Haiti seen mired in crisis throughout 2011 - ex-UN aid chief

By Katie Nguyen 

Haiti is likely to remain a humanitarian crisis for most of next year, with efforts to rebuild the earthquake-hit country making slow progress, former U.N. aid chief John Holmes said on Tuesday.

More than nine months after the Caribbean country suffered a catastrophic quake that killed hundreds of thousands and left 1.3 million homeless, Haiti has been rocked by another emergency -- a cholera epidemic that has killed 259 people in a week.

Even if the outbreak were contained, Haitians are as vulnerable as they were before the earthquake struck, if not more so, Holmes told a briefing at the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) thinktank.

"This will remain a humanitarian crisis well into 2011, in fact probably for most of 2011 as we all anticipated and feared it would be," said Holmes, who took up his new post as director of the Ditchley Foundation this summer.

"I think it's a fact of life -- and I'm not making any criticism here -- that the recovery and reconstruction effort is going very slowly for all sorts of reasons."

Holmes was joined by Ross Mountain, director of a taskforce charged with reviewing the humanitarian emergency response of Britain's Department for International Development and Linda Poteat, director of disaster response at U.S. aid coalition Interaction, to discuss applying the lessons learnt from Haiti.

Calling Haiti "the poster child ... of total failure of disaster risk reduction", Holmes said one of the biggest lessons was to reduce the risk of disasters before they happened -- a growing concern as climate change and urbanisation mean natural disasters will become even harder to tackle in the future.

Holmes outlined many of the points raised by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee -- a forum bringing together U.N. and other humanitarian agencies -- in its July report on weaknesses in the Haiti response.

Although he maintained more was done right than wrong, Holmes said the response faltered over shelter, management of Haiti's 1,300 tented camps, protection especially of women and girls from sexual violence, sanitation and assessment of survivors' needs.

Overlooked issues

Other shortcomings such as the lack of engagement with Haitian civil society groups, non-governmental organisations and community networks meant survivors' needs and views were often overlooked by U.N. agencies and international aid groups.

"It's sometimes difficult no matter how much training you've had, to involve local civil society as much as you would like and there's always the attitude that they are helpless victims and not actors themselves which is something that must be overcome," Holmes said.

Holmes said highlights in the response were the coordination of search and rescue teams, immediate medical care and post-operative care, the provision of water and food aid, as well as disease control up until the cholera outbreak.

"The biggest question ... does Haiti followed by the Pakistan floods, does the response to these disasters tell us that the humanitarian model is broken and needs to be looked at in a more fundamental way?" Holmes said.

There was no simple answer, he said, and pointed out the fragmented nature of the humanitarian system comprising U.N. agencies with overlapping mandates, and NGOs that usually work independently of each other.