Port-au-Prince, although not the only part of the country to be affected, is densely populated and the damage was immense. In the space of a single minute, the earthquake killed 230,000 persons, destroyed 250,000 homes, affected three million people and made one million homeless. Millions of people are now without their livelihood and the means for survival.
Buildings including the Presidential Palace, National Assembly and Cathedral collapsed. The United Nations Headquarters at the Hotel Christopher collapsed with 200 workers inside. Eighteen soldiers of the Brazil Army serving in the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti – MINUSTAH – were killed. The capital was plunged into total darkness as electricity supplies were cut, roads blocked and the seaports damaged. The main Toussaint L’Ouverture international airport was unaffected.
The quake hit the capital and demolished every significant centre of social activity, destroyed the systems upon which government business depends. The very public institutions and infrastructure which would have been needed to coordinate relief efforts were damaged from the outset.
There was widespread and generally favourable response from the hemisphere and around the world. A major operational setback was that the Haitian government itself was partially paralysed. President René Préval was obliged to seek refuge and direct the business of state from a neighbourhood police station. The scene was set for a strong international organisation or foreign government to take control.
The decision taken by US and UN commanders in charge of the disaster relief effort to make security the prime objective over relief measures, however, may have created confusion and despondency among the international agencies which rushed to assist. This decision could have been the cause of preventable deaths. Ten days after the earthquake, the United States secured “formal approval” from the United Nations to “take over” all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to “secure” roads. The Haitian government seemed not to have been involved in that agreement.
Several aeroplanes packed with essential emergency supplies, therefore, were diverted away from the disaster zone to the Dominican Republic in the early days in order to allow for the build-up of a huge and US military force. During the security phase, relief suffered. Thousands of marine and special forces troops, many without training in relief operations and humanitarian work, were brought in. At the same time, thousands of earthquake victims were dying in the ruins of lower Port-au-Prince, while international rescue teams concentrated their efforts on a few select locations.
The relief effort seemed skewed. Essential medical supplies were reserved for field hospitals set up near the US-controlled airport and other ‘secure’ zones while hospitals in ‘insecure’ zones were overwhelmed with badly injured and dying patients. Some of them had to perform amputations without anaesthetic or medication.
At the most critical stage of the catastrophe in its early days, the contribution of the Cuban government was incomparable. Two Cuban field hospitals were operational within 24 hours of the earthquake; 374 Cuban medical personnel were working in three temporary hospitals just one day after the first shocks. They were assisted by approximately 400 Haitian medical interns trained on scholarships in Cuba who provided care and major surgery for victims.
The Caribbean Community, also, was quick to respond but, like the Cuba, its efforts were ignored by the international communications media. The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency coordinated efforts to provide relief. Jamaica, which was not only the closest CARICOM member state but was also the Sub-Regional Focal Point, had operational responsibility for Haiti, another member state.
A Jamaica Defence Force Coast Guard vessel with military personnel and emergency supplies was deployed within the first 24 hours. The more than 350 personnel from eleven member states who participated in the mission as part of the CARICOM team provided search and rescue support in collaboration with international agencies, health support services and performed minor surgery.
Haiti’s capacity to respond effectively to a catastrophe of this magnitude was constrained by several factors. This can be explained in part by the inadequacy of the physical infrastructure and the poverty of the population – realities that cannot be separated from the country’s agonizing history.
Haiti is the only place in the world where plantation slavery was abolished by the enslaved Africans themselves. The ‘Haitian Revolution’ that started in 1791 and ended in 1804 was regarded as “the most subversive episode” in the history of the Western Hemisphere because of the example it set to other European colonies. When it became independent, Haiti was surrounded by the slave-owning societies and economies of the Caribbean and northern, central and southern America.
The three great seaborne empires of the day – France, Spain and Britain – all sent large armies to attempt to crush the Haitian Revolution. The United States and the Netherlands collaborated with the invaders. Toussaint L’Ouverture and then Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated them but the cost of years of conflict was crippling. The war of liberation killed a third of Haiti’s people and left its cities and plantations in ruins.
