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High energy biscuits get mixed reviews in Cite Soleil

2010-02-06T01:05:00Z

By Ansel Herz (originally published by Rueters)

PORT-AU-PRINCE (AlertNet) - A gentle breeze blew discarded U.N. biscuit wrappings jerkily across the dust in this makeshift camp in the Haitian capital's most notorious slum.

Each gust threatened to topple the shelters of sticks and sheets that are now home to around 100 families left shelterless by the earthquake.

"We want any help we can find," said Rosemand Bolivar, a grandmother who shares a patch of dirt beneath a faded pink bed sheet with her son, his wife and their three children.

Only the most heavily armed U.N. peacekeepers venture into the sprawling seafront slum of Cite Soleil (Sun City), home to the most feared gangs in Port-au-Prince.

For days security worries prevented U.N. food deliveries - now well established in other parts of Port-au-Prince -- from reaching Cite Soleil. This delayed essential aid for increasingly desperate and hungry people three weeks after the earthquake which devastated the Caribbean state.

The U.N.'s World Food Programme (WFP) has said it is increasing food distribution around the city and that it now feeds over 100,000 people a day.

But not -- at the start of the week at least -- in Cite Soleil.

"There has been an upsurge in gang violence in the last few days so we haven't been able to distribute food in Cite Soleil," Marcus Prior, WFP's spokesman in Port-au-Prince, said on Monday.

But by Thursday two sites in the slum were up and running, bringing the total in the city to 16, he said.

"We are encouraged," he said, "but there is still a long way to go."

But at the camp in Cite Soleil, some debated the merits of the little food aid that the WFP had managed to deliver earlier on ad hoc missions accompanied by U.N. troops.

Judette Cange said she knows the high-energy biscuits, called bon-bon, are packed with vitamins, but she will not give them to her children.

"They have ants in them. They have insects and they have expired already," she said, pointing to the brown crackers.

"We need rice, water, and tents. We don't want bad food."

A few white plastic wrappers are littered about the camp. They have expiry dates that are one or two days past due. Residents said they were given out by U.S. soldiers and at a nearby police station.

Some families appeared to be setting the biscuits aside in their makeshift tents, reluctant to eat them if they can find other food.

Two vendors sell balls of fried batter at the entrance to the field-turned-camp at normal, pre-disaster prices. But Haitian staples such as rice and beans are nowhere to be seen.

But the WFP biscuits have won some fans.

Bolivar, the grandmother, said the biscuits were nutritious and her children love them.

"They're good, they're good!" she said, bursting with enthusiasm.

(Editing by James Kilner in Port-au-Prince)

Democracy Now Interview with Bill Quigley

2010-02-05T00:36:00Z

Democracy Now

Bill Quigley, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. He just returned from a trip to Haiti.

AMY GOODMAN: As we move on now to Haiti, it’s been three weeks since the massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated much of the country. The official death toll stands at 170,000; it’s expected to rise. Many more have been left injured and homeless. A full twenty-one days after the quake, survivors are still desperate to receive aid, with food, water and medical relief not reaching the areas it’s needed most.

In the Haitian town of Gressier, residents blocked roads and seized trucks Friday to protest the lack of aid. Residents said trucks with humanitarian assistance have driven through the town on the road to Léogâne, but have not stopped to distribute any aid in Gressier. Well, when we drove to Gressier two weeks ago, a young man approached us to say, well, just that.

STEVENSON CALIXTE: [translated] Up until now, people are suffering. [inaudible] People are wounded. They have broken bones. And they haven’t done anything. There are no doctors. There’s nothing, nothing here. We, here in Gressier, we don’t have anything. And they haven’t told us anything, either. And for the wounded, we can’t even figure out. And 98 percent of the houses have been destroyed.

AMY GOODMAN: Where are the people buried?

STEVENSON CALIXTE: [translated] They made a hole up here. Some places, they made mass graves.

AMY GOODMAN: Are people still caught in the rubble?

STEVENSON CALIXTE: [translated] Yes, yes, up until now. We don’t know if they’re living or dead. There’s nothing. We have no means to know if they’re living or dead. The only thing I know, everywhere you go, when you smell the odor, you know that there are people dead there.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the US military on Monday resumed medical evacuation flights of critically injured Haitian earthquake victims after suspending the flights for five days. This is Air Force Colonel Len Profenna.

COL. LEN PROFENNA: We’re here to help the Haitians, and we want to move the patients as long as they’re given to us. If I’m given the mission to move the patients, I move the patients. As far as how the decision was made to stop and start, I was not involved in that decision.

AMY GOODMAN: The US military had ended the evacuation flights on Wednesday because Florida officials complained their hospitals were overwhelmed and they needed a plan for reimbursement for the care they were providing. The federal government announced Monday it would reimburse American hospitals who treat earthquake victims. Medical officials said the suspension of flights had been catastrophic for patients.

In the meantime, Haitians continue to bury their dead. On Monday, dozens of residents in the northern Haitian town of Titanyen gathered to bury relatives in a mass grave. One resident, Cartel Casseus, blasted the international community’s response to the disaster and called for the return of the ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

CARTEL CASSEUS: [translated] The Americans and the French have been in Haiti for a long time, and they never do anything. Only Aristide will do something for us. Each time Aristide wants to make a change, they make him fly away. I want to die for him. We are the people of Aristide, and we believe he’s going to come back. We don’t live, because we don’t have possibilities. We can’t go to school. We can’t go to work. We live on the street.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined here in the Democracy Now! studio in New York by Bill Quigley, the legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights. He has just returned from Haiti.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Bill. What did you find?

BILL QUIGLEY: Well, tragically, there was very little international assistance available in any of the neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince where we were. We saw tremendous examples of Haitians helping Haitians and sharing what they had, trying to take care of each other, but tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people living what I think the media has called “tent cities,” what really are sheet camps, that people don’t even have tents. They have sheets strung on ropes, with people under them.

And I really think that any person in the United States, any person in the international community that was dropped into any neighborhood in Port-au-Prince and walked two blocks would be shocked at the absence of international assistance there, because I think there was such an outpouring of individual charitable response, and—but that is just not getting to the people of Haiti.

As you know, I lived through Katrina, and I have been an advocate in there, but we’re talking, at this point, of a death toll that is a hundred times as serious as what happened in Katrina, and people without resources, without food, without water, without shelter. There has been another sixty aftershocks in the last couple of weeks. The engineers and people are advising people that they cannot move back into their houses. There is very little shelter. And there is some assistance in terms of healthcare; there’s a fair amount of international response in terms of that. But a comprehensive assistance for the people of Haiti is just not there.

AMY GOODMAN: The Associated Press reports that the Haitian government is receiving less than a penny for each dollar the United States spends on aid efforts in Haiti. Thirty-three cents of every dollar goes to the US military?

BILL QUIGLEY: Yes. Everybody who’s concerned should take a look at that brief report, because a third of it goes to military response, another third of it is going through and that, that—who knows how much of that money is actually getting into the hands of Haitians? And only one cent.

And one of the people that was very concerned that I spoke with there, I was telling him about the challenges that we had in Katrina, with out-of-state contractors and people from outside the community coming in and doing the jobs and then leaving, and he said, “Well, Bill, at least that money stayed in your own country.” He said, “You know, in the case of Haiti, it’s the outsiders who are coming in, the outsiders who are getting the assistance and getting the jobs, and then they’re going back with the money and the time back to their own country, and Haiti is being left with nothing.”

AMY GOODMAN: How does Haiti compare to the Haiti you knew before? You’ve been there many, many times.

BILL QUIGLEY: Haiti has always struggled. And, you know, the most impoverished country in our hemisphere. But it is much, much worse off. It is much harder to be a Haitian today than it’s ever been. And I think, unfortunately, from what I could see on the ground, the need of people is continuing to rise. People are getting sicker. They’re getting thinner. They have less and less food. But while the need is rising, the international response is leveling out and, if not, sort of declining. So I really fear that without a significant change in the response of the sisters and brothers of Haiti around the world, that what’s in front of Haiti for the next couple of weeks and couple of months is much worse than what it is today.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the best way to get aid to Haiti, do you think?

BILL QUIGLEY: I think that, historically, Haitians have helped Haitians and that the greatest source of—single source of money in Haiti’s economy has been money from other Haitians that have sent money in. That has been backed up because of a lack of money, lack of communications, that sort of stuff. So I think assisting Haitians in the United States to get money directly to family members in Haiti is very important.

The people on the ground kept telling me, “Put pressure on USAID to work with the Haitian community organizations, the churches.” The government is in collapse. There’s no doubt about that. And people are very upset with their government there. And you hear people saying Haitians want the United States to take over. I don’t think anybody want—I didn’t meet anybody who wants the United States to take over. They do want more assistance, and they do want assistance working in partnership with local organizations, who are begging for food and water. And they said they’ll be in charge of distributing that. And they’re ready to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: And you still—and you have this aid that we saw at the airport in Port-au-Prince, the massive mound of aid that is piled high. When we were there, aside from everything else, there were thousands of bottles of Aquafina water. A truck pulled up. We thought, oh, maybe there’s hope. And men started loading the truck, and we went up to them and asked them where are they bringing this water, and they said, “To the US embassy.”

BILL QUIGLEY: Well, there is a sense that some of the aid has been brought into the country, but it is being held in secret storage places, because whoever has it hasn’t figured out how to distribute it yet in a fair way. But in the meantime, literally, there are babies dying of malnutrition. There are elders who are dying from the shock and untreated wounds that they have had. And this is not something that we can’t do something. We can do it. But there seems to be a lack of a will. There’s lack of communication, lack of coordination.

AMY GOODMAN: The issue of letting Haitians into the United States, this holding off of critically injured Haitians to Florida hospitals?

BILL QUIGLEY: That is just disgraceful. It is just—it’s unbelievable that the state of Florida, the United States, the medical communities around the country, couldn’t figure a way to take these most critically ill, but still savable, people in. And I think it was a huge mistake on our part. But I think it is a good example of exactly what’s going on, magnified by a thousand, of what’s going on in Haiti itself.

AMY GOODMAN: The latest news of Haitian authorities arresting ten Baptist missionaries from the United States after they were caught, well, the Haitian authorities said, attempting to smuggle thirty-three Haitian children out of Haiti. These missionaries are saying, no, they just didn’t do the proper paperwork.

BILL QUIGLEY: As people know, half of Haitians are under the age of fifteen. It’s a very young country. There are little children all over the place. There are orphans all over the place. And the truth is that people are very, very desperate. So if somebody says, “Look, let me bring your child to a school. Let me bring your child to get some food and some shots, bring them to a doctor,” there are parents who would trust folks like that. So the idea that parents are being misled, that children are being spirited out of the country, that folks, for whatever purpose, are taking advantage of the situation is absolutely accurate.

At the same time, I think—I think the closer you look to what these people were doing, the closer it becomes that these folks had no clue of what they really were trying to do. There were very mixed messages. They had on their website that they were going to do wholesale adoptions. They told other people they were going to open an orphanage. They—

AMY GOODMAN: And then it turned out that some of the kids were not orphans.

BILL QUIGLEY: Yes. Several—many of the kids were not orphans. And as they said, you know, this was God’s call to them. This was God’s plan to them. And I thought the Minister of Justice in Haiti said, “Well, I’m going leave to God, you know, what belongs to God, but this is an issue of justice and law in Haiti, and we are not going to stand for it.”

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Quigley, finally, your center, the Center for Constitutional Rights, represents Maher Arar. He’s asking the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling blocking him from suing the US government.

BILL QUIGLEY: Yes. This is another example of the courts failing to uphold their duty as a check or a balance to the actions of Congress or the administration. And the courts have said, look, maybe it’s true that this guy was kidnapped, maybe it’s true that he was rendered and he was tortured and held in a little underground burial spot for a year, and it’s true that he was innocent, but this is not something for the courts to get into, because this looks into sensitive issues of foreign policy, sensitive issues of secrecy. Well, that is just—it’s a green light for the government to do whatever they want, under whatever circumstances.

And this is a guy who was snatched by the United States government at JFK Airport in New York and sent to Syria. So, I mean, it’s not something that happened in another place. We took him off of a plane in JFK, that he was going to Canada, and gave him to the Syrians, sent him to Syria to be tortured for a year, because people thought he was a terrorist, which he wasn’t. And unless the Supreme Court rises and reasserts its role, the role of the courts to hold the government accountable, then this is immunity for John Ashcroft and Bush officials, and it is impunity of the kind that we criticize countries for around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Quigley, I want to thank you for being with us, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, just recently back from Haiti.

Haiti Liberte: New York Marchers Mourn and Organize For Haiti

2010-02-05T00:18:00Z

by Kim Ives

Over 200 hardy souls braved frigid temperatures with sub-zero wind chill to rally on Friday, Jan. 29 at Columbus Park in Cadman Plaza, Brooklyn and then march across the Brooklyn Bridge. The Coalition to Stand With Haiti (in Kreyol, Kowalisyon pou Kore Ayiti) called the action to honor those who died in Haiti's Jan. 12 earthquake, now estimated at some 200,000, and to call for solidarity with the millions of Haitians who are now injured, homeless or mourning the loss of family members.

Speakers at the rally also denounced the growing U.S. military occupation of Haiti, where some 20,000 U.S. soldiers are now deployed, and the Pentagon's diversion of incoming international relief aid and doctors from Port-au-Prince's airport and port to give priority to the landing of U.S. soldiers and weapons.

"Haiti needs food, water and medicine, not guns," said Roger Leduc of the Haitian Coalition to Support the Struggle in Haiti (KAKOLA), one of the demonstration organizers. "Washington is using this calamity to strengthen its economic and political grip on Haiti and to push aside other countries, especially progressive ones, who are trying to help our people."

About half of the demonstrators in Cadman Plaza marched across the Brooklyn Bridge, a symbolic procession that Brooklyn's Haitian community has done several times over the past 20 years. The bridge marchers, many of whom carried mostly electric candles, were joined by other demonstrators for another rally at Foley Square behind the Federal Building in lower Manhattan.

Many North and Latin Americans turned came out in solidarity with the action. Among the many speakers were former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Father Luis Barrios of Manhattan's St. Mary's Church, Larry Holmes of the International Action Center (IAC), Kirby Joseph of the Party for Socialism & Liberation (PSL), Larry Adams of Newark's People's Organization for Progress (POP), and Joel Kupferman of the National Lawyers Guild.

