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WATCH: Weaponized Charity: Haiti Child Trafficking Hub Exposed

WATCH: Weaponized Charity: Haiti Child Trafficking Hub Exposed

Èzili Dantò

August 14, 2017

 

“The United Nations is by far the biggest harborer of pedophiles in the world. They prey on children with alarming regularity during their many years of UN employment throughout the world.” — Former senior UN official [Source]

 

Background: “Attorney Èzili Dantò is the most prolific international writer and advocate for Haiti and is internationally known as the foremost legal analyst and commentator/writer of the untold counter-colonial-narrative on Haiti. Dantò wrote a judicial reform agenda for Haiti, advised and supervised on numerous judicial reform projects while working as legal advisor and international foreign consultant to Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide between 1993-1995. Since the 2004 coup d’etat/rendition kidnapping of President Aristide that destroyed Haiti’s democracy and put it under UN proxy military occupation for the US, France and Canada, Attorney Dantò, through her work at Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, has been the leading and most trustworthy international voice in Haiti advocacy, human rights work, Haiti news and Haiti news analysis.”

 

Èzili Dantò Statement in New Haven Court

Case 3:09-cr-00207-JBA
Transcript from Perlitz Sentencing hearing on 12/21/2010, Pages 105 to 115

ezilidanto

Attorney Dantò brings an enlarged photo of Haiti philanthropist Pierre Toussaint to Court. Holds up his picture as she makes this statement to The Court

MS. PATEL: Your Honor,…I do know that based on conversations both with chambers as well as the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, there is an individual from that organization that wishes to address the Court. I don’t know if your Honor’s intention was to hear from Ms. Dantò now or if you would like to deal with the arguments on the upward departure motion.

THE COURT: I will hear from her…

MS. DANTÒ: Good afternoon, your Honor.

THE COURT: Just a moment, please. Yes your name, please.

MS. DANTÒ: My name is Èzili Dantò. I’m the president and founder of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network.

First, your Honor, I want to thank you for giving us this opportunity to address the Court.1 And I would like to also say, your Honor, that as Haitians, the Haitian Lawyers Leadership is an organization that was founded in 1994, 16 years ago, and our main purpose is to institutionalize the rule of law in Haiti and to protect and defend the cultural, the civil, the economic and the human rights of Haitians living at home and abroad.

THE COURT: Would you pull that microphone a little closer to you, please.

MS. DANTÒ: Can you hear me?

THE COURT: That’s fine.

MS. DANTÒ: We take this opportunity, your Honor, to thank you for this unique opportunity not often provided to Haitians to speak for themselves. We also take this opportunity to express our deep appreciation and gratitude of the U.S. government, the prosecuting team, Homeland Security staff, and all authorities, the U.S. investigators who worked so hard to get this case here.

I have been working on Haiti issues as a human rights lawyer for 24 years. I am a member of both the New York and the Connecticut bars. This is the first time that I’ve had the opportunity to represent Haitians at a level where we can actually speak for ourselves to the injustices that our people are suffering in Haiti. This, first of its kind case, is setting a precedent that is so important to us Haitians. It is warning all who prey on the helpless outside of the United States, masking it with benevolence, that impunity no longer rules.

Haitians Oct 28, 2009 
No Bail For Pedophiles – No bail for Douglas Perlitz

We give special thanks to lead counsel, Assistant United States Attorney Krishna Patel, for all her hard work, along with Stephen B. Reynolds, Richard Schechter, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Investigator Rod Khattabi. And, your Honor, I’d like to also thank the Haitians who took this case at the — at great personal risk. I think there is a representative here from the Haitian National Police Department Brigade of Protection For Minors, for all of their good work in getting the first, I think in 2009, warrant for the arrest of Mr. Perlitz. I know how difficult that was. So we give maximum respect also to the teachers and employees at Project Pierre Toussaint who first stepped forward to expose Mr. Perlitz at great risk to themselves, their families, and of course the loss of income.

All the way here — I want to say to especially Margarette, that though I don’t know who you are, but all the way here we heard of the work that you have been doing with the children. Thank you.

But above all, we are here, your Honor, to support the victims of Mr. Perlitz and to ask you to consider the severest, most maximum sentence and fines being moved against Mr. Perlitz.

Before I go on, I just want to say that in the courtroom we have some of the prominent attorneys who are with us at the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, attorneys who have traveled great distances to come here and who have practiced law both in New York and in Connecticut. We have Bob Celestin, who is licensed to practice law since 1985, for 25 years. He’s a New York lawyer. He’s been a founding member of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership and one of our board members. We have with us also someone you may know, your Honor, Henri Alexandre, who is also a member of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, former assistant attorney general, and who is now in private practice. We have also in the courtroom Joseph Makhandal Champagne, another lawyer, the newest member of the Haitian Lawyer Leadership board, practicing law in New Jersey, recently elected as mayor of South Town River, New Jersey.

Haitians say No Bail for Pedophiles, October 28, 2009

Our organization, your Honor, is made up of not just lawyers. We started out in 1994 as lawyers, but found that justice in Haiti was for sale and that we had to open up our organization of network to counter a narrative about Haiti that is used to abuse Haitians in many ways. And so, your Honor, we also have with us here this network of people of all races, of all creeds, of all nationalities. Most — a lot of our work is done on Haitian radio, on Haitian Internet, and we have partners and collaborators in Haiti, and I think it was around 2005 that we first heard about this particular case in Cap-Haitien.

We’ve come here, your Honor, to ask that you give the maximum sentence to Mr. Perlitz. There is, your Honor, an unconscious message and stereotype that allows for this sort of abuse to go undetected for so long, and I want to take the moments that I have to talk about that.

But first I want to say with respect to these children, what we have here is a man who used good deeds to entice, to persuade, and to serially rape children as young as 11 years old, 12 years old. These are babies who were not being fully formed. But more than that, your Honor, if a minor, if an underaged victim of sexual abuse in the United States, the richest country in the world, who have parents, who have family, who have a stable community, who has the rule of law, well-trained public police professionals, if that minor, underage victim finds it difficult, shameful and intimidating to come forward, imagine how a child on the streets of Haiti who must depend on shelter, who must depend on food from Mr. Perlitz would feel having to come forward.

This is, to me, the vilest form of abuse. Mr. Perlitz, in exchange for giving the children shelter, giving the children basics, food, stole their innocence, stole their childhood, shredded their soul and made them live in the shadow of victimhood and powerlessness.

I believe, your Honor, that it is critically important to the healing of these children that Mr. Perlitz is given the maximum sentence for several reasons. First, because he’s only facing one charge, and we know that he has admitted to at least eight minor victims, and that one charge has — the range is from 8 to 19.7, but we know beyond that that there were many, many more victims of Mr. Perlitz.

