Feb 4, 2015 | Clashes erupted between police and anti-government protesters in Port-au-Prince on Wednesday after thousands marched against Haitian President Michel Martelly over fuel prices.

Original article written by Angelyn Frankenberg

When Aspen humanitarian Susie Krabacher first visited Cite Soleil, the poorest and most dangerous section of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 20 years ago, she knew she had found her life’s work. With her husband, Joe Krabacher, she started a food program that was the first step in building HaitiChildren, a nonprofit that has grown to serve more than 5,000 Haitians.

Krabacher’s book, “Angels of a Lower Flight,” tells her story in detail. Her childhood was marred by sexual abuse, being passed among foster homes and her younger brother’s suicide. She had to quit school at age 15 to go to work full time because “no one was taking care of me at all,” but she always kept the fire to do something in a big way to improve life for a large group of children. She could not realize her dream of joining the Peace Corps without a high school diploma, but that made her more determined to start her own program.

Today, the Carbondale-based HaitiChildren provides housing, education and hope for Haitian children who would otherwise fall through the cracks. Its programs help the least of the least, children whom orphanages will not accept — HaitiChildren does not call its housing facilities “orphanages” — because they are too sick and disabled. The organization does not participate in adoptions because its broader mission is to help Haitian children grow into adults who will improve their country from within.

HaitiChildren’s mission is spiritually driven and is affiliated with Crossroads Church in Aspen and Fellowship Bible Church in Tennessee. It also partners with sister congregations that help support its Village Community Church. To further its mission of caring for and educating Haiti’s disabled, abused and abandoned children, though, HaitiChildren partners with diverse religious and secular organizations including the Vibrant Village Foundation and Catholic Relief Services.

ASPEN THERAPIST HELPS

The organization’s U.S. and in-country staffs also partner with professionals from multiple disciplines.

One such partnership is in its physical therapy center. Bill Fabrocini, with the Aspen Club, is a clinical specialist in orthopedic physical therapy who oversees the center. He worked with the organization in Haiti three years ago to develop structure and set protocols for the clinic and to help evaluate the children’s needs. He also improved the minimal education most of the local service providers had by recruiting qualified physical and occupational therapists to train them. Though the therapy center now has an on-site director, Fabrocini and volunteers he recruits travel to Haiti several times per year.

The HaitiChildren Village in Williamson, about 30 miles northwest of Port-au-Prince, features three residential centers and two schools. Besides traditional classroom education, children receive instruction and experience in building trades and agriculture.

The organization’s president, Robin Hamill, described how its education programs are changing expectations. He said students in HaitiChildren schools have a 99 percent pass rate at all grade levels compared with a national rate of 22 percent, and added that no amount of outside aid will solve Haiti’s vast problems — ultimately help has to grow within. He would “bet money that one of our kids will end up leading [Haiti] in our lifetime.”

Krabacher explained that helping the children can run head-on into entrenched voodoo beliefs that attribute the children’s disabilities to curses and evil spirits and often result in poor families paying everything they have to priests for potions and remedies that harm rather than help the children.

FINANCIAL TRANSPARENCY

Working against those practices, however, does not mean dishonoring Haiti’s history and culture. In the schools and on field trips, Krabacher said, HaitiChildren staff teaches children to be proud and hopeful for their country.

Krabacher and Hamill, who criticize a lack of transparency in the “global aid-industrial complex,” pointed out that HaitiChildren practices the financial transparency that it promotes. The organization’s 501(c)(3) Determination Letter as well as annual reports, financial statements, and tax forms are available on its website. In addition, its five-member board of directors pays all of its administrative costs to ensure that all donations go directly to helping Haitian children.

Staying true to its mission of helping Haitian children grow and develop so that they in turn can help develop and lead their country to a brighter future, HaitiChildren is working to educate Haitian mothers about unscrupulous adoption agents. Krabacher said that many orphanages in the country cooperate with such brokers while other individuals approach mothers directly promising a better life for their children. She emphasized that non-Haitian parents who adopt children through these agents are not aware of the high-pressure tactics that many of them use.

Instead of trying to work with the Haitian government to stop the practice, though, HaitiChildren is making progress through education. The organization is beginning a series of public service announcements that encourage mothers to resist the adoption brokers’ high-pressure tactics and to “Just say NO!” to anyone who tries to persuade them to give up their children.

