Haiti and the Year of Sorrow

Suffering continues a year after the earthquake.

Haiti and the Year of Sorrow
by Pascal Robert | TheLoop21

As the only nation created from a successful revolt of African Slaves, Haiti has been a beacon of light for oppressed people around the world. Ironically that same proud history of struggle through its valiant fight for liberty from the French in 1804 resulted in policies brought forth by its neighbors, many of whom were still steeped in slavery and colonialism, that mired Haiti in a cycle of poverty, political oppression, and periods of great suffering over its 200-year history.

In the face of such a history of turmoil, nothing has had the devastating affect on the lives of the Haitian people like the horrific earthquake that struck the country on Jan. 12, 2010. The category 7.0 colossus leveled the capital, Port-au-Prince, and devastated the towns of Jacmel and Leogane. In the end, nearly 300,00 Haitians lost their lives while the images of children with bodies lodged under pounds of rubble were broadcast to televisions around the world. The suffering of the Haitian people was put on display for all the world to see. The level of human devastation and misery felt by Haitians in the wake of the earthquake became a nightly spectacle that seared the hearts of people in almost every corner of the globe. Tears were shed by those who had little knowledge of Haitians and their proud history or the suffering they endured because of that history.

The resilience shown by the Haitian people in the face of this disaster was inspirational. The will to live among many of the earthquake's victims was evidenced by stories of individuals who had survived several days under debris, without water or food, to surprisingly be discovered by rescuers alive when all hopes of survival should have been lost.

Americans and the international community responded with a generosity and an outpouring of support demonstrated in those rare moments when humanity works under the guidance of its better angels. Celebrities, athletes and entertainers heard the cries of Haitian children dismembered by the earthquake loosing arms ands legs in often the most harsh, makeshift medical facilities. All together, Americans raised more than $1.4 billion in charitable donations. The international community pledged more than $10 billion to help Haiti just two months after the earthquake.

Though these efforts and pledges illustrated how people can often show the best intentions after such massive human devastation, the practical realities of planning and implementation combined with bureaucracy and sometimes mismanagement have denied the survivors of Haiti's earthquake the resources needed to adequately help them and their country get back on a trajectory toward any semblance of normalcy.

While more than 1 million Haitians languish in inadequate makeshift tents that have grown into whole towns and villages of displaced individuals, less than 12 percent of the temporary post-earthquake housing needed to protect them from hurricanes, massive rains and the indignities of often living without any latrines have been built since the earthquake. Because the earthquake damaged the main prison in the Capital of Port-Au-Prince, thousands of hardened criminals have taken to these tent cities and turned their innocent suffering fellow countrymen into prey.

Read Full Essay @ theLoop21

Haiti: Where Did the Money Go?

In January 2010, a 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti. The international community, including one out of two Americans, pledged billions of dollars in aid, yet the nation has seen little improvement. Three hundred thousand died, nearly two million live in ramshackle tent cities. Cholera has swept through the population, killing thousands and hospitalizing many others. Only about 2% of the rubble has been cleared.

Is this what you expected when you pledged your aid dollars? Independent journalists Film@11.tv journeyed to Haiti in November 2010 to see the situation for themselves, and dig into the burning question: what happened to all that money?

Haiti Update: Rape in the Camps

from Democracy Now!

Rape in the Camps:

Lacking Security, Women Organize to Protect Themselves

Something that gets lost in all the coverage of the Haiti earthquake is how people on the ground organize in the face of adversity. Rape and violence against women has become increasingly widespread in the tent camps across Haiti. While Haitian police and UN forces have done little, women on the ground are organizing to protect themselves. We spoke with Malia Villard Appolon, coordinator of KOFAVIV, the committee of women for survival.

On the Crisis in Haiti: From the Department of African & African-American Studies at Duke

From the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University

On the Crisis in Haiti

We are humbled by the tribulations of the people of Haiti. At this time of destruction, suffering, death, and survival, we offer our condolences, our prayers, and our aid.

