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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

German prosecutors are investigating almost 200 high-level soccer games in a match-fixing inquiry that is shaking European football.

My friend Declan Hill deserves some credit for getting the investigation rolling with his book, The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime. He explains in his blog.

UPDATE: Colleague Charlie Gillis covers the story in detail in the print edition of this week’s mag.

Colleague Aaron Wherry points to an op-ed by University of Ottawa professor Nipa Banerjee, who ran Canada’s aid program in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2006, in which she alleges that the United Nations and bosses at the Canadian International Development Agency chose to ignore and suppress reports of fraud and incompetence at an NGO and aid project Canadians were financing rather than do anything to fix it:

“Upon receipt of my e-mail alerting CIDA headquarters about the alleged fraud, a superior instructed me to not write any more e-mails on the subject, specifically so as to not leave any written trail that might have to be made available to the Canadian public under the Access to Information Act. My attempts to probe the results of any audit on the NGO met with similar stern warnings.”

Ms. Banerjee’s bosses need not have worried. I can personally attest that the chances of the Canadian public finding out that CIDA wastes their tax dollars on dubious or fraud-ridden projects is negligible for the simple reason that CIDA is neither transparent nor accountable. Continue…

It can be lonely writing about and covering wars and humans rights atrocities in Africa. Nobody really cares – at least not as much as they might had the victims been from almost anywhere else on the planet.

Consider the coverage afforded to the civil wars in Liberia and in the former Yugoslavia. They happened at around the same time. More died in Liberia. How many reading this even know that Liberia was consumed by a horrific, anarchic conflict for much of the 1990s?

It was, and so was next door Sierra Leone. Charles Taylor – first a warlord and then president of Liberia – is now on trial in The Hague for his role in the latter conflict. He’s on the stand now. The Special Court for Sierra Leone is posting daily transcripts. They’re worth reading.

Johaan Hari has an excellent piece about former Islamists in Britain who have renounced their past beliefs for something more humane and liberal. Last summer I spent a lot of time with Usama Hasan, featured in Hari’s article. My take on Hasan and some of his colleagues is here. I think one of the things I like most about Hasan is his love of astronomy. In addition to working as an imam, Hasan teaches artificial intelligence at Middlesex University. He helped launch the  remarkable Quilliam Foundation with Maajid Nawaz and Ed Husain. My take on Husain and his book, can be read here.

The University of Oxford’s Queen’s College has established a scholarship for Iranians in honour of Neda Agha-Soltan, a protester who was shot dead during protests against June’s rigged election. The Iranian embassy in London is incensed.

You who will emerge from under the flood

In which we have gone under

Remember

When you speak of our failings

The dark time too

Which you have escaped

- Bertolt Brecht, To Those Born Later

This morning, at cenotaphs and memorials across the country, Canadians will honour and remember those who fought and died in two world wars, in Korea, Afghanistan, and in several peacekeeping operations. This is as it should be. I’ll be there, too.

But there are those who few will remember today, though more should. On August 24, 1944, the first Allied tanks to enter Paris belonged to General LeClerc’s Free French. The names painted on the vehicles, however, were Spanish: Guadalajara, Ebro, Teruel. Continue…