22299: (Hermantin)Sun-Sentinel-Haiti's recent floods highlight nation's turmoil (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Haiti's recent floods highlight nation's turmoil



By Tim Collie
Staff Writer

June 6, 2004

The Haitian village was swamped with mud. The water was fetid and
disease-carrying mosquitoes were beginning to gather. There was no food
since the few crops had been washed away by rain and rockslides.

Children were everywhere. Many without parents because they had died in
other calamities or succumbed to preventable diseases like tuberculosis,
pneumonia or AIDS. Most of the men already had fled the farming region for
the city in search of some work that could support their families.

This isn't Mapou, the Haitian town where at least 1,000 people were killed
last month when mudslides wiped out the village after torrential rains. It's
many villages I've seen all over this desperately poor nation over the last
decade of travel there.

It could describe areas outside of Bombardopolis, in Haiti's bleak
northwestern region, where acre upon acre of once-beautiful forest has been
reduced to swampy, treeless fields that produce little of value except wood
burned to make charcoal. It's also a village called Galette Mousambe, about
a four-hour walk from the Central Plateau town of Bainet. Or a slum called
God's Village on the waterfront of Port-au-Prince, where people are
routinely swept out to sea after heavy rains drive mud down from the
mountains.

The truth is that much of this country lives under the threat of nature's
wrath. A major storm directly hitting the capital of Port-au-Prince could
easily kill thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, who live on steep,
treeless mountain slopes in crowded shantytowns.

The situation is even more desperate in the thousands of small towns
scattered throughout mountains, unreachable by anything but a
four-wheel-drive vehicle. For those who've never traveled these mountains,
it is difficult to imagine just how cut off from the world much of Haiti is.

Nearly half of Haiti's 8 million people live in its vast countryside, a
throwback to 1804, when Haiti was founded as a nation and newly freed slaves
fled inland to be as far as possible from cities controlled by Creole
elites. Since then, succeeding governments have done little to reach these
people. They lack roads, electricity, education and the most basic health
care.

Over the past decade, life spans in Haiti have fallen by six years, to under
50 years of age, driven by a relentless, staggering poverty that breeds
disease, political turmoil and ecological ruin.

Even before a rebellion ousted its former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide
in February, the country was one of the hungriest in the world, ranking with
places such as Afghanistan and Somalia. AIDS has spread unrestrained in part
because poor women often sell their bodies for food. In recent months, the
situation has only grown worse, according to United Nations diplomats. A
growing staple on the streets of major cities is dirt-clay shaped to
resemble bread that people consume merely to ward off hunger.

Ten percent of children do not make it past the age of 5 because of the
diarrhea, cholera and tetanus that are a daily fact of life here. Another 30
percent who survive suffer severe malnutrition. Most of the population,
about 7 million of its 8 million inhabitants, live on less than $1 a day.

It was this grinding poverty that indirectly led to Mapou's tragedy. Because
Haiti's land can no longer feed its people, the poorest have been chopping
down trees for decades to make charcoal to sell in the cities. Charcoal is
used for everything from cooking fuel to dry-cleaning. It is not only used
by the poor; you can smell it being burned to cook food and prepare laundry
in Haiti's finest luxury hotels.

As a result, the country is almost completely deforested. Its mountains are
row upon row of coffee-colored humps. They cover most of this harsh land,
rising up to peaks of some 8,000 feet, and creating a series of narrow,
steep valleys.

When it rains in Haiti, water slides like a sheet off of these bare
mountains. A slight rain sends boulders and mud that clog the streets of
Port-au-Prince. It's a perversion of the natural cycle, in which trees and
plants should capture water, replenish rivers and send topsoil down into
fertile valleys for the next growing season. What happens instead is that
massive flash floods carry tons of mud and topsoil down the mountains and
into the villages.

In fact, Mapou may have been lucky. Although the number of people who died
in this one place is high, hundreds or perhaps thousands of Haitians die
every year in similar circumstances in isolated villages and valleys all
over the country. Their fates often go unreported, their deaths unrecorded,
because more than half of this country's people have no official record of
their existence. It's doubtful that there ever will be a full recording of
everyone who died in Mapou.

But survivors had timing on their side. If an international military force
had not been in Haiti, arriving after Aristide's departure to support the
interim government, the toll likely would have been much higher. They
received water and food and medicine -- probably more medicine than many had
every seen -- within days.

Under normal circumstances, there would have been no helicopter airlift
capacity at the international airport, and certainly not hundreds of U.S.,
French, Canadian and other troops trained to help during national disasters.

Last year, I visited the headquarters of Haiti's hurricane emergency center
as a major storm was approaching the island. I found a huge number of men
chatting about a soccer game on the porch, and a listless clerk who could
not locate the head of the office.

What is to be done? As attention from this disaster recedes, Haiti likely
will fade once again from the minds of world leaders until the next
disaster. It's a humanitarian catastrophe, not a security threat, so the
attention it commands can only be on our collective conscience.

But the call to help Haiti isn't being heard. Soldiers from the United
States, who command the most respect among troops in Haiti, are scheduled to
leave at the end of this month and the official handover to the United
Nations was last Tuesday. The troops will be replaced by a U.N. force that
hasn't even fully arrived yet. Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan asked for a long-term U.N. commitment to transform Haiti, at the
cost of $35 million dollars. But so far, only a fraction of that has been
pledged.

Meanwhile, more storms are coming, and this tiny country simply cannot
weather them alone.

Tim Collie can be reached at tcollie@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4573.

Tim Collie is the Sun-Sentinel's chief foreign correspondent and has
traveled to Haiti many times over the past 15 years.


Copyright © 2004, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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