Living and dying in Port-au-Prince

(AP Photo/MINUSTAH, Logan Abassi)

The Haitian city of Jacmel, where much of the Canadian Forces’ relief efforts will be focused, has been as hard hit by last week’s earthquake as some of the most devastated neighbourhoods in Port-au-Prince.

The city of 40,000 is connected to the capital by mountain roads that have been made all but impassible by crevices and enormous chalky boulders that sheared off from cliffs during the earthquake. A Maclean’s reporter abandoned the car he hired when it was unable to continue and reached the city by flagging down a passing motorcycle. Subsistence farmers living in these hills complain that no aid has reached them.

“Nobody has come. We need food, medication, tents. The rain falls here every night and the children are sick and suffering,” Filamis Jimmy, a 34-year-old man, says. He and his family of six children are living under sheets beside the road, eating patties made of flour and water and fried in oil. Military engineers plus soldiers from 3rd Battalion, Royal 22^nd Regiment are deploying in the nearby town of Léogâne. They may soon push into the mountains where Jimmy and other rural victims of the earthquake live.

Jacmel itself is rubble and twisted metal. The city’s colonial-era architecture is cracked and toppling. Thousands of residents live in an enormous makeshift camp in a soccer field in the centre of the city. There is an open pit at one end that is used as a latrine. Huge vats of rice and beans supplied by the World Food Programme were cooking over open fires in the camp Wednesday, though some residents say they have had little to eat and those who hand out food in the camp give it to their friends and family. They say police beat people who swarm food trucks during aid deliveries.

The Canadian Forces are now in Jacmel in sizeable numbers. HMCS Halifax is floating offshore with 220 sailors on board. A medical unit from the Canadian Disaster Assistance Response team is also here.

The Halifax was diverted to Haiti immediately after the quake and arrived without stockpiles of emergency aid but made several deliveries of food and water. “We were able to spare what we could,” Lt.-Cmdr. John Wilson says.

Sailors from the ship have planned a latrine for the soccer field camp and have cleared rubble from the grounds of St. Michel’s Hospital, which was severely damaged during the quake. Dozens of earthquake victims are on the hospital grounds now. Some are in field hospital tents, erected where work crews from the Halifax hauled away debris. Other lie under scraps of cloth. All are at least off the ground, on cots or benches that have been pushed together.

DART’s medical contingent is at the hospital, working with Haitian doctors and nurses, and with some American civilian doctors who showed up and offered to help. Many of the injured suffer from fractures and open wounds. “We’re starting to do major surgeries,” Maj. Annie Bouchard, DART’s medical platoon commander, says. These include amputations.

“Some of the Haitian doctors are jealous because the Canadian doctors are giving such good aid,” one patient says. “The Canadians will do whatever it takes to help us. I’ve seen with my own eyes the Canadians and the other foreigners come with everything. If it were up to me, the Canadians could stay here all the time.”

Nearby, lies a 26-day-old baby girl, Elizabeth Joussaint, who has spent almost one third of her life under a pile of broken concrete.

“Me, all the family, we were sure she had died,” her grandfather, Michel Joussaint, says. The house Elizabeth was sleeping in collapsed during the earthquake. Her family hoped to recover her body and explained where she lay to a Colombian rescue team, whose members flagged an approximate location in the rubble where she might be found. A team of French firefighters arrived and started to dig. This was on Tuesday, eight days after the quake.

“We thought we were going to find a body,” one of the firefighters, Pascal Buisson, says. “When we saw she was living, we all felt tremendous emotion.” He slaps his chest. “We felt it here.”

The French firefighters handed Elizabeth to Haitian firefighters to take her to get medical help. She was brought to St. Michel’s. The French team came to see her the next day. She was sleeping, an intravenous drip in her arm, frail but breathing steadily.

Reading all the commentary that has come out in the last 48 hours you would think the Massachusetts senatorial election was a referendum on health care reform. That’s going too far. Sure, the victory on Tuesday of Republican challenger Scott Brown in the seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy has ended the Democrats’ super-majority in the Senate, making the passage of Democratic agenda much more difficult.

