Another man-made disaster in Haiti

Peter Hallward teaches philosophy at Middlesex University, and is the author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment (Verso, 2007). The following article was published on Hayti Net

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 Tuesday afternoon, but it’s no accident that so much of Port-au-Prince now looks like a war-zone. Much of the devastation wreaked by this latest and most calamitous ‘natural disaster’ to befall Haiti is best understood as another thoroughly man-made outcome of a long and ugly historical sequence.

The country has certainly had more than its fair share of catastrophes to contend with. Hundreds of people died in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the huge earthquake of 7 May 1842 may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of Cap Haitien alone. Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, mostly recently in 2004 and again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the town of Gonaïves and swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more than a thousand people and destroying many thousands of homes. The full scale of the destruction resulting from yesterday’s earthquake won’t become clear for several weeks. Even the most minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term impact is incalculable.

What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is almost invariably described as the ‘poorest country in the Western hemisphere.’ 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’ which is currently scrambling to send its ‘humanitarian aid‘ to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it aims to offset. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide‘s phrase) ‘from absolute misery to a dignified poverty’ has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies. Aristide’s own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, falling victim to an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country ever since.

Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population ‘lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% — four and a half million people — live on less than $1 per day.’ 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.

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 assault 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. Basic urban infrastructure – running water, electricity, decent roads, etc. – is 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 ever since the coup of 2004. The same countries scrambling to send emergency help to Haiti today, however, have over the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN mission’s mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. Proposals to divert some of this ‘investment’ towards poverty reduction or agrarian development have been blocked, in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the distribution of international ‘aid’.

The same storms that killed so many people in Haiti in September 2008 hit Cuba just as hard, but killed only four people.

Cuba has escaped the worst effects of neo-liberal ‘reform’, 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. Among other things, as the journalists Kevin Pina and Kim Ives have been urging, this means that we should facilitate the full mobilisation of all those Haitian people who can help put the country back on its feet, including its most popular (but effectively banned) political party, FANMI LAVALAS, and its popular (but effectively outlawed) political leader, the exiled Aristide. If we are serious about helping Haiti we need to stop trying to control its government, to pacify its citizens, and to exploit its economy.

And then we need to start paying for at least some of the damage we’ve already done.