"A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." --Stanford economist Paul Romer (later quoted by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel)
The staggering toll of death and human misery in Haiti will no doubt grow as survivors of last week’s 7.0 earthquake continue to suffer the lack of clean water, food, medicine, and electricity. Local emergency personnel were hard pressed to offer any help. The principal base of the U.N. mission in Haiti collapsed and many of peacekeepers were killed or remain missing. Doctors without Borders lost several of the clinics where they have offered free medical care. Haiti’s already dismal infrastructure is made incalculably worse by collapsed buildings and shattered roads. U.S. troops and foreign aid workers confront near-insurmountable roadblocks–-quite literally–-as they try to move desperately needed supplies to the hardest hit areas.
It didn’t have to be this bad. Of course even the wealthiest and best organized U.S. cities are devastated when earthquakes, hurricanes, or floodwaters wipe out whole communities. But any disaster–-and Haiti has experienced more than its share–-is grievously worsened by that country’s lack of basic material and organizational infrastructure that in other places would have been quickly mobilized to help.
This deplorable lack of the most basic “safety net” in Haiti is no accident. Neither is it solely the result of “mismanagement” and a series of corrupt and/or disorganized administrations, though the people along Delmas Avenue could certainly recite a litany of official abuses.
The great scandal is that a handful of powerful
nations–-the United States, France, and Canada chief among them–-have for
decades systematically stymied efforts at reform within Haiti, often by the
application of spectacular force. The detailed and sordid history of U.S.
efforts in the country are well documented. Since the 1960s the U.S. has
reliably supported the most repressive regimes, stymied the democratic
movement, and twice removed the wildly popular president, former priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from office–-first, in 1991, by supporting Army officers (led by a former CIA
“asset”) in a coup d’état and second, in 2004, by organizing a covert “contra”
army in the neighboring Dominican Republic and then “rescuing” Aristide from it
by removing him, by armed force, to the Central African Republic.
Throughout these decades–-and accelerating under President
Clinton–-the U.S. tightened the screws, withholding millions in promised aid
and mortgaging Haiti’s fragile economy to “onerous debts” to the World Bank and
IMF. (Haiti at last won partial relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor
Countries program, but the U.S. and France continue to press for loan payments
that constitute the largest expenditure in the Haitian economy.) In the U.N.
Security Council, France and the U.S. pressed for the current U.N. mission that
has from its first days been yet another mechanism of torment, charged with an
unprecedented series of massacres, rapes, and sexual abuse of Haitian children.
(Details and policy recommendations are available at www.haitiaction.net and www.ijdh.org.)
Haitian activists have looked in vain for any glimmer of
hope that the Obama administration will reverse this decades-long punitive
history. But up to now, this president has been “audacious” mostly in refusing
to grant Temporary Protected Status to Haitian refugees (a policy reversed, on a limited basis, only after the earthquake) or cancelling remaining
Haitian debts–-as if in the twisted U.S. moral calculus Haiti still “owed”
anything to its historic exploiters. By making her first policy speech
regarding the region from the floor of one of Andy Apaid’s notorious
sweatshops, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton (photo from www.haitiaction.net) signaled that the future
Washington sees for Haiti is the expansion of the sweatshop sector that enriches
a tiny elite and keeps cheap goods–-Gap clothing, Disney merchandise,
baseballs–-flowing into the U.S.
Obama’s promises of massive relief for Haiti are
welcome–-and long overdue. We must press our government to take this
catastrophe as the occasion for a decisive change of course. The current
mobilization of attention, compassion, and aid must be only the beginning of
restoring to the Haitian people the dignity that decades of antagonism and
exploitation have tried to strip away.
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