Haitian government urged to halt evictions from quake displacement camps

CAMP

Dieu Nalio Chery/The Associated Press A man bathes at a camp set up for people displaced by the 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Monday.

1 of 3

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI The international aid group Oxfam urged the Haitian government on Monday to halt evictions from encampments that still are home to more than 357,000 people nearly three years after a devastating earthquake.

The bulk of the removals, according to the new report, are led by landowners eager to reclaim their property. Some landowners have resorted to threats, intimidation, stone throwing, destroying tents, setting fires and other violent acts. In some cases, city officials are behind the evictions, the report said.

An adviser to Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe called the report distorted and said that the government has safely relocated people through a rental-subsidy program called “16/6.”

“The Government is not engaged in a policy of eviction, but it has, through the 16/6 project, taken measures to safely and permanently relocate the people living in the camps to safe and permanent shelters,” adviser Salim Succar wrote in an email. “The success of the program is well known and so far a number of camps have been safely closed.”

In a separate statement released Monday, the government announced that more than a thousand homes for poor families will open this month in a community north of the capital.

The new report, “Salt in the Wound,” comes as Haiti prepares to mark the third anniversary of the January 2010 earthquake. The capital of Port-au-Prince and other cities in the south were once filled with the gloomy displaced-persons camps that at one point housed 1.3 million people.

But that number has since dropped as people move out because of subsidies or because they could no longer bear to live in the squalid camps or, as the Oxfam report notes, were forced out.

The study says that until August, around 61,000 people had been evicted from 152 camps. Another 78,000 people housed in 121 camps faced eviction. The survey interviewed 3,600 camp residents in Port-au-Prince.

All but a few of the 121 camps currently under threat of forced evictions are on private property, the report said.

It said many of the people in the camps are stuck there: 86 per cent of them lack the financial resources to leave. Most don’t have formal jobs and live in extreme poverty, with 60 per cent saying they eat only one meal per day or even less.

In a separate report commissioned by Oxfam-Quebec, development researcher Helen Spraos offers a snapshot of life in 16 camps in the Port-au-Prince district of Delmas.

It said most are relatively small, with about 100 households. All are on private land, and most are nearly invisible because they are behind walls.

Most of the women living in them are street merchants and a few do domestic work. Men scrape by through construction work, and although fewer are unemployed than women, they work only a few days each month.

“Life in the camps is survival strategy for people, enabling them to subsist on reduced incomes because they no longer have to pay rent,” the report notes.

Many also said that the government’s rental support program would only briefly postpone problems without resolving underlying issues of how to make a living.

The report also calls for authorities to tackle several pressing needs, including the replacement of tarpaulins and taking measures to ensure clean water and sanitation until longer-term solutions are put in place.

The Associated Press

Share:

Author: `