Like HaitiChildren’s first food program in 1994, this mission to teach Haiti to “hold on tightly to your kids!” is starting small. But it is another example of the organization’s focus on programs that grow organically and ultimately help Haiti’s children develop pride and skills to help themselves.

The international community pledged enough aid to give every Haitian a check for $1,000. The money went elsewhere.

The corrugated metal fences surrounding construction sites in downtown Port-au-Prince are covered with a simple message: “Haiti ap vanse,” or “Haiti is moving forward.” Where once many thousands of people made tattered tents and makeshift shelters their home, now massive concrete shells and cranes stand tall amidst the rubble. Returning to Haiti, along with much of the world’s major media, for the fifth anniversary of the earthquake that killed more than 200,000 and displaced 1.5 million, it’s impossible not to see some signs that Haiti is in fact “moving forward.” The large camps of internally displaced persons, the most visible sign of the quake’s lasting impact, have for the most part been cleared, though certainly some remain. But beneath the veneer of progress, a more disturbing reality is apparent.

Eighteen kilometers north on the dusty hillsides overlooking the sea is Canaan, an informal city now home to hundreds of thousands of people and, according to the State Department, on its way to becoming the second-largest city in Haiti. “It’s a living hell,” says Alexis, one of the area’s residents, as we sit overlooking a new $18 million sports complex built by the Olympic Committee for Haitian national teams at the foot of the hills. “I’ll stay here because I can’t afford to go anywhere else,” she adds. Like many others here, Alexis received rental support from an NGO to move out of the camps in Haiti’s capital, but when it ran out, she was displaced all over again. While no longer facing the constant threat of eviction, Alexis faces a new set of problems: there are no government services in Canaan, water is scarce, employment even more so.

Five years ago, it took just seconds for hundreds of thousands of homes to crumble and crack. More than a million Haitians took to the streets, sleeping under the stars wherever space allowed, taking comfort that the only thing that could still fall was the sky. Almost just as quickly, the global aid-industrial complex was set in motion; the first no-bid contracts for groups responding to the crisis were awarded just days after. In a few months, the international community would come together, pledging $10 billion in relief and promising that this time would be different. No more of the failed policies of the past, in which the flow of foreign aid undermined the Haitian government; this time Haiti would “build back better.” But after five years and billions of dollars, just 9,000 new homes have been built.

And so, the big question five years later remains: “Where did the money go?” The funds pledged were enough to hand every single Haitian a check for $1,000. Yet compared to the lofty expectations, the internationally led reconstruction process has been a failure. To answer the question, you have to forget the notion that foreign aid is simply an altruistic endeavor to better the lives of those in need.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which has spent more than $1.5 billion in Haiti, explains its goal as “furthering America’s interests.” In a more candid assessment, contained in a document now over a decade old and no longer publicly available, USAID explained that “the principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been the United States.” Evidence from Haiti backs this up. For every $1 that USAID has spent, less than one penny went directly to Haitian organizations, be it the Haitian government or in Haiti’s private sector. More than 50 cents went to Beltway firms handling everything from housing construction, rubble removal, health services, security and more located in DC, Maryland and Virginia. As a jobs creator back home, USAID’s Haiti reconstruction effort has been an astounding success. The single largest recipient of USAID funding in Haiti was a for-profit, DC-based firm, Chemonics International, through USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives. In an earlier contract with Chemonics released through Freedom of Information Act requests, USAID clearly explained: “While humanitarian aid is distributed on the basis of need alone, transition assistance is allocated with an eye to advancing U.S. foreign policy objectives and priorities.”

A relevant example of just that philosophy is that the vast majority of USAID-financed houses were built many hours north of Port-au-Prince, where the need is greatest, in Caracol, the site of a shiny, new industrial park, which received high-level support from Bill and Hillary Clinton. And while the plan had been to build 15,000 houses, only 900 currently have been built. At the same time, a reliance on foreign contractors and imported materials led costs to balloon from $55 million to over $90 million. In October 2014, barely a year after the first families moved in to homes in Caracol, USAID awarded $4.5 million to yet another American firm to oversee massive repairs needed to fix the faulty work of the first contractor. This is the damage caused by putting political priorities and American business interests over the needs of those on the ground.

