legislation, you have higher value garments being made.  But that requires a different level of operator also.

Can you explain that again?  The question of the proposal that Preval came back with, that was enacted into law to phase in the wages – you’re saying that actually hurt the industry in a significant way and it wasn’t a compromise between the two sides?

I cannot say if it hurt the industry in a significant way, since it was counterbalanced by the HOPE advantages.  Right now, I cannot answer.  Those who were here, they just took the shock, and continued.  Luckily for them, those who are making those t-shirts, they are so efficient.

Today we are making 700,000 dozen t-shirts a week.  Three factories.  The people are working eyes closed.  And they making over 350-400 gourdes a day.  That’s a different story, that’s only because they are super efficient.

But I agree that a person should be able to live on the salary they earn.

Right now that’s not the case.

You are here, you see it.  Can you live with 200 gourdes a day?  200 gourdes a day is not the factory’s fault – that 200 gourdes cannot buy everything for them.

Will this industry ever be able to pay a living wage? 

Well, if you look at it historically, it has never done that.  What it does, it permits the people to be a little better.  Especially those who have nothing.  But the most important thing is it’s supposed give the powers that be some time.  It gives you about ten years to develop other kinds of industries.  You look at the Dominican Republic today – they sew a lot less than they used to, because they have moved on to other things.  Tourism, electronics, that kind of stuff.

New York.  You don’t have people sewing any more in New York, right?  That’s the reality.  But what it does is it gives you time.  First of all, you create a salaried mass.  You create income for the country itself, because you have 300,000 people working, making 300 gourdes a day.  That’s a lot of money turning inside the economy so it makes things better, and it give you as government time to develop other things.

So you’re saying ideally in ten years or something, the industry will be scaled down and people will be working better jobs?

Or it integrates.  You cannot just be sewing.  That’s why the Koreans are starting with making fabric.  That’s integration.  You design, you wash, you have a real textile industry.  But the end of the line is just sewing – that part of it, if it’s only that, you cannot survive on that.  That only gives you time to develop.  But if you’re just targeting this, you’re foolish.  I’m the last one to propose something like this.

Next question: do you see that happening?  Is the government, the international community developing the rest of the economy and Haiti such that this is going to work?

The new industrial park we are putting in the North is addressing that.  It’s facilitating the integration in the industry.  Short of planting cotton, which we cannot do, we can do everything else in the value chain.  Sewing, what’s happening here [in Port-au-Prince], is the last step.

And this is the one being squeezed all the time.  And unfortunately this is the one where you have the most unskilled workers.  And the most fragile persons, and the poorest people – that’s where they are, at the bottom, at the end of the line.  And they are the ones being squeezed.

I’m just trying to understand.  At some point you envision this industry expanding and being able to take on other aspects of the value chain such that maybe then, people could receive living wages?

People who are sewing are not just sewing.  They are part of a bigger picture.  And therefore they can be paid more, because they would not longer just be sewers.  This is my dream.  But unfortunately, we were almost there – we had a coup d’etat in 1992.  So now I’m back to square one.  We have to restart and that’s what I’m doing.  And I know, I have a maximum of twelve years ahead of me to do this.  And if I don’t have a different type of worker in 12 years, I have failed.  Haiti has failed.

What do you say to the argument that Alex Dupuy and others have made, that just trying to expand this industry and support it – that’s a misplacement of resources.  That the international community would do better to focus on agriculture, other aspects of the Haitian economy.  And that this is really kind of a sideshow, it’s not going to amount to anything, and in the meantime it’s making people work on sub-par wages.  What would you say to that?

I have two answers.  One is that this industry is the fastest way to create jobs.  That are permanent, semi-permanent, that gives a fixed salary.  Second answer: All other types of economic activity take a lot more capital and a lot more time.  Let’s take the next one.  Agriculture.  What do you want to plant?  Corn?  Can you plant corn in Haiti to sustain?  Can you compete with Michigan farmers?  Ok, let’s take mangos.  Mangos are being developed.  It takes five years for a mango tree to start giving you mangos.  So what do you in the meantime?

So you’re saying this kind of a quick fix. 

This is the quick fix!  But again, you have to be very careful to develop mangos.  Otherwise, we crash.  All I’m doing is absorbing people who are doing nothing, generating nothing.  At least they have enough money to eat, because it gives them enough money to eat.  Even if they cannot have a decent house, at least they can eat and they have healthcare in the factories where they work.

And the government now, has to not lean on that for its revenue.  Because that’s another thing also.  You cannot tax those people.  But they are doing that.

Right now the government is taxing workers too much?

Yes, yes.  You should let them be.  Let them go home with 200 gourdes, the full 200 gourdes, don’t take anything from them.  In the meantime, talk to to the international community, try to develop mangos, coffee – those are your strong points.  And tourism.  But tourism is a third tier – it takes a long time, much more capital.

