Editor's Introduction
“Haiti's Blame Game” by Poooja Bhatia. Foreign Policy. November 23 2010.
An Annotation
This week marks the one year anniversary of the earthquake that shook the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. This natural disaster threw an already impoverished nation into deeper social, economic, and even political distress. More than 230,000 people were killed, estimates are that a million remain homeless, and countless numbers of children were made orphans. The country was devastated, but the international community—more than ever before—was eager to respond with many pledges of assistance.
A year after the earthquake, neither the international community nor the Haitian state is making significant progress on critical reconstruction projects. A recently released report from Oxfam criticizes the slow pace of the recovery. "As Haitians prepare for the first anniversary of the earthquake, close to one million people are reportedly still displaced," the report says. "Less than 5 percent of the rubble has been cleared, only 15 percent of the temporary housing that is needed has been built and relatively few permanent water and sanitation facilities have been constructed." The report is particularly critical of international donors and, specifically, the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), co-chaired by former President Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. Oxfam officials, citing United Nations figures, note that less than half of the reconstruction aid promised by international donors has been disbursed.
The past year has not been merely one of slow recovery and unfulfilled promises in terms of financial aid for this Caribbean country. After the earthquake, the Haitian people had to face one crisis after another. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, taking nearly 3,000 lives, and the epidemic is likely to spread even further. Since November, Haiti has faced deep political turmoil due to the lack of clarity on the results of the presidential election and national and international denunciations of irregularities in the electoral procedures. This election was the first round of what was supposed to proceed to a runoff election, which has now been postponed until February.
Given the pessimistic account of Haiti’s recovery efforts, this month’s Roundtable centerpiece by Pooja Bhatia indicates that “Haitians' biggest political problem is figuring out who is responsible for their continued misery.” Bhatia poses the question, “ Indeed, who is to blame in a country dominated by peacekeepers and NGOs, helmed by a government too weak—or unwilling—to deal with them?” Without necessarily attempting to answer this very precise question, our panelists touch on a series of critical issues for the reconstruction efforts and future political challenges for the next Haitian government. The effectiveness of international aid, the recent electoral process, the importance of local ownership in rebuilding processes, and a comparison with other reconstructions efforts are among the topics discussed in this month’s Roundtable.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
January 2011: The Haiti Earthquake, One Year Later
Editor's Introduction
“Haiti's Blame Game” by Poooja Bhatia. Foreign Policy. November 23 2010.
The Scourge of Occupation
by Christina Cerna, Organization of American States
"Notably, MINUSTAH’s mandate does not contemplate substituting itself for the government of Haiti , so it should not be perceived as an occupying power as perhaps UNTAC or other UN missions might have been. MINUSTAH has no mandate to draft a constitution , adopt laws, conduct trials or perform any other governmental functions. So while elections might seem like an expensive , useless distraction, they are the essential sine qua non for maintaining Haitian sovereignty (…) "
“Haiti’s Blame Game” suggests that Haitians are wondering why they should bother voting when it is unclear that their government is running the country. The anger of the Haitians, according to the author, is focused on MINUSTAH, the UN mission that was created in 2004 to stabilize Haiti and to coordinate the work of the different UN agencies active in the country. Some Haitians perceive MINUSTAH to be an occupying force, but is it really, and who is running the country?
This article brings back to mind a chat I had many years ago with Dennis McNamara, at the time the Director of the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). We were chatting in the lounge of the UN Office in Geneva and I asked him whether the plans to establish an international criminal court for the Former Yugoslavia had provoked demands in Cambodia for a similar international tribunal. He responded, much to my surprise, that the Cambodian people were not interested in putting the Khmer Rouge on trial, but rather in ridding themselves of the Vietnamese occupiers in Cambodia. It was the first time I realized how hated an occupier can be.
It is estimated that the death toll in Democratic Kampuchea was approximately two to three million people, so it was stunning for me to imagine that the Cambodian people were more interested in ousting the occupiers than putting on trial the Khmer Rouge leaders. In Latin America, putting on trial the leaders of military dictatorships for the human rights abuses committed during the respective “dirty wars” was a clear priority for the victims’ and the survivors of the crimes committed in Argentina, Chile , and other countries in the region. Surely Dennis McNamara did not speak for all the people of Cambodia, but he reflected an informed perspective of at least part of the popular will in Cambodia at that moment in time. Indeed, it took many years after the Vietnamese occupiers had left for a movement to successfully create the Cambodian Genocide Tribunal to try the handful of Khmer Rouge leaders who were still alive.
