Bill Quigley is Legal Director of the Center for
Constitutional Rights, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans
and a long-time Haiti advocate. Jeena Shah is a lawyer serving in Port
au Prince as a Lawyers’ Earthquake Response Network Fellow with the
Bureau des Avocats Internationaux and the Institute for Justice and
Democracy in Haiti.
One year after the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake, more than a million
people remain homeless in Haiti. Homemade shelters and tents are
everywhere in Port au Prince. People are living under plastic tarps or
sheets in concrete parks, up to the edge of major streets, in the side
streets, behind buildings, in between buildings, on the sides of hills,
literally everywhere.
UNICEF estimates that more than 1 million people – 380,000 of them children – still live in displacement camps.
“The recovery process” as UNICEF says, “is just beginning.”
One
of the critical questions is how many people remain without adequate
housing. While there are fewer big camps of homeless and displaced
people, there has been extremely little rebuilding. The UN reported that
97,000 tents have been provided since the quake. Tents are an
improvement over living under a sheet but they are not homes. Many
families have lived many places in the last year circulating from rough
shelters to tents to camps to other camps to living alongside other
families.
It is important to understand that families may leave
the huge unsupervised camps and still be homeless someplace else – like
a tent in another part of the city or country. Moving from one type of
homelessness to another cannot be allowed to be declared progress
against homelessness and displacement.
The key human rights goal is housing, not moving out of the displacement camps.
One
illustration of the housing challenge facing the Haitian people can be
found in a recent report from the International Organization for
Migration (IOM). The IOM December report announced a reduction in the
number of persons remaining in displacement camps. The IOM then wrongly
concluded that the number of people displaced and homeless was reduced
accordingly. Why is this conclusion wrong? Because the IOM report does
not even try to track where displaced persons go after they leave a
particular camp. They equate homeless families moving out of
displacement camps as families finding housing.
These types of
erroneous conclusions are not only misleading but threaten to hinder
badly needed relief efforts one year after Haiti’s devastating
earthquake.
Careful consideration of the IOM report provides an
opportunity to examine some of the many important housing challenges
still facing Haitians.
IOM Assertion: “We finally start to see
light at the end of the tunnel for the earthquake-affected
population…these are hopeful signs that many victims of the quake are
getting on with their lives.” IOM reported there has been a 31percent
decrease in the number of internally displaced people living on IDP
sites in Haiti since July.
Fact: Getting on with their lives? Of
an estimated 1,268 displacement camps, at least 29 percent have been
forcibly closed – meaning tens of thousands of people have been evicted,
often through violent means. Many who are forcibly evicted from one
site move on to set up camp for their families in another location,
which is often more dangerous. This is not getting on with life; this
is searching for less dangerous places for the family tent.
IOM
Assertion: People with houses labeled red (uninhabitable or extremely
dangerous) or yellow (in need of repair) have “chosen to return to the
place of origin or nearby to establish a shelter.”
Fact: As of
Dec. 16, 2010, only 2,074 of the estimated 180,000 destroyed houses had
been repaired and a small percentage of rubble had been cleared.
Decisions by desperate homeowners to move back into still destroyed
homes is hardly progress.
It is also not even possible for large
numbers of people who were renters to return to their destroyed homes.
The destruction of more than 180,000 private residences coupled with
influx of international aid workers has made Haiti’s rental market soar.
An estimated 80 percent of those rendered homeless by the earthquake
were renters or occupiers of homes without any formal land title.
Current rents are unreachable by the majority of displaced Haitians,
many of whom who lost their means of livelihood during the earthquake.
The IOM admits “The lack of land tenure and the destruction of many
houses in already congested slums left many of those displaced with few
options but to remain in shelters.”
IOM Assertion: “Some
households rendered homeless after the earthquake left congested Port au
Prince all-together going home to the regions. Others sent their
children to the countryside for a better life.”
Fact: Rural Haiti
before the earthquake was home to 52 percent of the population, 88
percent of which was poor and 67 percent was extremely poor. Rural
residents had a per capita income one third of the income of people
living in urban areas and extremely limited access to basic services.
Disaster response following the earthquake has not tackled the extreme
structural violence that exists in rural areas, and Hurricane Tomas
further destroyed livelihoods of rural communities. People moving from
displacement camps in the city to living in a tent in the countryside
have not really moved out of homelessness, they have just moved.
IOM
Assertion: “Surviving in poor living conditions during the long
hurricane season has persuaded many to seek alternative housing
solutions.”
Fact: Homeless people are always seeking “alternative
housing solutions.” Camp conditions even before Hurricane Tomas and the
cholera outbreak revealed that displaced Haitians were in camps because
they had no “alternative housing solutions.” According to a study
conducted by CUNY Professor Mark Schuller before both Hurricane Tomas
and the outbreak of cholera, 40 percent of displacement camps did not
have access to water, and 30 percent did not have toilets of any kind.
Only 10 percent of families even had a tent, many of which were ripped
beyond repair during the hurricane season; the rest were sleeping under
tarps or even bed sheets. A study conducted even earlier by the
Institute of Justice & Democracy in Haiti found that 78 percent of
families lived without enclosed shelter; 44 percent of families
primarily drank untreated water; 27 percent of families defecated in a
container, a plastic bag, or on open ground in the camps; and 75 percent
of families had someone go an entire day without eating during one week
and over 50 percent had children who did not eat for an entire day.
Human
rights promise housing, not just forcing people away from displacement
camps. Haiti needs practical and sustainable solutions for re-housing
along with services and protections for the people still homeless.
One
year later, it is critically important for the international community
to assist Haitians to secure real housing. The million homeless Haitians
and the hundreds of thousands who have moved out of the large homeless
camps into other areas are our sisters and brothers and still need our
solidarity and help.
