Haiti’s fate

5th Feb 2010

This was not a nat­ural dis­as­ter, says Jonathan Gilbert. The human­i­tar­ian cri­sis cur­rently faced by the peo­ple of Haiti is the result of sys­tem­atic fail­ures by the rest of the world to answer their cries for help.

AS Haiti makes its first ten­ta­tive steps towards com­plete recon­struc­tion, ever-increasing vol­umes of for­eign aid, in the form of both resources and per­son­nel, con­tinue to arrive at its shores. The Caribbean nation has been almost oblit­er­ated by an earth­quake of truly dev­as­tat­ing effect. Mother Nature has, once again let it be known that we are but tem­po­rary occu­pants of her majes­tic world.
Yet if one delves a lit­tle deeper, past the tec­tonic plates which form Hispaniola’s Enriquillo-Plantain Gar­den fault zone, it becomes clear that the cur­rent fate of the Hait­ian peo­ple is not the prod­uct of an unstop­pable and unpre­dictable nat­ural force, but of the neg­li­gence of their human coun­ter­parts. The nat­ural dis­as­ter in Haiti is, more accu­rately, the human dis­as­ter in Haiti.
The for­mer Span­ish and French colony is the poor­est coun­try of the Amer­i­cas, and of the entire West­ern Hemi­sphere. The fig­ures to the right are con­clu­sive. Whilst the Los Ange­les Times’ asser­tion that ‘not even a devel­oped coun­try could com­pletely with­stand such a pow­er­ful tem­blor’ holds truth, the Hait­ian tragedy is almost entirely the result of its under­de­vel­oped, bro­ken state – a cul­mi­na­tion of eco­nomic, polit­i­cal and land man­age­ment causes.
Insa­tiable cor­rup­tion has been the crip­pling fac­tor for Haiti’s econ­omy. Dur­ing the 70s and 80s, Pres­i­dent Jean-Claude Duva­lier is reported to have siphoned off $500 mil­lion of pub­lic funds whilst pop­ulist Jean-Bertrand Aris­tide, who held power on two sep­a­rate occa­sions, has been accused of embez­zle­ment and of encour­ag­ing Haiti’s drug trade. Politi­cians’ per­sonal for­tunes and the needs of their peo­ple are almost always mutu­ally exclu­sive. Haiti’s pop­u­la­tion has been dev­as­tated by neglect.
How­ever, it is the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity that must bear the brunt of crit­i­cism. The role of G20, the UN, the World Bank and the gov­ern­ments of devel­oped nations who have con­tributed to for­eign aid needs, once again, to be called into seri­ous ques­tion. The devel­oped world’s efforts to effec­tively deal with the Hait­ian cri­sis are com­mend­able but belated.
The peo­ple of Haiti never ben­e­fit­ted from sub­stan­tial for­eign aid. Debt repay­ments to the World Bank and the IMF made large-scale invest­ment in the coun­try impos­si­ble.
Fur­ther­more, despite sit­ting on an active fault line, the infra­struc­ture of the country’s cap­i­tal, Port-au-Prince, was inad­e­quately equipped to deal with sud­den seis­mic activ­ity. 20,000 com­mer­cial build­ings and 225,000 res­i­dences have col­lapsed or been severely dam­aged since the earth­quake shook Haiti over three weeks ago, reports the New York Times.
The unreg­u­lated agri­cul­tural sec­tor has con­tributed to defor­esta­tion and soil ero­sion, which has left Haiti prone to flood­ing. In 2004, Hur­ri­cane Jeanne caused wide­spread floods and 3,006 deaths, and the mul­ti­tude of storms which hit in the lat­ter half of 2008 left 800,000 Haitians in need of human­i­tar­ian aid. This was Haiti’s last scream for help to which the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity, and its flawed poli­cies, never responded.
The present-day dis­as­ter in Haiti smacks of the neg­li­gence to which the world bore wit­ness when Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina dev­as­tated New Orleans five years ago. For­mer Uni­ver­sity of Birm­ing­ham Envi­ron­men­tal Gov­er­nance lec­turer James Evans stated that there was ‘noth­ing nat­ural’ about the New Orleans dis­as­ter.
Eco­nomic inequal­i­ties and the sidelin­ing of envi­ron­men­tal man­age­ment pro­grammes pro­vided the con­text for destruc­tion, and for­mer Pres­i­dent Bush’s claims that, ‘no one could have fore­seen such a dis­as­ter’ were untrue. The Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment was remiss before Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina and, dis­grace­fully, in its after­math, when the habi­tants of the superpower’s fifth most impov­er­ished state were insulted by a half-hearted relief effort. ‘The storm hits, cap­i­tal­ism pre­serves its prof­its and human­ity drowns,’ was Evans’ sum­mary of the Katrina-induced flood­ing.
New Orleans was the clas­sic case of envi­ron­men­tal injus­tice. A goal which will be achieved when ‘every­one enjoys the same degree of pro­tec­tion from envi­ron­men­tal and health haz­ards,’ envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice emerged in the USA dur­ing the 1980s. Today, in the glob­alised world, American-led inter­na­tional insti­tu­tions have been defi­cient in ensur­ing jus­tice for all nations.
The Hait­ian earth­quake was the bul­let leav­ing the gun’s bar­rel, but the hand which pulled the trig­ger was undoubt­edly human, not seis­mic. Yet, in what is referred to in acad­e­mia as the ‘ecol­ogy of fear’, mankind has, once again, shifted the blame onto nature. The fail­ures of global cap­i­tal­ism now have a dev­as­tated human front, not just a col­lapsed finan­cial one.
Humanity’s role in Haiti must not be hid­den. Unequal global-power rela­tions have made the for­got­ten cor­ners of Earth unjustly vul­ner­a­ble to abrupt cli­matic and envi­ron­men­tal events and left Haiti with lit­tle chance of avoid­ing its present tragic circumstances.