Controversy over Corail Camp
The Corail-Cesselesse camp was set up originally for about 5,000 displaced people being evacuated from a camp at a country club (the Pétion-ville Club), which was run by actor Sean Penn. Many of the refugees lived in tents on dangerously sloped muddy ground. Penn and some other humanitarian actors wanted the evacuees to be the first of thousands more who would be moved out of the city center.
But only three months after the first refugees were installed in tents – on July 29 2010 – the U.N.-linked International Organization for Migration (IOM) issued a report on the entire “public utility” expanse of land, saying that the area chosen for Sectors 1 through 4 “is prone to flood and strong wind. As reported earlier, it is flooded regularly at least once a year.”
“Due to the reoccurrence and magnitude of floods, this site should not be used for further relocation and resettlement of” displeaced persons, the report concluded.
Map from the IOM report.
Apparently undeterred, World Vision and later IOM itself soon built some 1,500 “transitional shelters” on that very site. Some 10,000 people remain there today and many have invested in their “shelters,” making them more permanent.
UN-HABITAT disagreed with the idea of setting up camps on the outskirts of the capital from the outset, according to Director Jean-Christophe Adrian, who spoke to HGW in January 2011.
“Corail was created because of pressure from the international community. The government was opposed to it. Préval was opposed,” according to Adrian. “This kind of spreading out of the city isn’t the best thing to do… at the time, it was very clear: pressure from the U.S. Army and from our friend Sean Penn, and support from the international community, made this turn into 'a good idea.'”
“By declaring the land ‘public utility,’ they opened a Pandora’s Box,” Adrian added.
World Vision told HGW that it had not seen the report and that it does not consider the area high-risk. The agency added that many humanitarian actors “felt the process was rushed” but that the government had “determined that the relocation process must begin immediately and selected Corail as the site for the new community.” World Vision is currently seeking funding to do a three-year project of “livelihoods and youth training and development” work with the camp residents.
The former camp manager from American Refugee Committee was more direct and less positive.
“ARC did not have a say in the planning of the Corail Camp (and in fact did not agree with how the things were set up),” Richard Poole told HGW in an email. While he was not opposed to moving people out of the capital, he noted that “the location of the camps far from Port-au-Prince with little or no prospect of economic activity was a mistake… Without an economic base, however, the plan was doomed to fail.”
The closed Croix-des-Bouquets City Hall annex in Corail Sector 3.
Photo: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint Val
Hélène Mauduit, who works for Entrepreneurs du monde in the Corail camp, said that “sure, there are shelters, a hospital and a school, but there is no future for the people of Corail because there is no work, there are not roads and there’s no electricity.”
“I think someone should make a decision about Corail. They either need to destroy it and put people somewhere else, or they need to say to themselves, ‘Ah, these are human beings who life at Corail!’ and then need to put into place everything that can guarantee a a normal life. You brought the people there. You told them there would be work. But nothing ever happened because the area turned into a slum.”
The former mayor of Croix-des-Bouquets, Jean Saint-Ange Darius, told HGW that following the earthquake, “local authorities were ignored and almost all the decisions were made by the central government… we were not at all implicated in the choice of the site.”
Asked about the Corail camp and surrounding slums for the Raoul Peck film Assistance Mortelle, former Interim Haiti Recovery Commission Senior Shelter Advisor Priscilla Phelps said:
“When the story of the Haiti reconstruction is written, the international community’s going to be doing a big mea culpa about this site… I hope.”
June 17, 2013
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