Moontown

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) — Clutching automatic assault rifles, truckloads of UN troops patrolled the streets of Haiti’s shattered capital on the day after the earthquake hit last month, seemingly oblivious to the misery around them.

Cries for help from people digging for survivors in collapsed buildings were drowned out by the roar of heavy-duty engines as the troops plowed through Port-au-Prince without stopping to join rescue efforts, much less lead them.

A common sight since they were deployed in 2004, the UN troops huddled in the shade of their canopied vehicles.

UN Brazilian Peacekeepers speak with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on the way to visit to a UN-Brazilian military base in Port-au-Prince. AFP PHOTO

There were about 9,000 uniformed UN peacekeepers stationed in Haiti when the quake struck on January 12 and they were the logical “first responders” to the disaster in the impoverished Caribbean country, whose notoriously weak central government was overwhelmed by the scale of the tragedy.

Initially, however, none of the peacekeepers appeared to be involved in hands-on humanitarian relief in what emergency medical experts describe as the critical first 72 hours after a devastating earthquake strikes.

Their response to the appalling suffering was limited to handling security and looking for looters after the magnitude 7.0 quake leveled much of the capital and took what Haitian President Rene Preval says could be as many as 300,000 lives.

There was looting in the capital, but it paled in comparison with the severity of the humanitarian crisis.

Horribly-injured patients flooded overstretched hospitals, forcing medical staff to decide which patients to treat and which were already too far gone to try saving.

“Doctors played God,” said Tyler Marshall, a veteran former Los Angeles Times correspondent working with an international aid group that helped out in a tent city erected at the height of the carnage on the grounds of Port-au-Prince’s University Hospital, the country’s largest.

Scores of UN personnel died in the quake, including Hedi Annabi, head of the UN mission that was set up in 2004. That helps explain what many have criticized as a glacially slow kickoff of relief operations after one of history’s worst natural disasters.

But in the days and weeks that followed it often seemed that lessons from other disasters were ignored in Haiti as fears of rioting or lawlessness overshadowed concerns about getting aid out quickly.

The UN’s top humanitarian aid official, John Holmes, is among those who have chided relief agencies, including the United Nations itself, for doing too little to help Haiti.

“We cannot … wait for the next emergency for these lessons to be learned,” Holmes wrote in a confidential email first published on the website of the journal Foreign Policy.

“There is an urgent need to boost significantly capacity on the ground, to improve coordination, strategic planning and provision of aid,” said Holmes.

Edmond Mulet, acting head of the UN mission, acknowledged in an interview that it played a limited humanitarian role in the first few days after the earthquake since its operations were effectively decapitated.

“At the very beginning it was very difficult because all the headquarters was completely destroyed and all the leadership of the mission was killed,” Mulet told Reuters.

Mulet gained notoriety for wielding an iron fist during a previous stint as head of the UN mission when he led mostly Brazilian “blue helmet” troops in a successful crackdown on Haiti’s heavily armed gangs.

Head of UN missionon Haiti, Edmond Mulet. AFP PHOTO

And he has made no secret about juggling the competing needs of relief operations with law enforcement, in his bid to track down the more than 3,000 inmates who took advantage of the earthquake to escape from its main prison.

“We are here also to provide security,” he said when asked about the failure of convoys of rifle-wielding UN troops to search for people trapped in the rubble of the ruined capital.

“I still have to patrol, I still have to go after all these criminals and bandits that escaped from the national penitentiary, the gang leaders, the criminals, the killers, the kidnappers. I cannot really distract myself from doing that.”

The relief mission shifted into higher gear after US troops deployed in large numbers and set up a supply chain to get food and medicine into areas crying out for aid.

But there were still many bottlenecks and setbacks, often involving UN-linked food distributions hobbled by inadequate organization, supplies and crowd control.

Unfortunately, UN troops in Haiti have over the years gained a reputation for toughness and abuse more than for easing suffering in the poorest country in the Americas.

“The only time I’ve seen one of these UN troops jump out of the back of a truck was to beat up on somebody or take a shot at them,” said a member of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, as he worked security during a recent aid handout.

“These guys have given all of us in uniform a bad reputation here,” he said, asking not to be identified.