Jocelyne Gay of KAKOLA, Berthony Dupont and Ray Laforest of the International Support Haiti Network (ISHN) and Pierre Florestal of the Lavalas Family party's New York chapter also spoke.

The Stand With Haiti Coalition is broad and international, comprising both Haitian community organizations and Dominican, Venezuelan, Filipino, Senegalese and Pakistani groups.

"The Haitian people need some serious help," said Urania Victor-King, a nurse with the Bedford Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corps, one of the first U.S. EMS teams to arrive by their own means in Haiti on Jan. 17. She worked for a week at Port-au-Prince's General Hospital. "We in America are talking about the economy, but what we need to do is help those people. To see their plight with your eyes is something that you can never, never forget. We know their pain and suffering."

Haitian leaders saw the march not just as an action to honor and show solidarity with the quake's victims but to launch an effort to organize Haitians to rebuild a new and better Haiti.

"We cannot mourn first and then organize later," said Leduc at Foley Square. "We have to organize and mourn at the same time. We have to show people back home that we understand, not from the head, but from the heart and the gut, that we are suffering together with them. Those people you saw in the rubble, digging through concrete with their nails to get out their relatives and neighbors, we have to join hands with them to rebuild Haiti, one based on justice, democracy and independence, with the help of you people here."

FAIR interviews Mark Weisbrot on Haiti

2010-02-05T00:01:00Z

Interview on FAIR's CounterSpin show

CounterSpin: Much of the latest reporting on Haiti disaster relief portrays the U.S. as doing its best under near-impossible circumstances, to bring food, water and medical aid to earthquake stricken Haitians. And indeed, many American efforts are giving aid and comfort to Haitians, but our guest, Mark Weisbrot, says the U.S. is in many ways hindering relief.

Mark Weisbrot is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Mark's latest piece, "Haiti Needs Water, Not Occupation," ran in London's Guardian newspaper, on January 20—he joins us now by phone from Washington D.C.

Welcome back to CounterSpin, Mark Weisbrot!

Mark Weisbrot: Thanks, Steve, it's always great to be here.

CS: Well, Americans including many U.S. journalists have been showing their compassion for Haitians in this latest hour of need, and you come along in this feel good moment—at least for the U.S.—saying the U.S. is in some way hurting the relief effort. Are you some kind of ghoul?

MW: No, I mean I'm not the only one. There were public complaints from Doctors Without Borders, from the French government, from Italian government officials, from a number of governments in South America that all said the same thing: that, and especially this was the worst during the first ten days or so, the U.S. military controlled the airport, and they had the overemphasis on security and so they're bringing—we don't know how many they've already brought in—but their goal was 20,000 troops and all the military equipment that goes with that. And at various points there were people, for example from the UN World Food Program, saying that most of the flights were being taken up by the U.S. military. Doctors Without Borders put out a press release—this was the Sunday following the earthquake—saying that they lost three days when they could have been saving people's lives, because their planes with 85 tons of medical supplies were rerouted through the Dominican Republic. So clearly this was mishandled in a big way and it did cost a lot of unnecessary suffering and death as well.

CS: So you're saying, just to be clear, that half of the airplanes coming into the Haitian Airport in Port-au-Prince were U.S. military planes for U.S. military purposes, not for aid purposes.

MW: That's right. You know, the U.S., I mean some of this is just kind of incompetence, some of it is a view of Haitians that, you know, one of the doctors from Partners in Health described as racist: that somehow the entire country is going to descend into complete chaos and people killing each other if they don't have U.S. troops occupying the country. So they had this idea that first you secure as much as you can, or maybe the whole country, who knows what they were trying to do. And then you establish supply chains and distribution centers, and then you get the stuff in the country. And really the most urgent need in the first few days is just to get the medical supplies and the water where they're needed, and if you lose some of it along the way, that's not so terrible. There was some looting, some food was lost through looting, but that's not really that big of a deal as compared to people not getting the lifesaving material.

CS: As you mentioned, security concerns go hand in hand with reports of rising crime and violence. A January 17 New York Times headline read "Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises." We saw many similar reports of rampant violence, later debunked, in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster. What can you tell us about the stories of violence raging in Haiti that we're seeing now.

MW: Well, I don't know how much there is. You know it's very hard to tell. I mean you did have fairly early on General Keen from the Southern Command, who's in charge of the operation saying that there was less violence in Haiti since the earthquake than there was before, and the reports from Partners in Health and doctors on the ground were quite similar to that. So I'm sure there's some, but again, you know, it's not enough—it isn't anything drastically different from what was in Haiti before the earthquake, I don't see any evidence for that.

CS: Well, you raise concerns about—among Haitians and other concerned people—about the U.S. military occupying Haiti. We talked about some of those concerns and about the history that might suggest that those concerns are bona fide with Bill Fletcher a few weeks ago. But there's a related storyline that's coming out of Haiti, and that is that the disaster could be a blessing in disguise, and perhaps provide the opportunity for Haiti to remake itself. How does that view fit with the sort of "disaster capitalism" model? I mean, you wouldn't think Haiti could be rebuilt without poor people, but they've done it in New Orleans, haven't they?

MW: Well, I don't know what they're plans are going to be, I've seen some of course but you know, I think the main thing right now, obviously the most urgent thing, is to make sure that this obsession with security—and part of that, of course, is trying to make sure that people don't leave the country and end up here. And part of it is also political in the sense that the government is of questionable legitimacy, and they were supposed to have elections in February, which were rightfully postponed, but they weren't going to allow the largest political party to run in the election, and 15 other parties. So the United States is also concerned with political control any time there could be a rebellion, because so many of the people don't consider the government to be legitimate, and for valid reasons. They mostly boycotted—89 percent according to the official count—boycotted the last election in April because again they excluded the largest political party, which is of course the party of the overthrown elected president that the United States helped overthrow in 2004. So, you have these political matters too, I think, that are most important. But in terms of the reconstruction of the country. It really is related to the question of just even the most basic electoral democracy. In other words, are you going to reconstruct the country without a state, without a government? I mean almost no—a tiny, tiny percentage of any of the aid that's coming in now goes to the government. And there are reasons, of course, that NGOs want to distribute the aid, and there's obviously a lot of corruption in the government. But this has been a policy for a long time of the U.S. government to not help build a functioning state in Haiti. Their total government revenues are about 10 percent of GDP, that's 50 percent less than any number of countries in Africa that are way poorer than Haiti. So the U.S. program for decades now has been—besides having overthrown the government twice—their idea of reconstruction somehow doesn't involve government, and that's going to be a big problem because they're going to need a functioning government. They wouldn't have as many casualties right now if they had any kind of a functioning government.

CS: We've been speaking with Mark Weisbrot, co director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and author of the January 20 Guardian column, "Haiti Needs Water, Not Occupation."

Mark Weisbrot, thanks again for joining us today on CounterSpin!

MW: Sure, thank you.

MEDIA LENS: Media Alert - Haiti, the Broken Wing

2010-02-04T02:20:00Z

by David Edwards and David Cromwell (the editors of Medialens)

It matters that the media have lavished so much attention on the aftermath of Haiti’s January 12 earthquake. The coverage has helped inspire people around the world to give of their time, energy and money in responding to the disaster. On the Democracy Now! website last week, filmmaker Michael Moore described how almost 12,000 members of the US National Nurses Union had signed up to leave for Haiti immediately. Moore explained:

“... the executive director of the National Nurses Union. She contacted the [Obama] administration. She got put off. She had no response. Then they sent her to some low-level person that had no authority to do anything.

“And then, finally, she’s contacting me. And she says, ‘Do you know any way to get a hold of President Obama?’ And I’m going, ‘Well, this is pretty pathetic if you’re having to call me. I mean, you are the largest nurses union... I don’t know what I can do for you. I mean, I’ll put my call in, too.' But as we sit here today, not a whole heck of a lot has happened. And it’s distressing.” (http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/26/michael_moore_on_haiti_the_supreme)

The courage and compassion of thousands of people willing to enter a chaotic disaster zone threatened with aftershocks are very real. Compassion arises out of a recognition that ‘their’ suffering is no different to ‘my’ suffering. The heart trembles and softens in response to this awareness. Such a subtle resonance and yet it has the power to relieve much of the world's despair. It is the only counter force to the brutality and greed of human egotism willing to sacrifice everyone and everything for ‘me’.

But if compassion is to make a real difference, it must be allied to rational analysis. In the absence of this analysis, compassion is like a bird with a broken wing flapping in futile circles, never leaving the ground.

Joining compassion with reason means asking why over 80 per cent of Haiti’s population of 10 million people live in abject poverty. Why less than 45 per cent of all Haitians have access to potable water. Why the life expectancy rate in Haiti is only 53 years. Why seventy-six per cent of Haiti's children under the age of five are underweight, or suffer from stunted growth, with 63 per cent of Haitians undernourished. Why 1 in every 10,000 Haitians has access to a doctor. (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/haiti/intro.htm)

In September 2008, Dan Beeton of the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research told us:

“Media coverage of floods and other natural disasters in Haiti consistently overlooks the human-made contribution to those disasters. In Haiti's case, this is the endemic poverty, the lack of infrastructure, lack of adequate health care, and lack of social spending that has resulted in so many people living in shacks and make-shift housing, and most of the population in poverty. But Haiti's poverty is a legacy of impoverishment, a result of centuries of economic looting of the country by France, the U.S., and of odious debt owed to creditors like the Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank. Haiti has never been allowed to pursue an economic development strategy of its own choosing, and recent decades of IMF-mandated policies have left the country more impoverished than ever.” (Email to Media Lens, September 9, 2008)

John Pilger has witnessed the reality on the ground that explains Western interest in the country:

“When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing, binding machines at the Port-au-Prince Superior Baseball Plant. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti's sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the cities and towns and jerry-built housing. Years after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their specialty from the Philippines to Afghanistan.” (Pilger, ‘The kidnapping of Haiti,‘ http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/4123)

Peter Hallward examined recent US policy in Haiti in the Guardian:

“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.” (Hallward, ‘Our role in Haiti's plight,’ The Guardian, January 13, 2010; http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight)

The US Double Game

Aristide took office in February 1991 and was briefly the first democratically elected President in Haiti's history before being overthrown by a US-backed military coup on September 30, 1991. The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs observed after the coup:

“Under Aristide, for the first time in the republic's tortured history, Haiti seemed to be on the verge of tearing free from the fabric of despotism and tyranny which had smothered all previous attempts at democratic expression and self-determination.” His victory “represented more than a decade of civic engagement and education on his part,” in “a textbook example of participatory, ‘bottom-up’ and democratic political development”. (Quoted, Chomsky, Year 501 - The Conquest Continues, Verso, 1993, p.209)

Aristide's balancing of the budget and “trimming of a bloated bureaucracy” led to a “stunning success” that made White House planners “extremely uncomfortable”. The view of a US official “with extensive experience of Haiti” summed up the reality beneath US rhetoric. Aristide, slum priest, grass-roots activist, exponent of Liberation Theology, “represents everything that CIA, DOD and FBI think they have been trying to protect this country against for the past 50 years”. (Quoted, Paul Quinn-Judge, ‘US reported to intercept Aristide calls,’ Boston Globe, September 8, 1994)

Following the fall of Aristide, also with US support, at least 1,000 people were killed in the first two weeks of the coup and hundreds more by December. The paramilitary forces were led by former CIA employees Emmanuel Constant and Raoul Cedras. Aristide was forced into exile from 1991-94. Noam Chomsky summarised the situation:

“Well, as this was going on, the Haitian generals in effect were being told [by Washington]: ‘Look, murder the leaders of the popular organisations, intimidate the whole population, destroy anyone who looks like they might get in the way after you're gone.’... And that's exactly what Cedras and those guys did, that's precisely what happened - and of course they were given total amnesty when they finally did agree to step down.” (Chomsky, Understanding Power, The New Press, 2002, p.157)

In 1994, the US returned Aristide in the company of 20,000 troops. This was presented as a noble defence of democracy, but in fact the US was playing a double game. As Chomsky noted, Aristide was allowed to return only after the coup leaders had slaughtered much of the popular movement that had brought him to power. His return was also conditional on acceptance of both the US military occupation and Washington's harsh neoliberal agenda. The plans for the economy were set out in a document submitted to the Paris Club of international donors at the World Bank in August 1994. The Haiti desk officer of the World Bank, Axel Peuker, described the plan as beneficial to the “more open, enlightened, business class” and foreign investors. (Quoted Noam Chomsky, 'Democracy Restored,' Z Magazine, November 1994)

In 2004, the US engineered a further coup by cutting off almost all international aid over the previous four years, making the government’s collapse inevitable. Aristide was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces. US Congresswoman, Barbara Lee, challenged the US government:

“It appears that the US is aiding and abetting the attempt to violently topple the Aristide government. With all due respect, this looks like ‘regime change’.” (Quoted Anthony Fenton, 'Media vs. reality in Haiti,' February 13, 2004; http://zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=11&ItemID=4977)

In our search of the Lexis Nexis media database (February 3) we checked for articles containing the word ‘Haiti’ over the last month. This gave 2,256 results (some online press articles are not captured by Lexis Nexis). Our search for articles containing ‘Aristide’ gave 47 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘Voodoo’ gave 53 results. The words ‘Haiti’ and ‘looting’ gave 136 results.

These numbers give an idea of how the broken wing of media analysis keeps public compassion grounded in an endless circling that is powerless to end the suffering of the people of Haiti.

Media Performance

The 47 mentions of Aristide in 2,256 articles discussing Haiti contained around nine articles that discussed US responsibility for his overthrow. We found several more online articles - notably two excellent pieces by Mark Weisbrot and one by Hugh O’Shaugnessey in the Guardian - that were not picked up by Lexis Nexis.

