Hello!
In view of the scope of the extended damage, high number of
casualties and extreme human sufferings resulting from the massive
earthquake that hit Port-Au-Prince, the capital city of Haiti, this
Tuesday afternoon, it is suggested that we all extend our spiritual
support to help the millions of souls struggling through these
difficult conditions, not only those still alive but also those who
just lost their lives and are still wandering, disoriented and
shocked, in the other world, all of them in need of spiritual succor
and loving support, so that they may sense that they are not left
alone to face these difficult circumstances. Just like every other
survivors of similar natural disasters around the world, but
especially more so because of the extreme poverty and the repeated
stressful challenges they have faced in recent years due to other
natural calamities, our Haitian brothers and sisters of all ages
especially need to be made to feel right now that despite the critical
situation they are experiencing at this moment, brighter days will
soon come to their devastated lands as people and nations around the
world are rallying right now in a magnificent show of human solidarity
to bring them physical assistance and medical help.
So let us dedicate moments of prayers and meditations every day,
and until the current situation of chaos and extreme distress is
significantly reduced, to shower Haiti with the Light of Love and
caring compassion and to also extend these vibrations to all the
humanitarian workers and everyone involved there and around the world
towards assisting in alleviating the suffering of Haitians. Let us
also form the collective vision that international efforts and
assistance will also be directed towards rebuilding at a much higher
level of sturdiness the physical infrastructures of Port-Au-Prince and
of the rest of this country so as to transform this terrible calamity
into an opportunity to permanently eradicate poverty and the state of
chronicle underdevelopment of Haiti, and also to provide healing
assistance both for the psychological traumas of all children, women
and men, but also for the deeper underlying causes of all forms of
abuses and social strife that have also been part of the long decades
of turmoil and suffering ever since Haiti gained its political
independence from France 206 years ago.
Please help network this call for a Spiritual Vigil for Haiti to as
many people as possible.
Jean Hudon
Focus Group Facilitator
HERE IS HOW YOU CAN SEND A DONATION TO SUPPORT RELIEF EFFORTS
IN HAITI...
A list of American humanitarian organizations providing
assistance in Haiti and seeking donations
Haitian contacts, relief efforts
A list of Canadian humanitarian organizations providing
assistance in Haiti and seeking donations
Google crisis responses - Support Disaster Relief in
Haiti
To find all the mainstream media news (in English) about
Haiti
The following provides some of the latest updates as well as
some background information...
Haiti earthquake survivors await global aid effort (14
January 2010)
Hundreds of thousands of Haitians are awaiting the start of a
global rescue effort in the wake of the country's devastating
earthquake.BBC correspondents say the situation is increasingly
desperate, with no coordinated rescue plan so far and aid only
trickling in.The search for survivors continues but rescuers have
little lifting equipment and are often using their bare hands.Tens of
thousands are feared dead and up to three million affected. (...) The
USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier will arrive on Thursday. The USS
Bataan, carrying a Marine expeditionary unit, is also on its way. The
Pentagon said it was "seriously considering" sending
thousands of marines.The World Bank is funding $100m of emergency
aid.The World Food Programme is working on supplying 15,000 tonnes of
food and the Red Cross has begun a $10m appeal.The help is desperately
needed as there is no coordinated rescue at present.Doctor's assistant
Jimitre Coquillon told Associated Press: "This is much worse than
a hurricane. There's no water. There's nothing. Thirsty people are
going to die."Haitian President Rene Preval could not give an
official estimate of the dead, saying: "I don't know... up to
now, I heard 50,000... 30,000." He spoke of how he stepped over
dead bodies and heard cries of those trapped in the parliament
building. CLIP
Haiti's history of misery (13 January 2010)
Haiti appears to have had more than its fair share of
political upheaval, misrule, poverty and natural disasters. And, as
has happened so often in the nation's past, just when the situation
was getting better, a fresh catastrophe struck, writes Nick Caistor.