Things like national production – that phrase has been thrown around.

What does that mean in the global scheme of things?  We plant rice, we plant corn, we have everything.  But how many people can eat Haitian rice from the production?  So you cannot compete with the guy from Arkansas.

Haiti can’t feed itself, effectively?

No, Haiti cannot.  The Haiti I was born in, yes, with 4 million people.  Today it has ten million.  So again, I keep telling Steven, don’t keep looking at the factory wages as something by itself in space.  It’s not true, it’s connected to a bunch of other things.  And a bunch of other things affect it!

So the issue is not – today you want to see that people are fired because they’re trying to organize.  I say flatly, that’s not true.  But it’s not for me to say it.  Nor for you.  Better Work and the Ministry of Social Affairs.  They are doing an investigation, let them say what the real story is.  And we will go by that.

But the wages being paid right now?  Something that Steven said is that it’s not actually meeting the minimum wage.

Keep in mind these are daily wage earners.  If you don’t come to work one day, you don’t earn anything.  At the end of the week, your salary is less than the others.  So someone like you comes in and you look at it and say, “Ah, he’s not making 200 gourdes a day.”  That’s not how to look at it.  You have to look at it per day.

And there’s not mandatory overtime?  I’m just checking on this.

Let me tell you, if a factory does not work overtime, the Haitian workers don’t stay.  They go somewhere else, because they say that’s a bad factory.  So they usually work ten hours a day.  Those making the t-shirts for instance, they work ten hours a day, but they get paid for it.  But they get paid twice – by the production they make, plus the overtime.

And they tell you that the two hours overtime is theirs, the others is their wives.  So there’s a question of cultural thing in it also, that unfortunately the ILO standards do not take into consideration.

So again, you don’t see any problem with the ILO standards?  You don’t think need to be adjusted or changed to accommodate these questions? 

Not adjusted.  The reports need to consider some cultural aspects.  I agree, in factories, you have sexual harassment at the supervisor level.  But culturally in Haiti – you see in my factory, I kept telling all the women that you have to give anything from your body, for anything, you let me know.  But culturally, they will never let me know.

And you have at the supervisory level, where a guy has 40 workers under him, he will ask for rights of what we call [unintelligible].  Ok?  And most of the women will provide.  Because they don’t understand.

So that’s another thing – education.  That’s another thing I expect from ILO.  Because when I tell my workers you are here, not because you’re pretty, not because you have a nice ass, you’re here because you know how to do something.  That’s why you are here – nothing else!

But when I say it, it’s different than if someone outside says it.  So it’s cultural again.  And that takes time.  Because the supervisor, also, it’s his culture to require sexual favors.

Now, you’re saying that is a problem in a lot of factories? 

Yes, yes sometimes it is.  But it’s very very hard to discover.

I mean, this is a counter-point.  This industry has existed in Haiti for a number of years.  It crashed with the first coup and then there was a restart.  But you don’t think someone could look at that and say, by now these questions of culture, sexual harassment, the conditions in the factories should be much better than they are? 

They are much better than they were.  The sexual thing, maximum, is about 20% more than it what it used to be.  Because the people are now more aware.  Today with television, there is a more democratic system.

We started this in the 60s.  It was a hard dictatorship.  Ok?  And you cannot even talk.  Myself, I was arrested for organizing unions [chuckle], myself.  Under Papa Doc, I was arrested, ok?  Things have changed.  I’m sure there are some supervisors who are doing things.  But it’s very hard to discover this.  Very hard.  Because the women will not talk, to them it’s almost normal also.

I know about this.  I mean, I was in Port Salut, I broke the story about the boy who was allegedly raped.  But you know, even there, there was that culture.  Everyone said it was more than that – there was transactional sex happening between the soldiers and the girls, but when I went to talk to the people to actually find evidence, nobody wants to talk and expose it or say anything.  So I know what you’re talking about.

You know what bothers me is the focus that we are putting on this.  When the focus should be much broader.  It should be a lot broader than this.  We are the only ones that have to obey international standards.  Everybody else does what they want.

I think they say that because you’re getting special treatment from the US government.  And from the international community, for this industry, and that’s why there’s increased scrutiny, right?

No, we have always been under scrutiny.

But do you feel like that scrutiny hurts more than it helps? 

No no.  I am personally the one who believes that the more socially responsible a factory is, the better it functions.  Because I’ve lived through it myself in my own factory.

It’s better for me.  In other words, I make more money when they behave as adults than as children.  It’s not because I’m altruistic, or because I’m good.  It’s because I’m a capitalist, I believe in making money.  But making money, you make a lot more when he works more for himself than for you.  So that’s how you make money.  That’s the belief.

