THE REAL HAITI SCANDAL
Yes, Oxfam’s abuse of prostitutes was sickening. But, as SUE REID reveals, the worst horror is that 8 years — and £9bn of aid money — later, earthquake victims are STILL in utter squalor
UP IN the cooler hills, away from the chaotic Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, is a big house in leafy grounds, behind a pair of imposing, pale-green metal gates. Watched over by uniformed security guards, the property, in the suburb of Petion-Ville, is a Haitian outpost of Oxfam, Britain’s fourth biggest charity.
A stone’s throw away is a smart, white villa, with maid and gardener, which used to be the home of disgraced Oxfam country director Roland van Hauwermeiren, who has been accused by a Haitian girl of picking her up on the street near the charity’s headquarters when she was 16 years old.
He told her she was ‘sexy’ and, the girl says, later gave her money, nappies and powdered milk for her baby in exchange for sexual favours — a claim he denies.
This allegation of sexual exploitation by Mr van Hauwermeiren, at the very time he was overseeing Oxfam’s efforts to help Haitians after the 2010 earthquake, has helped to pitch the powerful aid industry into turmoil.
The British Government has halted millions in funds to Oxfam as 26 complaints about its workers’ sexual misdemeanours in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, have emerged.
Meanwhile, the Haitian government this week stopped Oxfam operating in the country while it investigates what went on.
The 68-year-old Belgian at the centre of the storm has admitted being a man of ‘flesh and blood’ who ‘made mistakes’, including having an affair with a ‘mature’ Haitian woman.
It led to him, and six other male Oxfam workers who, in a separate incident, paid for prostitutes, packing their bags in a scandal hushed up by the charity.
This week in Haiti, I heard many locals, some of them living in a slum near the Oxfam headquarters, tell of their disgust at the behaviour of international aid workers.
‘The white-skinned charity men drove right past us in their big cars and could see our plight, but they did not come to help us,’ said Rosamene Masillon, a 37-year-old mother who shares her tiny canvas shack in Petion-Ville with her four children, aged between two and 18.
‘It has been like that ever since the earthquake, when our old home fell down and we found this place here.
‘A European man from a big charity did visit once. He promised he would build us houses. We were happy that morning. But he never came back.’
SHE adds: ‘It is bad here. Many days, I don’t have food for the children. They go hungry. When it rains, the water runs in a stream into the tent and over the blankets where we sleep. The children get wet and wake up.’
Rosamene says this as she stirs a gruel made of stale bread and herbs mixed with a few cups of dirty-looking water.
Her destitute family are among tens of thousands of Haitians still living in limbo eight years after the disaster, which killed more than 200,000 people and destroyed the homes of 1.5 million.
According to the Haitian government, the capital city alone has 27 shanty towns where those who lost their homes live in shacks made of wood, tin and yards of canvas plundered from the giant It was party central. Before the earthquake happened, it was quiet — you could walk into a Haiti bar and sometimes find Brad Pitt there, because he and his then partner, Angelina Jolie, gave huge sums to Haiti and often visited.
‘But then, the international aid workers came and began to think they were celebrities, too.’
Jacques Sterlin, the owner of Cafe Terrasse, a busy European restaurant in Port- au- Prince, remembers the Oxfam party scene led by Roland van Hauwermeiren.
HE WAS often seen at L’ Estaminet, an upmarket bar in Petion-Ville that was popular with European aid workers.
‘He was always there. There were girls, of course there were. Many of the aid men had girlfriends they picked up locally. It was the Belgians and Germans in particular who made it their way of life. The Americans and Brits dabbled, but they were much more careful.’
Entrepreneur Natalie Bateau Antoine, the owner of two of the capital’s smartest hotels, agrees.
She said this week: ‘ The aid workers loved Haiti because it was like working in Africa, with all the kudos of that, but nearer to home.
‘Now, our government wants them to leave because they don’t do things the right way. It is disappointing they have not helped us. Who would think in 2018 we would still have people dying of hunger in a country with perfect beaches and a holiday climate, just one-and-a-half hours’ flying time from the United States?’
So, what went wrong? Philippe Mathieu, a former Haitian agriculture minister who was ambassador for a Canadian branch of Oxfam, remembers meeting the charity’s now-disgraced Haiti chief Mr Van Hauwermeiren and his fellow Oxfam officials after the quake.
He begged them to let Haitians take a lead role in helping the country recover. He was rebuffed. Oxfam knew best.
Mr Mathieu, who was himself a victim of the disaster and living in a tent at the time, says: ‘They said no, no. They could bring their people in from all over the world. A bunch of experts.
‘These people from international aid groups, they appeared here like mercenaries.’
Haiti, a fiercely Christian nation, is geographically vulnerable. It straddles a major earthquake fault line and is also on the Caribbean’s principal hurricane route.
Desperately poor — a quarter of its inhabitants live on less than £1 a day — it has been struggling to cope with overpopulation since the Fifties. The survival rate for newborn babies in Haiti is the lowest in the Western hemisphere. After the earthquake hit, donations
poured d in i as aid id from f the th W est t propped up a failing state. Haiti was forced to accept how the money was spent, whether or not the international agencies controlling the purse strings and promising to rebuild the country were up to the enormous task of redevelopment.