It’s even possible, perhaps probable, that many Cambodians were unhappy with the UNTAC because, like MINUSTAH, it too was an occupier with the power to adopt laws, and in other ways it assumed the functions of a government. Having even the most well-intentioned of guardians run your affairs entails a certain level of humiliation inherent in the fact that you are incapable of running your affairs. The situation in Haiti, however, was different from that of UNTAC because MINUSTAH was not the result of a peace agreement and was not intended to serve as a transitional form of government. MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, was created in 2004 primarily to stabilize Haiti following the ouster of President Aristide. MINUSTAH was given the mandate to “ensure a secure and stable environment,” by reforming the Haitian police force and by protecting UN and other civilian personnel in Haiti. In addition, MINUSTAH’s mandate is to assist the transitional government in carrying out elections, to assist the government, the UN , and NGOs in protecting human rights, and perhaps most ambitiously, “to continue to contribute to the promotion of the social and economic development of Haiti, in particular for the long-term, in order to achieve and sustain stability and combat poverty.”
Reducing poverty by 2015 has become the UN’s number one human rights goal as set forth in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Some countries like China, Brazil, and Venezuela have made important gains in reducing poverty in their countries, but Haiti has probably suffered an increase in poverty due to a combination of the 2010 earthquake and the cholera epidemic.
Notably, MINUSTAH’s mandate does not contemplate substituting itself for the government of Haiti, so it should not be perceived as an occupying power as perhaps UNTAC or other UN missions might have been. MINUSTAH has no mandate to draft a constitution, adopt laws, conduct trials or perform any other governmental functions. So while elections might seem like an expensive, useless distraction, they are the essential sine qua non for maintaining Haitian sovereignty, and it is up to the people to assure that those elected are capable of running the country.
The author of this Roundtable article, Ms. Christina M. Cerna, is a staff member in the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States' Secretariat for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The opinions expressed in this note are the sole responsibility of the author in the author's personal capacity and are not to be interpreted as official positions of, and are not to be attributed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States, or the Organization of American States.
Stabilization in 2004 was to be carried out by 6,700 UN troops and 1,600 police. Today the total is approximately 12,000.
Christina Cerna - B.A., New York University; M.A., Fulbright Scholar, Ludwig-Maximilian Universitat; J.D., Dean's Fellow, American University; LL.M., Columbia University. Ms. Cerna is Principal Human Rights Specialist at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) at the headquarters of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C.. She has been with the OAS since January 1979 and is currently in charge of certain special cases and systematizing the IACHR’s jurisprudence. She taught international human rights law as an Adjunct for the law schools at George Washington University, Penn State University and, since 2005, at Georgetown University.
Bring Back Aristide
by Louis Edgar Esparza, University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies
"It is that now, just as then, when others struggle to improve their own lives, foreign powers often intervene to stymie development, to exploit labor, or to extract resources. Recent events in Haiti illustrate this sad ontological reality of global relations that people around the world are working every day to subvert. "
My friend Annie recently had her trip to Haiti postponed because of the political instability surrounding the November elections. Annie totes modest sums of cash, medicine, and clothing collected from sympathetic friends and has a resolute willingness to help. Together with the partner organizations she is working with, she is hiring Haitians to build an orphanage. Another colleague of mine, Tonya, traveled to the country very soon after the earthquake. She described her experience in The Nation, lamenting that the major US airlines, which had agreed to waive baggage fees for relief aid to Haiti, did not do so for individuals like Tonya who were not associated with a major relief agency.
Annie, Tonya, and thousands of others from all over the world are traveling to the country to lend their expertise and their good will. Their stories point to some of the slower recovery efforts that have typified larger agencies and the UN. Many of these groups have priorities that dovetail with the wishes of many Haitians. The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti warned that stationing UN forces (known as MINUSTAH and largely viewed as an occupying force among Haitians) at polling locations during the country's November elections would be more likely to create violence than to prevent it. Indeed, election observers wrote in NACLA Reports that MINUSTAH's presence made the country seem "under siege." Several presidential candidates, analysts such as Haitian economist Camille Chalmers, organizations including the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, journalists Kevin Pina and Nicole Phillips, and other “social agencies” had been pleading with the Organization of American States (OAS), delegates from the United States, France, United Nations, and international agencies to postpone the election to resolve outstanding logistical issues. The pleading went unheeded, and instead the elections resulted in widespread fraud, violence, and voter discontent.
