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http://links.org.au/node/1476
Securing disaster in Haiti

By Peter Hallward

January 21, 2010 -- Haitianalysis.com -- Nine days after the devastating 
earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, it's now clear that the 
initial phase of the US-led relief operation has conformed to the three 
fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island's 
recent history.[1] It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has 
sidelined Haiti's own leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the 
majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already 
harrowing gap between rich and poor. All three tendencies aren't just 
connected, they are mutually reinforcing. These same tendencies will continue 
to govern the imminent reconstruction effort as well, unless determined 
political action is taken to counteract them.

I

Haiti is not only one of the poorest countries in the world, it is also one of 
the most polarised and unequal in its disparities in wealth and access to 
political power.[2] A small clique of rich and well-connected families 
continues to dominate the country and its economy while more than half the 
population, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), survive on a 
household income of around 44 US cents per day.[3]

Mass destitution has grown far more severe in recent decades. Starting in the 
1970s, internationally imposed neoliberal "adjustments" and austerity measures 
finally succeeded in doing what no Haitian government had managed to do since 
winning independence in 1804: in order to set the country on the road towards 
"economic development", they have driven large numbers of small farmers off 
their land and into densely crowded urban slums. A small minority of these 
internal refugees may be lucky enough to find sweatshop jobs that pay the 
lowest wages in the region. These wages currently average US$2 or $3 a day; in 
real terms they are worth less than a quarter of their 1980 value.

Haiti's tiny elite owes its privileges to exclusion, exploitation and violence, 
and it is only violence that allows it to retain them. For much of the last 
century, Haiti's military and paramilitary forces (with substantial amounts of 
US support) were able to preserve these privileges on their own. Over the 
course of the 1980s, however, it started to look as if local military 
repression might no longer be up to the job. A massive and courageous popular 
mobilisation (known as Lavalas) culminated in 1990 with the landslide election 
victory of the liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president of 
Haiti. Large numbers of ordinary people began to participate in the political 
system for the first time, and as political scientist Robert Fatton remembers, 
"panic seized the dominant class. It dreaded living in close proximity to la 
populace and barricaded itself against Lavalas".[4]

Nine months later, the army dealt with this popular threat in the time-honoured 
way, with a coup d'état. Over the next three years, around 4000 Aristide 
supporters were killed.

However, when the US eventually allowed Aristide to return in October 1994, he 
took a surprising and unprecedented step: he abolished the army that had 
deposed him. As human rights lawyer Brian Concannon (director of the Institute 
for Justice and Democracy in Haiti) observed a few years later, "it is 
impossible to overestimate the impact of this accomplishment. It has been 
called the greatest human rights development in Haiti since emancipation, and 
is wildly popular".[5] In 2000, the Haitian electorate gave Aristide a second 
overwhelming mandate when his party (Fanmi Lavalas) won more than 90% of the 
seats in parliament.

II

More than anything else, what has happened in Haiti since 1990 should be 
understood as the progressive clarification of this basic dichotomy – democracy 
or the army. Unadulterated democracy might one day allow the interests of the 
numerical majority to prevail, and thereby challenge the privileges of the 
elite. In 2000, such a challenge became a genuine possibility: the overwhelming 
victory of Fanmi Lavalas, at all levels of government, raised the prospect of 
genuine political change in a context in which there was no obvious 
extra-political mechanism ― no army ― to prevent it.

In order to avoid this outcome, the main strategy of Haiti's little ruling 
class has been to redefine political questions in terms of "stability" and 
"security", and in particular the security of property and investments. Mere 
numbers may well win an election or sustain a popular movement but as everyone 
knows, only an army is equipped to deal with insecurity. The well-armed "friend 
of Haiti" that is the United States knows this better than anyone else.

