Frictions between nations rise over struggle of getting aid to Haiti

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By Mary Beth Sheridan and Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A13

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- Food and water trickled to the stricken people of Haiti on Saturday, as a global aid operation struggled with frictions and confusion over who was in charge to bring relief to this crumbled, earthquake-ravaged city.

Four days after the 7.0-magnitude quake brought much of Port-au-Prince down on its residents Tuesday, a few signs of national survival flickered, even as some Haitians began an exodus out of the devastated capital and into the countryside.

But there were growing tensions over which country's planes were allowed to land here first, with each nation insisting its aid flight was a priority, according to an official involved in the relief operation.

France, Brazil and Italy were said to be upset, and the Red Cross said one of its planes was diverted to Santo Domingo, the capital of neighboring Dominican Republic.

The French government became so annoyed when a plane with an emergency field hospital was turned back Friday that foreign minister Bernard Kouchner lodged a protest with the State Department, according to the French ambassador to Haiti, Didier Le Bret.

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Le Bret said that the Port-au-Prince airport has become "not an airport for the international community. It is an annex of Washington."

"We were told it was an extreme emergency, there was a need for a field hospital," the ambassador said. "We might be able to make a difference and save lives."

At the same time, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton flew in for a visit with Haitian President Rene Preval, as the Haitian government worked to maintain a presence amid the ruins of Port-au-Prince.

The nearly collapsed Haitian government is at least nominally in charge of the relief effort, even though it has ceded air traffic control at the airport to the U.S. military.

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With their offices heavily damaged, the president and his cabinet are now working out of a cramped, low-slung Haitian judicial police headquarters near the airport. International aid workers consider the building so fragile -- it has small cracks from the earthquake -- that they hold meetings with the officials on plastic chairs on the patio outside.

Adding to the confusion, the top two leaders of the U.N. mission in Haiti, who normally would coordinate an aid response, are presumed dead. They disappeared after the quake destroyed the building in which they were meeting.

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Clinton, while en route to Haiti, took note of the layers of authority in Haiti, which include the Brazilian-led U.N. security force.

"We are working to back them up, but not to supplant them," she said. "They have been there for years."

Clinton said the Haitian government has given the United States and others some leeway to meet emergency needs. The Haitian "government says the highest priority is to save lives," she said.

Haiti's government has reportedly recovered 20,000 bodies from the rubble. Estimates are that the death toll could reach 50,000 to 100,000.

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Despite the friction at the airport, conditions on the ground there Saturday seemed to be improving.

U.S. soldiers had taken over security at the entrance. What had been a mob of screaming Haitians pressing against the doors of the facility, hoping to catch flights abroad, was now an orderly line in roped-off rows.

Large pallets piled chest-high with orange juice, bottled water, canned chickpeas, military-style prepared meals, diapers, water, medicine and blankets appeared along the runway. Gradually, they were loaded on helicopters and the limited supply of trucks. A giant plane carrying USAID prepared meals sat on the runway.

SH-60 Seahawk helicopters from the USS Carl Vinson clattered over the city Saturday, full of cases of bottled water bound for isolated neighborhoods. Despite crowds mobbing some landing zones, Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for the U.S. military's Joint Task Force assisting Haiti, said helicopter crews were "finding good clean sites to land."

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On Saturday, the helicopters were picking up pallets of water from other organizations at the airport and dropping them around the city. "We're grabbing them, no matter where they come from," Kirby said.

But there was rising frustration -- and scattered looting -- among the desperate Haitian population. On Friday, the World Food Program had to suspend distribution of high-energy biscuits near the destroyed national palace when a crowd revolted, complaining that they were not getting better food.

"We're hungry. We're hungry," a group of boys on the side of the road implored a passing journalist on Saturday.

Image by simminch via Flickr

Much of the population of the city continues to sleep outside, with parks, streets, car lots and other sites turned into open-air dormitories. But other groups of people were seen trekking out of what one resident described as the "hell" of Port-au-Prince to friends, relatives and security in the countryside.

In Washington, meanwhile, former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush pledged to lead a long-term fundraising effort on behalf of Haitian relief as they stood with President Obama in the White House Rose Garden Saturday morning.

And before she left here Saturday evening, after her meeting with Preval, Hillary Rodham Clinton told the Haitian people:

"We will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead. You have been severely tested. But I believe that Haiti can come back even stronger and better in the future."

Ruane reported from Washington. Staff writers Glenn Kessler and Michael Shear contributed to this report.

Poll shows growing disappointment, polarization over Obama's performance

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By Jon Cohen and Jennifer Agiesta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A08

A year into his presidency, President Obama faces a polarized nation and souring public assessments of his efforts to change Washington, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Nearly half of all Americans say Obama is not delivering on his major campaign promises, and a narrow majority have just some or no confidence that he will make the right decisions for the country's future.

More than a third see the president as falling short of their expectations, about double the proportion saying so at the 100-day mark of Obama's presidency in April. At the time, 63 percent said the president had accomplished a "great deal" or a "good amount." Now, the portion saying so has dropped to 47 percent.

Republicans are particularly critical of Obama's efforts in general and on big domestic and foreign issues. Just 20 percent of Republicans approve of his overall job performance, compared with 87 percent of Democrats. That partisan gap is bigger than any that Presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan ever faced among the general public. It's about on par with divergent ratings of George W. Bush across his second term.

But Obama continues to benefit from GOP weak points. Three-quarters of all adults lack confidence in the Republicans in Congress to make good decisions for the future, and when it comes to assigning blame for the nation's economic woes, about twice as many fault the George W. Bush administration as do Obama's.

There is a growing racial divide in public assessments of Obama. African Americans overwhelmingly approve of the job he is doing, just as they did in April. There has also been little change in the numbers saying he has accomplished a lot so far. But among whites, a sense that Obama has achieved at least a good amount and his approval rating have both dropped nearly 20 points.