And I want to point out how egregious, how vile and arrogant Mr. Perlitz was in his abuse; that even when there was a warrant for his arrest in Haiti, he still managed to see the children in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, your Honor, there are some very good charity workers in Haiti, some very good people whose trust was betrayed here, because unbeknownst to donors — now, I was born in Haiti, but I was raised in Stamford, Connecticut, and I find that, you know, I have talked over the years about this case with some donors, and basically Mr. Perlitz used funds given in good conscience by good and kind and generous U.S. citizens to do the most unconscionable, to barter for sex and prey on helpless children. To give them an environment, supposedly, he was supposed to give them an environment healthier than the street environment, but, in essence, that did not happen.

“Douglas Perlitz forever scarred, in the vilest way, the most vulnerable of children in the Western Hemisphere. He deserves the maximum sentence.” — Èzili Dantò of HLLN

It was very heartbreaking for us here as Haitians to sit in this audience and listen to these Haitians speak about the pain, the wound. And I see a maximum sentence, your Honor, as a recognition, a validation of the dignity and value of the lives of these Haitians. Haitians lives should not be so devalued that Mr. Perlitz can say I believe I should have the lowest possible sentence because I was an alcoholic, because I was drunk, because I was abused myself, because I had lost my father. There is absolutely no reason for a man to take an 11-year-old, make him dependent on him and then destroy his soul.

There are many, many ways, your Honor, to kill someone, and I’ve been doing work, Haiti work for a long, long time, and have come across many predators as well as good people, but definitely many predators who have gone to Haiti because it’s safe for them. It’s a place where the business people turn a blind eye when a Blan, which is the word we use to mean foreigner, to mean a white person, to mean someone who is non-Haitian, brings a child to a restaurant and then goes to a room with that child. Some people turn a blind eye, some of the restaurant people. A lot of people just turn a blind eye because they are making money.

These children may not be dead physically by the action of Mr. Perlitz, but these children suffered tragedies that have affected Haiti. They’re a part of the uncounted victims of various tragedies that we are going through right now. These children have been both spiritually and mentally killed by this sexual predator. In essence, you know, they are the walking dead. I believe that a maximum sentence will help to heal them, would help to validate them, will help elevate their dignity. And so those are the various reasons that we think a maximum sentence should be given.

But most importantly, of course, as a deterrence, because as I speak to you right now, I can tell your Honor that in the last five years I’ve dealt with many other cases of similar abuse by charity workers and priests, and not many have gotten to this level. So the deterrence, the message that this can send is beyond measure. The message that giving a maximum sentence can send is to say to those who are in Haiti right now capitalizing on the lack of safety for children, the lack of stability, the lack of resources, is that you may not get away with this. There are judges like Judge Arterton who will look at this situation and who these children can turn to, people like Krishna Patel, who will take this to the maximum.

So, your ruling, your Honor, will be an international deterrence because it is not — there are many defrocked, there are many other sort of religious folks that when they’re caught in the United States they end up in Haiti or in Africa. One of the statistics you may not know about is that most Haitians know that sexual abuse by foreign tourists, charity workers, pastors and priests in Haiti is a pandemic. Our sources report that out of every ten Haitian families, more than half in Haiti have been molested by either a priest, a missionary or a charity worker. This generation of Haitians, we here, want to put a stop to it, and we’d like to begin here right now with the sentencing of Mr. Perlitz.

To end, your Honor, there is a Haitian whose name is being used here in vain. There is a Haitian who is I guess the most venerated Black Catholic in the Catholic church. He’s a person that was enslaved, African, who came to New York in 1787. His name is Pierre Toussaint. Pierre Toussaint was a philanthropist.

He’s the founder of Catholic charitable works in the United States.

It is his name that Mr. Perlitz, and his reputation, that Mr. Perlitz used to bless his project Pierre Toussaint. And as Haitians we find that to be vile, offensive, and we wanted to stand before you and take back Pierre Toussaint from all this mess because he, in 1787, came as an enslaved African to New York. By the example of his life, he showed what generosity is, what piety is, what the gospel of Christ is, what helping others selflessly is.

One of Mr. Perlitz’s supporters said that he had such a big heart, Mr. Perlitz, that he had such kindness, that he was, in fact, the face of Christ.

We respectfully disagree, and we respectfully would like everyone to remember that Pierre Toussaint, whose name is used to grace this mess, was someone who was — actually he founded the first orphanage in New York. His remains are at the Cathedral of Saint Patrick at the moment. He’s been venerated and he’s one step towards sainthood. So, if there was an image of (what divine charity objectively is) in this world, for Haitians and the world in this mess, it would be that of Pierre Toussaint.

Thank you, your Honor.

THE COURT: Thank you very much…”

 

[Èzili Dantò (formerlly colonially named-Marguerite Laurent), is founder and President of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (“HLLN”), a network of lawyers, scholars, journalists, concerned individuals and grassroots organizations and activists, dedicated to institutionalizing the rule of law and protecting the civil and cultural rights of Haitians at home and abroad. FULL BIO | You can follow her on twitter.]

 

Minister orders Oxfam to Hand Over Files on Haiti Prostitute Scandal

The Times

February 9, 2018

By Sean O’Neill

 

Roland van Hauwermeiren, Oxfam country director for Haiti, admitted using prostitutes after the disaster in Port-au-Prince

The government has ordered Oxfam to hand over files on charity staff who paid for sex in earthquake-torn Haiti. The demand follows an investigation by The Times that revealed Oxfam covered up the use of prostitutes by senior aid workers.

Matt Hancock, the culture secretary who is responsible for charity regulation, said: “These allegations are deeply shocking and Oxfam must now provide the Charity Commission with all the evidence they hold of events that happened in Haiti as a matter of urgency.

“The reported historic behaviour of senior aid workers is abhorrent and completely unacceptable. Charities must ensure that they have the highest standards of transparency and safeguarding procedures in place to protect vulnerable people and maintain the trust of the public.”

Times investigation found that Oxfam, which receives £300 million a year in British government funds and public donations, allowed three men to resign and sacked four for gross misconduct after an inquiry into sexual exploitation, the downloading of pornography, bullying and intimidation.

A confidential report by the charity said that there had been “a culture of impunity” among some staff in Haiti and concluded that children may have been among those sexually exploited by aid workers. The 2011 report stated: “It cannot be ruled out that any of the prostitutes were under-aged.”

Oxfam was part of a massive international relief effort in Haiti after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince in 2010, which killed 220,000 people, injured 300,000 and left 1.5 million homeless.

The revelations have caused international concern and triggered widespread coverage in the press throughout Europe. This morning Liz Truss, the chief secretary to the Treasury, called the revelations “shocking, sickening and depressing”.

Gavin Shuker, Labour MP for Luton South, said: “In case you were wondering, teenage girls, in one of the poorest countries in the world, immediately following an earthquake don’t by any measure ‘choose’ prostitution.”

One of the men allowed to resign without disciplinary action was Oxfam’s country director there, Roland van Hauwermeiren. The report said that Mr Van Hauwermeiren, 68, admitted using prostitutes at the villa rented for him by Oxfam with charitable funds.

Despite the admission, the charity’s chief executive at the time, Dame Barbara Stocking, offered the Belgian “a phased and dignified exit” because sacking him would have “potentially serious implications” for the charity’s work and reputation. After the internal inquiry, two other men in management were able to resign while four were dismissed for gross misconduct, including over the use of prostitutes at the apartment block where Oxfam housed them.