As soon as Aristide was re-elected, a systematic international campaign to 
bankrupt and destabilise his second government set the stage for a paramilitary 
insurrection and a further coup d'état, and in 2004, thousands of US troops 
again invaded Haiti (just as they first did back in 1915) in order to "restore 
stability and security" to their "troubled island neighbour". An expensive and 
long-term UN "stabilisation mission" staffed by 9000 heavily armed troops soon 
took over the job of helping to pacify the population and criminalise the 
resistance. By the end of 2006, thousands more Aristide supporters had been 
killed.

Over the course of 2009, a suitably stabilised Haitian government agreed to 
persevere with the privatisation of the country’s remaining public assets,[6] 
veto a proposal to increase minimum wages to $5 a day and to bar Fanmi Lavalas 
(and several other political parties) from participating in the next round of 
legislative elections.

When it comes to providing stability, today's UN troops are clearly a big 
improvement over the old indigenous alternative. If things get so unstable that 
even the ground begins to shake, however, there's still nothing that can beat 
the world's leading provider of peace and security.
III

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake that struck on January 12, 2010, 
it might have seemed hard to counter arguments in favour of allowing the US 
military, with its "unrivalled logistical capability", to take de facto control 
of such a massive relief operation. Weary of bad press in Iraq and Afghanistan, 
US commanders also seemed glad of this unexpected opportunity to rebrand their 
armed forces as angels of mercy. As usual, the Haitian government was 
instructed to be grateful for whatever help it could get.

That was before US commanders actively began – the day after the earthquake 
struck – to divert aid away from the disaster zone.

As soon as the US air force took control of Haitian airspace, on January 13, it 
explicitly prioritised military over humanitarian flights. Although most 
reports from Port-au-Prince emphasised remarkable levels of patience and 
solidarity by Haitians on the streets, US commanders made fears of popular 
unrest and insecurity their number one concern. Their first priority was to 
avoid what the US Air Force Special Command Public Affairs spokesperson Ty 
Foster called another "Somalia effort"[7] – which is to say, presumably, a 
situation in which a humiliated US army might once again risk losing military 
control of a "humanitarian" mission.

As many observers predicted, however, the determination of US commanders to 
forestall this risk by privileging guns and soldiers over doctors and food has 
only succeeded in helping to provoke a few occasional bursts of the very unrest 
they set out to contain. In order to amass a sufficiently large amount of 
soldiers and military equipment "on the ground", the US Air Force diverted 
plane after plane packed with emergency supplies away from Port-au-Prince. 
Among many others, World Food Program flights were turned away by US commanders 
on January 14 and 15, the New York Times reported, "so that the United States 
could land troops and equipment, and lift Americans and other foreigners to 
safety".[8]

Many similar flights met a similar fate, right through to the end of the week. 
Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) alone has so far had to watch at least five 
planeloads of its medical supplies be turned away.[9] On January 16, for 
instance, "despite guarantees given by the United Nations and the US Defense 
Department, an MSF cargo plane carrying an inflatable surgical hospital was 
blocked from landing in Port-au-Prince and was re-routed to Samana, in 
Dominican Republic", delaying its arrival by an additional 24 hours.[10] Late 
on January 18, MSF "complained that one of its cargo planes carrying 12 tonnes 
of medical equipment had been turned away three times from Port-au-Prince 
airport since Sunday [January 17]", despite receiving "repeated assurances they 
could land". By that stage one group of MSF doctors in Port-au-Prince had been 
"forced to buy a saw in the market to continue the amputations" upon which the 
lives of their patients depended.[11]

While US commanders set about restoring security by assembling a force of some 
14,000 marines, residents in some less-secure parts of Port-au-Prince soon 
started to run out of food and water. On January 20 people sleeping in one of 
the largest and most easily accessed of the many temporary refugee camps in 
central Port-au-Prince (in Champs Mars) told writer Tim Schwartz, author of the 
2008 book Travesty in Haiti, that "no relief has arrived; it is all being 
delivered on other side of town, by the US embassy".[12] Telesur reporter Reed 
Lindsay confirmed on January 20, a full eight days after the quake, that the 
impoverished south-western Port-au-Prince suburb closest to the earthquake's 
epicentre, Carrefour, still hadn't received any food, aid or medical help.[13]

