If Canada is to play a positive role in Haiti's future, we must know what the situation actually is, and why.
Recently I described how Haiti came to be in such wretched shape, thanks to its own brutal leaders and the interventions of France and the United States, a story that is rarely told in the mainstream media. What follows is more recent information about Haiti, shortly before and after the earthquake, all of it publicly documented yet little of it known.
For a serious government, there are important lessons to be learned here.
» Two million people need food. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon promised that by the end of January, the World Food Program and related organizations would feed at least half of those. In fact, the number fed was 600,000. “It has been slower than anyone hoped or expected,” UN humanitarian aid co-ordinator John Holmes said.
» Ban was also pushing a cash-for-work program. Jobs are to be created clearing the rubble at $4 to $5 a day. He appealed for $41-million for this program. By end January, $4.3-million had been donated.
» A “donor” conference for Haiti last April, 2009, after hurricane season, saw $402-million pledged. Actual disbursements were $61-million, about 15 per cent of funds promised. This is quite typical of many such pledges, not just to Haiti. Typically as well, we rarely hear of these broken promises.
» Many African nations – both governments and civil society groups – have donated funds to Haitian relief. With the sole exception of Botswana, and perhaps South Africa, all are as poor as church mice. Liberia, in west Africa, donated $50,000. Liberia's total budget for 2010 is $370-million for about 3.5 million people. The province of Alberta, with the same population, had revenues for 2009-10 of $31.7-billion.
» While rescue teams from six different countries worked frantically to rescue 50-70 trapped people – mostly foreigners – from the rubble of Hotel Montana, the best in town before the quake, as of the end of January a lower-middle class neighbourhood behind the hotel called Canape Vert had received no aid whatever.
» Like Canada, the United States expects Haitians, with minor exceptions, to remain in Haiti. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has launched Operation “Vigilant Sentry” using the large naval flotilla the United States has assembled around Port-au-Prince. Their job is to deter desperate Haitians from embarking on the 1,000-kilometre sea crossing to Miami.
» That the Haitian government and other local leaders are largely MIA is easily explained. According to the former chief economist of Haiti's central bank, more than 85 per cent of Haiti's best “human resources” now live abroad. Many who remained were apparently killed in the earthquake, since, as CTV's Tom Clark notes, all were at work in their offices when the quake struck.
A Haitian man pulls a load of salvaged metal through the rubble in Port-au-Prince on February 3, 2010 .
» Haiti is one of the most unequal and polarized countries in the world, with a minuscule fraction of its population controlling almost all real power and influence and living lives of ostentatious luxury. Their section of the capital was largely untouched by the disaster. This elite has long used brute force to keep poor people in line, with violent military and paramilitary forces (some trained by the United States) doing their dirty work.
» Much foreign aid lands in the laps of these elite Haitian families, who distribute it as they see fit. Even before the earthquake, almost half of all Haitians survived on a household income of 44 cents a day.
» Despite their own monstrous leaders, Haitians have always been among the most wondrously creative people in the world, excelling in painting, culture, literature and music.
