THREE FROM COUNTERPUNCH MAGAZINE
The U.S. Can't Repeat the Mistakes of New Orleans
Haiti's Ongoing Emergency
By DANIEL WOLFF
I last worked in Haiti as the co-producer of the Jonathan Demme documentary, “The Agronomist.” And since then have been working with him on “Right to Return,” a film about people trying to return to New Orleans. These projects affect how I see — and mourn — the disaster in Haiti.
We need to get medical aid to Haiti immediately because Haitians have so little to fall back on.
The United States government was criminally negligent in its immediate response Hurricane Katrina in 2005. There were a number of reasons, including a general lack of organization, but one can’t help but wonder if the lack of response had to do with the socio-economics of those most affected — they were poor. It was as if the U.S. government only recognized its wealthier citizens, while the poor were considered less important. No one said that, but no one had to: the images broadcast over TV and reproduced in the media showed low-income families left to fend for themselves in the post-Katrina heat and destruction.
In the brief time since the earthquake, Haiti has already produced similar images. And I’m afraid we’ll see more in the coming weeks: the remains of a country which we have long neglected.
The U.S. can’t repeat the mistakes of New Orleans. We need to get medical aid to Haiti immediately; indeed, with urgency and compassion because Haitians have so little to fall back on in this time of need.
Floods and earthquakes can’t be stopped; what we can do is help make sure the basic resources and educated citizenry are there to respond.
While I’m concerned that government corruption may mean that aid and relief won’t reach those most in need in Haiti — that was true before the earthquake. Our real challenge is not only the disaster, but the on-going, everyday emergency.
Daniel Wolff lives in Nyack, N.Y. His newest book is How Lincoln Learned to Read. His other books include "4th of July/Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land." He is a co-producer of the forthcoming Jonathan Demme documentary about New Orleans, "Right to Return." He can be reached at: ziwolff@optonline.net
Shock Therapy?
Haiti, Where America Never Learns
By TOM REEVES
In April 2004, my CounterPunch article, ¨Haiti: An American Learning Zone,¨ chronicled all the failures of U.S. policy in Haiti at that time, which those of us who regularly visited Haiti believed doomed Haitians to remain the world´s poorest people, subject to devastation at the whim of weather or geology. Among these failures was the U.S. emphasis on aid for urban jobs, rather than for sustainable agriculture. This meant continued support for the sweat shops of garment industries that had long been virtual slave factories, with a minimum wage of less than $2 a day. It meant a focus on a Haitian economy linked to the world ¨free¨ market of big multinationals, rather than on regional markets (multilateral and Caribbean) and local, self-sustaining markets. Taken together, U.S. and international economic policies were touted as ¨neoliberalism¨ and urged on Haiti by the World Bank and via U.S. AID policies that hooked Haitians on cheap U.S. rice and other products, undermining locally-produced Haitian rice and casava, among other foodstuffs. From a self-reliant agriculture, Haiti was rebuilt as a profitable neoimperial outpost.
Meanwhile, the U.S. totally ignored the sound advice of the international Haiti solidarity movement – including groups like Oxfam, Partners in Health and Amnesty International. These groups insisted that Haitian democracy could only thrive if a vibrant and locally-controlled Haitian economy thrived – with deference to the country´s huge peasant movements. When Haiti´s first democratically elected President, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was removed – not by a ´rebellion´ as recent US media have said - but by a U.S.-engineered coup, the solidarity movement and NGOs were proved right. Without a sound and independent Haitian economy, there could be no democracy. Period. Aristide´s sin was not that he courted Cuba (he did – and who wouldn´t, since Cuba alone has supplied doctors, engineers and educators for Cuba en masse), nor even that he dared propose a minimum wage of $5 a day (a day, not an hour!), but that he based his administration on a genuine Creole-speaking mass oeasant movement, Lavalas, which challenged the tiny Francophone elite with its ties to US business – a trend that the US had fostered since at least the early 1900s to replace France as the imperial power. A black country truly ruled by black masses was just not to be tolerated, a few miles from the only truly independent country in the hemisphere (Cuba). All of this continued a U.S. imperial approach to bind Haiti to U.S.. tutelage at the expense of its own economic health.
At the end of the 2004 CounterPunch article, I wrote: ¨It remains to be seen whether the U.S. empire will gain more from its exercise in the learning zone of Haiti, or the international solidarity movement. Let us hope for the latter -- since the next learning zones may come sooner than we expect, especially if the Bush regime lives through its debacle in Iraq and survives the November election...¨
Bush did survive, but Bush is now gone. America has still not learned from the Haitian learning zone. Obama – the first U.S. black president now sits in the White House. But just as he has changed little in Afghanistan or Iraq (and possibly made things worse there), Obama – and the former first couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton (Clinton is the special envoy to Haiti – called the ¨colonial governor¨by some peasant leaders) – are just proposing more of the same! Hillary dared pronouce that the Haitian situation after the earthquake was a Biblical tragedy – the work of God, in other words. A.N.S.W.E.R, a radical blog, put it better: The degree of suffering in the wake of disasters like last year´s hurricanes, and this terrible earthquake – is not the work of God, but the work of American imperial policy – specifically neoliberalism, that sees shoddy construction, urban growth in Port au Prince from 50,000 in 1975 to 3 million today, with peasants fleeing from a Haitian agriculture that was once self-sufficient, to the teeming slums of the capital. As A.N.S.W.E.R. put it, the makeshift dwellings of Haiti´s slums turned into graves.¨ It is not coincidental that the massive hurricanes that hit Cuba and Haiti with equal force in 2008 took 800 Haitian lives, but only 8 Cuban lives. If 50 or 100,000 Haitians die in this earthquake as feared , more than half of them will have died needlessly, or rather because of U.S. greed.
