Where There is No Will: Haiti’s Internally Displaced

When the landowner shouted “Why are you here?” Mr. Glover responded without hesitation: “I am here to represent these people.”During a visit to Port-au-Prince in August last year, I had a crystalline moment. I was standing between a spitting, gesturing and shouting Haitian landowner, and actor Danny Glover, surrounded by a hundred homeless Haitians in front of the gate to a construction company lot turned internal displacement camp, more than eighteen months after the earthquake. As I took stock of the situation around me, I felt it clear and bright as the Caribbean sun: there is not enough will to save these people.

We had been en route to another location, Camp Carradeux, so the delegation could see the line that had been drawn between the families “officially” relocated to the site and those that had fled there in the first days and weeks after the quake, just searching for a place safe from the collapsing that continued to go on around them in the city. 

The official camp residents were evicted from the prestigious (private) St Louis de Gonzague Catholic school in Delmas 33. When the school and church leaders wanted to clear out the majority of the camp, they stopped allowing distributions of desperately needed items to people inside their walls. Later they announced that people would be relocated to Carradeux, where the original inhabitants had twice already watched their tents and other makeshift shelters be bulldozed to make way for the Gonzague internally displaced persons (IDPs). 

A fence separates the "official" and "unofficial" camps at Carradeux, where unofficial residents have watched others receive t-shelters and drinking water.When Catholic Relief Services and others set up the camp for the Gonzague IDPs, they pushed the “unofficial” families to the back and outskirts of the camp. Months later, they erected a fence to separate those who receive aid and those who do not. On one side of the fence, you find rows and rows of transitional shelters painted in cheerful pastels. On the other side are weather-torn tarps and tents along with a set of latrines that has already washed away into a ravine during a flash flood. People in the “unofficial” camp relieve themselves in plastic bags and then toss these into the ravine to be taken by the water during the next rains.

As we neared the bottom of Delmas 33 and the Gerald Bataille intersection where we would turn right to Carradeux, I got a call from human rights attorney Mario Joseph, who was anxious to get in touch with Etant Dupain, director of the Bri Kouri Nouvèl Gaye (BKNG) alternative media and community mobilization team. Etant’s team has been a critical partner to Mèt Mario, whose law firm, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), has been the leading legal advocate for Haiti’s internally displaced. Together, BKNG and BAI have been the leading front in the battle against forced evictions of Haiti’s earthquake homeless.

Despite the fact that most of the camp residents are poor women and their children—and that the rooms they rented before the earthquake were crushed and have not been rebuilt—almost 20% of Haiti’s internally displaced are under the threat of evictions, according to official statistics. There are few avenues for these incredibly poor families to combat the powerful landowners, many of whom have their own private “security” forces to enforce unlawful evictions. 

BKNG and BAI work closely with International Action Ties (IAT) and other partners to educate IDPs about their rights and to intervene in forced evictions. The legal aspects of the intervention seek to ensure that people are aware that evictions cannot happen spontaneously but require a process that begins with verification of land ownership. Haiti’s Constitution provides the right to housing for all, so the popular education aspect of the work equips IDPs with knowledge of their rights. Finally, the community mobilization focuses on connecting communities facing eviction so they can work together—united—to defend their rights and nonviolent techniques of resistance in the face of extremely violent and aggressive action from landowners, both private and public.

There is an element of accompaniment in all of this work that is extremely important. I have often thought about the kind of people I am working with in Port-au-Prince because they are so deeply committed to their work. When they receive calls from people in a camp who need help, they don’t hesitate. They rush to the scene of forced evictions and photograph destruction crews with machetes in hand and the wounds of protestors beaten by police. They are constantly putting themselves into dangerous situations to help protect the most vulnerable people in Haiti.

A photo of UN soldiers taking a photo of me.This is how I have come to these very actions myself—putting my body between an enraged landowner and the IDPs who he had arrived to evict. Everyone in the car had agreed, when Mèt Mario called looking for Etant to mobilize his team to accompany the residents of Camp Barbancourt, that we should go, so Etant turned left and we bounced around the back roads looking for the camp. When we arrived, I jumped out first to survey the scene and decide if it would be safe for everyone to come out. Before I knew it, U.N. soldiers were taking my photo, a camp resident whose tent was already destroyed was standing in front of me, Danny Glover was right next to me and the landowner was shouting, finger in my face.

The situation of Haiti’s homeless earthquake survivors is complicated by questions of land tenure, withheld aid and slow moving governments. The landowner at Barbancourt 17 raised many rational concerns. He said that the American Red Cross and the International Organization of Migration had come and promised to help these people but they never came back. It had been eighteen months with people living in his construction yard, affecting his business, his own livelihood. Items had been stolen because out of necessity, he had to leave the gate open for people to come and go. 