There has been a dramatic falloff in the percentage of whites saying that Obama has brought needed change to Washington. In April, 58 percent of whites said Obama had done this; now the number is 41 percent. Overall, 50 percent of all those polled say Obama has delivered the change that was a main theme of his candidacy; 49 percent say he has not.

At the 100-day mark, nearly two-thirds of independents said the president had brought change; in the new poll, fewer than half say so.

The poll was conducted by telephone Tuesday through Friday among a random national sample of 1,083 adults. The results for the full poll have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Testing the Promise of Pragmatism

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By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A01

A month before he was inaugurated, Barack Obama pinpointed one of the biggest challenges he would face as president. Could he restore confidence in government, even as he was proposing the biggest federal intervention in the domestic economy in a generation?

At the time, Obama said he did not think his victory marked an abrupt end to the skepticism ushered in by President Ronald Reagan toward top-down government and social engineering by Washington.

"What we don't know yet is whether my administration and this next generation of leadership is going to be able to hew to a new, more pragmatic approach that is less interested in whether we have big government or small government; they're more interested in whether we have a smart, effective government," he said on that day in December 2008.

As Obama marks the first anniversary of his inauguration on Wednesday, that question remains one of the most politically charged of his presidency -- and central to the politics of this election year -- and will hinge on how Americans judge Obama and his policies.

Will the public conclude that his policies worked, however much they may cost and however much they may entail more government intervention in the economy? Or will they regard his agenda as intrusive and ineffective big government? What steps may Obama take to alleviate public discontent over these first-year decisions?

The stakes are sizable, with an early referendum coming Tuesday in a special Senate election in Massachusetts. Democrats are fighting to hold the seat once occupied by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, a dramatic turnaround in a contest previously seen as an almost certain win. A Republican victory would imperil the administration's health-care initiative and cast a pall over already-nervous Democrats, who fear considerable losses in November's midterm elections.

Obama receives mixed reviews for his first-year performance, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. His approval rating stands at 53 percent, with 44 percent disapproving. Among independents, 49 percent approve, the lowest of any of his recent predecessors at this point in their presidencies.

Majorities disapprove of his handling of the major domestic issues -- the economy, health care and the federal budget deficit. But more approve than disapprove of his handling of terrorism and Afghanistan, and he has broad support for his response to the attempted terrorist bombing on Christmas Day.

The good feelings that surrounded Obama in the months after Inauguration Day have faded. The week he was inaugurated, just 19 percent of Americans said the country was heading in the right direction; by April, that had risen to 50 percent. Today it has slipped to 37 percent.

The poll also shows how much ground Obama has lost during his first year of trying to convince the public that more government is the answer to the country's problems. By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services. Since he won the Democratic nomination in June 2008, the margin between those favoring smaller over larger government has moved in Post-ABC polls from five points to 20 points.

White House advisers maintain that many of Obama's actions are temporary and not a permanent enlargement of federal power at the expense of private industry. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said such actions as the bailouts of the banks and auto companies "were emergency interventions to stabilize" an economy on the edge of a depression.

The promise of change, which echoed so powerfully during his campaign, is now another source of division. At the time of his inauguration, three-fourths of the country said Obama would bring needed change to Washington. Today the nation is evenly divided on whether he has. Three-fourths of Democrats say yes; three-fourths of Republicans and a majority of independents say no.

Echoes of Reagan?

Around the White House these days, the president's advisers draw analogies with Reagan to paint a hopeful portrait of Obama's weakened standing. Reagan, they note, had approval ratings around 50 percent at the end of his first year in office and ended up winning a landslide reelection victory in 1984. What they don't say so vocally is that Reagan's approval dipped into the 40s in the fall of 1982, and that his party suffered substantial losses in Congress that November.

Obama has long shown an interest in Reagan's presidency. During Obama's campaign, he got under the skin of former president Bill Clinton when he characterized Reagan's presidency as one that "changed the trajectory of America" in ways that neither Clinton's nor Richard M. Nixon's had done.

After the New Deal and the Great Society, Reagan made government the enemy and, through tax cuts and generally unsuccessful attempts to cut spending, sought to scale down the size and power of Washington. What Obama proposed -- for the economy, health care and energy -- amounted to an attempt to reverse much of what Reagan had done. As Reagan transformed his political era, Obama hoped to transform his.

Obama didn't explicitly campaign on this theme. He often presented himself with the rhetoric of a centrist, though his policy priorities were those of an urban liberal Democrat, in contrast to those of, say, Clinton, a centrist from a Southern and heavily rural state. But Obama seemed keenly aware, as he outlined before his inauguration, that the public remained skeptical of Washington's power and that he would have to overcome that skepticism to carry out his objectives.

The election of 2008 and the economic collapse that occurred that fall altered perceptions, if not the reality, of the voters' message. The economic collapse seemed to prove that Republicans' faith in deregulation of the economy and in free markets was misguided, or so many Democrats thought at the time.

The election results, Obama said, represented "a correction to the correction." In other words, he meant his victory was a partial rejection of Reagan and the GOP. Still, he sounded cautious about the challenge of restoring faith in government.

Hours after that December interview, Obama met with his new economic advisers. They told him the recession was far worse than they had known and that avoiding a depression would require a far larger federal response than anyone had anticipated.

Administration officials say much of what they did to deal with the economy, in particular the $787 billion stimulus package and help for banks and automakers, was out of necessity and not ideology.

"The president had to deal with certain things and certain issues because of the economic crisis," said Joel Benenson, Obama's lead pollster during the campaign. "These were not matters of choice. . . . None of these reflect an agenda he campaigned on and, in fact, in doing a lot of them, he was very cognizant of the fact that they had big political downsides, that they weren't popular with the American people."

Benenson said Obama's goal has been to balance the scales on behalf of middle-class and working-class families, not to aggrandize the federal government. Obama's critics, however, see the administration's agenda as a liberal wish list writ large.

"This is seen as a really big-government machine," said former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). "Not just Obama, but [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid that started with the $787 billion stimulus bill."