But there were many other factors at play. For one thing, Martha Coakley was a weak Democratic candidate in a state, that while it stereotyped as “Blue” has a long history of voting for the other side to avoid one-party rule (and has elected numerous  Republican governors.) At this time, the governor is a Democrat, the state legislature is controlled by Democrats, and Democrats hold Congress and the White House.

Second, Massachusetts already has the kind of government-subsidized health insurance system that extends coverage to almost all people that is being debated in Washington.  Brown himself voted for the state program (which was signed into law by then Republican governor Mitt Romney, who must be licking his chops this week in anticipation of another presidential run in 2012) but says he doesn’t want to subsidize it for other states. Fair enough, but it doesn’t imply a national rejection of a national scheme.

Third, unemployment is at 10% and the economy is limping while bankers, recently bailed out by taxpayers, get big bonuses. People are angry and they are punishing the party in power. This would be the case health care bill or not.

Those caveats aside, the race is being interpreted in Washington as a rejection of the health care legislation. And Democrats seem undecided about what to do about it.

The simplest thing to do would seem to be for the House to pass the health care reform bill that has already passed the Senate — even though it is not as liberal as many House Democrats would want. The argument for this is that nothing more liberal can make it through the Senate now regardless. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said today that there simply aren’t sufficient votes in the House  to do that. Ezra Klein goes over the Democrats’ options.

President Obama has suggested a more stripped down approach — taking a few essential aspects of the legislation — such as expanding coverage, and imposing rules on insurance companies that will prevent them from denying insurance to the sick — and just passing those. He said yesterday, “I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don’t, then our budgets are going to blow up and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families.”

Then today the White House indicated that it is just itching to move past the health care debate to focus on economic populism ahead of the November mid-term elections (and you thought his approach of leaving the whole mess to Congress was surprisingly hands-off before…)  “As the majority leader and speaker continue to look to the best way forward, the president has a very full plate,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. “There’s plenty of work for the president to do in the meantime.”

They’d rather talk about enter Obama’s  proposed crackdown on the big banks. In one sense, though, Obama’s timing could not be worse — just as he was announcing his plan to regulate the banks, they and other corporations just got the green light from the US Supreme Court to pile their money into the defeat of candidates they don’t like. As my friend Ben Smith points out, tough week.

Michael Petrou reports from Port-au-Princ

I’ve been in Haiti since Friday. Much of what I’ve seen and heard will appear in the print edition of this week’s magazine, but in the meantime here’s a very brief rundown of the trip so far.

On Thursday night I flew into Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. There I hooked up with Rahul Singh and his team from Global Medic. Global Medic is something Singh, a Toronto paramedic, started 10 years ago after a collapsed marriage sent him backpacking around the world. He ended up in Nepal, worked for an NGO there, and was appalled by the bureaucracy and waste that’s rampant in so many international development organizations. He wanted Global Medic to be different. It doesn’t have a bureaucracy to speak of. Its overhead is low. Its staff of medics, doctors, and engineers are volunteers. And its goals are simple: bring clean water, medical aid, and food to people in disaster zones as quickly and efficiently as possible.

It helps that Singh could sell ashes to the devil. People give him free stuff because he makes you believe in what he does. He scored a free flight to Dominican Republic for his team of seven on its way to Haiti from a charter airline, which also lugged all their water purifying systems and medical gear. He hired a bus and jeeps in the Dominican Republic and drove them all to Port-au-Prince. We arrived around 3 p.m. By nightfall, one of the doctors on Singh’s staff, Michael Howatt, was amputating gangrenous limbs on a table at an outdoor field hospital, cutting with shaving razors instead of scalpels. By noon the next day, they had set up a water purification system and were pumping out clean drinking water to thousands.

Global Medic has an annual budget of a few hundred thousand dollars. The Canadian International Development Agency, by comparison, spends one hundred million dollars a year in Haiti alone. This doesn’t mean that Global Medic is popular with other, bigger and more established NGOs.