The BBC's Mark Doyle found the same thing in an eastern (and less badly 
affected) suburb: "Their houses are destroyed, they have no running water, food 
prices have doubled, and they haven't seen a single government official or 
foreign aid worker since the earthquake struck." Overall, Doyle observed, "the 
international response has been quite pathetic. Some of the aid agencies are 
working very hard, but there are two ways of reporting this kind of thing. One 
is to hang around with the aid agencies and hang around with the American 
spokespeople at the airport, and you'll hear all sorts of stories about what's 
happening. Another way is to drive almost at random with ordinary people and go 
and see what's happening in ordinary places. In virtually every area I've 
driven to, ordinary people say that I was the first foreigner that they'd 
met."[14]

Only a full week after the earthquake did emergency food supplies even begin 
the slow journey from the heavily guarded airport to fourteen "secure 
distribution points" in various parts of the city.[15] By that stage, tens of 
thousands of Port-au-Prince residents had finally come to the conclusion that 
no aid would be forthcoming, and began to abandon the capital for villages in 
the countryside.

On January 17, Al-Jazeera's correspondent summarised what many other 
journalists had been saying all week, "Most Haitians have seen little 
humanitarian aid so far. What they have seen is guns, and lots of them. 
Armoured personnel carriers cruise the streets" and "inside the well-guarded 
perimeter [of the airport], the US has taken control. It looks more like the 
Green Zone in Baghdad than a centre for aid distribution."[16] Late on the same 
day, the World Food Programme's air logistics officer Jarry Emmanuel confirmed 
that most of the 200 flights going in and out of the airport each day were 
still being reserved for the US military: "their priorities are to secure the 
country. Ours are to feed."[17] By January 18, no matter how many US embassy or 
military spokespeople insisted that "we are here to help" rather than invade, 
governments as different as those of France and Venezuela had begun to accuse 
the US of effectively "occupying" the country.[18]

IV

The US decision to privilege military over humanitarian traffic at the airport 
sealed the fate of many thousands of people abandoned in the rubble of lower 
Port-au-Prince and Léogane. In countries all over the world, search and rescue 
teams were ready to leave for Haiti within 12 hours of the disaster. Only a few 
were able to arrive without fatal delays – mainly it was teams, like those from 
Venezuela, Iceland and China, who managed to land while Haitian staff still 
retained control of their airport. Some subsequent arrivals, including a team 
from the UK, were prevented from landing with their heavy equipment. Others, 
like Canada's Heavy Urban Search Rescue Teams, were immediately readied but 
never sent – the teams were told to stand down, the Canadian Foreign Affairs 
Minister Lawrence Cannon eventually explained, because "the government had 
opted to send Canadian Armed Forces instead".[19]

USAID announced on January 19 that international search and rescue teams, over 
the course of the first full week after the disaster, had managed to save a 
grand total of 70 people.[20] The majority of these people were rescued in 
quite specific locations and circumstances. "Search-and-rescue operations", 
observed the Washington Post on January 18, "have been intensely focused on 
buildings with international aid workers, such as the crushed U.N. 
headquarters, and on large hotels with international clientele." [21] Tim 
Schwartz spent much of the first post-quake week as a translator with rescue 
workers, and was struck by the fact that most of their work was confined to 
places – the UN's hotel Christophe, the Montana Hotel, the Caribe supermarket – 
that were not only frequented by foreigners but that could be snugly enclosed 
within "secure perimeters". Elsewhere, he observed, UN "peacekeepers" did their 
best to make sure that rescue workers treated onlooking crowds as a source of 
potential danger rather than assistance.[22]

Until the residents of devastated places like Léogane and Carrefour are somehow 
able to reassure foreign troops that they will feel "secure" when visiting 
their neighbourhoods, UN and US commanders clearly prefer to let them die on 
their own.