CLIP
Haiti quake: The worst of places for a big tremor (13 January
2010)
It was immediately obvious that Tuesday's quake in Haiti
would be an appalling natural disaster.This was a large tremor centred
on an impoverished country with little recent experience or
preparedness for such a major event of this kind. The buildings in the
quake zones of major industrialised nations sit on damping systems
that allow them to ride out tremors that not only shake them back and
forth but also twist them in the same movement. The simplest concrete
structures in the capital of Port-au-Prince will have crumpled under
the same strain. Seismometers recorded a preliminary magnitude of 7.0
at 1653 local time (2153 GMT). The epicentre's proximity to
Port-au-Prince - 15km (10 miles) - and the focus (or depth) of just
8km (5 miles) will have ensured the destructive forces were at their
most intense."Closeness to the surface is a major factor
contributing to the severity of ground shaking caused by an earthquake
of any given magnitude," said Dr David Rothery, a planetary
scientist with the Open University, UK. CLIP
Haiti earthquake captured on security camera
Country profile: Haiti
Haiti became the world's first black-led republic and the
first independent Caribbean state when it threw off French colonial
control and slavery in a series of wars in the early 19th
century.However, decades of poverty, environmental degradation,
violence, instability and dictatorship have left it as the poorest
nation in the Americas.A mostly mountainous country with a tropical
climate, Haiti's location, history and culture - epitomised by voodoo
- once made it a potential tourist hot spot, but instability and
violence, especially since the 1980s, have severely dented that
prospect. CLIP
History of deadly earthquakes (13 January 2010)
Earthquakes have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in
the last 100 years and improvements in technology have only slightly
reduced the death toll. CLIP
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1.
Thousands feared dead, many trapped in Haiti
PM fears death toll above 100,000; food, water needed, aid worker
says
NBC,
msnbc.com and news services - updated 10:48 p.m. ET, Wed., Jan.
13, 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Spending a second night on the streets,
dazed earthquake survivors wandered past dead bodies Wednesday, crying
for loved ones or seeking help. Officials feared the death toll could
reach the tens of thousands.
Death was everywhere in this devastated city of 2 million. Bodies of
tiny children were piled next to schools. Corpses of women lay on the
street with stunned expressions frozen on their faces as flies began
to gather. Bodies of men were covered with plastic tarps or cotton
sheets.
Moreover, untold numbers were still trapped after the magnitude-7
earthquake Tuesday crushed thousands of structures - from schools
and shacks to the local U.N. headquarters and the National Palace,
where a dome tilted ominously above the manicured grounds.
Voices cried out from the rubble.
"Please take me out, I am dying. I have two children with me,"
a woman told a journalist from under a collapsed kindergarten.
The first cargo planes with food, water, medical supplies, shelter and
sniffer dogs headed to the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation as
charities on the ground warned they were running out of supplies, food
and water.
At a triage center improvised in a hotel parking lot, people with
cuts, broken bones and crushed ribs moaned under tent-like covers
fashioned from bloody sheets.
"I can't take it any more. My back hurts too much," said
Alex Georges, 28, who was still waiting for treatment a day after the
school he was in collapsed and killed 11 classmates. A body lay a few
feet away.
"There's no water," said doctors' assistant Jimitre
Coquillon. "There's nothing. Thirsty people are going to
die."
'Most horrific thing'
"It's the most horrific thing I've ever seen," Bob Poff, a
Salvation Army worker in Port-au-Prince, told MSNBC. "We have to
get food and water" quickly, he said, in describing conditions
that range from stifling heat to numerous aftershocks. "We're
trying to stay alive."
Haiti's leaders struggled to comprehend the extent of the catastrophe
- the worst earthquake to hit the country in 200 years - even as
aftershocks still reverberated.
"It's incredible," President Jean Preval told CNN. "A
lot of houses destroyed, hospitals, schools, personal homes. A lot of
people in the street dead. ... I'm still looking to understand the
magnitude of the event and how to manage."
