Not a storm from the rainy season bearing down, but a storm over why so many are still in dire straits a full four months after the earthquake.

Why so many are facing the ravages of the rainy season without safe shelter to protect them?A storm over how that could be the case when so much international aid has been committed to help the people of Haiti.

A CBS News investigation examines the total aid committed to Haiti and explores how much has been spent so far.

Critics such as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic Policy and Research say more money should have been spent up front making sure the population’s emergency needs were met. He argues that many donors who dug deep during their own tough times to give, thought they were putting immediate food in people’s mouths, giving immediate medical help, and putting a roof over victims’ heads now.

Just how much money has been collected so far? Within days of the earthquake, the United States and the

World Bank each made commitments of $100 million in aid. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Americans sent private donations worth another $150 million — more than they gave after the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. A recent international telethon raised another $57 million.

To put these amounts in perspective, consider that the annual value of all the goods and services produced by Haiti’s economy is about $7 billion. Pledges of aid from around the world already total about 10 percent of that figure, if not more. And so far, aid has been collected based on people’s willingness to give, not on the size of the need. There has been a tacit assumption that the amount donated cannot possibly be excessive.

That may indeed be true, but it does not mean that so much money can be put to immediate use. As aid groups on the ground in Haiti have found, the country’s infrastructure — roads, the power grid, etc. — are not very well developed, and it has few businesses capable of taking on big logistics and construction projects. In this environment, it is not easy to spend a lot of money productively in a short period of time.

This problem is similar to the “resource curse” facing poor countries that discover major reserves of fuels and minerals. When they begin extracting those natural riches (or selling the rights to do so), their economies receive sudden inflows of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. But they can’t always use all of that money right away; even if you have good intentions, you can’t double the size of an education or public health system overnight. Nor can you simply distribute the money to your people; if the economy doesn’t produce more goods and services, all that extra cash sloshing around will just raise prices. Left to sit, the money has a way of disappearing; for decades in Nigeria, billions in oil money were siphoned away annually by elites and corrupt bureaucrats.

Even saving the money for the future, as East Timor has done with its newfound oil wealth, can be dangerous. Several years ago, the Timorese knew that their government was starting to build up billions of dollars in saved funds — the process was actually quite transparent — but they wanted to see the money spent sooner, to create jobs and improve their quality of life. Riots and a change of government ensued.

If Haiti wants to spend its aid money now, it will clearly need help from overseas. But doing so will create an additional danger: that given Haiti’s lack of infrastructure and capacity, it will be dominated by foreign contractors in the same way as Iraq or Afghanistan. Foreign donors will undoubtedly employ their compatriots for big rebuilding projects — doing so makes giving aid that much easier — and they’ll risk falling into the same old traps of cronyism and unaccountability, as evidenced by no-bid contracts, shoddy work, and lack of buy-in from local people.

]]> http://my-complaint.com/how-is-the-aid-money-haiti-spent/feed/ 0 http://my-complaint.com/violence-against-women-gets-worse-during-disasters/ http://my-complaint.com/violence-against-women-gets-worse-during-disasters/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:56:05 +0000 admin http://my-complaint.com/?p=15338 PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Natural disasters, says Denyse Cote, are when women’s rights matter most. Which is why the sociology professor at the University of Quebec in the Outaouais agreed so readily to be part of Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean’s small official delegation to Haiti this week.

The invitation came only a week ago, and Cote admits she was surprised by it. But with deep ties to Haiti’s women’s movement, she felt it was important to travel to the Caribbean nation.

Sexual aggression and violence against girls and women often go hand in hand with the breakdown of social order during a catastrophe such as the Jan. 12 earthquake that pulverized parts of Haiti.

“We’ve heard a lot of architects and urban planners but they don’t think about these things. They don’t necessarily think about how to build a city that would be women friendly or family friendly, where schools are close to homes” for instance, she said.

But leaders must move forward on women’s issues even during disasters so that greater equality gaps don’t result in the aftermath of the catastrophe, she said. Cote acted as the Canadian delegate to a roundtable on women’s issues that Jean was to attend Monday in Port-au-Prince.

The symptoms associated to this syndrome are a consequence of the extreme physical and emotional stress the victims are subject to and occur without the victim knowing it, working, the affectionate and emotional identification with the abductor, as a way of emotional distancing themselves from the dangerous and violent reality the person is in. Simultaneously, the victim, who isn’t totally oblivious to his situation, remains alert to danger and it’s that alertness that allows most of the victims to try, at one point, to escape from his abductor, even in cases of prolonged captivity.
The Stockholm Syndrome comes into play when a captive cannot escape and is isolated and threatened with death, but is shown token acts of kindness by the captor. It typically takes about three or four days for the psychological shift to take hold.

A strategy of trying to keep your captor happy in order to stay alive becomes an obsessive identification with the likes and dislikes of the captor which has the result of warping your own psyche in such a way that you come to sympathize with your tormenter!

