Haiti's Gov't Leaders are Corrupt!
Prior to the recent Earthquake disaster Haiti was already in an extreme state of Poverty due to its Leaders wasting Foreign Aid to live like Royalty.
At the moment they are currently allowing citizens to die from simple injuries.
In other words Haitian Leaders are using a Natural Disaster to reduce its population.
Now those same Leaders are requesting $3 Billion for "Reconstruction".
I suggest that Pres. Obama and other World Leaders NOT to invest anymore money into Haiti unless its Leaders sign some sort of Agreement in reference to using the money wisely.
If they do waste the money, make them pay it back!
Every cent of it!
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Haiti To Ask For $3 Billion At Donors Conference
Haiti will ask the International Conference meeting in Montreal on Monday for $3 billion to rebuild this city, left largely in ruins by the Jan. 12 earthquake, according to a senior Haitian government official.
The official — the Tourism Minister, Patrick Delatour — was assigned by the Haitian president, René Préval, to assess the earthquake damage and prepare a reconstruction plan. Mr. Delatour said that Haiti would use $2 billion to build housing for the 200,000 people left homeless. The rest, he said, would be used to rebuild government ministries and national infrastructure — including upgrading the seaport and three international airports.
At the conference, representatives from 14 countries and the European Union are trying to determine how to structure aid efforts to a long-impoverished, troubled country subject to both political and natural disasters, with a government that itself suffered severely in the earthquake.
On Monday, the government made clear that it intended to be in command of the reconstruction.
Addressing the conference’s opening, Haiti’s prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, said, “The Haitian government is working in precarious conditions, but it can provide the leadership that people expect.”
In marathon meetings over the last week, Mr. Delatour said, the beleaguered Haitian government considered moving the capital to a new location. But he said it was agreed that doing so would take too long and cost too much.
Instead, most government ministries are to remain in Port-au-Prince, but functions may be moved elsewhere, to avert crowding the downtown area during the reconstruction.
While traveling to Montreal on Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton noted that the United States has been working closely with the Haitian government for over a year on rebuilding the country and its institutions.
“There’s a tremendous desire to help,” she told reporters. “But we’ve got to create the mechanisms so that it can be done effectively, and we’ve got to get the Haitian government’s capacity to lead put together.”
She declined to say how much money the United States would provide in the long term, adding that she anticipates that large donor nations will meet again in about 30 to 60 days.
Expectations for the conference are limited. The one-day meeting is not intended to map out a detailed plan for Haitian reconstruction. Nor are any major financing announcements expected from the nations that are attending. Instead it is hoped that the meeting will develop a basic structure for future, extended talks about the reconstruction of Haiti.
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“This conference is an initial, albeit critical, step on the long road to recovery,” Lawrence Cannon, the minister of foreign affairs for Canada and the host of the conference, said Sunday. “We need to identify with the Haitian government key priorities in order to define a road map of the tasks ahead.”
Several aid groups made presentations at a closed-door session on Monday morning. Before the start of the session, several of them outlined their broad proposals.
Oxfam Canada said it would urge the international community to cancel Haiti’s international debts, which, according to its estimate, total $890 million.
Other aid groups said they would encourage the foreign ministers to look at restructuring Haiti’s society rather than just its physical infrastructure.
Mr. Bellerive made a similar suggestion during his speech.
“We have to do more with less and we have to work in a different fashion,” he told the meeting. “We have to open a vision which will have a list of priorities clearly delineated by the Haitians for the Haitians by democratic means.”
But even before the conference began, some Haitians were doubtful that it would achieve anything significant.
“I don’t see them accomplishing much except a photo opportunity in one day,” Eric A. Pierre, the Haitian consul in Toronto, told The Globe and Mail, a newspaper in that city. “There has to be sustained and continuous dialogue between Haitians and the friends of Haiti.”
Canada claims to be the largest long-term donor of aid to Haiti on a per capita basis. Montreal, a largely French-speaking city, is home to a substantial, and prominent community of Haitian immigrants.
The meeting provides Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, with a convenient political distraction. Canada’s Parliament was supposed to resume Monday after breaking for Christmas. On Dec. 30, however, Mr. Harper, who is attending the Montreal meeting, took the unusual step of temporarily shutting down the legislature, including its committees, until March.
On Saturday, thousands of Canadians marched in several cities to protest the move.
Mr. Harper had also moved to shut down Parliament a year earlier to avoid a confidence vote that almost certainly would have defeated his government, which does not control a majority in the House of Commons.
