Trying to understand what is happening to the billions of dollars donated by private individuals and governments for post earthquake relief in Haiti is far from easy. So much so that one year on, it is hard not to conclude, as hundreds of thousands of Haitians struggle to survive, that many of those involved in politics and relief work seem more interested in maintaining their own bureaucratic procedures, priorities and influence than helping those who are suffering.
What now seems to be developing is a process of mutual recrimination in response to questions in the media about how the huge sums raised for Haiti are being spent. This variously involves the Haitian authorities and customs being blamed for creating difficulties or allegedly for corruption; the US and UN being castigated for their slow, opaque and unaccountable procedures; donors being challenged for failing to have met their pledged commitments; and mounting criticism of many of the NGOs in Haiti that appear to be acting without reference to anyone.
The appalling outcome is that 0.81m Haitians are still living under canvas, crime and violence is spiralling, public health is deteriorating and the internal situation is becoming politically and socially unstable with hard to foresee consequences.
Although it is hard to reconcile many of the figures being mentioned by politicians and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), there appears to be a shocking consistency: the money is not helping those most in need.
In March 2010 an International Donors’ Conference ‘Towards a New Future for Haiti’ was convened by the United States and the United Nations in New York. It resulted in pledges of US$5.6 billion over the two years 2010 and 2011 and US$9.9 billion for the succeeding three years and probably beyond. The money was to be used to reconstruct Haiti. However, speaking recently about this the former Caricom Secretary-General, Sir Edwin Carrington suggested that of this only a mere 10 per cent of the pledges had been honoured.
Alternative figures are little better. According to the Haitian Prime Minister, Jean-Max Belrive, only twenty per cent of what had been pledged for the first period has been disbursed and of the US$2billion that was meant to be spent in the first year only sixty per cent had been utilised.
At another level the one thousand or so NGOs operating in Haiti – ranging from the dubious to almost every major world charity – are largely working to their own agenda and in some cases seeing their involvement as a way of maintaining their profile and funding at a time when the recession had reduced their income.
Meanwhile, there is a growing sense that reconstruction is in the hands of everyone other than Haitian civil society, with a view widely shared among Haitians that the largely US and UN controlled Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), the body established between Haiti and the international community to manage reconstruction and relief, is operating to an agenda of its own.
This may be unfair as the just published report of the IHRC notes that almost half of the nearly two million who were displaced are now out of the tent cities; in the healthcare sector projects valued at US$202M have been approved and are in progress; initiatives to create jobs are gaining momentum, including an industrial park that is projected to create 60,000 full-time jobs; a debris removal and crushing project is demonstrating the feasibility of rubble removal and its uses; and nine projects valued at approximately US$192M have been approved for the housing sector.
Irrespective, such claims are hard to verify, criticism at a grass roots level is becoming more vocal and there is a sense that as in Iraq, the UN and the US have alternative motivations when it comes to reconstruction. The extent of this concern was reflected recently in the Miami Herald when it reported that twelve Haitian representatives on the IHRC signed a letter setting out their frustrations with the recovery process and criticised the apparent expectation that they are “figureheads to rubber-stamp decisions taken by the commission.”
One important voice in all of this is that of Jamaica’s former Prime Minister, P J Patterson. Speaking about the way the IHRC is operating, he has expressed concern about the IHRC process, the lack of visible progress, the mountains of rubble, the cholera outbreak and the general lack of urgency. Mr Patterson’s views are reflected by President Rene Preval’s office which has expressed its own alarm at the lack of information and the slow progress on the ground.
At a micro level the story is the same. One specialist who was recently in Haiti expressed her anger at the multilateral agencies and NGOs who, as she put it, drive around in SUVs for the most part unable to speak French or Creole, while long-standing and well respected Haitian organisations relating to critical areas of public health such as HIV/AIDS still have to operate out of tents for want of relatively small sums of money. This is because the NGOs and international donors, who support the organisation concerned, do not undertake capital projects and are unable to amend their operating procedures to meet the situation on the ground.
There are also a range of other problems not least of which is the possibility of tension on the border with the Dominican Republic as the number of Haitians desperate to enter Haiti’s neighbour continues to grow. According to Dominican media reports a quarter of all patients now seeking medical attention at public health care facilities like the Robert Reid Cabral Children’s Hospital in Santo Domingo are Haitians, and many hospitals are running at one hundred per cent capacity.
The danger is that if the situation deteriorates further in Haiti it will be the Dominican military which will act to secure the borders, bringing almost certain opprobrium from NGOs and others already expressing concern about expulsions, often without understanding the internal tensions that any yet larger influx of Haitian people will cause among Dominicans.
But most worrying of all is that as the political situation deteriorates the likelihood of Haiti developing the capacity to administer and choose its own path appears to be diminishing.
Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org