The other factory owners – do they share those beliefs and support for the ILO standards?

When I came with this, do you think I had it easy with them?  With my peers?  [Laughs.]  It’s only because it’s me and I’m respected.  Now they are starting to see where it is good.  Especially now with this issue, where I tell them, let the Ministry of Social Affairs and ILO come and do their investigation.  Before, we had to fight ourselves.  Now we don’t.  On the contrary, I welcome this.

But initially, there was a lot of resistance, you’re saying? 

You have to know the whole story of unionism of Haiti, whereby in the beginning the unions and labor movement was used for political ends.  But before that it was used for monetary ends.  Where a guy would be a so-called union representative in your factory and something happens – there’s a revolution in your factory, it closes down, and he represents everyone so he gets paid for everyone and he runs away with the money.

So to the workers themselves, union means one thing: factory closes.  And the guy takes my money.

Is that what you see happening now?

No no.  There is no push to have unionization inside factories.  There is no push, that I know of.

The woman that I talked to, for example.  You think she’s just…

She’s being used also.  Because I don’t know – why does it have to be a secret?  I go to the factories with one of the guy’s on my commission – Paul Loulou.  Another thing also: We had a guy here from the States named Anthony Jones from the AFL-CIO.  The other problem with the unions is they are Secretary General for life.

What do you understand to be Batay Ouvriye’s objective right now?

Batay Ouvriye – I know them since the 1980s.  Their only objective is to close down factories.  You cannot be calling yourself revolutionary workers union.  What is that?

What about CODEVI [factory in Ouanamithe in which Batay Ouvriye eventually succeeded in a campaign to unionize workers]?

They formed it and it became a real union because it was created by the people inside.  And when they tried to have them do political things, they refused.  And Yannick Etienne tried to form another union.  Because they would not follow her instructions.  They are defending their own rights within the factory, not outside the factory.  And Batay Ouvriye did not like that.

I am sorry I was so aggressive in the beginning.  But I’m so tired of this.  It’s the hypocrisy of it that gets to me.  Here is a country with 85% of employment.  The factories provide better than anyone else.  They have to follow all kinds of rules.  Yet they are the ones being admonished.

And again, for the woman who’s going to go back to selling on the street, you have no idea why she would do that? 

Well, don’t forget.  It is hard work.  And it’s based on production.  So if you cannot, you will not succeed.  If you don’t have the strength to work hard, then it’s not good for you.  But there are guys making 500 or 600 Haitian dollars a day.

But it’s not something you can do for twenty years.  It’s for young people who have strength.  Because it is hard work.  It’s very hard work.  You sit there.  Most factories are hot.  It’s noisy.  And you do the same thing over and over, the same gestures.  I couldn’t do it.

But people have to do it because they don’t have any other choice, basically.

Exactly.  But let’s work hard to give them another choice.  That’s my argument.

The Common Language Project, the journalism nonprofit that publishes the Globalist, put out this infographic reviewing the Globalist’s successful year. They encourage you to donate here.

The always-excellent Public Archive invited me to compile this retrospective of the important revelations showing the scope of US influence on Haiti. Check it out.

If you had free reign over classified networks… and you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC… what would you do?”

“God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms… I want people to see the truth… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.

Bradley Manning, “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed” Wired (July 2011).

Alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning’s pretrial hearing is expected to end next week. In what little media coverage the trial has received so far, attention has focused more on the harsh conditions of Manning’s imprisonment than the disruptive political ramifications of having exposed the secret machinations of the most powerful nation in the world.

In one of the thousands of leaked diplomatic cables, former US Ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson described Haiti as a “small, poor nation in the shadow of the American behemoth.” Unsurprisingly, as the Atlantic Wire put it, the cables “highlight how America has been micromanaging and manhandling the Haitian government into aligning their policies with U.S. interests.”

Consider this less-than-comprehensive overview of the profound American impact on Haiti in three key areas, as revealed by Manning and WikiLeaks:

POLITICS

US officials led a far-reaching international campaign aimed at keeping former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide exiled in South Africa, rendering him a virtual prisoner there for the last seven years, according to secret US State Department cables…

Read the rest at The Public Archive »

Joaquin Uy explains how Filipino activists were gunned down at this Seattle street corner in 1981. (Photo by Ansel Herz)

On Saturday, the Filipino activist group AnakBayan Seattle will celebrate its tenth anniversary as the first overseas chapter of the democratic youth organization, which is based in the Philippines.

But the history of Filipinos fighting for dignity and respect in Seattle reaches back further to over a century ago. This history isn’t taught in schools, and there are few, if any, public monuments to its impact.