Hallward made a brief reference in his Guardian article, cited above. Seumas Milne wrote in the Guardian that Aristide’s challenge to Haiti's oligarchy and its international sponsors “led to two foreign-backed coups and US invasions, a suspension of aid and loans, and eventual exile in 2004” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jan/20/haiti-suffering-earthquake-punitive-relationship)

Isabel Hilton wrote in the Independent:

“President Clinton negotiated his [Aristide’s] return in 1994, reportedly on condition that he accept a US blueprint for Haiti's economic development. When Aristide won a second election in 2001, he was again deposed, in 2004, this time forcibly flown by George W Bush's administration to exile in Africa, where he remains.” (http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/isabel-hilton-dont-blame-the-haitians-for-doubting-us-promises-1870940.html)

Mark Steel, Patrick Cockburn and Andrew Buncombe made similar comments in the Independent. To his credit, Buncombe published two pieces mentioning the US role in Aristide’s overthrow. This handful of brief references to the US role in destroying Aristide, restricted to two national newspapers - the Guardian and the Independent - represents most of the honest commentary on this issue available to the public. Meanwhile, a flood of mainstream broadcast and print coverage has depicted the US as the high-tech saviour of Haiti.

Even more shocking, not one of the above national media journalists made any mention of the role of the +media+ in suppressing the truth of the US role in Haiti. Journalists apparently do not find this silence problematic.

If it is important for journalists to hold governments to account, then why not their own industry? Public awareness and outrage +do+ have the power to obstruct government criminality. But the public cannot know enough to be outraged, to resist, if the media does not tell them what is happening and why.

Nevertheless, it seems clear to us that there has been a marked improvement in current media performance on Haiti compared to the output we analysed in 2004. Then, the US role was almost completely buried out of sight.

It could be that Aristide’s fate simply matters less now. Alternatively, it could be, as we believe, that this is evidence that the mainstream is beginning to improve its performance in response to pressure from alternative, web-based media. With all mainstream trend lines pointing down, notably advertising revenues, and with readers turning in droves to non-corporate websites, it could be that the mainstream liberal media are being forced to compete by publishing more honest, radical material. If so, this is an extremely hopeful sign for everyone who cares about working for a more peaceful, rational world.

Of Devils And Dignity Lost

The rest of recent media performance is consistent with earlier coverage. In 2004, as democracy was being crushed, The Times observed:

"Mr Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, won Haiti's first free elections in 1990, promising to end the country's relentless cycle of corruption, poverty and demagoguery. Ousted in a coup the following year, he was restored to power with the help of 20,000 US troops in 1994." ('Barricades go up as city braces for attack', Tim Reid, The Times, February 26, 2004)

There was no mention of the history of US support for mass murderers attacking a democratic government and killing its supporters.

The Guardian also believed the US had “restored” Aristide:

"To a degree, history repeated itself when the US intervened again in 1994 to restore Mr Aristide. Bill Clinton halted the influx of Haitian boat people that had become politically awkward in Florida. Then he moved on. Although the US has pumped in about $900m in the past decade, consistency and vision have been lacking." ('From bad to worse', Leader, The Guardian, February 14, 2004)

The BBC, Channel 4 News and other media followed the same themes (See our media alerts ‘Bringing Hell To Haiti’: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040301_Hell_Haiti_1.html and http://www.medialens.org/alerts/04/040302_Hell_Haiti_2.html)

Following the January 12 earthquake, Charles Bremner wrote in the Times: “Bankrupt, barren, misruled and ravaged by nature and human violence, the country on the western end of Hispaniola island serves as a text-book example of a dysfunctional nation.

“While the rest of the Americas have been pulling out of poverty in recent decades, Haiti has sunk deeper into destitution, dependent on foreign charity and a United Nations force to keep its eight million people from starving and fighting.” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6985880.ece?print=yes&randnum=1151003209000)

And the explanation for this? Bremner quoted Joel Dreyfuss, a Haitian journalist, who observed sagely: "Some countries just have no luck. Haiti is one of those places where disaster follows on disaster."

The photo caption to Vanessa Buschschluter‘s piece on the BBC website read: “The Clinton Administration intervened to restore President Aristide to power.” She added: “US troops left after two years - too soon, some experts argue, to ensure the stability of Haiti's democratic institutions.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8460185.stm)

In the Observer, Regine Chassagne could only lament “the west's centuries of disregard”. (Chassagne, ‘Think of Haiti and imagine all that you love has gone,’ The Observer, January 17, 2010)

Tragicomically, the media has preferred to focus on the colonial past 200 years ago rather than on the destruction of democracy in the last decade. Ben Macintyre wrote in The Times: “But for many Haitians, the fault lies earlier — with Haiti’s colonial experience, the slavers and extortionists of empire who crippled it with debt and permanently stunted the economy. The fault line runs back 200 years, directly to France.” (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article6995750.ece)

As for the role of the US: “When the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, pledged a US presence in Haiti for today, tomorrow and the time ahead, she was addressing a central concern of a relationship that has swung wildly from intervention to neglect.”

In the Guardian, Jon Henley wrote a piece entitled, ‘Haiti: a long descent to hell.’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/14/haiti-history-earthquake-disaster)

We wrote to Henley on January 26:

Hi Jon

In your January 14 Guardian article, 'Haiti: a long descent to hell,' you discussed Haiti's history without once mentioning the role of the United States. Also in the Guardian, Peter Hallward wrote on January 13:

"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." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/13/our-role-in-haitis-plight)

In 2004, Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, wrote in The Nation:

"Haiti, again, is ablaze. Almost nobody, however, understands that today's chaos was made in Washington - deliberately, cynically, and steadfastly. History will bear this out." (Sachs, 'Fanning the flames of political chaos in Haiti', The Nation, February 28, 2004)

Why did you make no mention of these issues?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Henley replied on January 27:

hi david obviously i "did not once mention the role of the united states" (which is untrue, in fact: i did mention the occupation) because i am a fervent believer in the longterm benefits of US cultural and commercial imperialism. happy? no seriously: the article was about haiti's colonial and post-colonial inheritance, the impossible reparations it was still paying until 1947, and the impact of its own corrupt and despotic rulers. i had five hours to write the piece and i ran out of time nd space to discuss the aristide era, about which many readers know something already and which in any event only compounded the country's pre-existing problems. i'm sorry this meant the article did not meet your high quality criteria. many other people have expressed their appreciation for throwing some light on an earlier period in haiti's troubled history about which they knew nothing. best wishes jh ps i assume you have chapter and verse to substantiate rofessor achs's comment. unfortunately, at time of writing, didn't.

If the media has had little time or space to consider the recent demolition of Haitian democracy, there has been room aplenty for speculation on the mysterious causes of Haitian suffering: “Why does God allow natural disasters?”, asked philosopher David Bain on the BBC website. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8467755.stm)

Archbishop of York John Sentamu wisely declared that he had "nothing to say to make sense of this horror", while Canon Giles Fraser preferred to respond "not with clever argument but with prayer". American Christian televangelist Pat Robertson said of Haitians: “They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil... ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.” (http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/01/13/crimesider/entry6092717.shtml)

For others the problem with Haiti appears to be the innate lawlessness of Haitians - “looting” has been a constant, shameful theme in media reporting of survivors' efforts simply to stay alive. The BBC’s well-fed Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, opined from the stricken country that “looting is the only industry” and “the dignity of Haiti's past is long forgotten”. (http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/4123) Other commentators have been awestruck by the fortitude and dignity of a people tragically accustomed to struggling against impossible odds.

Talk of colonial betrayals, deals with the devil, and a loss of dignity are fine. They are embarrassing, certainly, but not to the vested interests with the power to reward and punish. Expressions of sympathy in response to heartbreaking pictures on the evening news are also fine - they are important and admirable but ultimately unthreatening to the political and economic forces crushing the Haitian people.

More even than water, medicine, food and petrol, the people of Haiti need truth. They need donations of honesty from journalist whistleblowers willing to defy the self-imposed super-injunction on the complicity of their industry. They need journalists willing to break the silence, to defy the lie that only governments are to blame for the misery in our world.

Donate to Haiti: https://www.donate.bt.com/dec_form_haiti.html

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Congratulate the following editors on their excellent comment pieces on Haiti. Ask them if they have any plans to extend this honesty to their news reporting:

Write to Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk

Roger Alton, editor of the Independent Email: r.alton@independent.co.uk

Also write to Jon Henley at the Guardian Email: jon.henley@guardian.co.uk

Matt Frei at the BBC Email: matt.frei@bbc.co.uk

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In Grand Goave, Relief Efforts Frustrate Haitian Neighborhood Leaders

2010-01-29T20:49:00Z

by Ansel Herz (IPS)

GRAND GOAVE, Jan 28, 2010 (IPS) – Two gray 23-million-dollar hovercrafts sitting in the middle of a sandy tropical beach look like they are from another world. A pair of 15-foot-wide propeller fans sticks out from the back of each behemoth.

Along the narrow dirt road to this seaside town’s centre, families live under blankets stretched over sticks.

A tent city occupies the town’s main square, surrounded by crumbling buildings. Joseph Jean-Pierre Salam, the mayor of Grand Goave, about 15 kilometres west of Port-au-Prince, estimated that some 70 percent of the city’s important structures fell during the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12.

“They have made many promises, but we don’t see the action yet,” Salam said, referring to the international community. “We have a lot of people suffering. There is an expectation that help will come.”

Little food and water has been distributed by the dozens U.S. troops milling about the beach since the earthquake, according to local leaders.

“I went there to talk to them,” said Jean-Jacob Renee, an English teacher. “They said they are there to set up some tents for themselves, but they did not come with food or water – anything for the people.”

He said the only aid the military brought to Grand Goave was distributed by Catholic Relief Services, an international NGO. “When they are in the town, we don’t know. We don’t have their phone number,” he said. “Nobody has helped us.”

U.S. military personnel on the beach were busy unloading construction material and heavy equipment from cargo boats. Senior Chief Petty Officer Steve Krutky told IPS his disaster recovery team cleared a rockslide out of the road and worked to repair local orphanages run by evangelical missions.

The U.S. military did not respond to IPS requests for further clarification of the Navy’s role in Grand Goave.

An analysis by the Associated Press on Wednesday found that 33 cents of every dollar towards emergency aid in Haiti goes to military aid, more than three times the nine cents spent on food.

Residents of Grand Goave said there is a network of seven neighbourhood leaders for each section of the city that has not been tapped in the relief effort. Friends are pooling resources to purchase rice when possible, but family after family living outside the rubble of their homes told IPS they have received no assistance.

The roof of Rinvil Jean Weldy’s modest one-story brick house is broken off, resting at an angle on top of a kitchen table covered in dust. The rear wall crumbled, spilling onto the cracked ground. His wife remains at a nearby hospital nursing an injury from the quake.

“We need a tent, we need food and water, all the normal things,” Weldy said, pointing at his sons, who were hammering together scraps of wood to build the frame of a tent. “To the U.N., I say, I need help now.”

Weldy has been expecting compensation from the U.N. since Nov. 10, when he and numerous witnesses say part of a bullet fired by U.N. peacekeeping troops hit his shoulder. Four days before the earthquake, the U.N. said an internal investigation into the incident cleared the soldiers of any wrongdoing.

Witnesses told IPS the troops fired into the ground in an attempt to control a curious crowd, not into the air, as the U.N. maintains.

The U.N. peacekeepers are roundly dismissed by many Haitians as a source for relief in the country. “We have been living with the U.N. for many years, but now we see them very little,” Mayor Salam said matter-of-factly.

In Leogane, on the route back from Grand Goave to Port-Au-Prince, 500 families from a tent city in a field lined up in an orderly queue to receive food packages, in contrast to chaotic aid dispersals seen in Port-Au-Prince. Individuals walked into a clearing to grab a box each time a young Haitian man called out numbers through a megaphone.

“For us, it was very important to do this without military,” said Dolores Rescheleit, an aid worker with a German NGO called Arche Nova that provided the food. “Because the people in the camp are very strong. When you give the responsibility to the people in the camp, they will do it better than we will with the military.”

A committee of Haitians, with sub-committees to handle security, hygiene, and aid distribution, is governing the camp without problems, Rescheleit said. Women smiled as they walked back to their tents, balancing boxes of food on their heads.

Ansel Herz appended the following on his blog

I spoke to the New York Times Lede blog yesterday about what I’ve seen in Haiti over the past few days – chaotic food distributions, pros and cons of the US military’s presence, and the politics surrounding the question of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return. I’m disappointed that their writers went for the most sensational angle and highlighted the first subject, leaving the others in separate, less prominent audio embeds.

I have footage of Grand Goave, Cite Soleil and so much more, to share too – if I can sort some technical issues out. Point me towards specific instructions on a reliable way to export videos from Final Cut Pro into a format suitable for viewing on YouTube and the web if you know where I can find them.

The land that wouldn't lie: Foreign intervention in Haiti

2010-01-29T01:24:00Z

Peter Hallward

An abbreviated version of this article first appeared as 'The Land that Wouldn't Lie' in the New Statesman, 28 January 2010, at http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/02/essay-haiti-france-colonial.)

The Haitian people overthrew slavery, uprooted dictators and foreign military rule, and elected a liberation theologian as president. The west has made them pay for their audacity.

After a couple of weeks of intense media attention, some causes of Haiti's glaring poverty have become familiar: chronic under-investment, disadvantageous terms of trade, deforestation, soil erosion, and so on. What's less well understood is that the fundamental reasons for Haiti's current destitution originate as responses to Haitian strength, rather than as results of alleged Haitian weakness, corruption or incompetence.

Four such factors have shaped the country's modern history.

First of all – and it remains impossible to overstate the importance of this point – Haiti is the one and only place in the world where colonial slavery was abolished by the slaves themselves, in the face of implacable violence. By the 1770s, an exceptionally brutal plantation economy generated more revenue for Haiti's French colonial masters than did all of Britain's thirteen north-American colonies combined. As the end of the ancien régime approached, notes Eric Williams, for most its inhabitants this ‘pearl of the Caribbean’ had become ‘the worst hell on earth.’ But the 1789 revolution in France deepened a long-standing split between sectors of the colonial elite, and a couple of years after a massive and well-organised slave insurgency erupted in the summer of 1791 its leaders were able to force the Jacobin government to accept immediate and universal emancipation.

As historians of the revolution that began in 1791 have often pointed out, there is good reason to consider it as the most radically subversive event in the whole of modern history. Independent Haiti was surrounded by slave colonies in the Caribbean, and flanked by slave-owning economies in northern, central and southern America. The three great imperial powers of the day, France, Spain and Britain, sent all the troops at their disposal to try to crush the uprising; incredibly, Haitian armies led by Toussaint L'Ouverture and then Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated them one after the other. By late 1803, to the universal astonishment of contemporary observers, Haitian armies had managed to break the chains of colonial slavery at not their weakest but their strongest link.

