[Peace-discuss] Can't this administration do anything right?

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Quake victims pay deadly price for US failure -- again
	Disaster response pledged by the US to desperate Haitians
	has a chilling familiarity, writes Patrick Cockburn
	Saturday January 16 2010

The US-run aid effort for Haiti is beginning to look chillingly similar to the 
criminally slow and disorganised US government support for New Orleans after it 
was devastated by hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Five years ago, President George Bush was famously mute and detached when the 
levees broke in Louisiana.

By way of contrast, President Barack Obama was promising Haitians that 
everything would be done for survivors within hours of the calamity.

The rhetoric from Washington has been very different during these two disasters, 
but the outcome may be much the same. In both cases, very little aid arrived at 
the time it was most needed and, in the case of Port-au-Prince, when people 
trapped under collapsed buildings were still alive. When foreign rescue teams 
with heavy lifting gear do arrive it will be too late. No wonder enraged 
Haitians are building roadblocks out of rocks and dead bodies.

In New Orleans and Port-au-Prince there is the same official terror of looting 
by local people, so the first outside help to arrive is in the shape of armed 
troops. The US has 3,500 soldiers, 2,200 marines and 300 medical personnel on 
their way to Haiti.

Of course there will be looting because, with shops closed or flattened by the 
quake, this is the only way for people to get food and water.

Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. I was in Port-au-Prince in 
1994, the last time US troops landed there, when local people systematically 
tore apart police stations, taking wood and pipes and even ripping nails out of 
the walls. In the police station I was in, there were sudden cries of alarm from 
those looting the top floor as they discovered that they could not get back down 
to the ground because the entire wooden staircase had been chopped up and stolen.

I have always liked Haitians for their courage, endurance, dignity and 
originality. They often manage to avoid despair in the face of the most crushing 
disasters or any prospect that their lives will get better. Their culture, 
notably their painting and music, is among the most interesting and vibrant in 
the world.

It is sad to hear journalists who have rushed to Haiti in the wake of the 
earthquake give such misleading and even racist explanations of why Haitians are 
so impoverished, living in shanty towns with a minimal health service, little 
electricity supply, insufficient clean water and roads like river beds.

This did not happen by accident. In the 19th century it was as if the colonial 
powers never forgave Haitians for staging a successful slave revolt against the 
French plantation owners. US marines occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. 
Between 1957 and 1986 the US supported Papa Doc and Baby Doc, fearful that they 
might be replaced by a regime sympathetic to revolutionary Cuba next door.

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a charismatic populist priest, was overthrown 
by a military coup in 1991, and restored with US help in 1994. But the Americans 
were always suspicious of any sign of radicalism from this spokesman for the 
poor and the outcast and kept him on a tight lead. Tolerated by President Bill 
Clinton, Aristide was treated as a pariah by the Bush administration which 
systematically undermined him over three years leading up to a successful 
rebellion in 2004. That was led by local gangsters acting on behalf of a 
kleptocratic Haitian elite and supported by members of the Republican Party in 
the US.

So much of the criticism of Bush has focused on his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq 
that his equally culpable actions in Haiti never attracted condemnation. But if 
the country is a failed state today, partly run by the UN, in so far as it is 
run by anybody, then American actions over the years have a lot to do with it.

Haitians are now paying the price for this feeble and corrupt government 
structure because there is nobody to co-ordinate the most rudimentary relief and 
rescue efforts. Its weakness is exacerbated because aid has been funnelled 
through foreign NGOs. A justification for this is that less of the money is 
likely to be stolen, but this does not mean that much of it reaches the Haitian 
poor.

A sour Haitian joke says that when a Haitian minister skims 15pc of aid money it 
is called "corruption" and when an NGO or aid agency takes 50pc it is called 
"overheads".

Many of the smaller government aid programmes and NGOs are run by able, selfless 
people, but others are little more than rackets.

In Kabul and Baghdad, it is astonishing how little the costly endeavours of 
American aid agencies have accomplished. "The wastage of aid is sky high," said 
a former World Bank director in Afghanistan.

"There is real looting going on, mostly by private enterprises. It is a scandal."

Foreign consultants in Kabul often receive $250,000 to $500,000 a year, in a 
country where 43pc of the population live on less than a dollar a day.

None of this bodes well for Haitians hoping for relief in the short term or a 
better life in the long one. The only way this will really happen is if the 
Haitians have a legitimate state capable of providing for its people. The US 
military, the UN bureaucracy or foreign NGOs are never going to do this in Haiti 
or anywhere else.

There is nothing new in this. Americans often ask why it was that their 
occupation of Germany and Japan in 1945 succeeded so well but more than half a 
century later in Iraq and Afghanistan was so disastrous. The answer is that it 
was not the US but the efficient German and Japanese state machines which 
restored their countries. Where that machine was weak, as in Italy, the US 
relied with disastrous results on corrupt and incompetent local elites, much as 
they do today in Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti.

- PATRICK COCKBURN

Irish Independent

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