Helping Haiti

Suppose you wake up in the middle of the night and see your neighbor's house on fire. You rush outside and with a bucket or garden hose to help extinguish the fire. Once the fire is out, you return home and crawl into your warm bed, leaving your neighbors cold and miserable in front of their ruined house. You helped in an acute crisis but cared little for your neighbors.

This story is suggested by the continuing crisis in Haiti

When an earthquake struck Haiti last January, Americans and the world reacted with an outpouring of money and aid. Many NGOs sent teams to Haiti to help. They saved lives by supplying food, water, shelter and medical care to the victims.

But with the exception of such NGO's as Partners in Health or Médecins sans frontières, most of the private aid organizations have provided specific services without understanding the plight of Haiti. Foreign NGO's have supplied most of what government services there were in Haiti since the early 1990's. In 1994, the US imposed a harsh neo-liberal regime on Haiti. The government had to be cut to the bone and that slack was taken up by 3,000 NGO's. Borders had to be opened to foreign imports. Haiti had to import rice and other agricultural commodities from US agribusiness. Highly subsidized US agribusinesses were pouring commodities into Haiti; Haitian rice farmers could not compete with that. They were forced off the land into the cities.

Instead of raising their voices loudly about the US maltreatment of Haiti, the majority of NGO's seized the opportunity offered them by the forced imposition of neo-liberalism that pared the Haitian government to the bone. The NGO's were content to cooperate with the US domination of Haiti.

Today's poverty in Haiti, unemployment of 70%, rampant hunger and malnutrition are the direct results of US and other foreign interventions in Haiti, steady support for dictatorships and military take-overs whenever that favored US business interests. While helping, on one hand, the NGO's on the other hand enabled the US government's designs.

Haiti's profound poverty has made it so difficult to recover from the January earthquake and to combat the current cholera epidemic. That poverty is the direct result of two centuries of US intervention. It takes a daily toll in Haitian lives.

It is downright heartless to help Haiti in moments of acute crisis without informing oneself about Haiti, its sorry history of oppression and exploitation by more powerful countries. For Americans to return from helping in Haiti without protesting loudly the US abuse of the Haitian people is like helping to put out the neighbor's house fire and then leaving him cold and miserable in front of the charred ruins while you return to your warm bed.

The United States and Haiti

The United States and Haiti.

There are three important facts about Haiti. Two of those are well known. The third one is not. But the first two cannot be understood without taking the third one seriously.

Fact number one. The earthquake in Haiti was much more damaging because of Haiti's incredible poverty. Where people are not quite as poor, as for instance in Chile, their houses are likely to be constructed more solidly. Infrastructure is in better shape, etc. People have more resources in case of disasters.

Fact number two. US citizens have poured out incredible amounts of money and energy to help the victims of the Haiti earthquake.

Fact number three. The US government and US business there are seriously responsibility for the poverty of Haiti.

I referred to this in a recent blog: in the 1950s a US project built a dam in Haiti that flooded valuable farmland and provided irrigation for agribusinesses not owned by Haitians. While Haitian farmers lost fertile land, foreign companies profited; their profits were sent to the US and Europe instead of benefiting Haiti. Wealth created in Haiti was sent abroad.

I want to cite two more, recent stories about Haitian poverty.

The first has to do with the price of rice: “Not long ago, Haiti was self-sufficient in rice. . . Haitian rice production kept pace with its population growth over the years. The Duvalier governments kept the Haitian market more or less protected. Only one port, Port-au-Prince, was open, allowing control of imports and keeping the level of contraband down. Imported rice sold for about the same price as Haitian rice up through Jean-Claude Duvalier's flight in 1986.

In the seventies, however, the destucturation of Haitian rice began when the government imported tons of U.S. rice following a drought. With a shortage of food and an exodus of hungry peasants to the capital to look for work, the government feared unrest.

Despite the increased imports, in 1987 Haiti still produced three- quarters of its rice needs, but the Henri Namphy regime, under heavy US pressure, . . . moved to liberalize the country by slashing tariffs, and opening all the ports.

U.S. rice has an artificially low price, since the U.S. protects its rice (and sugar beet and other) farmers with multitudes of programs, so U.S. farmers produce rice for less than Haitian farmers thanks to massive subsidies totalling literally hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars. The U.S. regularly produces hundreds of tons more than it needs. . . Contrary to its clarion call of free trade, the U.S. protects its own while it wrenches open the borders of nearby countries in order to market its over-production.