Oxfam allowed staff to resign to avoid damaging the charity’s reputationJONATHAN TORGOVNIK/ GETTY IMAGES

A number of sources with knowledge of the case said they had concerns that some of the prostitutes were under age. One said that men had invited groups of young prostitutes to their guesthouse and held sex “parties”. The source claimed to have seen footage from a night there that was “like a full-on Caligula orgy”, with girls wearing Oxfam T-shirts. The charity is understood to have no record of the footage being given to the investigation.

Prostitution is illegal in Haiti and the age of consent is 18. Paying for sex is against Oxfam’s staff code of conduct and in breach of United Nations statements on the behaviour of aid workers, which the charity supported. Oxfam said that it did not report any of the incidents to the Haitian authorities because “it was extremely unlikely that any action would be taken”. None of those accused has been arrested or faced any criminal charges.

The charity said that it disclosed the sexual misconduct to the Charity Commission but the regulator told The Times last night that it never received the final investigation report and Oxfam “did not detail the precise allegations, nor did it make any indication of potential sexual crimes involving minors”. The commission said that it was asking Oxfam to review what happened and “provide us with assurance that it has learnt lessons from past incidents and is taking all necessary steps to ensure risks are minimised”.

An appendix to the investigation report raised a lengthy list of management concerns over the situation in Haiti and asked: “How far back and why did the culture of impunity in Haiti develop . . . Were there signals that could have been picked up earlier?”

The charity acknowledged that staff in Haiti had felt intimidated and unable to raise the alarm. Sources with knowledge of the investigation alleged that the report had been “watered down” and one claimed that Oxfam bosses “deemed it unnecessary to pursue some of the allegations if we could get enough to simply dismiss the individuals”.

Oxfam announced in September 2011 that a small number of staff had left after a misconduct investigation. It stressed that the issues did not concern fraud over its £70 million aid budget in Haiti but did not disclose sexual misconduct. The charity said yesterday: “Oxfam treats any allegation of misconduct extremely seriously. As soon as we became aware of a range of allegations — including of sexual misconduct — in Haiti in 2011 we launched an internal investigation. The investigation was announced publicly and staff members were suspended pending the outcome.” It added that the allegations “that under-age girls may have been involved were not proven”.

Oxfam was founded by Quakers, social campaigners and academics in Oxford in 1942. It is Britain’s fifth largest charity, with an income of £392 million last year. Its British arm employs 5,300 people worldwide and works with 22,000 volunteers.

The Left in Denial over Canadian Imperialism

Yves Engler

August 12, 2016

by Yves Engler

 

canadian-imperialism

Above: From the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: “Unprepared for Peace?: The decline of Canadian peacekeeping training (and what to do about it)(February, 2016)

As hard as it is to admit for a former junior hockey player who spends many hours writing at the neighbourhood Tim Hortons, some things are better in the USA.

For example, comparing Green Party leader Elizabeth May to her American counterpart Jill Stein on foreign-policy issues puts Canada to shame. While Stein has articulated forthright criticism on various international issues, May spouts nationalist platitudes as often as she challenges unjust policies.

Recently, Stein endorsed the Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, called for Washington and Moscow to work together and said, “US pursuit of regime change in Libya, Iraq, and Syria created the chaos that promotes power grabs by extremist militias. Many of the weapons we are sending into Syria to arm anti-government militias are winding up in the hands of ISIS. This isn’t a clever foreign policy — it’s disastrous militarism.”

canada-in-africa

For her part, May spent last weekend undermining her party’s internal democracy to protect the explicitly racist Jewish National Fund and Israel from censure. At their convention in Ottawa May and most of the Green leadership succeeded in eliminating any mention of the JNF in a resolution, which was rewritten from targeting that institution to call on the Canada Revenue Agency to revoke the status of all charities engaged in international human rights violations. Fortunately, the party leadership failed to block a resolution endorsing BDS in what is probably the single most significant pro-Palestinian victory in Canadian history.

While the Green members who bucked the party leadership to support the JNF and BDS resolutions deserve to be congratulated, the anti-Palestinian, right-wing Israeli nationalist groups who terrorized May in the lead-up to the convention raised an important, if disingenuous, point: Why were there only two resolutions dealing with foreign-policy at the convention? Why didn’t the Greens debate Canadian mining companies’ abuses abroad, special forces in Iraq/Syria, international tar sands promotion, troops on the Russian border, among numerous other important international issues?

The Green’s 2015 federal election foreign-policy platform paper was peppered with nationalist platitudes. It said “Canada is fundamentally a peaceful country” and “defender of human rights.” In laying out the party’s 2015 election position in Esprit de Corps magazine May wrote, “the world needs more Canada” and argued, “we should also support the United Nations’ ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) doctrine”, which was used to justify bombing Libya in 2011 and ousting Haiti’s elected government in 2004.

haiti-03

May backed the Conservative government’s National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy, a $30-$40 billion effort to expand the combat fleet over three decades. But the naval upgrade will strengthen Canadian officials’ capacity to bully weaker countries. The 2000 book Canadian Gunboat Diplomacy details the navy’s extensive history of flexing its muscles, including dozens of interventions in the Caribbean and pressuring Costa Rica to repay money the Royal Bank loaned to an unpopular dictator. And it’s not just history; over the past 25 years the Canadian Navy has played an increasing pro-imperial role in the Middle East and off parts of Africa.

May and Green Party policy statements have also mythologized Canadian foreign policy, citing Lester Pearson as some sort of hero. May claimed “a Green Party approach to international issues will return Canada to the values of Lester B. Pearson.” But, as I detail in Lester Pearson’s Peacekeeping: The Truth May Hurt, the former external minister and prime minister was an ardent cold warrior, who played a part in dispossessing Palestinians, creating NATO and helping the US wage war in Vietnam and Korea.

Of course, the problem runs deeper than May or the Green Party. Much of the Canadian ‘left’ is highly nationalistic, wedded to both the idea this country is a US “dependency” and international “peacekeeper”.

While far from what’s needed, internationalist minded Americans have helped expose US imperialism. Progressive people in this country have largely failed to do the same with Canadian imperialism. In fact, left-wing Canadian academics have probably written more books and articles criticizing US foreign policy than Canada’s.

Certainly the US left has built more of an infrastructure/culture willing to genuinely challenge US foreign policy. A number of prominent academics are highly critical of US foreign policy and left-wing US media outlets such as CounterPunch, Z, Dissident Voice, Common Dreams, etc. shun foreign-policy apologetics.

shipbuildimg-project

In Canada the most prominent ‘left-wing’ foreign-policy think tank is led by Peggy Mason who was a key adviser to Conservative foreign minister Joe Clark in the late 1980s and has held numerous diplomatic postings and UN positions since. During a 2012 National Defence Committee parliamentary meeting on NATO the head of the Rideau Institute noted, “I’m talking as someone who has spent the better part of the last 10 years working with NATO.” Mason trained NATO commanders for peace and crisis stabilization operations and boasted she trained the general Charles Bouchard, who led the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, which the Rideau Institute head described as a “very important mission.”

