NITED NATIONS - While scrambling to get a roof over their heads, the people of Haiti

are being presented with medium and long-term reconstruction plans intended to
radically change the Caribbean nation, beginning with decentralizing power to ease
pressure on the teeming capital of Port-au-Prince.

Key donors and international banking experts meet on Wednesday at UN headquarters

for a US-UN-led conference on the future of the country, shattered in a 7.0 magnitude
earthquake on January 12 in the deadliest natural disaster in modern times. Both Clintons
will be on hand: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton serves as co-chair with UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon while the former president, Bill Clinton, is the UN
envoy for Haiti reconstruction.

The donors are being asked to pledge $3.9 billion for the first 18 months. A 55-page
action plan is eventually expected to cost $11.5 billion over the next decade. President
Obama has asked Congress for $2.8 billion for both relief and reconstruction costs.

In presenting the plan, Haiti President Rene Preval is expected to explain his country's
financial needs to construct homes, schools, government institutions and attempt to
resurrect agriculture and create jobs - and a justice and social system that is responsive to
the dispossessed amid the country's rigid class structure. And a desperate need to move
many government functions, jobs and other projects into hubs away from Port-au-Prince.

"That is our challenge in New York -- not to rebuild but to 'build back better,' to create a
new Haiti," Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in an op-ed column in the Washington
Post on Monday.

Well over 200,000 people were killed in the earthquake that left over 1 million people
homeless, sleeping in the streets or in makeshift camps.

Excuses, excuses

No program is to be undertaken without the consent and input from the Haitian
government, according to Edmond Mulet, the acting chief UN representative in Haiti. He
told reporters that for years governments and charitable groups worked around Haitian
leaders, citing inefficiency and weak institutions. But he called the attitude "excuses not
to work with the government" and said the rational undermined the Haitian state instead
of helping it.

"I think the international community is co-responsible for that weakness of Haitian
institutions and the Haitian state," Mulet said. If this did not change, peacekeepers and
international interventions would be coming to Haiti "for the next 200 years."

Another plan, promoted by Mulet and some Haiti officials, is for large donors - including
Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, and the European Union, co-sponsors of the conference, --
to adopt and focus efforts on a geographical area or a thematic project (land registration,
fixing power grids, repairing roads etc) in an effort to reduce overlapping tasks.
In early February, Haiti's interior minister, Paul Antoine Bien-Aime, toured the town of
Armenia in Colombia's coffee region where a decade ago an earthquake killed 1,200
people, left tens of thousands homeless and destroyed 65 percent of the city's buildings.
Colombia established a public entity to coordinate and channel aid and assigned each
large donor a specific responsibility.

Meanwhile....

No reconstruction has begun as relief needs are still enormous. Violence has increased,
women and girls are endangered and gang leaders, locked up by UN peacekeepers,
escaped during the quake. The government lost 16,000 of its estimated 60,000 civil
servants, at least 1300 educational structures and some 50 hospitals and health centers.
And most of its office buildings, the parliament, and the presidential palace were
destroyed.

"Obviously this medium (and) long-term reconstruction recovery is incredibly important

but...if we don't get the humanitarian relief side right as well you don't have the
foundation for the successful longer-term recovery," Helen Clark, the head of the UN
Development Program, told reporters.

Shelter is still at a premium with many living in 800 or 900 makeshift camps around the
capital, some with no more than cardboard over their heads. Money and labor has to be
found to move people to larger camps outside of the city where they can be protected, but
time is running out. The UN has organized police units of women only, some from
abroad others among the Haitian police, once larger camps are set up.

Still, there is an obvious fear of sinking funds down a rat hole in an ambitious plan.
Monitoring of the funds is to be strict; outside auditors are to supervise spending under an
interim commission. It is a formidable task, with as much chance of failure as success, to
rebuild a country under plans resembling Plato's Republic in the Caribbean. But first
people have to be kept alive.

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