Exactly the same logic has condemned yet more people to death in and around 
Port-au-Prince's hospitals. In one of the most illuminating reports yet filed 
from the city, on January 20 Democracy Now's Amy Goodman spoke with Dr Evan 
Lyon of Partners in Health/Zamni Lasante from the General Hospital, the most 
important medical centre in the whole country. Lyon acknowledged there was a 
need for "crowd control, so that the patients are not kept from having access", 
but insisted that "there's no insecurity [...]. I don’t know if you guys were 
out late last night, but you can hear a pin drop in this city. It’s a peaceful 
place. There is no war. There is no crisis except the suffering that’s 
ongoing... The first thing that [your] listeners need to understand is that 
there is no insecurity here. There has not been, and I expect there will not 
be." On the contrary, Lyon explained, "this question of security and the 
rumours of security and the racism behind the idea of security has been our 
major block to getting aid in. The US military has promised us for several days 
to bring in machinery, but they’ve been listening to this idea that things are 
insecure, and so we don’t have supplies".

As of January 20, the hospital still hadn't received the supplies and medicines 
needed to treat many hundreds of dying patients. "In terms of aid relief the 
response has been incredibly slow. There are teams of surgeons that have been 
sent to places that were, quote, “more secure", that have ten or twenty doctors 
and ten patients. We have a thousand people on this campus who are triaged and 
ready for surgery, but we only have four working operating rooms, without 
anaesthesia and without pain medications."[23]

Almost by definition, in post-quake Haiti it seems that anyone or anything that 
cannot be enclosed in a "secure perimeter" isn't worth saving.

In their occasional forays outside such perimeters, meanwhile, some Western 
journalists seemed able to find plenty of reasons for retreating behind them. 
Lurid stories of looting and gangs soon began to lend "security experts" like 
the London-based Stuart Page[24] an aura of apparent authority, when he 
explained to the BBC's gullible "security correspondent" Frank Gardner that 
"all the security gains made in Haiti in the last few years could now be 
reversed... The criminal gangs, totalling some 3,000, are going to exploit the 
current humanitarian crisis, to the maximum degree."[25]

Another seasoned BBC correspondent, Matt Frei, had a similar story to tell on 
January 18, when he found a few scavengers sifting through the remains of a 
central shopping district: "Looting is now the only industry here. Anything 
will do as a weapon. Everything is now run by rival armed groups of thugs." If 
Haiti is to avoid anarchy, Frei concluded, "what may be needed is a full-scale 
military occupation".[26]

Not even former US president (and former Haiti occupier) Bill Clinton was 
prepared to go that far. "Actually", Clinton told Frei, "when you think about 
people who have lost everything except what they're carrying on their backs, 
who not only haven't eaten but probably haven't slept in four days, and when 
the sun goes down it's totally dark and they spend all night long tripping over 
bodies living and dead, well, I think they've behaved quite well.... They are 
astonishing people. How can they be so calm in the face of such enormous loss 
of life and loved ones, and all the physical damage?"[27]

Reporters able to tell the difference between occasional and highly localised 
bursts of foraging and a full-scale "descent into anarchy" made much the same 
point all week, as did dozens of indignant Haitian correspondents. On January 
17, for instance, Ciné Institute director David Belle tried to counter 
international misrepresentation. "I have been told that much US media coverage 
paints Haiti as a tinderbox ready to explode. I'm told that lead stories in 
major media are of looting, violence and chaos. There could be nothing further 
from the truth. I have travelled the entire city daily since my arrival. The 
extent of the damage is absolutely staggering [but...] NOT ONCE have we 
witnessed a single act of aggression or violence ... A crippled city of two 
million awaits help, medicine, food and water. Most haven't received any. Haiti 
can be proud of its survivors. Their dignity and decency in the face of this 
tragedy is itself staggering."[28]

