Eye on South Africa

This blog will from now on focus on South Africa and the region.

Eye on Haiti

Port-au-Prince, situated at the apex of the Gulf of Gonâve, is a place with many faces. Some of them are covered by high fences and walls with barbed wire; other houses in the city centre downtown have now trash and many people doing business in front of them. As a rule, the poor seem to be located in lower urban areas.

Former President Aristide on His Party’s Exclusion from Haiti’s Election: “Exclusion is the Problem, Inclusion is the Solution”

Democracy Now covered Aristide’s return to Haiti after seven years in exile in South Africa. Amy Goodman is reporting from inside the plane that brought Aristide and his entourage back to his home country and stays with the presidential company until arriving (with great difficulties due to the massive crowd) at their residence. Impressive piece of journalism on a historic day for Haiti.

Disaster to decentralization

Six months on

IRIN Global | HAITI-US: Washington aid policy may be shifting

IRIN Global | HAITI-US: Washington aid policy may be shifting | Latin America and Caribbean | Haiti | Economy Food Security Natural Disasters Aid Policy | Feature.

Haitians say jobs key to recovery | Oxfam International

Haitians say jobs key to recovery | Oxfam International

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How did their tragedy become All About Us? – Brendan O’Neill

How did giving aid to Haiti become All About Us? Emergency aid should be a politics-free, urgent provision of the essentials of life – food, water and shelter – to people affected by a disaster. Yet following the Haiti quake, it has been turned into the opposite: an arena for advertising Western decency and working out moral dilemmas,

The politics of Rice

Another short documentary from Al Jazeera English. Interesting again, because it looks into the recent history of trade policy in Haiti. Why a country with such a fertile land imports more than half of the rice its people eat: that’s the crux of the matter in Haiti’s economic underdevelopment story, and the real thing the international community needs to acknowledge. Subsidies for farming in the US and EU, opening up markets and not prioritizing local production when food security is an issue. How do you defend that?

Nevermind the bad English translation from Creole sometimes.

Faultlines in Haiti: the politics of rebuilding

I just saw a couple friends of mine posted this video on their blog:

An interesting short documentary on policy thinking after the earthquake. Interesting because, even though the whole world is now thinking ‘what with Haiti after the quake?’,  it shows how the need for change in Haiti is still the same as before the earthquake.

Although this devastating event will be marked in Haitian history as much as their revolution is, today the question still is ‘what went wrong in Haiti before the quake?’.

Haiti earthquake reporters titillate with disaster porn

Brendan O’Neill: Journalists are so vain they think this quake is about them. Click here to read the full article.