24864: Driver (discuss) Why Haiti is in such chaos

[sak-pase@bimini.ws]

Tom F. Driver <tfd3@columbia.edu>

I have been wondering all year why the U.S. Government 
has stood by while Haiti descended into chaotic 
violence.  It was no surprise that the U.S. got rid of 
Aristide, for the aim to make it impossible for him to 
govern was clear from 2000 onward, if not before.  But 
once he was gone, why let chaos reign?

The article below, by Naomi Klein in the May 2, 2005, 
issue of The Nation Magazine, goes far to explain it.  She 
shows how the American economic system is feeding off 
of areas of the world that are struck by both natural and 
political disasters.  In the latter part of the article, Haiti 
is shown to be an example.

This is chilling reading, but it's also clarifying.

Tom F. Driver
-----------------


  The Rise of Disaster Capitalism 
  by Naomi Klein


Last summer, in the lull of the August media doze, the 
Bush Administration's doctrine of preventive war took a 
major leap forward. On August 5, 2004, the White House 
created the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction 
and Stabilization, headed by former US Ambassador to 
Ukraine Carlos Pascual. Its mandate is to draw up 
elaborate "post-conflict" plans for up to twenty-five 
countries that are not, as of yet, in conflict. According to 
Pascual, it will also be able to coordinate three full-scale 
reconstruction operations in different countries "at the 
same time," each lasting "five to seven years."  

Fittingly, a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive 
deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual 
pre-emptive reconstruction.  

Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and 
then drawing up ad hoc plans to pick up the pieces. In 
close cooperation with the National Intelligence Council, 
Pascual's office keeps "high risk" countries on a "watch 
list" and assembles rapid-response teams ready to 
engage in prewar planning and to "mobilize and deploy 
quickly" after a conflict has gone down. The teams are 
made up of private companies, nongovernmental 
organizations and members of think tanks-- some, 
Pascual told an audience at the Center for Strategic and 
International Studies in October, will have "pre-
completed" contracts to rebuild countries that are not 
yet broken. Doing this paperwork in advance could "cut 
off three to six months in your response time."  

The plans Pascual's teams have been drawing up in his 
little-known office in the State Department are about 
changing "the very social fabric of a nation," he told 
CSIS. The office's mandate is not to rebuild any old 
states, you see, but to create "democratic and market- 
oriented" ones. So, for instance (and he was just pulling 
this example out of his hat, no doubt), his fast-acting 
reconstructors might help sell off "state-owned 
enterprises that created a nonviable economy." 
Sometimes rebuilding, he explained, means "tearing 
apart the old."  

Few ideologues can resist the allure of a blank slate--
that was colonialism's seductive promise: "discovering" 
wide-open new lands where utopia seemed possible. But 
colonialism is dead, or so we are told; there are no new 
places to discover, no terra nullius (there never was), no 
more blank pages on which, as Mao once said, "the 
newest and most beautiful words can be written." There 
is, however, plenty of destruction--countries smashed to 
rubble, whether by so- called Acts of God or by Acts of 
Bush (on orders from God). And where there is 
destruction there is reconstruction, a chance to grab 
hold of "the terrible barrenness," as a UN official 
recently described the devastation in Aceh, and fill it 
with the most perfect, beautiful plans.  

"We used to have vulgar colonialism," says Shalmali 
Guttal, a Bangalore- based researcher with Focus on the 
Global South. "Now we have sophisticated colonialism, 
and they call it 'reconstruction.'"  

It certainly seems that ever-larger portions of the globe 
are under active reconstruction: being rebuilt by a 
parallel government made up of a familiar cast of for-
profit consulting firms, engineering companies, mega-
NGOs, government and UN aid agencies and 
international financial institutions. And from the people 
living in these reconstruction sites--Iraq to Aceh, 
Afghanistan to Haiti--a similar chorus of complaints can 
be heard. The work is far too slow, if it is happening at 
all. Foreign consultants live high on cost-plus expense 
accounts and thousand- dollar-a-day salaries, while 
locals are shut out of much-needed jobs, training and 
decision-making. Expert "democracy builders" lecture 
governments on the importance of transparency and 
"good governance," yet most contractors and NGOs 
refuse to open their books to those same governments, 
let alone give them control over how their aid money is 
spent.  

Three months after the tsunami hit Aceh, the New York 
Times ran a distressing story reporting that "almost 
nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and 
rebuilding." The dispatch could easily have come from 
Iraq, where, as the Los Angeles Times just reported, all 
of Bechtel's allegedly rebuilt water plants have started 
to break down, one more in an endless litany of 
reconstruction screw-ups. It could also have come from 
Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai recently 
blasted "corrupt, wasteful and unaccountable" foreign 
contractors for "squandering the precious resources that 
Afghanistan received in aid." Or from Sri Lanka, where 
600,000 people who lost their homes in the tsunami are 
still languishing in temporary camps. One hundred days 
after the giant waves hit, Herman Kumara, head of the 
National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Negombo, Sri 
Lanka, sent out a desperate e-mail to colleagues around 
the world. "The funds received for the benefit of the 
victims are directed to the benefit of the privileged few, 
not to the real victims," he wrote. "Our voices are not 
heard and not allowed to be voiced."  