But Chemonics, whose contract with USAID explicitly states that decisions about what programs to fund “will be based upon US foreign policy interests in consultation” with the State Department, worked to further USAID’s objectives of “counter[ing] the destabilizing effects” and the “growing discontent” with the pace of reconstruction. It ran PR for the new industrial park, installing benches and flower planters in nearby areas to “project a positive image.” An audit later noted that the flowers soon died “from lack of care,” while the mayor decried the lack of community involvement. But business was good for Chemonics, whose CEO at the time received a $2.5 million bonus.

If you try to dig deeper into how USAID money is actually spent, you’ll find a black box. While it is relatively easy to look up online how much money Chemonics has received for work in Haiti since the quake (over $200 million), it is impossible to identify the thousands of subcontractors that actually implement the various programs USAID supports. Interested in how much money contractors are able to take off the top for their headquarters back home? Too bad — that information is a tightly protected trade secret that USAID and its contractors refuse to disclose.

When I submitted a FOIA request for more specific information about Chemonics’s work in Haiti, every document I received was heavily redacted. USAID explained that to “release the information…could willfully stir up false allegations…and cause strife within the target communities,” adding, “the release of the information…would likely instigate demonstrations and create an unsafe environment” to work in.

The international aid effort in Haiti has been plagued from the beginning by a lack of transparency and a lack of community participation. A reliance on opaque NGOs and unaccountable contractors has shielded programs from scrutiny. Decisions are expressly guided not solely by the needs on the ground but by powerful actors in Washington, New York and elsewhere. But this isn’t a mistake, it’s the system we’ve created, and it’s time to change it.

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Original article authored by Jake Johnston, January 21, 2015, in The Nation.

PRESS RELEASE

HaitiChildren
Debra Muzikar | Development Director
[email protected]
970-379-4490

On Friday, November 14, 2014, Susie Krabacher, Co-Founder of the non-profit HaitiChildren which serves children in Haiti, and The Links Organization of Denver kick-started a school philanthropy program called “Change for Change in Haiti.” Hallett Fundamental Academy’s goal is to raise $2,000 for the organization by collecting loose change over the next month. The mission of the International Trends and Services facet is to expand the global platform for programs designed and developed to service the educational, health, and cultural needs of people of African descent throughout the world. As part of the project, six students will travel with Susie to Haiti to see firsthand what their efforts have accomplished and the work that HaitiChildren is doing.

For over twenty years, Aspen-based philanthropists Susie and Joe Krabacher have dedicated much of their lives to bringing desperately needed care to the youngest and most vulnerable residents of the Caribbean island through their Haitian-registered humanitarian organization, HaitiChildren. “We believe that the best way to heal these children is in their own country,” says co-founder Susie Krabacher. “That’s why we work so hard to provide the children with the local support and services they need to heal and thrive.”

# # #

About HaitiChildren | HaitiChildren provides diverse services to the most vulnerable of Haiti’s citizens. Besides giving a home and 24/7 care to 126 children, Mercy &Sharing also runs three schools to educate over 1100 students, serves 2,000 nutritious meals to the areas poorest villagers every day, supplies clean water daily to over 5,000, operates a medical care and therapy center, and employs 220 Haitians. Mercy and Sharing’s administrative staff of four in the United States is funded directly by its Board of Directors, so all donations raised go directly to programs in Haiti. HaitiChildren is supported by loyal private donors (no public funding), dedicated volunteer Board members and officers, and numerous volunteers. To learn more about HaitiChildren and how you can help, visit www.haitichildren.org.

Interview by Nicole Weaver

Recently, I had the distinct honor to meet Susie Krabacher, co-founder and president of HaitiChildren, an organization dedicated to Haitian children’s relief. Susie is a relentless advocate for children, and was the recipient of the prestigious 2000 International Humanitarian Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Haitians in Washington, DC. HaitiChildren believes in equipping children with the tools and skills they need to become productive, responsible citizens. Go here to read about HaitiChildren’s 2014 Gala for Haitian Children’s Relief. Thank you Susie for taking time to do this interview.