In addition to legally imported and smuggled rice, food aid (corn meal, beans, soy, oil) also undermined and continues to undermine local products by driving all prices down. Tons of aid makes its way onto the market, legally or illegally, and is sold, thus competing with local products.” (http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/210.html)

The United States, in spite of its public veneration of the free market, subsidizes its rice farmers. The subsidies encourage increased production and the rice, and other food stuffs, not consumed in the US need to be exported. We then prevail on foreign countries like Haiti to import our excess food. Our food exports to countries like Haiti are much cheaper than the local product because they are subsidized by the US government. These subsidies benefit US Rice producers but they destroy indigenous agriculture. It puts farmers in Haiti out of work and thus increases poverty. Poverty in the Haitian countryside is the result of US agricultural policy.

Here is another story: “Currently, the minimum wage in Haiti for garment workers who produce for the US consumer market is $3.09 a day. Last year, the Haitian Parliament passed legislation to raise the minimum wage for all workers from $1.72 a day to $5 a day. But factory owners in the export sector producing for the US consumer market complained to Haitian President Preval, and he refused to implement the law. A compromise was reached: the minimum wage is now $5, except for the garment workers; they get $3.09 a day.

The AP gave the example of Jordanie Pinquie Rebeca, a garment worker:

Rebeca ... guides a piece of suit-jacket wool and its silky lining into a sewing machine ... If she does this for eight hours, she will earn $3.09. Her boss will ship the pinstriped suit she helped make to the United States, tariff-free. There a shopper will buy it from JoS. A. Bank Clothiers for $550.

The AP said that even the factory owners concede that garment-industry wages are too low to feed, clothe and house workers and their families.

As for Rebeca:

Rebeca ... sleeps on the street and barely eats. With a day's pay she can buy a cupful of rice and transport via group taxi, and pay down debt on her now-destroyed apartment. Anything left over goes to cell phone minutes to call her boyfriend, who was evacuated to the Dominican Republic with a leg fracture sustained in the quake, or her 4-year-old son, Mike, whom she sent to live with relatives in the countryside.” (http://www.truthout.org/haitian-garment-workers-should-get-5-a-day57145)

The United States is heavily involved in driving country folk off the land into the cities. There they are either unemployed or, if they're lucky, they get a job, like Rebeca in the story, making goods that get sold for a lot of money in United States,while they literally go hungry. American companies enrich themselves at the expense of Haitians who earn starvation wages.

These stories could be replicated indefinitely. The complicity of the United States governments and enterprises in Haitian poverty suggests a different interpretation of the second fact. The outpouring of help for Haiti is indeed a demonstration of American generosity but such generosity can barely scratch the surface of the reparations we should be offering Haiti for the damages our government's policies have done it.

The United States and Haiti

The US and Haiti

Copious reporting about the terrible suffering of earthquake ravaged Haiti never fails to mention that the effects of the major earthquake are magnified many times by the prevailing poverty and political chaos. 99% of the population are stunningly poor with most persons earning $1 a day, or less, most people living in slums without electricity, running water, or the most elementary sanitary facilities. Haiti has rarely achieved political stability. Its history is a series of political coups, political murders, and massacres.

While few observers say so in so many words, the implication is clear: The Haitian people have grossly mismanaged their country. They are, at least in part, to blame for their suffering. Other countries, above all the US, have for many years been most generous in their support for Haiti. But our generosity has not been able to overcome the self-destructive choices of the Haitians themselves.

It is time to set the facts straight. The myth of Haitian incompetence and self-destructiveness that won out over the generosity of the US and other Western nations conceals the fact that Haiti has been brought to its present tragic collapse by the deliberate interference of Western countries, above all the United States.

In the 18th century, Haiti was a French colony, home to large plantations, where slaves were literally being worked to death, but which thereby created a large portion of the wealth of France. A slave uprising in early 1800s created the free nation of Haiti--the first republic, the first country to abolish slavery, and the first Black nation on the American continent. France refused to recognize that nation until Haiti agreed to a very large restitution payment (which they did not finish paying until the 1870s)--the former slaves in Haiti had to pay France for their liberty which deprived the French of valuable possessions. The US, where Thomas Jefferson was then President, imposed a trade embargo on Haiti. The slave owner Jefferson was not about to recognize a republic founded by slaves who freed themselves. The US did not recognize the Republic of Haiti until 60 years later, after the Civil War.

Burdened by crushing debt, embargoed by the US and thus unable to sell the produce of its fertile farms, Haiti sank into poverty, not from its own ineptitude but the superior power of the Western nations.