Haiti’s wrecked infrastructure and poor transport links made it difficult to get aid out and keep it flowing, but that hardly made the situation different from that in other recent disasters around the globe.

“The poorest and the most vulnerable people tend to live in the regions that are hit the most by natural disasters,” said Solomon Kuah, an emergency medical physician based in New York who spent four weeks in Port-au-Prince after the quake.

There are no reliable estimates for the number of survivors who died from injuries due to inadequate medical supplies.

But Henriette Chamouillet, the World Health Organization’s representative in Haiti, said everything from staff shortages to bureaucracy and a lack of packing lists snarled the delivery of containers full of medicines from Port-au-Prince’s airport to doctors on the ground.

Port-au-Prince sits just 700 miles off the coast of Miami, which is home to a large Haitian-American community, and it seemed absurd that so few of the US troops rushed there spoke French or were accompanied by translators.

One gripping image of chaotic food distributions came when US helicopters offloaded boxes of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) at a site in the capital. Many Haitians opened them up only to toss them away in disgust because no French or Creole-language instructions were included with the apparently useless packets of dust, explaining that they needed to be mixed with water as part of their preparation.

Rajiv Shah, head of the US Agency for International Development, has touted the Haiti relief mission as “the largest and most successful international search and rescue effort ever assembled in history.”

But more than six weeks after the quake hit, the mission is still largely in an emergency response mode. The UN’s World Food Program is limiting its food rations to 55-pound (25 kg) bags of rice and the Haitian government estimates that a million quake survivors are still living in the streets in makeshift encampments with no running water or toilets.

Doctors are almost done dealing with traumatic injuries but rehabilitation for some 40,000 amputees and rebuilding Haiti’s health infrastructure are among long-term challenges.

“This is really a disaster of Biblical proportions,” said Lewis Lucke, who was the USAID director in Iraq before coming to Haiti as US ambassador.

UN and other officials have said the global response to Haiti’s quake was quicker and more effective than in other recent disasters, including the Asian tsunami that killed 226,000 people in 13 countries in December 2004.

But experts say the United Nations has a lot to learn from smaller, more nimble medical groups like International Medical Corps, or IMC, and Paris-based Medicins Sans Frontieres, along with charities more experienced in distributing aid, such as CARE and Catholic Relief Services.

Kuah, who coordinated relief efforts for IMC, a California-based group that had highly skilled doctors treating patients in Haiti 23 hours after the earthquake struck, stressed the “need for speed” when it comes to saving lives.

“When you ask yourself if there were ways you could have prevented more mortalities or diminished excess mortality, with earthquakes, in particular, it’s more timing than anything else,” said Kuah. (Caribnet)

Materials for the project, shipped in 23 containers, are already on the island and a group of 16 Chinese workers are due in Grenada on Monday, March 1.

Project Officer in the Ministry of Housing, Joseph Noel, said that everything is in place for the start of construction. The first set of houses will be built at Mt Gay in St George’s and in Soubise, St Andrew.

The sod-turning ceremony for the housing construction took place last November in St Andrew at a ceremony attended by Grenadian and Chinese officials, including Housing Minister Alleyne Walker and Finance Minister Nazim Burke.

The housing project is expected to be completed within 18 months. (Caribnet)

LONDON, England (Reuters) - Seasonal rains and hurricanes spell trouble for Haiti in the best of times, but with hundreds of thousands of people living in flimsy makeshift shelters after last month’s earthquake, this year the dangers are much greater.

The rainy season begins in earnest in early April and the hurricane season in early June, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Both can be deadly.

“If a hurricane hits Haiti head on, the loss of life will be severe and every temporary housing camp will be wiped out,” Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of non-profit design and building group Architecture for Humanity, wrote in a blog.

Margareta Wahlstrom, U.N. Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction in Geneva, offers a similar warning for the Haitian capital.

It bore the brunt of the January 12 earthquake, which has killed up to 300,000 people.

“Port-au-Prince is built on vulnerable small slopes and mountains. With the rains, these slopes start softening up and cause mudslides like we have seen in the past, causing schools to collapse and more deaths,” she told Reuters AlertNet.

A series of storms in Haiti in 2008 already showed the extent of damage they can cause, even to sturdy buildings. More than 800 people were killed and nearly 1 million left homeless or in dire need of help.