The Rideau Institute’s lead collaborator/advisor is an employee of the Canadian Forces who aggressively supported Canada’s worst foreign-policy crime of the first decade of the 21st century (the coup in Haiti). Walter Dorn’s Rideau Institute reports are usually co-published by Canada’s leading left think tank, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. While the CCPA Monitor publishes some articles critical of Canadian foreign policy, its international affairs reports, which receive the bulk of resources, do not offer serious criticism. A number of recent reports have called for adjustments to military priorities while accepting the broad outlines of Canadian militarism. In February they co-published Unprepared for Peace?: The decline of Canadian peacekeeping training (and what to do about it). On the cover of the report a white Canadian soldier, with a massive M-16 strapped around his shoulder, is bent over to hold the hand of a young black boy. In the background are Canadian and UN colours. A call for the Canadian Forces to offer its members more peacekeeping training, Unprepared for peace? is premised on the erroneous notion that UN missions are by definition socially useful and it repeatedly implies that Canada’s most significant recent contribution to a UN mission — the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) — was an operation we should be proud of.

Last year the CCPA and Rideau Institute co-published Smart Defence: A Plan for Rebuilding Canada’s Military, which introduces the issue this way: “When the Harper government came to power in 2006, it pledged to rebuild Canada’s military. But for nine long years, it has failed to deliver on most of its promises, from new armoured trucks and supply ships to fighter jets and search-and-rescue planes.” Author Michael Byers peppers the report with various militarist claims. Canada “faces challenges at home and abroad that require a well-equipped and capable military,” he writes. At another point he says “the Canadian Army cannot deploy large numbers of troops overseas because of a shortage of armoured trucks.” In other words, let’s improve Canada’s military capacity.

While mostly providing a counterpoint to the dominant media, Rabble also publishes some blatantly establishment foreign-policy pieces. It regularly runs Gerald Caplan’s apologetics for the US–Britain–Canada backed Paul Kagame, Africa’s most bloodstained dictator. In late 2015 Rabble ran interviews by CCPA research affiliate Christopher Majka of Libyan, Syrian and Russian invitees to the Halifax International Security Forum, which is sponsored by NATO, the Department of National Defence and various arms firms.

Last week Rabble published a blog by Penney Kome, former editor of the now defunct left website Straight Goods, claiming Donald Trump is soft on Russia. She wrote: “Three of Trump’s top aids have extensive Russian connections, (Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Carter Page) and Trump’s policies — such as they are — are strongly pro-Russian. It’s only fair to wonder what his Russophillia means for NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and for former Soviet Union countries that Vladimir Putin may still want to annex, such as Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.” Kome’s piece comes a few weeks after Ottawa announced it would send 450 troops and armoured vehicles to Latvia to be permanently stationed on Russia’s border.

During his campaign to win the Democratic Party nomination Bernie Sanders, who largely avoided foreign-policy before endorsing a hawk for president, at least criticized Washington’s role in overthrowing Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Salvador Allende in Chile as well as the US war in Indochina. It made me wonder if a leading Canadian politician had ever criticized a past foreign policy.

It’s hard to imagine an NDP leader saying, “we shouldn’t blindly follow Washington’s war aims since that led Lester Pearson’s government to deliver US bombing threats to North Vietnam in violation of international law.” Or, “as we evaluate our support for this UN mission let’s not forget the blow Canadian peacekeepers delivered to central Africa when they helped undermine Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba.”

patricslumumba-2

Further reading: Canada’s Role in the Assassination of Patrice Lumumba

It’s as if there’s a sign hanging in Parliament that says: “foreign policy mythologizers only.” A maxim Elizabeth May seems to have embraced, to the shame of all Canadians who really do want this country to be a force for good in the world.

The Clintons Do Haiti: Keep the Natives From Breeding

Counterpunch

March 15, 2016

 

Cut through all of Hillary Clinton’s reassuring lingo about “empowering women” and consider the realities of Clintonian population policy in Haiti.

As revealed in an internal U.S. Agency for International Development report, the fundamental goal of the American government is to keep the natives from breeding.

The June, 1993, document (unearthed by Ken Silverstein in CounterPunch) states policy “targets” for Haiti baldly: to obtain 200,000 new “acceptors” of contraception; a “social marketing component” target of “6,000 cycles of pills/month,” and the establishment of 23 facilities to provide sterilizations–soothingly referred to as “voluntary surgical contraception,” a goal that has been exceeded.

There is no mention of any “targets” with regard to women’s health.

The cynicism of the “empowerment” rhetoric is also apparent in the memo’s main recommendation, the “demedicalization or liberalization of service delivery.” The agency suggests “elimination of the practice of requiring physician visits” before doling out hormonal methods.

In plainer English, this means that AID feels that doctors in Haiti need not waste time with pelvic exams or pap smears; just get the “acceptors” on stream with the hormonal method of choice.

A Brooklyn-based Haitian women’s group, Women of Koalisyon, published a pamphlet detailing abuses at clinics in Haiti funded by AID.

Local clinics offered food and money to encourage sterilization. “Acceptors” were promised that vasectomies were not only reversible, but would help prevent AIDS. Women were offered clothing in exchange for agreeing to use Norplant (the five-year contraceptive implant), which led to a host of problems including constant bleeding, headaches, dizziness, nausea, radical weight loss, depression and fatigue. Demands that the Norplant rods be taken out were obstructed.

Such brute realities of population control are rarely mentioned in the United States, where reports from the U.N. population conference in Cairo have depicted a clash between libertarian respect for individual choice and the medieval tyranny of the Catholic or Muslim clergy. The Clinton Administration is not the first to flaunt its concern for individual rights where such issues are concerned. Back in 1974, in Nixon’s White House, Henry Kissinger commissioned National Security Study Memorandum 200, which addressed population issues.

Prefiguring the current “empowerment” shoe polish, Kissinger stressed that the United States should “help minimize charges of imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with the right of the individual to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of children.”

But the true concern of Kissinger’s analysts was maintenance of U.S. access to Third World resources. They worried that the “political consequences” of population growth could produce internal instability in nations “in whose advancement the United States is interested.” With famine and food riots and the breakdown of social order in such countries, “the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized.”

The authors of the report noted laconically that the United States, with 6% of the world’s population, used about a third of its resources. Curbs on Third World population would ensure that local consumption would not increase, and possibly affect availability of Third World resources. As a natural extension of this logic, the report favored sterilization over food aid.

By 1977, Reimert Ravenholt, the director of AID’s population program, was saying that his agency’s goal was to sterilize one-quarter of the world’s women. The gearing between Third World fecundity and First World prosperity is still a core policy theme. The immensely wealthy Pew Charitable Trusts–a cluster of foundations with an abiding interest in population control, recently issued a report that stated frankly: “The average American’s interest in maintaining high standards of living has been a prime motivator for U.S. population policy from its earliest formation and it is likely that this will continue for the foreseeable future.”

[Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His new book is Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence (with JoAnn Wypijewski and Kevin Alexander Gray). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch.]

