Italian official calls U.S. relief effort in Haiti 'pathetic'
By Associated Press
January 24, 2010, 4:45PM
ROME -- Italy's top disaster official called the Haiti quake-relief effort a "pathetic" failure Sunday, criticizing the militarized approach of the U.S. 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 coordinator 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 figura' before the TV cameras rather than focus on what's under the debris," said Bertolaso, who won praise for his handling of Italy's 2009 quake in Abruzzo.
In particular, he criticized what he called the well-meaning but ineffective U.S.-run military operation. The U.S. military has more than 2,000 troops on the ground, helping to deliver humanitarian aid.
U.S. officials have defended their presence and dismissed such criticism, which has most vocally been leveled by leftist Latin American leaders.
The American presence and willingness to send in a floating hospital, cargo planes, troops and aid was "commendable" and absolutely necessary, Bertolaso told Italy's RAI state television from Port-au-Prince. "Unfortunately it's a massive presence, but it's not been used in the best way," he said, criticizing the fact that American military officers were running a civilian relief operation.
Citing the botched U.S. response to Hurricane Katrina, he said the Americans "tend to confuse military with what should be an emergency intervention that cannot be given over solely to the armed forces. We're missing a leader, a coordination capacity that goes beyond military discipline."
"It's a truly powerful show of force, but it's completely out of touch with reality," Bertolaso said. "They don't have close rapport with the territory, they certainly don't have a rapport with the international organizations and aid groups," leading everyone do their own thing without any coordination.
Bertolaso's criticism was unusual coming from Italy, which is a close European ally of the United States. While Bertolaso isn't an elected official, he is a Cabinet undersecretary and enjoys a close relationship with Premier Silvio Berlusconi. He stressed, however, that he wasn't speaking in that official capacity in his comments to RAI.
While many have lamented the slow pace of the relief effort, Bertolaso joined several allied leftist Latin American presidents — Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Bolivia's Evo Morales and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega — in voicing such criticism of the U.S. military effort
Former Cuban President Fidel Castro also wrote an op-ed piece saying the U.S. military presence was hindering international cooperation and accusing Washington of sending troops "to occupy Haitian territory."
John Caulfield, a U.S. diplomat in Caracas, Venezuela, pointedly dismissed those claims on Thursday, saying: "What's important for us is to provide aid to the Haitian people and not be distracted by those political criticisms."
Speaking to RAI, Bertolaso said the United Nations and powerful countries need to craft international procedures to follow when such catastrophes occur.
"I think it has truly been a pathetic situation," Bertolaso said. "It could have been run a lot better, and instead of being the first time that the world came together to do something good, it's instead been the latest time that the world has done it this way."
He said there was widespread consensus on the ground among relief officials that the effort to date had shown the "failure" of the international community that also was evident in the South Asian tsunami emergency.
"No one came here with the idea of running the emergency," he said. "They came here thinking this was just a humanitarian catastrophe ... so they came with the idea of bringing them a bit to eat, some water, and the problem is resolved.
"This is the great contradiction," he said.
Zie: http://www.cleveland.com/world/index.ssf/2010/01/italian_official_calls_us_reli.html
3 opmerkingen:
At the beginning of 20th century, the physical and political card of the Island of Haiti, drawn up in 1908 by Mr. Alexandre Poujol and Henry Thomasset, announced a significant oil reservoir in Haiti in the vicinity of source of Rio Todo El Mondo,(Perhaps that’s where the name THOMONDE came from) Affluent of right-hand side of the river Artibonite, more known today under the name of Rivière of Thomonde.
The layer of oil in question is located between the districts of Hinche and Mirebalais, in a mountainous zone, located at the foot of the chain of the Black Mountains, in western direction full with Thomonde.
The same card announces an oil reservoir in the Dominican plain of Azua, at a short distance in the north of the Dominican Republic of the town of Azua. According to information to my sources, this last layer in Dominican Republic had been put indeed in exploitation in first half of this century it had produced more than 60.000 oil barrels per day, then had been closed, having been judged at the time " insufficiently profitable It was said that in 1982 it had been discovered opposite this plain of Azua, an immense offshore oil rig oil reservoir near by Barahona, but that layer had been left unexploited also.
Those who have made the trip between Port-au-Prince and Santo-Domingo can testify that the plain of Azua and its littoral resemble the region of Vieux-Bourg d'Aquin and the corresponding littoral. There are reasonable chances that there are OIL RESERVOIRS in the plain of Cayes and l'Ile-à-Vache as well.
One person even suspected that there might be OIL deposits in Plaine de Léogane, Morne-à-Cabrit, and Département de la Grand-Anse
According to the study There are many places on our island (Haiti and Dominican Republic) which present all the criteria geologic of presence of THE BLACK DIAOMND In Haiti, let us say la plaine des Cayes, la plaine de Léogane, la plaine du Cul-de-Sac, la plaine des Gonaïves et la Savane désolée, la Plaine du Nord. The Island of Gonâve and literal correspondents for the layers offshore oil rig. In this list, one should not forget the large sedimentary basin of Plateau Central.