Can you explain in detail all the work you are doing with Haiti’s children through your foundation, HaitiChildren?
The main focus of HaitiChildren is to rescue children who are not picked by any orphanage in Haiti. 99% of orphanages in Haiti do not accept children with disabilities. However, 50% of the babies with a handicap can become functional and completely normal [with] medical intervention. This is what we do. Then we raise these little Haitian heroes in their own country with the highest level of education in Haiti. [Students helped by] M&S [are] consistently in the 99-100% [range] of passing the State exams. The Haitian average is 22%. All of our children are introduced to leadership programs. Many will lead their country in the future. We do not avoid teaching values and all the children pray to our Heavenly Father for themselves and each other.

Do you have any short and long-term goals for HaitiChildren? If so, what are they?
I would like to see financial stability. I would like to have every program annually funded. We have challenges in keeping every program operational from year to year. This is always on my heart. I am always looking for faith-based partners who will join me in this great privilege of serving the poor and saving children’s lives.

How many times a year do you travel to Haiti? How are you able to remain safe?
I try to maintain a schedule of five weeks in the U.S. to raise funds and every sixth week in Haiti. HaitiChildren employs 212 local Haitians to run our 11 life-saving programs.

Let’s say someone wants to donate to HaitiChildren. What urgent, immediate needs do you have right now?
Any amount is a blessing. Keeping all the programs open is such a challenge. We serve 5,200 Haitians every single day. They get clean water, or their children get an education in our schools. We often provide the only meal they get per day. Our clinics offer care to entire villages. You can’t put a value on keeping people from suffering. But the best part is when they get hope from knowing about Jesus. We can ease the suffering but we get to spend eternity with them if they know him.

I understand all the proceeds from your book Angels of a Lower Flight go to HaitiChildren. Where can one can purchase a copy of your book?
The book can be purchased at Amazon or you can always order from your local bookstore. I would love to sign anyone’s copy and answer questions. I am now writing book two. Again, all names will be changed!

. . . . . .

If you would like to learn more about HaitiChildren and make a donation, please visit its website. You can also follow HaitiChildren on Twitter and Facebook.

Blog by Nicole Weaver

The other night I attended a most amazing event: my first HaitiChildren Haitian Gala. HaitiChildren is a one-of-a-kind organization whose mission is to provide care and education to abandoned, orphaned, and disabled children in Haiti.

I first learned about HaitiChildren after reading the book Angels of a Lower Flight: One Woman’s Mission to save a Country…One Child at a Time by the organization’s CEO, Susie Scott Krabacher. I read it in one day and immediately became Krabacher’s number one fan. Her story touched me so deeply that it moved me to action. Haiti trip planner . I made the decision to support HaitiChildren financially.

Susie’s story made me stop to think that we do not have to let life’s curveballs define who we become in life. Having been sexually abused by her grandfather from age four until eight, Susie made a sound decision to not let her past impact her future in a negative way. She used her pains as a way to reach out to other children who had struggled with the same lack of self-worth that she had.

Her good deeds have made it possible to help educate the forgotten, feed the hungry, house the neglected, show mercy and dignity to the abused, and empower a new generation to hope and sustainability in my native Haiti.

Twenty years later, HaitiChildren is still going strong. The gala was held to raise additional funds to help reach more abandoned and disabled children from a vulnerable state of being hurt and broken and provide comprehensive care until they become independent and thriving.

I am Haitian American and I was deeply touched by people’s generosity. At the gala one person purchased a Peyton Manning-signed jersey for $1,500 dollars. Another purchased a Ty Lawson-signed jersey for $2,500. At a high school teacher’s salary, I can’t afford to make these types of donations, but nonetheless, I was left in awe at how kind and generous some people are.

If you would like to donate to HaitiChildren, please visit their website. Thank you!

— — —

Nicole Weaver is an award-winning author. Her first trilingual book Marie and Her Friend the Sea Turtle was published in 2009. Her love for languages and other cultures resulted in publishing the award-winning book, My Sister Is My Best Friend which was published in 2011 by Guardian Angel Publishing. My Sister Is My Best Friend has won the following awards: 2012 Creative Child Awards Program consisting of moms and educators has awarded this book the 2012 PREFERRED CHOICE AWARD Kids Picture Storybooks category. 2012 Children’s Literary Classics Seal of Approval 2012 Children’s Literary Classics Gold Award Readers’ Favorite 5 Star Review Her newest book , My Brother Is My Best Friend was also published by Guardian Angel Publishing, January 2014.

By David Keene | The Washington Times | September 23, 2014

Reprinted from the Washington Times.