On a rainy November afternoon, Joaquin Uy, one of the founding members of AnakBayan Seattle, showed how the struggles of Filipino writers, poets, workers, and community organizers are woven into this city’s brick and concrete. The past came alive as Uy guided us on a historical tour from the International District, to a dilapidated downtown street corner, to the steps of King County Courthouse, and finally to a hilltop Queen Anne cemetery after dark. To learn this history, watch this video of the tour below.

Watch the video and read more at the Seattle Globalist »

UN Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton speaks to hospital staff in Mirebalais.

From my blog entry for the Pulitzer Center in March:

In early March, Bill Clinton showed he is learning the lessons of Haiti’s man-made disasters. Far from natural byproducts of the nation itself, the widespread poverty, misery and deaths among Haitians have an awful lot to do with mistakes made by influential foreigners.

After the January 2010 earthquake, Clinton acknowledged that he was wrong to champion agricultural trade policies during his presidency that benefitted “some of my farmers in Arkansas,” but damaged the livelihoods of Haitian peasant farmers.

Those policies helped drive Haitians out of the countryside into overcrowded, shoddily-built urban slums in Port-au-Prince, where many of them perished in the quake. Earthquakes of that magnitude don’t kill tens of thousands of people in industrialized countries.

“I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else,” Clinton said in testimony before the U.S. Senate.

On March 7, Clinton candidly admitted to having learned another lesson from another man-made tragedy in Haiti—the October 2010 cholera outbreak which has killed more than 7,000 and made sick at least 500,000 Haitians.

At a press conference at a new hospital in Mirebalais, with United Nations troops standing guard outside, I asked him whether he agreed with recent comments by the American ambassador to the UN that those responsible for the cholera’s introduction to Haiti should be “held accountable.”

Cholera was alien to Haiti and the Caribbean prior to the outbreak. Multiple scientific studies have pinpointed UN peacekeeping troops as the definitive or most likely source of imported cholera bacteria from Nepal to central Haiti.

Clinton sidestepped the question, at one point calling that decision “above his pay grade.” He receives a symbolic $1 per year salary from the UN as its special envoy to Haiti.

But he also became the first UN representative to acknowledge the truth that’s long been in plain sight, ever since reporters captured shocking images of waste from the Mirebalais UN peacekeeping base flowing into Haiti’s waterways.

“I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera to Haiti, the UN peacekeeping soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus,” Clinton said. (It is a bacterium, not a virus.) “It was the proximate cause of cholera,” he continued. “That is, he was carrying the cholera strain. It came from his waste stream into the waters of Haiti, into the bodies of Haitians.”

The UN has long denied its decisive role in the cholera outbreak. This was an unusual level of candor from such a high-ranking official. I immediately broke the news on Twitter. Within hours the Associated Press had filed its own dispatch about Clinton’s comments, making headlines around the world. A Haitian law firm that sued the UN on behalf of cholera victims praised Clinton’s response to my question. One of the lawyers told me he thinks it’s “going to have a big impact on the case.”

Still, even after Clinton’s admission, the UN issued a statement attributing the cholera outbreak to “a confluence of factors.” In New York on March 9, a spokesperson fended off questions from reporters about Clinton’s admission.

Clinton, for his part, also emphasized that “what really caused” the cholera epidemic is Haiti’s virtually non-existent clean water and sanitation system. He pondered aloud, “And I can’t recall ever until this cholera outbreak hit, people even asking: ‘Did these people come from a place where they have a lot of cholera or malaria or you name it, and are we sending them to a place where they don’t have that, and therefore, almost by accident, we could start an epidemic?’

“And I have to tell you—at least I had never thought about it before. And insofar as I would have any influence over continuing UN operations it’s one question that I think that will always be asked from now on. I feel terrible about what happened here.”

Clinton commands enormous influence in Haiti. As special envoy, he co-chaired the reconstruction commission set up after the earthquake alongside Haiti’s prime minister, and he was recently appointed to the President’s Economic Advisory Council.

The question now is whether the policies Clinton champions today are the right ones or whether he will lament how things should have been done better in Haiti years from now. These include export-driven agricultural and trade policies, as well as boosting the textile and tourism industries as panaceas for Haiti’s pervasive unemployment.

There is already a stark dissonance between his comments about aid organizations and how his own foundation conducted itself in quake-battered Leogane. Clinton urged aid groups to work themselves “out of a job” and build the capacity of Haitian institutions. But journalists found that the Clinton Foundation ignored local officials and installed trailer classrooms laced with formaldehyde. The foundation deflected the accusations.

As a governor and president in the U. S., Clinton distinguished himself with his charisma, intelligence, and ability to get things done. But it’s hard to see Haiti’s faltering recovery since the earthquake as anything but a failure. (The reconstruction commission he co-chaired is now defunct.)

“Building back better” will require learning from errors more quickly, or better yet, not making tragic mistakes in the first place.