Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2011-01-18-Speech-2-623-000"
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"en.20110118.22.2-623-000"2
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"Madam President, I sincerely thank Members of Parliament for all their comments this evening. In closing, I would like to make five points.
Firstly, I agree very much with all speakers who emphasised the governance failure as the most significant factor underlying the problems Haiti faces today. That was my first impression after the earthquake and it still stands today: that bad as the earthquake was, it is not Haiti’s biggest problem. Its biggest problem is the many decades of bad governance that have practically left no social structures and government structures in place to help the Haitian people, and that creates a big deficit of trust of the Haitian people in their government.
I remember very vividly how, when I was there, universally all the Haitians I talked to had one message for me consistently, which was ‘Do not give money to the government’. Now, on the humanitarian side, we do not give money; we provide direct assistance. But it does give us pause for thought on the question of how long it will take to rebuild Haiti: it will take a very long time because it will not happen without this institutional infrastructure in place.
This being said, my second point is that there is actually a positive side to Haitian society which has helped the Haitian people survive: their own resilience and the resilience of their communities. I met people who lived together: they lost their houses together, they moved to camps together and they have organised in the camps a support system for each other, with some taking responsibility to oversee the kids and to improvise some schooling for them; others taking responsibility to find work; others, actually the women, taking on responsibility for cooking for everybody. That resilience is what gives us some hope today for the future of Haiti.
This leads on to my third point, which is that our support programmes for Haiti have to take into account what the country has and does not have. For that reason, we have, on the humanitarian side, emphasised cash for work, voucher programmes, innovations like getting seeds and tools at the Community level so that people can actually increase their reliance on themselves.
Fourthly, I am grateful for the points that were made on what lessons we have learnt from Haiti. I would not agree that we were slow to respond: help from the European Union was flowing within 24 hours. But I would agree that coordination left room for improvement and that our ability to organise ourselves before a disaster strikes is absolutely essential. In this sense, I am grateful for the point that was made that, based on lessons from Haiti, we have indeed moved in the direction of creating a European Response Capacity and stronger coordination through the European Disaster Response Centre.
Let me then move to a last point, looking forward on the humanitarian side. What is it that we are very worried about? It is actually the question of protection, especially for women, and of increasing our support for dealing with the tragedy of primarily women-led households stuck in the camps. I can assure you that this year, as well as with the funding next year, we will put the emphasis on making sure that this question of protection is addressed and that the EU is there for people.
Let me, in closing, just thank everyone once again for their comments and especially those of you who have recognised the sacrifice of the humanitarian workers for the benefit of the people of Haiti."@en1
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