'Hungry' Andre Berto vows to upset Mayweather

Hunter believes Berto's losses were more to do with his health than lack of talent

Andre Berto uses the jumping rope during a media workout
in preparation for his fight against Floyd Mayweather Jr.
August 28, 2015, in Los Angeles, California. (Getty)

By AFP
Published Monday, September 07, 2015
 Andre Berto is the fall guy for pound-for-pound king Floyd Mayweather's supposedly final fight, an opponent regarded as game but not having the quality to deviate from the script.
Berto is a massive underdog for Saturday's showdown against the unbeaten Mayweather, who will match the perfect 49-0 record of legendary heavyweight Rocky Marciano if - as expected - he retains his welterweight world titles in Las Vegas.
Few give Berto, a former two-time title holder, much of a chance, in what would be one of the greatest upsets in boxing history if he becomes the first man to stop Mayweather.
"I'm in the best shape I've ever been in," said a relaxed-sounding Berto (30-3, 23 KOs), vowing to go after the "crafty" and defensively brilliant Mayweather.
"I'm going to bring a combination of speed and power to the table and I believe I have better athletic ability (than Mayweather's previous opponents)."
"I'm a young and hungry fighter coming in, and if I can take that (crown) away from him, that'd be huge. That's my mindset," he added.
Berto, 32 on Monday, is only now emerging from an ugly chapter in what had been a promising career.
He tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2012, had shoulder surgery in 2013 that left him fearing for his career - "it shook up my whole world" - and is on a run of three defeats in his last six fights. Berto says being the man to tear up the history books and prove his knockers wrong is all the inspiration he needs.
"Those critics aren't there in the ring with us, they're not in the gym," he said. "I don't get affected by the critics."
Hungrier
Mayweather (48-0, 26 KOs) had the pick of a packed welterweight division, but he infuriated boxing fans in choosing Berto, who says he is hungrier and better than ever after those troubled three years inside and outside the ring.
He refuses to say what some of the personal issues were and is coy on his injury problems too, but his highly respected trainer Virgil Hunter believes Berto's losses were more to do with his health than lack of talent. Berto, an all-action fighter with a big heart who will reportedly pocket $3 million from the bout, did not box for over a year because of his shoulder and Hunter says the comeback from that - mentally and physically - is still not quite complete.
But Berto says he will show the MGM Grand crowd - which will be fully behind him - that he is "a whole different man" compared to 2013, when he only narrowly lost to journeyman Jesus Soto Karass despite being injured early in the bout.
Berto may have been born in the United States but he identifies heavily with Haiti, where his family are from, and is said to have been traumatised by the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people and shattered much of the impoverished country's ramshackle infrastructure.
Berto is believed to have lost friends and family in the quake and he put boxing to one side in the aftermath to travel to Haiti to help in the painstaking recovery.
He also founded the Berto Dynasty Foundation, whose work includes raising money for Haiti's needy.
Berto talks darkly of things in his past, without ever saying what they are.
"Where my people come from, there's a lot worse than anything in that ring," Berto says.
Mayweather has talked up Berto - likely in an attempt to generate interest in the fight - and there has been a noticeable absence of trash-talking between the pair.
"He feels like he has nothing to lose, and I think that when you got a guy that's put in that situation, it makes him work that much harder because he got a chance to be one of the top guys in the sport when I'm through," said Mayweather.
http://www.emirates247.com/sports/other/hungry-andre-berto-vows-to-upset-mayweather-2015-09-07-1.602632

HAITI DO-GOODER, TV BEET FARMER

You know him best as Dwight Schrute, a tall, loud, awkward beet farmer prone to displays of gallantry, chauvinism, paranoia and one-upmanship, and who is often the butt of office jokes. But yo! Rainn Wilson has a secret identity: a do-gooder in Haiti.

After the earthquake of January 2010, celebs from Kim Kardashian to Beyoncé traveled to Haiti to “raise awareness,” while others, like Sean Penn and Olivia Wilde, have built longer-standing relationships. But it’s safe to say that Wilson is among the lowest-key celebrity philanthropists on the island of Hispaniola. He and his wife, Holiday Reinhorn, first traveled there in 2009, and ended up starting a nonprofit called Lide — the name means both “idea” and “leader” in Creole — devoted to the arts education of girls in Haiti’s rural areas. OZY caught up with Wilson last month. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

OZY: So, how did you end up working in Haiti?
Rainn Wilson: When I started getting well-known as an actor, I got inundated with requests to be involved in charitable efforts — from political organizations, or environmental movements, or fundraising, or just lending my name in some capacity. I was overwhelmed, and I needed to do some serious thinking. There was a nonprofit called the Mona Foundation that does education around the world. My dad knew the founder. They took my wife and me on a trip to Haiti, and we visited a whole bunch of schools.

OZY: And why, ultimately, did you settle on arts education for girls?
R.W.: I was skeptical. I really was, like, why are we going to Haiti to teach photography and drawing and creative writing? These girls might be hungry. They need rice and beans and shoes, scholarships, jobs, stuff like that. But it was really miraculous to see the transformation of girls over that two-week span [of the program]. They came in very shy, with low self-esteem, but by the end they had this swagger, they were just glowing with possibility. We were stunned. So my wife and I started talking about getting more involved.

OZY: And ended up with a program way out in the boonies. Haiti is challenging, but the places you operate in — Gonaïves, and the Artibonite — are even more challenging. Why there?
R.W.: We don’t want to be in Port-au-Prince. It’s where everything already goes — the money, the foreign workers, the schools and universities — draining the countryside. We wanted to work in the countryside and work in partnership, with a Haitian church, or school, or community center.

OZY: Why didn’t you attach yourself with one of the big agencies or nongovernmental organizations?
R.W.: I looked into that, and I did do some fundraising for big organizations. The world of the nonprofits and the NGOs is a fascinating one — and it’s a really broken system that’s really corrupt. I’m not going to say that every larger organization is corrupt, but the system is broken. Billions of dollars have been funneled to eradicate poverty and to increase education, and by and large you can’t see any result.
A lot of them do grant chasing. Essentially, they don’t really have a mission, but they hear, oh, the king of Saudi Arabia or whomever wants to put a $100 million toward, say, food distribution in Honduras or whatever. So the whole organization tries to get the grant. They don’t necessarily work in Honduras or do distributions, but they shift things around and it keeps them going. They have big offices in Midtown, and fancy fundraisers, and very high overhead and salary costs, lots of corporate retreats at fancy beach clubs. That’s the world of the NGO.

OZY: And what is the world of Lide?
R.W.: Our program right now is extremely cheap: We’re able to reach 500 girls, for about $150,000 a year. There’s also Haitian staff — five full time, about 14 teachers, 20 teaching assistants. It’s very cost-effective to help in Haiti. The average salary is $2 or $3 a day, and though we pay good deal more than that, it’s still a lot less than in the U.S. And we don’t have an office. We teach under a tree or in a community center or a classroom or a church.

OZY: How does your faith intersect with your work?
R.W.: I’m a member of the Baha’i faith, and education is a very important aspect of it. And as Baha’is, we have a twofold moral purpose: to make ourselves better human beings, and to work for social justice and make the world a better place. A lot of Christians might talk about the kingdom of God ascending from the heavens; I would say the Baha’is believe the kingdom of God is a do-it-yourself kit. So we need to make the world a better place.

 OZY: What should the U.S. be doing to help Haiti?
R.W.: Things have gotten better over the past 20 years — I see the increased commitment, which is only right given that we’ve done so much harm over the past 100 years. Bill Clinton and his Clinton Global Initiative do a lot of great work there. One of the things that’s really important is developing a long-term strategy, not just a piecemeal one.

OZY: Which of the characters on The Office would be most likely to donate to Lide?
http://www.ozy.com/pov/haiti-do-gooder-tv-beet-farmer/63301 R.W.: Phyllis. Definitely Phyllis.

Fraud, Violence, and Protests Cloud Results of Haitian Election

By Jake Johnston
September 6, 2015 | 4:05 pm
On August 9, in the impoverished Cité Soleil neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, a man in plainclothes carrying an automatic weapon casually got into a crowded SUV and left the premises one of Haiti's largest voting centers. It wasn't yet noon on election day. Inside the center's gate, three Haitian National Police officers sat in the shade. All 51 voting booths had been destroyed. Thousands of ballots littered the courtyard.