Jonathan Katz, author of The Big Truck That W ent By: How The World Came T o Save Haiti And L Left ftB Behind hi d A Disaster, Di t says there th were lots of good intentions, but that huge sums were squandered on tent cities, bags of rice and the salaries and air fares of aid workers.
Crucially, and appallingly , there was no long-term planning. ‘There was no connection between putting a tent over someone’s head on day three [ after the disaster] and putting a roof over someone’s hea head five years later ,’ says K atz. Som Some of the worst-hit areas were slum slums, with roads so narrow the aid workers’ large vehicles could not get in. Ot Other parts of the capital were dec declared no - go zones by aid offi officials who deemed them too diff difficult or dangerous to enter. One O 54-year-old Haitian woman called cal Catherine, who owns a large lar property on the hills above the capital, found 2,000 homeless people pe sleeping in her grounds aftS after the earthquake. She called the Red Cross to ask for help, but no one came. The same agency is also accused ac of promising to build thousands th of homes that never materialised m because its foreign staff st could not untangle the endless en local disputes over land la ownership. When I visited Haiti three weeks w after the earthquake, the th warning signs were already there. ther I flew in with a charity chief from America who said proudly that he was bringing in equip - ment for a children ’s playground to create a ‘photo opportunity’ for raising more funds. American nurse Michael Brewer , who had run a street refuge for children in Haiti for a decade, told me then: ‘What the people here need now is homes. The money sent from abroad is going on the wrong things. The aid agencies don’t know about building houses, yet they insist they must be the only custodians of the money arriving and decide how it is spent.’
The result of such highhandedness is that there has since been a bitter rebellion by Haitians against the aid industry.
Last September, the government published a list of 257 international aid agencies and charities it wanted to leave the country.
Revoking their operating licences, Agiol Fleurant, head of the plan - ning ministry, declared: ‘These institutions must finance what the Haitian people need and not what they consider necessary.’
Henry Hogarth, a Haitian who returned from America a decade ago to help with the country’s development, told me this week: ‘What we need is trade, not aid. Those times are over now and we must build our own future without outside interference.’
In a further indication of local anger, Haiti’s P resident, Jovenel Moise, said this week that the Oxfam sex scandal was ‘the tip of the iceberg’. He described the behaviour complained of as ‘an extremely serious violation of human dignity’ and claimed that another huge aid agency, Doctors Without Borders, had sent home 17 of its workers from Haiti for undisclosed misdemeanours.
A recent letter to the Guardian newspaper, normally a mouthpiece of the aid industry , highlights the scale of the backlash. It was written by activists from humanitarian organisations working in Haiti, the Caribbean and Africa. Its signatories said that they had warned Oxfam chiefs about rapes committed over decades by aid and charity workers in Haiti, but received no response.
They also accused aid workers of enjoying a culture of impunity while ‘exercising power over the poorest’ and said they thrived on keeping the people poor.
The letter also said that, while earthquake relief funds had amounted to £9 billion, ‘some of us who visited Haiti have seen little or no sign of that money’.
They certainly haven ’ t at St Christophe, a collection of shacks on a hillside in the suburb of Croixdes-Bouquets, eight miles from Port-au-Prince.
All the people here used to live in a tented city run by USAID, which bills itself as the world’s premier international aid and development agency. It housed thousands of earthquake survivors and stretched as far as the eye could see, until it was abandoned a few years ago.
THe1,500 residents at St Christophe were subsequently given a piece of rough land appropriated by the government to build themselves shelters. It over - looks the aquamarine sea and pale sands of P ort-au-Prince Bay, but these people are in dire poverty.
A community leader, 33-year-old Samuel, who invited me there this week, recently called for a contribution from the residents to essential communal funds.
‘Between all the hundreds of them, they could not raise the $100 (£70) that was asked for,’ he says.
Alicia Alexander has lived here with her 16-year-old daughter since 2013. She looks half - starved and her hair is falling out.
There is a slop bucket by the entrance to her home, which has no door — only a Mickey Mouse child’s sheet, one of thousands featuring the cartoon character that were donated by the U . S. people after the quake.
She has no running water and says she has to beg food from neighbours and friends.
‘I have seen no foreign aid people here ever,’ she says, sadly. ‘Nor do I expect them to look for us.’
Further along the rough track, I find Dieubon Olinse, a 34-year - old former mason who can ’t find work and now sells the occasional sack of cement to make do. He lives in a shack with his 12-year - old son, evenson. His 33-year- old wife died in the night a year ago.
With no proper roads and no electricity in St Christophe, she could not be taken to a doctor in time to save her.
‘She was never well after the earthquake. It shocked her when we lost our home,’ says Dieubon. ‘She hated the tent city run by the aid workers because it was either too cold or too hot under the canvas.’
Then he told me of his feelings, shared by many despairing Haitians today: ‘W e have been abandoned by the foreign world that told us it would help us.’
What a terrible indictment of the Western aid industry that is.