Regardless of what happens, Gingrich said, Obama has stamped himself as a big-government president. "Right now, they're faced with the question of him becoming a failed big-government president," he said. "If they succeed, they're still a successful big-government president."

William A. Galston, who was domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House and is now at the Brookings Institution, said he thinks almost any other president facing the economic problems Obama was dealing with would have made many of the same decisions. The fateful step, he said, was to plunge ahead with health care as the next major initiative.

"After $2 trillion of intervention [by the federal government], a lot of Americans, a lot of independents, viewed it as a final nail in the coffin of the administration's ability to portray itself as a third way between big, liberal government and small, conservative government," he said.

Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota, said the Obama team's analysis that America was ready for a sharp change in direction was not as misguided as many conservative critics contend. When the administration launched the stimulus and the health-care package, he said, "they thought the country was at a very different place ideologically -- and had reason to believe that it was at a different place."

Since then, Weber said, the country has reattached itself to its more centrist moorings, or even moved to the right.

"When the Clinton administration faced similar difficulty, they were quite adept at reorienting themselves to the center ideologically," Weber said. "Can this administration and this Congress do that? It's not clear to me how they do that."

Growing partisanship

Obama begins his second year having failed to ease political polarization. "What I haven't been able to do in the midst of this crisis is bring the country together in a way that we had done in the Inauguration," he told People magazine recently. "That's what's been lost this year."

The new Post-ABC news poll underscores the degree to which there is a partisan divide in perceptions of the president -- more so than with any recent president other than George W. Bush. Administration officials blame the GOP for their near-unanimous opposition to his major domestic initiatives. Republicans blame Obama for not reaching out to them in a genuine way.

Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton University who has written extensively about polarization, said he was surprised that Republicans did not reach out more to Obama and that the president did not look for issues on which there was common ground with the opposition.

"The agenda for the first year was the Democratic Party wish list -- issues where Republicans and Democrats disagreed the most," McCarty said. "Some criticized him for not compromising more with Republicans. But the biggest mistake was not finding an issue that was analogous to Clinton's decision to work with Republicans on something like welfare reform."

Galston said he thinks Obama as a candidate misjudged the depths of partisan polarization. "I don't think he would have gone as far out on a limb as he did if he had really known how deep the polarization is," he said.

The question now is whether and how Obama will adapt in his second year.

Theodore C. Sorensen, who was counselor to John F. Kennedy, recalled the president's response when a reporter asked him in the fall of 1963 why his poll numbers had dropped from 70 percent to 56 percent over a matter of months. "Kennedy said, 'If my approval rating were still 70 percent after a vigorous congressional session, I'd feel I hadn't been doing my duty,' " Sorensen recalled. "He said . . . you can't measure great transformation in the country by taking the country's pulse every week."

Obama, advisers say, thinks much the same way -- that given the problems he has taken on and the decisions he has made, his lowered approval rating should have been expected. White House senior adviser David Axelrod said he told Obama a year ago a sharp decline in the numbers was likely.

So what lies ahead? In February 1982, facing difficult economic conditions and controversy over his economic and budgetary initiatives, Reagan famously announced that he would "stay the course." His party suffered in that fall, but the economy recovered and so did he.

Obama appears committed to his agenda, and Emanuel said Saturday that "the goals are still the same," citing administration initiatives on health care, energy and financial regulatory reform. But Obama also has shown a willingness to make mid-course corrections. The first clues will come when he delivers his State of the Union address. Whatever way he moves will have major consequences for the country, his party and his presidency.

As lives and houses shattered in Haiti quake, so did some religious differences

Image by Garrett Crawford via Flickr

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A01

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- At night, voices rise in the street. Sweet, joyful, musical voices in lyric Creole. A symphony of hope in a landscape of despair.

"It doesn't mean anything if Satan hates me, because God loves me," sing the women at Jeremy Square, their faces almost invisible in the darkness of this powerless, shattered downtown. "God has already paid my debt."

Haiti is known as a society of devout Christians -- Catholics, Protestants, Methodists, evangelicals -- and followers of voodoo. Faith has long played a powerful role in this impoverished nation, giving hope to the poor and fulfilling social functions that the government is incapable of handling.

But in the days since the earth pitched and rolled here, pulverizing shanties and mansions alike, the religious differences that sometimes separated Haitians have come crashing down.

Image by eebrierley via Flickr

Port-au-Prince has become a kind of multidenominational, open-air church. Tens of thousands live in the street together, scraping for food and water, sharing their misery and blending their spirituality.

The women singing together in Jeremy Square might never have worshiped side by side before the disaster, but now their voices harmonize and soar well past 2 in the morning. Lionelle Masse, a stringy woman with a deep, sad voice, lost a child in the quake. She sings next to Rosena Roche, a fiery-eyed Catholic whose husband is buried under tons of rubble.

"I still have faith in God," Roche says. "I want to give glory to God."

Regardless of their faith, countless Haitians have similar questions: Why was I spared? Are we being punished for our sins? Is this a test of faith? What happens in the afterlife?

'Not the will of the Lord'

Seekers stream into the parking lot of the ruined Sacre Coeur Catholic church, a 105-year-old brick gem that was turned into a grim, hollowed-out shell, its stunning stained-glass windows tossed to the ground in shards. There, the Catholics and the Protestants and others seek solace from Father Hans Alexander, a Haitian priest who took his decidedly un-Haitian first name from his German father. He doesn't ask them about their religion; he asks them about their pain.

"Catholics and Protestants and other religions are praying together now," Alexander says, as two tearful women slump over his thick, broad shoulders. "We are saying, 'We love Jesus; we don't care about religions. We just care about the Lord.' " He has tried to teach his followers this lesson for years but did not always succeed in changing the minds of parishioners who thought their religion was better or truer than others. The quake, he says, has done much to convince those he could not.

As it often can be with faith, there are doubts to overcome. Some parishioners want to blame the devil, or take responsibility themselves because they have sinned. Some think God has abandoned them.