All across the country, the vote was held amid a climate of chaos and tension. In Chansolme, in Haiti's rural northwest, a polling place supervisor was forced to hide under a bed for hours after being threatened by armed bandits who needed his signature to officially endorse completed ballots that they had provided. In Nippes, another supervisor was held at gunpoint and forced to sign a document canceling the election for an entire voting center. In the commune of Desdunes in the Artibonite, all five voting centers were shut down by midday.
Nationwide, turnout was estimated at 18 percent. In Haiti's most populous West department, where President Michel Martelly's approval rating is the lowest, that number fell to less than 10 percent of registered voters going to the polls. The final results of the first round of legislative elections will be announced on September 8, but protests have been held across the country denouncing what was seen as an unfair process. There have been calls for changes within the electoral council, and, in some cases, the outright annulment of the election.
In January, Haiti was left without a functioning government when the terms of the entire lower house and one-third of the Senate expired. Another third of the Senate had already termed out previously in 2012. Without a functioning government, Martelly was left to rule by decree. He was constitutionally barred from running again for president this year.
Altogether, 128 parties registered to participate in the August election, with 1,621 candidates competing for 119 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and 232 fighting for 20 seats in the Senate. Playing out across Haiti's 10 departments, it was the first election under Martelly, who came into office only after the international community intervened in the 2010 election.
For the international community, once again the primary funders of the electoral process, the first round was seen largely as a test of the key presidential and second-round elections scheduled to be held in October.
Local and international observers have offered drastically differing accounts of what occurred on election day. The Organization of American States (OAS), while acknowledging incidents of violence, proclaimed just a day after the vote that those issues "did not affect the overall voting process." The UN, US, Canada, and the European Union have all added their stamps of approval. For them, the act of simply holding elections signaled success.
On the other hand, a local observation mission led by a network of human rights organizations (RNDDH), which had more than 15 times the number of observers as the OAS and the EU, denounced the process as an assault on democracy. They cited fraud, irregularities, and violence in 50 percent of voting centers across the country.
"Be wary of anyone saying that everything went well," the group warned.
The Provisional Electoral Council, or CEP — the nine-member institution responsible for organizing and carrying out elections — originally said only 4 percent of polling centers had been closed on election day, but when preliminary results were announced 11 days after the vote, they acknowledged the problems were worse than originally proclaimed.
Elections will be re-held in 25 areas most impacted by irregularities. Across the country, nearly a quarter of all votes were never counted.
Most political parties have pointed the blame at Martelly's political party, PHTK, as well as others close to the government. The CEP has reacted by excluding 16 candidates from continuing in the electoral process for their role in electoral violence; five are from PHTK. On August 24, the CEP issued a broader warning, calling out political parties whose candidates and supporters were involved in violence, suggesting they could face sanctions. Eight departments were listed; the two parties involved in the most incidents were PHTK and Bouclier, which was founded by a close advisor to the president. Overall, 16 different parties were cited.
But the warning from the CEP offered another message: Parties performed extremely well in those departments where they were warned for violent actions. In Haitian elections, violence appears to pay off.
* * *
On the Saturday before the election, it was clear that problems would begin early in the voting. Just 12 hours before polls opened, the electoral council said that due to technical problems they would only be able to print a fraction of the passes needed for political party observers.
After the election, the local group led by RNDDH noted that some parties had difficulty obtaining accreditations, while those "favored by electoral officials" had received theirs.
On Sunday, in the Don Bosco polling center in Cité Soleil, with more than 15,000 registered voters, a group of officers from the Randevous party, a relatively small party running just 17 candidates for the lower house, milled about in the courtyard. Only officers from PHTK and Bouclier were allowed in, they were saying. "They have the money and the means to get the accreditation," one explained. "This came from the top." Party officers inside could not say what party they represented without first looking at their accreditation document. None mentioned either PHTK or Bouclier.
'As the days pass, we're beginning to realize it's a larger mess than we first thought.'
"There was an army of them," an international observation mission official, who asked not to be identified since the process is ongoing, told VICE News, adding that in some centers the ratio of officers to voters was as high as four to one. "For parties, it's a way to defend themselves, but also a way to intimidate."
Every crisis needs its scapegoat. Explaining the lack of accreditations, the CEP announced on the night of the election that an employee, Joseph Hébert Lucien, had made off with sensitive documents in an attempt to sabotage the process. Lucien shot back on local radio, saying he left the night before the elections because he had been receiving threats from political parties and welcoming an investigation into what happened.
"From my experience working with him, he was simply overwhelmed," a foreign diplomat who requested anonymity said in an interview. Still, it deflected criticism from the CEP and the United Nations Development Progamme (UNDP), which oversaw the election budget. Both groups have come under increasing scrutiny as the lack of preparation became clear. While the Haitian justice system is notoriously slow to act, the next day there was a press conference announcing a warrant for Lucien's arrest.
Still, the foreign diplomat, who's been in country working almost exclusively on elections for two years in one of the largest foreign embassies in Haiti, remained optimistic. "Some parties had an organized strategy to take advantage of it, but the problem is still fixable," he told VICE News. The CEP has pledged to have all the accreditation passes for the next round available 15 days in advance, but after overselling its hand before the first round, the CEP has already lost the trust of many throughout Haiti.
To anyone watching the run-up to the elections, it should have come as no surprise that election day itself was plagued by widespread irregularities. In its preliminary report, the EU observation mission noted that PHTK had "undoubtedly dominated the electoral scene," adding that 38 percent of election commercials were for PHTK.
Though the Haitian government committed about $10 million for political parties, those funds weren't released until just a week before the vote, leaving little time to run an actual campaign. While smaller parties waited, PHTK and Martelly were canvassing the country.
"We didn't use any state resources," Roudy Choute, a PHTK party representative, told VICE News. "The only thing we have is the president, and I'll keep using him." Both Choute and another PHTK insider, who requested anonymity, denied that PHTK had more funds than other parties. But the insider added, "What money does come, comes from the government, I'm not going to hide that."
PHTK and Bouclier are also the two parties most staunchly defending the results. In an interview in the party's headquarters, presidential candidate Steeve Khawly of Bouclier indicated that since international observers had said the results were acceptable, they should stand. "Elections happened on Sunday like the CEP said they would happen," he added. Khawly denied any connection with PHTK.
In a press conference the day after the vote, PHTK called the elections acceptable and denounced a "smear campaign" by its opponents. "Elections were good enough to move on," Choute later said. He blamed the opposition for intimidating potential voters to not go to the polls. "They forgot this is a democracy, even if there are three votes, the one with two goes on. You can't cancel the vote," he added.
While few outright winners were declared in the preliminary results, PHTK appears to be the main beneficiary of the election. The party has 42 candidates moving on in the 94 deputy races that will stand, four of whom will be declared the winner in the first round. The party also leads the field with eight Senate candidates moving on to the second round. Together with Bouclier, the two will have candidates advancing to the second round or winning outright in the majority of deputy races that were validated by the CEP.
* * *
"The elections won't be perfect, but it'll be better than 2010," a high-level foreign official involved in the process said the day before the election. The first of three scheduled elections this year, the vote held on August 9 cost at least $25 million — in addition to the $10 million the Haitian government distributed to political parties — and was years in the making.
In 2010, after initially being left out of the second round, Martelly supporters took to the streets, shutting down Haiti's capital. A mission from the OAS (also observing the current electoral process) came to Haiti and arbitrarily overturned the results, thrusting Martelly into the second round, and eventually the presidency. This time, even the head of the EU observation mission felt it necessary to give an interview to Haiti's leading newspaper,Le Nouvelliste,saying the mission would not interfere with the results of the election.
"The international community has their own agenda, they see that the money was wasted [in the election], but they want to do what is good for Martelly," a high-level official in Vérité, a newly created party associated with former President René Preval, explained. It was Preval's handpicked successor, Jude Célestin, who was removed by the international community in 2010 to allow Martelly into the runoff. "It's 2010 all over again, but instead of against Preval, it's for Martelly," he added.
The widespread knowledge that the international community would put their stamp of approval on the process, no matter how flawed, opened the door to the irregularities that plagued election day. "The sense is it was a 'check and move on,' but now we're realizing there are serious challenges on the horizon," the diplomat added.
With election day marred by extremely low turnout, irregularities and fraud, it is naturally the 'violent and corrupted' who will benefit.
Over lunch at an upscale restaurant in Port-au-Prince's wealthy Petionville neighborhood, Jocelerme Privert, one of 10 remaining senators and a former minister of the interior, explained that in order to get back to work he "needs elections." But, he added, "I need fair elections, I need good legislators." A $25 million test of the election system is one thing, but when that test results in the election of both houses of parliament, the impact on Haitian democracy is massive. "How this crisis is managed will determine the success of the next round. But the process is essential to the future of the country," Privert added.
The diplomat acknowledged that they had not done nearly enough to vet candidates, as it was difficult to assess all 1,800 of them. "This is not a glorious roster of candidates," he said. Unfortunately, with election day marred by extremely low turnout, irregularities and fraud, it is naturally the "violent and corrupted" who will benefit, as one candidate explained. As the electoral process continues, the legitimacy of Haiti's next legislature hangs in the balance.
* * * "As the days pass, we're beginning to realize it's a larger mess than we first thought. How will the government, CEP and international community get out of it?" the Vérité official posited during an interview. "The hope is that the CEP manages to explain carefully and transparently how its decisions are made," the observation official added.
But the results posted by the CEP and the brief press conference on August 20 have failed to assuage the many doubts. Elections will be re-run in 25 towns where less than 70 percent of tally sheets were counted, either due to fraud, irregularities, or the fact that they simply never made it to the tabulation center. The senate race in Haiti's second most populous department, the Artibonite, will also have to be re-run. The CEP, however, failed to explain the criteria for dismissing votes and there is no indication of whether the 70 percent threshold was based on any sort of statistical analysis.
Many towns and even entire departments will see the election results validated despite having just over 70 percent of the votes counted. Nationally, more than 23 percent of tally sheets were missing or excluded.
On August 27, 12 political parties wrote to the head of the CEP, Pierre Louis Opont, accusing the organization of favoring those close to the government, refusing to recognize the results posted by the CEP, and calling for his resignation.
"The credibility of the process and the honesty of the CEP will be tested," Privert said. Parties are now going through the results and filing complaints with the CEP. More than 200 complaints have been filed.
Privert added that documenting abuses on election day and being able to follow up on them largely depends on local officials, who in many cases are directly appointed by the Haitian government, making contesting the results difficult. Of course, it does help to be a sitting senator: In his home town in the Nippes department, where a group threatened a poll supervisor with a gun to his head, the PHTK candidate who was allegedly behind the violent actions has been excluded from continuing in the election. But without that benefit, there is no action one can take against decisions of the CEP. "It is a state within the state," the senator said.
The transparency, and the perceived fairness of how that unaccountable "state within a state" responds to these serious problems and deficiencies will determine if Haiti's electoral process continues with all parties still at the table, or if these elections will end up being another travesty in Haiti's ongoing struggle for democracy and national sovereignty.
Jake Johnston is a research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington DC. He is the lead author for CEPR's Haiti: Relief and Reconstruction Watch blog. Follow him on Twitter: @JakobJohnston

