17001: charles posts: The Trials of Haiti - Tracy Kidder (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Philippe Charles <pgcharles@hotmail.com>

   The Trials of Haiti
   by Tracy Kidder

   In the winter of 2003, when war loomed in Iraq and every rock was
   suspected of concealing a terrorist, one might have imagined that the
   last thing on the minds of American diplomats would be a little
   impoverished country like Haiti, a mere third of an island, which
   lacks even an army. But the United States has a foreign policy
   everywhere, and, as a rule, the weaker and poorer the nation, the
   more powerful the policy is.
   Most Americans if they visited Haiti would, I imagine, come away with
   new definitions of poverty. What you notice most of all are absences
   of the most basic things. Water, for instance. In a recent survey of
   the potable water supplies in 147 nations, Haiti ranked 147th. It's
   estimated that only 40 percent of Haiti's roughly 8 million people
   have access to clean water.
   In the capital, Port-au-Prince, the morning after rain, you see
   working men take up manhole covers and lean in beneath the pavement,
   dipping buckets into the city's brimming drainage channels. They use
   the water to wash cars for pay, and occasionally, when the day gets
   hot, you'll see one of them invert a bucket over his head. This is
   very dangerous, because any contact with sewer water invites skin
   diseases and a mere thimbleful swallowed can cause bacillary
   dysentery.
   All over Haiti, you see boys and girls carrying water, balancing
   plastic buckets on their heads as they trek long distances up and
   down the hillsides of Port-au-Prince or climb steep footpaths in the
   countryside. Many of the water-carriers are orphans, known as
   restavek--children who work as indentured servants for poor families.
   Contaminated water is one of the causes of Haiti's extemely high rate
   of maternal mortality, the main reason there are so many orphans
   available for carrying water. "Sanitation service systems are almost
   nonexistent," reads one development report. Many Haitians drink from
   rivers or polluted wells or stagnant reservoirs, adding citron, key
   lime juice, in the belief that this will make the water safe. The
   results are epidemic levels of diseases such as typhoid, and a great
   deal of acute and chronic diarrhea, which tends to flourish among
   children under 5, especially ones who are malnourished. Hunger is
   rampant. "Haitians today are estimated to be the fourth most
   undernourished people on earth, after Eritrea, Ethiopa, and Somalia,"
   the World Bank reported in 2002. The cures for many waterborne
   ailments are simple. But in Haiti, it's estimated (almost certainly
   overestimated) that only 60 percent have access even to rudimentary
   healthcare. In the countryside, the vast majority have to travel at
   least an hour, over paths and main roads that resemble dry riverbeds,
   to reach health centers, which not only charge fees that most can't
   afford to pay but also lack the most basic provisions.
   Last winter, I visited the centerpiece of Haiti's public health
   system, the University Hospital in Port-au-Prince. It was founded in
   1918, during the time when American Marines occupied and essentially
   ran the country. It's a large complex of concrete buildings in the
   center of the city, and it seemed to be open when I arrived. My
   Haitian guide and I strolled over toward the pediatric wing. It
   seemed unnaturally quiet. No babies crying. Inside, the reason was
   obvious. There were no doctors or nurses or patients in sight, only a
   young male custodian, who explained that the doctors had recently
   ended a strike but that the nurses had now launched one of their own.
   Strikes at the hospital are frequent; this one had to do with current
   political strife.
   "Where did the sick children go?" I asked my Haitian guide.
   "They went home." She made a face. "To die."
   We walked past rows of empty metal cribs, and then, turning a corner,
   down at the end of a long row of old metal beds with bare, stained
   mattresses, we saw a lone patient. A girl lying on her side, very
   thin in the arms and legs, with a swollen belly. Her mother, standing
   beside the bed, explained that the girl had been sick for a long
   time. The doctors said she had typhoid. When the strike began, the
   mother and daughter had simply stayed, because the mother didn't know
   what else to do. But a doctor did stop in now and then, and had left behind
   some pills.

   At the hospital, the morgue, at least, was functioning. I looked
   into the one reserved for victims of diseases, mostly diseases that
   could have been prevented or cured. The door was made of corroded
   metal, like the door to a meat locker. The room inside was filled
   with trays on racks, stacked horizontally, several bodies per tray,
   the majority children, the little girls still in their dresses, bows
   in their hair.
