by RICHARD SWIFT
‘All Hands on Deck for Haiti!’ shouted the headlines in the Trinidad Express. It was ‘Hold on Haiti: We Are Here For You’ from the Barbadian Press. The echoes of solidarity reverberated throughout the Caribbean as Haitians struggled to pull themselves out from under the rubble of the Force 7-plus earthquake that devastated the overcrowded Haitian capital of Port-Au-Prince. At this writing the number of dead remains uncertain but the Haitian Government claims that 75,000 people have already been buried in mass graves without even being identified. The final death toll could top 200,000 – ten per cent of the city’s population. The ramshackle capital, where building codes are almost non-existent, has had its hardest-hit quartiers reduced to a crumble of cement and other building materials. These areas included the university sector where many buildings collapsed, leaving students and teachers buried underneath their own classrooms.
Schoolchildren elsewhere were among the primary victims as many were inside these large but precarious educational institutions at slightly before 5pm on Tuesday, 12 January, when the quake hit (the Haitian school day is in the afternoon). The UN and other expatriate aid and security workers were also prominent among the victims, as they were largely resident in the kind of large building structure that proved deadly when it collapsed. Ironically the informal squatter areas such as Port-Au-Prince’s massive Cité Soleil shantytown (‘the most dangerous place in the world’) were relatively less affected: there is only so much damage that can be done when a flimsy tin structure collapses.
Promises, promises
A groundswell of sympathy across the world and promises of a massive amount of both official and privately-raised aid from all quarters quickly followed the quake. But time was of the essence. The international press reached Port-Au-Prince long before the massive amount of promised food, water, tents and rescue equipment. So the first days were filled with images of the increasingly frustrated population trying to dig out their families and neighbours with little more than their bare hands. Predictably, the hard-hit Haitian infrastructure of ports, airports and road systems – poor at the best of times – quickly became clogged by the competing claims and demands of donors. The overall co-ordination was lacking, as both the UN and the Haitian Government were crippled by quake damage. Accusations of inefficiency, corruption and looting of food stocks quickly emerged, as did charges by small (but usually quite effective organizations) like the French Médicins Sans Frontières that the US military was monopolizing ports of entry and thus impeding the efforts of others.
The response in the Caribbean region is heartening, promising not only aid but the regularizing of the status of the thousands of ‘illegal’ Haitians who have already fled their poverty- and disaster-stricken homeland and are resident in virtually every other Caribbean country. The members of CARICOM (the Caribbean Community and Common Market) and other Caribbean states went further, offering the possibility of taking in and helping settle those who no longer felt there was a future for them in Haiti. The Prime Minister of St. Vincent spoke for many when he proclaimed: ‘We cannot treat these Haitians as if they are from another planet.’ Still, with a few possible exceptions like Guyana these small and mostly poor Caribbean states have limited capacity in this regard. The other sentiment that reverberated throughout the region was the worry that the involvement of outsiders in Haiti’s affairs would only make matters worse in the long run.
A terrible history
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