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Haiti PM: Gov’t to take land for temporary camps

20 February 2010 02:21 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive says the Haitian government will appropriate land to build temporary camps for earthquake victims, APA reports quoting Associated Press. The decision, announced in an interview with The Associated Press, is potentially explosive in a country where a small elite owns most of the land in and around the capital.
That elite, a traditionally corrupting force in Haitian politics, has the power to bring down the government.
The government owns some land but not enough, Bellerive said in an interview Thursday, meaning he has no choice but to take over private terrain.
He would not say how much land will be appropriated. But international aid groups say hundreds of hectares (acres) are needed to get quake victims out of overcrowded makeshift camps sprawled all over the devastated capital.
Bernard Fils-Aime, a businessman, property owner and president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Haiti, said he was not aware of anyone in the business community being approached by the government about land. He said the issue would need to be treated cautiously.
"Land is one of our very scarce resources and an issue that has underlined many political conflicts in Haiti since independence," Fils-Aime said, adding: "You don’t want to create more conflict."
Aid agencies have criticized the government for dragging its feet in building camps for the displaced.
"The temporary camps where people have congregated are fast becoming over-crowded slums," the relief agency Oxfam International warned last week. "The government ... needs to clarify whether there is government land available or if it needs to confiscate private land instead. These decisions need to be taken quickly."
The Haitian government has seemed to operate on a slower timetable. On Friday, the economist leading a government emergency commission on shelter held a news conference, saying government panels will make decisions in three to four weeks, and that the homes will be built in five or six months.
In the meantime, Charles Clermont said, people in the private sector have offered to build 20,000 to 30,000 temporary homes on private land and, presumably, sell them to the government.
Some 1.2 million Haitians were left homeless by the Jan. 12 quake, about half of them in the capital where about a third of Haiti’s nearly 10 million people are concentrated along with the government and almost all industry.
Camps have sprung up on every bit of available land â€” school and university grounds, public gardens, a golf course, the central Champ de Mars plaza or simply on sidewalks. But the camps, many made of little more than bed sheets propped up by poles, have little sanitation, and early sporadic downpours already are adding to the misery of their residents.
Health workers warn of disease in the camps â€” something Haiti’s already strained health system can hardly handle. Relief agencies are working against the clock to find temporary settlements for the homeless before the spring rainy season.
Haitian law provides for the government to seize land as long as it is in the public interest and the owners are fairly compensated, said lawyer Benissoit Jude Detournel, who handles property disputes.
"There has to be a just and equitable indemnity, taking into account the market value of the property," Detournel said. He said setting a price is difficult now in the quake’s aftermath.
The government has appropriated land in the past without conflict â€” to build a wider road on the western outskirts of Port-au-Prince four years ago, to protect underground water aquifers 14 years ago and to construct government buildings in downtown Port-au-Prince in the 1970s, said Jean-Andre Victor, an agronomist who worked on a failed government attempt to survey land ownership in 2003.
But Detournel said his firm still is litigating for owners of land expropriated by the government near the Port-au-Prince airport in the 1980s to build a free-trade zone of factories that churn out T-shirts and other products sold in the United States.
Compensation was paid at the time, but more people showed up later demanding payment, he said, because squatters, corrupt notaries and judges often means multiple individuals can hold title to the same properties. Detournel said his firm takes few land dispute cases "because you can end up dead, or with someone casting a Voodoo spell on you."
Bellerive is clearly aware of the stakes.
He told the AP on Thursday, in a separate interview, that the government could fall as political opponents capitalize on its inability to respond strongly to the Jan. 12 earthquake.
Camp-dwellers are also offering resistance. Many don’t want to move out of the debris-choked capital, which would separate them from family, jobs and aid. An Oxfam survey of 110 people showed less than a third of them willing to move out of the capital.
Meanwhile, those camps are becoming ever more miserable.
Leonel Martine, a 42-year-old electrician, said a light overnight shower Friday left his camp in ankle-deep water and soaked the mattress he shares with his wife, his daughter and two grandchildren.
"My wife spent the night standing, holding the baby," he said.