PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — The man's body lay face down, his white dress shirt shining like wax in the sun, as he was unearthed in the ruins of a Port-au-Prince restaurant a year after the earthquake.
The bodies still being found in the rubble are a
sign of how far Haiti has to go to recover from a disaster that left the capital
in ruins and is estimated to have killed more than 230,000 people.
As the dust was still settling from the Jan. 12,
2010 disaster, volunteers and hundreds of aid groups flocked in with food,
water and first aid that saved countless lives. But the effort to rebuild has
been dwarfed by the size of the tragedy, the extent of the need and, perhaps
most fatally, the lack of Haitian and international leadership and of
coordination of more than 10,000 non-governmental organizations.
President Rene Preval did not speak publicly for
days after the quake. He has been seen by most Haitians as ineffective at best,
and many observers have criticized him for not spearheading a coherent
reconstruction or making the hard policy decisions needed to rebuild.
Preval and Haitian officials stress that their
government was weak and underfunded to begin with, then devastated, and never
really recovered from the earthquake. Ministries were relocated but could not
replace vast numbers of staff killed in the quake or material lost in the
destruction.
Advocacy groups also blame much of the Haitian
government's weakness on an international community that is not keeping its
pledge of support.
"The international community has not done
enough to support good governance and effective leadership in Haiti," the
aid group Oxfam said in a recent report. "Aid agencies continue to bypass
local and national authorities in the delivery of assistance, while donors are
not coordinating their actions or adequately consulting the Haitian
people."
Ericq Pierre, Haiti's representative to the
Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, said "the problem is that
at a certain point the international community gave the impression they could
solve the problem quickly. ... I think there was an excess of optimism."
Street markets were soon up and running after the
quake and Port-au-Prince's traffic is worse than ever. On Tuesday, Preval, his
wife and other officials lay flowers at symbolic black crosses marking a mass
grave outside Port-au-Prince where hundreds of thousands of earthquake victims
were buried.
"We have this memory in our heads and our
hearts and etched on our bodies. We will never forget them. This is hallowed
ground," Preval said.
But from the barren hillside, the destruction is
clearly visible. The slogan "build back better," touted by former
U.S. President Bill Clinton and others even before the quake, remains an
unfulfilled promise.
Less than 5 percent of debris has been cleared,
leaving enough to fill dump trucks parked bumper to bumper halfway around the
world. In the broken building where the dead man was discovered, workers hired
to clear rubble by hand found two other people's remains.
About a million people remain homeless and
neighborhood-sized homeless camps look like permanent shantytowns on the fields
and plazas of the capital. A cholera epidemic erupted outside the earthquake
zone that has killed more than 3,600 people, and an electoral crisis between
Preval's ruling party and its rivals threaten to break an increasingly fragile political
stability.
Progress has been slow across the board, starting
with the omnipresent rubble.
The U.S.-based RAND organization said donors and
the Haitian government are responsible for more not being cleared. Haitian
workers are not given personal equipment while heavy lifters have been blocked
by customs officials at the border, the report said. The government has also
not designated sufficient dumping space.
"Unless rubble is cleared expeditiously,
hundreds of thousands of Haitians will still be in tent camps during the 2011
hurricane season" — which runs from June through November, the report
said.
Construction of new housing has barely begun. The
core underlying issue of sorting out Haiti's broken system of land ownership,
where several people hold claim to the same plot of land, has not even been
addressed. Without sorting out land ownership, there is nowhere to build.
Internationally financed inspectors have certified
that some houses are safe for residents to return, but few have. Many are
merely moving their shacks closer to where they used to live, because they
don't want to risk another earthquake in their damaged homes.
Meanwhile, only 15 percent of needed temporary
shelters have been built, with few permanent water and sanitation facilities.
Owners of small construction materials businesses,
such as Justin Premier, 43, should be raking in money. But most people in his
neighborhood are just buying plywood to reinforce their tarps.
"It's going to take a lot of time for us to
come back where we were before," Premier said.
The earthquake was an opportunity to completely
remake a broken education system where only half of school-age children were
enrolled, often in bad private schools with predatory fees.
But plans from the Inter-American Development Bank
for safer buildings and a unified Creole-language curriculum have not yet come
to fruition. The government education ministry, which also lost its
headquarters, remains weak.
Instead, schools have opened here and there. About
80 percent of children attending school before the quake are going to class
again, said UNICEF Haiti Education Chief Nathalie-Fiona Hamoudi. UNICEF planned
to build 200 semi-permanent structures to teach in, but only finished 88 by the
end of 2010 because an ongoing cholera outbreak diverted its effort.
The reconstruction effort overall is hampered by
the failure to deliver or spend billions of dollars in promised aid.
Americans donated more than $1.4 billion to private
organizations to help earthquake survivors and rebuild, but just 38 percent of
that total has been spent to provide recovery and rebuilding aid, according to
a Chronicle of Philanthropy survey of 60 major relief organizations.
Governments have not done better.
More than $5.3 billion was pledged at a March 31
donors conference for a period of 18 months. Only $824 million — about a
quarter of the public money not including debt relief — has been delivered,
according to former U.S. President Bill Clinton's U.N. Office of the Special
Envoy to Haiti. Some $3.2 billion in public funding is still owed.
The United States had originally pledged $1.15
billion for 2010, but moved nearly its entire pledge to 2011 following delays
in Congress and the Obama administration.
Clinton was supposed to rally governments and
coordinate international efforts. He has had three prominent, simultaneous
roles in Haiti's rebuilding: co-chair of the reconstruction commission with
Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive; U.N. special envoy for Haiti; and head of
his Clinton Foundation, a major donor. In July he told AP he would follow
through with donors to remind them of their promises, and expressed frustration
when payment was slow through the summer and fall.
But as the year ended, even the United States —
whose secretary of state is his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton — had paid just a
fraction of what it promised. Clinton has cited bureacracy and the world's
financial troubles last year as problems in securing the pledged funds. On his
recent trips to Haiti, he has expressed frustration that more is not getting
done.
Bellerive said he is disappointed by the slow
delivery of funds. He said the delays may be caused by uncertainty surrounding
the question of who will succeed outgoing president Preval.
"Perhaps some donors say, 'Let's wait until we
know exactly who will be there for the next five years,'" said Bellerive.
"Everyone is talking about the resilience of
the Haitian people, and everyone is taking advantage of that resilience,"
Bellerive said. "It's going to end. Success for me is to do the basic, the
minimum, so we can really build a future. And we have to do it right now."
In an Op-Ed to Haiti's Le Nouvelliste newspaper,
the IADB's Pierre asked that on the anniversary itself, foreigners leave
Haitians alone.
"I ask only one day per year, from 2011 on, to
enable us to mourn our dead ... to try to understand how and why we got where
we are," he wrote. "We need to find some peace."
Associated Press writers David McFadden, Ben Fox
and AP television journalists Julia Galiano-Rios and Chris Gillette contributed
to this story
Copyright
2011 The Associated Press.
Photo Caption: Sebastian
Lamoth, 8, left, looks over at his aunt, Roseleine Royer, at his home in
Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Monday Jan. 10, 2011. Lamoth's leg was amputated due to
an injury suffered in the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. Almost one year has passed
since the magnitude-7.0 quake that killed more than 220,000 people and left
millions homeless. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)