"This is not the will of the Lord," Alexander tells the two women, sisters who lost their mother and one of their children, a 1 1/2 -year-old, in the quake. "Don't put this blame on the back of anyone. Don't put it on yourself."

Like almost everyone here, the woe is personal for Alexander, who is wearing sandals, almost as if to defy the dangerous pieces of glass, jagged metal and concrete that litter the sidewalk outside his church and befoul his courtyard. Beneath the broken remnants of his rectory are the bodies of at least 20 church members he must mourn alongside their friends and relatives.

A woman whose relative is now entombed there quietly prays, with arms spread out toward a statue of the Virgin Mary. Some of the grieving have wrestled with guilt about having survived while their loved ones died, but Alexander assures them that "it is not because God loves one person more than another."

Alexander, 40, grew up in this church, first as a vicar and for the past seven months as its principal priest. He is himself pondering basic questions. He has spoken so many times of "original sin," but the quake has led him to what he calls "a discovery," reinforcing his belief that "God created us to be good." The neighbors he sees helping one another -- carting debris, digging for survivors, patching wounds both physical and psychological -- confirmed it for him.

That sense of fundamental goodness is what rankles the priests gathered at Sacre Coeur about comments such as those by American televangelist Pat Robertson, who suggested that the earthquake was a punishment for Haitians aligning themselves, at times, with the devil. When Catholic priest Arsene Jasmin heard that, he was enraged. Jasmin, a Haitian who is a priest at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart Church in the District, arrived in Port-au-Prince for a visit the day before the earthquake.

"I get mad when I hear that Haiti is somehow being punished," he says. "It's unacceptable and wrong."

Jasmin gathered Friday night in a nearby building with 100 worshipers for three hours of prayer and song. His friend, Alexander, has no church anymore -- the building that once received 3,000 worshipers for five Sunday services is a wreck. But Alexander says he will celebrate Mass outside a nearby house Sunday anyway, and he expects hundreds, if not thousands, to come.

Salvation under the skies

For others, especially those stuck in place because they have no way to travel around the city, places such as Jeremy Square will be their makeshift churches, as they have been each night. Roche, the Catholic woman who fears her husband is dead, sleeps and worships in the square, squeezed into a row of 25 men, women and children -- one of at least 60 tightly packed rows along the slope pavement of the square.

Just a few steps from Roche's thin, white blanket, Primrose Toussaint, a fervent Pentecostal believer drenched in sweat, waves her arms in the air.

"Even if I die, I die with Jesus," she calls out to no one in particular. "God bless this country. God bless these people."

She has no home, and almost all her meager possessions are gone, but she says, "I don't feel like I am in trouble. Without Jesus, I would be in trouble."

The children sleep while Roche and Toussaint sing in voices fast growing hoarse from hours of hymns. A chorus builds behind them.

"If you believe in God, salvation is sure," the voices sing as one. "Oh God, open the way."

From Haiti's ruins, a chance to rebuild a nation

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Alec MacGillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A01

Even as rescuers are digging victims out of the rubble in Haiti, policymakers in Washington and around the world are grappling with how a destitute, corrupt and now devastated country might be transformed into a self-sustaining nation.

Development efforts have failed there, decade after decade, leaving Haitians with a dysfunctional government, a high crime rate and incomes averaging a dollar a day. But the leveled capital, Port-au-Prince, must be rebuilt, promising one of the largest economic development efforts ever undertaken in the hemisphere -- an effort "measured in months and even years," President Obama said Saturday in an appeal for donations alongside former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. And those who will help oversee it are thinking hard about how to use that money and attention to change the country forever.

"It's terrible to look at it this way, but out of crisis often comes real change," said C. Ross Anthony, the Rand Corp.'s global health director. "The people and the institutions take on the crisis and bring forth things they weren't able to do in the past."

The early thinking encompasses a broad swath of issues. Policymakers in Washington are considering whether to expand controversial trade provisions for Haiti and how to help fund the reconstruction for years into the future. The rule of law needs to be strengthened, particularly with regard to matters of immediate concern, such as property rights, inheritance issues and guardianship in hard-hit neighborhoods.

And somehow, development officials agree, the recovery effort must build up, not supplant, the Haitian government and civil society, starting with putting Haitian authorities at the center of a single, clearly defined plan to rebuild Port-au-Prince and its environs in a far sturdier form.

"National disasters, as awful as they are, you want to seize those moments, use that awful, awful opportunity, to strengthen the ability of national and local authorities to act for the benefit of their citizens," said Jordan Ryan, the assistant administrator of the U.N. Development Program. There is, to an extent, a development framework in place from efforts underway before the earthquake involving the Obama administration, the United Nations, a huge network of international aid groups and a Haitian government that, despite corruption, was viewed as more reliable than any in years. The United States budgeted $292 million in assistance to Haiti this year, including food aid, infrastructure funds and money to fight drug trafficking. And the Haitian economy grew by 2.5 percent in 2009, despite the global recession.

"We were really making progress," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday, before visiting the capital Saturday. "We had a good plan that was a Haitian plan. The Haitian government created the plan. It was realistic. It was focused. We worked with them. . . . And it was certainly on track to be, in my view, a very positive effort."

But some development veterans say a full rethinking is now in order. Gerald Zarr, who was the U.S. Agency for International Development's director in Haiti from 1986 to 1990, said even more must be done to involve the Haitian government. Too often, he said, understandable distrust of local authorities has led the United States and the United Nations to work mostly through the many aid groups in Haiti.

"Haiti's going to have to change. And if they do, we ought to make a commitment to stick with the government of the day to keep the institutional development going," Zarr said. "Unless we are committed to institutional development, I fear Haiti's never going to get off this terrible treadmill it's been on."

Others aren't so sure. Putting more faith in Haitian authorities can be done only if there is a crackdown on corruption, said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., who has witnessed the tension between local empowerment and wasted aid money as special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. The United States has spent $800 million in Haiti in five years, he said, with little to show for it.