But if the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at 
rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its 
primary purpose. According to Guttal, "It's not 
reconstruction at all--it's about reshaping everything." If 
anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence 
serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a 
predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the 
desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage 
in radical social and economic engineering. And on this 
front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and 
efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are 
usually locked in before the local population knows what 
hit them. Kumara, in another e-mail, warns that Sri 
Lanka is now facing "a second tsunami of corporate 
globalization and militarization," potentially even more 
devastating than the first. "We see this as a plan of 
action amidst the tsunami crisis to hand over the sea 
and the coast to foreign corporations and tourism, with 
military assistance from the US Marines."  

As Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz designed 
and oversaw a strikingly similar project in Iraq: The fires 
were still burning in Baghdad when US occupation 
officials rewrote the investment laws and announced 
that the country's state-owned companies would be 
privatized. Some have pointed to this track record to 
argue that Wolfowitz is unfit to lead the World Bank; in 
fact, nothing could have prepared him better for his new 
job. In Iraq, Wolfowitz was just doing what the World 
Bank is already doing in virtually every war- torn and 
disaster-struck country in the world--albeit with fewer 
bureaucratic niceties and more ideological bravado.  

"Post-conflict" countries now receive 20-25 percent of 
the World Bank's total lending, up from 16 percent in 
1998--itself an 800 percent increase since 1980, 
according to a Congressional Research Service study. 
Rapid response to wars and natural disasters has 
traditionally been the domain of United Nations 
agencies, which worked with NGOs to provide 
emergency aid, build temporary housing and the like. But 
now reconstruction work has been revealed as a 
tremendously lucrative industry, too important to be left 
to the do- gooders at the UN. So today it is the World 
Bank, already devoted to the principle of poverty-
alleviation through profit-making, that leads the charge.  

And there is no doubt that there are profits to be made in 
the reconstruction business. There are massive 
engineering and supplies contracts ($10 billion to 
Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan alone); "democracy 
building" has exploded into a $2 billion industry; and 
times have never been better for public-sector 
consultants--the private firms that advise governments 
on selling off their assets, often running government 
services themselves as subcontractors. (Bearing Point, 
the favored of these firms in the United States, reported 
that the revenues for its "public services" division "had 
quadrupled in just five years," and the profits are huge: 
$342 million in 2002--a profit margin of 35 percent.)  

But shattered countries are attractive to the World Bank 
for another reason: They take orders well. After a 
cataclysmic event, governments will usually do 
whatever it takes to get aid dollars--even if it means 
racking up huge debts and agreeing to sweeping policy 
reforms. And with the local population struggling to find 
shelter and food, political organizing against 
privatization can seem like an unimaginable luxury.  

Even better from the bank's perspective, many war-
ravaged countries are in states of "limited sovereignty": 
They are considered too unstable and unskilled to 
manage the aid money pouring in, so it is often put in a 
trust fund managed by the World Bank. This is the case 
in East Timor, where the bank doles out money to the 
government as long as it shows it is spending 
responsibly. Apparently, this means slashing public-
sector jobs (Timor's government is half the size it was 
under Indonesian occupation) but lavishing aid money on 
foreign consultants the bank insists the government hire 
(researcher Ben Moxham writes, "In one government 
department, a single international consultant earns in 
one month the same as his twenty Timorese colleagues 
earn together in an entire year").  

In Afghanistan, where the World Bank also administers 
the country's aid through a trust fund, it has already 
managed to privatize healthcare by refusing to give 
funds to the Ministry of Health to build hospitals. Instead 
it funnels money directly to NGOs, which are running 
their own private health clinics on three-year contracts. 
It has also mandated "an increased role for the private 
sector" in the water system, telecommunications, oil, 
gas and mining and directed the government to 
"withdraw" from the electricity sector and leave it to 
"foreign private investors." These profound 
transformations of Afghan society were never debated or 
reported on, because few outside the bank know they 
took place: The changes were buried deep in a 
"technical annex" attached to a grant providing 
"emergency" aid to Afghanistan's war-torn 
infrastructure--two years before the country had an 
elected government.  