El psiquiatra de Centro Médico DarSalud, Rolando Ahubert explica “durante el cautiverio, las personas desarrollan síntomas como culpa, respuestas exageradas frente a estímulos estresantes, comportamiento impulsivo y autodestructivo, apartamiento social, cambios en las características de la personalidad y disminución del mecanismo de defensa inmunitario, entre otras consecuencias”

Posteriormente, una vez liberados “sufren el denominado Trastorno de Estrés Postraumático. Para que se configure este cuadro, debe haber exposición a un suceso o situación suficientemente estresante, es decir, que sea notablemente amenazador o catastrófico” señala el psiquiatra de DarSalud.
El trastorno tiene – como síntomas – “revivir el suceso en “flashback”. La aparición de conductas de evitación de las circunstancias asociadas al factor estresante. Amnesia parcial o completa de la exposición al factor estresante, problemas del dormir, irritabilidad o accesos de cólera o rabia, escasa concentración, hipervigilancia (demasiados alertas o perseguidos), respuestas exageradas ante el mínimo susto, entre otras situaciones”, comenta el Doctor de DarSalud.

La familia de estas personas sufrió, día a día, la agonía de carecer de una pieza trascendental de su conjunto, debiéndose reorganizar y, en muchos casos, disolverse como grupo humano.

El experto explica “los familiares pueden presentar cuadros depresivo-ansiosos, incluso, puede haber episodios de psicosis con pérdida de la capacidad de juicio”.

Justice Department inspector general Glenn Fine found that claims made against Bureau of Prisons staff members increased dramatically from 2001 to 2008. Claims of sexual misconduct more than doubled, rising 130 percent in the same period.

According to the findings, female prison workers had a disproportionately higher percentage of accusations against them, yet those women who were convicted were less likely to serve time behind bars.

The inspector general is recommending that the bureau update its training and consider alternatives to automatically transferring or isolating prisoners who make such allegations. The report also recommends that the U.S. Marshals Service create new policies for preventing and reporting sexual abuse of prisoners in its custody.

About half of the claims of prison staff sex abuse were made against guards, while nearly 9 percent were made against food service workers in the prisons.

In the 2001 budget year, there were 76 allegations of criminal sex abuse, while in 2008 there were 155. Over that same time period, prison staff increased only 5 percent, and inmate population 27 percent, so the growth of the prison system does not account for the surge of sex allegations.

Bureau of Prisons officials told investigators the increase is due to a greater emphasis on encouraging people to report such abuse.

According to the International Organization for Migration, the majority of trafficking victims are young boys, taken “for the purpose of sexual exploitation and forced labour.” Abuse and exploitation is equally prominent among young girls, as figures indicate “57 percent of Afghan marriages involved girls under the legal age of 16,” with many of those marriages being arranged. Young girls are also at times used to pay off family debts and those who refuse can become the victims of honour killings.
The trafficking and sexual exploitation of children in Afghanistan is a growing concern, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department was told in a confidential human-rights report prepared by senior officials.

The illegal marriage of underage girls and the sexual abuse of young boys is commonplace, warned the Afghanistan Human Rights Report obtained by The Canadian Press under access-to-information laws.

“Sexual violence is commonly reported but remains difficult to verify,” said the partially censored review, written last summer.“According to the International Organization for Migration, trafficking in children is a problem in Afghanistan and the majority of the children trafficked are boys who are trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation and forced labour,” said the report.

The NDP foreign affairs critic, Paul Dewar, said the assessment is disturbing, especially in light of the abuse allegations, which he claimed the Canadian military isn’t eager to substantiate.

“The Afghans know this is going on; they’re not stupid,” Dewar said. “It’s a case of ‘see no evil; hear no evil; speak no evil’ and therefore there’s no evil.

“There have been many claims that abuse is going on, but I suppose if you don’t acknowledge there’s actually problems, then there are no problems.”

The treatment of young girls is just as abysmal.

Figures indicated 57 per cent of Afghan marriages involved girls under the legal age of 16. Many of those unions are arranged marriages, where the girls are sometimes used to pay off family debts and those who disobey become the victims of so-called honour killings.
More than six million children are enrolled in classes, with roughly 35 per cent of them girls — a vast improvement from the days of the brutal Taliban regime, under which girls were barred from attending school.

But behind those cheery, often-quoted statistics is the reality that “half of all school-age children do not attend school, including the majority of school-age girls,” said the human rights report.

Canada has committed to expand and repair 50 schools in Kandahar as one of its benchmarks to be accomplished by the time the Forces ends their combat mission in 2011. According to the latest progress report, five of those schools are completed with another 25 in the planning or construction stage.

The signatories of the July 25 letter included former President Mohammed Khatami, reformist cleric Mehdi Karoubi, and Mir Hossein Mousavi, the man whose supporters say had Iran’s June election stolen from him by hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

They warned of torture being used to extract false confessions from reformist activists, and said that they’d received “disturbing news in recent days about the physical and mental health of several of the detainees.” (A rough translation of the letter is available on Mr. Mousavi’s facebook page.)
Joe Stork, who covers Iran and other Middle Eastern countries for Human Rights Watch, says his group is certainly concerned about deaths in detention, but sees no evidence of a flood of such deaths.