FLASHBACK TO 2015: The Star Studded White Savior Industrial Complex in Haiti

The Feminist Wire

March 11, 2015

by Natalia Cardona

 

Patricia Arquette’s recent remarks during the Oscars made for strong debate among feminists of color and white feminists in the U.S. Arquette stated that women, in this case white women, helped gays and people of color in the U.S. in their struggles for their human rights, and that now it was their turn to help women [read: white women] achieve wage equality. The remarks spurred much anger and questioning of her white privilege. That same dynamic occurred when Sean Penn stood up to present the Academy Award for Best Picture to “Birdman” director Alejandro González Iñárritu and said, “Who gave this sonofabitch a green card?” The sentiment, widely shared on twitter by Latin Americans in the U.S., was that the Oscars proved that even when Latin Americans win the highest honor, someone will without a doubt ask for your papers.

For me, the question also became about what happens when people like Arquette and Penn take their white privilege into developing countries like Haiti, placing themselves in the role of white savior. Because what seems to have been overshadowed by both of their highly insensitive remarks about the gay community, communities of color in the United States, and immigrants is that both of these personalities believe themselves to be supporting Haiti’s sustainable development.

What does it mean when people who don’t recognize their white privilege or racist actions—Arquette recently dressed as a stereotypical “Chola” for Halloween and Penn never apologized for his remarks at the Oscars in fact he stated he “didn’t give a f*ck about all of this.”—go abroad to “help” Brown and Black people through development projects?

Arquette’s commentary promotes the idea that the U.S. is a post-racial, post homophobic society with a civil rights movement that has achieved full equality for people of color and a gay rights movement that has secured gains for LGBTQ communities in all fifty states. These assertions are expressed in a country where 64,000 African American women are missing and where every week so far this year, one transgendered woman, most of whom are women of color, has been killed because of who they are. While Penn’s remarks were dismissed by Iñárritu as “hilarious,” many of us who are considered Latin Americans did not find them so funny. For us, it was another humiliation and a reminder that racism and white privilege are the forefront of some of the toughest challenges for Brown and Black freedom and true equality.

Given that Arquette doesn’t understand how she could possibly be White, a woman, poor, and still be privileged, I politely direct her to Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Penn should know better given his liberal activist persona, but what kind of expectations can one have of a man who was charged with domestic assault and pleaded to a misdemeanor? Yes, these are the type of people that find it quite easy to go to developing countries, develop reputations as “do-gooders,” and become the epitome of white saviors without any question as to their backgrounds or even whether their skills are fit for the job. Whereas, Haitians who set the example for all Latin American nations by being the first to overthrow colonialism and ban slavery outright are constantly being viewed through a white gaze that has sought to entrench the prejudice that they are not capable of handling their own development and freedom. What does it mean when Arquette and Penn export this narrow and ahistorical view of the world to Haiti and other places in the Global South?

Arquette and Penn’s comments immediately reminded me of Teju Cole’s assessment of the industrial White savior complex and its impact on development policies that focus on people of color both at home, here in the U.S., and abroad. Cole has said that the “white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.” Sounds familiar?

The White savior industrial complex, according to Cole, plays an important role in the current system of global pillage. It provides a safety valve for unbearable conditions created by foreign imperialists in places like Haiti. In this context Arquette and Penn, as well as other white personalities, play an important role in sustaining that very oppressive system. The challenge for these white saviors, according to Cole, is in thinking beyond their prime objective of doing good and feeling good. These celebrities don’t see or don’t want to see the machinations of power behind extreme situations like those in Haiti. The role colonial powers like France, U.S. foreign policy, and non-governmental organizations play in undermining Haiti’s independence scape these White “saviors” because as Cole has already stated this industrial complex “is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”

slideshow_feature_4When I look at Arquette’s charity, Give Love, through this White savior lens and as part of an industrial complex I cannot help but challenge its role in Haiti. Arquette’s organization claims to support “Community-led sanitation projects to improve public health & create jobs around recycling,” but upon closer inspection of its website, it’s extremely difficult to identify how, in fact, communities in Haiti are leading these projects. If she is really trying to “help” people in Haiti, doesn’t it behoove her to ask Haitians if and how they want help and ensure Haitians themselves are leading the changes they want to see? When organizations like Give Love only pay lip service to community leadership they dismiss the autonomy, dignity, and self-respect of the very people they are claiming to help. If you ask Penn about his charity the first thing he will spout out and that is very evident in his website is that he hires mostly Haitians. Good for him! But hiring Haitians to implement your vision and that of others with privilege only perpetuates prejudices and reinforces the oppressive system that Haitians have been trying to fight off for centuries. In fact, Penn went from being a do-gooder whose ambitions may cause more harm than good to being a political operative when he asserted that the current president of Haiti, Michel Martelly, had transitioned to his post democratically and peacefully and then proceeded to dismiss the thousands of Haitians that regularly protest Martelly’s presidency and call for his resignation. Because as former Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive put it: “the line between intrusion, support and aid is very fine.”

Currently, most aid to Haiti is directed to more than 300 officially recognized non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This situation begs the question: are NGOs like Arquette’s and Penn’s good or bad for Haiti’s development and sustainable independence? Are they somehow less corrupt then the Haitian government, or are they just tools of foreign imperialist efforts, wittingly or unwittingly playing the role of undermining Haitian autonomy and independence?

A first glance at the work of Arquette’s charity in Haiti would have the average person nodding in support, myself included. Who wouldn’t agree with the need for improved sanitation in a global context where more people have a cell phone then a toilet! Would I donate the $50 so that a family or school has a toilet that will ensure sanitation needs are met? Sure, I would. And as for Penn’s work, he’s brought millions of dollars to Haiti but he also has done real damage to Haitian autonomy by working with the people in the halls of power including the U.S. government and army, MINUSTAH, and the IMF to implement projects that support the existing system, which was founded by imperialist nations including the U.S., rather than question that system and truly put Haitians in the proverbial driver’s seat of their own freedom!

Yes, there is much more to “making a difference” than making a donation, especially for privileged whites from the USA, given the role that U.S. foreign policy has played in the underdevelopment of Haiti! If Arquette and Penn want to support Haiti, they and their organizations should also consider addressing questions of U.S. foreign policy which has swung from invasion and military occupation to the removal of President Aristide. Because there is a very small difference between using your privilege to transform the world and just making yourself feel good.

 

[Natalia Cardona is from Guatemala.  She has been active on issues of militarism and economic justice for more than a decade. She began her career at UNIFEM’s Andean Regional Office in Ecuador. Natalia also spent nine years at American Friends Service Committee lobbying to change U.S. military and economic policy in Latin America and the Caribbean region. She also worked as Program Director for the Center for Women’s Global Leadership leading their work on militarism and violence against women as well as social and economic rights. And is currently the Membership and Constituency Engagement Manager at the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (a global network of feminist organizations).]

Red Cross Built Exactly 6 Homes For Haiti With Nearly Half A Billion Dollars In Donations

June 4, 2015
HAITI HOUSING
The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted the logo of the American Red Cross.