How Gregory Peck Fought Hollywood Bigotry

he recent publication of Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” has left many fans of her 1960 novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” disillusioned. Some who regarded “Mockingbird”’s central character Atticus Finch as a moral paragon fighting Southern racism have been deeply disappointed by “Watchman” (actually an earlier draft of “Mockingbird”), in which Atticus is rendered as a racist curmudgeon.
Readers unhappy about losing a fictional Atticus might, however, reclaim the “real” one. Gregory Peck, who so famously embodied Atticus in the film version of “Mockingbird,” passionately opposed racial prejudice. And now, unpublished documents in the Margaret Herrick Library (the Oscars archive) reveal Peck’s personal opposition to racism, long before Harper Lee even wrote “Mockingbird.” The young actor attacked bigotry against both blacks and Jews.
Peck expressed some of his earliest anti-racist views with regard to Haiti. The U.S. had occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and Hollywood films from the era depicted the country as a land of bizarre “voodoo” rites and zombies. However, Peck had visited the country in the 1940s, and when Darryl Zanuck of Fox Studios sought to persuade him to star in “Lydia Bailey,” an adventure-romance set during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), Peck asked to make a more serious film about Haiti.
He wanted to highlight the egalitarian ideals of Haiti’s revolution, in which African slaves had successfully revolted and made their country the first free black republic in the Americas. Peck likened Haitians’ fight for independence to the American Revolution. He spoke of how Haitian revolutionaries “carried on democratic ideals… against all the efforts of the French to retake the island and continue the exploitation of the people, their former slaves.” Peck compared the suffering of Haitians and “the poor negroes in the [American] South,” who he felt were even worse off.
Peck also denounced anti-Semitism, most notably through his role in the 1948 film “Gentleman’s Agreement.” It is easy today to forget the strength of anti-Semitism in the U.S. before the 1960s, where Jews faced widespread discrimination in housing and the workplace, as well as at prestigious universities and resorts. Anti-Semites such as Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi even used the word “kike” on the House floor. Though many Jewish studio executives were afraid to acknowledge the problem, for fear of a backlash, Daryl Zanuck, one of Hollywood’s few non-Jewish studio heads, decided to tackle the subject. He sought to turn Laura Hobson’s 1946 novel “Gentleman’s Agreement” into a film, personally entrusting the story to Peck. Peck’s stirring portrayal of Phil Green, a gentile journalist who goes undercover to expose everyday anti-Semitism, has become legendary. The role earned Peck an Oscar nomination.
Peck’s spirited defense of egalitarianism in the film was not merely an act. He took the role against the advice of his agent, who told him that challenging anti-Semitism could make him deeply unpopular. When asked by Coronet Magazine what the film meant to him, Peck responded, “To me ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ was a picture about Americanism.” As the House Un-American Activities Committee had begun targeting many of Peck’s liberal colleagues, Peck remarked pointedly that the best defense against communism was to live up to America’s noblest ideals: “We can best fight communism by practicing democracy.”
Though “Mockingbird” fans can safely reclaim Peck, it would oversimplify the history of racism and anti-Semitism in the U.S. to treat him as the uncomplicated paragon Atticus once appeared to be. It is perhaps a fool’s errand to search for unblemished heroes, given how deeply rooted prejudice can be even among those seeking to free themselves from it. Even before “Watchman”’s publication, scholars of race had noted that Atticus, despite defending an accused African American, did little to attack the larger structure of racism in his society.
In Peck’s case, his actions may not have always lived up to his pronouncements. For his proposed film about Haitian history, he wanted to occupy the starring role himself rather than hire an African-American actor — which would have meant his appearing in blackface. More notably, even as he crusaded on screen against “gentleman’s agreements” barring Jews, he may not have challenged them as forcefully in person. At the same time that he was filming “Gentleman’s Agreement,” he was founding the La Jolla Playhouse in his hometown of San Diego. Though Jews numbered among San Diego’s founders in the 19th century, the coastal area of La Jolla remained one of the city’s most fervent strongholds of prejudice. Mary Ellen Stratthaus has chronicled the restrictive covenants there, dating from the 1920s, that excluded anyone whose “blood was not entirely of the Caucasian race” from purchasing property. Real estate agents also used more subtle means to prevent Jews from moving to town, which residents feared would ruin the community and drive down property values. While conducting oral histories, Stratthaus was told that, when the Playhouse held cast parties at the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club, Jewish actors were not allowed to attend, something that Peck apparently did not protest (though Peck denied this to her in a 1996 letter).
Today, La Jolla is home to a thriving Jewish community — one of the most vibrant on the West Coast. However, it was not Peck who effected this sea change, but rather Roger Revelle, founder of the University of California, San Diego. Revelle insisted to town fathers in the 1950s that restrictive covenants must disappear if he were to build a world-class research institution that could attract Jewish faculty.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to underestimate Peck’s influence in creating a new America in the postwar period, one in which anti-Semites found themselves on the wrong side of history. In “Antisemitism in America,” Leonard Dinnerstein has written of the explosive impact that “Gentleman’s Agreement” had in “unmask[ing] those who tried to hide their bigotry under the mask of gentility and conformity.” The film, Fox’s highest grossing of 1948, deeply affected those who saw it. Zanuck told Peck, “I have never received half as many telegrams or phone calls on any previous picture and many people believe it is the best picture they have ever seen.” Peck himself was deluged with letters from Jews who suffered from anti-Semitism in their daily lives, and who were overwhelmed with gratitude at seeing him denounce these practices openly. “Gentleman’s Agreement” went on to win Best Picture at the 1948 Oscars, beating “Crossfire” (an equally well-intentioned film on anti-Semitism that had a lesser impact).
It was Peck’s deep belief in the words he spoke in “Gentleman’s Agreement” that allowed him to deliver them so powerfully — and that inspired both Jews and blacks to imagine a world without prejudice. At a time when parallel films about blacks were not being made, one African-American teenager wrote Peck that “Gentleman’s Agreement” gave her the “courage to fight” to achieve her dreams. She noted that Peck should not feel bad about having lost the Best Actor award to another nominee, since “In Gentleman’s Agreement you weren’t acting. Your sincerity, honesty and belief in what you said rang as clear and true as a church bell.”
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall is a professor of history at California State University, San Marcos.
Read more: http://forward.com/culture/320336/how-gregory-peck-fought-hollywood-racism/#ixzz3kn3mjYlk