Bill Clinton never stops. Last week while he and Hillary were in Iowa, Mr. Clinton continued his nonstop campaign to sell his unique take on his own accomplishments.

This time it was Haiti. Politicians and their minions practice spinning the facts to fit their campaign and governing narratives, and when they leave office, many of them spend their retirement years making sure that as many people as possible buy into their version of history.

They do it because, at the end of the day, it’s not what happened that’s as important as what people “think” happened while they were in office. Former presidents write memoirs and hawk them not just for the money, but to justify their service and to blame others for any failures that may have occurred on their watch.

Mr. Clinton doesn’t let a day go by without reminding people of his accomplishments as president (and former president). On university campuses, late-night talk shows and international conferences, Mr. Clinton peddles his version of history. The admittedly brilliant but flawed politician who squandered his White House years has morphed into a giant who somehow knew how to govern better than anyone — Republican or Democrat — since and who could charm the pants off anyone. Barack Obama tries, but as often as he blames George W. Bush, the Koch brothers and an insufficiently grateful public for his troubles, he can’t seem to do it with the style of the master.

Sometimes, though, even the master oversells, as he did last week recalling his efforts to lift the poor people of Haiti out of poverty and grant them the blessings of democracy.

Few Americans pay much attention to what goes on in Haiti. We know that it has a violent past, was run for not decades, but generations by thieving dictators, is the poorest nation in the Americas, and when its inhabitants aren’t being conned, beaten or killed by their rulers, they are fighting killer hurricanes and earthquakes.

This was going to change when “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled for the French Riviera, leaving his country in the hands of a defrocked and possibly psychotic Catholic priest who promised the nation’s poor a quasi-Marxist day of reckoning. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president in 1991, but after a year was forced to decamp to Georgetown to be wined and dined by Washington’s Democratic elite, and he became quickly addicted to the finer things in life.

Washington Democrats, led by members of the Congressional Black Caucus and eventually Mr. Clinton, adopted him. The United States dispatched 20,000 troops to Haiti and returned Mr. Aristide to Port au Prince, where he emulated his predecessors by eliminating opponents, outlawing rival political parties, cowing the press, doing business with drug cartels and creating the sort of crony capitalist economy that allowed him to reward his friends and supporters in Haiti and the United States.

As he became more high-handed, he suggested first that his term should be extended for two years to cover the time he had suffered in exile in Georgetown and then that the Haitian Constitution be amended to allow a true leader to serve for, well, life.

Even he couldn’t force these ideas through, however, and he was forced to put a crony in until he could run again in 2000. By then, his opponents were organized and following his earlier example by seeking assistance in Washington. They formed something called the “Democratic Convergence,” which consisted of more than a dozen political parties united by a desire to put the Aristide years behind them.

I visited Haiti during the man’s second attempt to loot his country and was treated to a lunch by leaders of the “Convergence,” a diverse bunch of civil society and religious leaders as well as politicians. On my right sat the head of the old Duvalier party and on my left the chairman of the Communist Party. Most were early, but completely disillusioned, Aristide supporters. I couldn’t resist observing that they had obviously been wrong about Mr. Aristide, as they were proof that he had indeed been able to unite his countrymen as he promised.

Mr. Clinton had named a new ambassador in the spring of 2000 who stayed around for some time until the new President Bush focused on Haiti. The ambassador was an Aristide cheerleader of the first rank. When we met in Port au Prince in 2001, I suggested that the economic situation in the country was worse than ever. He disagreed and said some sectors were doing quite well. I asked him to name one. He didn’t hesitate. “Banking,” he said. I looked at him in amazement and said simply, “Can you spell laundry?” By that time, Haiti’s bankers were serving not the collapsed domestic economy, but drug lords who were channeling cash through Mr. Aristide’s friends.

Mr. Aristide was finally ousted again, but his legacy lives on. Much of the public and private money our former president sent to Port au Prince resides today not in Haiti, but in U.S. and Swiss banks while the long-suffering people of Haiti continue to live desperate lives. So much for the Clinton legacy.

David A. Keene is opinion editor of The Washington Times.