However, despite government intimidation that has “left people frightened about communicating with groups like ours,” he says the scope of arbitrary detention in Iran now is a great worry. “

“There are lots of people who have been detained for many weeks now that have without access to lawyers or family, and what we’re hearing is rather alarming about their condition,’’ he says. “It’s hard to say anything for certain. There’s a real effort on the part of the government there to make sure that information doesn’t get out, in particular, complaints about detention and so forth.”

On Monday, Mr. Mousavi called for ongoing protests and continued to press for use of Tehran’s Grand Mosala, a sprawling public prayer location, this Thursday to commemorate the “martyrs” killed by pro-government security forces and militiamen in June.

The government has been reluctant to give such permission until now, well aware that mass mourning in Shiite Islam is a powerful tool of political mobilization. Thursday would mark the 40th day since 20 protesters were killed, an important milestone in the Shiite ritual mourning cycle.

The death – many Iranians are calling it a murder – that helped spur this weekend’s letter was of Mohsen Ruholamini, who was arrested at a July 9 protest in Tehran. Last Tuesday, his family was informed of his death, and he was buried on Friday. Mr. Ruholamini, who was 25, was apparently healthy when taken into custody, reformists say.
That death – and the detention of hundreds of students, lawyers, and journalists – in crowded and filthy conditions appears to at least be creating some cracks in the coalition of hard-liners that backed Ahmadinejad in the election.

Conservative member of parliament Ali Motahari told the Tehran Times on Monday that Iran’s intelligence and interior ministers need to make a full accounting to parliament about what’s happening to Iran’s political prisoners, and said there’s a strong movement among lawmakers to have the men fired.

President Ahmadinejad has also been at odds with his intelligence minister. On Monday, the head of Iran’s judiciary also called for some political prisoners to be released.

Evin Prison in Tehran has long been a house of horrors for Iranians, part of the reason regime opponents appear to be gaining traction over the issue

Some eleven women and two children, held in this prison, have to live in cold cells during these winter months. But they say they want to change their living conditions in the prisons. A teacher, Sayed Bigum from the Shaikh Shahabuddin School in the capital city is spending a 20-year jail sentence for the murder of her husband. Speaking to Pajhwok Afghan News, she expressed her views about the prison. “This is not a prison; it is a ‘Haramsarai’ or a harem. Everyone comes and sexually abuses us.” But she did not elaborate on who would enter the prisons and commit immoral acts against the women prisoners.
But the prison authorities vehemently deny the allegations made by the prisoners and say there are female prison guards to take care of the women. The inspector in charge of the Mazar jail, Mohammad Sharif Ghorbandi, told Pajhwok: “Except for two female guards, no one else is allowed to enter the cells where women prisoners are kept. All these claims made by the women are unfounded.” But the Human Rights Commission in Mazar responsible for assessing Afghan prisons says the conditions in these prisons are unbearable.

The statistics reveal that out of the total 103 complaints received by the NHRC during 2008-09 in connection with oppression of women prisoners across the country, 23 are from the jails in Gujarat alone.

This accounts for about 22.33 per cent of the total number of

complaints received by the rights body from various jails across the country.

The statistics show that the state has witnessed a sudden surge in the number of such complaints in the last three years. Uttar Pradesh comes a close second with a total of 21 such complaints filed since 2008. This state had accounted for 26 such complaints in 2007-08 and 16 in 2006-07.

In its annual report for 2009, Amnesty International reprimanded Denmark in several areas including its police force and its position on the return of those seeking asylum in the country.

The report criticised Denmark’s decision to rely on ‘political assurances’ to determine whether it was safe to send refugees home to their native countries. It also questioned the country’s ‘tolerated residency’ policy for refugees who have been convicted of crimes and sentenced to deportation.
With regard to refugees from Iraq – of whom around 300 are currently awaiting deportation after being denied asylum – the report stated that ‘at least 11 Iraqis were forcibly returned to Iraq, contrary to the recommendations of the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency’.

Amnesty International added that ‘some asylum-seekers who had been subjected to torture or other ill-treatment did not receive adequate medical treatment in Denmark’.

‘The most important thing for the Danish government seems to be closing the country’s borders to refugees, forcing 282 Iraqi asylum seekers home to an unknown future, and deporting terror suspects to countries that employ torture and unfair trials,’ Lars Normann Jørgensen, secretary general of Amnesty International’s Danish division, said in a press release.

Denmark’s much-maligned police force also came under criticism from the humanitarian organisation.

‘The system for resolving complaints against the police fails to ensure an effective remedy for allegations of ill-treatment,’ stated the report. ‘Very few complaints – between five and eight out of every 1,000 – were upheld by regional public prosecutors, and even fewer resulted in criminal charges being brought against the police.’

The police were also criticised for their lack of response and efforts for Denmark’s rape victims, citing a ‘lack of legal protection and redress for survivors of rape’.

According to the report, only one in five rape cases resulted in a conviction.

‘In 2006 the Minister of Justice commissioned a committee to examine the current complaints system and suggest possible changes. The committee had not published its report by the end of 2008.’