The Clintons’ Haiti Screw-Up, As Told By Hillary’s Emails

It’s hard to find anyone these days who looks back on the U.S.-led response to the January 12, 2010, Haiti earthquake as a success, but it wasn’t always that way. Right after the disaster, even as neighborhoods lay in rubble, their people sweltering under tarps, the consensus—outside Haiti—was that America’s “compassionate invasion” (as TIME Magazine called it) had been “largely a success” (Los Angeles Times), offering further proof that “in critical moments of the history of mankind … the United States is, in fact, the indispensable nation” (Expresso, Portugal).
As the latest release of Hillary Clinton’s personal emails by the U.S. State Department Monday revealed, that perception was not an accident. “We waged a very successful campaign against the negative stories concerning our involvement in Haiti,” Judith McHale, the under-secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, wrote on February 26, 2010. A few weeks before, the public affairs chief had emailed newspaper quotations praising U.S. efforts in Haiti to Secretary Clinton with the note “Our Posts at work.” Clinton applauded. “That’s the result of your leadership and a new model of engagement w our own people,” she replied. “Onward!”
But one person even closer to the secretary of state was singing a different tune—very, very quietly. On February 22, after a four-day visit to the quake zone, Chelsea Clinton authored a seven-page memo which she addressed to “Dad, Mom,” and copied their chief aides. That informal report tells a continuing story of the unique brands of power and intelligence wielded by the Clinton family in Haiti and around the world—and of the uniquely Clinton ways they often undermine themselves.
First off, there was the secrecy. The memo—by a Clinton, with a master’s in public health from Columbia University, pursuing a doctorate in international relations from Oxford and with a prominent role at her family’s foundation—would have obliterated the public narrative of helpful outsiders saving grateful earthquake survivors that her mother’s State Department was working so hard to promote. Instead, like so much of the inner workings of the Clintons’ vast network, it was kept secret, released only in an ongoing dump of some 35,000 emails from Hillary’s private server, in response to a Freedom of Information Act Lawsuit wrapped up in the politics of the 2016 presidential election.
Chelsea Clinton was blunt in her report, confident the recipients would respect her request in the memo’s introduction to remain an “invisible soldier.” She had first come to the quake zone six days after the disaster with her father and then-fiancé, Mark Mezvinsky. Now she was returning with the medical aid group Partners in Health, whose co-founder, Dr. Paul Farmer, was her father’s deputy in his Office of the UN Special Envoy for Haiti. What she saw profoundly disturbed her.
Five weeks after the earthquake, international responders were still in relief mode: U.S. soldiers roamed Port-au-Prince streets on alert for signs of social breakdown, while aid groups held daily coordination meetings inside a heavily guarded UN compound ordinary Haitian couldn’t enter. But Haitians had long since moved on into their own recovery mode, many in displacement camps they had set up themselves, as responders who rarely even spoke the language, Kreyòl, worked around them, oblivious to their efforts.
“The incompetence is mind numbing,” she told her parents. “The UN people I encountered were frequently out of touch … anachronistic in their thinking at best and arrogant and incompetent at worst.” “There is NO accountability in the UN system or international humanitarian system.” The weak Haitian government, which had lost buildings and staff in the disaster, had something of a plan, she noted. Yet because it had failed to articulate its wishes quickly enough, foreigners rushed forward with a “proliferation of ad hoc efforts by the UN and INGOs [international nongovernmental organizations] to ‘help,’ some of which have helped … some of which have hurt … and some which have not happened at all.”
The former first daughter recognized something that scores of other foreigners had missed: that Haitians were not just sitting around waiting for others to do the work. “Haitians in the settlements are very much organizing themselves … Fairly nuanced settlement governance structures have already developed,” she wrote, giving the example of camp home to 40,000 displaced quake survivors who had established a governing committee and a series of sub-committees overseeing security, sanitation, women’s needs and other issues.
“They wanted to help themselves, and they wanted reliability and accountability from their partners,” Chelsea Clinton wrote. But that help was not coming. The aid groups had ignored requests for T-shirts, flashlights and pay for the security committee, and the U.S. military had apparently passed on the committee’s back-up plan that they provide security themselves. “The settlements’ governing bodies—as they shared with me—are beginning to experience UN/INGO fatigue given how often they articulate their needs, willingness to work—and how little is coming their way.”
That analysis went beyond what some observers have taken years to understand, and many others still haven’t: that disaster survivors are best positioned to take charge of their own recovery, yet often get pushed aside by outside authorities who think, wrongly, that they know better. Her report also had more than an echo of the philosophy of her Partners in Health tour guides. More than five years later, her candor and force of insight impress experts. “I am struck by the direct tone and the level of detail,” says Vijaya Ramachandran, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.
But then came the recommendations—and a second classic pitfall. Far from speaking uncomfortable truths to her parents’ power, Chelsea was largely agreeing with their own assessments. At a March UN donors’ conference for Haiti over which Bill and Hillary Clinton presided, the secretary of state would tell the assembled delegates that the global community had to start doing things differently. “It will be tempting to fall back on old habits—to work around the [Haitian] government rather than to work with them as partners, to fund a scattered array of well-meaning projects rather than making the deeper, long-term investments that Haiti needs now,” she said, nearly repeating her daughter’s dismissal of the “ad hoc efforts” that had defined the early response.
Bill Clinton had also long been scathing in his assessments of aid work there. As the Associated Press correspondent in Port-au-Prince before, during and after the quake, I’d followed him on his visits since becoming UN Special Envoy in mid-2009. In public, the former president called for better coordination between NGOs and donors. In private, after long, frustrating days in the Caribbean heat, he’d sometimes just go off, lighting into the nearest staffer about partners’ missed meetings and broken promises. The former president also loved to apologize for his own past actions—destructive food policies which flooded the Haitian market with cheap Arkansas rice, and ordering a crippling embargo that destroyed the Haitian economy during the reign of a 1990s military junta (some of whose members had been on the CIA payroll).
Yet those introspections rarely extend to the present. As anyone who’s covered the Clintons can tell you, they armor themselves with staffers who hit back against almost any hint of criticism—especially when an election is near. The one thing the Clintons never seem to question is the idea that they, personally, should remain in charge. And that is precisely what Chelsea recommended in her report: “The Office of Special Envoy—i.e., you Dad—needs authority over the UN and all its myriad parts—which I do believe would give you effective authority over [the NGOs].” Her father, the former president, should be a “single point of authority,” she said—overseeing a replacement for the organizational system of government agencies, militaries and NGOs.
The truth is that Bill Clinton was already by far the most powerful individual in this flawed system, with Hillary close behind. She was guiding the U.S. response as secretary of state. He was already UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Envoy for Haiti, head patron of the Clinton Foundation and co-leader of the newly formed Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. Weeks later the couple would share the dais at the donors conference, where governments and aid groups pledged some $10 billion for Haiti’s recovery. Her father would soon accept the co-chairmanship of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the quasi-government body charged with allocating many of the funds. (“Finally,” chief of staff Cheryl Mills wrote to the secretary in a March 29, 2010, email, when news of the appointment leaked to the Haitian press.)
The irony is that, after pages of scathing analysis about the failure of international responders to understand and respect ordinary people in Haiti, Chelsea Clinton’s plan would have created an even more powerful foreigner operating at an even greater remove. She did call on this new Super Clinton-led structure to “support the Haitian government,” but noted that it could only build “local capacity and capabilities, where feasible”—a logical loophole the U.S. government would fall back on time and again as it kept to old habits after all, including refusing to provide Haiti’s government with direct budget support.
As it was, that personality-driven leadership style meant the response to the Haiti quake would focus on priorities set by those surrounding them, rather than those of majority of Haitians. The new email tranche shows how quickly the construction of low-wage garment factories and prioritizing exports to the U.S. market came to the center of the U.S.-led response in Haiti. That strategy, authored by economist Paul Collier, was what Bill Clinton had come to Haiti to promote as special envoy before the quake. Little more than two weeks after the disaster, Mills, a former Clinton White House counsel who became her point woman on Haiti, forwarded the secretary a New York Times op-ed by Collier and consultant Jean-Louis Warnholz rebranding the pre-quake strategy as a form of post-quake reconstruction. “He now works for us,” she noted for her boss, referring to Warnholz.
The new emails also show how Hillary’s staffers brought former Liz Claiborne Inc. executive Paul Charron into the fold to collaborate with Hillary Clinton and Warnholz on helping to make the garment factories a reality. “As I communicated to Jean-Louis, I am happy to be helpful to you and the State Department on this project,” Charron wrote Mills in August 2010. Around that time, Charron made a key phone call to a former Liz Claiborne colleague now working as an advisor for the South Korean garment giant Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd., to encourage that company to come up with an investment plan in Haiti, the New York Times reported two years later. In 2012, Bill and Hillary Clinton attended the opening of the brand-new, $300 million Caracol Industrial Park in northern Haiti, with Sae-A as the anchor tenant. Today, there has been little reconstruction in Port-au-Prince. Most quake survivors have moved back into precarious homes, hoping another disaster doesn’t strike. The country is still being ravaged by a cholera epidemic that began nine months after the earthquake and has killed nearly 9,000 people. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have publicly acknowledged this epidemic, unrelated to the quake, was caused by United Nations peacekeepers—who in turn, as Chelsea correctly foresaw, have been able to avoid any semblance of accountability. President Michel Martelly, who Hillary Clinton helped put in office as secretary of state, is struggling to hold the country’s first elections since he took power, with observers watching warily to see if he will leave office next spring.
As for Caracol, the northern industrial park has created just 5,479 out of a promised 60,000 jobs when I visited in the spring, as workers complain about the long hours and low pay. Farmers who once tended land on the property complain they were pushed off without proper compensation (a claim the park’s boosters deny). Many of those living around the park now see it as the embodiment of the powerful Clintons’ disconnect. “They go to the park, but they don’t come to our village, because they care more about the park,” said Cherline Pierre, a 33-year-old resident who signs up would-be laborers near her home, a few miles from the park’s high gates. All a reader plowing through the email tranche can do is wonder, what might have gone differently had Chelsea Clinton’s insights reached more people in real time, and if the Clintons had applied more of them to themselves. “I wish this had been made public when it was sent,” Ramachandran said of the report. “It might have helped.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/hillary-clinton-email-213110#ixzz3klj7usxq Jonathan M. Katz won the James Foley/Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for his coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and cholera epidemic, and the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award for his book, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. He reported on the Clintons in Haiti for POLITICO on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Follow him on Twitter @KatzOnEarth. Authors: Jonathan M. Katz Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/hillary-clinton-email-213110#ixzz3kkbqtaAl

