Haiti, where, almost three years since a 7.0 earthquake devastated the country, rebuilding has barely begun. Almost 400,000 people are still living in crowded camps. A new report by Amnesty International says the housing situation in Haiti is “nothing short of catastrophic.” The earthquake on January 12th, 2010, killed roughly 300,000 people and left more than 1.5 million homeless in what was already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. A cholera epidemic, widely blamed on international U.N. troops, spread shortly after the earthquake and killed almost 8,000 people, making more than half a million sick.
According to reports, only about half the $5.3 billion in promised funding from international donors has been paid out. Critics point out that even of the money thats been delivered, very little has made it directly to the Haitian people, going instead to international non-governmental organizations, private companies involved in the relief effort.
Jonathan Katz talking:
The world saw all the images of this enormous relief effort then that appeared suddenly in Haiti and with promises. there were some very expensive Band-Aids purchased. a lot of the money thats spent in the wake of any natural disaster, but especially in a foreign aid context, kind of goes in circles. Youre looking at a lot of money literally burned off for jet fuel or spent on hotel rooms for aid workers and officials who are on their way down, and even things that, you know, really did ultimately buy things that got into the hands of people in Haiti. You know, if you donated money to an organization that specialized in providing tarps for shelter and bags of rice for people to eat, you know, afterward, people are left with a tarp and an empty bag of rice. And so, what really strikes you when you look at it is that there was a lack of permanence and a lack of durability.
Clinton wore so many hats that it would take all our time to discuss all of his different individual roles. I mean, I would say that, largely, Bill Clinton probably was doing what he thought was best, in many circumstances. But Clinton had actually become the U.N. special envoy for Haiti in the year before the earthquake. And Clintons priorities are very particular. He came down with an aim, for instance, to revitalize the garment sector, which some people call sweatshops, low-wage assembly factories that are producing for export to the United States. And in some ways, those projects were successful in the sense that they accomplished the goal that they had set out, the goal of opening these factories back up. The question is whether or not that actually is a long-term benefit for Haiti, and many people say its not. And I think they actually make a quite persuasive argument.
two governments over the period of the last three years. At the time of the earthquake, it was the government of René Préval, and there was actually an election held just a couple months after the earthquake, of course, and that resulted in the election of Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly as president.
the problem hasthroughout, has been the problem that, again, affects foreign aid all over the world, in which donor countries avoid local governments, they avoid local institutions, they fund through their own agencies, their own NGOs, their own militaries, and that weakens institutions. And as a result, the institutions were already weak coming into the earthquake, so they had a very, very hard time responding on their own.
The president ofat that time, René Préval, was famously very absent from the public eye, even though he was apparently zipping around town on a motorcycle on his own. Since then, theres been an election. The election was a bit of a mess. There was a very heavy hand of the international community. President Martelly has an extremely different governing style than President Préval, but the institutions are no stronger than they were before, and thats really the problem.
Last month, the U.N. launched a $2.2 billion campaign to wipe out cholera over the next decade in Haiti, where the epidemic, widely blamed on U.N. troops, has killed thousands of people.
all evidence shows the United Nations peacekeepers brought the epidemic in the first place. And in some ways even worse than that, or at least more grossly negligent, the U.N. has done a very good job of avoiding accountability over the last two, two-and-a-half years.
The newest initiative that the United Nations has put forwardI mean, eradication is a good, if lofty, goal, but this project doesnt really seem to be able to do that. Its mostly reshuffling around existing money, sanitation and water projects that were promised even before the cholera outbreak began in the first place. And the United Nations is itself putting in very little money, especially in light, again, of all of the evidence. And it is really a mountain of uncontradicted evidence that the United Nations is responsible for the worst cholera outbreak in recent history.
there have definitely been moments that I was living in Haiti that I talked to people even in areas like Cité Soleil, where people have also suffered quite a bit from the presence of the United Nations troops in terms of collateral damage, you know, children being killed in crossfires by U.N. bullets, who were still even praising them being there because they felt that they were driving down crime. But theres a lot of resentment to the presence of the peacekeepers. And what were really dealing with now is mission creep. Theyve been there for so long, since 2004, the mission now wouldnt seem to have anything to do with whatever the mission was originally, and its really unclear to most Haitians why these foreign troops are on their soil.
The Big Truck That Went By
It actually comes from a phrase in Creole, gwo machin ki pasé, “the big truck that went by.” It describes the sound of the earthquake. Part of the reason why people were using different names—and that was one of several that were going around after the quake—was because there wasn’t a lot of experience with earthquakes, even though there have been some in Haitian history. And so, people were just looking for a way to describe it.
But the two other pieces of it is I knew it would be evocative for, you know, readers in the States and elsewhere of the big aid effort that came through, and also, for me, it was evocative of the private trucks that would go through the city before the earthquake, because of the dissolution of the Haitian state, delivering basic services like water and power. And so, it sort of has a triple meaning.
the impact of these celebrities on the so-called—on the reconstruction effort.
