Report indicts U.S. government
and Inter-American Development Bank for violations of the rights
to clean water and health in Haiti
by Tom Spoth
Partners in Health, www.pih.org/,
December 2008
In 1998, the Inter-American Development
Bank (IDB) awarded $54 million in loans to the Haitian government
to improve the country's patchwork, crumbling public-water system.
The money was intended to bring clean water to people who for
many years had been denied this basic human right, with devastating
consequences for public health. Ten years later, however, this
desperately needed money has not produced a single improvement
to Haiti's water supply in the city designated to be one of the
first recipients.
A new report from Partners In Health and
three other groups reveals the United States government's clandestine
efforts to ensure that political considerations (namely the desire
to destabilize Haiti's elected government at that time, led by
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide) took precedence over the rights
of some of the planet's poorest and most vulnerable people.
In the 10 years since the loans were approved,
the Haitian water system has actually gotten worse. In 2002, a
water-poverty index released by the British-based Centre for Ecology
and Hydrology ranked Haiti dead last out of 147 countries surveyed.
On June 23, Partners In Health - along
with its Haitian sister organization Zanmi Lasante, the Center
for Human Rights and Global Justice, and the Robert F. Kennedy
Memorial Center - released the 87-page report "Wòch
nan Soley: The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti" in
New York City.
"We have to stand up for what's right,"
Loune Viaud, director of operations at Zanmi Lasante, said at
the press conference. "What is right is for the IDB and the
international community to stop playing with the lives of innocent
people."
Viaud and the rest of the investigative
team worked for six years to bring the story of the IDB loans
to light. During that time, Haiti's water system continued to
deteriorate. The report states that:
* Public water systems are rarely available
throughout the year and close to 70 percent of the population
lacks direct access to potable water at all time.
* The percentage of the population without
access to safe drinking water has increased by at least seven
percent from 1990 to 2005.
* Infectious diarrhea was the second leading
cause of death in Haiti in 1999, and gastrointestinal infection
was the leading cause of mortality for young children. These preventable
diseases result primarily from unsafe drinking water and poor
sanitation.
The failure to address Haiti's crippling
public-health problems is the latest in a long line of oppressive
policies toward the country. Haiti, the only nation to be born
from a successful slave revolution, has been hamstrung by crushing
foreign debt for virtually its entire existence. It took Haiti
more than 100 years to pay off a debt of 150 million francs (equivalent
to $21 billion today) imposed by France in 1825 to "compensate"
for the value of lost property, including the former slaves themselves.
More recently, impoverished Haiti has been forced to pay $1 million
a week toward settling a $1.54 billion debt piled up mainly by
the dictatorial Duvalier regime, which did nothing to improve
the lives of average Haitians.__Massive debt has precluded spending
on desperately needed infrastructure projects. In 2003, for example,
Haiti's debt service was $57.4 million; the Haitian government's
combined budget for education, health care, environment, and transportation
was $39.21 million.
Meanwhile, the Haitian people continued
to endure crushing poverty, which has been exacerbated by the
failure to disburse the IDB loans. The report contains a telling
comparison: In order to purchase the World Health Organization's
minimum standard of 20 liters of water per day, a Haitian family
of four would have to spend approximately 12 percent of its annual
income - the equivalent of asking a U.S. family living at the
poverty level ($20,444 per year) to pay nearly $2,500 per year
for water.__In Port-de-Paix, the Haitian city that was supposed
to be one of the first beneficiaries of IDB loans, the private
sector provides 80 percent of drinking water, and 86.7 percent
of residents surveyed reported that they are "always"
or "sometimes" unable to pay for water. Eighty percent
indicated that water quantity had either declined or stayed the
same in the five years before the survey was conducted, and 88.9
percent said water quality had gotten worse or not improved.
A household survey conducted by PIH documented
the devastating impact on public health. Fifteen percent of the
surveyed households reported probable recent cases of typhoid.
One-third of respondents suffered from symptoms of gastrointestinal
infection, the leading cause of death for Haitian children under
the age of five.__"I've been working in Haiti for more than
a decade," commented Evan Lyon of PIH, "so I have long
been aware of the connection between lack of access to clean water
and preventable disease. But surveying households in Port-de-Paix
opened my eyes to how essential clean water is to all facets of
life, from cooking and washing, to growing food and the ability
of children to attend school. At one household, we perched on
rickety chairs in front of the house, ankle-deep in water, and
the family was literally bailing filthy water out of their yard
while I asked them questions. When we tested water at the local
hospital we discovered it was just as contaminated as the water
that makes people sick in the first place. The hospital's water
comes from the same dirty sources."
Although initial bids have been taken
for the Port-de-Paix project, as of May 2008, no ground had been
broken. Several attempts to obtain updates from the IDB's Public
Information Center were unsuccessful. (In an article about the
report, The Miami Herald quoted an IDB spokesman as saying that
in Port-de-Paix, funds are being disbursed to contractors and
work should be completed by 2009.)
By failing to distribute loans and grants
to Haiti, the IDB violated its own charter, which strictly prohibits
the bank from letting politics influence its decisions. Internal
documents from the U.S. Treasury Department and the office of
the U.S. Executive Director at the IDB, obtained through Freedom
of Information Act requests, show that officials actively used
American influence to block the loans in an attempt to destabilize
the government led by President Aristide, who was ultimately overthrown
in 2004.
International law also protects the human
right to water, according to the United Nations' Committee on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as other international
covenants and declarations. If one accepts the notion of water
as a fundamental right, then the U.S. government's actions can
be construed as a direct violation of its international human-rights
obligations.
"I bet most of the people in this
city do not think about this as a right," Viaud said. "It
is taken for granted every day. Just imagine one day without water,
here in New York City. It would be a disaster -- in the news around
the world. It would be outrageous."__The report's authors
recommend a "rights-based" approach to water projects
in Haiti going forward: All initiatives should focus on accountability
and sustainability, and should involve Haitians living in the
communities where projects will be implemented in the process.
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