Haiti: A natural and human-made catastrophe combine
Any large city in the world would have suffered extensive damage from an earthquake on the scale of the one that ravaged Haiti’s capital city on January 12. But it's no accident that so much of Haitian capital Port-au-Prince now looks like a war zone.
Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in
the western hemisphereâ€. This poverty is the direct legacy of
perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world
history, compounded by decades of systematic post-colonial
oppression. The noble “international community†currently
scrambling to send its “humanitarian aid†to Haiti is
largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to
reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915,
every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move
(in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) “from
absolute misery to a dignified poverty†has been violently and
deliberately blocked by the US government and its allies.
It
is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of
the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless
neoliberal assaults on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of
thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although
there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of
Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard
informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of
deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places
and conditions is itself no more “natural†or accidental
than the extent of the injuries they have suffered. As Brian
Concannon, the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in
Haiti, said: “Those people got there because they or their
parents were intentionally pushed out of the countryside by aid and
trade policies specifically designed to create a large captive and
therefore exploitable labour force in the cities; by definition they
are people who would not be able to afford to build earthquake
resistant houses.â€
Aristide’s own government (elected by some 75% of the
electorate) was the latest victim of such interference. It was
overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed
several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering
in resentment. The United Nations has since maintained a large and
enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the
country. Haiti is now a country where, according to the best
available study, about 75% of the population “lives on less
than [US]$2 per day, and 56% — four and a half million people —
live on less than $1 per dayâ€. Decades of neoliberal
“adjustment†and neo-imperial intervention have robbed
its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or
to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial
arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a
structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, the city's basic
infrastructure — running water, electricity, roads, etc —
remains woefully inadequate, often non-existent. The government’s
ability to mobilise any sort of disaster relief is next to nil. The
international community has been effectively ruling Haiti since the
2004 coup. In the past five years, the same countries now scrambling
to send emergency help to Haiti have consistently voted against any
extension of the UN mission’s mandate beyond its immediate
military purpose. Proposals to divert some of this “investmentâ€
towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked,
in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the
distribution of international “aidâ€. Haiti was hit by
terrible storms in 2008 that killed hundreds. But the same storms
that killed so many Haitians hit Cuba just as hard — but killed
only four people. Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neoliberal
“reformâ€, and its government retains a capacity to defend
its people from disaster. If we are serious about helping Haiti
through this latest crisis then we should take this comparative point
on board.
Along with sending emergency relief, we should ask
what we can do to facilitate the self-empowerment of Haiti’s
people and public institutions. If we are serious about helping, we
need to stop trying to control Haiti's government, to pacify its
citizens, and to exploit its economy. And then the West needs to
start paying for at least some of the damage we’ve already
done.
[This
article is abridged from the British Guardian. For a series of other
articles on the background to the situation in Haiti, visit
www.greenleft.org.au.
Peter Hallward is a Canadian-born professor of philosophy at
Middlesex University in London, UK. His Damming the Flood: Haiti,
Aristide and the Politics of Containment was published in 2008 by
Verso.]
