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  After Hurricane Melissa, Haiti’s Southern Peninsula Demands Help — and Accountability   By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson * (Le Français suit) PORT-AU-PRINCE — The storm had a name; the losses do not. As Hurricane Melissa tore across Haiti’s southern peninsula this week, rivers rose into homes, bridges buckled and long-fragile roads snapped. By Friday, local authorities were estimating more than 23 deaths, with over 20 reported in Petit-Goâve alone, and families still searching for the missing in rural communes where the water fell fastest and help is slowest. In a stark Creole-language communiqué, a grassroots coalition from the south, Evèy Gran Sid, cataloged not only the damage — ruined harvests, drowned livestock, collapsed classrooms and clinics, severed market routes — but the failures that made it worse: rivers left undredged, floodplains unprotected, no preventive evacuations, official warnings that came late or not at all. “We have been living in calamity si...

  In Haiti, naming the war to better end it By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson * (Le français suit) PORT-AU-PRINCE — At dawn, the streets open or close to the rhythm of rumors: such and such a road has held, such and such a market has folded, such and such a school will not open. Daily life seems to be confined to corridors that are lit intermittently. In a country where the "crisis" has been described so much that it has almost lost words, one thing is clear: Haiti is at war — an asymmetrical war against the very routine of living. This truth, long diluted in the euphemisms of the "transition", invites us to make a simple and radical choice: stop entrusting the future to arrangements of continuity that replay the same play, and instead bring together all the forces willing to build a fairer and more republican nation, breaking with political dependence and the parody of democracy that only gives birth to contested elections. The question is no longer rhetorical:...

  Haiti’s Transition Faces a Deadline. What Comes Next? By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson (Le Français suit) PORT-AU-PRINCE — Haiti’s transition is running on borrowed time. With roughly three months left before the mandate of the nine-member Presidential Transitional Council (CPT) expires in early February, the question that has stalked this process from the beginning has returned to the center: who governs after February 7 — and on what authority? The Caribbean Community’s Eminent Persons Group, which helped midwife the current arrangement, has written to the April 3, 2024 Accord signatories asking them to state, in writing, how they believe the transition should end and what should come next. The note, conveyed this week by Ambassador Colin Granderson and seen by Haitian media, comes after months of private prodding. The signatories, many of whom have not met collectively since 2024 to review the CPT’s performance, are now being asked to take public positions. Inside the CPT...