At the same time, as scholars of the African and African-American experience, we are dismayed by the inhumanity of those who have used this tragedy as an opportunity to espouse groundless explanations for Haiti’s troubles. The events unfolding in the Caribbean are the result of neither a supernatural curse nor of a cultural pathology. And we hope that as the relief efforts currently underway turn their focus to rebuilding, Haiti’s international partners will draw more appropriate lessons from the history of Haiti’s unique predicament in the world of nations.

Until 1791, Haitians suffered under one of the most brutal regimes of slavery ever known to mankind, generating astronomical profits for France at an equally astronomical cost in African lives.

Yet the enslaved Africans of Haiti accomplished the first successful slave revolution in recorded history. In its commitment to human equality, it exceeded that of the American Revolution. With donations of money and arms, Haiti helped to liberate what is now Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, and Panama from the Spanish Empire. For such reasons, Haiti has long served as an inspiration to the enslaved and the oppressed. This inspiration is likely the source of the name of Durham's own Hayti neighborhood, like that of its counterparts across the United States.

And Haiti paid a dear price for its exemplary ambition to freedom. For example, as a precondition of diplomatic recognition in 1825, Haiti paid France an indemnity equivalent to roughly $22 billion in today's dollars, burdening the Haitian state with a crippling debt for generations. In fear of the example set by Haiti, the US denied diplomatic recognition until 1863, for over half a century. Thus, the slave-holding powers laid siege to the island nation. Despite an official economic blockade against Haiti by the US and the European powers, the Haitian peasantry secured a profitable place in the 19th-century coffee market. However, the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, 20th-century patterns of land acquisition by foreign corporations, a series of US- and French-backed dictators, and shifts in the global economy have set Haiti back, without, however, extinguishing the enormous hope, energy, and skills that Haitians bring to the building of a new future.

The Haitian people are heirs to a stunningly beautiful culture of collective labor, self-help, spiritual wisdom, musical performance, and indefatigable perseverance. The people of Haiti, their energetic diaspora, and their friends abroad can and must roll up their sleeves and work together for a better tomorrow.

Duke's Department of African and African American Studies commits itself to making the gifts and the travails of the Haitian people a continued inspiration to the entire world. With Haiti we stand united in the pursuit of clean water, nourishing food, life-sustaining shelter, good health care, and freedom for all. At this moment of crisis, we focus our prayers, our donations, and our efforts on saving the lives of our beloved Haitian brothers and sisters.

--The Department Faculty

On Haiti's "Devil Pact" (ver. 2.0)

special to NewBlackMan

On Haiti's "Devil Pact"
by Regine O. Jackson

Managing representations of Haiti and Haitian people is always part of the response to crisis in Haiti. The enormity of the tragedy last week has meant even more vigilance. As many across the globe are scrambling to make sense of what happened and why, vivid depictions of “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere” and tall tales about the island nation’s “devil pact,” leave little room for the history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment of Haiti. Americans want to alleviate the suffering of millions of Haitian earthquake victims. The solution is not simple. But Americans who send soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan understand the complex world.

Then again, perhaps the solution in Haiti is simpler. We might actually owe the Haitian people a fairer deal than the one they have been getting. But most of us are as feeble in our knowledge of Haiti, or the nation’s long relationship to the United States, as Pat Robertson. It’s important that we know more, because American assistance will play an important role.

Most Haitians and friends of Haiti think that Americans ought to know that Haitians, like Henri Christophe, shed their blood in fighting the British to free white Americans from tyranny. 500 Haitian troops joined American colonists and French soldiers in the attempt to drive the British from Savannah. Haitians made up the largest military unit to fight in the 1779 siege.

As Americans, we ought to know that the Haitian military victory over the French, the Spanish, the British, and then the French under Napoleon, owed less to Vodou – a profound and civilizing West African heritage that still flourishes in the Haitian homelands of Benin, Togo, and Ghana – than it did to the remarkable military leader and diplomat Toussaint L’Ouverture. The embarrassed French abandoned their imperial pursuits in the western hemisphere and sold Thomas Jefferson the entire span of land surrounding the two thousand mile Mississippi River. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the nation's size, making it formidable enough to withstand almost any outside threat; it gave the country its heartland. The U.S. benefited the most from Haiti defeating the big European powers, and since the British suffered greater losses in Haiti than they did at Waterloo, it likely tempered their ambition during the War of 1812.