It has been much the same story in Haiti, following the 
ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In exchange 
for a $61 million loan, the bank is requiring "public-
private partnership and governance in the education and 
health sectors," according to bank documents--i.e., 
private companies running schools and hospitals. Roger 
Noriega, US Assistant Secretary of State for Western 
Hemisphere Affairs, has made it clear that the Bush 
Administration shares these goals. "We will also 
encourage the government of Haiti to move forward, at 
the appropriate time, with restructuring and privatization 
of some public sector enterprises," he told the American 
Enterprise Institute on April 14, 2004.  

These are extraordinarily controversial plans in a 
country with a powerful socialist base, and the bank 
admits that this is precisely why it is pushing them now, 
with Haiti under what approaches military rule. "The 
Transitional Government provide[s] a window of 
opportunity for implementing economic governance 
reforms...that may be hard for a future government to 
undo," the bank notes in its Economic Governance 
Reform Operation Project agreement. For Haitians, this 
is a particularly bitter irony: Many blame multilateral 
institutions, including the World Bank, for deepening the 
political crisis that led to Aristide's ouster by 
withholding hundreds of millions in promised loans. At 
the time, the Inter- American Development Bank, under 
pressure from the State Department, claimed Haiti was 
insufficiently democratic to receive the money, pointing 
to minor irregularities in a legislative election. But now 
that Aristide is out, the World Bank is openly celebrating 
the perks of operating in a democracy-free zone.  

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund 
have been imposing shock therapy on countries in 
various states of shock for at least three decades, most 
notably after Latin America's military coups and the 
collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet many observers say 
that today's disaster capitalism really hit its stride with 
Hurricane Mitch. For a week in October 1998, Mitch 
parked itself over Central America, swallowing villages 
whole and killing more than 9,000. Already impoverished 
countries were desperate for reconstruction aid--and it 
came, but with strings attached. In the two months after 
Mitch struck, with the country still knee-deep in rubble, 
corpses and mud, the Honduran congress initiated what 
the Financial Times called "speed sell-offs after the 
storm." It passed laws allowing the privatization of 
airports, seaports and highways and fast-tracked plans 
to privatize the state telephone company, the national 
electric company and parts of the water sector. It 
overturned land-reform laws and made it easier for 
foreigners to buy and sell property. It was much the 
same in neighboring countries: In the same two months, 
Guatemala announced plans to sell off its phone system, 
and Nicaragua did likewise, along with its electric 
company and its petroleum sector.  

All of the privatization plans were pushed aggressively 
by the usual suspects. According to the Wall Street 
Journal, "the World Bank and International Monetary 
Fund had thrown their weight behind the [telecom] sale, 
making it a condition for release of roughly $47 million in 
aid annually over three years and linking it to about $4.4 
billion in foreign-debt relief for Nicaragua."  

Now the bank is using the December 26 tsunami to push 
through its cookie- cutter policies. The most devastated 
countries have seen almost no debt relief, and most of 
the World Bank's emergency aid has come in the form of 
loans, not grants. Rather than emphasizing the need to 
help the small fishing communities--more than 80 
percent of the wave's victims--the bank is pushing for 
expansion of the tourism sector and industrial fish 
farms. As for the damaged public infrastructure, like 
roads and schools, bank documents recognize that 
rebuilding them "may strain public finances" and 
suggest that governments consider privatization (yes, 
they have only one idea). "For certain investments," 
notes the bank's tsunami-response plan, "it may be 
appropriate to utilize private financing."  

As in other reconstruction sites, from Haiti to Iraq, 
tsunami relief has little to do with recovering what was 
lost. Although hotels and industry have already started 
reconstructing on the coast, in Sri Lanka, Thailand, 
Indonesia and India, governments have passed laws 
preventing families from rebuilding their oceanfront 
homes. Hundreds of thousands of people are being 
forcibly relocated inland, to military style barracks in 
Aceh and prefab concrete boxes in Thailand. The coast 
is not being rebuilt as it was--dotted with fishing villages 
and beaches strewn with handmade nets. Instead, 
governments, corporations and foreign donors are 
teaming up to rebuild it as they would like it to be: the 
beaches as playgrounds for tourists, the oceans as 
watery mines for corporate fishing fleets, both serviced 
by privatized airports and highways built on borrowed 
money.  

In January Condoleezza Rice sparked a small 
controversy by describing the tsunami as "a wonderful 
opportunity" that "has paid great dividends for us." Many 
were horrified at the idea of treating a massive human 
tragedy as a chance to seek advantage. But, if anything, 
Rice was understating the case. A group calling itself 
Thailand Tsunami Survivors and Supporters says that for 
"businessmen- politicians, the tsunami was the answer 
to their prayers, since it literally wiped these coastal 
areas clean of the communities which had previously 
stood in the way of their plans for resorts, hotels, 
casinos and shrimp farms. To them, all these coastal 
areas are now open land!"  

Disaster, it seems, is the new terra nullius.  
                                ###

This article can be found on the web at: 
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050502&s=klei
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