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What looks like an essential new blog, Haiti Relief and Reconstruction Watch, "will keep track of current efforts at relief and reconstruction with an eye towards ensuring that such efforts are oriented toward the most urgent and important needs of the Haitian people, and that aid is not used to undermine Haitians' right to self-determination." It's being done by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, whose co-directors are Dean Baker (he of the excellent blog on economic reporting, Beat the Press) and Mark Weisbrot. Very righteous and needed, if you think the key to reconstruction, heck construction, is democracy and sovereignty. The most recent two posts are . . .
Conditions are improving, slowly, steadily, 3 weeks after the earthquake but we have a really long way to go. The rainy season is coming in a other month and there is a need to provide shelter and sanitation needs that must be addressed quickly.
After enduring delays in receiving urgent medical supplies and equipment, as well as continuous aftershocks that threatened already-damaged facilities, MSF staff are now treating patients inside an inflatable hospital.
Originally the plan was to keep the Inflatable Hospital open for 3 months. It was then extended to 6 months, now, the plan is to keep it open indefinitely and expand it from 100 beds to 200 beds by adding 4 more sections to the already existing 9.
What do people want to know about Haiti? The overwhelmingly chaotic reality or the success stories being achieved by the international community led by the U.S.? Well, I'll provide the chaotic and inadequate (by a factor of about ten) reality as balance to your mainstream TV watching. Six reports and some extra stuff and thoughts at the end.
1. AP reports -- in U.S. halts airlifts of Haiti patients, citing space -- that all flights carrying earthquake victims out of Haiti have been suspended. An American doctor warns 100 critically ill patients may die if they are not transported to U.S. hospitals within 48 hours:
The only way this ['relief in the short term or a better life in the long one'] will really happen is 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.
Alex Cockburn and myself -- in Haiti's neoliberal catastrophe, pre and post quake -- predicted the real ineffectiveness of the international and internal response to the quake. The short-term ineffectiveness was confirmed yesterday by Italy's civil protection chief, Guido Bertolaso. He called the US-led 20,000 troop effort in Haiti a "pathetic" failure, saying it was too reliant on military personnel:
"I think it has truly been a pathetic situation. It could have been run a lot better, "The Americans are extraordinary but when you are facing a situation in chaos they tend to confuse military intervention with emergency aid, which cannot be entrusted to the armed forces.
"It's a truly powerful show of force but it's completely out of touch with reality." Mr Bertolaso, who holds the rank of a government minister, also accused individual countries and aid agencies of conducting a "vanity show".
He said: "Unfortunately there's this need to make a 'bella figura' before the TV cameras rather than focus on what's under the debris."
On Wednesday morning, as Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams in Haiti continued to work through long queues of patients waiting for treatment and surgery, the country was shaken anew by a powerful aftershock. In Choscal hospital, where MSF has been running two operating theaters, patients were so alarmed by the tremors that they had to be relocated into tents outside the building. The surgeons stayed in the hospital, however, rotating in regular shifts, performing one operation after another.
In the week since the January 12 earthquake, MSF has established 10 operating theaters in the battered country. Seven are in Port-au-Prince hospitals-Choscal, Trinité, Carrefour and Chancerelle-and three others are outside the capital, in the towns of Leogane and Jacmel. Overall, MSF surgical teams have been carrying out an average of 130 operations per day. Simultaneously, logisticians are racing to find new facilities or rehabilitate damaged ones. Additional operating theaters are being prepared in Leogane and Grand Goave, west of the capitol, and inside Port-au-Prince, where a team expects to complete the construction of an inflatable hospital with two operating theaters by Friday.
As aid trickles into Haiti and news trickles out, and as the extent of the horror unfolding there following the earthquake becomes more widely known, decisions are already being made that will affect the kind of country surviving Haitians will live in that emerges from the disaster.
In this video from The Real News today independendent journalist Ansel Herz reports live from Port-Au-Prince on the role that the deployed US troops are playing, while author Peter Hallward weighs in on the role that the US has played in Haiti's recent history and shares his concerns that post-earthquake Haiti will further cement the domination of the Haitian people by foreigners.
Ansel Herz is an independent journalist and web designer originally from the United States but currently based in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. His personal website can be found at www.mediahacker.com.
Peter Hallward is a Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University in England. In 2007 he published the acclaimed historical account of post-1990 Haitian politics, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. He is the editor of the journal Radical Philosophy and a contributing editor to Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.
1917: The US wrote Haiti's 'Constitution'-- which mainly abolished the previous prohibition on foreign owned land. FDR claimed to have written it.
This document abolished the prohibition on foreign ownership of land-the most essential component of Haitian law. When the newly elected National Assembly refused to pass this document and drafted one of their own preserving this prohibition, it was forcibly dissolved by Gendarmerie commandant Smedley Butler. This constitution was approved by a plebiscite in 1919, in which less than five percent of the population voted. The State Department authorized this plebiscite presuming that "The people casting ballots would be 97% illiterate, ignorant in most cases of what they were voting for."
