Anti-MINUSTAH protesters peacefully marching.

Here’s a round-up of some of odds and ends that I haven’t gotten around to posting until now.

First, there’s this piece for Haiti Liberte: WikiLeaks Reveal: Expecting Civilian Deaths, US Embassy Approved of Deadly Attack on Crowded Haitian Slum. The article describes how a top Embassy official agreed with private sector leaders like Reginald Boulos, who now holds influence over Haiti’s reconstruction, that MINUSTAH should attack Cite Soleil knowing full well that innocent Haitians would be killed by the “peacekeepers” during the operation.

For more on the Port Salut abuses, there are these interviews I did with Democracy Now!, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and if you speak Spanish, this Uruguayan media outlet. The five soldiers accused of abusing Johnny Jean in the video are reported to have been jailed in Uruguay pending sentencing. 17-year-old Rose Mina Joseph, who was pregnant with a Uruguayan soldier’s child when this was published, gave birth to a healthy boy a few days ago. She told me yesterday she hasn’t been able to reach the father in Uruguay to tell him yet, but that when they last talked he said he’d seen an article about her.

Amnesty International issued an action alert that you can participate in about the eviction threat to Camp Mosaic, which I reported on a few weeks ago. And this interview with Dr. Renaud Piarroux about cholera and its origins in Haiti is well worth reading.

Finally, I’d like to shout out this heartfelt and insightful reflection from Sebastian Walker, Al Jazeera’s post-quake Haiti correspondent (check out his new film), especially this part: “I would have liked to stay in Haiti forever. If you spend any significant time there, you will believe, as I did, that Haiti deserves to be on the front page of every newspaper, every single day. It is a permanent, urgent and unjustified humanitarian tragedy.”

I feel the same way.  To me, it’s not just the humanitarian tragedy that makes Haiti worthy of front page coverage every day, but the extraordinary way that tragedy is politically and internationally maintained.  There are stark political choices (some examples) that keep Haiti mired in this state which implicate a wide range of powerful groups in Haiti and across the globe.  Sebastian’s team did a great job of exposing many of them while listening to and projecting the voices of ordinary Haitians.

This contrasts with some recently sloppy reporting by the Associated Press.  An anti-MINUSTAH protest march last Wednesday was completely peaceful from the start, when it was confronted by MINUSTAH soldiers in a jeep, very nearly until it reached its destination in Chanmas. When the march arrived near the palace, Haitian police immediately began launching tear gas canisters, to which the protesters responded by throwing rocks.  This can be observed in a video I produced.

The Associated Press team was not present at that time, to my knowledge.  I saw them walking down towards the protests hours later, after many of the demonstrators had left and only a small band of rock-throwers remained.  But the AP wrote that protesters had “fled into” the camps in Chanmas (they may have since improved the language from the original article), which I did not observe (one resident of the tent camp told me he did not blame the protesters for the tear gas).  The AP did not even mention the peaceful march.  And today, another AP article reduces all recent anti-UN protests in Haiti to “rock-throwing.”  I already pointed out some serious flaws in their initial reporting on the Port Salut abuses.

They should do better. Update: One of the AP’s photographers may have been present as the march itself reached Chanmas.

View on YouTube: Haitians Upset With UN Base Runoff into Foul-Smelling Pool

Or is living with swarms of mosquitoes and an overpowering stench in the area an acceptable level of suffering for Haitians? They’re resilient people, after all.

Interviewed in the video is Dantes Eseck, whose house is directly across from the UN peacekeeping base (there are two different bases) in Port Salut. His house is visible on the left at the 16 second mark. He’s a painter and his wife is a teacher. I wasn’t able to show in the video, but the manhole seen at the beginning is one of several spaced out evenly with connecting pipes along a dirt road leading to the base, and not further.

Check out this photo gallery to get a better view.

I had to look up anophele and filariasis. And please forgive my rough translation of Dantes, though it’s essentially accurate.

Below is a MINUSTAH spokeswoman’s official response. Here is the UN’s response in New York.