As anyone can see, however, dignity and decency are no substitute for security. 
No amount of weapons will ever suffice to reassure those "fortunate few" whose 
fortunes isolate them from the people they exploit. As far as the people 
themselves are concerned, "security is not the issue", explains Haiti Liberté's 
Kim Ives. "We see throughout Haiti the population themselves organizing 
themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the 
rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps. 
This is a population which is self-sufficient, and it has been self-sufficient 
for many years."[29] But while the people who have lost what little they had 
have done their best to cope and regroup, the soldiers sent to "restore order" 
treat them as potential combatants. "It’s just the same way they reacted after 
[Hurricane] Katrina" in New Orleans, concludes Ives. "The victims are what’s 
scary. They’re black people who, you know, had the only successful slave 
revolution in history. What could be more threatening?"

"According to everyone I spoke with in the centre of the city", wrote Schwarz 
on January 21, "the violence and gang stuff is pure BS". The relentless 
obsession with security, agrees Andy Kershaw, is clear proof of the fact that 
most foreign soldiers and NGO workers "haven't a clue about the country and its 
people".[30]

V

True to form, within hours of the earthquake most of the panicked staff in the 
US embassy had already been evacuated, and at least one prominent foreign 
contractor in the garment sector (the Canadian firm Gildan Activewear) 
announced that it would be shifting production to alternative sewing facilities 
in neighbouring countries.[31] The price to be paid for such priorities will 
not be evenly distributed. Up in the higher, wealthier and mostly undamaged 
parts of Pétionville everyone already knows that it's the local residents "who 
through their government connections, trading companies and interconnected 
family businesses" will once again pocket the lion's share of international aid 
and reconstruction money. [32]

In order to help keep less well-connected families where they belong, 
meanwhile, the US Department of Homeland Security has taken "unprecedented" 
emergency measures to secure the homeland this past week. Operation "Vigilant 
Sentry" will make efficient use of the large naval flotilla the US has 
assembled around Port-au-Prince. "As well as providing emergency supplies and 
medical aid", notes The Daily Telegraph, "the USS Carl Vinson, along with a 
ring of other navy and coast guard vessels, is acting as a deterrent to 
Haitians who might be driven to make the 681-mile sea crossing to Miami". While 
Senegal's president Abdoulaye Wade offered "voluntary repatriation to any 
Haitian that wants to return to [the land of] their origin", US officials 
confirmed that they would continue to apply their long-standing (and thoroughly 
illegal) policy with respect to all Haitian refugees and asylum seekers – to 
intercept and repatriate them automatically, regardless of the 
circumstances.[33]

Ever since the quake struck, the US Air Force has taken the additional 
precaution of flying a radio-transmitting cargo plane for five hours a day over 
large parts of the country, so as to broadcast a recorded message from Haiti's 
ambassador in Washington. "Don’t rush on boats to leave the country", the 
message says. "If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be 
wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. They will intercept you right on 
the water and send you back home where you came from." Not even 
life-threatening injuries are enough to entitle Haitians to a different sort of 
US reception. When the dean of medicine at the University of Miami arrived to 
help set up a field hospital by the airport in Port-au-Prince, he was outraged 
to find that most seriously injured people in the city were being denied the 
visas they would need to be transferred to Florida for surgery and treatment. 
As of January 19 the US State Department had authorised a total of 23 
exceptions to its golden rule of immigration. "It’s beyond insane", O'Neill 
complained. "It’s bureaucracy at its worst."[34]

VI

This is the fourth time the US has invaded Haiti since 1915. Although each 
invasion has taken a different form and responded to a different pretext, all 
four have been expressly designed to restore "stability" and "security'" to the 
island. Earthquake-prone Haiti must now be the most thoroughly stabilised 
country in the world. Thousands more foreign security personnel are already on 
their way, to guard the teams of foreign reconstruction and privatisation 
consultants who in the coming months are likely to usurp what remains of 
Haitian sovereignty.