“They are what we call a cowboy organization. They come and do something flashy,” says Bogdan Dumitru, a security officer with Care Canada. “We could have distributed all our stockpiles and grabbed a bunch of journalists, and it would be great. But that’s not the point.”

Dumitru says the responsible thing to do is to coordinate aid efforts with other organizations, especially the United Nations. Doing otherwise, he says, risks creating a “holy mess” if word gets out that there is fresh water in one part of the city but not in others.

To be frank, it’s not a convincing argument. Care, which already had a presence in the country before the quake, planned three water distributions Saturday. One was successful. They gave water purification packets to 600 people. They say they had to work through a local committee that had a list of people designated as water recipients. The same day Global Medic delivered clean water to 25,000. There was no riot or even disorder in the lineup of people waiting. And they trained Haitians in the neighbourhood to take over the purification system when Global Medic leaves.

A police officer patrols Port-au-Prince downtown to discourage looting (AP Photo/Ricardo Arduengo)

“If you look at the other NGOs, not to be critical, but they go in with clipboards,” says Singh. “When they fill up that clipboard with notes, they’ll go back and start bringing in what people need. Our job is to come in and be an expert, efficient, and immediate solution.”

International development types are welcome to fight this one out in the comments section.

I SAW THE FIRST dead body minutes after arriving in Port-au-Prince. Today, three days later, I can’t count them anymore. They’re everywhere, and some died much more recently than the earthquake. Vigilantism and score settling are on the rise. The police can’t restore order and for the most part don’t try.

I was in Port-au-Prince two years ago. Today, the city has turned into something I could not have imagined then and cannot accurately describe now. How many horror-infused anecdotes are necessary to convey what’s happening here? People carry toothpaste in their pockets so that they can re-apply a smear on their upper lip when the stench of death becomes too much. Body parts stick randomly out of the rubble, blistering in the sun. Is that enough?

I remember visiting the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince two years ago. Then, the overcrowding flooded my senses, and it took me a few minutes to trust my eyes, with men packed together tighter than animals in a stockyard. During the earthquake, the prison burned and crumbled. Some 3,000 prisoners forced their way out and onto the streets. I walked in to the prison Sunday, kicking open a gate and stepping over the razor wire that clung to my pant cuffs. It was like visiting the abandoned set of a horror movie. The cells were busted open, but inside dozens of hammocks crafted from scraps of cloth hung between bars and bunks to mark the tiny piece of air where men were once forced to carve out a place to sleep. Four dead bodies lay swelling in the prison yard. It’s impossible to tell how they died.

Aid is coming slowly. On Sunday, the joint Canadian and Norwegian Red Cross field hospital still hadn’t arrived. A handful of Canadian nurses and doctors did their best providing basic first aid to patients who lay on disintegrating mattresses and moaned under a field of tarps.

At the Canadian Embassy, mid-afternoon Sunday, Canadian Forces Captain Mark Peebles said that the Disaster Assistance Relief Team reconnaissance unit had sent its report back to Ottawa in the last “24 to 48” hours but that an order to deploy DART in full had not yet been given.

The embassy’s compound was filled with cheerful journalists and Canadian citizens waiting to be evacuated. The grounds are shaded, and there is a tennis court. There is also a small medical tent, but staff there are sufficiently underwhelmed: a man who appears to be suffering only from loneliness is attended to with compassion and time. Elsewhere in the city bodies are burning in ditches for lack of a place to bury them. It’s like stepping into a different world.

As mentioned in a previous post, Jayson Myers, president of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, is wrapping up four days of meetings here in DC. His main goal was to the press the Obama administration and lawmakers on Capitol Hill on the importance of reaching a resolution on Buy American provision in the US stimulus bill, and to nip it in the bud before similar provisions continue to spread to other government spending legislation.

His message was that the clock is ticking: an agreement on a clear exclusion for Canada must be reached before the February 17 deadline by which contracts under the stimulus will have been granted. “By mid-February, if the negotiations are prolonged, then there is not a great deal of value because most of the money will have been spent,” he said.