"Certainly, at this stage, the delivery of aid should be direct and not through the government," he said. "And that process should be maintained for a while, until there is a sense of stability . . . to make sure that the government delivers the aid well."

Because nongovernmental organizations will play a central role for years to come, development veterans say, it will be up to the United Nations to ensure that their efforts are coordinated, as was done after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

William Loris, director general of the International Development Law Institute in Rome, points to another lesson from the tsunami: the role of the rule of law. In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, this meant coming up with a formal, regional legal system to replace the informal customs in villages that were all but swept away. The new laws also empowered women to own property.

"You've got to figure out what is the state of the rule of law in Haiti and what are the strategies for improving on it," Loris said. "It's really critical that this not get lost. You're working on a mountain of injustices unless there's justice at the bottom of the heap."

The international community is already wrestling with one major factor hanging over Haiti's economic future, its crushing foreign debt, which has required the nation to pay more than $50 million a year in debt service. On this front, too, some progress had been made, with the International Monetary Fund announcing in July that the country's reforms had qualified it for $1.2 billion in debt relief out of the more than $1.9 billion it owed. On Friday, France contacted the Paris Club, the informal group of financial officials representing the world's wealthiest nations, to discuss speeding up relief.

Meanwhile, Peter Yeo, vice president for public policy at the United Nations Foundation, said the Obama administration needs to develop its strategy for appealing to Congress for additional aid for Haiti, beyond the $100 million in emergency aid Obama announced last week.

"It's important to get Congress on board," said Yeo, a former congressional aide. "Right now, in the heat of the emergency, everyone's on board, but they [the administration] shouldn't take that for granted. They need to keep Congress fully informed of what they're doing."

But creating a new economy will rest on more than sacks of food and aid dollars, which is why others say the United States should revisit trade policies with Haiti. Over the protest of American textile manufacturers, the United States granted tariff exemptions in 2006 to Haitian-made apparel and, after seeing middling results, in 2008 eased restrictions on using fabrics from certain low-cost countries. By 2009, more than two dozen Haitian companies employed 24,000 people making T-shirts, men's suits and more.

James Roberts, a former Foreign Service officer in Haiti now at the Heritage Foundation, argues for liberalizing the fabric rules further, to lower Haitians' costs. He also called for revisiting the "really destructive" U.S. tariffs on sugar to encourage growers in Haiti. Others say the United States should make it easier for Haiti to export its mangoes, which are prized by many American consumers but have faced hurdles because of U.S. food safety rules.

Some experts say that the answer is a rice revival. Until the 1980s, Haiti grew almost all the rice that it ate. But in 1986, under pressure from foreign governments, including the United States, Haiti removed its tariff on imported rice. By 2007, 75 percent of the rice eaten in Haiti came from the United States, according to Robert Maguire, a professor at Trinity Washington University. Haitians took to calling the product "Miami Rice."

The switch to importing rice was driven by U.S. subsidies for its own growers, said Fritz Gutwein, co-director of the social justice organization Quixote Center and coordinator of its Haiti Reborn project. The result in Haiti was a neglect of domestic agriculture that left many of the country's farmers, still the majority of its population, unable to support themselves, fueling waves of urban migration and environmental degradation.

"America needs to look at how its own agricultural policies affect Haiti," Gutwein said.

No one is expecting controversial trade policies to be taken up overnight. But the broader rebuilding effort needs to begin as soon as the initial rescue is over, said Mark Schneider, a former USAID official now with the International Crisis Group. "You can't hope to create any kind of sustainable development if this process doesn't start quickly," he said. "If you don't start it now, something will take the world's attention away from Haiti."

Staff writers Binyamin Appelbaum and Renae Merle contributed to this report.

Peggy Noonan: Slug the Obama Story 'Disconnect'

The first thing I learned in journalism is that every story has a name. At WEEI News Radio in Boston, the editor would label each story with one word, called a "slug," and assign a writer to write it for air. This week's devastating earthquake would be slugged "Haiti." A story about a gruesome murder might be "Nightmare."

We're at the first anniversary of the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and the slug, the word that captures its essence, is "Disconnect."

This is, still, a surprising word to use about the canny operatives who so perfectly judged the public mood in 2008. But they haven't connected since.

There is a disconnect, a detachment, a distance between the president's preoccupations and the concerns of the people. There's a disconnect between his policy proposals and the people's sense, as expressed in polls, of what the immediate problems are.

I'm not referring to what is being called the president's rhetorical disconnect. In this criticism, he is not emotional enough when he speaks, he doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, he is aloof, like a lab technician observing the movements within a petri dish called America. It may be true that this doesn't help him, but so what? In a successful presidency, his cool demeanor would be called an interesting facet, not a problem. And we don't really need presidents to move us, when you think about it. We need them to lead, and in the right direction.

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Barbara Kelley

Nor am I referring to an iconic disconnect. In this criticism, the president refuses to or is unable to act as a paternal figure. "A president is a father," say these critics. "He must comfort us." But, actually, your father is your father. Voters didn't hire Mr. Obama to play the old dad in the MGM movie. In any case he always seemed like the bright older brother, not the father. At the end of the day you, being a grownup, don't need him to be your daddy, do you?

You want a competent chief executive with a deep and shrewd sense of the people. Americans want him to be on the same page as they are. But he's on a different page, and he may in fact be reading a different book. Thus the latest Quinnipiac poll, which puts his approval/disapproval at a descending 45% to 45%. Pure hunch: The approval number is probably slightly high because people don't want to disapprove of their new president—the stakes are so high!—and don't like telling pollsters they disapprove of him.

The real story is that his rhetorical and iconic detachment are harped on because they reflect a deeper disconnect, the truly problematic one, and that is over policy. It doesn't really matter how he sounds. It matters, in a time of crisis, what he does. That's where the lack of connection comes in.