In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.

Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.

The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.

The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.

The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.

After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.

Aid organizations from around the world have struggled after the earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But ProPublica and NPR’s investigation shows that many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.

One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.

In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group was failing in Haiti and that senior managers had made “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, “he is the only hard working one among them” and “the ones that we have hired are not strong so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs.”

The Red Cross won’t disclose details of how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.

Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget.

In statements, the Red Cross cited the challenges all groups have faced in post-quake Haiti, including the country’s dysfunctional land title system.

“Like many humanitarian organizations responding in Haiti, the American Red Cross met complications in relation to government coordination delays, disputes over land ownership, delays at Haitian customs, challenges finding qualified staff who were in short supply and high demand, and the cholera outbreak, among other challenges,” the charity said.

The group said it responded quickly to internal concerns, including hiring an expert to train staff on cultural competency after St. Fort’s memo. While the group won’t provide a breakdown of its projects, the Red Cross said it has done more than 100. The projects include repairing 4,000 homes, giving several thousand families temporary shelters, donating $44 million for food after the earthquake, and helping fund the construction of a hospital.

“Millions of Haitians are safer, healthier, more resilient, and better prepared for future disasters thanks to generous donations to the American Red Cross,” McGovern wrote in a recent report marking the fifth anniversary of the earthquake.

In other promotional materials, the Red Cross said it has helped “more than 4.5 million” individual Haitians “get back on their feet.”

It has not provided details to back up the claim. And Jean-Max Bellerive, Haiti’s prime minister at the time of the earthquake, doubts the figure, pointing out the country’s entire population is only about 10 million.

“No, no,” Bellerive said of the Red Cross’ claim, “it’s not possible.”

When the earthquake struck Haiti in January 2010, the Red Cross was facing a crisis of its own. McGovern had become chief executive just 18 months earlier, inheriting a deficit and an organization that had faced scandals after 9/11 and Katrina.

Inside the Red Cross, the Haiti disaster was seen as “a spectacular fundraising opportunity,” recalled one former official who helped organize the effort. Michelle Obama, the NFL and a long list of celebrities appealed for donations to the group.

The Red Cross kept soliciting money well after it had enough for the emergency relief that is the group’s stock in trade. Doctors Without Borders, in contrast, stopped fundraising off the earthquake after it decided it had enough money. The donations to the Red Cross helped the group erase its more-than $100 million deficit.

The Red Cross ultimately raised far more than any other charity.

A year after the quake, McGovern announced that the Red Cross would use the donations to make a lasting impact in Haiti.

We asked the Red Cross to show us around its projects in Haiti so we could see the results of its work. It declined. So earlier this year we went to Campeche to see one of the group’s signature projects for ourselves.

Street vendors in the dusty neighborhood immediately pointed us to Jean Jean Flaubert, the head of a community group that the Red Cross set up as a local sounding board.

Sitting with us in their sparse one-room office, Flaubert and his colleagues grew angry talking about the Red Cross. They pointed to the lack of progress in the neighborhood and the healthy salaries paid to expatriate aid workers.

“What the Red Cross told us is that they are coming here to change Campeche. Totally change it,” said Flaubert. “Now I do not understand the change that they are talking about. I think the Red Cross is working for themselves.”

The Red Cross’ initial plan said the focus would be building homes — an internal proposal put the number at 700. Each would have finished floors, toilets, showers, even rainwater collection systems. The houses were supposed to be finished in January 2013.

None of that ever happened. Carline Noailles, who was the project’s manager in Washington, said it was endlessly delayed because the Red Cross “didn’t have the know-how.”

Another former official who worked on the Campeche project said, “Everything takes four times as long because it would be micromanaged from DC, and they had no development experience.”

Shown an English-language press release from the Red Cross website, Flaubert was stunned to learn of the project’s $24 million budget — and that it is due to end next year.

“Not only is [the Red Cross] not doing it,” Flaubert said, “now I’m learning that the Red Cross is leaving next year. I don’t understand that.” (The Red Cross says it did tell community leaders about the end date. It also accused us of “creating ill will in the community which may give rise to a security incident.”)

The project has since been reshaped and downscaled. A road is being built. Some existing homes have received earthquake reinforcement and a few schools are being repaired. Some solar street lights have been installed, though many broke and residents say others are unreliable.

The group’s most recent press release on the project cites achievements such as training school children in disaster response.

The Red Cross said it has to scale back its housing plans because it couldn’t acquire the rights to land. No homes will be built.

Other Red Cross infrastructure projects also fizzled.

In January 2011, McGovern announced a $30 million partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. The agency would build roads and other infrastructure in at least two locations where the Red Cross would build new homes.

But it took more than two and a half years, until August 2013, for the Red Cross just to sign an agreement with USAID on the program, and even that was for only one site. The program was ultimately canceled because of a land dispute.

A Government Accountability Office report attributed the severe delays to problems “in securing land title and because of turnover in Red Cross leadership” in its Haiti program.

Other groups also run into trouble with land titles and other issues. But they also ultimately built 9,000 homes compared to the Red Cross’ six.

Asked about the Red Cross’ housing projects in Haiti, David Meltzer, the group’s general counsel and chief international officer, said changing conditions forced changes in plans. “If we had said, ‘All we’re going to do is build new homes,’ we’d still be looking for land,” he said.

The USAID project’s collapse left the Red Cross grasping for ways to spend money earmarked for it.

“Any ideas on how to spend the rest of this?? (Besides the wonderful helicopter idea?),” McGovern wrote to Meltzer in a November 2013 email obtained by ProPublica and NPR. “Can we fund Conrad’s hospital? Or more to PiH[Partners in Health]? Any more shelter projects?”

It’s not clear what helicopter idea McGovern was referring to or if it was ever carried out. The Red Cross would say only that her comments were “grounded in the American Red Cross’ strategy and priorities, which focus on health and housing.”

Another signature project, known in Creole as “A More Resilient Great North,” is supposed to rehabilitate roads in poor, rural communities and to help them get clean water and sanitation.

But two years after it started, the $13 million effort has been faltering badly. An internal evaluation from March found residents were upset because nothing had been done to improve water access or infrastructure or to make “contributions of any sort to the well being of households,” the report said.

So much bad feeling built up in one area that the population “rejects the project.”

Instead of making concrete improvements to living conditions, the Red Cross has launched hand-washing education campaigns. The internal evaluation noted that these were “not effective when people had no access to water and no soap.” (The Red Cross declined to comment on the project.)

The group’s failures went beyond just infrastructure.

When a cholera epidemic raged through Haiti nine months after the quake, the biggest part of the Red Cross’ response a plan to distribute soap and oral rehydration salts — was crippled by “internal issues that go unaddressed,” wrote the director of the Haiti program in her May 2011 memo.

Throughout that year, cholera was a steady killer. By September 2011, when the death toll had surpassed 6,000, the project was still listed as “very behind schedule” according to another internal document.

The Red Cross said in a statement that its cholera response, including a vaccination campaign, has continued for years and helped millions of Haitians.

But while other groups also struggled early responding to cholera, some performed well.