As nations around the world mobilized to send help, Preval said at
least thousands of people were probably killed. Haitian Sen. Youri
Latortue said 500,000 could be dead, but conceded that nobody really
knows.
"Let's say that it's too early to give a number," Preval
said.
Haitian Red Cross spokesman Pericles Jean-Baptiste said his
organization was overwhelmed. "There are too many people who need
help ... We lack equipment, we lack body bags," he said
Wednesday.
Doctors Without Borders said its three hospitals in Haiti were
unusable and it was treating the injured at temporary shelters.
"The reality of what we are seeing is severe traumas, head
wounds, crushed limbs, severe problems that cannot be dealt with the
level of medical care we currently have available with no
infrastructure really to support it," said Paul McPhun, an
operations manager for the charity.
Haiti seems especially prone to catastrophe - from natural disasters
like hurricanes, storms, floods and mudslides to crushing poverty,
unstable governments, poor building standards and low literacy
rates.
Digging with bare hands
In Petionville, next to the capital, people used sledgehammers and
their bare hands to dig through a collapsed commercial center, tossing
aside mattresses and office supplies. More than a dozen cars were
entombed, including a U.N. truck.
Nearby, about 200 survivors, including many children, huddled in a
theater parking lot using sheets to rig makeshift tents and shield
themselves from the sun.
Looting began almost as quickly as the quake struck at 4:53 p.m. on
Tuesday and people were seen carrying food from collapsed buildings.
Many lugged what they could salvage and stacked it around them as they
slept in streets and parks.
People streamed into the Haitian countryside, where wooden and
cinderblock shacks showed little sign of damage. Many balanced
suitcases and other belongings on their heads. Ambulances and U.N.
trucks raced in the opposite direction, toward Port-au-Prince.
About 3,000 police and international peacekeepers cleared debris,
directed traffic and maintained security in the capital. But law
enforcement was stretched thin even before the quake and would be
ill-equipped to deal with major unrest.
The international Red Cross said a third of the country's 9 million
people may need emergency aid, a burden that would test any nation and
a crushing catastrophe for impoverished Haiti.
The United States and other nations began organizing aid efforts,
alerting search teams and gathering supplies that will be badly needed
in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.
The United Nations said Port-au-Prince's main airport was "fully
operational" and open to relief flights.
Port-au-Prince's ruined buildings fell on both the poor and the
prominent: The body of Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, 63, was found in
the ruins of his office, according to the Rev. Pierre Le Beller at
Miot's order, the Saint Jacques Missionary Center in Landivisiau,
France.
Senate President Kelly Bastien was among those trapped alive inside
the Parliament building, and a day later had stopped responding to
rescuers' cries, Latortue said.
Even the main prison in the capital fell down, "and there are
reports of escaped inmates," U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman
Elisabeth Byrs said in Geneva.
Haiti's Radio Metropole quoted France's foreign minister, Bernard
Kouchner, as saying hundreds of French nationals were missing.
Preval told the Miami Herald that he had been stepping over dead
bodies and hearing the cries of those trapped under the rubble of the
national Parliament building, describing the scene as
"unimaginable."
"Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools
have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed,'' he said.
Video obtained by the AP showed a huge dust cloud rising over
Port-au-Prince shortly after the quake as buildings collapsed.
"The hospitals cannot handle all these victims," Dr.
Louis-Gerard Gilles, a former senator, said as he helped survivors.
"Haiti needs to pray. We all need to pray together."
Speaking from Port-au-Prince, Frank Thorp, Jr., told NBC's TODAY how
he helped dig through the rubble of a building to rescue his wife. She
had been trapped for 10 hours, he said.
Thorp said his spouse, who is a missionary in the country, was
"doing OK" and suffered only bruises. However, a colleague
who had also been buried lost both of her legs.