Here then lies the first reason for Haiti's exceptional poverty: an extraordinary victory provoked an extraordinary backlash. The war killed a third of Haiti's people and left its cities and plantations in ruins. When it was finally over the imperial powers closed ranks and, appalled by what the French foreign minister called a 'horrible spectacle for all white nations', imposed a blockade designed to isolate and stifle this most troubling 'threat of a good example'. France only re-established the trade and diplomatic relations essential to the new country’s survival when Haiti agreed, twenty years after winning its independence, to pay its old colonial master colossal amounts of ‘compensation’ for the loss of its slaves and colonial property – an amount roughly equal to the annual French budget at the time.

With its economy still shattered by the colonial wars, Haiti could only begin to repay this debt by borrowing, at extortionate rates of interest, massive sums from French banks. By the end of the nineteenth century Haiti’s payments to France still consumed around 80% of the national budget. French banks received the last instalment in 1947. This was the single most important factor in establishing Haiti as a systematically indebted country, a condition which in turn served as a pretext for a long and debilitating series of international raids on the Haitian treasury. (It may not require much imagination to guess at the consequences of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s subsequent decision, in the run-up to the bicentennial celebration of Haitian independence in 2004, to ask France to pay some of this money back...).

The second major factor in Haiti's structural destitution stems directly from the first. The slaves who won the war against the French were determined above all to avoid any return to a plantation economy or its industrial equivalent. Over the course of the nineteenth-century large parts of Latin America, as well as much of Europe and Europe's colonies, were ravaged by the process Marx famously dubbed 'primitive accumulation' (the systematic expropriation of peasant farms, and of collectively- or indigenously-owned land and resources), but in Haiti resistance to such trends, nourished by exceptionally resilient forms of communal solidarity, popular culture, and religious affiliation, proved a powerful obstacle to this essential stage in the consolidation of a 'properly functioning' capitalist economy. This resistance in turn solicited powerful counter-measures, including, from 1915-1934, the first and most damaging of an apparently unstoppable series of US military occupations.

Direct US rule imposed a poverty-enhancing 'structural adjustment' programme avant la lettre. The Americans abolished an irritating clause in the Haiti's constitution that had barred foreigners from owning Haitian property, took over the National Bank, reorganised the economy to ensure more regular payments of foreign debt, imposed forced labour on the peasantry, and expropriated large swathes of land for the benefit of new plantations like those operated by the US-owned Haitian American Sugar Company. Some 50,000 peasants were dispossessed in northern Haiti alone. Most importantly, the Americans transformed Haiti's army into an instrument capable of overcoming popular opposition to these developments. By 1918 peasant resistance gave rise to a full-scale insurgency, led by Charlemagne Péralte; US troops responded with what one worried commander (General Barnett) described as the 'practically indiscriminate killing of natives', 'the most startling thing of its kind that has ever taken place in the Marine Corps'. Some 15,000 people died in this first phase of the 'modernisation' of the Haitian economy.

The next phase of this operation was temporarily contracted out to the noiriste dictator François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, who came to power in 1957 via a rigged election in which he won only a quarter of the votes garnered by his main rival. Four years later Duvalier ripped up the last shreds of the constitution when he arranged for his re-election, winning 1,320,748 votes to zero. Duvalier's determination to gain complete control over the country encountered resistance not only among the rural poor but also among more cosmopolitan sections of the elite. He overcame both problems by supplementing the army he inherited from its US patrons with a more home-grown paramilitary force, the 'Tontons Macoutes.' The paranoid ferocity of Duvalier's regime has long been the stuff of legend; after a dozen young men from Jérémie launched a reckless insurgency in August 1964, for instance, Duvalier's militia publicly slaughtered hundreds of their kin. By the mid-1960s perhaps 80% of Haiti's professionals had fled to safety abroad, and most never returned. Estimates of total number of people killed under Duvalier vary between 30,000 and 50,000 – 'terror has surely never had so bare and ignoble an object', reflected Graham Greene. The CIA itself was impressed with the result, noting that by the 1970s 'most Haitians [were] so completely downtrodden as to be politically inert.'

Complete downtreading was the immediate and necessary precondition for our third factor, international imposition of the neoliberal policies that began to reshape Haiti's economy when in 1971 Jean-Claude Duvalier inherited his father's office as 'president for life'. Spurred on by the example of post-Allende Chile, these policies aimed to 'open up' Haiti to far-reaching foreign penetration and manipulation. They were designed to turn the country into the sort of place that international investors tend to like: a place where people are prepared to work for starvation wages without making a political fuss, a place where private property and profits receive well-armed protection but where domestic markets, local farmers, state assets and public services do not. Locals soon started to refer to these policies as the 'death plan.'

The death plan has stifled public spending and forced the privatisation of Haiti's (often highly lucrative) public assets, while accelerating the reorientation of Haiti's economy away from agrarian autonomy and towards urban hyper-exploitation. The case of rice production – the staple food for most of the population – is especially significant. In the mid 1980s, local farmers were still able to produce almost all the rice Haitians consumed, but the last tariffs protecting Haitian farmers were removed in the mid 1990s and the country is now swamped by heavily subsidised American rice that trades at around 70% of the price of its indigenous competition. Domestic production is undercut still more by the vast amounts of additional ‘free’ rice that are dumped on Haiti every year through the ministry of USAID grantees, in particular the Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist and other like-minded churches. In 1985, imports accounted for only 2% of Haitian rice consumption; by 2002 this proportion had soared to 62%. A tiny handful of well-connected families now reap huge profits from importing rice, while thousands of desperate ex-rice farmers and their dependents have joined the ranks of the urban unemployed.

According to a 2006 IMF study, 55% of Haitian households survive on a daily income equal to 44 American pennies. When the global food crisis hit Haiti in 2008, whole communities were pushed to the brink of starvation.

Structural adjustment was supposed to compensate for agrarian collapse with increases in the garment and light manufacturing sector. For a little while, the lowest wages in the hemisphere encouraged mainly American companies or contractors to employ around 80,000 people in this sector, while military and paramilitary coercion kept the threat of organised labour safely at bay. By the end of the millennium, however, a combination of international competition and local 'instability' had reduced sweatshop employment to just 20,000 people whose wages, averaging $2/day, had in real terms fallen to less than a quarter of 1980 levels.

The real source of this so-called instability brings us to the fourth and most immediate reason for Haitian poverty. Once again it stems from popular resilience and strength. Bitter experience has forced the Haitian poor to improvise robust ways of defending themselves against their oppressors. Over the course of the 1980s, opposition to the twin forces of Duvalierist oppression and neo-liberal adjustment inspired a powerful and courageous popular mobilisation. This mobilisation was able first to 'uproot' Duvalier and his Macoutes (in 1986) and then, after an army crackdown that killed another thousand people or so, to overcome direct military rule (in 1990). It forced the army's international backers reluctantly to sanction Haiti's first ever round of genuine democratic elections, which in early 1991 brought the liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power on an anti-neo-liberal and anti-army agenda.

Haiti was the only country in Latin America that had the temerity to choose a liberation theologian as its president, and this is a crucial but often neglected aspect of its recent history. The Catholic church had long been a solid pillar of the status quo, and its partial conversion over the 1970s into a well-organised instrument calling for 'the self-emancipation of the oppressed' sent shock waves throughout Latin America. Pentagon officials were quick to realise (as military intelligence officer Captain Lawrence Rockwood later put it) that ‘the most serious threat to US interests was not secular Marxist-Leninism or organised labour but liberation theology.’ Pope Jean-Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger reached a similar conclusion with respect to their own interests, and the backlash against liberation theology was complemented in the US by the rise of the religious right. In Haiti itself, thirty years ago there were only a tiny handful of small (and often US-funded) evangelical churches preaching political resignation and passive reliance on God's grace; today there are more than 500.

Aristide's election in 1990 changed the balance of power in Haiti forever. Political violence came to an abrupt and exceptional stop. ‘We have become the subjects of our own history’, Aristide said a couple of years before his election, and ‘we refuse from now on to be the objects of that history.’

Their refusal remains the key to understanding the course of Haitian politics ever since. Haiti isn't only the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere, it's now also and more importantly the most unequal in terms of its division of wealth and power. A tiny minority lives in paranoid luxury, surrounded by millions of the poorest people on earth. From the perspective of its elite, Haiti's main political problem is very simple: how, once the democratic door has been prised open, might it be possible to preserve such a grotesquely inequitable distribution of property and privilege?

When Aristide was first elected it was still possible to solve the problem in the usual way – by slamming the door shut. In September 1991, another US-backed military coup cut short Haiti's 'transition to democracy.' Three years of repression decimated the popular movement and left some 4,000 Aristide supporters dead.

When the US eventually allowed a hamstrung Aristide to return in late 1994, he still managed to transform Haitian politics overnight, by abolishing the army that had deposed him. A central priority for the businessmen and sweatshop owners whose interests were previously protected by the army, understandably, has been to restore or replace it. The need for such restoration became still more acute when Aristide was re-elected in 2000 with an even bigger share of the vote, backed up for the first time by a political organisation, Fanmi Lavalas, that won some 90% of the seats in parliament.

The subsequent ten years of struggle in Haiti are best understood in terms of this basic alternative: Lavalas or the army. As any number of post-9/11 initiatives confirm, there is no better way of deflecting political questions that might otherwise be 'unprofitably' answered by the will of the majority than by redefining them in terms of crime, security, and stability – terms, in other words, that allow soldiers rather than people to resolve them.

Ruthless application of this strategy after the Lavalas election victory in 2000 led to another internationally-sponsored coup in early 2004, just in time to squash any untimely celebration of the bicentenary of Haitian independence. Since they could no longer rely on Haiti's own army, in order to overthrow a duly elected government for the second time US troops were obliged to lever Aristide out of Port-au-Prince themselves. In mid-2004 a large UN 'stabilisation' force took over the job of pacifying a resentful population from soldiers sent by the US, France and Canada, and by the end of 2006 another several thousand Aristide supporters were dead. Around 9,000 heavily armed UN troops occupy the country to this day.

Last year, the president (René Préval) who ostensibly governs this UN protectorate agreed to renew its stabilisation mandate, to persevere with the privatisation of Haiti's remaining public assets, to veto a proposal to increase minimum wages to $5 a day, and to bar Fanmi Lavalas, along with several other political parties, from participating in the next round of legislative elections.

This is the context in which we need to understand the most salient characteristic of the disaster relief effort so far – the decision, taken by US and UN commanders, explicitly to prioritise military and security objectives over civilian-humanitarian ones.

This inexcusable decision has already caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths. Plane after plane packed with essential emergency supplies was diverted away from the disaster zone, so as to allow for the build-up of a massive and entirely unnecessary US military force. Many thousands of people were left to die in the ruins of lower Port-au-Prince, while international rescue teams concentrated their efforts on a few locations (like the Montana Hotel or the UN headquarters) that were not simply frequented by foreigners but that could also be enclosed within a 'secure perimeter.'

For exactly the same reason, all through the first week of the disaster desperately needed medical supplies were reserved for field hospitals set up near the US-controlled airport and other 'secure zones': hospitals in 'insecure' Port-au-Prince itself, overwhelmed with dying patients, have had to perform untold numbers of amputations without anaesthetic or medication. Still more 'insecure' neighbourhoods like Carrefour and Léogane – the places closest to the earthquake's epicentre – received no significant aid for at least ten days after disaster struck.

Unless prevented by renewed popular mobilisation in both Haiti and beyond, the perverse international emphasis on security will continue to distort the reconstruction effort, and with it the configuration of Haitian politics for some time to come. As reconstruction funds accumulate, pressure to expropriate what remains of Haiti's public services and collectively-owned land is sure to be accompanied by pressure to accelerate the growth of Haiti's booming security industry, and perhaps to restore – no doubt in close cooperation with the current occupying power – the army that Aristide managed to demobilise in 1995.

One thing is already certain: if further militarisation proceeds unchecked then the victims of the January earthquake won't be the only avoidable causalities of 2010.

Peter Hallward teaches philosophy at Middlesex University and is the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment.

The kidnapping of Haiti

2010-01-29T01:19:00Z
John Pilger (Originally published in the New Statesman)
The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured "formal approval" from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to "secure" roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in a US naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training.
The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now a US military base and relief flights have been rerouted to the Dominican Republic. All flights stopped for three hours for the arrival of Hillary Clinton. Critically injured Haitians waited unaided as 800 American residents in Haiti were fed, watered and evacuated. Six days passed before the US air force dropped bottled water to people suffering dehydration.
A very American coup
The first TV reports played a critical role, giving the impression of widespread criminal mayhem. Matt Frei, the BBC reporter despatched from Washington, seemed on the point of hyperventilating as he brayed about the "violence" and need for "security". In spite of the demonstrable dignity of the earthquake victims, and evidence of citizens' groups toiling unaided to rescue people, and even a US general's assessment that the violence in Haiti was considerably less than before the earthquake, Frei claimed that "looting is the only industry" and "the dignity of Haiti's past is long forgotten".
Thus, a history of unerring US violence and exploitation in Haiti was consigned to the victims. "There's no doubt," reported Frei in the aftermath of America's bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003, "that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now to the Middle East . . . is now increasingly tied up with military power."
In a sense, he was right. Never before in so-called peacetime have human relations been as militarised by rapacious power. Never before has an American president subordinated his government to the military establishment of his discredited predecessor, as Barack Obama has done. In pursuing George W Bush's policy of war and domination, Obama has sought from Congress an unprecedented military budget in excess of $700bn. He has become, in effect, the spokesman for a military coup.
For the people of Haiti the implications are clear, if grotesque. With US troops in control of their country, Obama has appointed Bush to the "relief effort": a parody lifted from Graham Greene's The Comedians, set in Papa Doc's Haiti. Bush's relief effort following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 amounted to an ethnic cleansing of many of New Orleans's black population. In 2004, he ordered the kidnapping of the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and exiled him to Africa. The popular Aristide had had the temerity to legislate modest reforms, such as a minimum wage for those who toil in Haiti's sweatshops.
When I was last in Haiti, I watched very young girls stooped in front of whirring, hissing binding machines at the Superior baseball plant in Port-au-Prince. Many had swollen eyes and lacerated arms. I produced a camera and was thrown out. Haiti is where America makes the equipment for its hallowed national game, for next to nothing. Haiti is where Walt Disney contractors make Mickey Mouse pyjamas, for next to nothing. The US controls Haiti's sugar, bauxite and sisal. Rice-growing was replaced by imported American rice, driving people into the town and jerry-built housing. Year after year, Haiti was invaded by US marines, infamous for atrocities that have been their speciality from the Philippines to Afghanistan. Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN's man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as "Mr Nice Guy . . . bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land", Clinton is Haiti's most notorious privateer, demanding deregulation that benefits the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed "tourist playground".
Not for tourists is the US building its fifth-biggest embassy. Oil was found in Haiti's waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington's "rollback" plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela's abundant petroleum reserves, and sabotage of the growing regional co-operation long denied by US-sponsored regimes.
Obama's next war?
The first rollback success came last year with the coup against the Honduran president José Manuel Zelaya, who also dared advocate a minimum wage and that the rich pay tax. Obama's secret support for the illegal regime in Honduras carries a clear warning to vulnerable governments in central America. Last October, the regime in Colombia, long bankrolled by Washington and supported by death squads, handed the Americans seven military bases to "combat anti-US governments in the region".
Media propaganda has laid the ground for what may well be Obama's next war. In December, researchers at the University of the West of England published first findings of a ten-year study of BBC reporting on Venezuela. Of 304 BBC reports, only three mentioned any of the historic reforms of Hugo Chávez's government, while the majority denigrated his extraordinary democratic record, at one point comparing him to Hitler.
Such distortion and servitude to western power are rife across the Anglo-American media. People who struggle for a better life, or for life itself, from Venezuela to Honduras to Haiti, deserve our support.