The Marines and Gendarmerie initiated an extensive road-building program to enhance their military effectiveness and open the country to U.S investment. Lacking any source of adequate funds, they revived an 1864 Haitian law, discovered by Butler, requiring peasants to perform labor on local roads in lieu of paying a road tax.
- Wikipedia
1921: The Haitian revolt, and the US military kills approximately 15,000.
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.
Not long ago I read an account, from someone on the ground, saying that the "information" coming out of Haiti regarding violence and looting were mostly lies. I couldn't remember where I'd read that, and honestly haven't had much time to go back and look for it.
It got me to thinking. Why would The Powers That Be spread such lies? Well, it's pretty obvious.
But as I write about in The Shock Doctrine, 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.
And I just want to pause for a second and read you something, which is pretty extraordinary. I just put this up on my website. The headline is "Haiti: Stop Them Before They Shock Again." This went up a few hours ago, three hours ago, I believe, on the Heritage Foundation website.
"Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S. In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti's long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the image of the United States in the region." And then goes on.
Now, I don't know whether things are improving or not, because it took the Heritage Foundation thirteen days before they issued thirty-two free market solutions for Hurricane Katrina. We put that document up on our website, as well. It was close down the housing projects, turn the Gulf Coast into a tax-free free enterprise zone, get rid of the labor laws that forces contractors to pay a living wage. Yeah, so it took them thirteen days before they did that in the case of Katrina. In the case of Haiti, they didn't even wait twenty-four hours.
Now, why I say I don't know whether it's improving or not is that two hours ago they took this down. So somebody told them that it wasn't couth. And then they put up something that was much more delicate. Fortunately, the investigative reporters at Democracy Now! managed to find that earlier document in a Google cache. But what you'll find now is a much gentler "Things to Remember While Helping Haiti." And buried down there, it says, "Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue."
But the point is, we need to make sure that the aid that goes to Haiti is, one, grants, not loans. This is absolutely crucial. This is an already heavily indebted country. This is a disaster that, as Amy said, on the one hand is nature, is, you know, an earthquake; on the other hand is the creation, is worsened by the poverty that our governments have been so complicit in deepening. Crises-natural disasters are so much worse in countries like Haiti, because you have soil erosion because the poverty means people are building in very, very precarious ways, so houses just slide down because they are built in places where they shouldn't be built. All of this is interconnected. But we have to be absolutely clear that this tragedy, which is part natural, part unnatural, must, under no circumstances, be used to, one, further indebt Haiti, and, two, to push through unpopular corporatist policies in the interests of our corporations. And this is not a conspiracy theory. They have done it again and again.
It is still unclear how many have been killed in the earthquake, which measured 7.2 on the Richter scale, but aid agencies fear thousands are dead.
My daughter and I said some special prayers last night as we snuggled in our warm bed. Empathy. I couldn't get the idea out of my head of what it must be like for the people there. What a dreadful deep dark night they were facing. Even though there weren't many photos out yet, I could only begin to imagine. Having been through Hurricane Ike here a couple of summers ago, I at least know the frustration and dismay that comes with no power, no communication, no relief. But we were fine. Can't even begin to compare. We were able to camp out in (and outside) our old funky but sturdy home, get in our funky little car and drive back and forth to The Pod for government issued emergency water and supplies, and listen to our Emergency Weather Radio. A walk in the park for us. I cannot comprehend this...
Bodies on the streets Aftershocks rattled the city of 2 million people as women covered in dust clawed out of debris, wailing. Stunned people wandered the streets holding hands. Thousands gathered in public squares singing hymns.
People pulled bodies from collapsed homes, covering them with sheets by the side of the road. Passersby lifted the sheets to see if a loved one was underneath. Outside a crumbled building the bodies of five children and three adults lay in a pile.
snip
Haitian President René Préval told the Miami Herald that he had been stepping over dead bodies and hearing the cries of those trapped under the rubble of the national Parliament building, describing the scene as "unimaginable."
"Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed,'' he said.
Préval issued an urgent appeal for aid.
Tens of thousands of people appear to have lost their homes and many perished in collapsed buildings that were flimsy and dangerous even under normal conditions.
"The hospitals cannot handle all these victims," Dr. Louis-Gerard Gilles, a former senator, said as he helped survivors. "Haiti needs to pray. We all need to pray together."
(This is chock full of informational linky goodness! Thanks Ek! - promoted by Diane G)
Haiti is half the island of Hispaniola, larger and slightly to the right and South of Cuba on your map. The Haiti part of it is the fishhead looking thing with Port Au Prince, the capital, located near the base of the lower jaw.
The epicenter was 10 miles to the Southeast and six miles deep.
************* The Wild Wild Left's graphics are courtesy of Edger.
Want a better look? Contact Edger at edger10 at gmail dot com!
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