By Amy Bracken | August 29, 2014

Reprinted from PRI

When the US military pulled out of Vietnam in 1973, it left something of a living legacy: Tens of thousands of pregnant Vietnamese women. But this issue is not confined to Americans in Vietnam, or even to wartime. It’s also an often overlooked side effect of United Nations peacekeeping operations. Now, the babies of UN peacekeepers are becoming an issue in Haiti.

In the seaside town of Port Salut, 5-year-old Sasha Francesca Barrios basks in the attention of her mother and a couple of visitors. Barrios lives in a small house with her mother, grandmother and aunt. She talks about school and sings the popular Haitian children’s song “Ti Zwazo,” or Little Bird.

And when Sasha’s mother asks her to identify the young, pale man in a photo, she knows right away — “Papa.” Roselaine Duperval, her mother, says Sasha’s father was a Uruguayan marine in the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti — known as MINUSTAH, its French acronym.

“They came here, and there was one who was friends with me,” Duperval says. “He said he loved me, and we were together. I never thought if I stayed with him and had a child with him, that he would leave and not support the child.” But he did. Sasha has never met him.

Duperval says the marine gave her $200 early in her pregnancy, but he left Haiti before Sasha was born and she never heard from him again. Now she’s scraping by giving manicures and pedicures in people’s homes. And she knows other women in similar situations.

“They come in our country to help us and they don’t help us; they have kids with us and leave,” she says. “I need aid for my child, to pay for school. It’s MINUSTAH’s responsibility. We’re in a country without work. We need the UN’s help. They know MINUSTAH troops leave babies here, children without dads.”

The UN does have a policy of helping facilitate paternity claims and child support in these kinds of cases. In February, the UN brought seven mothers — including Duperval — to the capital with their children for DNA tests. The mothers are still waiting for results.

Sasha Barrios holds up a picture of the Uruguayan marine her mother says is Sasha’s father. The man was a member of MINUSTAH, the UN peacekeeping for in Haiti.
Photo credit: Amy Bracken

And while the UN plays a role, it’s ultimately up to the country where the peacekeeper is from to determine follow-up. In the case of Duperval and her six fellow mothers, a Uruguayan military official said the alleged fathers have been asked to submit DNA samples. If paternity is established, it will be up to the Uruguayan courts to determine what should be done about it.

Of course, establishing paternity and getting child support are a challenge when the dad is a local Haitian, says community activist Miriame Duclair, let alone when the father is a foreign peacekeeper.

“The difference is if it’s [a Haitian] dad, often his family will help the mom,” Duclair says. “But when a foreigner leaves a child, there’s no one to help. When the UN talks about coming to Haiti to stabilize, it’s not true. They come to /de/stabilize.”

Both the UN and the Uruguayan army say they strictly forbid such relationships. Uruguayan Col. Girardo Frigossi says no matter what the circumstances, relationships between UN peacekeepers and locals are never acceptable.

“There’s no possibility of any relation, consensual or not,” he says. “Because the power is in the UN soldier - because they have food, they have water, they can provide security, they have money.”

Sylvain Roy of the UN’s Conduct and Discipline Unit, or CDU, makes it even clearer. “Regardless of whether the mother might have been consenting,” he says, “the relationship is exploitative.”

Yet the chances for mothers receiving restitution are slim. The UN only started pulling together paternity claim statistics last year, and they show only 19 substantiated paternity claims against peacekeepers across the entire globe from 2010 through 2012. An independent report suggests there were many more claims before the UN began recording cases.

And in Haiti, many mothers aren’t making claims because there isn’t a known system for doing that. The Port Salut women were only brought to the attention of the UN when an American journalist reported on them in 2011.

The CDU’s Roy says this is an area that needs improvement. “You cannot expect a woman living in the middle of Congo, for example, to be able to file a claim for recognition of paternity, and then child support, in a court on another continent,” he says, “but it’s a situation with which we’ve got to deal.”

In the meantime, mothers left behind have a simple request. Rose Mina Joseph was 16 when she became pregnant, she says, by a 35-year-old Uruguayan peacekeeper. “I want MINUSTAH to get me out of poverty,” Joseph says, “to put me and my child in a better place.”

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Amid a probe of Aristide, the former president offers a new version of events.

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady

Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal

It’s tempting to try to forget about all the misery that Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Democrat friends have inflicted on Haiti. But like perpetrators who cannot resist the urge to return to the scene of the crime, the Clintons keep reminding us.