II. WASTE MANAGMENT SYSTEM

Whenever there is a technical problem related to sanitation and waste management issues, being in Port Salut or in other areas of Haiti, MINUSTAH discusses them with the local authorities, with whom it coordinates all necessary efforts in order to solve it and keep improving the sanitation and waste management system. Important surveillance measures also exist and inspection teams are regularly dispatched to the field to monitor/test the waste and sanitation systems.

MINUSTAH is not the only player in this chain of waste management. There are several other actors, including the companies in charge of garbage, waste collection, the local authorities, the state of infrastructures in the country as well as the riverine population.

MINUSTAH is currently in the process of installing water treatment plants in its bases, in order to be fully independent in the whole chain of waste management and be able to control the process for A to Z.

The demonstration took place on Friday (struggled to find a decent Internet connection to get the video online until today). A friend of mine got sick and we had to leave Hinche (in Haiti’s Central Plateau) for Port-au-Prince just before they were to burn the seeds in symbolic protest.

Mark Hare, an agronomist from Ohio who’s worked with Mouveman Peyizan Papay for years, explained how Haitian farmers will be roped into a dependence on hybrid Monsanto seeds. Monsanto released an indignant statement responding to the protest the day it took place, insisting the donated seeds won’t hurt Haitian farmers in any way. Further reading here and here.

I didn’t get into it much in the video, but most of the marchers I spoke with also slammed Haitian President Rene Preval for “doing nothing” in response to the earthquake and accepting the seed donation. Wearing straw hats stamped with “Down with Preval” and “Down with Monsanto,” the peasants (young kids, old women, wiry farmers alike) marched from the MPP’s headquarters in Papay for nearly three hours past mango trees and fields to the larger town of Hinche. As they began rallying in the town’s public plaza, I had to go.

I’ll continue following this issue closely, but in the meantime, check out Al Jazeera English’s report looking at the controversy over the seeds.

This is a short video looking at IDP camps in Cite Soleil, Grand Goave, and Chanmas where people still have almost nonexistent shelter. The UN shelter cluster claims they’ve provided shelter materials to 75% of Haiti’s 1.3 million displaced people. Most people I talk to believe that’s an overestimate.

The Cite Soleil camp featured in the video, in particular, I know has received nothing in months. I’ve gone back several times. Last time kids were digging mini-trenches with sticks and rocks to divert the rain. It’s down the street from the Doctors Without Borders clinic.

Red Cross spokesperson Alex Wynter has said the rains are expected to double from March to April and are likely to include continuous downpours for days on end. We haven’t had any of those yet. Last night it rained fairly heavily, but only for about twenty minutes.

Thanks to the New Media Advocacy Project for their video documentation of rained-out camps in March. And to Jerry. Read More…

Update: Also big thanks to Valparaiso for adding Japanese captions to the YouTube video! Check out his Caracas Cafe blog for continuing independent coverage of Venezuela, Honduras, and Haiti (in Japanese).

Finally sorted out some video editing problems last night. Here’s a dispatch I completed a few days ago, focusing on an aid distribution near Cite Soleil last week. Read More…

This dispatch begins at 10pm the night of the Tuesday’s earthquake, and resumes the following morning after I caught some sleep in an open bus abandoned in a downtown Port-Au-Prince street.  More to come.

Update: Here is a written piece published at Inter-Press News Service. Video of Moliere‘s burial coming later. Read More…

I really wish I could have edited and uploaded this footage sooner.  Here it is.  The scenes are graphic, shot as soon I left my house in Jacquet, in the 2-30 minutes after the tremors. Much more video to come.

My on-the-ground report for Inter-Press Service is up: read here.  Narco News too.  I also spoke with Pacifica’s Flashpoints Radio and again with the BBC and PBS Newshour.  Also Russia Today.  (Narration in video is unclear at one point – the man in the truck had not died yet.  Don’t know if he lived.)

Update: (from Galen Herz, in Austin, TX) Ansel was interviewed again by PBS’s NewsHour about possible violence in Port-au-Prince and other relevant topics.

Text of latest report is below.  It was difficult for me get my mind in a clear state to write it. Read More…