“None of these people had to die. That’s what upsets me,” said Paul Christian Namphy, a Haitian water and sanitation official who helped lead the effort to fight cholera. He says early failures by the Red Cross and other NGOs had a devastating impact. “These numbers should have been zero.”

So why did the Red Cross’ efforts fall so short? It wasn’t just that Haiti is a hard place to work.

“They collected nearly half a billion dollars,” said a congressional staffer who helped oversee Haiti reconstruction. “But they had a problem. And the problem was that they had absolutely no expertise.”

Lee Malany was in charge of the Red Cross’ shelter program in Haiti starting in 2010. He remembers a meeting in Washington that fall where officials did not seem to have any idea how to spend millions of dollars set aside for housing. Malany says the officials wanted to know which projects would generate good publicity, not which projects would provide the most homes.

“When I walked out of that meeting I looked at the people that I was working with and said, ‘You know this is very disconcerting, this is depressing,’” he recalled.

The Red Cross said in a statement its Haiti program has never put publicity over delivering aid.

Malany resigned the next year from his job in Haiti. “I said there’s no reason for me to stay here. I got on the plane and left.”

Sometimes it wasn’t a matter of expertise, but whether anybody was filling key jobs. An April 2012 organizational chart obtained by ProPublica and NPR lists 9 of 30 leadership positions in Haiti as vacant, including slots for experts on health and shelter.

The Red Cross said vacancies and turnover were inevitable because of “the security situation, separation from family for international staff, and the demanding nature of the work.”

The constant upheaval took a toll. Internal documents refer to repeated attempts over years to “finalize” and “complete” a strategic plan for the Haiti program, efforts that were delayed by changes in senior management. As late as March 2014, more than four years into a six-year program, an internal update cites a “revised strategy” still awaiting “final sign-off.”

The Red Cross said settling on a plan early would have been a mistake. “It would be hard to create the perfect plan from the beginning in a complicated place like Haiti,” it said. “But we also need to begin, so we create plans that are continually revised.”

Those plans were further undermined by the Red Cross’ reliance on expats. Noailles, the Haitian development professional who worked for the Red Cross on the Campeche project, said expat staffers struggled in meetings with local officials.

“Going to meetings with the community when you don’t speak the language is not productive,” she said. Sometimes, she recalled, expat staffers would skip such meetings altogether.

The Red Cross said it has “made it a priority to hire Haitians” despite lots of competition for local professionals, and that over 90 percent of its staff is Haitian. The charity said it used a local human resources firm to help.

Yet very few Haitians have made it into the group’s top echelons in Haiti, according to five current and former Red Cross staffers as well as staff lists obtained by ProPublica and NPR.

That not only affected the group’s ability to work in Haiti, it was also expensive.

According to an internal Red Cross budgeting document for the project in Campeche, the project manager – a position reserved for an expatriate – was entitled to allowances for housing, food and other expenses, home leave trips, R&R four times a year, and relocation expenses. In all, it added up to $140,000.

Compensation for a senior Haitian engineer — the top local position — was less than one-third of that, $42,000 a year.

Shelim Dorval, a Haitian administrator who worked for the Red Cross coordinating travel and housing for expatriate staffers, recalled thinking it was a waste to spend so much to bring in people with little knowledge of Haiti when locals were available.

“For each one of those expats, they were having high salaries, staying in a fancy house, and getting vacation trips back to their countries,” Dorval said. “A lot of money was spent on those people who were not Haitian, who had nothing to do with Haiti. The money was just going back to the United States.”

Soon after the earthquake, McGovern, the Red Cross CEO, said the group would make sure donors knew exactly what happened to their money.

The Red Cross would “lead the effort in transparency,” she pledged. “We are happy to share the way we are spending our dollars.”

That hasn’t happened. The Red Cross’ public reports offer only broad categories about where $488 million in donations has gone. The biggest category is shelter, at about $170 million. The others include health, emergency relief and disaster preparedness.

It has declined repeated requests to disclose the specific projects, to explain how much money went to each or to say what the results of each project were.

There is reason to doubt the Red Cross’ claims that it helped 4.5 million Haitians. An internal evaluation found that in some areas, the Red Cross reported helping more people than even lived in the communities. In other cases, the figures were low, and in others double-counting went uncorrected.

In describing its work, the Red Cross also conflates different types of aid, making it more difficult to assess the charity’s efforts in Haiti.

For example, while Red Cross says it provided more than 130,000 people with homes, that includes thousands of people who were not actually given homes, but rather were “trained in proper construction techniques.” (That was first reported by the Haiti blog of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.)

The figure includes people who got short-term rental assistance or were housed in several thousand “transitional shelters,” which are temporary structures that can get eaten up by termites or tip over in storms. It also includes modest improvements on 5,000 temporary shelters.

The Red Cross also won’t break down what portion of donations went to overhead.

McGovern told CBS News a few months after the quake, “Minus the 9 cents overhead, 91 cents on the dollar will be going to Haiti. And I give you my word and my commitment, I’m banking my integrity, my own personal sense of integrity on that statement.”

But the reality is that less money went to Haiti than 91 percent. That’s because in addition to the Red Cross’ 9 percent overhead, the other groups that got grants from the Red Cross also have their own overhead.

In one case, the Red Cross sent $6 million to the International Federation of the Red Cross for rental subsidies to help Haitians leave tent camps. The IFRC then took out 26 percent for overhead and what the IFRC described as program-related “administration, finance, human resources” and similar costs.

Beyond all that, the Red Cross also spends another piece of each dollar for what it describes as “program costs incurred by the American Red Cross in managing” the projects done by other groups.

The American Red Cross’ management and other costs consumed an additional 24 percent of the money on one project, according to the group’s statements and internal documents. The actual work, upgrading shelters, was done by the Swiss and Spanish Red Cross societies.

“It’s a cycle of overhead,” said Jonathan Katz, the Associated Press reporter in Haiti at the time of the earthquake who tracked post-disaster spending for his book, The Big Truck That Went By. “It was always going to be the American Red Cross taking a 9 percent cut, re-granting to another group, which would take out their cut.”

Given the results produced by the Red Cross’ projects in Haiti, Bellerive, the former prime minister, said he has a hard time fathoming what’s happened to donors’ money.

“Five hundred million dollars in Haiti is a lot of money,” he said. “I’m not a big mathematician, but I can make some additions. I know more or less the cost of things. Unless you don’t pay for the gasoline the same price I was paying, unless you pay people 20 times what I was paying them, unless the cost of the house you built was five times the cost I was paying, it doesn’t add up for me.”