Haiti is extremely vulnerable to floods and mudslides because most of its hillsides have been stripped bare.

Cutting down trees to make charcoal to sell for fuel is a last resort for many rural Haitians who have no other income between harvests.

There is no talk in the Haiti aid community of building enough durable housing before the storms start and no mention so far of evacuation plans in case of floods or mudslides.

“We have a huge challenge in terms of just providing emergency shelter — something that we feel that if we put all of our weight behind, as we are doing right now, we will be able (to do),” said Kristen Knutson, a spokeswoman for the U.N. office that is coordinating the international relief effort, in a telephone interview from Haiti.

She added that aid groups were for now focusing on providing plastic shelter materials to earthquake survivors and that more robust housing would be needed in the longer-term.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), which is coordinating all shelter-related aid work in Haiti, is so far building only one model transitional house and hopes construction of more houses will begin before the rainy season.

Beyond distributing waterproof shelter materials, aid agencies are also working to improve sanitation and health care — all essential in wet conditions which help infections spread.

“Neither tents nor tarpaulins, however, will provide more than minimal protection from the Haitian rainy season which peaks in May, when Port-au-Prince gets an average 230 mm of rain and sometimes as much as 50 mm in two hours.

The hurricane season, which begins later in the year, is of special concern,” IFRC said in a statement.

When asked for more information, including on evacuation plans, an IFRC spokesman in Haiti declined to comment further.

The WMO has also been asking Haitian authorities and some aid agencies on the ground whether it would be possible to anticipate floods and move the displaced people — many of whom have camped out in low-lying planes and near the sea — to safer ground, said Maryam Golnaraghi who heads the disaster risk reduction program at the U.N. weather body.

“I do not know the answer to that,” she told Reuters AlertNet. Before any evacuation can begin, reliable and consistent forecasts of extreme weather must reach the government and relief groups quickly.

In Haiti, that is difficult as the earthquake shattered its weather stations and now several countries are supplying meteorological information to the country.

To prevent any confusion, the WMO is working with Haiti’s authorities to ensure that all weather forecasts are channeled through Haiti’s single official meteorological service.

Another challenge is disseminating the information, now that only a fifth of all media in Haiti are working, Golnaraghi said.

As those aims are achieved one by one, Haiti will become better prepared for the stormy season. But time is short and the number of people at risk enormous.

“We recognize that this is minimal perfection,” said Knutson from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). (Caribnet)

Curtis Rampersad Business Editor

If you live in a standard, one-bathroom house in the Tunapuna/Piarco area, get ready for an annual property tax of about $1,296.

Residents who have two bathrooms in their homes in the San Juan/Laventille area can expect a property tax bill next month of approximately $1,215.

And if your house in St Joseph Village in San Fernando has at least one ensuite bathroom and a speciality area like a dining room or library, then you may be paying $2,365 a year in property tax.

Executive homes which contain at least as many bathrooms as there are bedrooms, especially in areas like Westmoorings, Valsayn, Lange Park and Sumadh Gardens in San Fernando, will be charged more in property taxes.

For instance, an executive home in Westmoorings will incur a tax of $5,670 while one in Valsayn could have a property tax of $5,184.

These are some of the property tax projections contained in a Ministry of Finance press advertisement on Tuesday titled ’Property tax is less than you think’.

It included a calculation of how property tax figures are arrived at and a breakdown of what these costs could be, based on the size of homes, their annual rental value and annual taxable value.

To calculate property tax, residents have to take the annual rental value, less ten per cent and multiply this by three per cent to determine the amount.

For example, a San Juan home with one bathroom and an annual rental value of $30,000 would have an taxable value of $27,000 and would have a property tax of $810 a year.

A Westmoorings home with an annual rental value of $210,000 would have a taxable value of $189,000 and an annual property tax of $5,670, the ministry ad said.

Of the 16 locations throughout Trinidad projected in the ad, the ministry’s calculations showed that property tax would be lowest for a one-bathroom home at Golconda between San Fernando and Princes Town. Here a house would incur $324 a year in property taxes.

Customers are expected to start receiving their property tax bills by the end of March.