The Clintons clearly have learned nothing from their visits to Haiti, and Obama seems only to follow the tired notion of ¨saving the poor Haitian people¨ by sending in ships of aid and marines. Clinton proposes that Soros build a huge garment industry industrial park to expand, not cut back, on sweat shops. He proposes swanky tourist resorts on remote beaches and at the mountain palaces of former emperors. He celebrated $324 million in pledges last June from the InterAmerican Devlopmemt Bank – when Haiti´s ambassador Raymond Joseph says less than 35% of those pledges had been seen by January, and when 80% of any money that did arrive would go to pay salaries of non-Haitian ´experts´ or for goods and services contracted from the U.S.. And when IADB refuses to cancel the Haitian debt, and continues to collect huge interest fees from the Haitian government every year. More of the same. America doesn´t learn from Haiti, because to really learn those lessons would be to give up the prerogative of empire, and America – even under a black President – is obviously not ready to consider that option.
The only alternative to America´s unlearned lessons on Haiti, is for the international Haiti solidarity to revive, and for the so-called U.N. Peacekeepers to get off the backs of Lavalas activists, and allow the re-invigoration of that revolutionary movement. Maybe this horrible earthquake can shock American ¨humanitarians¨ and ¨radicals¨ into reviving their lagging interest in Haiti – and surely it will revive the revolutionary yearnings of the Haitian peasant masses. Let´s hope so.
Without that, the horror will go on and on, enriching the coffers of U.S. business and bureacracy, via various earthquake relief measures and massive food aid, and continuing to enslave the brave, proud nation that first saw a genuine revolution in this hemisphere.
Tom Reeves was Professor at Roxbury Community College in Boston, and
director of the Caribbean Focus Program, which sponsored nine
delegations of nongovernmental activists from the US and Canada to Haiti
during the Aristide and Preval presidencies, and during the times of the
coup d´etats.
When Haitian Ministers Take a 50 Percent Cut of Aide Money It's Called "Corruption," When NGOs Skim 50 Percent It's Called "Overhead"
Crushing Haiti, Now as Always
By PATRICK COCKBURN
The US-run aid effort for Haiti is beginning to look chillingly similar to the criminally slow and disorganized US government support for New Orleans after it was devastated by hurricane Katrina in 2005. Four years ago President Bush was famously mute and detached when the levies broke in Louisiana. By way of contrast President Obama was promising Haitians that everything would be done for survivors within hours of the calamity.
The rhetoric from Washington has been very different during these two disasters, but the outcome may be much the same. In both cases very little aid arrived at the time it was most needed and, in the case of Port-au-Prince, when people trapped under collapsed buildings were still alive. When foreign rescue teams with heavy lifting gear does come it will be too late. No wonder enraged Haitians are building roadblocks out of rocks and dead bodies.
In New Orleans and Port-au-Prince there is the same official terror of looting by local people so the first outside help to arrive is in the shape of armed troops. The US currently has 3,500 soldiers, 2,200 Marines and 300 medical personnel on their way to Haiti.
Of course there will be looting because, with shops closed or flattened by the quake, this is the only way for people can get food and water. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. I was in Port-au-Prince in 1994, the last time US troops landed there, when local people systematically tore apart police stations, taking wood, pipes and even ripping nails out of the walls. In the police station I was in there were sudden cries of alarm from those looting the top floor as they discovered that they could not get back down to the ground because the entire wooden staircase had been chopped up and stolen.
I have always liked Haitians for their courage, endurance, dignity and originality. They often manage to avoid despair in the face of the most crushing disasters or the absence of any prospect that their lives will get better. Their culture, notably their painting and music, is among the most interesting and vibrant in the world.
It is sad to hear journalists who have rushed to Haiti in the wake of the earthquake give such misleading and even racist explanations of why Haitians are so impoverished, living in shanty towns with a minimal health service, little electricity supply, insufficient clean water and roads that are like river beds.
This did not happen by accident. In the 19th century it was as if the colonial powers never forgave Haitians for staging a successful slave revolt against the French plantation owners. US Marines occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. Between 1957 and 1986 the US supported Papa Doc and Baby Doc, fearful that they might be replaced by a regime sympathetic to revolutionary Cuba next door.
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a charismatic populist priest was overthrown by a military coup in 1991, and restored with US help in 1994. But the Americans were always suspicious of any sign of radicalism from this spokesman for the poor and the outcast and kept him on a tight leash. Tolerated by President Clinton, Aristide was treated as a pariah by the Bush administration which systematically undermine him over three years leading up to a successful rebellion in 2004 led by local gangsters acting on behalf of a kleptocratic Haitian elite and supported by right wing members of the Republican Party in the US.
So much of the criticism of President Bush has focused on his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that his equally culpable actions in Haiti never attracted condemnation. But if the country is a failed state today, partly run by the UN, in so far as it is run by anybody, then American actions over the years have a lot to do with it.
Haitians are now paying the price for this feeble and corrupt government structure because there is nobody to 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. “The wastage of aid is sky-high,” said a former World Bank director in Afghanistan. “There is real looting going on, mostly by private enterprises. It is a scandal.” Foreign consultants in Kabul often receive $250,000 to $500,000 a year, in a country where 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.
Patrick Cockburn is the Ihe author of "Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq."
No comments:
Post a Comment