Bill Clinton: 20,000 to 40,000 Could Die in Haiti Now If Not Moved To Higher Ground

March 29, 2010 (LPAC)—In an impassioned presentation to NGOs and donors operating in Haiti on March 24, Special Envoy Bill Clinton said that 20,000 to 40,000 people could die if they are not moved to higher ground. "We gotta get those people out of there now," he said.

"Here's the problem. If they die, our concern about the services we were going to provide them two weeks from now, won't sound very good.... I am pleading with you, if you can do anything about this now." Clinton said that the necessary action will not come from some grand centralized effort, but must be done now by those who have the means to help.

The difficulty with a centralized effort is that President Barack Obama turned down the emergency action needed more than one month ago.

On Feb. 22, Lyndon LaRouche called upon the Obama administration to offer the Haitian government the logistical capability of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to carry out precisely that urgent relocation in the centralized fashion required to save the 1.3 million lives in imminent danger of dying from mass epidemics of dengue, cholera, malaria, typhoid and other diseases during the coming rainy season. A few days later, LaRouche PAC learned that senior U.S. political figures had presented such a proposal to the White House on their own. The proposal was rejected out of hand. Instead, despite the foreseeable second humanitarian catastrophe of mass death through disease, the U.S. military capabilities deployed to Haiti for the relief effort were ordered to begin their pull-out. LaRouche asked then: how many Haitians must die before we impeach President Obama?

Now, more than five weeks later, the rainy season is here, and as the former President warned in his speech at New York University's Rosenthal Pavillion, mass death could strike at any time. "Nobody knows what the weather is going to do. Maybe we'll catch a huge break," he said. "But every day we leave people in a low camp at risk of flooding, when we don't have to, is a day we put their lives at risk."

Clinton noted also that the chief U.S. Army engineer in Haiti has said that encampments that typically get high winds, but won't flood out, are at risk to hurricanes. "A 40-mile-an-hour wind could blow down a lot of those places there," said the former President. He said he is trying to get at least one big hurricane-resistant building to be erected in each of the camps. Clinton urged the NGOs and others to work with the government of Haiti in its efforts to "decentralize and decompress" Port-au-Prince. Aid, he said, must be used to support the government and its plans to rebuild. The NGOs must adopt as their mission "to work ourselves out of a job" in Haiti, by strengthening its capacity to become self-sufficient.

THE PRESIDENT OF USA.

OBAMA WATCH. 

http://www.larouchepac.com/obamawatch

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