Perhaps some of these guards and consultants will help their elite clients 
achieve another long-cherished dream: the restoration of Haiti's own little 
army. And perhaps then, for a short while at least, the inexhaustible source of 
"instability" in Haiti – the ever-nagging threat of popular political 
participation and empowerment – may be securely buried in the rubble of its 
history.

[This article first appeared at Haitianalysis.com. Peter Hallward is professor 
of modern European philosophy at Middlesex University, member of the Radical 
Philosophy editorial collective and author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, 
Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. London: Verso, 2007.]

Notes

[1] An abbreviated version of this article first appeared in The National, 
January 21, 2010, 
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100121/REVIEW/701219960.

[2] See Pål Sletten and Willy Egset, Poverty in Haiti (FAFO, 2004), 9.

[3] IMF, Haiti: Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (November 2006), 7.

[4] Robert Fatton, Haiti’s Predatory Republic (Boulder: Lynne Rienner 
Publishers, 2002), 86-87, 83.

[5] Brian Concannon, "Lave Men, Siye Atè: Taking Human Rights Seriously", in 
Melinda Miles and Eugenia Charles, eds. Let Haiti LIVE: Unjust US Policies 
Towards its Oldest Neighbor (Coconut Creek FL: Educa Vision, 2004), 92.

[6] See for instance Jeb Sprague, "Haiti's Classquake", HaitiAnalysis, January 
19 2010, http://www.haitianalysis.com/2010/1/19/haiti-s-classquake.

[7] BBC Radio 4 News, January 16, 2010, 22:00GMT.

[8] Ginger Thompson and Damien Cave, "Officials Strain to Distribute Aid to 
Haiti as Violence Rises", New York Times, January 17, 2010.

[9] "Médecins Sans Frontières says its plane turned away from US-run airport", 
Daily Telegraph, January 19, 2010, 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/haiti/7031203/Haiti-earthquake-Medecins-Sans-Frontieres-says-its-plane-turned-away-from-US-run-airport.html.

[10] "Doctors Without Borders Cargo Plane With Full Hospital and Staff Blocked 
From Landing in Port-au-Prince", January 18, 2010, 
http://doctorswithoutborders.org/press/release.cfm?id=4165&cat=press-release.

[11] "America sends paratroopers to Haiti to help secure aid lines", The Times, 
January 20, 2010, 
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6994523.ece.

[12] Email from Tim Schwartz, January 20, 2010.

[13] "No aid [in Carrefour]. In the morning at UN base they said they would 
distribute there, but it didn't happen", Reed Lindsay, Honor and Respect 
Foundation Newsletter, January 20, 2010, http://www.hrfhaiti.org/earthquake/. 
Cf. Luis Felipe Lopez, "Town at epicenter of quake stays in isolation", Miami 
Herald, January 17, 2010.

[14] BBC Radio 4, News at Ten, January 18, 2010.

[15] Ed Pilkington, "We're not here to fight, US troops insist", The Guardian, 
January 18, 2010.

[16] "Disputes Emerge over Haiti aid control", Al Jazeera, January 17, 2010.

[17] Ginger Thompson and Damien Cave, "Officials strain to distribute aid to 
Haiti as violence rises", New York Times, January 17, 2010.

[18] "Haiti aid agencies warn: chaotic and confusing relief effort is costing 
lives", The Guardian, January 18, 2010, 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/18/haiti-aid-distribution-confusion-warning.

[19] Don Peat, "HUSAR not up to task, feds say: Search and rescue team told to 
stand down", Toronto Sun, January 17, 2010, 
http://www.torontosun.com/news/haiti/2010/01/17/12504981.html.

[20] USAID, http://www.usaid.gov/helphaiti/index.html, accessed on January 20, 
2010.