Finance Minister Karen Nunez-Tesheira has said, under the new rates, the average homeowner would pay about $81 a month in property taxes and that the Government was actually reducing the tax from previous years. (Trinidad Express)

Aretha Welch

THE TRINIDAD and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC) will now have to pay customers a minimum rebate of $60 if their power supplies are unexpectedly interrupted for more than 10 hours at a time.

This mandate was passed on to the commission by the Regulated Industries Commission, (RIC), the overseer for electricity transmission and distribution, on December 19 last year.

Commercial and Industrial customers will meanwhile be rebated ten times the amount residential customers will be paid. The RIC mandated that T&TEC tack on a $600 credit to the customer’s bill if the standards for repairs and queries set by the RIC is not fulfilled.

Should a company be left without lights for more than ten hours, T&TEC will then owe them $600 for every additional 12 hours beyond the first 10-hour period. House owners will get $60 for every additional 12 hours after their first 10 hours in the dark.

In a press release yesterday, the RIC said the new guidelines are to ensure citizens are appropriately compensated and show ’several improvements over the old standards’.

Asked in a telephone interview yesterday evening whether the new compensation laws will be applied to areas T&TEC workers claim are high risk and refuse to go into without police protection, T&TEC chairman, Clement Imbert, said, ’The RIC does not discriminate.’

He said regardless of area, the company will reimburse its customers if their service is interrupted.

Asked whether these new stipulations meant that the service which T&TEC offers will be drastically improved, Imbert said, ’T&TEC already offers excellent value and excellent service.’

He said in the last few years, the company has been consistently working at reducing the amount of time it takes to repair electricity interruptions. Imbert also said thet measuring how much money T&TEC had to repay a customer would not be difficult.

’We are able to measure when an outage occurs. We have monitoring systems.’ (Trinidad Express)

Joel Julien joel.julien@trinidadexpress.com

SMOOTH: A water truck drives along the partly-paved road leading to the controversial church currently under construction at the Heights of Guanapo, Arima, yesterday. -Photo: JERMAINE CRUICKSHANK

A FRESH coat of asphalt yesterday replaced the bumpy dirt track that once led to the controversial church currently under construction at the Heights of Guanapo, Arima.

The stretch of road at the entrance of the ’mysterious’ church was the starting point of yesterday’s road-paving exercise. The black carpet is scheduled to extend to the entrance of Cemetery Street.

The cost of the roadwork was estimated at $3 million by a contractor who spoke to the Express under the condition of anonymity yesterday.

Construction of the ’mysterious’ church was brought to public attention at last Friday’s sitting of the House of Representatives, when Chaguanas West MP Jack Warner raised the issue of construction of what he said was a ’private church’ at the Heights of Guanapo. He called on Prime Minister Patrick Manning to say if he knew anything about the construction works.

In a statement issued by the Office of the Prime Minister on Wednesday, Manning denied that he owned the church or that public funds were being used for its construction. He, however, confirmed that the church is being built on State lands.

The cornerstone for a private church was laid on December 30, 2005 by an Apostle Reverend named Juliana Peña.

On Saturday, the Express visited the remote hillside where the construction site of the church is located. Cemetery Street was a dusty dirt track then. The car ride yesterday was much smoother as the dirt was covered by a fresh coat of asphalt.

Residents along Cemetery Street lauded the much needed road works.

’Thank God for the church and the big names who supporting it. Look we getting a new road because of it,’ a female resident, who requested anonymity, said.

For years, residents said they have been clamouring for a new road, the resident added.

The trucks and other vehicles and equipment being used in the paving exercise yesterday were unmarked. Contractors declined to say who they were working for.

Meanwhile, the Rose Foundation and its directors, Sterling and Marcia Belgrove, yesterday distanced themselves from construction of the ’mystery’ church. (Trinidad Express)

Former opposition leader Basdeo Panday yesterday said he is willing to work with party leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar, but only if Jack Warner accounts for the millions of dollars he received on behalf of the party and is removed as Chief Whip.

Until Panday’s requests are acceded to, he will be moving to the back bench of the Parliament from today. Opposition MPs Subhas Panday, Mickela Panday and Kelvin Ramnath are also expected to move with Panday, joining Tabaquite MP Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj on the back benches.

Panday’s move comes as Persad-Bissessar created history yesterday with her appointment as Leader of the Opposition.