The people are here, and he is there. The popularity of his health-care plan is very low, at 35% support. Someone on television the other day noted it is as low as George Bush's popularity ratings in 2008.

Yet—and this is the key part—the president does not seem to see or hear. He does not respond. He is not supple, able to hear reservations and see opposition and change tack. He has a grim determination to bull this thing through. He negotiates each day with Congress, not with the people. But the people hate Congress! Has he not noticed?

The people have come alive on the issue of spending—it's too high, it threatens us! He spends more. Everywhere I go, I hear talk of "hidden taxes" and a certainty that state and federal levies will go up, putting a squeeze on a middle and upper-middle classes that have been squeezed like oranges and are beginning to see themselves as tired old rinds. Mr. Obama seems at best disconnected from this anxiety.

The disconnect harms him politically, but more important it suggests a deepening gulf between the people and their government, which only adds to growling, chafing national discontent. It also put the president in the position, only one year in, only 12 months into a brand-new glistening presidency, of seeming like the same old same old. There's something tired in all this disconnect, something old-fashioned, something sclerotic and 1970's about it.

And of course the public is reacting. All politicians are canaries in coal mines, they're always the first to feel the political atmosphere. It was significant when the Democrats lost the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey two months ago. It is significant that a handful of House and Senate Democrats have decided not to run this year. And it is deeply significant that a Republican state senator in Massachusetts, Scott Brown, may topple the Democratic nominee to fill Ted Kennedy's former seat, Martha Coakley. In a way, the Republicans have already won—it's a real race, it's close, and in "Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts"!

Mr. Brown's whole story right now is not about disconnect but connect. Massachusetts has an 8.8% unemployment rate, and graduates of the commonwealth's great universities can't find work. An old Boston Republican hand said of the race, "It's 100% about policies—health care, taxes, what's the plan on the economy?" Mr. Brown charges that Ms. Coakley's support for cap and trade and health care will amount to $2 trillion in taxes in the next five years.

Ms. Coakley has the advantage—Massachusetts is the heart of blue-state America—but in a way her advantage is her curse. Because she is the candidate of a party that for 40 years has been used to winning, reigning and winning again, she looks like the same old same old, a standard old-line liberal, the frontwoman for a machine, a yes woman for the Obama-Pelosi era.

It is interesting that Ms. Coakley, too, has been told by pundits the past week that her problem is that she's not emotional enough. She should show passion and fire! She should cry like Hillary!

This comes not only from pundits but normal people, and if you contemplate the meaning it is, weirdly: You're not good enough at manipulating us! We want more theatrics!

Both national parties are trying to pour in money and resources, but the most obnoxious intrusion must have been the fund-raising letter this week from New York's Sen. Charles Schumer, who tried to rouse the troops by calling Mr. Brown a "far-right teabagger." Does that kind of thing even work anymore? Doesn't name calling put off anyone not already predisposed to agree with it?

In a time when the people of Massachusetts have real concerns about their ability to make a living, stuff like the Schumer letter is just more evidence of a party's disconnect.

Politics is about policy. It's not about who's emotional and who cries or makes you cry. It's not about big political parties and the victories they need in order to rule. It's not about going on some ideological toot, which is what the health-care bill is, hoping the people will someday see and appreciate your higher wisdom.

In a way, Mr. Obama's disconnection is a sign of the times. We are living in the age of breakup, with so many of the ties that held us together loosening and fraying. If the president wants to lead toward something better, he should try listening. If you can't connect through the words you speak, at least you can do it through your ability to hear.

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Nigerian bloggers take on would-be bomber Umar Abdulmutallab

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Friday, January 15th, 2010 @ 14:31 UTC

by Eremipagamo Amabebe

On December 25th, 2009 the world was taken by surprise when news broke that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian citizen, had nearly succeeded in detonating explosives on a Northwest Airlines flight between Amsterdam and Detroit. The incident was the latest in a series of close-calls in airline terrorism since the attacks of

September 11, 2001 and was the first case of a Nigerian attempting to carry out a suicide bombing on American soil.

Image via Wikipedia

In the immediate wake of the attempt, there was much speculation about the young Nigerian's background, motives and possible connections to al-Qaeda. Over the next few days it emerged that Abdulmutallab was the youngest son of prominent Nigerian banker Alhaji Umaru Abdul Mutallab; soon after it was revealed that the “underwear bomber” - as Abdulmutallab became known - was a devout but conflicted Muslim and a lonely young man who had received much of his education in Dubai, the United Kingdom, and Yemen.

Prior to the attack, Abdulmutallab had gone missing in the latter country for two months, before which he reportedly told his family to “forget” about him as he was never coming back. Alarmed, his father notified the US Embassy in Abuja as well as other security agencies; as a result Abdulmutallab was added to the US's counterterrorism database, but was not added to the “no-fly list”.

After leaving Yemen, Abdulmutallab spent a short period in Ethiopia and Ghana, then passed briefly through Nigeria en route to the Netherlands where he would board NWA flight 253 to Detroit.

Image via Wikipedia

When news of the attempted attack first broke, many Nigerians were caught by surprise, some even doubting whether Abdulmutallab was truly a Nigerian.

Imnakoya at Grandiose Parlor wrote:

I wondered, is this Mudallad a real Nigerian? Having a Nigerian passport is not a cast-iron proof of nationality given the extent of corruption in the nation.

Jide Salu agreed:

Believe me; Nigerians are too cowardly to be terrorists. Our attitude to death is simple; let it be as natural as possible, preferably in bed, sleeping in total oblivion, after a good night out at a party.

When the news was released that Abdulmutallab was beyond doubt Nigerian citizen, some found consolation in the fact that many of his formative experiences had been made abroad. In a thoughtful post entitled “What does it mean to be a Nigerian?”, Seyi at Heal Nigeria wrote:

If Umar AbdulMutallab was a son of a “Mr Nobody”, it is likely that we will still be arguing over his nationality. It wouldn’t come as a surprise if the govt says, his father is an “illegal immigrant” in Nigeria.