   Diarrhea alone kills sixty-eight Haitian children out of every 1,000
   before the age of 5. Did many of the people in the morgue die because
   of dirty water? I asked the medical director.
   "Oh, of course!" he said. He also told me, "Sometimes we have to
   put more bodies together than we're supposed to, because there
   isn't room."
   Haiti is in dreadful shape. No one disputes the fact. So it seems
   odd that over the past few years foreign aid to the country has
   actually declined. Haiti still receives assistance, from the United
   States, the European Union, Canada, Japan and various United
   Nations organizations, but the total amount has been reduced by
   about two-thirds since 1995. The United States has cut its
   donations by more than half since 1999. The World Bank, meanwhile,
   has shut down its lending to the country, for the time being at
   least, and has closed its Haiti office, leaving behind only an
   administrator and driver.
   Then there is the case of the Inter-American Development Bank. The
   IDB isn't as well-known as some of the other IFIs (the international
   financial institutions, or "Iffies" in aidspeak) but ranks as a major
   player in Latin America and the Caribbean. It has long been one of
   the most important lenders to Haiti. In the late 1990s it made
   comprehensive plans for a passel of new low-interest loans to address
   some of the country's most pressing needs--$148 million in all for
   improving roads, education and the public health system, and for
   increasing the supplies of potable water. But in the spring of 2001,
   when the loans were about to be disbursed, the US representative on
   the IDB board of executive directors wrote the bank's president
   asking that the process be halted. This was unusual. No member nation
   is supposed to be able to stop the disbursement of loans that are
   already approved. Nevertheless, the IDB complied. The Haitian
   government also lost access to loans it could have received from the
   IDB over the next several years, worth another $470 million.
   The State Department seemed reluctant to discuss this matter. I was
   granted an interview with a senior department official only on
   condition that I not use his name. He told me it wasn't just the
   United States that had wanted to block the IDB loans; it was "a
   concerted effort" of the Organization of American States. The legal
   justification for blocking the loans, he said, originated at an OAS
   meeting called the Quebec City Summit, which produced something
   called the Declaration of Quebec City. But that document is dated
   April 22, 2001, and the letter from the IDB's US executive director
   asking that the loans not be disbursed is dated April 6, 2001. So it
   would seem that the effort became concerted after it was made. The
   reason for blocking the loans, according to the official, was "to
   bring pressure to bear on the Aristide government, to address what
   the OAS itself and other members of the international community saw
   as serious flaws in the 2000 electoral process."
   The official was referring to elections held in May 2000, in which
   Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Lavalas political party won large majorities
   in both houses of the Haitian Parliament. Each candidate had to win a
   clear majority to avoid a runoff, but the election procedures made it
   impossible to determine whether some had won majorities or merely
   pluralities. This was the case with eight Senate seats, in seven of
   which Lavalas candidates had received the most votes. But the
   Provisional Electoral Council eschewed runoffs, and declared those
   eight the winners. Opposition parties claimed the elections had been
   stolen, and many foreign diplomats made a fuss. Soon, many were
   calling the entire election "fraudulent." This seemed rather harsh,
   given the fact that to a great extent, foreigners had financed,
   managed and monitored the proceedings, and in the immediate aftermath
   many observers had declared a victory for Haiti's fledgling
   democracy. Sixty-five percent of Haiti's eligible voters had turned
   out, many walking miles along mountain paths and waiting for hours in
   the hot sun to vote. Moreover, those eight contested Senate seats
   didn't affect the balance of legislative power. Even if they'd lost
   them all, Lavalas would still have had control of Parliament.
   The election didn't seem like a sufficient reason for cutting aid to
   Haiti. To me the State Department's explanation seemed like obvious
   diplomatic obfuscation, what diplomats called "irregularities in
   vote-counting" serving as the pretext for reducing the amount of
   money that went to Haiti's government.
   Back in 1990, after centuries of slavery and dictatorship, Haitians
   finally got the chance to vote in free and fair elections. They
   chose Aristide, a Catholic priest from a poor parish of
   Port-au-Prince, as their president by an overwhelming margin--he
   received 67 percent of the vote in a field of thirteen candidates.
