Abrir las fronteras para Haiti...

Ante mi carencia de talento para escribir, prefiere reproducir un artículo que publicó John Ackerman sobre Haiti...

"WE MUST OPEN OUR BORDERS TO HAITIAN REFUGEES"


“If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then bring Mohammed to the mountain”. According to an ancient tale, Mohammed finally thanked God for not complying with his wish – moving the mountain would have caused countless deaths as the rocks tumbled down to reach their new location.

The international community should return to these words of wisdom when discussing how to co-ordinate aid efforts in Haiti. The best way to deal with the crisis in the short term is not to move mountains of aid to Haiti, but to move Haitians to outside locations where they can receive the support they need. Each country at the United Nations summit in New York in March should commit to receiving a specific number of displaced Haitians as short-term visitors during the initial phase of the reconstruction of Port-au-Prince.

This makes simple economic sense. It is much more effective to bring the sick to functioning hospitals, the hungry to working cafeterias and the homeless to existing shelters than to spend enormous amounts of time and energy on improvising makeshift equivalents. It is vastly more expensive to fly out daily sufficient bottled water, food and medicine from London, Paris, New York and Mexico City than to fly needy Haitians into each of these locations.

This strategy would allow aid efforts in Haiti to focus on long-term goals. Today the central concern is how to get enough tents to shelter the hundreds of thousands of homeless before the hurricane season starts in May. Instead, the international community should concentrate all its resources on the significant challenge of developing a sustainable urban development plan for Port-au-Prince.

The Obama administration’s decision to suspend deportation proceedings and to offer 18-month temporary visas for all Haitians in the US, independent of their legal status, is an important positive gesture. The governments of Canada and Mexico are implementing similar measures. The UK and other European countries may follow suit.

But such actions do not get to the root of the problem. The Haitians who need the most help are not those fortunate enough to have been away from home when the January 12 earthquake struck, but the direct victims of the disaster. President Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, should take the lead in co-ordinating an international effort to grant temporary asylum status to these victims.

Asylum is normally granted only to political refugees. Under the existing UN convention, this means someone who has “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion” in his or her home country.

The time has come to update our approach to these issues. The UN estimates that the number of people displaced by natural disasters and ecological degradation could soon pass 50m. Politics and ideology are not the only sources of extreme human suffering. The wealthier nations of the world should rise to the occasion by expanding the reach of their asylum laws. This would be an excellent precedent for future talks on modifying the 1951 refugee convention itself.

The recent wave of expedited adoptions of Haitian children throughout the world demonstrates that the international community is aware of the importance not only of sending aid but also of receiving people from the battered nation. Nevertheless, an irrational fear that refugees might stay on past their welcome combined with the power of racism are serious obstacles to the efficient and humane strategy of bringing in adults as short-term visitors. Would we maintain the same barriers to exit if Stockholm or Geneva, not Port-au-Prince, had been the victim of a natural disaster causing 200,000 deaths and almost a million homeless?

The reconstruction of Haiti will not be easy. It will take months to remove the rubble and bodies, and years before the country is back on its feet, hopefully with a bright future of vigorous economic development and democracy. Meanwhile, the Haitian people deserve all the support we can offer. This means not only air-dropping ration packets and sending in military personnel, but opening our borders.

The writer is a professor at the Institute for Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and a columnist for La Jornada newspaper and Proceso magazine

Me permití tomar el artículo integralmente del blog del autor que es de libre acceso en la red:
www.johnackerman.blogspot.com

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