When all was said and done, this landowner felt that no one was looking out for his rights or helping him. He repeatedly told us if we loved “these people” so much, we should take them home with us. When I continued to question him, he admitted that although he is Haitian, he is not the “same kind of Haitian” as the people living in his construction yard. They are “uneducated, illiterate” and are most certainly not his problem.

And that was the crystalline moment. I’ve been talking for a long time about the gap between Haiti’s wealthy and Haiti’s poor. It’s a social apartheid, a system that goes back to colonial times that separates the rich from the impoverished by a gap so wide that even the middle class seeks to distance itself from the truly poor. The poor are generalized, demonized and dehumanized to the point that their welfare is not of importance to those with privilege. They can be left to rot under torn tarps and tents for a year or longer. They can be forcibly evicted from a construction lot because at the end of the day, the business of this educated Haitian elite is more valuable than the lives of the hundreds of people living in his lot. 

President Martelly’s plan to move people from the six most prominent camps in Port-au-Prince and ostensibly relocate them back to their original neighborhoods is frightening as well because it will move people out of sight, most likely resulting in them also being out of mind. If the first relocation is any indication, the people from these six camps will move from their central locations, where they could access services in the neighborhoods and city around them, to isolated areas that lack even the most basic services such as sanitation and access to clean water.

The situation of IDPs in camps two years after the earthquake is crystal clear: there is no will. Those who can act, influence or change the situation, simply choose not to do so. It is not only the government of Haiti or the business owners and contractors. And it is not for nothing that so-called “unsolvable” land ownership issues have blocked NGOs. Those who have in Haiti lack the basic human conscience to care for those who do not. 

Don’t get the wrong idea about Haitians—in the Haitian culture, there is a deep and profound link to an African tradition known as konbit, where people come together as a community to perform difficult tasks and to help the vulnerable in times of need. This tradition—this way of life for Haitians—is alive and well today. We saw it in the days after the earthquake, when people used their hands to dig out their loves ones and neighbors, together. We see it today as people unite together to fight evictions and share the tasks of survival in the camps.

This is where the true spirit of Haiti is alive, even in the most horrific living conditions imaginable. The will does not exist in the powerful, in Haiti’s political class and its wealthy elite. It belongs to those most deeply affected by the injustices, those who are being “served” by humanitarian aid, the “beneficiaries” who are systematically excluded from forming the plans to solve their own problems and to determine how to spend the money donated in their names.

Haitians are engaged in a life and death struggle and the IDPs are the most visible evidence of this daily labor. For now, the mistreated, maligned, excluded and marginalized majority of Haitians are on display in the parks and streets of the capital. We must join them in their fight for dignity, equality and life without misery now before it is too late and they are quietly shifted out of sight. If we don’t act now, they will likely be forced to join the ranks of Haiti’s other most vulnerable and impoverished population: rural families who struggle every day to survive in the worst environmental crisis in our hemisphere.

Today the most powerful movement in Haiti is one of solidarity—solidarity among the poor, especially the earthquake homeless. It is growing to be solidarity between Haiti’s urban and rural poor, a turning point that will bring real change to Haiti as the marginalized majority unite and begin to fight for a redistribution of Haiti’s resources, most especially the earthquake relief and reconstruction funds.

This movement needs people to act, just as Danny Glover and all of us did that day in Barbancourt 17. We can’t all physically accompany Haiti’s IDPs but we can pledge our solidarity to their fight and pressure the key players who are failing them today to step up and do better. From our own government to the non-governmental organizations and charitable agencies we donated our funds to after Haiti’s earthquake, to the Haitian government and elite who turn a blind eye to the suffering of the people in the intersections and parks of their capital city—we can now amplify the voices of Haiti’s most vulnerable at a time when when our solidarity can be the critical aspect that changes the rules of the game in Haiti.

Update:

Blogger Justin Podur reported on October 5, 2011, that IDPs living at Barbancourt 17 were forcibly evicted the week prior. The landowner finally got what he wanted and the families were allegedly removed by the International Organization of Migration (IOM), one of the NGOs he had specifically criticized for bringing aid once and then never retruning to help the IDPs on his land. According to reports Podur received, “When the two IOM representatives arrived on Thursday, they told camp residents to board buses. They were driven to four different alternative sites but none of them took them in. Eventually, they were all deposited outside the Delmas 33 police station. When some of them made their way back to the camp on Friday, two were arrested.” Read his blog here.