Thorp described conditions in Port-au-Prince as "worse than a war
zone."
Even relatively wealthy neighborhoods were devastated.
People screamed for help at a wrecked hospital in Petionville, a
hillside district that is home to many diplomats and wealthy Haitians
as well as the poor.
At a destroyed four-story apartment building, a girl stood atop a car,
trying to peer inside while several men pulled at a foot sticking from
rubble. She said her family was inside.
"A school near here collapsed totally," Petionville resident
Ken Michel said after surveying the damage. "We don't know if
there were any children inside." He said many seemingly sturdy
homes nearby were split apart.
U.N. peacekeepers were distracted from aid efforts by their own
tragedy: Many spent the night hunting for survivors in the ruins of
the local U.N. headquarters, where more than 100 people are
missing.
The quake struck at 4:53 p.m. on Tuesday, centered 10 miles west of
Port-au-Prince at a depth of only 5 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey
said. USGS geophysicist Kristin Marano called it the strongest
earthquake since 1770 in what is now Haiti.
Most of Haiti's 9 million people are desperately poor, and after years
of political instability the country has no real construction
standards. In November 2008, following the collapse of a school in
Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince estimated about 60 percent of
buildings were shoddily built and unsafe in normal circumstances.
Cuba said its existing field hospitals in Haiti had already treated
hundreds of victims.
Venezuela's government said it would send a military plane with canned
foods, medicine and drinking water and provide 50 rescue workers.
Mexico, which suffered an earthquake in 1985 that killed some 10,000
people, planned to send doctors, search and rescue dogs and
infrastructure damage experts.
Italy said it was sending a C-130 cargo plane Wednesday with a field
hospital and emergency medical personnel as well as a team to assess
aid needs. France said 65 clearing specialists, with six sniffer dogs,
and two doctors and two nurses were leaving.
---
RECENT NATURAL DISASTERS IN HAITI
1963 - Hurricane Flora
More than 8,000 people are killed in the sixth-deadliest tropical
hurricane ever in the Atlantic.
1994 - Hurricane Gordon
Nearly 1,000 Haitians are buried in mudslides caused by widespread
deforestation.
1998 - Hurricane Georges
400 victims and 80 percent of crops destroyed.
2004 - Hurricane Jeanne
Floods caused by more than 13 inches of rain kill more than 3,000
people, mainly in Gonaives.
2008 - Four major tropical storms
793 people die, 310 are missing and 593 are injured in successive
strikes by Tropical Storm Fay and Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike.
Nearly 23,000 homes are destroyed. The storms affect 800,000 Haitians
and wipe out 70 percent of the country's crops. Damage is estimated at
$1 billion, 5 percent of Haiti's GDP.
NOTE: There is a slideshow on the earthquake's aftermath with 55
most heart-wrenching pictures
HERE (You have to scroll down a bit to find it on the right of
the page)
-------
Related news:
Quake 35-times more powerful than atomic bomb
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Haitians piled bodies along the
devastated streets of their capital Wednesday after a powerful
earthquake flattened the president's palace, the cathedral, hospitals,
schools, the main prison and whole neighborhoods. Officials feared
thousands -- perhaps more than 100,000 -- may have perished but there
was no firm count. Death was everywhere in Port-au-Prince. Bodies of
tiny children were piled next to schools. Corpses of women lay on the
street with stunned expressions frozen on their faces as flies began
to gather. Bodies of men were covered with plastic tarps or cotton
sheets. (...) Some of the biggest immediate health threats include
respiratory disease from inhaling dust from collapsed buildings and
diarrhea from drinking contaminated water.With hospitals and clinics
severely damaged, Haiti will also face risks of secondary infections.