Opinion: The Dangers Of Fred Mitchell...LES BAHAMEENS D'ORIGINE HAÏTIENNE EN GRAND DANGER

Politicians from all parties fear the power of a Haitian-Bahamian voting block and are complicit in the illegal and unconstitutional policies regarding citizenship in the Bahamas, Fred Smith argues
#I am a firm believer in giving credit where credit is due. I agree with Dr Andre Rollins who said that Fred Mitchell poses a “clear and present danger” to the continued development of democracy in The Bahamas. #In my opinion, Fred Mitchell is a long term racist schemer and political opportunist.
#And, as Nicki Kelly so accurately said in her article in The Punch on August 13: “There is little that Foreign Affairs Minister Fred Mitchell does without malice aforethought”. She goes on to say, again historically accurately: “And since it is always Mr Mitchell’s wont to fire up racial discord as part of his political arsenal.”
#So, permit me to share the full extent and objectives of what I suspect these malicious multi-pronged racist and ethnically targeted policies are towards the Haitian-Bahamian community in the Bahamas.
#First, the policies are not the personal expressions of Fred Mitchell, although he is no doubt the architect of these malignancies.
#Second, the policies have been 100 per cent supported, adopted, encouraged and fully executed and maintained by the current Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) government.
#Third, the policies, from inception, have been 100 per cent embraced by the Free National Movement (FNM), the official Opposition, which has maintained that they stand “shoulder to shoulder with the government.“
#Fourth, the Democratic National Alliance (DNA) have likewise fully supported and encouraged the policies.
#Fifth, after all the abuses manifested by the policies were exposed, the FNM have been invited - and have been provided with multiple opportunities - to distance themselves from the government policies but have failed to do so.
#In the lower and upper houses of Parliament, the FNM voted unanimously to support the 2015 Amendments to the Immigration Act which have purported to legalise some aspects of the PLP policies.
#One of the main reasons that all three political parties find the policies attractive is their political insecurity and fear of what they are now observing as the potential “Haitian-Bahamian political voting block”.
#It is one that they cannot control; it has the potential for growing extremely large, powerful and articulate; and it is legally entitled to grow and therefore must be “contained”. Which is why Fred Mitchell becomes overly excited every time I publicly urge the Haitian-Bahamian community to politically organise, to promote and protect their interests and rights, and make sure that he and other abusive MPs are not re-elected and/or get their own MPs elected.
#The unstated but long term full extent and objective of the PLP, and adopted by default, by the FNM and DNA, is to rid The Bahamas of as many people who are identified ethnically as “Haitians”, lest the Haitian “pestilence” overrun and overwhelm The Bahamas.
#This ethnic cleansing objective is being achieved by making it as difficult as possible for those who are here and have legal, moral, ethical and internationally recognised rights to have those rights recognised and/or to be accorded the legal status to which they may be entitled by various provisions of the Constitution, the Immigration Act, International Conventions or otherwise.
#That is quite a different policy than the one which is perfectly legal pursuant to the provisions of the Bahamas Immigration Act and accepted by international norms and practices, which is to humanely prevent illegal immigration. I have no quarrel with enforcement of the law, and neither does the Grand Bahama Human Rights Association or other NGOs.
#But once again, Fred Mitchell is not only holding the Rule of Law and the Constitution in contempt by threatening to burn it as he did in 1989, but now that he is an actual power, he is using the police and executive power of the State to execute illegal and unconstitutional policies.
#The underpinning of these illegal policies is the overarching illegal requirement that Fred Mitchell has illegally proclaimed by ministerial diktat that all persons in The Bahamas are required to be “documented”.
#There is no such law passed by Parliament; there is no such law found in our Constitution; there is no such common law; there is no such judge-made law; there is no international convention or law to that effect. Being “documented” is the aberrant brainchild of Fred Mitchell.
#Being documented was the fulcrum of Hitler’s discrimination against the Jews, the United States’ internment of American citizens of Japanese heritage during World War II, and South Africa’s abuse of blacks under Apartheid.
#This illegal and discriminatory policy is being achieved by various means, but ultimately by forcing every person in The Bahamas who is of Haitian ethnic origin and who does not currently hold a Bahamian passport, to get a Haitian passport even though they were
#1 born in The Bahamas before independence in 1973 and entitled to be a Bahamian citizen; or
#2 born in The Bahamas after 1973 and are entitled to be registered under article 7 of the Constitution; or
#3 entitled to apply after 19 to be naturalised and get citizenship.
#I suspect that when these persons of Haitian heritage, all born in The Bahamas, pursue their applications for citizenship, their applications will either never be determined or will be refused, by the thousands, and when not dealt with (as has been the historical position) or refused, they will then be directed to make arrangements to leave The Bahamas because, perversely, their Haitian passports, issued in The Bahamas, will not have a visa from the government entitling them to be here.
#This will then be used as the lawful reason to deport them. Many more thousands will simply be left in a “Belongers Permit Limbo Land”.
#This is not a short term policy objective. This policy has been embraced by the PLP administration, the FNM and the DNA.
#Accordingly, it is a policy that will become embedded, ubiquitous and endemic in Bahamian political governance and will continue to be implemented aggressively by successive administrations of whichever flavour of the day.
#The government will, on a continuous and ongoing basis, effect mass deportations of every person who is not a citizen, ie those whose applications have not been determined and/or have been refused.
#So in The Bahamas, the government will use this legal justification, just as in the Dominican Republic, where they have passed a law stripping all Dominican Republicans of Haitian ethnic origin of their Dominican citizenship going back generations.
#The new “Belongers Permit“ will not be of any assistance to:
#1 Those who apply for citizenship after the age of 19 as the government has already stated that such a permit will only be given to persons who have applied under article 7 (2).
#2 Those who apply for citizenship under article 7 (2) but who cannot show and produce documentation for the legal status of their parentage; those persons, despite their entitlement by being born in The Bahamas will simply not be able to apply for the belongers permit
#3 Those who are born in The Bahamas before 1973 as they, too, will be unable to produce documentation for the legal status of their parentage as required by the belongers permit application form.
#Deviously, the children of persons born in The Bahamas of Haitian heritage are also being required to obtain a passport from Haiti. Accordingly, when the continuous deportations begin of the Bahamian-born persons who have children, in accordance with what The Bahamas government will proclaim as “humanitarian internationally recognised norms”, their children, all of whom are second or third generation born in The Bahamas, will also be deported on the perverse basis that, “humanely”, they should remain with their parents.
#This is a malevolent master plan that the Fred Mitchell and the PLP have cooked up and which the FNM and the DNA have - without one dissenting voice - embraced.
#And, the master plan and objective will then be easily executed on a continuous basis, because all of the targeted deportees, including all of their children, will now have valid Haitian passports to be shipped back to Haiti ... A country none of them have ever seen or known, even though they were born in The Bahamas and have rights to be here.
#The courts of The Bahamas will not be able to deal with this as there will be too many cases of abuse. The judicial system is already clogged with thousands of unheard cases and the delays unavoidable; the Executive branch of the government does not recognise any judicial precedent set for one person as being a principle applicable to all persons in a similar category; there is no publicly funded legal aid; most persons will not be able to afford legal representation for these kinds of immigration human rights matters; most persons will not even know what their legal rights may be; and lastly there are very few lawyers (out of nearly 2,000) who are available on a pro bono basis to assist.
#Let it not be forgotten also that the Haitian government is complicit in this illegal policy, by going along with the programme and providing, at the insistence of the Bahamas government, passports to persons born in The Bahamas, notwithstanding that the Haitian government knows that these Bahamian-born applicants do not wish to be citizens of Haiti, but are being forced to obtain Haitian passports by the illegal policies of the Bahamian government.
#Lastly, I maintain there is no legal requirement for anybody to be “documented” in the Bahamas.
#Indeed, as can be seen from the accompanying official publication of the Registrar General of The Bahamas, responsible for registering births and deaths in The Bahamas, the only document we really need if born here is a birth certificate.
http://www.tribune242.com/news/2015/aug/27/opinion-dangers-fred-mitchell/?opinion

Dominican Republic-Haiti Crisis Simmers as the OAS Comes Down Hard on the D. R.