The revolutionaries’ victory provoked extraordinary revenge by the imperial powers. It was only when Haiti agreed, 20 years after winning independence, to pay France an enormous amount of ‘compensation’ for the loss of its property – human slaves and plantations – that trade and diplomatic relations essential to the new country’s survival were established. Haiti could repay this debt only by borrowing huge sums from French banks at extortionate rates of interest. The final instalment of Haiti’s ‘debt’ to France was not paid until 1947.
It was President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s daring demand that France pay back some of this money, in the run-up to the bicentennial celebration of independence in 2004, that embarrassed and angered France and might have encouraged the former colonial power to help to overthrow him and send him into exile in the Central African Republic that year.
Another damaging experience to the Haitian people’s psyche was the propensity of the US during its era of ‘big stick’ diplomacy to intervene forcefully in the internal affairs of the small states of the Caribbean and Central America. It also used to indulge its compulsion for the appointment of compliant presidents and, when that failed, for ‘regime change.’ In particular, Haitians harbour bitter memories of the US occupation of the country from 1915 until 1934 during which the US Marines bloodily suppressed the two-year revolt led by the nationalist Charlemagne Péralte. Despite US military withdrawal, fiscal control was retained until 1947.
Haiti suffered under the sway of dictatorial presidents who ruled with the support of the army with US approbation for several decades. For nearly thirty years in the second half of the last century, the country was plundered by the two notorious Duvaliers. The first was François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier who came to power in 1957. The second was his son Jean-Claude Duvalier who succeeded him in 1971.
Opposition to the Duvalierist repression inspired powerful popular mobilisation forcing Jean-Claude Duvalier out of office in 1986. After another period of direct military rule, Haiti’s first genuine democratic election brought the liberation theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power on a nationalist, anti-capitalist and anti-army programme in early 1991.
A military coup interrupted Haiti’s democratic experiment in September 1991. Under a UN mandate and with the help of 20,000 US troops sent in by the Clinton administration, President Aristide was restored to power in 1994. CARICOM contributed a contingent of troops as part of the United Nations Mission in Haiti – UNMIH – at that time.
Aristide seemed obliged to modify his populist economic programme and adopt astringent conditionalities which turned out to be inappropriate to his country’s economy. Thirty years ago, for example, Haiti was self-sufficient in its staple of rice. In the mid-1990s the International Monetary Fund forced the government to slash tariffs. This allowed the US to dump its cheaper, subsidised surplus rice on the country thereby undermining the domestic market. Haiti was obliged to import the bulk of its rice. Thousands of rice farmers were forced to migrate from the countryside into the slums of Port-au-Prince.
Conditions for loans and aid that were imposed over the past two decades, also forced Haitian governments to privatise, hold down the minimum wage and reduce expenditure on the already minimal health, education and public infrastructure. The impact of these measures was reflected in the government’s inability to provide the most basic relief to its own people. New IMF conditionalities require Haiti to raise electricity tariffs and freeze public sector pay.
The popular Aristide tried to transform Haitian politics by abolishing the army, legislating modest reforms such as a minimum wage for those workers in sweatshops and building more schools. After the election victory of his party – Fanmi Lavalas – in 2000, well-armed and well-organised rebels suddenly appeared and directed attacks against his administration.
Ironically, while the celebrations of the bicentenary of Haitian independence were underway, Aristide, the elected president, was forced out of office and exiled to Africa. From that year, a large United Nations stabilisation force took over internal security from soldiers sent by the USA, France and Canada under the Bush administration. René Préval, the current president, who ostensibly governs what has virtually become a UN protectorate, agreed to renew MINUSTAH’s mandate last year.
Poverty has been the main contributory cause of the huge death toll in the January earthquake. But Haiti’s poverty is not an act of God or an accident of history. It is, largely, the consequence of the attitude of the Western World — notably France and the United States — for more than two hundred years.
