23373: Esser: Another Unnatural Disaster (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. E s s e r <torx@joimail.com>

Boston Haitian Reporter
http://www.bostonhaitian.com

"Another Unnatural Disaster"
by Brian Concannon Jr.

October, 2004


Sorrows cascaded on Gonaives last month - the storm itself was bad
enough under any circumstances, but it descended on a quarter million
people (the size of half of Boston) who had not been warned or helped
to higher ground. When the rain relented, bad roads stopped rescuers,
and help that did get through was stolen by the local “freedom
fighters.”

At least 2,500 people were killed, and the remaining water and
corpses threaten survivors with deadly diseases. All this on top of a
murderous year in the City of Independence, that should have been
proudly celebrating Haiti’s bicentennial.

Many of us - people who know Haiti well and those who first heard of
Gonaives this year - struggle to comprehend the tragedy’s vastness,
and to find meaning or at least an explanation for such suffering.

Some point up to the heavens for answers. But Jeanne hit Puerto Rico,
the Dominican Republic, Barbados and the U.S. as a full hurricane,
killing thirty-four people — in all those places combined. She was
only a tropical storm when she killed seventy times that number in
Haiti.

Others point up too, but not as high - to the mountain farmers who
cut down the trees that in other countries slow the rain down. But
the farmers would not cut the trees if they had a choice - they know
better than the experts what happens when rain hits a deforested
slope, because it rushes away with the topsoil that is needed for
next year’s crop and is many farmers’ only legacy for their children.
But legacies and next year’s crop mean nothing when the children are
dying now, so the farmer cuts and sells the tree to buy today’s
medicine and food.

The farmers may point up as well, up north to the governments and
international financial institutions. Some sit in offices beautifully
paneled with tropical hardwood, all sit in countries where people are
not forced to sell next year’s life to survive this year. The farmers
know that Haiti’s peasants did not start the deforestation - Moreau
de St. Mery, a French administrator, complained of deforestation
during the slavery era; American firms harvested industrial quantities
of trees in the 20th century. The farmers also know that people in
comfortable offices in comfortable countries impose the crushing
national debts, the embargoes, and the “economic reforms” that force
poor countries to cut already inadequate programs for healthcare,
education and environmental protection. They know when the government
cannot provide a safety net, the trees must, no matter the cost.

“Captain Meteo,” Renan Jean-Louis, has been Haiti’s preeminent
weatherman since the Duvaliers. He did not survive the political and
natural storms for that long by mixing meteorology with politics. But
he saw the storm coming, as did anyone who listened to news or
clicked on a weather website. Everyone knew that the water would
stream quickly down the deforested mountains - Haiti’s interim
Minister of Agriculture even wrote a book in 2002 about Haiti’s
vulnerability to natural disasters, which listed Gonaives as the
largest area of extreme risk for flooding. But unlike every other
government in Jeanne’s path, Haiti’s government did not warn or
evacuate its citizens. Mr. Jean-Louis called this “negligence and
nonchalance,” and blamed it for many preventable deaths.

Haiti’s interim government will point to its lack of resources: not
enough trucks or money for supplies, poor roads and little disaster
response training. But last hurricane season Haiti had a functioning
Civil Protection Office, set up with the help of the United States
Agency for International Development and the Pan American Development
Foundation. Last year, twenty-three local civil protection committees
were formed, and over 5,000 people were trained in disaster
awareness. The Civil Protection Office had plans to warn communities
of approaching storms and to provide emergency assistance.

The Civil Protection Office, its committees, network and supplies were
attacked along with the rest of Haiti’s constitutional government
earlier this year. The government’s trucks were burned, officials were
killed, arrested or forced into hiding, the offices where planning was
done were ransacked.

This infrastructure has not been rebuilt anywhere, especially in
Gonaives where the government has left the running of the city to the
gangs that brought it to power.

The Gonaives gangs, like their allies in Port-au-Prince acquired
their power by the bullet, not the ballot. They cannot be voted out
for negligence or nonchalance, or even for stealing food from women
leaving disaster relief offices.

Neither the government nor the UN troops has made a serious effort to
dislodge them by force. To the contrary, the UN cooperates with them
on “security matters,” the Prime Minister praises them as “freedom
fighters.”

All of the other countries in Jeanne’s path have an elected
government, accountable to the voters, with enough resources to
provide a minimum of basic services, especially healthcare,
nutrition, education and security against natural and unnatural
threats. That these countries endured the hurricane’s wrath with such
little loss of life shows that their democracies, if imperfect, do
work.

Haiti, proved once again, the limits of government by dictatorship
and anarchy, a lesson already known too well from the Gonaives plain
to the bare mountaintops.

[Brian Concannon Jr. directs the Institute for Justice and Democracy
in Haiti (www.ijdh.org). He lived in Haiti from 1995 to 2004, working
for the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, a group of lawyers
established by Haiti’s constitutional governments to help human
rights victims pursue their cases in Haitian courts.]
.