Existing development plan as basis for rebuilding
Clinton said international donors and organisations had been mapping out a plan for the country’s development for months before the quake. She spoke while en route to a conference in Montreal on how to channel aid into Haiti, and indicated this could be the basis for a revised plan now.
“I don’t want to start from scratch, but we have to recognise the changed challenges that we are now confronting,” she said.
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said his government needs to rely strongly on its partners but he asserted that Haiti is able to lead the rebuilding after the January 12 earthquake.
The magnitude-7 earthquake killed an estimated 200,000 people and left the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere virtually without a functioning government. It wrecked the presidential palace, parliament, government ministries and the UN headquarters, among thousands of other structures.
Bellerive has previously acknowledged the government was facing serious legitimacy issues, as people question whether it exists at all. The destruction of the key government buildings has hampered the work of what was already a weak and inefficient state.
Bellerive said yesterday that Haiti’s government has set up six groups to deal with issues such as humanitarian aid, housing and security. He said each group is being led by a Haitian minister as well as an international party.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and foreign ministers from more than a dozen countries, eight international bodies and six major non-governmental organisations are meeting at the conference.
“I believe the international community is working to support the Haitian government and the Haitian government needs to be in the lead for deciding what happens in their country,” said Caroline Atkinson, director of external communication for the International Monetary Fund.
Governments have pledged nearly $1 billion (€706 million) in aid to Haiti, according to an Associated Press estimate, including €406m from the EU.
Meanwhile, the collapse of much of Haiti’s capital has a large part of the nation struggling just to find a place to sleep. As many as one million people – one in nine Haitians need to find new shelter, the UN estimates, and there are too few tents, let alone safe buildings, to put them in.
That leaves about 700,000 people living on the streets around Port-au-Prince under whatever they can salvage. In the case of Jean Anthony’s family, that’s a blue plastic tarpaulin for a ceiling and a faded pink sheet with a floral print border for two walls.
“I’m not sure what you’d call it, but it’s much more than terrible,” said Anthony, the 60-year-old owner of a collapsed restaurant. Thousands of people were camped around him yesterday across from the National Palace, amid piles of trash and the stench of human waste.
“We live like dogs,” said Espiegle Amilcar, an unemployed 34-year-old who has been living under a sheet of plastic nearby.
Aid organisations say they are collecting tents, but few so far are in evidence. And the International Organisation for Migration, an intergovernmental agency, says it could take experts weeks to search out suitable sites for enough tent cities to hold earthquake refugees.
Vincent Houver, the Geneva-based agency’s chief of mission in Haiti, said on Sunday the agency’s warehouse in Port-au-Prince holds 10,000 family-size tents, but he estimates 100,000 are needed.
The organisation has appealed for $30 million to pay for tents and other aid needs and has received two-thirds of that so far.
Haiti’s government wants many of the homeless to leave the capital city of two million people to look for better shelter with relatives or others elsewhere. Officials estimate that about 235,000 have taken advantage of its offer of free transport to leave the city, and many others left on their own, some even walking.
An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 have returned to the region around the coastal city of Gonaives in northern Haiti, a city abandoned by many after two devastating floods in six years.
