Relief agency slams Haiti quake recovery “quagmire”

PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – Reconstruction has barely  begun in Haiti a year after its catastrophic earthquake, a  leading international charity said yesterday in a report  sharply critical of a recovery commission led by former U.S.  President Bill Clinton.

There was a tremendous outpouring of support from around  the world after the Jan. 12 quake that devastated much of the  poor Caribbean country’s capital, Port-au-Prince, killing about  a quarter of a million people and leaving more than a million  homeless.

But the report by UK-based Oxfam, while acknowledging that  disaster recovery can be slow even in developed countries, said  efforts in Haiti had been paralyzed by a lack of leadership  from the Haitian government and the international community.

“As Haitians prepare for the first anniversary of the  earthquake, close to one million people are reportedly still  displaced. Less than 5 percent of the rubble has been cleared,  only 15 percent of the temporary housing that is needed has  been built and relatively few permanent water and sanitation  facilities have been constructed,” the report said.

Money is part of the problem, Oxfam said. The report cited  U.N. figures showing that less than 45 percent of the $2.1  billion pledged for Haiti’s reconstruction during 2010 at an  international donor conference in New York in March had  actually been disbursed.

More importantly, however, the report said a reconstruction  commission chaired by Clinton and Haiti’s Prime Minister  Jean-Max Bellerive had fallen short in many crucial areas.

“So far, the commission has failed to live up to its  mandate,” it said. “The commission is a key element for  reconstruction and it must cut through the quagmire of  indecision and delay.” Set up as the main disaster management body in April, the  Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) was supposed to  improve coordination of international aid projects, build state  capacity for their implementation and bring donors and  government actors together to lead the reconstruction.

The commission has met only a few times since it was  formed, however, and the report said it was plagued by “often  contradictory policies and priorities” and needed to do far  more to adequately consult and communicate its role and  decisions to the Haitian people.

POOR PLANNING
In one glaring example of poor planning, the report said  money had been made available for temporary housing, but almost  no funds had been allocated for rubble removal. That’s despite  the fact that the quake, which destroyed 105,000 homes and  damaged 208,000, left 20 million cubic meters of rubble.

Without debris removal, housing construction cannot begin  in earnest and Oxfam said the volume of quake rubble in Haiti  could fill enough dump trucks, parked bumper to bumper, to  reach more than halfway around the globe. “Major stakeholders, including Bill Clinton, should  urgently review the workings of the IHRC and speed up delivery  of its mandate,” the Oxfam report said.

United Nations and Haitian government officials have called  repeatedly for patience with reconstruction, and Oxfam said  countless lives had been saved thanks to humanitarian efforts  to provide water, sanitation, shelter, food and other vital  assistance to millions of people affected by the earthquake.

In the short term, however, Oxfam said it was difficult to  be optimistic about progress in the shattered nation.

Haiti is currently locked in political limbo following a  disputed presidential election on Nov. 28, adding to chronic  instability, and a national cholera outbreak, which has killed  more than 3,400 people since mid-October, shows no sign of  abating anytime soon.
That points to what some critics have described as another  abject failure of the humanitarian relief system.

Dr. Unni Karunakara, president of the International Council  of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres), asked in  an opinion column late last month in Britain’s Guardian  newspaper why so many Haitians, in a country filled to  overflowing with as many as 12,000 foreign aid groups, had died  of a disease that is easily treated and controlled.

Karunakara said MSF and a brigade of Cuban doctors were  treating hundreds of patients every day, but few other agencies  seemed to be implementing critical cholera control measures,  such as chlorinated water distribution and waste management.    “In the 11 months since the quake, little has been done to  improve sanitation across the country, allowing cholera to  spread at a dizzying pace,” he said.