Many have argued that Umar AbdulMutallab cannot be classified as typical Nigerian because of the length of time he spent overseas…. So as far as most Nigerians are concerned, Umar AbdulMutallab hasn’t exposed to the traditional Nigerian upbringing. And considering the limited time he spent living in his home country, there was no way he could have been ‘radicalised’ in Nigeria.

Image via Wikipedia

Jennifer Ehidiamen worried that Abdulmutallab's actions would sink Nigeria's already floundering reputation:

There’s an Igbo proverb that says, “If one finger touches palm oil, it spreads to all the other fingers.” This is indicative of how Nigerians the world over felt when they heard the news of a young man who attempted to detonate a bomb on U.S. soil in the name of Al Qaeda. Many of us worried that the actions of this one finger would spread to cover the entire 150 million of us.

Though she managed to find a silver lining in the events:

Then the next day, the news surfaced that the young man’s father had sent word months earlier to security forces saying he was worried that his son had become radicalized and might even be a threat. In an instant, I was again proud to be Nigerian. I was relieved that the shame that would have hung over my country’s reputation by adding terrorism to the list of already popular vices was abated. Yet somehow, the newsflash on CNN did not reflect this development as fervently as I’d hoped.

She concluded:

If all British citizens don’t have to carry the stigma of the shoe bomber, if all Oklahomans, don’t have to bear the shame of the Oklahoma bombings, then let the world be mindful of the invidious conclusions it so easily makes when someone from a poorer nation commits similar crimes. And if this is too much to ask, then let the oil of his father’s noble and highly sacrificial actions spread to cover those worried 150 million fingers.

And indeed, as many had feared, on January 4th, the US government added Nigeria to a 14 country “watch-list”. The list designates four “state sponsors of terrorism” (Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria) as well as 10 “countries of interest” including - in addition to Nigeria - Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, and Algeria. Passengers flying to the United States from Nigeria and the 13 other countries listed will be subjected to enhanced security screenings, including full-body pat-downs.

Image by catface3 via Flickr

In the following days, many Nigerians vented their displeasure by commenting in facebook forums such as “150 million Nigerians disown Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab” and “Get us off that list: Nigerians are not terrorists.”

Chippla Vandu had a different take on “disowning ” Abdulmutallab:

To “disown” connotes a refusal to accept as one's own or to repudiate. Irrespective of what one may say or think, Umar Farouk is a Nigerian. And while his actions certainly do not represent what one could expect from a “typical” Nigerian male adult (Muslim or not), disowning him does not in any way help understand why he did what he did and ensure that such does not happen again.

Citing a Pew Research Center poll which found that 43% of Nigerian Muslims support suicide bombing, Chippla continued:

How does disowning him help Nigerians understand what role extreme Islamic ideology played in causing him to attempt detonating an explosive device on board a US-bound airliner? How does it help Nigerians understand the complex interplay of religious faith, access to extremist religious groups and ideological brainwashing?

Seyi at Heal Nigeria also saw broader implications in Abdulmutallab's actions, pointing out that the addition of Nigeria to the “Terror watch-list” was not prompted by the events of December 25th alone. Highlighting the recent clashes between Nigerian Security forces and militant Islamists groups such as Boko Haram and Kalo Kato, Seyi wrote:

For anyone to think that US govt reaction was just because of Umar AbdulMutallab’s terrorist expedition smacks of naiveté.

With the level of corruption in Nigeria, I’m convinced that a suicide bomber can pay his/her into a passenger aircraft. For the right price, such a person would be offered a ‘first class’ seat. It is in Nigeria where Customs officials aid and abet importation of fake drugs. It is in Nigeria where Immigration officials knowingly issue passports to non-citizens using false identity. There is no doubt that the new US policy would affect every Nigerian, irrespective of social status. Unfortunately, 150 million people will now pay for the sins of one stupid individual. Already a Nigerian traveling overseas is a suspected asylum seeker, suspected over stayer, suspected illegal immigrant, suspected identity fraudster, suspected drug courier, and now a suspected terrorist.

Seye Abimbola also wondered about increasing religious extremism in Nigeria, describing recent minor clashes at his university. Seye concluded:

Mild as these incidents were, what they show is that for these to happen in the liberal south, at the very bastion of southwestern Nigeria liberalism, you can imagine what possibly goes on in the north where some states already practice the Islamic Sharia legal system.

Chxta remarked that it was not the first time “'bigmen’ in Nigeria have gotten away with murder simply because they are ‘bigmen’”:

Earlier our beloved minister of information had attempted to shift the blame to our nice ‘bredas’ in Ghana, pointing out that the misguided young man spent only thirty minutes in Nigeria upon arrival from Ghana before he boarded that KLM flight. The memo that she did not read apparently is the one that states that if he was so disposed, he could have actually taken a motorcycle from the airport to as far as Surulere, collected the explosives there, and returned to the airport. All in less than thirty minutes. Of course at the airport no one would have asked him questions being that he is a ‘bigman’s' son.

Some were able to see a lighter side to the attempted attack: “Rejoice!!! For the terror suspect is not Igbo” wrote Sugabelly on December 26th. Later, in an update she took a more serious tone:

It's like everyone has lost their sense of humour fa! People on twitter are giving me a hard time because I tweeted this. Oya, I'm sorry. Ndo so.

We are all Nigerians and we are all going to get shit the next time we set foot inside an airport, but let's laugh at the lighter side of this (since no one was hurt).

Be honest, when you heard a Nigerian man tried to commit a terrorist act in America, how many of you immediately thought ‘Please don't let him be [insert your ethnic group]?

Arukaino wryly tied the whole incident back to the government campaign to re-brand Nigeria, he commented:

So much for the rebranding slogan “Nigeria: Good People, Great Nation”. As a result of Abdulmutallab’s failed bomb attempt in Detroit, maybe the US could now interpret it as, “Nigeria: Good People, one terrorist, but still a Great Nation…hmmn.