Dominican leaders are defensive and in denial, as investigators document 'forced' migration of Haitians out of the DR.
By Nathalie Baptiste / AlterNet August 27, 2015
A new Dominican policy that could leave hundreds of thousands of Haitians and their descendants without citizenship has renewed old tensions between the neighboring countries and has created an oft-ignored but very serious humanitarian crisis. Haitians and their descendants are living in fear and thousands have already fled. Despite reports from international organizations and journalists on the ground, the Dominican Republic is outright denying that a crisis exists.
In September 2013, a high court in the Dominican Republic ruled that anyone born after 1929 to undocumented people were not Dominican citizens; some 200,000 people are now at risk of being deported and becoming stateless. The 2014 Dominican Republic Human Rights Report published by the U.S. State Department identifies discrimination against Haitians and their descendants as the most serious human rights problem facing the country.
After a small backlash (mostly from human rights organizations), the Dominican Republic announced that anyone who could prove that they had registered with the government or had Dominican birth certificates by June 17 of this year would not be at risk of deportation.
It was supposed to fix the looming crisis, but providing documentation proved to be a lot harder for Haitian immigrants and their Dominican-born children. Undocumented Haitians are often unable to or actively prevented from registering the births of their children with the civil registry. And much like in the United States, undocumented immigrants in the Dominican Republic had trouble receiving the proper documents from their employers.
As activists worldwide began to advocate for the plight of those at risk for deportations and journalists ramped up their coverage of the crisis, the international community finally stepped in to propose a resolution between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, whose officials had been engaged in a war of words.
Last month the Organization of American States sent a fact-finding mission to the border region between Haiti and the Dominican Republic to gather information, listen to the views of government and non-governmental players, and present the Secretary General with observations and recommendations. The mission found what activists had been saying for months. There are people at risk of being stateless and displaced persons living in precarious conditions.
The recommendations included OAS facilitating dialogue to solve the problem and urging the Dominican government strengthening the registration process; finding a way to help vulnerable displaced persons also made the list.
The Dominican government’s response to the OAS was to deny and defend. In an official statement from the Office of the Presidency, the government essentially called OAS’s findings false. “The descriptive part of the report presents clear evidence that the accusations voiced in recent weeks against the Dominican Republic are false and unfounded,” read the official statement, “specifically those referring to a humanitarian crisis and alleged systematic violations of human rights that do not exist.”
Everyone has a right to a nationality, so by stripping away citizenship from hundreds of thousands people the Dominican government is, in fact, in violation of international human rights law.
The statement also mentioned that the Dominican government did not request the presence of the OAS because “there is no currently existing conflict between the two nations that may warrant the need for said mediation,” but that dialogue between Haiti and the Dominican Republic can begin again “as soon as the Haitian government moves away from its attitude of discrediting the Dominican Republic, as a means of evading its responsibility with the people of Haiti.”
The Dominican government has managed to pretend that a crisis of its own doing does not exist, while still placing the blame for the crisis on the Haitian government. But try as they might, the human rights crisis cannot be denied.
The June 17 deadline to register with the Dominican government passed without mass round-ups, but rather with thousands of people pouring over the border into Haiti out of fear of deportation, violence, and harassment. So far, an estimated 37,000 Haitians and their Dominican-born descendants have crossed the border into Haiti.
The International Organization for Migration monitored several border crossings between the two countries and interviewed 1,133 people sheltered inside of a school. Nearly 59 percent of those interviewed said they “spontaneously” returned to Haiti. However, an alarming 36 percent of interviewees said police, military, or immigration officials had forced them out. The majority of interviewees were born in Haiti, but 33 percent of them were born in the Dominican Republic—forced out of the country they used to call home.
In Haiti, along the Dominican-Haitian border, Dominican-born descendants of Haitians and Haitian immigrants have settled in makeshift camps in squalid conditions. The conditions are similar to the tent cities that emerged in the country after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake toppled buildings and killed scores of people in 2010.
It is not lost on critics and activists that the people affected by the 2013 ruling are overwhelmingly black. Antihaitianismo—or anti-Haitian sentiment—is not uncommon in the Dominican Republic. “I have lots of Haitian friends, including undocumented ones whom I’ve helped to get their papers in order,” a Dominican man told Huffington Post in July. “I can go to their homes, spend time with them. But I can’t completely trust them, because you help a Haitian today and he hurts you later. It’s in their blood.” Dominican government officials deny that this kind of racism and discrimination exists.
Much like the rampant discrimination, the Dominican government is trying to evade responsibility for the citizenship crisis by simply pretending it doesn’t exist. Officials seem more concerned with accusing the international community of discrediting them. The Haitian government, international groups, and activists will not be able to discredit the Dominican government but denying the existence of a humanitarian crisis will.
Nathalie Baptiste is a writing fellow at The American Prospect. She has worked as a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus and written for Inter Press Service.
http://www.alternet.org/immigration/dominican-republic-haiti-crisis-simmers-oas-comes-down-hard-d-r

CARICOM Wants Ground Monitoring System to Stop Potential Dominican Republic Abuse of Haitian Immigrants

The Caribbean Community, or CARICOM, will ask the United Nations to install a ground monitoring system to ensure the Dominican Republic does not violate human rights during the process of repatriating people of Haitian descent, an official told EFE via phone on Wednesday.

The CARICOM official said that organization’s secretary-general, Irwin LaRocque, and Haitian Foreign Minister Lener Renaud agreed during a meeting this week that the international community must intervene to ensure immigrants’ rights are not abused.
Though no specific details were provided on this request, the official said this initiative follows on the heels of an agreement by the heads of government of the 15-member CARICOM.
The Dominican Republic is not a member of CARICOM although it has applied for membership. Haiti is one of the 15 members along with Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.

During CARICOM’s annual summit in early July, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stressed the importance of respect for human rights and human dignity.

“I have discussed this with the president of the Dominican Republic and trust there will be further progress in resolving this matter, protecting the rights of affected persons, and preventing the loss of nationality,” Ban said at the opening ceremony.

Many people born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents faced immense obstacles when trying to obtain the right documentation to register for the National Regularization Plan and only around 240,000 applications were received ahead of a June 17 deadline.
The Dominican Republic and Haiti share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, with Haiti in the western portion.

Though both countries are poor, Haiti is destitute, and Haitians cross the border to do work that many Dominicans will not do such as harvesting sugarcane.

Haitians have been the target of mob violence on many occasions in recent years and the Dominican government has been widely criticized for its treatment of the migrants.
Read more at latino.foxnews.com

http://atlantablackstar.com/2015/08/27/caricom-will-ask-united-nations-install-monitoring-systems-haiti/

