12695: Why Do We Punish the Haitian People? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: kevin pina <kpinbox@hotmail.com>

washingtonpost.com
Why Do We Punish The Haitian People?


By Tracy Kidder

Wednesday, August 7, 2002; Page A21


In the famished, deforested and desperately poor Central Plateau of Haiti,
there is a first-rate medical complex, called Zanmi Lasante, which is
financed in large part by a small American charity and operated almost
entirely by Haitians. Some 56,000 patients visited Zanmi Lasante in 2001.
This year the medical complex is on course to receive more than twice as
many. Patients fill every bed in its hospital wards and every reclining
chair. Many desperately ill people lie on mats on the floors.

The main explanation for this dramatic, indeed catastrophic, increase in
patients is obvious. Haiti's public health system was deplorable in 2000 and
it has deteriorated since. Private hospitals in the Central Plateau stand
all but empty, because they charge user fees that most Haitians can't
afford. Impoverished patients are flocking to Zanmi Lasante because they
have nowhere else to go.

The situation is far from hopeless. The wise application of relatively small
amounts of money has allowed Zanmi Lasante, working with the cash-strapped
Haitian authorities, to vastly improve public health in its vicinity. To
reproduce this success throughout the country and to make it last would
require the creation of a good national public health apparatus, adequately
financed and ultimately managed by Haitians for Haitians. Since Haiti lies
only a short plane ride away from Miami, one might expect that the United
States, out of self-interest if nothing else, would try earnestly to help
start such an endeavor.

In fact, we are sending some aid to Haiti -- about $100 million a year if
one accepts the State Department's accounting, often creative. But all of it
is being sent to international and charitable organizations and none of it
to the government of Haiti. Indeed, the United States is actively impeding
the flow of foreign aid to Haiti's government, a total of approximately $500
million, a sum roughly equal to the country's annual budget. We are even
blocking, illegally, a series of already-approved loans from the
Inter-American Development Bank totaling $148 million, designated for
improvements in Haiti's water resources, education and public health.

The Bush administration's foreign policy bureaucrats have spun webs of
pretexts to justify this shunning of a democratically elected government --
"irregularities in vote-counting" in a legislative election is only the most
ridiculous of these. The plain fact is that our foreign policy establishment
despises Haiti's very popular president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, and wants
to make sure his popularity wanes.

The hypocrisy of our position is painful. We support many unelected
governments throughout the world and have supported many in Haiti -- cruel
kleptocrats and military juntas and, most notoriously, the Duvalier family
dictatorship. But Aristide, whatever his demerits may be, was elected for a
second time in November 2000 by an overwhelming majority.

Many Americans feel hurt and puzzled when they hear that large numbers of
people in poor countries fear and resent the United States. But imagine how
our current policy must look to the impoverished majority of Haitians. Their
ancestors were slaves, kidnapped from West Africa. When they rebelled
against their French masters and established the second independent nation
in the Western Hemisphere, the young, slave-holding United States punished
them, both politically and economically. To Haitians now, it can't help but
seem that we intend to punish them some more for having reelected Aristide.

Haiti is part of the world we occupy. In spite of their long travails, the
people of that small island country created their own wonderfully expressive
language, their own vibrant literature and art, their own much maligned and
misunderstood but rich religion. We have done them a great deal of harm in
the past -- it was, for instance, American and Canadian sex tourists who
carried AIDS to Haiti. Now we should help them and the leaders they have
chosen through free and fair elections. Instead, in the name of all
Americans, our government is following a policy that is not merely
hypocritical but also murderous.

The writer won a Pulitzer Prize for his book "The Soul of a New Machine." He
is a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly.



© 2002 The Washington Post Company



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