(For more reactions from the Nigerian blogosphere, check here, here, here and here).

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ICT4Peace Inventorisation Wiki / Haiti Earthquake - January 2010

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. The ICT4Peace Foundation presents the following resources as those that contain, or in turn point to, resources including datasets, emergency numbers, helplines and updates, vital to aid efforts.

Information from the ground / Haiti

Twitter feeds

1. http://twitter.com/cnnbrk/haiti (from CNN / requires manual refresh)
2. http://spy.appspot.com/find/%23haiti?latest=100 (aggregation from a number of sites / works best on Firefox / automatic refresh)
3. Twitter lists: @NYTimes/haiti-earthquake; @BreakingNews/haiti-quake; @nprnews/haiti-earthquake;
4. Alertnet Haiti Earthquake Live blog (now archived, with text, audio, photos and video)

Citizen media (including on the ground reporting and updates)

Haiti earthquake and citizen media response

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake (refresh often for more updates and edits)

Google social media updates

Google’s own social media search, which is updated every second automatically)

News services

1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8456322.stm (live updates from the BBC)
2. YouTube video updates (for videos from news services and citizen journalism)
3. Google News aggregation of news updates on earthquake (refresh for updates)
4. http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2010/haiti.quake/ (CNN special page to cover earthquake)

Local media websites (recommended by Google)

TNH, Le Nouvelliste, Radio Metropole Haiti, Radio Galaxie, Radio Ginen

Videos on the earthquake and its aftermath

A collection of videos on YouTube curated by Citizen Tube.

UN + Reliefweb

1. http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/missions/minustah/index.shtml (MINUSTAH page)
2. http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/doc106?OpenForm&rc=2&cc=hti (Latest updates from Haiti / response times slow on account of traffic)

Blog updates

Google blog search (refresh for updated blog posts, aggregated by Google)

Crisis Information Management (Actors & situation reports)

1. http://haiti.ushahidi.com (Ushahidi implementation has vital information up)
2. http://haiti-orgs.sahanafoundation.org/prod (Haiti 2010 Sahana Disaster Response Portal, which includes a list of NGOs on the ground)
3. http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php/haiti:start (wiki to help set up Sahana in Haiti)
4. InSTEDD Situation Report 14 January 2010 (courtesy Ushahidi Situation Room. Direct download here as Word doc.)
5. InSTEDD Situation Report 15 January 2010 (courtesy Ushahidi Situation Room. Direct download here as Word doc.)

Crisis Information Management (Blogs by key actors)

1. http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/2010/01/13/haiti-earthquake/ (Ushahidi’s efforts to respond to the earthquake)
2. Ushahidi Situation Room (linked to Ushahidi deployment in Haiti)
3. http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php/haiti:start (wiki to help set up Sahana in Haiti)

Missing persons registries

1. Haitian Earthquake Registry (a site to share information about people you know who are affected by the Earthquake in Haiti)
2. Family News Network of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Haiti - Earthquake 2010 (available in French and English)
3. Haiti Situation Tracking Form by Google (available in French and English. This is now replaced by entry / initiative below.)
4. Person Finder by Google (updated with over 3,000 names at the time of writing)

DPKO Support for UN staff and families

1. DPKO Support Page for UN Staff in Haiti on Facebook
2. Twitter feed by DPKO on Haiti

Wikis for aggregation ground info and help

1. http://mobileactive.org/earthquake-haiti-how-you-can-help-and-learn-more (by MobileActive.org, well populated)
2. http://globalvoicesonline.org/specialcoverage/haiti-earthquake-2010/ (by the hugely respected Global Voices, updated regularly)

Mapping data / Imagery etc

http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake (set up by Crisis Commons)

Wikis for aggregation ground info and help

1. http://mobileactive.org/earthquake-haiti-how-you-can-help-and-learn-more (by MobileActive.org, well populated)
2. http://globalvoicesonline.org/specialcoverage/haiti-earthquake-2010/ (by the hugely respected Global Voices, updated regularly)

Mapping data / Imagery / GIS

1. Google Maps with post-earthquake satellite imagery overlays
2. Google Earth KML file, also with post-earthquake satellite imagery overlays
3. http://crisiscommons.org/wiki/index.php?title=Haiti/2010_Earthquake (set up by Crisis Commons)
4. Wikiproject Haiti (has a good list of GIS datasets on Haiti)
5. The UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT) has produced a map identifying road and bridge obstacles in Port-au-Prince to support the international humanitarian relief effort in Haiti: Satellite-Identified IDP Concentrations, Road & Bridge Obstacles in Central Port-au-Prince, Haiti
6. Maps from Reliefweb on the crisis

Logistics and infrastructure

1. UN Logistics Cluster Haiti Earthquake Update webpage
2. Medical facilities (as of 15th January, information unconfirmed since media reports suggest many were hit bad by earthquake and have been rendered useless.)
3. OCHA Map of Haiti Quake Epicenter

Photos from Haiti

1. Photo collection from Doctors Without Borders
2. Large photo collection from the Denver News (contains graphic content)
3. Port au Prince destruction by the New York Times (excellent visualisation of pre and post earthquake imagery)

Ways to help

The ICT4Peace Foundation is, unless specifically noted, not in any way associated with or part of the initiatives mentioned below. We cannot therefore vouch for their work, but have pointed to reliable sources such as Google who have first flagged the initiatives.

1. Google Crisis Response on Haiti lists a number of aid agencies that have set up helplines and ways to deliver aid.
2. The Lede by the New York Times on how to contribute to aid.
3. Aidwatch publishes the following ways to help:
   1. Philanthropy Action Advice for Donors to Haiti
   2. Chris Blattman suggests Haiti Partners
   3. Tyler Cowen and many others recommend Paul Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health
   4. GlobalGiving has a list of 20 organizations already working in Haiti and has set up a Relief Fund for Haiti Earthquake
4. Donate using Apple iTunes (only confirmed for those in the US)

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