Following Outcry, the Red Cross Is Shifting Its Priorities in Haiti

y Jacob Kushner
August 18, 2015 | 6:50 pm
When an earthquake decimated Haiti's capital and nearby cities in 2010, people around the world pledged $13 billion in aid, $488 million of which was donated to the American Red Cross — the largest branch of the world's largest relief charity.
In June, an NPR/ProPublica report alleged that the Red Cross had misused and wasted funds it devoted to housing, building only six out of 700 planned homes and failing to shelter anywhere near as many displaced Haitians as it had claimed. US Rep. Rick Nolan (D-Minn.) urged the House Oversight Committee to hold congressional hearings on the matter, calling the allegations "extremely disturbing," but none have yet been scheduled.
In a letter last month to Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern, US Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said he was "deeply concerned" by indications that "the Red Cross failed to meet many of its objectives in Haiti," and asked for a detailed accounting of its programs.
Rather than assert that its spending information amounted to "trade secrets," as it did when it initially declined to detail its spending on Hurricane Sandy relief last year, the Red Cross replied that it had spent $76.5 million on temporary or provisional shelter, another $34 million on repairing damaged houses and helping families relocate, and $62 million on neighborhood renovation programs, which also included the repair of permanent homes. (Grassley's office told VICE News that he still wants the agency to disclose overhead costs and other spending details.)
Five years after the earthquake, some 64,000 Haitians remain officially displaced, and tens of thousands more reside in temporary shelters or on land from which they face eviction. Roughly 150,000 of them live in a desolate stretch of land at the foot of the mountains north of Port-au-Prince that Haitians call Canaan — the biblical Promised Land.
It is located just southeast of Titanyen, a settlement whose grassy plains have long served as a dumping ground for the bodies of political opponents and, more recently, for victims of the earthquake and a cholera epidemic, sourced to UN peacekeepers, that quickly followed.
With more homesteaders arriving each week, the Red Cross has partnered with USAID to invest $14 million in a series of projects over the next two years to support them as they build a permanent community. There is much work to be done: Canaan lacks paved roads, electricity, plumbing, and public services, while heavy rains and hurricanes make it vulnerable to severe flooding and landslides.
The Canaan projects are part of a $56 million investment that the Red Cross says it has committed to development and disaster preparedness in Haiti. It expects to spend most of this by the end of 2016, but will continue to sponsor various initiatives into 2017 and perhaps beyond.
The agency's adjustment of priorities in Canaan illustrates its evolving understanding of the infrastructural challenges that disaster recovery entails, but critics of its effort in Haiti insist that this does not absolve it of what they say were harmful mistakes.
'Helping people live more permanently in Canaan… is that a good idea?'
"They raised more money than they knew what to do with," Jonathan Katz, the Associated Press bureau chief in Haiti at the time of the earthquake and author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, told VICE News. He argues that the ineffective use by the Red Cross and other aid agencies of hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions shaped many of the problems the country faces today.
"When people criticize the Red Cross they say, 'We gave half a billion dollars to the Red Cross and five years later there are still some tent camps — where did the money go?' " he remarked, referring to temporary shelters for people whose homes had been destroyed or damaged. "Answer: into the tent camps. They built tent camps."
Habitat for Humanity estimated in 2013 that $500 million in total aid had been spent on emergency aid and transitional shelters, leaving just $200 million for reconstruction.By spending so much on temporary accommodation, charities left thousands of Haitians entrenched in precarious lodging conditions while allocating insufficient funds to permanent housing or services.
"If the response to the earthquake had been competent, Canaan wouldn't exist," Katz said. "The amount of work that would be put into making it safe to live in would be tearing it down and building it from scratch."
Missing from this discussion is the role of Haiti's government. There was no one living in Canaan at the time of the earthquake, but after Haiti's government declared the area a public utility, government officials and some relief agencies began promoting the area as a viable location for Haiti's displaced masses. Many heeded the call, creating a disorderly sprawl of improvised housing.
Clement Belizaire, the head of the country's housing agency, agrees that the humanitarian response was chaotic.
"There was a lack of coordination," he told VICE News. "International agencies were not responding to the will of the Haitian government, and that was a shame."
Belizaire noted that the Red Cross closely aligned its spending with the government's wishes, however. If the agency misappropriated its resources, he suggested, it did so at the direction of Haiti's leaders.
Leslie Schaffer, the American Red Cross's current Latin America regional director, told VICE News that this is why, apart from funding temporary shelters, the agency allocated millions of dollars to projects like Campeche, the urban housing project described as a major failure because only six houses of a promised 700 were constructed.
"The government of Haiti said, 'Listen, if you build new communities, there are land tenure issues, and we have to provide all the other services that accompany it. What would be better is if you would help us to reconstruct our inner cities,' " she recalled.
Belizaire believes that it is misguided to blame the Red Cross for not crafting a comprehensive housing plan when Haiti's government itself didn't have one. It took more than two years to create the housing policy agency that Belizaire now directs and for that agency to compose a national policy.
"You can't build houses when there's no housing policy," he said.
Meanwhile, he added, the government's preliminary plan contained what were in retrospect poor directives. Released two months after the earthquake, it urged swift and largely temporary solutions to shelter. The plan called for the immediate relocation of 100,000 people squatting in precarious Port-au-Prince locations, saying it had identifying five sites for relocation where "provisional shelters should be installed." But it did not name these sites, making it impossible to know if Canaan was among them.
By the time it formulated a national housing policy, Haiti's government had changed its tune drastically. "The construction of housing is the responsibility of families," it declared at the outset of the 72-page document. The plan called for increased loans and credit as well as incentives and support for Haitians to build or rebuild homes and communities themselves.
"That's what the Red Cross is doing now," Belizaire said.
'This is recognizing that this will be a massive city to come.'
Just three years after the disaster, homesteaders had already spent $90 million of their own money on construction in Canaan, according to an estimate by Habitat for Humanity.
Some of Canaan's areas have markets, schools of varying quality, and even two-story buildings and spotty, informal electricity. But newer arrivals must settle in areas with little more than dirt paths snaking between tiny structures made of sticks, tarpaulin sheets, and salvaged scraps of metal. The Red Cross and USAID have designed a series of projects to help change that. A nonprofit called Global Communities won the bid to implement the project, but it won't be building houses. It will instead lead from behind, working with the Red Cross to provide technical assistance for Canaan residents to accomplish their own goals.
Anna Konotchick, who is managing the Canaan program on behalf of the Red Cross, told VICE News that this strategy reflects the Haitian government's new approach to housing.
"Instead of 'get a government to build a house, get an NGO to build a T-shelter,' now it's shifted to providing communities support in leading the process," she said.
Red Cross funding will be used to help a Haitian bank set up microfinance lending and banking locations so that Canaan residents can benefit from long-term financial services and planning. People will receive loans to start small enterprises, ranging anywhere from wheeled coffee carts to cellphone charging stations. A second microfinance institution will extend loans to those who might not otherwise qualify — people without assets or who seem less likely to repay a loan.
Other projects are structural. The Red Cross will pay for a Haitian contractor to build Canaan's first paved road and fund its first water pipeline. (Residents currently buy water that is brought in on trucks.) It will also bankroll the construction of Canaan's first school to be approved by the Ministry of Education, and help establish a proper electrical grid.
Most importantly, the Red Cross will work with nearly a dozen different government agencies and utilities to coordinate Canaan's future development.
"This is recognizing that this will be a massive city to come," Konotchick remarked. "It's not just trying to react to what this is now, but trying to react to what it will be years from now, knowing that it will double or triple in size."
From funding technical studies on soil quality, to ensuring that each part of the Canaan is accessible by road, to creating local governance structures, the Red Cross will support residents as they "plan what Canaan will look like five years, ten years from now," she said.
To everyday donors, that may not sound coherent or even measurable. But it's what the Red Cross, USAID, and Haiti's government agree is the best way forward.
"Infrastructure, roads, electricity — this is our vision, and the Red Cross is supporting this," Belizaire said.
But Canaan's fate remains uncertain. Some believe the land may be a flood zone, and that heavy rains or hurricanes could jeopardize the homes and lives of its residents. A study released in April warns that "large areas of the settlement are currently exposed to flood hazard." If those risks aren't properly mitigated, Canaan could be another disaster in the making.
Global Communities is currently drafting a proposal due in mid-September that will lay out how Red Cross funding can mitigate these risks — by supporting the planting of trees to reduce soil erosion, for example. Belizaire has also acknowledged that the government will likely have to resettle Haitians residing on steep hillsides and other hazardous zones.
Critics like Katz counter that the premise of assisting the development of a city in a disaster-risk area is ill-advised.
"Helping people live more permanently in Canaan… is that a good idea?" he asked. "If in five years there's a hurricane and 2,000 people are dead in Canaan, [the Red Cross] better not say that they had nothing to do with that and then try to raise more money."
But Belizaire says there's little alternative.
"Yes, the area has a very high risk of flooding," he said. "We are a natural disaster risk country."
Follow Jacob Kushner on Twitter: @JacobKushner
TOPICS: americas, haiti, 2010 earthquake, international red cross, american red cross, disaster relief, canaan, housing, shelters, development, habitat for humanity, global communities, usaid, charles grassley, rick nolan, gail mcgovern

Editorial: Red Cross faces questions on Haiti relief

Posted Aug. 17, 2015 at 11:00 PM
The world reached out in grand fashion when a massive earthquake struck Haiti five years ago. Former President Bill Clinton raised millions of dollars. Celebrities organized high-profile benefits. The Times-News held a fund-raiser at the Williams High School auditorium starring our very own Alamance County humorist and star Jeanne Robertson. Thousands of dollars were raised here. Millions elsewhere.
The American Red Cross joined in the effort in a big way, promising to rebuild homes, schools and infrastructure in a country that was in desperate shape before the earthquake. The Red Cross raised almost $500 million, more than any other group.
Where did the money go? That has come under question in an investigation by ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization, and National Public Radio.
The chief executive of the Red Cross said in 2011 that the agency would “provide tens of thousands of people with permanent homes.” The actual number of permanent homes built through the Red Cross in Haiti is six, according to the ProPublica/NPR investigation.
Overall, reporters found “a string of poorly managed projects, questionable spending and dubious claims of success.”
The reporting has prompted an inquiry by U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. In a letter to Red Cross officials, Grassley said he had been “assured that the Red Cross had made substantial steps forward in improving efficiencies and reducing waste, fraud and abuse within the organization. However, the recent news articles cast doubt on some representations made by the Red Cross.”
The Red Cross’ initial plan, according to the ProPublica/NPR reports, was to build roughly 700 homes with toilets and showers — luxuries in Haiti. They would start in Campeche, a hillside neighborhood in Port-au-Prince where residents lived in mud and sheet metal shacks.
No homes were built there.
According to the reports, the Red Cross was unable to deliver on many of its projects in Haiti. Red Cross leaders were reluctant to rely on the Haitian people or native speakers for help navigating the cultures and politics of a complex, poverty-stricken nation. So the Red Cross gave millions to outside groups, didn’t properly track the money, and spent too much on overhead and bureaucracy.
The Red Cross continued to raise money for Haiti “well after it had enough for the emergency relief that is the group’s stock and trade,” ProPublica/NPR reported.
The Red Cross has challenged the reporting.
In a letter to Grassley, Red Cross officials said they spent $400.5 million of the $487.6 million raised. They used the money to repair homes, provide rental subsidies and shelters. They also trained Haitians on first aid and jobs skills, and provided soap, buckets and rehydration packets during a cholera outbreak. The money bought mosquito nets. It helped toward rubble removal efforts. And it helped repair infrastructure.
Page 2 of 2 - “For a disaster of the scale of the Haiti earthquake, the needs were so great that we could not in good conscience halt donations or imagine at the outset what precise amount of donations would be needed,” the agency wrote to Grassley. “We are confident that those donations were needed and we spent and committed them well.”
But Grassley’s frustration has only grown. The senator has criticized the Red Cross for not being more transparent about how it spent the money it raised for Haiti. Red Cross frontline workers over the years, decades, have done tremendous work, often under extremely difficult conditions. Locally in Alamance County they’re the first to lend a hand to those touched by fires or other tragic events. Their work here is a godsend for families.
But it’s essential that not-for-profit fundraising organizations be utterly transparent to donors, to recipients, to the broad public. They deal with disaster. But first they have to earn trust.
Parts if this editorial were previously published in the Chicago Tribune.