WATCH: Haiti – The Role of the UN, International Aid, and NGOs in Haiti

Video published on Jan 28, 2015

The year 2015 marks the 100th anniversary of the US occupation of Haiti and 10 years of the UN Stabilization Mission in the country. Telesur reports looks at the role of the UN mission through interviews with Sandra Honore, special representative of the Secretary General of the UN and chief of the UN Mission in Haiti (Minustah) and various participants in Haitian political and social life. They offer their different points of view and conflicting balance sheets of the role played by the United Nations in stabilizing the country and, along with other agencies, USAID, and NGOs, in providing aid after the devastating 2010 earthquake. Many social activists charge that the aid came with a political agenda attached and little of the funds trickled down to help those most at need. Source: teleSUR

United Nations Covers Up Child Rape in Africa and the Buying of Sex in Haiti

InnerCity Press

June 18, 2015

by Mathew Russell Lee

With scandals surrounding UN Peacekeeping, from covering up child rape by French “peacekeepers” in the Central African Republic to buying sex in Haiti and selling UN Police jobs in the DR Congo, on June 18 UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was scheduled to give a speech to UN Force Commanders in Conference Room 9 of UN Headquarters in an open meeting, following a public photo-op with the commanders.

But when Inner City Press showed up for the photo op, UN Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous directed one of his officials to tell Inner City Press to leave.

Inner City Press refused, noting that Ban Ki-moon’s appearance was listed in the online Media Alert of the UN Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit (MALU). Nevertheless, Ladsous’ official insisted, and Ladsous himself began to film Inner City Press with his phone.

When Ban Ki-moon and his security detail of at least four arrived, they proceeded into Conference Room 9, as did Inner City Press accompanied by a MALU staff member and a staffer from UN Photo. But just as Ban Ki-moon began speaking, two of his security officers came over and told Inner City Press to leave. In the hall they said that “the organizer” — Ladsous — had ordered it.

Inner City Press asked, if some UN official tells you to throw out the media, you just do it? “If he told you to throw me on the ground, would you throw me on the ground?”

“Somebody doesn’t have to tell me to throw you on the ground, if I’ve got to put you on the ground, I put you on the ground,” came the response. Audio here. Periscope video here. Now YouTube video permalink here.



Another security officer said, at this point the media is not coming in. That’s it.

This is called censorship. And it happened right in front of Ban Ki-moon.  When Ban came out of Conference Room 9, he had a discussion with Ladsous – what about? – then walked on by. Periscope Video II here. This is Ban’s UN, UNtransparent, descended to censorship.

Inner City Press has reported not only on Ladsous’ cover up of rapes in CAR (and before that in Minova in the DRC and Tabit in Darfur), but also on a growing lack of transparency in Ban Ki-moon’s UN, including the reported use of Ban’s name by his nephew “Dennis” Bahn while purporting to sell real estate in Vietnam to the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar. (Bahn works for Colliers International, which rents office space to and for Ban’s UN system.) Now, outright censorship.

The old UN Correspondents Association has said nothing, just as they said nothing and more when Ladsous said he would not answer Inner City Press and Ban’s spokesman decided not to call on Inner City Press to put a question to Ladsous, on the CAR rapes and cover up. The new Free UN Coalition for Access has demanded an explanation and response from MALU and the Department of Public Information above it. A senior UN official told Inner City Press, “There is no court.”

This use of UN Security is ironic, given that as Inner City Press reported on June 17 and asked Ban’s deputy spokesman about on June 18, Ban shook hands in the UN in Geneva with a person on the US Al-Qaeda terrorist list, photo here. But today’s UN has become the source of lawless censorship, amid its scandals. Watch this site.

August 11, 2015: On rapes by UN peacekeeping in Central African Republic (CAR), InnerCity Press asks UN if Ban Ki-moon will disclose findings and punish men:

 

August 13, 2015: When InnerCity Press asks US Samantha Power about UN rapes and the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) cover up in Tabit, Darfur, she ignores the question and walks off the podium:

 

PRESS RELEASE on the Assassination Attempt Against Our Comrade Yannick Etienne [Haiti]

Batay Ouvriye

February 3, 2015

boheader

With this document, we wish to inform all our comrades of the entire world that a handful of fake “union centrals” serving the bosses attacked our fellow militant, Yannick Etienne, in fact attempting to assassinate her.

With much more details, the denunciation Note of the Batay Ouvriye Textile and Garment Union (SOTA – BO) is below.
At the same time, we exhort our friends and sympathizers to also denounce this act internationally with cc to cnoha.haiti@gmail.com; sainteloid@yahoo.com

THE FIGHT HAS JUST BEGUN!

SENDIKA OUVRIYE TEKSTIL AK ABIMAN
(SOTA-BO)
TEXTILE & CLOTHING WORKERS UNION
Blvd Toussaint Louverture/1, Imp Templier sindicatsota@gmail.com 3786-4038

Port-Au-Prince January 30, 2015

batay-ouvriye

Press Release

The Executive Committee of the Textile & Clothing Workers Union-Batay Ouvriye firmly denounces an assassination attempt against our comrade Yannick Etienne at the SONAPI Industrial Complex on January 30, 2015. This assassination attempt happened after a meeting with the MULTIWEAR S.A. administration on the question of salary arrears for the workers in accordance to an agreement with the owners; as Yannick came out of the meeting, she was confronted by a group of people armed with screw drivers, rocks, and scissors claiming to belong to an organization calling itself ROHAM, which is affiliated with CNOHA under the leadership of Dominique St. Eloi.

However, the chief commando leaders of the assassination attempt are Elmerome Bresier, Julien Frenel, Daniel (so-called) and many more un-identified individuals (who are working in the factory), who assaulted verbally and physically our comrade, threatening her, punctured 3 tires of her car with scissors and threw rocks at her car. This criminal assault on our comrade comes after a campaign of defamation by CNOHA and ROHAM against us at SOTA-BO spewing lies to the workers about some supposedly U.S. $114 million donated through us to the workers of MULTIWEAR. As we were in negotiations and signed an agreement with MULTIWEAR, we were always in a position to counter their lies and assert to the workers that those people are quacks and are using this lie about the U.S. $114 million to put them in total darkness. They are not defending workers’ interests by lying.

Therefore, with this cowardly assassination attempt by those scoundrels against our comrade, we demand that the MAST (Ministry of Social Affairs and Work) take action against those so-called union leaders who think they are bigwigs who can do whatever they want in the name of union freedom. Gangsters like these should not be free to roam as union leaders. Their actions are serious violations of Article 242 of the Labor Code, which says that MAST must take immediate and effective sanctions. This is why we are denouncing the assassination attempt before the national and international public opinion. And we will pursue every legal means at our disposal so that such acts, which are not worthy of unionists are not repeated. We are telling members of ROHAM and CNOHA, that Yannick Etienne’s life and that of all the members of SOTA-BO working in MULTIWEAR and our other union chapters are in the hands of those who made this assassination attempt. We demand that the Haitian State be accountable.

DOWN WITH YELLOW UNIONS THAT WANT TO DECEIVE WORKERS AND DEDICATED UNIONISTS!!!

LONG LIVE A CREDIBLE, SERIOUS AND COMBATIVE UNION MOVEMENT!!!

FLASHBACK: CrossTalk on Haiti: Year of Agony

Video uploaded on Jan 12, 2011

“On this edition of Peter Lavelle’s CrossTalk, he asks his guests why aid efforts in Haiti have largely failed. Who is to blame? Is it the U.N., the U.S. and its NGOs or is it the fault of the Haitian people?”