Limited Compassion for Haiti

2010-01-27T03:57:00Z
By Justin Podur (Znet)
Everyone agrees that the Haiti earthquake is a serious situation. Serious enough for the US to send thousands of Marines, to take over the airport, to suspend Haiti's sovereignty and take over the operation. Serious enough to unify the bitter partisan divide and put Bush, Clinton, and Obama together to raise funds. Serious enough for benefit concerts and the invention of new forms of philanthropy, where people can donate through their cell phones. But the Haiti earthquake is apparently not all that serious:
1. It's not serious enough to give undocumented Haitians a full amnesty. Yes, it was serious enough to give them Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which they'd been asking for for years, so that they can send back money legally and so they're not in danger of being deported back to their re-devastated country. But they still have to pay $470 dollars for registering (every dollar of which could have gone to Haiti - which adds up to millions of dollars if more than a few thousand register and pay the fee), and after their 18 month grace period ends they will be in the system and easier to deport than they were before registering.
2. It's not serious enough for public money. 200,000 people dead and millions homeless is a tragedy, but one approximately 30,000 times less serious than the Iraq war ($100 million for earthquake relief, $3 trillion for the Iraq war) and 40,000 less serious than the $4 trillion bank bailout. For those crises, the treasury magically opens, the money magically appears in the accounts, the public debt grows, and the taxpayers can pay later. For an earthquake or a tsunami, we rely on people's generosity, and put together star teams to beg for money on behalf of the victims.
3. It's not serious enough to let Aristide return. In times like these, playing politics is frowned upon, right? But playing politics to prevent a popular leader from returning to his own country after being forced into exile isn't. Aristide's kidnapping and the 2004 coup was a special humiliation inflicted on Haiti, his continuing exile a continued insult. This earthquake is not serious enough to stop that insult.
4. It's not serious enough to pay Haiti back the $22 billion it's been owed by France since the money was extorted by a blockade. The story is old and much repeated but deserves to be repeated again. When Haiti became independent in 1804 through a revolt of the slaves, France used a naval blockade to force the new country to pay its colonial master compensation for the property the Haitians "stole" - the property being the value of the slaves themselves. The indemnity, 150 million francs at the time, stopped the country from being able to rebuild after the devastation of the war of independence. When the international community was starving Haiti to death from 2001-2003, Aristide began a campaign to say - okay, if aid is blocked and loans are blocked, forget those, just give us our money back. 150 million francs in 1804 makes about $22 billion today. At that point, the machinations to overthrow Aristide began in earnest. Before too long, as the security and looting stories rise in prominence, opinion pieces will appear about the ingratitude of Haitians. As donations level off, analyses will discuss compassion fatigue. These would be better informed by being a little less oblivious to the limits of governmental compassion for Haiti.
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. He visited Haiti in 2005. His blog is www.killingtrain.com

Too Close To Home: South Florida's Haitians Mobilize Earthquake Relief

2010-01-26T00:41:00Z
by Alexandra Lavelanet (Haiti Liberte)
Only 600 miles from Haiti, South Florida is home to the largest Haitian community in the United States. Practically all of the 300,000 Haitians living in the area left family behind Haiti. Now, a week after the devastating earthquake, frustrations are even higher for the thousands who still have yet to make contact with loved ones. As international efforts for survivors seem to fall short of their expectations, South Florida residents are mobilizing efforts to help the neighboring nation.
South Floridians are following traditional methods of donating water, canned food, protein bars, blankets, sleeping bags, lightly worn clothing and shoes, pre-paid satellite cell phones, flashlights and other goods to collection sites across St. Lucie, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties. Most of these items are picked-up by established charities such as Food for the Poor and brought to Haiti.
Local school districts are committed to the cause. Broward County announced on Thursday that all of its 32 high schools, the Ft. Lauderdale headquarters, and three area offices are all now serving as donation drop-off locations for three charities contributing to relief efforts.
In Palm Beach County school district, where roughly 500 employees and 16,000 students are of Haitian decent, the efforts are focused on the local community. School officials set-up an international phone line at Toussaint L'Ouverture High School in Boyton Beach, transforming the campus into a de facto communications hub for local families to contact relatives in Haiti. Several grief counselors are also being provided to the high school, where 93% of the students are Haitian. District administrators have also created a special work group designed to implement direction and organization in their relief efforts for earthquake survivors.
Last weekend, several live music events on Las Olas and South Beach featuring local, national, and international talent including, Kimani Marley, donated all or most proceeds to relief efforts.
A more controversial plan proposes an airlift of perhaps thousands of orphaned children to Miami. Catholic Charities and South Florida immigrant rights organizations refer to the model of Operation Pedro Pan, a U.S. government-backed covert mission launched in 1960 to take children out of Cuba, where Fidel Castro's revolution had just triumphed. Over 14,000 Cuban minors were brought to Miami over a period of 22 months. Some went to live with relatives or family friends in Miami but most were funneled through Miami-Dade group homes. Organizers believe this will be an effective way to care for the thousands or hundreds of thousands of children left orphaned by the earthquake.
Nearly every day since last Tuesday's catastrophic earthquake, South Florida community leaders and members have met to discuss different strategies to help survivors. The church Notre Dame d'Haiti and the Jean-Jacques Dessalines community center in Miami are serving as support centers and drop-off locations for material and monetary donations. Yet the local South Florida community has been alarmed and frustrated at seeing images of thousands of Haitians, a week after the quake, still buried under the rubble and lacking food, water or proper medical attention.
"What everyone is saying is 'I want to be there,'" says Miami-based entertainer/activist Farah Juste. Juste, who has not been able to make contact with her mother, sister, brother-in-law and other family members in Haiti, understands the desperation brewing here in South Florida. "People are begging for the right to go and help their country but are being denied by the US government and organizations. It is obvious that these governments and organizations are not doing enough."
The American Red Cross, one of the largest organizations helping on the ground in Haiti, is also providing food, shelter, and hygiene kits to U.S. citizen evacuees in South Florida. Chrystian Tejedor, Public Affairs South Florida Regional Officer for the American Red Cross says the organization is bombarded with calls everyday from community members who want to help. Tejedor says that most of the calls the local Red Cross branches receive are from civilians who want to physically volunteer in Haiti. "It's unbelievable how many calls we receive from people ready to go and help their countrymen," he said. "It's remarkable. However, the American Red Cross is limiting our volunteers to experts in disaster relief. It's just not safe to send untrained people into such a dangerous situation." He adds that "the most effective way for people to contribute to the relief efforts are through monetary donations." According to Tejedor, The American Red Cross has raised over $100 million dollars for Haiti.
Juste says the need for a strong leader is more critical now for Haitians both in Haiti and the United States than ever before. The name most mentioned at community meetings to fill this role: "Aristide," says Juste. "I wish President Préval had enough courage, enough pride and dignity to open his arms to President Aristide and say 'let's sit down together. Let's rebuild together. Forget about the past, and let's work to rebuild Haiti." The widely-popular exiled former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide released a statement from South Africa last week, announcing he and his wife, Mildred are ready to return to Haiti at a moment's notice to join in relief efforts and the rebuilding of their nation.
"This is the best time for us to come together," says radio host and activist Lucie Tondreau. "If we cannot pull together as a community now, we will never be able to."

Fearing the Victims, Some Aid Givers Use Helicopters and Guns

2010-01-26T00:35:00Z
by Kim Ives (Haiti Liberte)
The small white helicopter had landed in a field just behind the Léogane police station. Hundreds of Haitians had gathered around with a mixture of curiosity and anticipation. This was the first helicopter to land, despite many flying over the town in the previous days. But shortly after landing, the helicopter lifted off again and began to circle above the field at about 150 feet. Then a door popped open and someone inside began throwing out small bags.
One of the bags fluttered down and landed high up in a tall tree's branches. Another bag plopped down in the police station's backyard, where dozens of young community leaders were hovering around a cluster of bigwigs meeting with Léogane's Mayor Alexis Santos and an official from Haiti's Interior Ministry.
The bag contained brown bread rolls. When the young community leaders saw this, they erupted.
"This is a complete outrage," said Alex Estimé, a young man who had spent the last week organizing his neighborhood to dig out bodies from the rubble of the town where an estimated 80% of the buildings have been destroyed. "This is pure humiliation. An earthquake is a misfortune which could befall any country. Would they treat other people like this? No. It is like they are throwing bones to dogs. We don't want their stinking bread." With that he stamped on the bag. Other men around him also kicked it.
The men shook their fists and hurled invective at the small white helicopter which continued to circle in the sky, raining down the small bags of bread. Miguel Joseph, a community leader and director of a town radio station, said the aid delivery was the work of the Mormon Church.
"This type of aid distribution is totally unacceptable," said Max Mathurin, the former head of the Provisional Electoral Council that carried out the 2006 elections. Born and raised in Léogane, he was one of those meeting with the mayor.
"Over the past week, I petitioned repeatedly for a backhoe that could have helped excavate people from under rubble and saved lives," he lamented. "I couldn't even get something as simple as that from our government or the UN. That was the injury. Now this helicopter is the insult."
In many ways, the allegedly Mormon helicopter dropping food was emblematic of the way the United States and United Nations are carrying out relief to the Haitian people. Léogane was only five miles from the epicenter of the 7.0 magnitude quake and probably had the most extensive damage of any Haitian city. But earlier that day, the United Nations had announced that it could not bring relief to Léogane until it had established security.
"I don't know what security they need to establish," responded Roland St. Fort, 32, another one of the town's neighborhood leaders. "There have been no riots here. The people have been very disciplined. They set up their own security around their outdoor camps."
Throughout the capital, where security is presumably being established, thousands of troops from the U.N. Mission to Stabilize Haiti (MINUSTAH) continue to ride around the capital in armored vehicles, pointing their guns at Haitians, just as they did before the quake. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced the deployment of another 3,500 to complement the 9,000 already in Haiti.
In addition, 12,000 U.S. soldiers were deployed in Haiti this week. The 82nd Airborne put the General Hospital (HUEH) in lock-down when they arrived on Jan. 19, turning away victims, family members and journalists for about an hour until hospital administrators intervened to have them relax their conduct. Wielding M-16s in front of the hospital gates, they managed to increase chaos rather than diminish it by yelling orders in English at Haitians trying to enter the state hospital they theoretically own. Many were people in need of care or family members bringing food for hospital patients. The hospital's kitchen, located next door to the stench-emitting morgue, is still closed.
In counter-point, many of the 500 Cuban doctors working in Haiti have fanned out throughout Port-au-Prince, particularly in the massive refugee camp that now covers the Champ de Mars, the downtown square. There they have set up small clinics, identified by a Cuban flag, to tend to the earthquake's many victims. According to Dr. Evan Lyon of Partners in Health, who is presently administering the HUEH, some 40,000 to 50,000 people living in the square benefit greatly from this aid. The Cuban doctors carry out their work, without having to be guarded by helmeted men with guns. "The Cuban doctors are an intense resource," he said.
Meanwhile, at the Matthew 25 Hospitality House in Delmas 33, an anecdote made the rounds among a group of recently arrived North American doctors caring for some 500 quake refugees camped out in a soccer field next door. They too manage to deliver life-saving operations and medical care without military guard. Sister Mary Finnick, who runs the house, told of an incoming doctor remarking that he saw huge quantities of guns being brought in through the Mais Gaté Airport, which the U.S. military has taken over and runs.
"They should be bringing more gauze, not more guns," quipped one of the doctors on hearing the news.

Looting - is it really a matter of black and white?