[21] William Booth, "Haiti's elite spared from much of the devastation", 
Washington Post, January 18, 2010.

[22] Tim Schwarz, phonecall with the author, January 18, 2010; cf. Tim 
Schwartz, "Is this anarchy? Outsiders believe this island nation is a land of 
bandits. Blame the NGOs for the `looting'", NOW Toronto,  January 21, 2010, 
http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=173333.

[23] "With Foreign Aid Still at a Trickle, Devastated Port-au-Prince General 
Hospital Struggles to Meet Overwhelming Need", Democracy Now!, January 20, 
2010, 
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/20/devastated_port_au_prince_hospital_struggles.

[24] Stuart Page is chair of Page Group, 
http://www.pagegroupltd.com/aboutus.html.

[25] Gardner then explained that, with the police weakened by the quake, 
"thousands of escaped criminals have returned to areas they once terrorised, 
like the slum district of Cité Soleil [...]. Unless the armed criminals are 
re-arrested, Haiti's security problems risk being every bit as bad as they were 
in 2004" (BBC Radio 4, Six O'clock News, January 18, 2010). In fact, when some 
of these ex-prisoners tried to re-establish themselves in Cité Soleil in the 
week after the quake, local residents promptly chased them out of the district 
on their own (see Ed Pilkington and Tom Phillips, "Haiti escaped prisoners 
chased out of notorious slum", The Guardian, January 20, 2010; Tom Leonard, 
"Scenes of devastation outside Port-au-Prince `even worse'", Daily Telegraph, 
January 21, 2010).

[26] BBC television, Ten O'clock News, January 18, 2010.

[27] BBC Radio 4, News at Ten, January 18, 2010. It sounds as if Clinton, in 
his role as UN special envoy to Haiti, may be learning a few things from his 
deputy – Zanmi Lasante's Dr. Paul Farmer.

[28] David Belle, January 17, 2010.

[29] "Journalist Kim Ives on How Western Domination Has Undermined Haiti’s 
Ability to Recover from Natural Devastation", Democracy Now! January 21, 2010, 
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/20/journalist_kim_ives_on_how_decades. Ives 
illustrates the way such community organisations work with an example from the 
Delmas 33 neighbourhood where he's staying: "A truckload of food came in in the 
middle of the night unannounced. It could have been a melee. The local popular 
organization was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members .... They 
lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the 
[Matthew 25] house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in 
an orderly, equitable fashion. They were totally sufficient. They didn’t need 
Marines. They didn’t need the UN... These are things that people can do for 
themselves and are doing for themselves." Kershaw makes the same point: "This 
self-imposed blockade by bureaucracy is a scandal but could be easily overcome. 
The NGOs and the military should recognise the hysteria over `security' for 
what it is and make use of Haiti's best resource and its most efficient 
distribution network: the Haitians themselves. Stop treating them as children. 
Or worse. Hand over to them immediately what they need at the airport. They 
will find the means to collect it. Fill up their trucks and cars with free 
fuel. Any further restriction on, and control of, the supply of aid is not only 
patronising but it is in that control and restriction where any `security 
issues' will really lurk. And it is the Haitians who best know where the aid is 
needed" (Andy Kershaw, "Stop treating these people like savages", The 
Independent, January 21, 2010).

[30] Andy Kershaw, "Stop treating these people like savages", The Independent, 
January 21, 2010.

[31] Ross Marowits, "Gildan shifting T-shirt production outside Haiti to ensure 
adequate supply", The Canadian Press, 1January3,  2010, 
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/markets/headline_news/article.jsp?content=b131693719.

[32] William Booth, "Haiti's elite spared from much of the devastation", 
Washington Post, January 18, 2010.

[33] Bruno Waterfield, "US ships blockade coast to thwart exodus to America", 
Daily Telegraph, January 19, 2010; "Senegal offers land to Haitians", BBC News, 
January 17, 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8463921.stm.

 

    



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