LEARNING FROM HAITI

By Ignacio Ramonet Reprint | | Print |

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PARIS, Feb 8 2010 (IPS) - As “natural” as it may seem, no catastrophe is natural. An earthquake of the same intensity has more victims in a poor country than in a rich industrialised one. For example, the earthquake in Haiti, 7.0 on the Richter scale, caused more than 200,000 deaths, while the one six months ago that struck Honshu, Japan, caused only one death and one injury though it was of the same strength (7.1).

“The poorest countries and those with problems of governance are more exposed to risks than others,” a recent United Nation report concludes[i]. In the same city, the human impact of a calamity can vary widely depending on the characteristics of the various neighbourhoods. In Port-au-Prince, the earthquake ravaged the dilapidated shantytown of the centre, yet the privileged areas where the mulatto merchant middle class lived was barely damaged.

Nor do the poor weather adversity equally. The International Federation of the Red Cross holds that in the event of disasters, “women, the handicapped, the elderly, and ethnic and religious minorities, the habitual victims of discrimination, are the worst hit.”[ii]

On the other hand, a country that is not rich but has an effective disaster prevention plan can save many, many lives. In August 2008, hurricane Gustav, the most violent of the last 50 years, blasted the Caribbean with winds of 340 kilometres per hour. In Haiti 66 people were killed. In Cuba, not a single person died.

Is Haiti a poor country? In reality, there are not poor countries, there are only “impoverished countries”. This is a crucial difference. In the last third of the 18th century, Haiti was the “Pearl of the Antilles” and produced 60 percent of the coffee and 75 percent of the sugar consumed in Europe. However, its great wealth benefitted only 50,000 or so white colonists and not the 500,000 black slaved that produced it.

Invoking the noble ideals of the French Revolution, these slaves rose up in 1791 led by Toussaint Louverture, the “Black Spartacus”. The war lasted thirteen years. Napoleon sent an expedition of 43,000 veterans. The rebels won. It was the first anti-colonial racial war and the only slave rebellion that resulted in a sovereign state.

On January 1, 1804, the new country proclaimed its independence. The event reverberated throughout the American continent. The black slaves had demonstrated that without external assistance, of their own strength, they could win their own freedom. Thus Afro-America appeared on the international political scene.

But the “bad example of Haiti”, as then US president Thomas Jefferson characterised it, terrorised those powers that continued to practice slavery. And they never pardoned Haiti. No one recognised or helped the new black republic, which was the nightmare of white colonialism. The terror has not yet disappeared. It was not by chance that American televangelist Pat Robertson said that thousands of Haitians died in the earthquake because the slaves “swore a pact with the devil” to win their freedom.” [iii]

The new independent state was boycotted for decades in the hope of “sealing off the plague” in the country. Haiti descended into a period of civil wars that razed the land, missing the necessary phase building the institutions of a nation state. Despite the high calibre of its many intellectuals, the country grew stagnant.

Then came the US occupation, from 1915-1934, and the war of resistance. The hero of the rebellion, Charlemagne Peralte, was crucified by the Marines, nailed onto the door of a church. Washington ended up handing Haiti over to new dictators, including “Papa Doc” Duvalier, one of the most despotic.

In 1970, Haiti still enjoyed food sovereignty. Its farmers produced 90 percent of the food the country consumed. But the Reagan-Bush Plan imposed by Washington forced the country to lower tariffs on imported rice, the central crop of local farmers. US rice, cheaper because it was subsidised, flooded the local markets and ruined thousands of peasant farmers, who emigrated en masse to Port-au-Prince, where they would be later trapped in the earthquake.

Haiti’s only experience with a real democratic government was the two terms of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, (1994-1996, 2001-2004), who was driven into exile by both his own errors and pressure from Washington. Since then Haiti has found itself under the protection of the UN and a conglomerate of international NGOs. The government of Rene Preval, the current president, who followed Aristide, was systematically denied any means of action. It is thus absurd to reproach him for a failure to act after the earthquake struck. The public sector had been long dismantled and its particular functions transferred to the private sector if they were profitable and to NGOs if there weren’t. Well before it was converted into the “ground zero” of the planet, Haiti was the first case of “humanitarian colonialism”. The current tragedy will only reinforce its dependency, and so its resistance. The “shock capitalism” described by Naomi Klein will have a new place to demand -in the name of efficiency- the complete privatisation of every economic and trade activity connected with reconstruction.

The US is first in line, with its armed forces deployed in a broad humanitarian offensive. This is without doubt the result of a generous desire to help. However there are also indisputable geopolitical interests. Washington prefers invading Haiti with aid to seeing its shores invaded by tens of thousands of Haitian “boat people”. Ultimately, here too it’s a matter of “sealing off the plague”. (END\COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Ignacio Ramonet is the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish.

[i] Risk and poverty in a changing climate. Invest today for a more secure tomorrow. United Nations, New York, May 2009.

[ii] World Disasters Report, 2009, International Red Cross, July 2009.

[iii] Christian Broadcasting Network, January 14, 2010.

(*)Ignacio Ramonet is editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in Spanish.