   Aristide's liberation theology--a doctrine whose central tenet is
   "to provide a preferential option for the poor"--won him a devout
   following among Haiti's poor but few friends in the first Bush
   Administration. After just seven months Aristide was deposed by a
   military junta, which ruled the country with great violence and
   cruelty for three years. Finally, in 1994, the Clinton
   Administration sent troops, which restored Aristide and his
   government. In the remaining year and a half of his term, Aristide
   made some small progress in rooting out the endemic corruption that
   various juntas and dictatorships had left behind. With the help of
   the United States, he also disbanded the Haitian Army, which the US
   Marines had reconstituted during the American occupation of Haiti in
   the early part of the century--an army, it was often said, that
   never knew an enemy besides the Haitian people.
   An array of foreign governments and Iffies pledged their help in
   rebuilding Haiti, but many of the donors insisted that in return for
   their aid Aristide institute "structural economic adjustment"--the
   privatization of state-owned enterprises, for example. According to
   one diplomat who spent a great deal of time conferring with him,
   Aristide was "privately ambivalent and publicly ambiguous" about the
   Iffies' recipes for Haiti. Too ambiguous to suit some of his former
   admirers on the left, for whom neoliberal economic reform is
   anathema, but also too ambiguous to win over any of his numerous
   detractors on the right.
   In 1996, Aristide, barred from seeking a consecutive term by the
   Haitian Constitution, endorsed as his replacement an old friend,
   Ren&eacute; Pr&eacute;val, and for the first time in Haitian history,
   a democratically elected head of state turned over power to another.
   Aristide ran for president again in November 2000. Citing the
   unresolved flaws in the May legislative elections, the United States
   declined to assist or monitor the presidential elections, which the
   political opposition in Haiti also boycotted. Aristide won easily,
   though--and legitimately, in the eyes of most of the world. But by
   then he had acquired many detractors, a large and varied cast, mostly
   situated outside Haiti.
   To the American right, liberation theology had long seemed like an
   especially dangerous doctrine, combining Marxist analysis with a call
   to connect the struggles of Christ to those of the poor. And
   Aristide's preaching and criticisms of the United States, combined
   with his great popularity among the Haitian poor, made him a natural
   target for right-wing politicians, such as Jesse Helms, who had
   denounced Aristide, even retailing slanders against him. Some of
   Aristide's early detractors are still in the American government. One
   of Helms's chief aides on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
   Roger Noriega, was until recently the permanent US representative to
   the OAS. In that capacity, he issued a number of statements
   criticizing Aristide and his government. Recently he was nominated as
   the Bush Administration's chief of policy on Latin America.
   Today, Aristide's critics argue variously that he is guilty of
   fomenting corruption and violence, or of condoning them, or, at the
   very least, of being too irresolute to put a stop to them. And it may
   be that, as one former diplomat told me, Aristide returned to power
   in 1994 with a "never again" attitude, resolving that if his enemies
   had guns and thugs, he would not be without them either. When I
   interviewed Aristide, he allowed that the issue of controlling his
   supporters was "a preoccupation," and added that he couldn't control
   agents provocateurs who committed crimes in the name of Lavalas. (A
   common sort of charge in Haiti. Opposition leaders have claimed, for
   instance, that Lavalas staged the notorious armed attack on the
   presidential palace on December 17, 2001, in order to have a pretext
   to attack them.) Aristide also told me, "I will do more to try to
   provide security and push the judicial system to render justice and
   not to delay and delay."
   I wasn't sure he'd get very far in those efforts. Haiti now has about
   3,500 poorly trained and ill-equipped police, including many amenable
   to payoffs and bribes, and some involved in drug trafficking. The
   United States has withdrawn all its support for the police and
   judicial system and, with the OAS, has been demanding that Aristide
   improve security and the administration of justice. A State
   Department official told me that the United States was trying to give
   "recognized political parties as much training as possible so they
   can compete nationally." In fact, Washington has long tried to create
   a counterforce to Aristide's vast popular support--most
   preposterously back in the mid-1990s, when the American soldiers
   temporarily occupying the country were told by their commanders that
   a right-wing terrorist organization called FRAPH was the "loyal
   opposition" to Aristide. More recently, public documents show, the
   United States helped to create the main political opposition, the
   Democratic Convergence, and has aided it in developing platforms and
   strategies. In theory, this could be a laudable program; democracy
   benefits from real competition. But it is sinister if, as Aristide's
   supporters say, part of Washington's strategy is to make room for an
   opposition by crippling Aristide's government--by blocking IDB loans,
   for example.