People seeking medical attention for broken bones and other injuries
may not be able to get the help they need and may develop
complications.Dead bodies piled on the streets typically don't pose a
public health risk. But for a country wracked by violence, seeing the
dead will exact a psychological toll. (..) Most Haitians are
desperately poor, and after years of political instability the country
has no real construction standards. In November 2008, following the
collapse of a school in Petionville, the mayor of Port-au-Prince
estimated about 60 percent of buildings were shoddily built and unsafe
normally.The quake was felt in the Dominican Republic, which shares
the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, and in eastern Cuba, but no major
damage was reported in either place.With electricity out in many
places and phone service erratic, it was nearly impossible for Haitian
or foreign officials to get full details of the
devastation."Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and
shaken," said Henry Bahn, a U.S. Department of Agriculture
official in Port-au-Prince. "The sky is just gray with dust."
CLIP
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2.
Hundreds of thousands feared dead in Haiti
By Bill Van Auken -- 14 January 2010
Officials warned Wednesday that the earthquake that devastated
the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince may have claimed the lives of
hundreds of thousands, as the city's residents piled corpses in the
street and dug through the rubble for survivors.
Measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, the earthquake was the most
devastating to hit the impoverished Caribbean island nation in 240
years. With its epicenter barely 9 miles from Port-au-Prince, a city
of 2 million, and its source relatively close to the surface, the
earthquake inflicted immense damage.
Thousands of buildings, ranging from shantytown dwellings and schools
to the Presidential Palace, government ministries and the five-story
Hotel Christoph, headquarters of the United Nations peace-keeping
forces in the country, collapsed, many with occupants inside them.
According to some estimates, 75 percent of the city's structures
were reduced to rubble.
"More than 100,000 are dead," Felix Augustin, Haiti's consul
general at the United Nations, told reporters Wednesday.
Haiti's prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, told CNN that "several
hundred thousand may have died," the cable news network
reported.
"Because we have so [many] people on the streets right now, we
don't know exactly where they were living. But so many, so many
buildings, so many neighborhoods totally destroyed, and some
neighborhoods we don't even see people," CNN quoted Bellerive as
saying.
CNN's Gary Tuchman, one of the first US reporters on the scene,
reported seeing corpses covered with sheets lining the streets and
"truckloads of bodies."
"There are absolutely no police, fire, emergency authorities on the
scene, as the search for survivors continues," he said. Haitian
civilians frantically dug through the rubble with their bare hands in
areas that they believed people could be trapped.
Reuters news agency described the scene in Port-au-Prince: "Sobbing
and dazed people wandered the streets of Port-au-Prince, and voices
cried out from the rubble. 'Please take me out, I am dying. I have
two children with me,' a woman told a Reuters journalist from under
a collapsed kindergarten in the Canape-Vert area of the
capital."
Among the cruelest effects of the earthquake was the destruction of
all of the city's hospitals. The humanitarian aid group Doctors
Without Borders reported that all three of the facilities to which it
normally refers patients are so severely damaged that they are
unusable.
"The level of care we can now provide without that
infrastructure is very limited," said the group's spokesman in
Toronto. "The best we can offer them at the moment is first-aid care
and stabilization. The reality of what we're seeing is severe
traumas-head wounds, crushed limbs-severe problems that cannot be
dealt with at the level of care we currently have available with no
infrastructure really to support it."
The Red Cross in Haiti reports that it has run out of medicine. The
agency estimates that some 3 million Haitians have been affected by
the tragedy.
Meanwhile, aftershocks have continued to shake the city and the
surrounding areas.
"Experts fear the worst could still be to come in Haiti," reported
the Financial Times of London. " 'There will be aftershocks for
many weeks,' said David Kerridge, head of earth hazards at the
British Geological Survey; 'there is a strong possibility of
landslides, which may have caused many causalities in more remote
parts of the island.' "
The earthquake is the latest and the most severe in a series of
natural disasters that have struck Haiti. The country has still not
recovered from four hurricanes and tropical storms that swept through
the island in 2008.
These natural disasters come on top of, and their effects are brutally
amplified by, the disaster created by capitalism and more than a
century of imperialist oppression in this, the poorest nation in the
Western Hemisphere.
