Obama renews backing of earthquake-stricken Haiti

By Mary Beth Sheridan, William Booth and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 10, 2010; 2:31 PM

President Obama pledged enduring U.S. support on Wednesday for Haiti's recovery and reconstruction following its devastating earthquake two months ago, and the visiting Haitian president urged the creation of a special U.N. disaster relief force.

"The situation on the ground remains dire, and people should be under no illusions that the crisis is over" in Haiti, Obama said after a meeting with Haitian President René Préval. With the onset of the spring rainy season, Haitians' needs "will only grow," Obama said, adding, "The challenge now is to prevent a second disaster."

Appearing with Préval in the White House Rose Garden, Obama said, "America's commitment to Haiti's recovery and reconstruction must endure and will endure. . . . America will be your partner in the recovery and reconstruction effort."

Préval thanked the United States and the international community for what he called "the massive, spontaneous, generous help" that Haiti received in response to its "unimaginable" disaster. But he said the effectiveness of such efforts "must be improved," and he expressed support for the "creation of so-called 'red helmets' within the United Nations," a humanitarian response force for natural disasters that would be the equivalent of U.N. peacekeepers, who traditionally wear blue helmets.

Obama and Préval spoke before an audience of lawmakers, administration officials, representatives of private relief groups, Haitian American community leaders and American service members and civilians who worked in Haiti after the earthquake, including personnel from the USNS Comfort hospital ship and members of urban search and rescue teams from Fairfax County, Virginia Beach, Los Angeles, Miami and New York. Both leaders expressed their gratitude to those who participated in the rescue and relief efforts.

The Comfort ended its relief mission off the Haitian coast Wednesday and began a four-day journey back to its home port of Baltimore after treating more than 800 earthquake victims over seven weeks.

Préval arrived in Washington on Tuesday in search of additional U.S. and international help for his beleaguered nation, where the economy is stalled, crops have gone unplanted and a million people remain homeless.

The Haitian government is racing to finish a blueprint on which it will base its requests for potentially record-breaking aid commitments at a United Nations conference in three weeks. The Jan. 12 quake killed more than 200,000 people out of a population approaching 9.8 million, and the Inter-American Development Bank has estimated that the damage could hit $14 billion.

Saying that the Haitian disaster "defies comprehension" even now, Obama on Wednesday offered what he described as "some perspective on the awful scale" of the country's losses.

"It's as if the United States, in a terrible instant, lost nearly 8 million people; or it's as if one-third of our country -- 100 million Americans -- suddenly had no home, no food or water," Obama said. "No nation could respond to such a catastrophe alone. It would require a global response."

Préval said the Haitian disaster carries "lessons for all of mankind" and warned that many other nations are in jeopardy.

"The countries that have seismic risks are not merely those countries which are located on top of seismic faults," he said. He noted that tsunamis resulting from earthquakes "threaten other regions as well as the United States."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday after talks with Préval that "progress has been made, but not nearly enough, and therefore we are holding these meetings . . . to discuss in depth what we need to do still to alleviate suffering and what we will do together to help build back Haiti better."

Among the few specifics she offered was that Préval is eager to hold parliamentary elections. A vote had been scheduled for February but was canceled because of the disaster.

"I assured President Préval that the United States would work with the international community to hold elections as soon as possible," Clinton said.

With the March 31 donors conference rapidly approaching, U.S. officials and lawmakers appeared eager to nail down Haiti's priorities and plans. Congressional staffers said they expect the administration to request an aid package of between $1 billion and $3 billion in the coming weeks.

Préval faced a sympathetic but skeptical audience in his meetings in Washington, where officials have seen past assistance to Haiti evaporate in a miasma of mismanagement and corruption.

Cheryl Mills, Clinton's chief of staff and point person on Haiti, said U.S. officials "want to have an understanding of their long-term goals, of the priorities they have, and their vision for doing things differently."

In Haiti, about 300 people have been scrambling to put together what many simply call "the plan" -- officially, a Post-Disaster Needs Assessment -- that will be presented at the U.N. conference.

A draft is scheduled to be completed in the next week.

Drawn up by Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, who is also the minister of planning, with the assistance of imported development wonks and aid bureaucrats, the plan is being touted as a founding document for a new Haiti -- not only a wish list for food, tarps and medicine, but a road map to move beyond a legacy of dependence. It will include a vision for the next five, 10 and 15 years, officials said.

Drafts of the plan call for the decentralization of power, population and industry away from the teeming, ravaged capital to the environmentally degraded countryside, which the plan says could bloom again, with solar-powered irrigation systems and mango processing facilities -- as well as flower farms shuttling fresh-cut bouquets by cargo jet to Montreal, Miami and New York.

The plan suggests social engineering on a vast scale, which would involve unprecedented levels of public and private investment in Haiti.

"We are saying that a disaster is a terrible thing to waste, and that if we are ever to make Haiti into a nation that can actually sustain itself, then we must dream big dreams," said Leslie Voltaire, a Haitian city planner, architect and one of the more forceful contributors to the plan.

In a conference room at a damaged, unoccupied luxury hotel in Port-au-Prince, where the plan is being typed on loaner laptops under palm trees, the authors imagine transforming an overcrowded, dysfunctional capital city into a revived and smaller urban center with a sewage system and green belts replacing some of the fetid slums. They see seaside promenades with bicycle paths being built with recycled earthquake rubble.

"We are trying to remake 206 years of history in two months," said Bernard Craan, a mango producer and leader of a business think tank. "Normally you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but I have seen people work together on these visions who have not spoken to each other in years. There is a new approach."

According to the plan, the billions of dollars in assistance would likely be managed by a multi-donor trust fund, whose multinational board of directors would make most of the important spending decisions in the country.

Eduardo Almeida, head of the Inter-American Development Bank office in Haiti, said the plan might call for billions of dollars in investments in construction, tourism, government services and especially agriculture -- for irrigation, fertilizer, roads and processing plants.

Haiti is a rural, once-bountiful country with a large peasantry, but it cannot feed itself. As much as 70 percent of its food is imported.

Booth reported from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.