   Over the past few years, the United States and the OAS have placed
   increasingly onerous conditions on the Aristide government, which
   have included satisfying the demands of the political opposition.
   Foreign diplomats insisted that the senators in the contested seats
   resign; all did so several months after Aristide's re-election as
   president. Aristide has continually called for new elections, but the
   opposition has demanded that Aristide resign before they will
   cooperate. A State Department official in Haiti told me that the
   United States won't countenance such intransigence but also said that
   no support for new elections in Haiti will be forthcoming until
   Aristide improves "security," among other things. But it may be, as
   Aristide's supporters believe, that no support will be forthcoming
   until Washington thinks elections will yield the result it wants.
   There is no telling, of course, how new elections would turn out, but
   it is possible to guess. The United States has commissioned opinion
   polls in Haiti. These have not been released publicly, but I managed
   to obtain one, dated March 2002. The most striking thing about the
   data is that on many significant issues between 40 and 46 percent of
   those surveyed either refused to answer or said they had no opinion.
   Among those who responded, the poll reveals a rise in national
   cynicism. And the poll does show significant declines in Aristide's
   ratings from a poll conducted a year before, but those are declines
   from a very high level. About 60 percent of those who responded in
   2002 named him as the leader they trusted most, and no more than 4
   percent named anyone else. About 40 percent of respondents also named
   Lavalas as the political party they sympathized with, while only
   about 8 percent named the Convergence.
   One foreign journalist recently wrote, "Among the disaffected former
   supporters [of Aristide] are virtually all of Haiti's leading
   intellectuals and artists, the persons who had best articulated the
   humane values that should be at the basis of any new Haitian
   society." But should Haiti's leading artists and intellectuals,
   however well articulated and humane their values, be the ones to
   define a new Haitian society? Perhaps 80 percent of Haitians live in
   poverty, about 70 percent in poverty so desperate that they've never
   had a chance to go to school, let alone become intellectuals. These
   are the people most often invoked in discussions about Haiti's
   suffering, but they are also the people least often consulted on the
   question of what should be done. The main exception has been
   elections. The Haitian poor demanded the right to vote. They ran
   grave risks to get it--in the aborted elections of 1987, for
   instance, when thugs employed by the junta in power gunned down
   would-be voters at polling places. And when they've finally had their
   chance, the impoverished majority has, time and again, turned out in
   large numbers and expressed their hopes by electing Aristide.
   The saga of the blocked IDB loans has continued. In September 2002,
   the OAS seemed to relent a little, and resolved that the Iffies
   should resume normal relations with the Haitian government. But this
   had no immediate practical effect. The World Bank had no plans to
   make new loans. And the IDB couldn't disburse the loans for clean
   water and health and roads and education, because arrears had
   accumulated since 2000. Haiti now owed the bank millions more in
   debts on previous loans, ones taken out, ironically enough, by
   Aristide's predecessors--by "Baby Doc" Duvalier and by various
   military juntas that had tried to kill Aristide several times back in
   the late 1980s. Haiti didn't qualify for the international program of
   debt relief because Haiti didn't owe enough. It did, however, owe
   more than it could pay. So if the loans were going to be released,
   some foreign government or institution would have to make a bridge
   loan to Haiti. One senior State Department official told me that the
   United States was in favor of a bridge loan, but only if Aristide's
   government met various conditions. Clearly, the IDB loans were still
   being used to exert pressure on Aristide.
   This past summer the Haitian government decided to pay the arrears
   itself, a total of $32 million, a sum that represented more than 90
   percent of the country's foreign reserves. In effect, the government
   has all but bankrupted itself for the sake of those loans and in the
   hope of more to come.
   Last winter I made a call to the World Bank, to the person then
   serving as its Caribbean country director, Orsalia Kalantzopoulos. I
   knew that the World Bank had run into the same problems as the IDB,
   and that loans were being held up by about $25 million in arrears.
