Bill Clinton lobbies for earthquake aid to Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Former President Bill Clinton said desperately needed U.S. aid is coming to Haiti despite delays after listening on Wednesday to refugees in a sprawling homeless camp complain of a lack of food, jobs and housing nine months after a devastating earthquake.

Clinton, the co-chair of the commission overseeing Haiti's reconstruction, expressed frustration with the slow delivery of promised funds by donors who have delivered about $732 million of a promised $5.3 billion in funds for 2010-11, along with debt relief. Most notably absent is the United States, which has yet to deliver any of its promised $1.15 billion.

"First of all, in the next day or so it will become obvious that the United States is making a huge down payment on that," the former U.S. president and husband of the current secretary of state told reporters without providing details. "Secondly I'm not too concerned — although I'm frustrated — because the Congress have approved the money that the Secretary of State and the White House asked for."

The stakes were made clear in a morning visit to a storm-battered hillside former golf-course in Port-au-Prince now home to 55,000 increasingly desperate Haitians, who told Clinton amid mosquito swarms and fraying tarps that they need money, jobs, houses and education to get out of the dangerous and inhospitable camp where they are stuck.

Hours later Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive stood in the sweltering heat before the former U.S. Embassy that is now Bellerive's office to announce $777 million in projects for education, business, rubble removal and other areas freshly approved by the commission they jointly lead.

Clinton singled out, without naming, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn for holding up an authorization bill that could have eased the flow of money. Coburn's secret hold on the bill — used because he objected to a $5 million provision to create the office of a senior Haiti coordinator of U.S. policy — was revealed by an Associated Press investigation last week.

Citing "a rather bizarre system of rules in the United States Senate," Clinton said that "barely over one-half of 1 percent of the money that's been approved is holding up all the rest."

"Since I believe that we are still essentially a sane as well as a humane country I believe the money will be released, and when that happens that will also give a lot of other donors encouragement to raise their money," Clinton said.