’Notwithstanding my reservations on the integrity of the recent internal elections of the UNC, I am, in the interest of unity within the party and my desire to see the UNC grow from strength to strength, willing to work with Mrs Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the new Leader of the Opposition,’ Panday said.

’I am, however, not prepared to serve under Jack Warner as Chief Whip in the Parliament, until such time as he renders an account for the millions of dollars received by him on behalf of the party.’

Panday added, ’In the circumstances, I intend to approach the Speaker of the House with my request, that I be seated on the back-bench on the Opposition side of the House, until such time as Mr Warner is removed as Chief Whip, or until he accounts for the millions of party funds received by him, for which he has persistently refused to account.’

Speaking to the media yesterday after being appointed Opposition Leader, Persad-Bissessar said, ’I would ask Mr Panday to reconsider moving to the back bench in the interest of the party. He has indicated that in the interest of the party he will work with us, we welcome that.’

Asked about Panday’s call for Warner to account for millions, she said, ’I do not want to be today distracted by distractions of the past.’

Addressing the issue himself, Warner said, ’I am extremely disappointed that Mr Basdeo Panday should seek to dim the glory of our Political Leader in her finest hour. Mr. Panday is aware of the historical importance of today because it will be the first time a female will ever be appointed as the substantive Leader of the Opposition in the House of Representatives, and to seek to hog the limelight and detract from this moment is terribly sad.’ -Anna Ramdass (Trinidad Express)

Carolyn Kissoon South Bureau

many faces: Top left, Kamla Persad-Bissessar takes the oath as alderman in the St Patrick County Council in 1987; top right, co-ordinator of the law week committee, Hugh Woodling Law School; below left, as attorney general 1995-1996; below right, as UNC MP.

Kamla Persad-Bissessar yesterday replaced her ’political guru’, Basdeo Panday, as Opposition Leader-a position she now adds to an impressive resume.

But she is not the first Siparia Member of Parliament to unseat Panday for the opposition post.

That distinction is held by Raffique Shah, who for eight months between 1977-78, while the MP for Siparia for the United Labour Front, replaced Panday.

An attorney-at-law, Persad-Bissessar has been the Member of Parliament for Siparia for the past 13 years, after having won on a UNC slate in four consecutive elections, with one of the highest number of votes for any candidate on each occasion.

Born on April 22, 1952, Persad-Bissessar began her education at the Mohess Road Hindu School, Erin Road Presbyterian School and Siparia Union Presbyterian School. Her secondary school years were spent at the Iere High School, Siparia. She later moved to Norwood Technical College, London, to begin her tertiary education.

Persad-Bissessar’s drive for success took her to the Mona campus of University of the West Indies in Jamaica, followed by the Cave Hill campus in Barbados.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree (Hons), a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) from the University of the West Indies and a Diploma in Education, and pursued studies in the Master of Education.

After she graduated, Persad-Bissessar, became a high school teacher, both in Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica. At age 25, she became one of the youngest university lecturers at UWI, Mona.

Persad-Bissessar later pursued a career in law and was named the top student at her graduation from the Hugh Wooding Law School, winning prizes for the Most Outstanding Student and the Best Overall Performance. Her most recent academic achievement was at the Institute of Business’ executive MBA programme.

In her political career, Persad-Bissessar has also recorded many accomplishments. She was the first woman to act as prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. She was also the first woman to be appointed attorney general and minister of legal affairs. She was the first woman deputy political leader of the UNC and the first woman to act as leader of the opposition.

Persad-Bissessar eventually became the first woman to lead a major political party and was yesterday sworn in as the first woman to become Leader of the Opposition.

During her two-year reign as minister of education, Persad-Bissessar was successful in establishing universal secondary education, removing the Common Entrance Examination, replacing it with the Secondary Entrance Assessment SEA, and establishing some 32 new secondary schools in the country.

Her life goal and mission is working towards building a more just and equitable society for all persons in Trinidad and Tobago.

Persad-Bissessar, who lives in Siparia, has been married to Dr Gregory Bissessar for 38 years. Together, they have a son, Kris. She is also a grandmother of two.

Persad-Bissessar’s new home, near Palmiste, San Fernando, is almost complete.

When she moves in this year, she will be living around the corner from Panday. (Trinidad Express)