Haiti before the earthquake (all photos by Ruth Fremson, NY Times, 2005, preserved here)
The most depressing four paragraphs I've read recently were these by Patrick Cockburn on Friday (emphasis added):
Haitians are now paying the price for this feeble and corrupt government structure because there is nobody to coordinate the most rudimentary relief and rescue efforts. Its weakness is exacerbated because aid has been funneled through foreign NGOs. A justification for this is that less of the money is likely to be stolen, but this does not mean that much of it reaches the Haitian poor. A sour Haitian joke says that when a Haitian minister skims 15 per cent of aid money it is called 'corruption' and when an NGO or aid agency takes 50 per cent it is called 'overhead'.
Many of the smaller government aid programs and NGOs are run by able, energetic and selfless people, but others, often the larger ones, are little more than rackets, highly remunerative for those who run them. In Kabul and Baghdad it is astonishing how little the costly endeavors of American aid agencies have accomplished. . . . Foreign consultants in Kabul often receive $250,000 to $500,000 a year, in a country where 43 per cent of the population try to live on less than a dollar a day.
None of this bodes very well for Haitians hoping for relief in the short term or a better life in the long one. The only way this will really happen if the Haitians have a functioning and legitimate state capable of providing for the needs of its people. The US military, the UN bureaucracy or foreign NGOs are never going to do this in Haiti or anywhere else.
There is nothing very new in this. Americans often ask why it is that their occupation of Germany and Japan in 1945 succeeded so well but more than half a century later in Iraq and Afghanistan was so disastrous. The answer is that it was not the US but the efficient German and Japanese state machines which restored their countries. Where that machine was weak, as in Italy, the US occupation relied with disastrous results on corrupt and incompetent local elites, much as they do today in Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti. |
Haiti before the earthquake
Those paragraphs predicted what the most reliable reports say is going on now: I See No Evidence of a Government Presence Here. The Haiti money problem is being solved, but the chaos prevents help, in time, to most Haitians trapped under rubble or dying of treatable injuries. Nothing at all is being done or will be done about the non-functioning, failed state, which derives whatever legitimacy of the bullet it has from UN enforcers with their own, neocolonial agenda. If anything the death-squad-aided government has just picked up new enforcers, U.S. ones, to add to the UN occupation force. Let's see how that goes (NOT fucking very WELL).
Haiti before the earthquake
Haiti long neo-colonial history continues: decades of the bloodsucking U.S.-backed Duvaliers, then a brief early 1990s Jean-Bertrand Aristide spring, and then back to continuing U.S. neocolonialism -- Aristide's U.S.-backed ouster in 1991, his restoration in 1994 on condition he impose neoliberalist "plan of death" on Haiti, a brutal U.S. economic embargo and Aristide's eventual ouster in 2004 -- featuring U.S.-backed death squads that still roam free today -- because he was not neoliberal enough, then U.S. puppet and Duvalieresque kleptocrat Gérard Latortue's incredibly harsh neoliberal regime. Finally, he was ousted and in the 2006 elections an Aristide ally, René Préval, was elected, but he has turned out to feeble, cooperating with the U.S. (that's now Mr. Obama, btw) neo-liberal "plan of death" program.
So who really rules Haiti, if not the failed state:
In fact, the U.S., UN and other imperial powers effectively bypassed the Préval government and instead poured money into NGOs. "Haiti now has the highest per capita presence of NGOs in the world," says Yves Engler. The Préval government has become a political fig leaf, behind which the real decisions are made by the imperial powers, and implemented through their chosen international NGOs.
The real state power isn't the Préval government, but the U.S.-backed United Nations occupation. Under Brazilian leadership, UN forces have protected the rich and collaborated with--or turned a blind eye to--right-wing death squads who terrorize supporters of Aristide and his Lavalas Party.
The occupiers have done nothing to address the poverty, wrecked infrastructure and massive deforestation that have exacerbated the effects of a series of natural disasters--severe hurricanes in 2004 and 2008, and now the Port-au-Prince earthquake.
Haiti before the earthquake
And what are the occupiers against? Aristideism: "land reform, aid to peasants, reforestation, investment in infrastructure for the people, and increased wages and union rights for sweatshop workers." I.e., the same thing they're against everywhere: more for you and me, less for the investor class. Let's finish with a little bit of hope, More Than Aid, Haiti Needs Allies:
Haitians, it is true, need all the help they can get, but, as Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, warns, "crises are often used now as the pretext for pushing through policies that you cannot push through under times of stability. Countries in periods of extreme crisis are desperate for any kind of aid, any kind of money, and are not in a position to negotiate fairly the terms of that exchange." Desperation ought not to be abused by oligarchic governments to drown Haiti into more debt or hold that sovereign nation economically hostage. Desperation ought not to be abused to enforce even more draconian mandates that only promote further instability. Desperation ought not to be abused to enhance specific political policies that only service imperialistic ambitions. Unless one still believes in fairy tales, it's almost unthinkable to assume many foreign governments, who've already come bearing gifts, don't see this as an opportunity to accomplish all three.
. . . Only a courageous countervailing movement that stands strong for the dignities and humanities of Haitians-during the aftermath and beyond: when TV channels have moved on to the next circus, when people have stopped giving and relief organizations are running out of aid-would save Haiti from an even greater earthquake already rattling the ground beneath.
Haiti needs Aristideism, an end to neoliberalist economic brutality. That's what needs to be imposed on Haiti, Mr. and Ms. Hollywood Celebrities, what its common people have long voted for and courageously fought and died for. |