   But I wondered why it had pulled out of the country. It seemed like a
   strange thing to do, given that its mission statement reads, "Our
   dream is a world free of poverty."
   Kalantzopoulos told me, "The problem was that most of the projects,
   with very few exceptions, did not meet their objectives. In addition,
   the projects had a lot of execution problems. There was not proper
   procurement and sometimes money was not going to the projects
   described." She added, " The bottom line is, if there is not the
   political will to use the money properly, does it really make sense
   to mortgage the next generation?"
   Of course, the status quo doesn't promise future generations much of
   a future in Haiti. And the Iffies are already making the current
   generation of Haitians pay for the sins of the past.
   Today, the United States is passing almost all of its direct aid to
   Haiti through USAID, which then funnels the money to various NGOs.
   But according to Gerard Johnson, until recently the IDB's
   representative there, this tactic is only a palliative, not a cure.
   "In the sense of development, NGOs cannot replace the government.
   They can satisfy short-term humanitarian problems, they're very
   important as a partner to government, but I don't think you can avoid
   the government and do lasting development." The only real solution in
   the long run, Johnson felt, was to strengthen the institutions within
   Haiti, and one way to do that was through IDB loans. Haiti, he
   explained, has an informal economy, untaxed and untaxable, that
   probably accounts for about 85 percent of the country's employment.
   Incompetence and corruption are problems, but the bigger problem is
   that the government can't raise enough in taxes to do much more than
   pay its employees' salaries. Low-interest IDB loans could provide the
   capital for making real improvements.
   There are a few examples of successes even in Haiti. One of Johnson's
   favorites was a recent Canadian project that had brought reliable
   electricity to the city of Jacmel. One of the most harmful legacies
   of the American occupation early in the twentieth century and of the
   Duvaliers' long rule has been the centralization of everything. The
   Jacmel project was so far fairly successful, Johnson thought, because
   the Aristide government had ceded control, including over revenues,
   to the local government. "This is exactly the model that we would
   like to replicate with the water loan," Johnson told me. "Support
   good governance, support local government, and that's definitely
   linked to democracy. The people are to stand in relation to the state
   to the point where they're willing to trust enough to pay their water
   rates, which sounds like something automatic in Washington, DC, but
   in Haiti when you pay your water rate, you may or may not get water."
   Of course, some opponents of neoliberal economic reform believe that
   poor countries should have no truck with the Iffies, because the
   conditions that are invariably attached to their aid usually end up
   doing further harm to the poor. I raised this objection with Dr. Paul
   Farmer. He is a professor of medicine and medical anthropology at
   Harvard and the medical director of a remarkably effective and
   expanding public health system in a desperately impoverished region
   of rural Haiti. He has also published a number of articles critical
   of the Iffies and neoliberal economic reforms. He told me,
   "Anti-neoliberal people say Haiti would be better off without the IMF
   and the World Bank and the IDB, but there's no topsoil left in a lot
   of the country, there are no jobs, people are dying of AIDS and
   coughing their lungs out with TB, and the poor don't have enough to
   eat. These are problems in the here and now. Something has to be
   done. Haiti is flat broke, and I don't see what else the government
   can do but turn to the Iffies. It's the job of the true friends of
   Haiti to protect it from the hypocrisies of the Iffies."
   I have spent portions of the past three years in Haiti, mostly in the
   country's famished, deforested central plateau. During that time I've
   met a number of people who describe themselves as peasants, among
   them a man in his 30s, named Ti Jean Gabriel. When I spoke with him
   last winter in Haiti, he said he wished he could talk with President
   Bush and tell him about the problems in the country. He could tell
   his own story, how when he was 8 he had so few clothes that he used
   to work naked in his father's field. "I feel like if I could get to
   the right person, so I could explain the situation..."
   I told him that some people thought giving more aid to Haiti now
   would be a mistake. What was his response to that?
   He leaned toward me. "I will answer your question with a question,"
   he said. "You have seen Haiti. Do you think Haiti needs more aid?"

This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031027&s=kidder

Visit The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/

Subscribe to The Nation:
https://ssl.thenation.com/

______________________________________________________________________________________
Cheer a special someone with a fun Halloween eCard from American Greetings!