Haiti at Davos | Short Answers > Celso Amorim

 

Foreign Minister of Brazil, Celso Amorim, answers a question posted by a YouTube user: what can we do to build a sustainable economy in Haiti?

More from Celso Amorim >
More on Celso Amorim >  
More "Haiti at Davos | Short Answers" >

Haiti at Davos | Short Answers > David Cameron

David Cameron  

David William Donald Cameron (born 9 October 1966) is the leader of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Opposition in the United Kingdom. He has occupied both positions since December 2005. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, gaining a first class honours degree. He then joined the Conservative Research Department and became Special Adviser to Norman Lamont, and then to Michael Howard. He was Director of Corporate Affairs at Carlton Communications for seven years. A first candidacy for Parliament at Stafford in 1997 ended in defeat but Cameron was elected in 2001 as Member of Parliament for the Oxfordshire constituency of Witney. Promoted to the Opposition front bench two years after entering Parliament, he rose rapidly to be head of policy co-ordination during the 2005 general election campaign. Cameron won the Conservative leadership later that year after being seen as a young and moderate candidate who would appeal to young voters. His early leadership saw the Conservative Party establish a lead in opinion polls over Tony Blair's Labour for the first time in over ten years. Although they went behind for a time after Gordon Brown replaced Blair as Labour leader and Prime Minister, under Cameron's leadership, throughout 2008 and to date, the Conservatives have been consistently ahead of Labour in the polls. More "Haiti at Davos | Short Answers" >

Yéle Haiti - Blog - Numbers tell stories of Horror, Heroism in Haiti

Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) -- Two weeks after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated Haiti, the numbers have mounted. The numbers tell stories of death and destruction, as well as a global outpouring of aid. CNN has compiled the latest, most reliable figures available as the devastation continues to unfold:  

THE TOLL

> 230,000: Latest estimate of the death toll, from the Haitian Health Ministry. The European Union and the Pan American Health Organization, which are coordinating the health-sector response, have estimated the quake killed 200,000 people.
> 194,000: Number of injured
> 134: Estimated number of people rescued by international search teams since the quake  

THE EFFECT

> 9 million: Population of Haiti > 3 million: Estimated number of people affected by the quake
> 1 million: Estimated number of displaced people
> 800,000 to 1 million: People who need temporary shelter
> 235,000: People who have left Port-au-Prince using free transportation provided by the government. The number who left by private means is undetermined.
> At least 50: Aftershocks of magnitude 4.5 or higher that have hit Haiti since the January 12 quake  

THE CHILDREN

> 300,000: Children younger than 2 who need nutritional support
> 90: Percentage of schools in Port-au-Prince that have been destroyed
> 363: Haitian orphans who have been evacuated  

THE RESPONSE IN DOLLARS

> $1.12 billion: International aid pledges
> $783 million: Funds received as of Tuesday
> $317 million: U.S. assistance as of Monday  

THE RESPONSE IN MANPOWER

> 17,000: U.S. military personnel in and around Haiti
> 8 million: Meals the World Food Programme has delivered to nearly 400,000 people
> 300: Aid distribution sites that are up and running
> 130 to 150: Flights arriving every day at the single-runway Port-au-Prince airport with aid Huge crowd of Haitians lines up for rice  

EFFECT ON FOREIGNERS

> 12,000: U.N. workers in the country at the time of the quake
> 53: U.N. workers still missing
> At least 82: U.N. workers dead
> 20: Brazilians dead
> 27: U.N. workers injured or hospitalized
> 11,500: Americans and family members who have been evacuated
> 4,800: Americans unaccounted for  

Sources: Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Red Cross, the United Nations, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. State Department and the World Food Programme"

Avengers of the NewWorld

“If we live in a world in which democracy is meant to exclude no one, it is in no small part because of the actions of those slaves in Saint-Domingue who insisted that human rights were theirs too...”
 

Laurent Dubois Avengers of the NewWorld
The Story of The Haitian Revolution

Prologue Excerpts

On new year’s day 1804, a group of generals gathered in Saint-Domingue to create a new nation. Their leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had once been a slave. So, too, had several of the men who joined him in signing their declaration of independence. Some had been born in Africa and survived the middle passage; others, including Dessalines, had been born into slavery in the French colony. They signed their names next to those of men who had once been slave owners, including one apparently was nicknamed “the good white.” Many were men of mixed European and African descent who had been free long before the Revolution began, several of whom had fought against Dessalines in a brutal civil war a few years earlier. Now, however, they stood behind him to declare that they had forever renounced France, and would fight to the death to preserve their independence and freedom. "I have avenged America". Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1804) Haiti was founded on the ashes of what had been, fifteen years before, the most profitable slave colony in the world Its birth premised on the self evident truth that no one should be a slave. It was a dramatic challenge to the world as it then was. Slavery was at the heart of the thriving system of merchant capitalism that was profiting Europe, devastating Africa, and propelling the rapid expansion of the Americas. The most powerful European empires were deeply involved and invested in slavery’s continuing existence, as was much of the nation to the north that had preceded Haiti to independence, the United States. For decades Saint-Domingue had been the leading example of the massive profits that could be made through the brutal institution. Then, in 1791, the colony’s slaves began a massive uprising. It became the largest slave revolt in the history of the world, and the only one that succeeded. Within a few years these Caribbean revolutionaries gained liberty for all the slaves in the French empire. The man who came to lead Saint-Domingue in the wake of emancipation, Toussaint Louverture, had once warned the French that any attempt to bring slavery back to the colony was destined to fail. Although he did not live to see it, he was proven right. When freedom was threatened by Napoleon Bonaparte’s regime, the people of Saint-Domingue fought successfully to preserve it. Through years of struggle, brutal violence, and imperial war, slaves became citizens in the empire that had enslaved them, and then founders of a new nation… During the nineteenth century an economically and politically isolated Haiti became the object of scorn and openly racist polemic… The revolution began as a challenge to French imperial authority by colonial whites, but it soon became a battle over racial inequality, and then over the existence of slavery itself. The slaves who revolted in 1791 organized themselves into a daunting military and political force, one ultimately embraced by French Republican officials. Facing enemies inside and outside the colony, these Republicans allied themselves with the insurgent slaves in 1793. They offered freedom in return for military support, which quickly led to the abolition of slavery in the colony. The decision made in Saint-Domingue was ratified in Paris in 1794: the slaves of all the French colonies became citizens of the French Republic. These events represented the most radical political transformation of the “Age of Revolution” that stretched from the 1770s to the 1830s. They were also the most concrete expression of the idea that the rights proclaimed in France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were indeed universal. They could not be quarantined in Europe or prevented from landing in the ports of the colonies, as many had argued they should be. The slave insurrection of Saint-Domingue led to the expansion of citizenship beyond racial barriers despite the massive political and economic investment in the slave system at the time. If we live in a world in which democracy is meant to exclude no one, it is in no small part because of the actions of those slaves in Saint-Domingue who insisted that human rights were theirs too...  

View at:  
> Google Books  
> Amazon

Brazil for Haiti: Foreign Relations Minister after The Haiti Donors' Meeting