PORT-AU-PRINCE – Italy’s top disaster expert has called the Haiti quake-relief effort a “pathetic” failure, criticising the militarised approach of the United States as ineffective and out of touch for the emergency at hand.
Guido Bertolaso, Italy’s well-respected civil protection chief, said what was needed was a single international civilian co-ordinator to take charge, and for individual countries and aid agencies to stop flying their flags and posing for TV cameras and get to work.
"Unfortunately there's this need to make a bella figurabefore the TV cameras rather than focus on what's under the debris," said Mr Bertolaso, who won praise for his handling of Italy's 2009 quake in Abruzzo. In particular, he criticised what he called the well-meaning but ineffective US-run military operation.
The US military has more than 2,000 troops on the ground, helping to deliver humanitarian aid. US officials have defended their presence and dismissed such criticism, which has most vocally been levelled by leftist Latin American leaders.
Meanwhile yesterday, the Haitian government said it could start relocating almost half a million homeless survivors from its ruined capital this week, as foreign donors mapped out a long-term rebuilding plan.
Authorities have said they are looking to relocate at least 400,000 survivors – now sheltering in more than 400 sprawling makeshift camps across the wrecked city – in temporary refugee settlements, initially tent villages, outside Port-au-Prince.
“We have to evacuate the streets and relocate the people. That is the most important for us,” said communications minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue.
“We hope we will be able to start at the end of the week.”
Health minister Alex Larsen said one million Haitians had been displaced from their homes in the Port-au-Prince area.
The government had tents for 400,000 to be used in the new, temporary settlements, but would need more.
Almost daily aftershocks have shaken the shattered coastal capital since the January 12th quake that killed up to 200,000, raising the possibility that the city eventually might have to be rebuilt on a safer location, away from dangerous geological fault lines.
Nearly two weeks after the massive earthquake, a huge US-led international relief operation is struggling to feed, house and care for hundreds of thousands of hungry, homeless survivors, many of them injured.
Facing persistent complaints by desperate survivors that tonnes of aid flown in was not reaching them on the ground, US troops, UN peacekeepers and aid workers have widened and intensified the distribution of food and water.
In Montreal yesterday, a Canadian-hosted meeting of foreign donors pondered how to move from immediate humanitarian relief for Haiti to long-term reconstruction of a country that even before the quake was the poorest in that part of the world.
Haitian prime minister Jean-Max Bellerive, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner and others were examining debt relief and reconstruction strategies. Mr Bellerive told the conference Haiti needed the world to assist it for at least five to 10 years.
“The people of Haiti will need more and more and more in order to complete the reconstruction,” he said.
Canadian foreign minister Lawrence Cannon told the Montreal meeting that donors stood ready to help, but basic questions about the recovery strategy first needed be thrashed out.
“There’s the question, for example, of whether we’ll rebuild on the present site of Port-au-Prince,” Mr Cannon told CBC television, saying geological fault lines had to be considered.
Canadian officials said the Montreal conference yesterday would not likely emerge with a total of pledged aid but rather a clearer idea of what the needs were.
It also aimed to decide on the date and venue for a pledging conference, he said. – (Reuters/AP)