Myers said he was repeatedly told that Canada was never meant to be the target of the Buy American provisions, but that the issue is low on the administration’s priority list and is therefore moving slowly. So what is the likeliest resolution? Few people expect Congress to vote to amend the legislation. More likely, the process would be a bit more discreet:  It could involve the Obama administration (i.e. the US Trade Representative’s Office) issuing a “notification” to the relevant congressional committees of jurisdiction that negotiations with Canada have concluded in an agreement that Canada is excluded from the provision. This would be done after behind-the-scenes consultation with relevant members of Congress. The theory is that there are lawmakers who would not object to an exclusion for Canada, but do not want to be seen openly voting to water-down the law. At least that’s the theory.

Myers also said he’s learned a thing or two about talking to Americans: “One of the things I’ve learned is how important the terms of the discussion are here,” he said. Rather than talking about the importance of keeping “open trade”, he says he’s learned to say that an exclusion for Canada is ” important to creating jobs in the US by keeping business opportunities open between Canada and the US.” He adds, “trade is a bad word here.”

…Or at least better than the alternative.

Right now the fate of cap-and-trade legislation is looking pretty dicey in Washington. When and if Congress passes health care reform, there may be little appetite left among Democrats for a big controversial bill ahead of the mid-term elections in November. Many observers expect that a general energy bill will pass while climate change legislation will be kicked down the road to an even more uncertain future.

Today, Jayson Myers, president of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, wrapped up four days of meetings in here in Washington, DC with administration officials, congressional staffers, and business associations. He says he came away concerned about what might happen if climate change legislation does not pass. Namely, aggressive unilateral carbon regulation by Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, and a complex patchwork of regulations emanating from state governments, all of which could hit Canadian energy and energy-intensive manufactured exports.

What he heard was, “The EPA would take a more aggressive regulatory stance — but no one knows what that would mean.” Add to that various regulations or taxes coming from the states, and compliance costs to Canadian businesses would become more expensive and complicated, he feared.

“A federal approach to this is preferable for us,” said Myers, emphasizing the need for a coordinated US-Canada approach with a mutually recognized framework and principles.

Forty-seven members of Rights and Democracy, the government-funded agency charged with promoting democracy and human rights abroad, yesterday sent a letter to three members of its board of directors, Jacques Gauthier, Elliot Tepper, and chair Aurel Braun, claiming that they have lost the confidence of their employees at Rights and Democracy and requesting their resignations.

The letter, which was cc’d to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon, follows the sudden death late last week of Rights and Democracy President Remy Beauregard and the resignation of two board members, Payam Akhavan and Sima Samar.

Ew. This is embarrassing to read, yet morbidly fascinating. This guy really thought he should stay in the presidential race. His wife thought he should stay in, though on some days she allegedly refused to campaign for “that a–hole” or even stay at the same hotel. New York mag has an excerpt from the new book, Game Change, that digs up all kinds of dirt from the 2008 campaigns. Every future candidate should read page five of this excerpt to learn what not to do when a campaign aide confronts you about rumours that you are having an affair.

Sima Samar, chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and an honourary officer of the Order of Canada, resigned Thursday from Rights and Democracy, an organization created by Canada’s Parliament in 1988 to promote and protect democracy abroad.

Samar blamed what she described as the undemocratic actions of the organization’s board of directors. Payam Akhavan, a McGill professor of international law, also quit the board.

Tension has been building at the organization for several months, with board members divided along what some members describe as ideological lines. The government appoints most members of the 13-person board. Two recent vacancies were filled by the appointments of David Matas, legal counsel for the conservative Jewish organization B’nai Brith Canada, and Michael Van Pelt, president of the Cardus, a think tank that describes itself as “inspired by … a long tradition of Christian social thought.” Continue…

In most popular uprisings against tyranny, there is a time when security forces are faced with a decision whether or not to open fire on their fellow citizens. So much hinges on this moment. In Serbia, for example, they didn’t, and Slobodan Milosevic was overthrown.

