From the Baltimore Sun
By Jeffrey Buchanan
December 13, 2006
WASHINGTON
-- This is Human Rights Week, an appropriate time to consider a strange
situation: The United States, a leader on the issue of improving human
rights after disasters around the world, is refusing to apply the same
high standards to a serious human rights crisis here at home.
Hurricane
Katrina - and the man-made crisis that followed - was a disaster
unprecedented in the U.S. More than a million people were uprooted from
their communities; about 300,000 from New Orleans alone are still
displaced well over a year after the levees broke.
Community
leaders embrace the idea that all the storm's survivors have a right to
participate in the rebuilding process and to return to their
neighborhoods.
"There are instances of officials at all levels
of government siding against repairing homes and restoring the lives of
displaced people," Stephen Bradberry, Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now head organizer in New Orleans, told me.
This
idea is supported by the United Nations' "Guiding Principles on
Internal Displacement," the internationally approved framework to
protect a person's human rights before, during and after being
displaced by a humanitarian disaster.
The principles include the
right to shelter, food, water, due process and equal justice, as well
as the right to health, access to information and the right to vote and
participate in local decisions about rebuilding. Under the principles,
final responsibility for the human rights of displaced people in the
United States falls to the federal government. It must create
conditions allowing the displaced to voluntarily return and prevent
them from being displaced longer than necessary.
The U.S. Agency
for International Development endorses the principles and uses U.S. tax
dollars to implement its framework in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, postwar
Iraq and Colombia. Oddly, Bush administration officials over the summer
told the U.N. Human Rights Committee that Americans displaced by
Katrina - whom they evasively call "evacuees" rather than the legally
correct "internally displaced persons" - do not deserve the rights
extended under the principles. Legal scholars with the Institute for
Southern Studies have found the federal government in violation of 16
of 30 guiding principles.
The U.S. government's failures to
respond to Hurricane Katrina have been well-documented, but few realize
the role the federal government has played in stopping the displaced
from receiving the aid they need to pull their lives back together to
return and rebuild.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency
arbitrarily denied thousands of vulnerable, displaced families access
to housing aid - until a federal judge ruled against the agency this
month, describing FEMA's system for delivering aid as "Kafkaesque."
FEMA has refused the judge's order to resume payments as it mounts a
legal appeal, while many displaced people face evictions.
Thousands
of families have been permanently evicted from New Orleans public
housing by the city's U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
administrator, the Housing Authority of New Orleans. The authority
plans to use relief funds to bulldoze 5,000 habitable apartments to
develop mixed-income housing, with room for only 10 percent as many
low-income people.
Displaced people scattered across 46 states
have no way of knowing the current state of their homes and
neighborhoods. FEMA refuses to use its knowledge about the whereabouts
of the displaced to help them stay informed and participate with local
authorities in decisions that will affect their families and
communities.
Displaced homeowners remain unable to afford the
repairs they need to return, even as $10.4 billion in federal aid to
homeowners given to Louisiana has reached only 44 families.
In
August, New Orleans was about to begin seizing the homes of displaced
people who had not been able to afford to restore their property;
federal authorities were silent about this unconstitutional abuse of
property rights. Local advocates such as ACORN had to pressure the City
Council and at the last minute reformed a local ordinance to protect
the disadvantaged and to allow appeals.
The United States can
still lead the world in human rights advocacy, but leadership must
begin at home. The federal government needs to step up as the defender
of human rights in this country. The incoming Congress must work with
the president to make sure these kinds of abuses will not occur in
future relief efforts. It is not too late to create policies that will
empower the displaced to return and participate in rebuilding their
lives, their communities and the entire Gulf Coast.
Jeffrey Buchanan is information officer at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial's Center for Human Rights, www.rfkmemorial.org [3].
Copyright © 2006, The Baltimore Sun