Haiti's gross domestic product stood at $7 billion in 2008, roughly
one third the amount that the Wall Street finance house Goldman Sachs
set aside for 2009 year-end bonuses. According to World Bank figures,
more than half of the population barely survives on less than $1 a
day, while over two thirds of the Haitian people subsist on less than
$2.
Life expectancy for Haitian men is little over 50.
Blackouts were daily occurrences in the Haitian capital before the
earthquake. And, according to the World Health Organization, not a
single Haitian city has a public sewage system and half the population
lacks access to clean drinking water.
Now there is no electricity and no phone communication, water is
running out in many areas, and the threat of infectious disease could
produce many more victims.
In 2004, the United Nations secretariat that focuses on disaster
relief pointed to this combined effect of natural and socio-economic
disasters:
"The impact of the hazards is much greater in Haiti because the
vulnerability of people there is higher. Rapid urbanization, lack of
land management, the exploitation of charcoal and consequent
deforestation make Haitian people more vulnerable to mudslides."
The head of the secretariat, Salvano Briceño, said at the time:
"What is happening in Haiti is an illustration of a combination of
vulnerabilities that was bound to happen. Vulnerabilities have been
allowed to grow in Haiti in proportions such that any natural hazard
would lead to great disaster."
He urged international agencies and the world's governments to
invest in aiding Haiti to build up its infrastructure so that it could
be prepared to deal with disasters, rather than relying only on relief
after the fact.
Instead, the United Nations sent thousands of troops, led by the
Brazilian army, to occupy the impoverished nation and impose "law
and order" in the wake of a US-backed coup that overthrew the
elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. An estimated
8,000 Haitians were killed in the period of the coup, many at the
hands of right-wing gunmen, some of them trained by the CIA.
This was only the latest in a long series of US interventions aimed at
maintaining Washington's domination of the country and suppressing
any movement of the masses to transform the oppressive social and
economic conditions.
The US militarily occupied the country from 1915 to 1934, withdrawing
its troops only after creating a Haitian army that kept a repressive
grip on the political life of the country for decades to come.
Washington likewise backed the 30-year dictatorship of the
Duvaliers-Papa Doc and Baby Doc-whose victims number in the tens of
thousands.
The US media has no interest in this history. Haiti's poverty
is presented merely as a fact of life, with the implication that it is
the fault of the Haitians themselves. (Televangelist Pat Robertson,
the founder of the Christian Coalition and a leading figure in the US
Christian Right, offered his own explanation. The Haitians, he
affirmed, had succeeded in overthrowing French rule, freeing
themselves from slavery and establishing the first black republic only
thanks to a "pact with the devil," and they have been punished for
it ever since.)
CLIP
---
Related articles:
Obama administration deporting 30,000 Haitians (20 February
2009)
The US Department of Homeland Security and its Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, under the new Obama administration,
are proceeding with the deportation of tens of thousands of Haitian
immigrants. The continuity of this brutal policy speaks volumes about
the new administration.According to an ICE spokeswoman, Nicole Navas,
the agency had 30,299 Haitians on "final order of removal" last
week, meaning that an immigration judge ordered them deported from the
US. Some 600 Haitians are currently detained and 243 have electronic
monitoring.After the Caribbean nation, the poorest in the Western
hemisphere, was battered by four tropical storms and hurricanes last
summer, Washington temporarily halted deportations in mid-September.
In December ICE resumed the expulsions, claiming that conditions had
normalized in Haiti. Its spokeswoman Navas told the media at the time,
"We fully expected to resume deportation flights when it was safe.