As much as I’ve wanted to believe that the popular will of most Iranians for a more decent and democratic regime would prevail in that country, my optimism has always been tempered by the repeatedly demonstrated reality that the thugs in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Basij will open fire; will massacre their own people; will arrest, torture, and rape; will do whatever it takes to stay in power.

This stunning video has given me new hope. A gunman opens fire on a crowd of protesters. They continue to advance.

As I approach my first holiday season in New York City, I have been reading and listening to countless accounts of the first decade of the 21st century and how America has fared. The general view is that this past decade was the most trying since the 1940s. It started off with a presidential election that was ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Then, of course, came the horrific events of 9-11. The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq followed, while Hurricane Katrina only added to the heavy burden of the American people. Finally, the financial meltdown and the deepest economic recession since the Great Depression closed out the decade, leaving most Americans in a state of uncertainty and vulnerability.

The rest of the word did not fare much better. The economic woes of the United States were felt globally and natural disasters, like the tsunami of 2004 that left over 200,000 people dead, devastated entire regions. Terrorism continued on its ugly course and was not just relegated to U.S. soil. We need only think of London, Madrid, Mumbai, and Bali to remind us that terrorism has no boundaries. Tensions in the Middle East intensified with two armed conflicts involving Israel. Meanwhile, Iran and North Korea continued their nuclear sabre rattling. Political divisions also surfaced in Iran and parts of China. And finally, an anti-climactic outcome in Copenhagen rounded out a less-than-stellar decade on the international stage.

Continue…

It’s startling how quickly Iraq has fallen off of our collective radar. There are good reasons for this, I suppose. Notwithstanding carnage such as the bombings suffered by Baghdad this week, the level of violence continues to trend sharply downward. He wont get it, but former president George W. Bush deserves credit for reversing Iraq’s slide into anarchy with his troop surge gamble, which he approved in the face of opposition from just about everyone. President Barack Obama derided the strategy and is now mimicking it – albeit with less resolve – in Afghanistan.

This morning I was reminded of how far Iraq has come, how far it still has to go, and why we can’t yet afford to look away. I met with members of La’Onf, a network of Iraqi civil society groups committed to human rights, democracy, and, above all else, non-violence.

This year, Rights and Democracy, a Canadian institution created by Parliament in 1988 to promote and defend democracy and human rights abroad, awarded La’Onf its ‘John Humphrey Award,’ which comes with at $30,000 grant. Ibrahim Ismael and Saba Al Nadawi were in town to accept it. Continue…

MPs discussing a private member’s bill proposing an apology and compensation for Italian Canadians (about 700) who were interned during the Second World War might want to read this book, introduced and summarized here.

Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro’s assertion that those detained were “just everyday people going about their lives” when they were “pulled off the streets” doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of historians who have studied the issue.

There’s an effective ban on foreign media in Iran, and domestic media there isn’t free, which makes getting accurate information about what is happening in the country extremely difficult.

Those of us who want to know should keep close tabs on this site. Run by Iranian expats – many in Toronto – its members collect news from contributors inside Iran, translate these reports, and post them.

Their dispatches show that popular democratic dissent in Iran remains widespread.

Listening to today’s congressional testimony by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, two points are becoming clear.

First, the 18-month surge timeline does not have a deadline set in stone. July 2011 is not a deadline for withdrawal, it is a date for “beginning a process” of shifting responsibility for security to Afghan forces, Gates said several times today. When US forces actually leave will depend on “conditions on the ground.” This may or may not placate Republican critics of any “timetable” or “exit strategy.” It certainly will not reassure those Democrats who are skeptical about Obama sinking into a military quagmire.

Second, the target date appears to have been set primarily as an incentive to the Afghans to get their own act together, or Gates put it, “lighting a fire under” the Afghans.  Gates repeated several times that the worry within the administration was that unlike the Iraqis who actively wanted the Americans to get out of their country, the administration is afraid that the Afghans would be happy to have US troops stay indefinitely. Gates said that this wasthe “toughest part” of designing the strategy.

Relevant exchanges below. Continue…