Haiti’s critical test — and ours

BY FREDERICA S. WILSON
wilson.house.gov Haiti faced a critical test last week when voters headed to the polls to cast ballots for the men and women who will serve in the next Parliament. The election, three years overdue, was the first of three to be held by December and will measure the nation’s ability to hold fair and transparent elections and self-govern.

In this first round, more than 1,800 candidates vied for approximately 130 seats, which in itself is extremely problematic. During the inevitable October runoffs, voters will also cast ballots to elect a new president from yet another overcrowded field of more than 50 candidates.
Its current head of state, President Michel Martelly, has governed by decree since January, when the last Parliament coincidentally dissolved on the fifth anniversary of the 2010 earthquake that killed 200,000 people. Without the same checks and balances that most democracies enjoy and not enough lawmakers to even form a quorum, Martelly has been unable to achieve much in the past eight months.

Haiti took its first tentative steps toward true democracy just days after the United States marked the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. It was a bittersweet occasion since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling that eviscerated the heart of the landmark law — the coverage formula that required certain states and jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to first clear election changes with the Department of Justice. So, instead of serving as model that Haiti can emulate, we are still creating barriers to voting for certain Americans, including minorities, poor people, seniors and young adults.

Haitian voters faced obstacles at the polls that were reminiscent of that unfortunate period in American history before the VRA when African Americans, especially in the South, were denied the right to vote. At some polling stations in Haiti, they were forced to wait for hours before they were able to cast ballots, while at others, they were turned away because their names were not on the official lists of registered voters. In too many instances, voters could not cast their ballots in privacy. Fifty-four polling stations were closed because of violence and there were also allegations of ballot stuffing and missing election materials. At least two people were killed.

Yet according to a report from the Organization of American States, which sent 28 monitors to observe the elections, “most polling stations were able to conclude their operations as planned, and characterized the holding of the elections as a step forward for Haitian democracy.”
That’s not good enough, and I believe that Haitian voters, who have waited three long years to have their say, deserve much, much better. I also have a vested interest in seeing democracy grow and thrive in Haiti. South Florida is a gateway to it and other Caribbean nations. But practicalities aside, I consider the Haitian people to be both friends and family.

Fair and credible elections are a critical first step toward showing the world that the Haitian people are ready to move beyond the disasters, natural and man-made, that have adversely affected their nation. There is no more fundamental way of doing that than through the power of the ballot box.
It may be a while before the election results and details about turnout are made public. I am hoping that Haitian voters defied expectations of low turnout and that millions went to the polls en masse. And, I hope they will be ready to do it again in October and December.

I urge Haitian voters to not be discouraged by any obstacles they may have faced because voting is the foundation on which all other changes, from the political to the economic, will be built. As my colleague and civil-rights icon Rep. John Lewis recently noted, “When it comes time to get out and vote, we have to do so. The right to vote is the most powerful nonviolent, transformative tool we have in a democracy, and the least we can do is take full advantage of the opportunity to make our voices heard.”

The world will be waiting and watching.
It will be watching us, too, and waiting to see whether the United States will hold itself to the same expectations that it has for others by ensuring that the Voting Rights Act fully reflects its original intent and the promise of fair and credible elections here at home.

U.S. REP. FREDERICA S. WILSON IS A THIRD-TERM MEMBER OF CONGRESS REPRESENTING DISTRICT 24, WHICH INCLUDES PARTS OF MIAMI-DADE AND BROWARD COUNTIES.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article31340492.html#storylink=cpy

Cholera, climate change fuel Haiti's humanitarian crisis: UN

By Amelie Baron
 Port-au-Prince (AFP) - Climate change, cholera and the return of thousands of emigrants from the neighboring Dominican Republican are fueling a humanitarian crisis in Haiti, the UN warned. The impoverished Caribbean nation is facing a deluge of problems, pushing an already vulnerable population closer to the edge, said Enzo di Taranto, who heads Haiti's UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Among these pressures is a new cholera outbreak. Cases are up 300 percent in the first months of 2015 compared to the same period last year, di Taranto said in an interview with AFP. Haiti -- the poorest country in the Americas -- is already suffering from chronic instability and struggling to recover from a devastating 2010 earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people and crippled the nation's infrastructure.

A cholera outbreak after the quake was blamed on UN peacekeepers' poor hygiene.
According to UN data, nearly 20,000 people have been affected and 170 killed by the disease since the beginning of the year.
More than 8,800 Haitians have died of cholera since it appeared in October 2010 and, even today, cases recorded in Haiti surpass the total number of people with the disease elsewhere in the world.
Beyond the increase in cholera, the humanitarian situation in the country is worsening because of a "convergence of several factors," di Taranto said.

"The devaluation of the gourde (Haitian currency), which means an increase in the price of baseline products like medicine, food and water; the drought which has hit many regions in the country; and also the repatriation of Haitians from the Dominican Republic," are all contributing, he said.
- Families with nothing -
In June, the neighboring Dominican Republic introduced a tough new immigration policy, prompting 60,000 Haitians to leave the country.
Many ended up back in Haiti, straining an already vulnerable system.
The uncontrolled flow is exerting a "demographic pressure on the already very weak health system in Haiti and on the supply of food and water," di Taranto said.
He said the problems are especially bad in the southeastern community of Anse-a-Pitres.
Many families who returned from the Dominican Republic are living hand-to-mouth in shanties.
The effects of climate change are also encroaching. The summer drought previously confined to country's north has crept into the south.
"In the Cayes region and the Macaya natural park, water sources are dry," di Taranto said. "It's a problem that's spreading."



Haiti, which has lost 98 percent of its forest cover, has seen worsening agricultural conditions and topsoil erosion.
Because of this, the warm air current from "El Nino" is affecting Haiti more than other countries in the region.
"We need to launch public rural development programs which let us confront these climatological dynamics that we can't control," di Taranto said.
To address the immediate humanitarian emergency, OCHA estimates it will need around $25 million in the next four to six months.
But five years after the devastating earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people, international aid for Haiti is diminishing.
It's a situation that directly threatens help for more than 60,000 victims of the quake who are still living in camps.
To access a broader pool of potential donors, the United Nations is planning an online crowdfunding campaign and also using celebrities to draw attention to the cause.
The last such visit was from the singer Beyonce in May.
http://news.yahoo.com/cholera-climate-change-fuel-haitis-humanitarian-crisis-un-042305002.html

Haiti Elections 2015: Violence At Polls Results In 14 Candidate Disqualifications

By Clark Mindock @clarkmindock on August 18 2015 6:37 PM EDT

Fourteen candidates for national office in Haiti were disqualified Tuesday by state election officials following violent disturbances at voting stations across the country earlier this month. Accusations of violence during the elections spanned from allegations that one candidate asked their supporters to attack their opponent to allegations that a candidate shot a gun in the air at a polling station.

Voters went to the polls Aug. 9 to choose two-thirds of the country's 30-member Senate and to elect the entire Chamber of Deputies class. Whether or not those who were disqualified had won, according to the Associated Press, is uncertain because the winners had not been announced yet. In January, the country disbanded its parliament, and it had been three years since the last vote in the country took place.

Of those disqualified was Arnel Belizaire, a former opposition member of the Chamber of Deputies who was accused of firing a weapon at a polling site. He has denied the accusations.
In spite of the violence concerns during the polling, which was the first of three scheduled dates to renew the government, international observers considered the voting to have gone pretty well overall. Still, there has been concern that the violence and intimidation kept many people at home when they should have been casting their votes.

"The consensus is that, while there were some problems -- including more than two dozen polling places that were shut down for some reason or another -- the process did go on fairly smoothly," said senior correspondent for Al-Jazeera Rob Reynolds at the time.

The country is slated to vote again in October, when presidential voting will also begin. A third round could take place in December. International allies have been pitching in to cover the $74 million price tag of the elections, and citizens have been encouraged to vote in all three rounds of voting. Every two years, a third of the Senate seats are normally replaced; however, voting was suspended in 2012.

http://www.ibtimes.com/haiti-elections-2015-violence-polls-results-14-candidate-disqualifications-2059222