In the Fifties, the Knappen-Tippen-Abbet Company (called by the local populations (Company Ti-pain à beurre) had carried out drillings in Gonâve, in plain of plaine de Cul-de-Sac, Plateau-Central and in the area of Gonaïves. All these drillings had proven extremely promising and the results had been beyond the hopes. However, the large oil multinationals, of which some operated in Haiti, had made pressure so that the layers discovered were not exploited. Haiti was neither Saudi Arabia nor Kuwait. With one time when the crude oil barrel was sold a little more than one dollar, and that the Persian Gulf provided oil at a cheaper price. There was no reason for these Companies to put in exploitation layers much less profitable, whereas the ARAMCO made the rain and beautiful time in Arabia, at cheap price, plundering even the invaluable oil resources of this kingdom.
The Haitian OIL as well as other layers were to be kept as reserves for 21st when the means-Eastern gold mine would have been depleted. That is exactly what is happening. The wells of Knappen-Tippen-Abbet were numbered, carefully padlocked, or sealed with cement and one forgot them
These reports were not supposed to be made public to the Haitians. It shows that the superpowers do not want Haiti to become a powerful nation. The exploitation of these Oil Reservoirs could have easily removed Haiti in the poorest Nation’s list in the Western hemisphere.
http://kiskeyanconnection.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=58
22/01 De Venezolaanse leider Hugo Chavez zegt dat de Verenigde Staten achter de aardbeving in Haïti zitten. Volgens de man zou de Amerikaanse marine op het eiland een experimentele wapentest hebben gedaan.
Aan de Spaanse krant ABC vertelt Hugo Chavez dat de aardbeving in Haïti een opgezet plan is. De Verenigde Staten zouden volgens hem beschikken over een tektonisch wapen dat grote aardschokken kan veroorzaken.
De V.S. zouden dit wapen getest hebben om te kijken of het sterk genoeg zou zijn om Iran te vernietigen. Want dat is hun definitieve doel, aldus Chavez.
http://www.gva.be/nieuws/buitenland/aid896354/chavez-v-s-veroorzaakte-aardbeving-haiti.aspx
Alarm
Niet 9-11 maar 1-12
Haiti Presidential Palace Earthquake
PHOTOS: Before And After The Quake
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/13/haiti-earthquake-presiden_n_421510.html
The former Imperial Palace was destroyed on 19 December 1869 during a rebel revolt that brought down the government of President Sylvain Salnave. The building was bombarded during the conflict by the man-of-war La Terreur, a government warship that had been captured by the rebel forces. As a contemporary report stated, "It appeared that Salnave had stowed away in vaults at the Palace a large quantity of ammunition. The shells fired from the Terreur, penetrating these vaults, caused several terrific explosions, and the palace was wholly destroyed". Per two such incidents, history, an observer noted, had shown "the President had been unable to trust anyone with the keeping of the national supply of ammunition and was forced to keep it in his own palace, so that in both cases the Presidents were killed by means of their own powder".
The palace's replacement, built in 1881, was seriously damaged on 8 August 1912 by a violent explosion that killed President Cincinnatus Leconte and several hundred of his soldiers almost a year to the day from Leconte's election. The National Geographic Magazine called the palace "a rather ugly structure of glistening gray white, with apparently a good deal of corrugated iron about it," though adding that it "contained, however, some fine lofty rooms". Others called it "a low straggling house" whose rooms were "pretty and decorated à la française".
The National Palace presently occupying the site was designed in 1912 by Georges H. Baussan (1874–1958), a leading Haitian architect who graduated from the Ecole d'Architecture in Paris and whose commissions included the City Hall of Port-au-Prince and Haiti's Supreme Court Building. He was a son of a former Haitian senator and the father of Robert Baussan, an architect who studied under Le Corbusier and later became the country's Undersecretary of State for Tourism. Baussan's classical design was chosen from a range of plans submitted by Haitian and French architects in an national competition in 1912, His entry was awarded the second-place prize but also was selected to be the new National Palace, for financial reasons—the structure proposed by the first-place winner was deemed too costly. The construction budget for the new palace was set at $350,000 and work began in May 1914. By 1915, however, the under-construction palace was set ablaze by a mob that ousted and assassinated President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. A contemporary news report stated the palace "has been partially destroyed after an early-morning attack which lasted several hours". After President Sam's death the country was occupied by the United States, with American forces taking possession of the palace and U. S. naval engineers overseeing its completion. The building was finished in 1920.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Palace_(Haiti)
En wat ik even zo snel niet kan terugvinden: ook in 1948 werd Haiti getroffen door een aardbeving, een zwaardere dan die van januari 2010.
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