And we made a determination that it was appropriate to resume
deportation based on the conditions on the ground." The claim is
absurd. In a January 26 letter to Obama's Department of Homeland
Security secretary Janet Napolitano, the Florida Immigrant Advocacy
Center (FIAC), appealing for a stay in the "inhumane deportations,"
noted: "The storms [in Haiti] killed 800 and have left tens of
thousands of people homeless, living in shelters, on roofs and in
mud-filled homes. Flooding wiped out livestock and most of the food
crops, deepening already desperate hunger among more than 2 million
Haitians. The four storms destroyed 15 percent of Haiti's fragile
economy, the equivalent of 8 to 10 Hurricane Katrinas hitting the
United States in one month."The Miami Herald reported recently that
the devastation wrought by the storms was "the worst humanitarian
disaster to hit Haiti in 100 years.''According to a fact sheet
prepared by Haitian advocates in the US, Haiti's third largest city,
Gonaives, "has been rendered uninhabitable." Inadequate sanitation
and potable water "and standing pools of polluted flood water have
left hundreds of thousands at risk of malaria, hepatitis, and cholera.
The nation's food crop has been largely destroyed, as have farm
tools, seeds for next year's crop, and livestock and irrigation
systems vital to farmers and rice production. Dozens of children have
starved to death."A UNICEF Humanitarian Action Report on Haiti,
released February 3, noted that the combination of storms affecting
800,000 people, including 300,000 children, and food price riots
earlier in the year had plunged Haiti into a massive humanitarian
crisis. UNICEF reports that 24 percent of children under age five in
Haiti suffer from chronic malnutrition and 9 percent from acute
malnutrition. The 2008 storms totally destroyed some 23,000 houses and
damaged another 85,000 in the Caribbean nation. "The few existing
basic social services were severely damaged," writes the UN agency.
"Across the country, 964 schools were reported either totally or
partially destroyed leaving nearly 217,000 schoolchildren directly
affected," in a context "where nearly 400,000 school-aged children
(around 15 percent of the total number of children) had no access to
education before. Sixty percent of the damaged schools are
government-owned."
(...) In a statement to the WSWS, Marguerite Laurent of the
Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN) commented: "Why does
Obama's Homeland Security feel it must deport 30,000 Haitians now,
to storm ravaged, famine-stricken Haiti? "When the US deports an
income earner to storm-ravaged Haiti, this decreases remittances and
further impoverishes family members. Diaspora remittances are the most
effective and direct aid to the Haitian poor in Haiti. We do not
believe the Obama administration will continue the racist and
discriminatory immigration policies of the Bush administration."HLLN
continues to urge the Obama administration to do the right thing and
grant relief to the Haitians in the same manner it has provided
appropriate assistance to the Hondurans, Nicaraguans and El
Salvadorans."
US halts deportations to Haiti (Jan 13, 2010)
WASHINGTON (AP) - Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
temporarily halted deportations Wednesday of some Haitians illegally
in the U.S. in response to the Caribbean nation's devastating
earthquake. Those with deportation orders will be allowed to remain in
the U.S. Those held in detention centers will remain jailed, Homeland
Security spokesman Matt Chandler said.The magnitude 7.0 earthquake
that hit Haiti Tuesday is believed to have left thousands dead.
Corpses were piled in the streets near flattened buildings as the
world relief response got under way. The impact of Napolitano's
decision should be limited, because the Obama administration quietly
stopped deporting Haitians without criminal records last March, said
Florida Democratic Rep. Kendrick Meek. In 2009, 221 noncriminal
Haitians were deported to Haiti, down from 1,226 the previous year,
according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics.
Deportations of Haitians with criminal records totaled 466 last year,
compared to 428 in 2008. About 30,000 Haitians have orders to leave
the U.S. and about 160 are in detention, according to the Homeland
Security Department. The federal government has suspended deportations
following previous disasters. Deportation flights to Haiti were
suspended in September 2008 because of hurricane damage in the
country. The flights later resumed. Several members of Congress who
represent Haitian communities have been pressuring the Obama
administration to give temporary protected status, or TPS, to Haitians
illegally in the U.S. CLIP
-------
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