At an Iowa “steak fry” last week, Mr. Clinton bragged about his Haiti record. That was strange: Two decades after using the U.S. military to restore deposed Haitian tyrant Jean Bertrand Aristide to power, five years after becoming the U.N.’s special Haiti envoy, and three years after taking charge of the post-earthquake Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, Mr. Clinton is persona non grata in much of the country due to the dismal results of his involvement.

Yet bringing up Haiti now, even in such an unlikely venue, may come to serve a purpose. Mr. Aristide was put under house arrest in Port-au-Prince earlier this month in connection with an investigation into allegations of money laundering and corruption. If he decides to talk and remembers things differently than Mr. Clinton, the former U.S. president will be out in front with his version of events.

Former US President Bill Clinton visits a peanut plantation in Tierra Muscady, in the central plateau of Haiti, on June 29, 2014. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Speaking after his wife addressed the Iowa crowd, Mr. Clinton explained his 1994 Haiti intervention: “The military dictator down there was putting tires around people’s necks and setting them afire, in an affectionate policy called necklacing,” he recalled satirically. “I was told that nobody gave a rip about Haiti.” But “we did it and no shot was fired. Nobody got hurt.”

That’s some tale. But as any Haitian knows, it was Mr. Aristide who championed Haitian “necklacing,” aka “Père Lebrun” after a domestic tire merchant. Governing a democracy with a national assembly was more difficult than he had anticipated and he urged his followers to give Père Lebrun to his opponents, as an Oct. 1993 Congressional Research Service report documented.

On Sept. 29, 1991, the military stepped in and kicked him out. It employed its own paramilitary, which also practiced repression—but guns, not necklacing, were its weapon of choice.

Mr. Aristide fled to Washington, where President George H.W. Bush released Haiti’s international telephone and airline revenues to him as the government-in-exile. There was never any accounting for those funds but they reportedly topped $50 million. Mr. Aristide lived the high life in Georgetown and mounted an aggressive and costly lobbying campaign for U.S. military intervention to restore his presidency.

Once Mr. Clinton put Mr. Aristide back in the palace in Port-au-Prince, his supporters picked up where they had left off. Opponents were hacked with machetes, set on fire and gunned down. Money disappeared.

The Clinton administration did nothing to contain these abuses. Instead, a company called Fusion, run by Democrats—including Joseph P. Kennedy II, Mack McLarty, who had been Clinton White House chief of staff, and Marvin Rosen, a former finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee—went into the long-distance telephone business with Haiti Teleco, the government-owned monopoly.

In 2000, several Haitians, fearing for their lives, surreptitiously approached me to ask for help in exposing this arrangement, which they said was destroying Haiti-Teleco. Fusion clammed up, but with the help of the Freedom of Information Act I eventually uncovered the sweetheart deal between the friends of Bill and the Haitian despot. (See the Oct. 27, 2008, Americas column.) Fusion has denied any wrongdoing.

Since 2012, Haiti’s judges no longer answer to the executive branch and their independence could reverse decades of impunity. Former dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier is currently under investigation for numerous allegations of human-rights violations during his rule in the 1970s and ’80s.

Sources familiar with the investigation of Mr. Aristide conducted by Judge Lamarre Belizaire tell me that the potential charges include money laundering, drug trafficking and the illicit use of state funds. One credible source told me by telephone from Port-au-Prince last week that the court also is looking at corruption inside Haiti Teleco.

It would be reasonable to expect U.S. authorities to cooperate since they have prosecuted several Haitians for telecom kickback schemes and drug trafficking during Mr. Aristide’s rule. My sources say that the Aristide Foundation for Democracy also is being investigated and that some well-known Americans are involved.

Last week Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), who has been a vocal supporter of Mr. Aristide and has served on the U.S. board of directors of the Aristide Foundation for Democracy, sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry expressing concern that there might be an “effort to illegally arrest” Mr. Aristide and that his supporters might react violently. She asked the U.S. to “intervene immediately.”

Ms. Waters did not mention the importance of setting a precedent in Haiti that no one is above the law. Nor did she show concern for the safety of Judge Belizaire, who according to multiple reports is receiving death threats. Funny that. Just as strange as the unexpected Haiti spiel from Mr. Clinton in Iowa.

