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

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Our Role in Haiti's Plight
	by Peter Hallward

Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an 
earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti's capital city on Tuesday 
afternoon, but it's no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a 
war zone.  Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous 
disaster to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly man-made 
outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.

The country has faced more than its fair share of catastrophes.  Hundreds died 
in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the huge earthquake of 
7 May 1842 may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of Cap Haitien alone. 
Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, mostly recently in 2004 and 
again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the town of Gonaïves and 
swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more than a thousand 
people and destroying many thousands of homes.  The full scale of the 
destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several 
weeks.  Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term 
impact is incalculable.

What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the 
result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and 
disempowerment.  Haiti is routinely described as the "poorest country in the 
western hemisphere".  This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most 
brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades 
of systematic postcolonial oppression.

The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its 
"humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the 
suffering it now aims to reduce.  Ever since the US invaded and occupied the 
country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move 
(in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a 
dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US 
government and some of its allies.

Aristide's own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest 
victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally 
sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the 
population smouldering in resentment.  The UN has subsequently maintained a 
large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.

Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% 
of the population "lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% -- four and a half 
million people -- live on less than $1 per day".  Decades of neoliberal 
"adjustment" and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any 
significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. 
Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such 
destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the 
foreseeable future.

It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the 
horror in Port-au-Prince today.  Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal 
assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small 
farmers into overcrowded urban slums.  Although there are no reliable 
statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in 
desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the 
side of deforested ravines.  The selection of the people living in such places 
and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the 
injuries they have suffered.

As Brian Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in 
Haiti, points out: "Those people got there because they or their parents were 
intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and trade policies 
specifically designed to create a large captive and therefore exploitable labour 
force in the cities; by definition they are people who would not be able to 
afford to build earthquake resistant houses."  Meanwhile the city's basic 
infrastructure -- running water, electricity, roads, etc -- remains woefully 
inadequate, often non-existent.  The government's ability to mobilise any sort 
of disaster relief is next to nil.

The international community has been effectively ruling Haiti since the 2004 
coup.  The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti now, 
however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any 
extension of the UN mission's mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. 
Proposals to divert some of this "investment" towards poverty reduction or 
agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns 
that continue to shape the distribution of international "aid".

The same storms that killed so many in 2008 hit Cuba just as hard but killed 
only four people.  Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal "reform", 
and its government retains a capacity to defend its people from disaster.  If we 
are serious about helping Haiti through this latest crisis then we should take 
this comparative point on board.  Along with sending emergency relief, we should 
ask what we can do to facilitate the self-empowerment of Haiti's people and 
public institutions.  If we are serious about helping we need to stop trying to 
control Haiti's government, to pacify its citizens, and to exploit its economy. 
  And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we've already 
done.

Peter Hallward is professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex 
University and author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of 
Containment.  This article was first published by the Guardian on 13 January


C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>     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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