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For Haiti, Opportunity To Transform
Yes, the earth-shattering quake was powerful enough to bring many countries to their knees.
But Haiti's horrendous death toll and cataclysmic damage must also be blamed on a history of bad policies pursued by its own weak leadership and the foreign powers — governments and aid institutions — that have long held sway here.
This latest in a history of Haitian calamities may offer an unmatched opportunity to turn the tide in a country where decades of food aid still have left desperate mothers feeding their children chalk to stop hungry stomachs from rumbling.
Analysts offer Revolutionary solutions.
Haitian political commentator Michel Soukar suggests creating farming communities styled on the Israeli kibbutz, taking advantage of the flight of hundreds of thousands from the capital.
Professor Simon Fass of the University of Texas says a mass migration abroad, like Ireland's great famine exodus of the 19th century, would allow millions to escape a degraded environment incapable of supporting the ever-growing population.
Enabling Haitians to help themselves
All agree that key to lifting Haiti from the virtual dark ages is a strengthening of democratic institutions, enabling Haitians to help themselves.
U.S. President Barack Obama has promised to transform Haiti. That pledge, according to Mark Schneider, special adviser on Latin America for the International Crisis Group, would involve the United States in "its largest-ever financial commitment to a single post-disaster nation — ultimately measured in the billions — and extend over the next decade."
Obama's top adviser on the calamity, former President Bill Clinton, said: "Everybody that has seriously followed Haiti for a long time believes Haiti has the best chance in our lifetime to break the chains of its past, to build a true and modern state."
Past U.S. involvement in Haiti's government has largely failed, however. Washington installed a military government that ruled from 1915 to 1934, and supported the corrupt and murderous Duvalier family dictatorship that endured from 1956 to 1986, turning a blind eye because it was a bulwark against the communism that nearby Cuba embraced.
Clinton sent troops to oust Haiti's military dictators in 1994 and restore democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The former priest and self-appointed savior of Haiti's poor then accused Clinton's administration of mounting its own coup against him, when he was forced in 2004 to leave the country, which had become a major drug-shipment point under his watch.
While Haitians seem to welcome the post-quake influx of U.S. military, some worry what it portends.
"It's true we need a Marshall Plan for Haiti," Soukar said. "But to do what?"
Clashing interests
He accused Haiti's elite — a mainly lighter-skinned minority — of having no interest in building a competent Haitian state.
"These are the people who even now are in the throes of organizing to enrich themselves from the disaster," Soukar said, "to get their hands on that $100 million" Obama has promised.
Richard Morse, a Haitian-American hotelier, musician and commentator, said Washington and its allies in Haiti's elite have clashing interests.
"Washington wants democracy. It wants a free market. It wants stability. But those are diametrically opposed to the interests of its allies, who control 90 percent of the money, who get rich off monopolies and who want to control the 80 percent of the population that it keeps illiterate to provide a pool of cheap labor."
Soukar said the United States must ensure its aid goes to productive groups, such as farmers, and not to the importers of foreign foods that have helped decimate agricultural production. Haiti was self-sufficient in its staple, rice, until imports of cheap American rice forced farmers to migrate to the cities.
Led by the U.S. Agency for International Development, foreign governments have created their own operations or channeled international aid through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to avoid corrupt Haitian administrations. And more than 10,000 of those NGOs have been operating in Haiti since at least the 1970s, with little result, said the University of Virginia's Robert Fatton Jr., author of a book on Haiti's unending transition to democracy.
"Instead of pumping its resources into NGOs, the international community must shift its priorities and concentrate on helping Haitians build durable state institutions," Fatton said.
Mass Migration is unrealistic
Fass, of Texas, acknowledges his own solution, mass migration, is unrealistic, since the United States, Europe or the rest of the world are unlikely to open their doors to 3 million or 4 million Haitians.
"Salvation, if it is to come, must take place mainly within the borders, assuming that it is at all possible," Fass said.
Otherwise, the world must expect more instability, more violence and floods of boat people to other Caribbean shores and the United States.
Soukar said rebuilding the country's agricultural base kibbutz-style would be familiar to Haitians, whose tradition of "coumbte" has villagers communally sharing tasks such as harvesting, planting, child care and cooking.
Haiti's government should immediately act on the mass reverse exodus from Port-au-Prince to the countryside to provide resources that will encourage people to stay, he said.
"We have to radically change the way we do things in Haiti," Soukar said.
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