{"id":7722,"date":"2010-10-11T00:00:33","date_gmt":"2010-10-10T22:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=7722"},"modified":"2010-10-08T12:32:20","modified_gmt":"2010-10-08T10:32:20","slug":"report-haiti-recovery-paralysed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2010\/10\/report-haiti-recovery-paralysed\/","title":{"rendered":"Report: Haiti Recovery ‘Paralysed’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Refugees International says agencies co-ordinating Haitian relief efforts are “dysfunctional” and “inexperienced”.<\/em><\/p>\n

More than a million Haitians remain in squalid “emergency phase” camps, nearly nine months after January’s earthquake, and security is still a major problem, a new report says.<\/p>\n

The findings from US-based advocacy group Refugees International<\/a> said that more than 70 per cent of refugee camps in Haiti face daily threats of violence and intimidation.<\/p>\n

“The people of Haiti are still living in a state of emergency, with a humanitarian response that appears paralysed,” the report said. “Gang leaders or land owners are intimidating the displaced. Sexual, domestic, and gang violence in and around the camps is rising.”<\/p>\n

It charged that the non-governmental organisations co-ordinating the recovery efforts in the country were often dysfunctional and lacking in experience.<\/p>\n

“Action is urgently needed to protect the basic human rights of people displaced by the earthquake,” Refugees International said.<\/p>\n

‘Huge job’<\/strong><\/p>\n

The UN has rejected some of the report’s criticisms. Imogen Wall, a spokeswoman for the UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told Al Jazeera that the word paralysed, in relation to its operations in Haiti “is completely the wrong word”.<\/p>\n

“We have one of the largest-scale humanitarian operations in the world running now … and just keeping that show on the road is a huge job,” Wall said.<\/p>\n

She said security remained a real concern, and that efforts were being made to improve the situation, but that “at the moment, we are struggling to find the capacity to deal with it”.<\/p>\n

The massive earthquake, which struck Haiti on January 12 killed some 300,000 people and left millions more homeless.<\/p>\n

Findings unsurprising<\/strong><\/p>\n

Little progress has been made to find permanent shelter for those living in the nearly 1,300 camps ad-hoc camps set up, Refugee International said.<\/p>\n

It criticised the International Organisation for Migration, which is responsible for co-ordinating and managing the camps in Haiti, and the United Nations operations in the country for not giving priority to actions to protect quake victims.<\/p>\n

Al Jazeera’s Sebastian Walker, who has been reporting from Haiti since the earthquake struck, said the organisation’s findings were unsurprising to anyone who has spent time there.<\/p>\n

“News that the situation in the camps is simply appalling really isn’t anything particularly new. We’ve seen for many months now this very large displaced population of more than a million Haitians living in very basic conditions,” he said.<\/p>\n

One example, he said, was the existence of just five toilets at a camp in the capital,\u00a0Port-au-Prince, where around 5,000 people reside.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 aljazeera.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Refugees International says agencies co-ordinating Haitian relief efforts are “dysfunctional” and “inexperienced”. More than a million Haitians remain in squalid “emergency phase” camps, nearly nine months after January’s earthquake, and security is still a major problem, a new report says. The findings from US-based advocacy group Refugees International said that more than 70 per cent of refugee camps in Haiti face daily threats of violence and intimidation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}