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Pace of Haiti re-construction slows
Creating a new commission won’t be easy for the same reason the original one’s 18-month mandate died: A proposal must go before Parliament for approval. And lawmakers routinely spar with Haitian President Michel Martelly, a pop star-turned-president whose old onstage antics as “Sweet Micky” sometimes make a cameo in his new role.
International donors say the need for a new commission is urgent.
“We call on President Martelly and Prime Minister Garry Conille to take the necessary steps to address this issue in a timely and effective manner,” Justin Broekema, a spokesman for Canada’s Ministry of International Cooperation, said in a statement.
Modeled after a commission for post-tsunami Indonesia, the reconstruction panel sought to shy away from the haphazard practice of bilateral negotiations in an effort to rebuild the nation from scratch. It also wanted countries including the United States, France and Venezuela to sit literally at the same table with Haitian leaders and avoid a duplication of projects.
“We had France knowing what Spain is doing in Haiti,” Jean-Max Bellerive, former prime minister and former co-chair, told The Associated Press. “We had the U.S. Agency for International Development knowing what the Inter-American Development Bank was doing in Haiti. We had the World Bank knowing what the IMF was doing.”
Board members met every two months or so, the bulk of the meetings taking place at high-end hotels away from the piles of rubble and the hundreds of thousands people still holed up in precarious settlements vulnerable to flooding and stormy weather long after the quake.
Despite the efforts, the panel drew heaps of criticism. It was sluggish. It was bureaucratic. It had too many foreigners involved.
Sen. Jean William Jeanty and other critics blasted the IHRC for showing too few results and excluding too many Haitians from the planning. Aid groups say hundreds of the quake camps have closed, through a combination of forced removal and payments, but the mountainside shanties ringing Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, seem to be swelling with blue and orange tarp-covered structures.