Sean Penn, for instance, is actually a fascinating character. It’s not—you can’t simply write him off as being a celebrity who came in for a photo-op, and he’s certainly not. But that doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t be—once you take him seriously, it doesn’t mean that that’s the end of the conversation. You know, he came in. He had no experience with Haiti. He had very—he had no experience being an actual aid worker, that—he really became one. He had on-the-ground training. But in the process of that on-the-ground training, within weeks, he is a leader in the aid effort. In the cluster meetings at the United Nations base in Port-au-Prince, he’s taking a leading role. He’s being invited to testify before Congress about the situation in Haiti. he was allowed to sort of skip all of the interim steps between being new to a field and then becoming a leader in the field, simply because of his celebrity in the States, but also because of the differential in power between foreigners—white foreigners—and Haitians. he was able to come in and be more important in Haiti than nearly anybody else in Haiti, simply because he was an important person in a powerful country.
he basically became the mayor of a village of, you know, tens of thousands of people, somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 people, depending on who’s counting and on what day. It’s an incredible amount of responsibility. And, you know—and I have to say, you know, I’ve talked to Sean Penn a number of times, and I think he took his responsibilities seriously. But he also didn’t shun the incredible amount of power that he was bestowed with.
One example that I talk about in the book—and this was fairly early on while he was still really learning the ropes—was that there was a very unfortunate case in which a young man, among the displaced people that he was overseeing, contracted diphtheria and died. And it was—it’s a tragedy; it was very sad. And Sean Penn, I think, did commendable work trying to get him help. In fact, he used his celebrity and his power to mobilize assistance for the young man in a way that nobody else, not even another aid worker, would have been able to do. But then, you know, focused on this one case, he took to the airwaves—I think he went on CNN—and, you know, really stirred up a bit of a panic about a pending diphtheria outbreak, which wasn’t happening and wasn’t likely, which, you know, allocated resources. It changed the dynamic on the ground. It was just an example of an error that a more experienced aid worker probably wouldn’t have made. And even though there is something to be said for being new and doing things in a different way than have been done so ineffectively before, you really have to—you really have to be careful. It’s so easy to come in in Haiti and step on toes and be a bull in a china shop.
Wyclef Jean is another interesting guy. You know, he obviously briefly became a politician, probably had the inside track to being president of Haiti, had he not been excluded from the ballot right before the election in 2010. There were a lot of questions about his NGO, Yele Haiti, even at the time. Since then, even more revelations have come out that he was maybe pocketing money himself. He was using funds from the NGO to pay himself to do performances—you know, a lot of really ugly things. And the charity has been thoroughly discredited at this point. But, you know, he’s another—he’s another interesting character.
because of these disclosures that he had unpaid taxes, that it was using money, you know, to—perhaps to line his own pockets, or at least to help with his recording career, and not do what was promised, which was, you know, to help people on the ground in Haiti. You know, and ultimately—one of the most disappointing things about Yele is that it was looked at as being—you know, since it was run by a Haitian American, it was a Haitian NGO, that maybe it would be more on-the-ground and, you know, more direct assistance to the people who actually live there. But in many ways, it turned out to be worse than a lot of even, you know, the so-called Beltway bandits.
ow the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. part of the problem is that our conception of how foreign aid works is not how it actually happens. We imagine that, you know, powerful countries just have this pot of money, and that when they give foreign aid, they just hand it over to a poorer or vulnerable country, and that if there aren’t results on the ground, that something must have happened—the money must have gotten stolen, or there must have just been gross incompetence, and somebody put the pot somewhere and forgot where they left it, right? But that’s not really what happens.
You know, what ends up happening is the money is spent by the donor governments on their own agencies within their own governments. You know, as I’ve said, the money kind of goes in circles. It goes to priorities that the donors think are important, but are not necessarily actually the priorities that are most important on the ground, or at least are not the priorities that the people who live in these countries actually want. And very little effort is made to cross language barriers, to take into account these gross disparities in power. And so, you know, people come in, and oftentimes they have good intentions. Sometimes they have good intentions combined with their own profit motive. But what ends up happening is that the aid system is helped, the NGOs grow more powerful, the governments are able to, you know, circulate more money amongst themselves and amongst their own favored elements, but, you know, in the case of Haiti, as a really good example, the emergency situation becomes permanent. And every time there is a new crisis, and—the officials can say, “We can’t do it better this time. There’s no time. Let’s do it next time.” But then it never changes.
I would say that there really is cause for optimism, because there is an opportunity—there’s always an opportunity to change the way things have been done and to do them better. But, you know, what I’ve seen and what the people that I’ve interviewed have said, who really know the situation, including, you know, aid workers from these major organizations who are on the ground, is that things have to change. And if things can start changing now, things will improve. But if foreign aid keeps being done in the way that it has been done and the situation in Haiti remains the way that it has been, we’re going to see more and more and more of these disasters, and possibly even a repeat of the tragedy of January 12th.
– source democracynow.org, 2