Jeffrey Buchanan is the information officer for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, a human rights organization dedicated to supporting grassroots defenders in the U.S. and around the world.
Human Rights Day , which was December 10, is an appropriate time to review a serious human rights crisis here in the United States: The fate of people from the Gulf Coast—particularly from New Orleans—displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Our nation’s greatest natural disaster—and the man-made crisis that followed—were on an unprecedented scale. More than a million people were uprooted from their communities after the storm, and over 300,000 from New Orleans alone are still displaced over one year after the levees broke.
Community leaders in the city are embracing the idea that all the storm’s survivors have a right to return to their neighborhoods to participate in the rebuilding process. But their efforts are being barred by federal, state and local authorities.
"There are instances of officials at all levels of government siding against repairing homes and restoring the lives of displaced people," said Stephen Bradberry, ACORN head organizer in New Orleans and 2005 winner of the RFK Human Rights award. There needs to be a fundamental shift towards government assistance that supports the right to return to a place once called home.”
This idea is supported by the U.N.’s Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the internationally approved framework to protect 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, the final responsibility for the human rights of displaced people in the United States falls to the federal government. It is required to create conditions allowing the displaced to voluntarily return and prevent them from being displaced longer than necessary.
The U.S. Agency for International Development already endorses the Principles, and uses U.S. tax dollars to implement its framework in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, post-war Iraq and Colombia. Oddly, Bush administration officials over the summer told the U.N. Human Rights Committee that they do not believe Americans displaced by Katrina, who they evasively re-brand as “evacuees,” deserve the rights extended under the Principles. While the United States can be proud of its international leadership improving human rights situations after disasters abroad, it has not helped Americans realize those same human rights standards. Legal scholars with the Institute of Southern Studies have found the federal government in violation of 16 of 30 Principles.
The U.S. government’s failures to respond to Hurricane Katrina have been well documented but fewer people realize the federal role in stopping the displaced from receiving the aid necessary to pull their lives back together to return and rebuild.
FEMA arbitrarily denied thousands of vulnerable displaced families access to housing aid—until a federal judge ruled against the agency last week, describing FEMA’s system for delivering aid as “Kafkaesque.” Still, FEMA has refused the judges orders to begin payments while it mounts a legal appeal. Hurricane survivors, leaders from ACORN and Members of Congress like Maxine Waters, D-Calif., Al Green, D-Texas, Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, and Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., pressed federal officials in Washington, D.C., New Orleans and Houston this week to follow the judge’s orders and resume payments to save displaced survivors facing eviction.
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, HANO. In a saddening twist, the agency plans to use relief funds to bulldoze 5,000 habitable apartments—the majority of the city’s subsidized housing—senselessly denying their former tenants their right to return home. Instead, they plan to start building mixed income housing, with room for only 10 percent as many low-income people—further shrinking the city’s stock of affordable housing at the same time as rental prices have already risen as much as 70 percent.
To the detriment of local democracy, hundreds of thousands of displaced people—scattered across 46 different states—have no way of knowing the current state of their homes and neighborhoods. FEMA refuses to use its knowledge about the current whereabouts of the displaced to help these citizens stay informed and participate with local authorities in decisions that will affect their families and communities. Local officials, community organizations, and churches have had to improvise to plan and communicate about important new policies.
Displaced homeowners remain unable to afford the repairs necessary to move home, even as $10.4 billion in federal aid to homeowners given to the state of Louisiana has reached only 44 families. How could the state rationalize sitting idly on these vital funds while its citizens continue to suffer?
Mayor Ray Nagin recently told USA Today local officials cannot access most of the federal government’s almost a billion dollars pledged to rebuild New Orleans' infrastructure. The government, in his view, has violated federal laws requiring it to assist in the rebuilding of the vital infrastructure, necessary to encourage people and businesses to return.
Neither are city officials without fault. In August, the city of New Orleans was about to begin seizing the homes of displaced people who had not been able to afford to restore their property—as the federal government remained silent about this blatant abuse of property rights. Thankfully, brave local advocates like ACORN pressured the city council and at the last minute recrafted a local ordinance to protect the rights of the disadvantaged, and to permit appeals.
The federal government needs to step up as the defender of the values our country defined in helping craft the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. The United States can still lead the world in human rights, but leadership must begin at home. There is still hope that the incoming Congress will work with the president, ending the federal indifference to the abuses faced by the displaced in rebuilding efforts—and to make sure these kinds of abuses will not occur in future relief efforts. It is not too late for the federal government to adapt their policies to limit suffering and empower the displaced to return and participate in rebuilding their lives, their communities and the entire Gulf Coast.