Paul Farmer, United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti and founder of Partners in Health, has suggested that former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is by far the most popular and trusted Haitian political figure. There is no lack of Haitian leadership. Rather, the networks of international agencies, the United States, and France have exerted powerful influence over domestic Haitian affairs. Those who care about the welfare of Haiti should advocate for the return of Aristide to Haitian politics. Both the African Union and the Caribbean Community have called for an inquiry into the coup that ousted the democratically elected Aristide.
But the US will not entertain this idea and has worked against Aristide and his political supporters. President Rene Preval hand-picked the members of the Election Council that certified candidates. Although this is unconstitutional, since Haitian law mandates that the Election Council be an independent body, the US was quick to demand that the constitution be upheld by lobbying for elections to take place this past November. The Council, unsurprisingly, banned Aristide's Lavalas Party, the largest in the country, from running in the elections. This move was criticized by dozens of members of the US Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, as completely undemocratic. Even the OAS admitted that at least fifty-nine polling locations experienced "failure" on election day. This is in stark contrast to the election that put Aristide in power, which boasted a voting participation rate of over fifty percent.
Thousands of Haitians took to the streets in December of 2009 to demand the return of Aristide. Thousands protested again just last month, decrying the elections that have been so riddled with fraud that the Institute for Economic Affairs has called the election a "sham" and President Aristide referred to them as a "selection." Asking Haitians to accept the results of an election while banning major parties would be like asking a US citizen to accept an election without the Democratic Party. In his Second Treatise of Government, John Locke argued that one of the central assumptions of government is that those entrusted to lead the people should not transfer their lawmaking authority to others. Such an instance would make the State of Nature preferable. For Haitian elections to reflect the interests of Haitians, they first need to become free of the strong foreign influences which have derailed their development.
But bringing Aristide back into the fold is not only the right thing for Haitian development and democracy; it is also the best US policy option. The Latin American and Caribbean region is already distancing itself from US foreign policy. And now, with the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) having come into effect on December 1, the region is developing the infrastructure to carve its own collective political and economic path.
Annie concluded her most recent email to me with, "There are so many beautifully simple Haitian proverbs. One of my favorites is, ‘Deye mon gen mon.’ Translated it means, literally, ‘Behind mountains, there are more mountains.’ As in, ‘There is more than meets the eye,’ or ‘If it's not one thing, it's another.’ The spirit is not one of defeat, but of acknowledgment of the struggles while striving towards the solution."
Haitian civil society is mobilized. In the past year, Haitians have marched to restore Aristide; they have marched against the elections; they have marched against the spread of cholera they believe came from the UN. During my fieldwork in the sugarcane valley of rural Colombia, which, after the US and Haiti, has the next largest African diaspora, I witnessed firsthand how the legacy of colonialism is still patterning social and economic relationships. It is not simply that individuals cannot or will not help themselves, even if there exist acute instances in which others indeed need assistance. It is that now, just as then, when others struggle to improve their own lives, foreign powers often intervene to stymie development, to exploit labor, or to extract resources. Recent events in Haiti illustrate this sad ontological reality of global relations that people around the world are working every day to subvert.
Louis Edgar Esparza is Lecturer in Human Rights at the University of Denver, Josef Korbel School of International Studies. His work appears in Societies Without Borders, Qualitative Sociology and Sociological Forum. Dr. Esparza is writing a book on grassroots human rights movements in Colombia, where he completed ethnographic fieldwork in 2008. His research has attracted grants and awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Latin American Studies Association and Oxfam America.
Earthquakes and Expectations in Haiti and Chile
by Robert Funk, Institute for Public Affairs of the University of Chile
"Chile’s vast experience with earthquakes can teach Haitians that these events have long-lasting and often unintended consequences. They engrave images into the public consciousness and contribute to the creation of institutions that can survive for generations. Haitian officials and the international agencies charged with the task of helping them should keep this in mind as they continue the rebuilding efforts."
Although 2010 was a bicentenary year for many countries in Latin America, that the year was a memorable one for Chileans is due less to celebrations of independence than to two disasters— one natural and one man-made—and to the country’s response to them. The usual year-end retrospectives tended to emphasize the February 27 earthquake and the accident and rescue at the San José mine much more than the light shows and other forgettable pyrotechnics of the bicentenary. But as with the bicentenary, both the earthquake and the San José disaster enabled the authorities and the average Chilean to indulge in a little bit of chest thumping, an extreme example of which was the suggestion that the country’s tourism and foreign investment slogan should be changed to “The Chilean Way,” as if the Chilean way were a light unto the nations.