But the honorable history and rich culture of Haiti is not all we ought to know. For Americans, who understand the complex world, understand the importance of history lest it repeat itself. We ought to know that Haiti’s recent earthquake is indeed a concrete manifestation of the many metaphoric ‘earthquakes’ suffered for the past four centuries.

We could start with the brutal, superexploitation of natural resources under French colonialism; the decades of international ostracism after the Haitian revolution that left the new nation with no trading partners; crippling international debt – especially to the French who demanded 150 million francs as reparations for the “property” in human flesh they lost with the abolition of slavery – which ruined the Haitian economy for over a century and a half; or the American occupation of Haiti from 1915 – 1934 that enflamed divisions among Haitians and resulted in the murder of hundreds including the charismatic leader Charlemagne Péralte.

Such a long view of Haitian history may seem immaterial, but even within my lifetime American policy towards Haiti helps to explain why this disastrous earthquake is devastating Haiti. Americans ought to know that:

•American support of oppressive dictatorships in Haiti, especially the Duvalier regime (1957 – 1986), led to the mass exodus of Haitian professionals, including doctors and engineers, and the accumulation of additional international debt and political instability in the island nation.

•Neo-liberal policies (punitive international trade and financial arrangements, such as loan aid instead of grants, the substitution of American rice for locally grown Haitian rice) are directly responsible for the flood of rural migrants to cities like Port-au-Prince, the feminization of poverty, and the relative failure of American assembly manufacturing plants to alleviate poverty in Haiti.

•The CDC designation of Haiti as the source of the AIDS crisis destroyed the tourist industry in Haiti, which in the 1950s and 1960s was one of the strongest in the Caribbean. Images of Haiti based on uncritical folk models which are not carefully or critically examined further damage any possibility of rebuilding.

•The coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide from 1991 to 1994 frustrated efforts within Haiti to make sure the country could grow its own food, develop national industries and invest in rural areas and urban infrastructure (roads, bridges, buildings, a reliable power grid) and a clean water supply. As a condition of Aristide’s return, the country’s economy was geared toward paying off interest on Western debt and as a market for Western goods.

•The militarization of the UN's mandate in Haiti blocks proposals to invest some of the international community’s funds to reduce poverty or develop the agricultural sector, while the privatization of services with the proliferation of NGOs further weakened the Haitian state.

Americans ought to know that Haitians are simply asking for the support of a civilized world. Haiti needs our help to clear the rubble, to rebuild the roads, schools and hospitals – Haiti needs unconditional, humanitarian aid. But if this history teaches us anything, it is that cultural racism, which manifests in economic, social, political, and ideological damage to Haiti and exacerbates natural disasters, can also taint relief efforts. This is not an opportunity for the US to reshape Haiti for its own interests, but to finally let Haiti live.

***

Regine O. Jackson is Assistant Professor of American Studies Emory University

Saving Haiti

Saving Haiti
by Joel Dreyfuss

Some countries are just not lucky. Haiti is one of those places where bad things keep happening. The massive earthquake that destroyed a large part of the 250-year-old capital city, Port-au-Prince, is just the latest blow for a country that can ill afford any more disasters. In the last two decades, Haiti has suffered a series of coups, flawed elections, high crime and inept governments. Last year, back-to-back hurricanes devastated cities in Haiti's central plain, its richest and most fertile region.

Haiti is a country with a glorious past, a brutal present, and a bleak future. It is also a country sharply divided along class and cultural lines. You will hear over and over in the coming days that it is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. What you will not hear is that it is also a country rich in culture, world-class art, and music that is celebrated all over the French-speaking world.

For those of us who were born there, each setback is a blow in the gut, a reminder of the precarious state of our native land. It also gives us a gnawing sense of guilt about how fortunate we are to be in places where systems work, building codes are enforced and a system of emergency rescue exists.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

To Contribute to Relief Efforts in Haiti: Yele Haiti or The American Red Cross