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by Thomas Péralte

Reprinted from HAITI LIBERTE

This past Mon., Sep. 8, 2014 marked two major events in Haiti: the first day of school and the last day of the regular session of the 49th Legislature.

The former was the bigger calamity of the two. Since the arrival of President Michel Martelly and Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe in power in 2011, the opening of school has always been delayed until October. According to many educators, Martelly’s so-called Free and Compulsory Universal Schooling Program (PSUGO), clumsily and demagogically introduced in his first year, has contributed significantly to the deterioration of education in Haiti. This year, after a dismal success rate of only 22% in the state exams, 3.3 million students are expected to return to classrooms throughout Haiti, according to statistics from the Ministry of National Education and Vocational Training. But less than 3% of students are heading to school on the first day of classes, a telling failure for the government.

Various factors contributed to most students flunking state exams and missing the start of the school year: widespread poverty, chronic unemployment, soaring costs of school materials and tuitions, and growing insecurity.

While every new school year presents a heavy burden for most parents, this year is worse than most. While some schools have opened their doors to welcome a few students, many have not. The state has not yet finished correcting the tests of students who had to retake the Baccalaureate 1 and 2 exams because they failed the first time. While the Martelly-Lamothe regime trumpets education as its priority and arbitrarily and illegally taxes international money transfers for $1.50 and international telephone calls at 5 cents a minute to supposedly pay for free education, Haiti’s poor are nonetheless finding it impossible to send their children to school. Where is the money supposedly collected for education? Three years after the establishment of the National Education Fund (FNE), no clear and transparent accounting of it has ever been presented to the public.

At the same time, teachers are demanding the payment of back salaries owed to them and reform of the system. President Martelly spends a fortune to churn out patently false and outlandish propaganda about what he calls “free education,” which has thrown the antiquated Haitian educational system completely out of whack. He often claims to have sent 1.9 million children to school, but investigations have concluded that only 250,000 children have benefitted from this hyped but substandard education initiative.

Meanwhile, senators and deputies met together in a National Assembly as required by the 1987 Constitution to close the last session of the 49th Legislature. Since Martelly came to power on May 14, 2011, elections to renew senators, deputies, and municipal governments have never been held, as required by law. Deputies have now held the last regular session of the fourth year of their term, and no election for the renewal of the lower house is scheduled. Aware of the poor record of this Parliament, deputies during the final plenary session voted a dozen proposals and bills in about three hours, after having spent four years neglecting the mission entrusted to them by the Constitution: law-making and oversight.

One of the bills passed would change the administrative divisions of the territory. The deputies proposed increasing Haiti’s current 10 departments to 16 to take into account the demographic weight of several regions. The West Department would spin off a new department called the Palms Department, which would encompass Petit-Goâve and the island of La Gonâve. The North Department would be divided into North 1 and North 2, with Cap Haïtien and Grande Rivière du Nord as their respective seats. The Artibonite and Central Plateau Departments would be divided into High and Low. The South would spawn a new Southeast and Southwest, covering such remote towns as Tiburon.

The deputies also elevated several communal sections with significant populations to the rank of commune.

The deputies are now in recess, waiting to see what will happen on the second Monday of January 2015, when Parliament is supposed to reconvene. But because elections have not been held and are not scheduled, it is more likely to expire with the end of the terms of another third of the Senate. (Some legal experts interpret the law to say that the Senators’ terms won’t expire until May 14, 2015, since they took office late, but it appears Martelly would like Parliament out of the way as soon as possible.)

For some opposition deputies, the 49th Legislature was the worst legislature in Haitian history. Some even said that during the reign of the Duvalier dictatorship (1957-1986) the legislature was not as vassalized, sold-out, and corrupt.

Meanwhile, the Haitian people continue to denounce and mobilize against the political persecution of Martelly’s political opponents, including former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and activist lawyer Michel André. People call for respect of the 1987 Constitution, democratic principles, and the rule of law.

The complete failure of students during this summer’s state exams, of getting kids back to school, and of the 49th Legislature demonstrates very clearly the damage that can be done when imperialist nations override a sovereign election to impose incompetent and corrupt stooges in power in the world’s first black republic. Propaganda is killing education in Haiti, just as President Martelly’s arrogance is killing democracy. Martelly is leading the country toward chaos and dictatorship. Democratic institutions are endangered, and democracy will disappear if the people do not take their destiny into their hands.