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HAITI: NO WELCOME MAT FOR RETURN OF U.S. TOXIC WASTE

Inter Press Service

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, 13 June 1999 - More than12 years after the United States dumped 4,000 tons of US toxic waste in Haiti, officials here are still waiting for the green light to send it back. The cargo of contaminated garbage from Philadelphia arrived in January, 1987 on the barge Khian Sea which dumped it at an abandoned pier in the town of Gonaives, 177 kilometer north of the capital, Port-au-Prince. All efforts by Haitian authorities and environmental groups, such as Greenpeace International and the Haitian Collective for the Protection of the Environment (COHPEDA), to get the Americans to reclaim their trash had been completely ineffective, Calixte Aldrin, general secretary of the Haitian group, said last week.

Aldrin told IPS that all the Philadelphia mayor's office had done was to contribute 50,000 dollars toward the 450,000 dollars demanded by the Caribbean Dredging Excavation Company, which was assigned to return the waste last October.

Haiti's Prime Minister, Jacques Edouard Alexis, announced in early May that the United States was ready to take back the waste and contaminated soil. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, charged with resolving the affair, was in "advanced negotiations" with US authorities to return the polluted waste to its port of origin, Alexis said at the time.

Alexis added that, in addition to contacts made by Foreign Minister Fritz Longchamps, a lawyer managing Haitian interests in the United States also was involved in finding a permanent dump site for the toxic refuse on American soil. Alexis, who expressed his concern over the spread of toxic dust, emphasized that the firm MADRASOU had already been retained to repatriate the waste. In the meantime, all precautions were being taken by the Ministries of the Environment, Agriculture, and the Interior to protect the sites where the toxic materials were currently, he said.

Citizen and environmental groups from Gonaives have kept the pressure on authorities in Haiti to get things moving. On April 30, hundreds of people protested the continued presence of the toxic waste in their midst. According to the agreement signed with the government last year, Caribbean Dredging agreed to clean up 4,000 tons of toxic waste and 1000 tons of residue. The operation's first phase will consist of transporting the waste from its storage site to a warehousing area in the port of embarkation. Since 1989, the refuse has been stored in concrete tanks in the village of La Pierre, 2.5 kilometers to the north of Gonaives.

According to a report by Angela Strefenson of Greenpeace International's laboratories published January 31, 1995, the 4000 tons of industrial wastes abandoned by the captain of the Khian Sea contained heavy metal, such as lead, and benzene among other toxic chemicals.

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