Chile enjoyed its “fifteen minutes” of global fame in the wake of the mine disaster. Yet it is the contrast between the February 27 earthquake and the one that occurred only a few weeks earlier in Haiti which perhaps best illustrates what the “Chilean Way”—if there is such a thing — is really about.
The Chilean earthquake was one of the most powerful in recorded history, measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale (almost a hundred times stronger than the earthquake that hit Haiti). It caused billions in damage to buildings and infrastructure, especially in the southern city of Concepción, located close to the epicenter, and in nearby coastal regions which were devastated by the tsunamis that followed. Most of the nearly 500 deaths occurred as a result of the tsunami rather than the earthquake itself.
Compare that to the tragic earthquake in Haiti. Measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, the quake killed hundreds of thousands of Haitians, left close to a million homeless, and destroyed thousands of buildings, including the Presidential Palace and the parliament buildings. It left the economy devastated…or even more devastated. By mid-2010, not only had reconstruction barely begun, but the rubble had hardly been cleared away. Then in October, over a thousand Haitians were killed by a cholera outbreak, undoubtedly connected to the unsanitary conditions resulting from the January 12 earthquake. While it seems odd that Haitians would turn to blaming the epidemic on those sent to help them, they are instinctively latching on to something which a comparison between the two earthquakes shows: there is little that is natural about natural disasters.
Earthquakes, like many other disasters, cause deaths when societies are ill-equipped to deal with them, as the Haitian case makes so tragically clear. Building codes, zoning, escape routes, tsunami preparedness, the ability to maintain public order, all impact on survival rates in earthquakes. For these things to be designed and enforced, societies require a fairly high level of governance. For them to be implemented and respected, a sufficient degree of economic development is needed. It is difficult to see how the hemisphere’s poorest country, which has been governed either by corrupt dictators, inept democrats, or foreign aid agencies, would find it difficult to implement any of these things, even if the country were as seismically active as Chile. In the face of a 7.0 earthquake, in other words, Haiti barely stood a chance.
Chileans, on the other hand, expect earthquakes. At the same time, the country has enjoyed governability and economic growth for the better part of a generation. Even earlier, following a massive 1939 earthquake that killed 5,000 people, the Chilean state established its economic development agency, CORFO, to lead the recovery through industrialization. Successive governments, democratic and less so, left and right, have continued to rely on CORFO’s institutional capacity. The same cannot be said of anti-seismic building regulations which, strengthened after the 1939 disaster, were weakened during the dictatorship (relying on auto-regulation). In recent years they have been tightened up again.
All these measures helped ensure that the February 27 earthquake caused relatively little damage and death. Where things did go wrong, they had to do with human error on the part of the authorities, disrupted communications systems (representing a major flaw in earthquake preparedness, exacerbated by the fact that many were enjoying the final weekend of summer holidays), and an unusually large tourist population in coastal regions hit by the tsunami.
And yet, as in Haiti, people need someone to blame. Despite having endured far less material damage than in Haiti, Chileans do look to the authorities to lead reconstruction efforts. Early on, average Chileans as well as politicians suspected the government had been slow to respond, criticizing the outgoing president, Michelle Bachelet. Nearly a year after the earthquake, a public opinion poll shows that only twenty-six percent of Chileans believe the government of Sebastián Piñera is doing a “good” or “very good” job regarding reconstruction.
Chile’s vast experience with earthquakes can teach Haitians that these events have long-lasting and often unintended consequences. They engrave images into the public consciousness and contribute to the creation of institutions that can survive for generations. Haitian officials and the international agencies charged with the task of helping them should keep this in mind as they continue the rebuilding efforts.
Robert Funk is Deputy Director and Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Institute for Public Affairs of the University of Chile. Dr Funk’s research areas include democratization, left and populist movements in Latin America, and political elites. Recent publications include “Parties, Personalities and the President: The Institutional Challenges of the Bachelet Government”, in The Bachelet Government: Conflict and Consensus in Post-Pinochet Chile, edited by Silvia Borzutzky and Gregory Weeks. From 2006 to 2008, Dr Funk served as president of the Chilean Political Science Association.
The Perils of Walking Fast and Walking Far
by Walter Lotze, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
"For the next Haitian president, life will not be easy. He will need to be seen by the Haitian people to be far more assertive with the international community so present in the country without alienating the internationals that provide such critical support to Haitians who still remain in desperate need. If the balance is not struck just right, Haitians could soon be throwing more than just refuse and rubble at MINUSTAH and the Haitian government."
