Christopher Jenkins' short documentary about our work in South Sudan will be featured at the Santa Barbara 2012 International Film Festival end of this month.
Haiti News
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Haiti’s history: Many trials and errors
UK Only Article:
standard article
Issue:
A way out of the woods
Fly Title:
Haiti’s history
Rubric:
A legacy of villains, inside and outside the country
Main image:
Look back in anger
Look back in anger
Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. By Laurent Dubois. Metropolitan Books; 434 pages; $32 and £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
AFTER the huge earthquake that shook Haiti in 2010, hundreds of foreign journalists swarmed into the country. They sought both to take stock of the damage and to explain why Haiti was in such poor shape to begin with. Laurent Dubois, a professor at Duke University, was disappointed with their accounts of Haiti’s past, which attributed the country’s poverty either to cultural flaws or foreign meddling. “Pundits offered a plethora of ill-informed speculation,” he writes. “Nearly all of the coverage portrayed Haitians themselves as either simple villains or simple victims.”
In this sectionThe places in between
Days of heaven
Justice, delayed ...
Impunity in Port-au-Prince
Brazil Limits Haitian Immigration
Haiti's judiciary: Just what the Doc ordered
MAKING the rounds in Haiti this week is a cartoon that depicts Jean-Claude Duvalier (pictured) behind the wheel of a blood-stained Mercedes brimming with human skulls. A policeman writes a ticket, exclaiming, “I’m arresting you for stealing a car, Mr Duvalier!”
Such is the state of justice in Haiti, where on January 30th Carvès Jean, an investigative magistrate, dismissed charges of grave human-rights crimes against Mr Duvalier, including torture and political assassination, because a ten-year statute of limitations had expired. Mr Duvalier ruled the country from 1971 to 1986, when he fled to France and spent 25 years living off the millions of dollars he is frequently accused of having siphoned from the public treasury. Mr Jean ruled that a trial for misappropriation of government funds could go forward, though it will be heard by a tribunal that handles relatively minor crimes. The maximum penalty would be five years in prison.
The UN and human-rights groups raised an immediate outcry. Human-rights crimes during Mr Duvalier’s regime are amply documented, and under international law, they argue, there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. “Courts from Argentina to Cambodia have set aside time limits to address past atrocities, but once again, Haiti is an exception,” said Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch, which helped build the case against Mr Duvalier ...
Getting Back the Bad Guy’s Loot
8 Guilty for Prison Massacre in Rare Trial of Haiti’s Police
The convicted police officers were among 14 tried for a prison massacre that occurred a week after the 2010 earthquake.
E.R.: Port-au-Prince
Daily chart: Natural disasters
The costliest natural disasters since 1980 THE world has succeeded in making natural disasters less deadly. Annual death tolls are heavily influenced by outliers, such as Haiti’s earthquake in 2010 (which killed more than 200,000) or the Bangladeshi cyclones in 1970 (300,000). But, adjusted for the Earth’s growing population, the trend in death rates is clearly downward. Economic costs, though, are rising as people and industrial activity cluster in disaster-prone areas such as river deltas and earthquake fault lines. The world’s industrial supply chains were only just recovering from Japan’s earthquake and tsunami in March when a natural disaster severed them again in October. The deluge in Thailand cost $40 billion, the most expensive disaster in the country’s history. J.P. Morgan estimates that it set back global industrial production by 2.5%. Five of the ten costliest, in terms of money rather than lives, were in the past four years. Munich Re, a reinsurer, reckons their economic costs were $378 billion last year, breaking the previous record of $262 billion in 2005 (in constant 2011 dollars). Besides the Japanese and Thai calamities, New Zealand suffered an earthquake, Australia and China floods, and America a cocktail of hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and floods. Barack Obama issued a record 99 “major disaster declarations” in 2011.See full article
Brazil to Grant Work Visas to Haitians
Justice Minister José Eduardo Cardozo said that Brazil would grant visas to thousands of Haitians who have arrived recently in remote areas of the Amazon seeking work.