In the years before World War I, German companies had considerable influence in Haiti. With the first World War approaching, the US government worried about German influence in a country so close to Florida. In addition a period of political instability threatened US commercial interests such as HASCO--the Haitian-American Sugar Company. Our response was to send in the Marines in 1915 and keep them there until 1934. The national bank of Haiti was taken over by National City Bank of New York, the country was run by us. U.S. Railroad interests soon followed, and it wasn’t too long before a host of American business interests, including W.R Grace Corp., lobbied President Woodrow Wilson to demand the revenue coming in from Haitian customs as repayment for the Haitian government’s debt: in effect, turning over the administration of Haiti’s independent government to the U.S. During that period, the US built roads and schools and thus contributed to progress in Haiti. The US also forced the Haitians to adopt a constitution which, unlike previous Haitian constitutions, allowed foreigners to own property in Haiti. Besides, it organized the Haitian military--the faithful servants and executioners of the Duvalier dictatorship (1932 - 1986) which we left in Haiti after quitting the country in 1934. The association between Haiti's military and ours continued into the present century when coups and repressions of democratic movements in Haiti were organized by the CIA and military officers who had been trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, GA.

Under the heel of a murderous dictatorship of the Duvaliers from the early 1930s through the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the elder Bush, Haiti was a victim of the Cold War. The Duvaliers had the support of our government because they were staunchly anti-Communist, close to Communist Cuba and capitalist Florida. Their regime was as murderous as that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and we sacrificed the liberties, the very lives of Haitians to what we considered our own interests in the Cold War.

Since the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, Haiti has had two democratically elected presidents, but their tenures have also been disrupted by coups, military take-overs and repressions. The detailed history of that period is full of controversy but a series of very unsavory American political operatives, several of them intimately involved in the secret and illegal Contra operations in the 1980s, weaves in and out of events in Haiti.

The Haitian people never have been and still are not independent masters of their country or their history. Our country bears a heavy responsibility for the suffering of the Haitian people.

Disaster Lessons

Disaster Lessons

In Port-Au-Prince, devastated by an earthquake, the police are armed and looking out for violence. Newspaper reporters of a law-and-order orientation, many of them with racist agendas who project their own thirst for violence, are reporting gangs, armed with machetes, and looting. “Roaming bands of young men were carrying machetes, looting and robbing everywhere you go said one aid worker. “ (http://www.norcalblogs.com/post_scripts/ 2010/01/haiti-sees-140000-dead-fe.html). No doubt some people become violent in desperate situations. Some people are looking to take advantage of chaos and disorder; some people react violently to their own suffering. But most other observers see the terrible desperation of people who have lost everything, who lack food or water, and marvel at how peaceful they are. “Reports of armed gangs, including video of young men with machetes, have appeared in citizen and news video today. . . . But blog and media reports of looting appear to be based on only a few cases.” http://www.news5.etigari.com/haiti-instances-of-%E2%80%9Clooting%E2%80%9D-but-little-confirmed-evidence-of-post-quake-violence/).

It is Katrina all over. The poor and largely black population who survived the flood were reported to be violent and looting. The National Guard, armed to the teeth, were there to maintain law and order. Later reports showed that the violence reported existed mostly in the imagination of reporters. The greatest threat of violence came from the heavily armed troops. “Shades of Katrina emanate from the descriptions of "anarchy" engulfing the streets. Remember the Superdome, the "looting," the alleged explosion of mayhem? The media conjured images of death and destruction with voyeuristic zeal, while curating the stories to fit a prevailing narrative of savagery and social breakdown. Sharp criticism eventually emerged, too late, to debunk the initial portrayals of lawlessness as distortions, colored by latent anxieties about how black people might act in the absence of white domination. ” (http://www. racewire.org/archives/2010/01/please_dont_superdome_haiti.html).

There is a frightening lesson to be learned here. During natural disasters, the element of violence is mainly introduced by the heavily armed soldiers whom governments send to the scene of devastation-- in the case of Katrina, long before they sent any help for the victims. Reports of violence are often manufactured by angry persons, by haters, or persons terribly scared who are constantly expecting violence--hoping perhaps for an opportunity to be violent themselves. In Haiti too complaints have been heard that the US is preventing relief supplies from entering the country by giving preference to flights bringing in troops over flights bringing in relief supplies.

Violence is not primarily introduced by the victims of the disasters but by the heavily armed troops. Governments send in their soldiers, allegedly to prevent violence, but they actually are the most violent actors. Governments, whom we expect to preserve the peace, are often its greatest enemies. Its is they who introduce heavily armed men and women and promote the possibility of mayhem.

Iraq was a violent country to be sure under Saddam Hussein. But the damage he did to the Iraqi people pales besides the loss of life inflicted by allied troops. The same is true in Afghanistan. When will our government learn that war does not promote peace and killing does not save lives?