When Haitian President René Préval early in January 2011 lambasted the international community for riding roughshod over his country’s sovereignty and his government, and called for greater Haitian ownership over the aid and recovery effort in his country, he highlighted a frustration which has been noted by so many other nations before: while international aid efforts are welcome and usually do provide critical relief to the targeted populations in the short term, they generally tend to undermine governments (and the faith of the people in their government) over the long term.
Thus, while the presidential candidates prepare to grab power during the runoff election scheduled for February 2011, and tensions mount over the outcomes of the first round of voting (the UN and the international community were satisfied with the first round of voting, while most Haitians, including most presidential candidates, were not), it remains quite unclear what degree of control a new government in Haiti will have. Indeed, many aid organizations actively work to minimize their engagement with the government, while development partners are known to symbolically promote the government in all their partnerships, only to do whatever they deem most appropriate or what will best promote the national interest of the day.
The UN mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), too, struggles to strike the right balance: attain its mandate in support of the government, while minimizing affiliation with a government that mission personnel by and large deem weak, ineffective, and corrupt. It is these tensions that in the previous months resulted in accusations that the Americans had annexed the international airport, that aid workers have kidnapped children and driven them across the border to the Dominican Republic, that aid is benefitting the elite and bypassing the disempowered, and that MINUSTAH introduced cholera to the island. Whether these accusations are true or not, what is true is that the international aid effort has propped up a government despised by many Haitians, created a bubble in the economy and driven up costs, and alienated many Haitians from their government and from each other. Seeing black and white SUVs cruising the streets, foreigners lounging on beaches, and the arrival of chique restaurants designed to absorb all those per diems certainly does not make ordinary Haitians feel warm and fuzzy towards the “international community,” the UN included.
Sadly, the story is every little bit as new as it is unique to Haiti. In Monrovia, no fewer than four sushi restaurants and some excellent Italian and Lebanese eateries sprung up with the arrival of UNMIL, the UN mission in Liberia. All have white SUVs parked outside every evening. This at a time when the UN is planning to draw down its peace support operation in Liberia and the government is fast losing credibility over its inability to deliver to the Liberian people. Expectations have been elevated so highly by the large international presence that the government will be hard-pressed to deliver on even a proportion of them The Liberian people will surely take their anger out on someone. The story is no different elsewhere. In Juba, southern Sudan, brick and mortar hotels have sprung up at an incredible pace while the local population is left without shelter, roads, water, or healthcare. Internationals can dine on fine Italian fare while watching the sun set over the Nile River, while locals struggle to purchase fresh water trucked in from Uganda and Kenya. In the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, foreigners enjoy sumptuous barbecues and all-night dancing near the border with Rwanda, while locals spend nights camping on the forest floor, for fear of rebel raids on their villages.
While the international community has been quite adept at riding roughshod over sensitivities and riling local resentment, at the same time it has been very adept at undermining local authorities and leaving governments looking weak and ineffective. While governments may indeed be weak and ineffective during times of crisis, bypassing them on the basis of humanitarian need and then publicly showing off flashy lifestyles while locals trudge in the mud does not help to build the credibility of governments and local civil society actors. While the justification for these actions is often that following local rules and working with local actors would slow down the delivery of much-needed assistance, which in all likelihood is true, the result is that we further weaken the capacity of local actors to drive national processes, be this the delivery of humanitarian assistance, the coordination of elections, or implementing long term recovery strategies. When the internationals finally do leave, the resilience and durability of what is left in place quickly comes into question.
For the next Haitian president, life will not be easy. He will need to be seen by the Haitian people to be far more assertive with the international community so present in the country without alienating the internationals that provide such critical support to Haitians who still remain in desperate need. If the balance is not struck just right, Haitians could soon be throwing more than just refuse and rubble at MINUSTAH and the Haitian government. In Kirundi, a popular expression asserts that those who wish to walk fast should walk alone, while those who wish to walk far should walk together. Both the Haitian government and those constituting the international presence in Haiti would be wise to jointly consider whether they wish to walk fast, or far.
Walter Lotze (South African) is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) in Oslo, Norway. Prior to joining NUPI, Walter worked in the Peace Support Operations Division of the African Union Commission, prior to which he headed the Peacebuilding Division at the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), a non-governmental organization working in conflict situations across the African continent. Walter recently completed his PhD in International Relations with the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
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