2010-01-22T01:23:00Z
by Andrew Buncombe (originally published in the UK Independent)
I'm sure I'm not the first person to have imagined what it must have been like for the people of Haiti, struggling without food and water or medical help for days on end. And to have imagined too, what it must then have felt to have been accused of "looting" if you went to a store or a warehouse and helped yourself to some bottles of water or a bag of rice. To be honest, I didn't need to think about it long; in such circumstances I'd have had no hesitation in doing so if I thought it would keep myself, or my family or friends alive. Would anyone? Why then this obsession with looting, this obsession in so much we've read or watched with law and order?
There's a fine piece on this topic by Rebecca Solnit, a veteran of many natural disasters, who, in an article for Tom Dispatch, suggests we ban the use of the word "looting" altogether. Her article is very critical of much of the media coverage of Haiti and of "those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I'm talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti".
Of course, in Katrina, for some people, whether you were a "looter" or a "gatherer" appeared to come down a matter of race. Who fails to remember the painfully shameful captioning of two separate photographs by the new agencies, the white couple having just "found" some food while the black person had "looted" theirs. Indeed, the obsession with law-and-order and the hyping of reports of criminal activity led to a situation in New Orleans where volunteers from police departments and National Guard units from across the country were dispatched to the city when what it really needed was people with food and water, or at the very least a bucket and mop.
I remember one afternoon, maybe five days after Hurricane Katrina struck, standing outside the police control room in the centre of New Orleans, trying to interview some heavily-armed and scowling mercenaries from Blackwater or some such outfit, who were sitting on the steps of a bank, letting everyone see their automatic weapons and wrap-around sunglasses. It would have been comical were it not so sad. Needless to say, I didn't get much of an interview.
A colleague from the Guardian, Julian Borger, also wrote a superb eye-witness account of the failure of armed police and soldiers to help those most in need, suggesting that it appeared that "being poor and black was a contagious disease".
At the same time, I think it's important that we're honest and admit that looting does go on in the aftermath of such disasters. I don't have much time for people hauling away televisions and DVD players in shopping carts, but let's also keep in mind that such episodes are usually in the minority. (One example to the contrary was following the overthrowing of Saddam, when the US stood by and allowed a minority of Iraqis steal wholesale from government ministries and museums. Donald Rumsfeld blew it off. "Stuff happens." Indeed it does.)
But the business of race does not go easily away. One of the most chilling episodes during Katrina was when police from an overwhelmingly white suburb fired their guns above the heads of a largely black crowd that was trying to get out of the city, forcing them back. In contrast, who would have said a word against the little old lady I saw when I was driving out of New Orleans to get a flight out of Houston (the airport was still shut for normal flights)?
I was in the the city's Garden District and was driving past a Whole Foods store (an upmarket, organic supermarket) and spotted the door to the store was swinging open. I could see the store was full of fresh food that would soon go bad. A moment later the elderly, white woman came out, pushing a shopping trolley with provisions. I had to chuckle to myself, wondering whether she would have been a looter or a gatherer if she'd been snapped by a photographer.
I was discussing such issues by email with David Edwards of the always-worth-a-look Media Lens website, who had an interesting take on the recent events in the Caribbean. "I think Haiti helps reveal one of the great, hidden truths of our time - that the 'civilised' West is "still" afflicted by a deep, deep racism/cultural arrogance towards poor, brown-skinned people," he said. "The difference is that, now, we don't see them as inferior primarily because they're black but because they're dirt poor and lacking in modern technology. Our prejudice hangs on different hooks, but we still think they're 'savages', innately prone to violence, and so on."

