Relocate One Million Haitians Before the Rains

LaRouche Calls For Emergency Measures To Relocate A Million Haitians Before The Rainy Season Hits
Lyndon LaRouche
2-23-10

(LPAC)-Lyndon LaRouche issued an urgent call for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to work with the Haitian government to help relocate up to a million Haitians, now homeless and living amid the rubble of shattered Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed some 300,000 Haitians.

The immediate emergency, LaRouche noted, is that the rainy season is upon us, and under current conditions, Port-au-Prince within a month or two will be subjected to floods, hit by mudslides, and become inundated in deadly sewage from the 1.5 million people who are now homeless and destitute in that city. These people have been forced to live in the streets and slums under ramshackle pieces of plastic, and amid human excrement that is not being removed-because there is no ability to do so, nor even a place to take it.

Even before the earthquake, Haiti-long the victim of the globalization and free trade policies of London-centered financial predators-did not have a single sewage treatment plant.

If we do not act, LaRouche stressed, Haiti will soon face conditions in which dengue, cholera, malaria, typhoid and other epidemics will spread, with devastating consequences. Haiti is the image of what awaits all of humanity under the current, bankrupt British-imperial international financial system: it is the face of the New Dark Age. We must stop it in Haiti, if we are to have the moral fitness to survive on this planet.

To prevent another wave of mass deaths and total national disintegration, a bilateral treaty agreement between the United States and Haiti should be promptly reached to evacuate up to a million people from this potentially deadly situation into the United States on an interim basis, and possibly into inland parts of Haiti as well. Under a reasonable Presidency, the U.S. can mobilize the capacity to do that, and we can further use our military capacity, through the Army Corps of Engineers, to either rebuild semi-permanent housing, or reopen military bases with barracks, including those shut down under the BRAC commission.

Full reconstruction in Haiti will take up to 25 years, LaRouche has pointed out, but in the short term it is possible to build new relocation camps and even cities outside of Port-au-Prince, where the essentials of life can be provided: food, water, sanitation, a roof over their heads, and sufficient energy and electricity to make all this possible. Even under a dysfunctional, impeachable President Obama, the United States must act, and act quickly, LaRouche stated.

In his Jan. 30 international webcast, LaRouche responded to a question about Haiti, saying that the United States has to take the kind of approach that Presidents like Lincoln and Roosevelt did:

"You cannot apply a band-aid to Haiti. And you can not bring in many other countries, because the objective is, if the country is going to be viable, coming out of this mess, you have to have a sovereign Haiti. So, the contract has to be essentially, a United States treaty agreement, a treaty agreement to re-establish the efficient sovereignty of the nation of Haiti, after the destructive effect of this and preceding difficulties...

"[Haiti] is a small nation, of people who have been subjected to all kinds of terrible history; who have been promised this, and betrayed, and promised that, and betrayed, and promised and betrayed. Never delivered. It's in a group of national territories which has also tended to be somewhat of a mess, in one way or the other. So, therefore, it's a model approach: We make a contract with the government, as a treaty agreement, between the United States and Haiti, to assure the rebuilding of their country, in a form in which it will actually be a functioning country which can survive."