Capitalizing on Disaster?

Writing about the Corail-Cesselesse disaster in an article and his recent book, Associated Press reporter Jonathan Katz accused NABATEC President Gérald Emile “Aby” Brun of pulling off a “backroom deal” by recommending NABATEC land for emergency refugee camps so that he could eventually offer foreign companies “a ready-made workers community.” Brun was a member of a presidential commission that recommended the site.

In extensive interviews with Haiti Grassroots Watch, Brun did not deny that he had hoped the camps might one day be integrated into “a decent and modern housing scheme that had already been approved” as part of the Habitat Haïti 2020 project. But he also noted that the expanse of territory owned largely by NABATEC is the only open space left near Port-au-Prince, which is bordered on one side by mountains and a lake and by the Caribbean Sea on another.

“When they were looking for land for debris, land for recycling and eventually land for settlements, they realized that the state did not have any land larger than the size of a soccer field,” Brun said.

Numerous sources, including officials at UN-Habitat, confirmed that “the land problem” was one of the biggest challenges of the reconstruction.

Katz never spoke with Brun in person.

Gérald Emile “Aby” Brun, an architect, the president of NABATEC S.A.,
looks at the layout of the Habitat Haïti 2020 project. Photo: HGW

Brun – who resigned from the commission after Katz’s July 12 2010 article – said he never dreamed squatters would soon overrun the property.

“Why in the world would I have dropped a 14-year planning and investment dream and effort?” he asked HGW in a December 2012 email.

Once the invasions started, foreign companies that had been negotiating with NABATEC, including Korean clothing firm SAE-A, dropped out of the project. (Today SAE-A is the “anchor tenant” of an industrial park in the north championed by Clinton and Martelly.)

“A dreamed of new city was killed by narrow minded and greedy people, under the tolerant observation of the international community,” according to Brun, who said NABATEC had spent over US$1.5 million on its project. “Habitat Haïti 2020 has been most likely killed by Corail and Canaan!”

June 17, 2013

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