Securing Disaster in Haiti

2010-01-22T01:22:00Z
Peter Hallward
Nine days after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010, it's now clear that the initial phase of the U.S.-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island's recent history. [1] It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti's own leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor. All three tendencies aren't just connected, they are mutually reinforcing. These same tendencies will continue to govern the imminent reconstruction effort as well, unless determined political action is taken to counteract them.
I
Haiti is not only one of the poorest countries in the world, it is also one of the most polarised and unequal in its disparities in wealth and access to political power. [2] A small clique of rich and well-connected families continues to dominate the country and its economy while more than half the population, according to the IMF, survive on a household income of around 44 US pennies per day.[3]
Mass destitution has grown far more severe in recent decades. Starting in the 1970s, internationally imposed neo-liberal 'adjustments' and austerity measures finally succeeded in doing what no Haitian government had managed to do since winning independence in 1804: in order to set the country on the road towards 'economic development', they have driven large numbers of small farmers off their land and into densely crowded urban slums. A small minority of these internal refugees may be lucky enough to find sweatshop jobs that pay the lowest wages in the region. These wages currently average $2 or $3 a day; in real terms they are worth less than a quarter of their 1980 value.
Haiti's tiny elite owes its privileges to exclusion, exploitation and violence, and it is only violence that allows it to retain them. For much of the last century, Haiti's military and paramilitary forces (with substantial amounts of US support) were able to preserve these privileges on their own. Over the course of the 1980s, however, it started to look as if local military repression might no longer be up to the job. A massive and courageous popular mobilisation (known as Lavalas) culminated in 1990 with the landslide election of the liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president. Large numbers of ordinary people began to participate in the political system for the first time, and as political scientist Robert Fatton remembers, 'panic seized the dominant class. It dreaded living in close proximity to la populace and barricaded itself against Lavalas.’ [4]
Nine months later, the army dealt with this popular threat in the time-honoured way, with a coup d'état. Over the next three years, around 4,000 Aristide supporters were killed.
However, when the US eventually allowed Aristide to return in October 1994, he took a surprising and unprecedented step: he abolished the army that had deposed him. As human rights lawyer Brian Concannon (director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti) observed a few years later, ‘it is impossible to overestimate the impact of this accomplishment. It has been called the greatest human rights development in Haiti since emancipation, and is wildly popular.' [5] In 2000, the Haitian electorate gave Aristide a second overwhelming mandate when his party (Fanmi Lavalas) won more than 90% of the seats in parliament.
II
More than anything else, what has happened in Haiti since 1990 should be understood as the progressive clarification of this basic dichotomy – democracy or the army. Unadulterated democracy might one day allow the interests of the numerical majority to prevail, and thereby challenge the privileges of the elite. In 2000, such a challenge became a genuine possibility: the overwhelming victory of Fanmi Lavalas, at all levels of government, raised the prospect of genuine political change in a context in which there was no obvious extra-political mechanism ― no army ― to prevent it.
In order to avoid this outcome, the main strategy of Haiti's little ruling class has been to redefine political questions in terms of 'stability' and 'security', and in particular the security of property and investments. Mere numbers may well win an election or sustain a popular movement but as everyone knows, only an army is equipped to deal with insecurity. The well-armed 'friend of Haiti' that is the United States knows this better than anyone else.
As soon as Aristide was re-elected, a systematic international campaign to bankrupt and destabilise his second government set the stage for a paramilitary insurrection and a further coup d'état, and in 2004, thousands of US troops again invaded Haiti (just as they first did back in 1915) in order to 'restore stability and security' to their 'troubled island neighbour.' An expensive and long-term UN 'stabilisation mission' staffed by 9,000 heavily armed troops soon took over the job of helping to pacify the population and criminalise the resistance. By the end of 2006, thousands more Aristide supporters had been killed.
Over the course of 2009, a suitably stabilised Haitian government agreed to persevere with the privatisation of the country’s remaining public assets, [6] veto a proposal to increase minimum wages to $5 a day, and to bar Fanmi Lavalas (and several other political parties) from participating in the next round of legislative elections.
When it comes to providing stability, today's UN troops are clearly a big improvement over the old indigenous alternative. If things get so unstable that even the ground begins to shake, however, there's still nothing that can beat the world's leading provider of peace and security.
III
In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake that struck on 12 January 2010, it might have seemed hard to counter arguments in favour of allowing the US military, with its 'unrivalled logistical capability', to take de facto control of such a massive relief operation. Weary of bad press in Iraq and Afghanistan, US commanders also seemed glad of this unexpected opportunity to rebrand their armed forces as angels of mercy. As usual, the Haitian government was instructed to be grateful for whatever help it could get.
That was before US commanders actively began – the day after the earthquake struck – to divert aid away from the disaster zone.
As soon as the US air force took control of Haitian airspace, on Wednesday 13 January, they explicitly prioritised military over humanitarian flights. Although most reports from Port-au-Prince emphasised remarkable levels of patience and solidarity on the streets, US commanders made fears of popular unrest and insecurity their number one concern. Their first priority was to avoid what the US Air Force Special Command Public Affairs spokesman (Ty Foster) called another 'Somalia effort' [7] – which is to say, presumably, a situation in which a humiliated US army might once again risk losing military control of a 'humanitarian' mission.
As many observers predicted, however, the determination of US commanders to forestall this risk by privileging guns and soldiers over doctors and food has only succeeded in helping to provoke a few occasional bursts of the very unrest they set out to contain. In order to amass a sufficiently large amount of soldiers and military equipment 'on the ground', the US Air Force diverted plane after plane packed with emergency supplies away from Port-au-Prince. Among many others, World Food Program flights were turned away by US commanders on Thursday and Friday, the New York Times reported, 'so that the United States could land troops and equipment, and lift Americans and other foreigners to safety.' [8]
Many similar flights met a similar fate, right through to the end of the week. Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) alone has so far had to watch at least five planeloads of its medical supplies be turned away. [9] On Saturday 16 January, for instance, 'despite guarantees given by the United Nations and the US Defense Department, an MSF cargo plane carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was blocked from landing in Port-au-Prince and was re-routed to Samana, in Dominican Republic', delaying its arrival by an additional 24 hours. [10] Late on Monday 18 January, MSF 'complained that one of its cargo planes carrying 12 tonnes of medical equipment had been turned away three times from Port-au-Prince airport since Sunday,' despite receiving 'repeated assurances they could land.' By that stage one group of MSF doctors in Port-au-Prince had been 'forced to buy a saw in the market to continue the amputations' upon which the lives of their patients depended. [11]
While US commanders set about restoring security by assembling a force of some 14,000 Marines, residents in some less secure parts of Port-au-Prince soon started to run out of food and water. On 20 January people sleeping in one of the largest and most easily accessed of the many temporary refugee camps in central Port-au-Prince (in Champs Mars) told writer Tim Schwartz, author of the 2008 book Travesty in Haiti, that 'no relief has arrived; it is all being delivered on other side of town, by the US embassy.' [12] Telesur reporter Reed Lindsay confirmed on 20 January, a full eight days after the quake, that the impoverished south-western Port-au-Prince suburb closest to the earthquake's epicentre, Carrefour, still hadn't received any food, aid or medical help. [13]
The BBC's Mark Doyle found the same thing in an eastern (and less badly affected) suburb. 'Their houses are destroyed, they have no running water, food prices have doubled, and they haven't seen a single government official or foreign aid worker since the earthquake struck.' Overall, Doyle observed, 'the international response has been quite pathetic. Some of the aid agencies are working very hard, but there are two ways of reporting this kind of thing. One is to hang around with the aid agencies and hang around with the American spokespeople at the airport, and you'll hear all sorts of stories about what's happening. Another way is to drive almost at random with ordinary people and go and see what's happening in ordinary places. In virtually every area I've driven to, ordinary people say that I was the first foreigner that they'd met.' [14]
Only a full week after the earthquake did emergency food supplies even begin the slow journey from the heavily guarded airport to fourteen 'secure distribution points' in various parts of the city. [15] By that stage, tens of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents had finally come to the conclusion that no aid would be forthcoming, and began to abandon the capital for villages in the countryside.
On Sunday 17 January, Al-Jazeera's correspondent summarised what many other journalists had been saying all week. 'Most Haitians have seen little humanitarian aid so far. What they have seen is guns, and lots of them. Armoured personnel carriers cruise the streets' and 'inside the well-guarded perimeter [of the airport], the US has taken control. It looks more like the Green Zone in Baghdad than a centre for aid distribution.' [16] Late on the same day, the World Food Programme's air logistics officer Jarry Emmanuel confirmed that most of the 200 flights going in and out of the airport each day were still being reserved for the US military: 'their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed.' [17] By Monday 18 January, no matter how many US embassy or military spokesman insisted that 'we are here to help' rather than invade, governments as different as those of France and Venezuela had begun to accuse the US of effectively 'occupying' the country. [18]
IV
The US decision to privilege military over humanitarian traffic at the airport sealed the fate of many thousands of people abandoned in the rubble of lower Port-au-Prince and Léogane. In countries all over the world, search and rescue teams were ready to leave for Haiti within 12 hours of the disaster. Only a few were able to arrive without fatal delays – mainly teams, like those from Venezuela, Iceland and China, who managed to land while Haitian staff still retained control of their airport. Some subsequent arrivals, including a team from the UK, were prevented from landing with their heavy lending equipment. Others, like Canada's several Heavy Urban Search Rescue Teams, were immediately readied but never sent – the teams were told to stand down, the Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon eventually explained, because 'the government had opted to send Canadian Armed Forces instead.' [19]
USAID announced on 19 January that international search and rescue teams, over the course of the first full week after the disaster, had managed to save a grand total of 70 people. [20] The majority of these people were rescued in quite specific locations and circumstances. 'Search-and-rescue operations', observed the Washington Post on 18 January, 'have been intensely focused on buildings with international aid workers, such as the crushed U.N. headquarters, and on large hotels with international clientele.' [21] Tim Schwartz spent much of the first post-quake week as a translator with rescue workers, and was struck by the fact that most of their work was confined to places – the UN's hotel Christophe, the Montana Hotel, the Caribe supermarket – that were not only frequented by foreigners but that could be snugly enclosed within 'secure perimeters.' Elsewhere, he observed, UN 'peacekeepers' did their best to make sure that rescue workers treated onlooking crowds as a source of potential danger rather than assistance. [22]
Until the residents of devastated places like Léogane and Carrefour are somehow able to reassure foreign troops that they will feel 'secure' when visiting their neighbourhoods, UN and US commanders clearly prefer to let them die on their own.
Exactly the same logic has condemned yet more people to death in and around Port-au-Prince's hospitals. In one of the most illuminating reports yet filed from the city, on 20 January Democracy Now's Amy Goodman spoke with Dr. Evan Lyon of Partners in Health/Zamni Lasante from the General Hospital, the most important medical centre in the whole country. Lyon acknowledged there was a need for 'crowd control, so that the patients are not kept from having access', but insisted that 'there's no insecurity [...]. I don’t know if you guys were out late last night, but you can hear a pin drop in this city. It’s a peaceful place. There is no war. There is no crisis except the suffering that’s ongoing [...]. The first thing that [your] listeners need to understand is that there is no insecurity here. There has not been, and I expect there will not be.' On the contrary, Lyon explained, 'this question of security and the rumours of security and the racism behind the idea of security has been our major block to getting aid in. The US military has promised us for several days to bring in machinery, but they’ve been listening to this idea that things are insecure, and so we don’t have supplies.' As of 20 January, the hospital still hadn't received the supplies and medicines needed to treat many hundreds of dying patients. 'In terms of aid relief the response has been incredibly slow. There are teams of surgeons that have been sent to places that were, quote, “more secure," that have ten or twenty doctors and ten patients. We have a thousand people on this campus who are triaged and ready for surgery, but we only have four working operating rooms, without anaesthesia and without pain medications.' [23]
Almost by definition, in post-quake Haiti it seems that anyone or anything that cannot be enclosed in a 'secure perimeter' isn't worth saving.
In their occasional forays outside such perimeters, meanwhile, some Western journalists seemed able to find plenty of reasons for retreating behind them. Lurid stories of looting and gangs soon began to lend 'security experts' like the London-based Stuart Page [24] an aura of apparent authority, when he explained to the BBC's gullible 'security correspondent' Frank Gardner that 'all the security gains made in Haiti in the last few years could now be reversed [...]. The criminal gangs, totalling some 3,000, are going to exploit the current humanitarian crisis, to the maximum degree.' [25]
Another seasoned BBC correspondent, Matt Frei, had a similar story to tell on 18 January, when he found a few scavengers sifting through the remains of a central shopping district. 'Looting is now the only industry here. Anything will do as a weapon. Everything is now run by rival armed groups of thugs.' If Haiti is to avoid anarchy, Frei concluded, 'what may be needed is a full scale military occupation.' [26]
Not even former US president (and former Haiti occupier) Bill Clinton was prepared to go that far. 'Actually', Clinton told Frei, 'when you think about people who have lost everything except what they're carrying on their backs, who not only haven't eaten but probably haven't slept in four days, and when the sun goes down it's totally dark and they spend all night long tripping over bodies living and dead, well, I think they've behaved quite well [...]. They are astonishing people. How can they be so calm in the face of such enormous loss of life and loved ones, and all the physical damage?' [27]
Reporters able to tell the difference between occasional and highly localised bursts of foraging and a full-scale 'descent into anarchy' made much the same point all week, as did dozens of indignant Haitian correspondents. On 17 January, for instance, Ciné Institute director David Belle tried to counter international misrepresentation. 'I have been told that much US media coverage paints Haiti as a tinderbox ready to explode. I'm told that lead stories in major media are of looting, violence and chaos. There could be nothing further from the truth. I have travelled the entire city daily since my arrival. The extent of the damage is absolutely staggering [but...] NOT ONCE have we witnessed a single act of aggression or violence [...]. A crippled city of two million awaits help, medicine, food and water. Most haven't received any. Haiti can be proud of its survivors. Their dignity and decency in the face of this tragedy is itself staggering.' [28]
As anyone can see, however, dignity and decency are no substitute for security. No amount of weapons will ever suffice to reassure those 'fortunate few' whose fortunes isolate them from the people they exploit. As far as the people themselves are concerned, 'security is not the issue', explains Haiti Liberté's Kim Ives. 'We see throughout Haiti the population themselves organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps. This is a population which is self-sufficient, and it has been self-sufficient for many years.'[29] But while the people who have lost what little they had have done their best to cope and regroup, the soldiers sent to 'restore order' treat them as potential combatants. 'It’s just the same way they reacted after Katrina', concludes Ives. 'The victims are what’s scary. They’re black people who, you know, had the only successful slave revolution in history. What could be more threatening?'
'According to everyone I spoke with in the centre of the city', wrote Schwarz on 21 January, 'the violence and gang stuff is pure BS.' The relentless obsession with security, agrees Andy Kershaw, is clear proof of the fact that most foreign soldiers and NGO workers 'haven't a clue about the country and its people.' [30] True to form, within hours of the earthquake most of the panicked staff in the US embassy had already been evacuated, and at least one prominent foreign contractor in the garment sector (the Canadian firm Gildan Activewear) announced that it would be shifting production to alternative sewing facilities in neighbouring countries.[31] The price to be paid for such priorities will not be evenly distributed. Up in the higher, wealthier and mostly undamaged parts of Pétionville everyone already knows that it's the local residents 'who through their government connections, trading companies and interconnected family businesses' will once again pocket the lion's share of international aid and reconstruction money. [32]
In order to help keep less well-connected families where they belong, meanwhile, the US Department of Homeland Security has taken 'unprecedented' emergency measures to secure the homeland this past week. Operation 'Vigilant Sentry' will make efficient use of the large naval flotilla the US has assembled around Port-au-Prince. 'As well as providing emergency supplies and medical aid', notes The Daily Telegraph, 'the USS Carl Vinson, along with a ring of other navy and coast guard vessels, is acting as a deterrent to Haitians who might be driven to make the 681 mile sea crossing to Miami.' While Senegal's president Abdoulaye Wade offered 'voluntary repatriation to any Haitian that wants to return to [the land of] their origin', American officials confirmed that they would continue to apply their long-standing (and thoroughly illegal) policy with respect to all Haitian refugees and asylum seekers – to intercept and repatriate them automatically, regardless of the circumstances. [33]
Ever since the quake struck, the US Air Force has taken the additional precaution of flying a radio-transmitting cargo plane for five hours a day over large parts of the country, so as to broadcast a recorded message from Haiti's ambassador in Washington. 'Don’t rush on boats to leave the country', the message says. 'If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. They will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.' Not even life-threatening injuries are enough to entitle Haitians to a different sort of American reception. When the dean of medicine at the University of Miami arrived to help set up a field hospital by the airport in Port-au-Prince, he was outraged to find that most seriously injured people in the city were being denied the visas they would need to be transferred to Florida for surgery and treatment. As of 19 January the State Department had authorised a total of 23 exceptions to its golden rule of immigration. 'It’s beyond insane,' O'Neill complained. 'It’s bureaucracy at its worst.' [34]
V
This is the fourth time the US has invaded Haiti since 1915. Although each invasion has taken a different form and responded to a different pretext, all four have been expressly designed to restore 'stability' and 'security' to the island. Earthquake-prone Haiti must now be the most thoroughly stabilised country in the world. Thousands more foreign security personnel are already on their way, to guard the teams of foreign reconstruction and privatisation consultants who in the coming months are likely to usurp what remains of Haitian sovereignty.
Perhaps some of these guards and consultants will help their elite clients achieve another long-cherished dream: the restoration of Haiti's own little army. And perhaps then, for a short while at least, the inexhaustible source of 'instability' in Haiti – the ever-nagging threat of popular political participation and empowerment – may be securely buried in the rubble of its history.
NOTES
[1] An abbreviated version of this article first appeared in The National, 21 January 2010, http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100121/REVIEW/701219960.
[2] See Pål Sletten and Willy Egset, Poverty in Haiti (FAFO, 2004), 9.
[3] IMF, Haiti: Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (November 2006), 7.
[4] Robert Fatton, Haiti’s Predatory Republic (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 86-87, 83.
[5] Brian Concannon, ‘Lave Men, Siye Atè: Taking Human Rights Seriously', in Melinda Miles and Eugenia Charles, eds. Let Haiti LIVE: Unjust US Policies Towards its Oldest Neighbor (Coconut Creek FL: Educa Vision, 2004), 92.
[6] See for instance Jeb Sprague, 'Haiti's Classquake', HaitiAnalysis 19 January 2010, http://www.haitianalysis.com/2010/1/19/haiti-s-classquake.
[7] BBC Radio 4 News, 16 January 2010, 22:00GMT.
[8] Ginger Thompson and Damien Cave, 'Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to Haiti as Violence Rises', New York Times 17 January 2010.
[9] 'Médecins Sans Frontières says its plane turned away from US-run airport', Daily Telegraph 19 January 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/7031203/Haiti-earthquake-Medecins-Sans-Frontieres-says-its-plane-turned-away-from-US-run-airport.html.
[10] 'Doctors Without Borders Cargo Plane With Full Hospital and Staff Blocked From Landing in Port-au-Prince', 18 January 2010, http://doctorswithoutborders.org/press/release.cfm?id=4165&cat=press-release.
[11] 'America sends paratroopers to Haiti to help secure aid lines', The Times 20 January 2010, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6994523.ece.
[12] Email from Tim Schwartz, January 20, 2010.
[13] 'No aid [in Carrefour]. In the morning at UN base they said they would distribute there, but it didn't happen' (Reed Lindsay, Honor and Respect Foundation Newsletter, 20 January 2010, http://www.hrfhaiti.org/earthquake/). Cf. Luis Felipe Lopez, 'Town at epicenter of quake stays in isolation', The Miami Herald 17 January, 2010.
[14] BBC Radio 4, News at Ten, 18 January 2010.
[15] Ed Pilkington, 'We're not here to fight, US troops insist', The Guardian 18 January 2010.
[16] 'Disputes Emerge over Haiti aid control', Al Jazeera 17 January 2010.
[17] Ginger Thompson and Damien Cave, 'Officials strain to distribute aid to Haiti as violence rises', New York Times 17 January 2010.
[18] 'Haiti aid agencies warn: chaotic and confusing relief effort is costing lives', The Guardian 18 January 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/18/haiti-aid-distribution-confusion-warning.
[19] Don Peat, 'HUSAR not up to task, feds say: Search and rescue team told to stand down', Toronto Sun 17th January 2010, http://www.torontosun.com/news/haiti/2010/01/17/12504981.html.
[20] USAID, http://www.usaid.gov/helphaiti/index.html, accessed on 20 January 2010.
[21] William Booth, 'Haiti's elite spared from much of the devastation', Washington Post, 18 January 2010.
[22] Tim Schwarz, phonecall with the author, 18 January 2010; cf. Tim Schwartz, 'Is this anarchy? Outsiders believe this island nation is a land of bandits. Blame the NGOs for the “looting,”' NOW Toronto, 21 January 2010, http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=173333.
[23] 'With Foreign Aid Still at a Trickle, Devastated Port-au-Prince General Hospital Struggles to Meet Overwhelming Need', Democracy Now! 20 January 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/20/devastated_port_au_prince_hospital_struggles.
[24] Stuart Page is chairman of Page Group, http://www.pagegroupltd.com/aboutus.html.
[25] Gardner then explained that, with the police weakened by the quake, 'thousands of escaped criminals have returned to areas they once terrorised, like the slum district of Cité Soleil [...]. Unless the armed criminals are re-arrested, Haiti's security problems risk being every bit as bad as they were in 2004' (BBC Radio 4, Six O'clock News, 18 January 2010). In fact, when some of these ex-prisoners tried to re-establish themselves in Cité Soleil in the week after the quake, local residents promptly chased them out of the district on their own (see Ed Pilkington and Tom Phillips, 'Haiti escaped prisoners chased out of notorious slum', The Guardian 20 January 2010; Tom Leonard, 'Scenes of devastation outside Port-au-Prince "even worse"', Daily Telegraph 21 January 2010).
[26] BBC television, Ten O'clock News, 18 January 2010.
[27] BBC Radio 4, News at Ten, 18 January 2010. It sounds as if Clinton, in his role as UN special envoy to Haiti, may be learning a few things from his deputy – Zanmi Lasante's Dr. Paul Farmer.
[28] David Belle, 17 January 2010.
[29] 'Journalist Kim Ives on How Western Domination Has Undermined Haiti’s Ability to Recover from Natural Devastation', Democracy Now! 21 January 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/20/journalist_kim_ives_on_how_decades. Ives illustrates the way such community organisations work with an example from the Delmas 33 neighbourhood where he's staying. 'A truckload of food came in in the middle of the night unannounced. It could have been a melee. The local popular organization was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members [...]. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the [Matthew 25] house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion. They were totally sufficient. They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the UN. [...] These are things that people can do for themselves and are doing for themselves.' Kershaw makes the same point: 'This self-imposed blockade by bureaucracy is a scandal but could be easily overcome. The NGOs and the military should recognise the hysteria over "security" for what it is and make use of Haiti's best resource and its most efficient distribution network: the Haitians themselves. Stop treating them as children. Or worse. Hand over to them immediately what they need at the airport. They will find the means to collect it. Fill up their trucks and cars with free fuel. Any further restriction on, and control of, the supply of aid is not only patronising but it is in that control and restriction where any "security issues" will really lurk. And it is the Haitians who best know where the aid is needed' (Andy Kershaw, 'Stop treating these people like savages', The Independent 21 January 2010).
[30] Andy Kershaw, 'Stop treating these people like savages', The Independent 21 January 2010.
[31] Ross Marowits, 'Gildan shifting T-shirt production outside Haiti to ensure adequate supply', The Canadian Press, 13 January 2010, http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets/headline_news/article.jsp?content=b131693719.
[32] William Booth, 'Haiti's elite spared from much of the devastation', Washington Post 18 January 2010.
[33] Bruno Waterfield, 'US ships blockade coast to thwart exodus to America', Daily Telegraph 19 January 2010; 'Senegal offers land to Haitians', BBC News 17 January 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8463921.stm.

Stop treating these people like savages

2010-01-21T04:51:00Z
by Andy Kershaw: (Originally published in the UK Independent)
Just a couple of hours before the earthquake hammered poor Haiti, I was reorganising my bookshelves at home. In the Haiti section I came across a lovely old volume I'd bought from a wandering bookseller in Port-au-Prince on one of my many visits to the former "Pearl of the Antilles", once – incredibly – the richest colony in the world.
The book, Haiti Cherie, published in 1953, was clearly intended for the souvenir stalls – in the days when Haiti had tourists. The full-page photos show a Haiti, and particularly the architectural splendours of Port-au-Prince, during what was known as la belle époque, that period between the Second World War and the arrival, in 1957, of the crazed Duvalier father-and-son dynastical dictatorship in the now-crumpled presidential palace (which was designed and built by British architects and engineers).
Even before the earthquake, and without the photographic evidence in the book, it was scarcely credible that the already broken country and the shattered streets of Port-au-Prince were once elegant and glamorous. But until the dark night of Duvalierism came down, the Haitian capital was a rival to Havana as the chi-chi tropical retreat of Hollywood stars and the literati. Noël Coward was a regular at the Hotel Oloffson, which, a decade later, would be the setting for Graham Greene's The Comedians, his mid-1960s not-so-fictional novel that blew the whistle internationally on Duvalier's terror.
The death of the old monster François Papa Doc Duvalier in 1971, and the succession of his slow-witted teenage son, Jean-Claude Baby Doc Duvalier, brought about a brief encore to la belle époque. Until it was realised that the young playboy President was almost as bloodthirsty as his father, celebrities sipped cocktails again in Port-au-Prince. Mick Jagger inherited the creative perch on the Oloffson's veranda, where he wrote some of the Rolling Stones album, Emotional Rescue, in the late-1970s. Jackie Onassis was often holed up in the privacy of Habitation Leclerc, the capital's most handsome estate.
Haiti will not be enjoying another belle époque for many generations. Ravaged by the cancer of Duvalierism, self-serving military regimes, predatory elites, the cruelties of previous US administrations' realpolitik, and overpopulation it was – long before the horrors and humiliations of last week – already a wreck, by the norms and measures applied by reeling visitors from the affluent outside world.
And they are there again this week, rightly outraged, in huge numbers and, no doubt, mostly well-intentioned. But many of these new arrivals – aid workers, journalists, diplomats, politicians and soldiers – are in Haiti for the first time. They cannot be blamed for not having been there before but their inexperience of the country and their unfamiliarity with Haitians seems to be contributing to the catastrophe, rather than easing it.
The crisis, for more than a week now, has been not about the shortage of donated food, water, fuel and medicines but the distribution of those essentials that are piling up, obscenely, at Port-au-Prince airport. On Monday evening's Channel 4 News, Jon Snow, at that same airport, interviewed the head of Oxfam in Haiti. Snow remarked that he and his team had been to areas around the capital that had not had any NGO visits, never mind material aid. The Oxfam woman spoke authoritatively, but emptily, about how her teams were all over the city conducting "assessments".
I'm certain every thirsty Haitian (water is a far more urgent priority than food) is much-comforted and reassured that armies of clerical teams from a leading NGO are all across town filling in forms.
(The runways, incidentally, at this allegedly grid-locked airport were, during Snow's broadcasts, disturbed by just one aircraft. The US military, now running the control tower, says there is no room to park more planes. Over Snow's shoulder, one could see acre upon acre of empty airport outfield.)
The alarmingly unanimous priorities of the spokesmen and women of aid organisations and the military, have been with "issues" (for they love that word) of "security", "procedures", and "logistics" (what we used to call "transport" or "trucks"). These obsessions indicate not only a self-serving and self-important careerist culture among some, though not all, aid workers (although wide experience of the profession in Haiti and across Africa tells me it is more common than donors would like to think), but that the magnitude of the crisis has paralysed them into a gibbering strike force of box-tickers. Most worryingly, it reveals that many – even selfless – NGO workers on the ground haven't a clue about the country and its people.
There has now solidified a consensus among aid organisations that the relief they are bringing is itself a liability; that distributing what Haitians are dying for – literally – will bring on a second nightmare. So, supplies pile up at the airport because, apparently, the Haitians need to be fed and watered at gunpoint. And there aren't enough men with guns to provide this totemic "security" and there aren't enough trucks to move the supplies around the country. (Haiti is always absolutely full of trucks. The first relief priority ought to be fuel for those convoys, to deliver the water, medicines and food. In that order).
This self-imposed blockade by bureaucracy is a scandal but could be easily overcome. The NGOs and the military should recognise the hysteria over "security" for what it is and make use of Haiti's best resource and its most efficient distribution network: the Haitians themselves. Stop treating them as children. Or worse. Hand over to them immediately what they need at the airport. They will find the means to collect it. Fill up their trucks and cars with free fuel. Any further restriction on, and control of, the supply of aid is not only patronising but it is in that control and restriction where any "security issues" will really lurk. And it is the Haitians who best know where the aid is needed.
An unbelievable 10,000 charities were already working in Haiti when the earthquake rocked the island, most of them tiny independent organisations. Humanitarian aid is, almost by definition, never where it is needed when natural disasters strike. But, in Haiti, what's needed has been flown in with impressive speed. Yet the combined concern of all those organisations – many of them regarding fellow charities as professional rivals – has so far been unable to get that assistance a ride from the airport. Too much energy in the last week has been expended on bickering about procedure and the fetish about "security".
This assumption that there is a security threat has gone completely unchallenged by an army of foreign press, equally unfamiliar with Haiti and the character of the Haitians. Indeed, TV reporters particularly, having exhausted the televisual possibilities of rubble, have been talking up "security", "unrest" and "violence" when all available evidence would indicate anything but.
Astonishingly, among these TV dramatists, I am sorry to say, is the BBC's Matt Frei. An incongruously ample figure around Port-au-Prince, Frei has been working himself up all week into what is now a state of near hysteria about "security" and the almost non-existent "violence".
Over the weekend we saw him anticipating an outbreak of unrest, standing before a crowd of thousands of hungry, humiliated Haitians as they waited, patiently and quietly, to be given rations by UN soldiers. Their dignity and stoicism seemed to escape Frei who was, in any case, looking away from them while ranting about the inevitability of looming bloodshed – conspicuously unlikely, judging from the evidence of his own report. (When he is not almost tumescent about violence, Frei speculates and pontificates pompously to camera, or booms at earthquake victims in French. Most Haitians don't speak French. They speak Creole).
Frei's reluctance to recognise the amazing self-control of these desperate people, and instead to amplify the hysteria about violence for which he has scant evidence, has brought him at times worryingly close to calling the Haitians savages.
Disgracefully, on Monday's Newsnight, Frei had the audacity – and again, anything but the evidence – to declare: "The dignity of Haiti's past is long forgotten."
No, it certainly is not. And it took Bill Clinton, being interviewed by Frei on Monday, to correct him on that one, and to point out that Haiti still has dignity, immense quantities of it, especially in the present catastrophe. Their chat was turned by Frei, inevitably, to his appetite for imminent violence. "But what about this history of violence," he asked, "and civil unrest in this country?"
"When you consider," explained Clinton, "that these people haven't slept for four days, haven't eaten and have spent their nights wandering the streets tripping over dead bodies, I think they've behaved pretty well."
Clinton might have added that Haiti's history of violence has been state violence against its own people. And the Haitian enthusiasm for civil unrest has always been directed bravely at brutal and corrupt rulers.
Most journalists were also reporting breathlessly that Port-au-Prince's main prison had collapsed. Good story. But not for the reasons we were told. The inexperience – and indeed arrogance – of every single reporter who drew our attention to the jail, missed the real significance of its destruction.
It was not that "violent criminals", "murderers", "gang bosses" "notorious killers" or "drug dealers" had "simply walked out the front gates". (And just how did these escapees miraculously avoid being crushed to death in their cells?) Even if true, that was a minor detail to the people of Port-au-Prince, who had more urgent concerns.
The true significance of the prison's implosion was that it represented for ordinary Haitians, like the wreckage of the presidential palace and the city's former central army barracks, exquisite revenge upon the prime symbols of decades of state cruelty and oppression.
And many of the prison's inmates were surely not the dangerous stereotypes of these lurid reports. Haiti's jails were, notoriously, full of petty thieves and other unfortunates who shouldn't have been in there anyway. I once had to go into that Penitentiaire Nationale, where I saw hundreds of men kept in cages, without room to lie down, shuffling around literally ankle deep in their own shit, to get out of there the son of a Haitian friend who'd been arrested so that the local police could extort money from his father for the release of his boy.
Like their fellow arrivistes in the NGOs, most reporters now in the country never saw Haiti in its everyday state of chaos and decay. They simply have no appreciation that, while the earthquake has magnified their misery, Haitians – rivalled, possibly only by the permanently flooded Bangladeshis – are the world champions at survival and that shortage, suffering, torment and the absence of infrastructure and effective government are their norms.
Haitians are extremely industrious and always busy, even though there are few formal jobs. They are resourceful, resilient, proud and dignified. On all my visits I have marvelled at Haiti's capacity not just to survive but to function and even, at times, to flourish. (The economy grew by 6 per cent last year. Things were on the up before the earthquake dished it out again on poor Haiti.) It is a puzzle I have never resolved and a fascination that has drawn me back to Haiti more than 20 times: it shouldn't work; nobody knows how it works; but somehow or other it does.
And it will again. I am reluctant to recruit Bob Dylan into the rescue and recovery operation in Haiti but, as Bob put it so neatly: "When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose..." No one understands that better than the Haitians.
In the past, with nothing to lose, they kicked out the French, overthrew colonialism with a slave rebellion and created the world's first black republic. Later, when still they had nothing, they chased Baby Doc to the airport, into exile, and took on his Tonton Macoutes death-squads with their bare hands. In 1990, against all odds, predictions and expectations of routine state violence, they voted-in their first democratically elected president.
Haitians certainly aren't happy always to have nothing. But they are accustomed to it. They are also adaptable and supremely skilled at making lives for themselves amid rubble, and out of rubble, both physical and political.
The pile of rubble today is more appalling and daunting than usual. But in that remarkable Haitian way, every lump of it will be recycled and, with it, the indefatigable Haitians will rise, rebuild and live again.

Haiti's Classquake

2010-01-19T05:17:00Z
By: Jeb Sprague - Znet
Just five days prior to the 7.0 earthquake that shattered Port-au-Prince on January 12th, the Haitian government’s Council of Modernisation of Public Enterprises (CMEP) announced the planned 70% privatization of Teleco, Haiti’s public telephone company.
Today Port-au-Prince lies in ruins, with thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands dead, entire neighborhoods cut off, many buried alive. Towns across the southern peninsula, such as Léogâne, are said to be in total ruin with an untold number of victims. Haiti’s president, René Préval, and his administration remain largely inept, absent from Port-au-Prince and even the local radio.
At Pont Morin in the Bois Verna section of the capital, Teleco’s office building is badly damaged. One twitter poster in Port-au-Prince on Monday warned local residents to evacuate “After the latest evaluations of the building, they've noticed that the main poles of the structure are damaged.”
With masses of people unable to get critical emergency medical care, water and basic supplies, the lack of local state infrastructure and personnel is plainly apparent.
Instead of investing in social programs and government infrastructure that could have helped care for the people of Port-au-Prince, especially following such a natural disaster, Haiti’s government has long been pressured by the United States and International Financial Institutions to sell off its infrastructure, to shut down government sponsored soup kitchens, to lower tariffs that might benefit the rural economy.
The demographic trend in Haiti over the last few decade’s showcases the impact of capitalist globalization: the movement of rural folks to slums in Port-au-Prince, often perched in large clumps precariously on hillsides.
"Slums begin with bad geology,” writer and historian Mike Davis explains. In his book Planet of Slums, Davis describes the explosion of slum communities in today's era of global capitalism. Billions have no choice but to live in close proximity to environmental and geological disaster, Davis explains.
In mid-2007, Haitian journalist Wadner Pierre and I wrote a piece for IPS (Inter Press Service) that investigated the gutting of Haiti’s public telephone company. We interviewed public sector workers laid off in droves. The government’s plan was to reduce Teleco employees from 3,293 to less than one thousand. By 2010 Préval’s appointed heads of Teleco had terminated employment for two-thirds of the workers at the company. During his first term in office from 1996-2001, Préval had already sold off the government’s Minoterie flourmill and public cement company.
Préval now follows through with the Cadre de Coopération Intérimaire (CCI), a macro-economic adjustment program formulated by his unelected predecessor (the interim regime of Gerard Latortue), along with international donor institutions and local sub-grantee groups. Privatization has been one plank of neoliberalism in Haiti.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Haiti was pressured to lower tariffs on foreign rice, bringing down the few protections in place for its local economy. With a lack of opportunity in the countryside, migration to the nation’s capital intensified. Hundreds of thousands took up residence in poorly constructed shantytowns, many in hillside slums such as Carrefour.
Using the worn-out rhetoric of nationalism to draw attention away from the implementation of policies favorable to global capitalism, government functionaries in Haiti have worked closely with IFI, NGO and governmental advisors and experts from abroad. For those Haitian politicians unwilling to go along with these plans, the brute force of coup d’états, economic embargo and reoccurring civil society training missions from abroad have reinforced the “right way” to govern.
In the aftermath of the earthquake, the Haitian state evaporated. Police searched for their own loved-ones, as government ministries and UN bases lay in ruins, many top officials now dead under tons of fallen concrete.
Widely criticized for failing in the days following the quake to visit or speak out on the radio to the neighborhoods of the capital in turmoil, Préval and other aloof Haitian government leaders have been encamped at a police station on the cities edge meeting with foreign leaders and journalists. On Tuesday Préval went to Santo Domingo in the neighboring Dominican Republic to confer further with aid officials.
The Washington Post explained “The U.S. government views Préval, an agronomist by training, as a technocrat largely free of the sharp political ideologies that have divided Haiti for decades. But at a time when tragedy is forcing the country essentially to begin again, Préval's aversion to the public stage has left millions of Haitians wondering whether there is a government at all.”
Hundreds of journalists have streamed into Port-au-Prince, while the U.S. military has set up base-camp at the damaged national airport with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the ground. Giving priority to unloading heavy weaponry, U.S. forces have turned away a number of large planes carrying medical and rescue equipment, prompting protests from France, Venezuela and the Médecins sans frontières.
International media outlets show images of Haitians digging with pieces of concrete at collapsed buildings. But over the days the cries of loved ones buried below have slowly fallen silent.
Other media have begun to show images of poor people in the capital's downtown searching for food, calling them "looters", when in fact mass starvation is setting in. This occurs as shotgun-wielding security guards attempt to cordon off the rubble of some of the larger markets.
Given the past decades of forced austerity measures imposed upon Haiti, it has been nearly impossible for the country to build up a larger government, one with more capacity to deal with emergencies, to support social investment projects, soup kitchens, or even improved slum housing. The overthrown Aristide government, 2001-2004, though severely crippled by aid embargoes and elite-backed death squads and opposition groups, had refused privatization, instituted a national program of soup kitchens and literacy centers, and even constructed a few blocks of improved slum housing in the capital (as covered at the time in an article by the former government newspaper L’Union).
Those small but welcome measures are a thing of the past. The repression of attempts by the people to have a say through democratic means and the forced subjugation of the local economy to global capitalism parallels the assumption of power by elites disconnected from the people they govern. These are the technocratic elites that Sociologist William I. Robinson in his book A Theory of Global Capitalism refers to as “transnationalised fractions of local dominant groups in the South…sometimes termed a ‘modernizing bourgeoisie’, who have overseen sweeping processes of social and economic restructuring and integration into the global economy and society.” Out from the ashes, do not be surprised if the Haitian people refuse to accept this.
Geographer Kenneth Hewitt coined the term 'classquake' in examining the 1976 earthquake in Guatemala that cost the lives of 23,000 people, because of the accuracy with which it struck down the poor. The classquake in Haiti today is much worse, compounded by decades of capitalist globalization and U.S. intervention.
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Jeb Sprague received a Project Censored Award in 2008 for an article he published with the Inter Press Service (IPS) from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Visit his university website: http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~jhsprague/