Haiti After the Earthquake (66 page)

45
Katz and Mendoza. “Haiti Still Waiting for Pledged U.S. Aid.”

46
Martha Brannigan and Jacqueline Charles. “US Firms Want Part in Haiti Cleanup.” Associated Press (February 9, 2010). Available:
http://www.truthout.org/us-firms-want-part-haiti-cleanup56775
. (accessed April 15, 2011). Competing for roles like these was, of course, unseemly for universities. Whether speaking of a Harvard doctor helping a colleague from Dartmouth perform, with Haitian colleagues, the first dialysis in a town in central Haiti or an American plastic surgeon addressing complex surgical problems in a quake-affected hospital, there was purity of purpose for the American research university. Whether it was a group of students and faculty coordinating volunteers and planes and helping to transfer patients, or students and other university-affiliated groups willing to raise money for relief and reconstruction, it was evident that universities had much to offer even before we got to the in-kind donations of research and teaching that we are uniquely qualified to offer. The alternative was to curry favor with power qua power, with the sort of results laid out so clearly in
The Best and the Brightest
. Halberstam mentioned the story of how, in 1967, a leader of the Urban League “defended the war and ended up in a bitter confrontation with Dr. King; [Whitney] Young told King his criticism of the war was unwise, it would antagonize the President and they wouldn't get anything from him. King, genuinely angry, told him, ‘Whitney, what you're saying may get you a foundation grant, but it won't get you into the kingdom of truth.'” (David Halberstam.
The Best and the Brightest,
p. 185.) It wasn't as if we didn't need foundation grants to respond effectively to the sorts of problems we encountered in Haiti. But we didn't need to sell our souls to get them.

47
Trenton Daniel. “Bill Clinton Tells Diaspora: ‘Haiti Needs You Now.'”
Miami Herald
(August 9, 2009). Available:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/haiti/story/1179067.html
.

48
Even the U.S. Government Accounting Office, an independent evaluative body, long ago reached dim conclusions about the effectiveness of our government's programs. It concluded: “The aid program to date has had limited impact on Haiti's dire poverty, and many projects have had less than satisfactory results.” See U.S. General Accounting Office.
GAO Report-Assistance to Haiti: Barriers, Recent Program Changes and Future Options
(1982). Available: http://archive.gao.gov/d41t14/117663.pdf (accessed April 15, 2011).

49
The “late Victorian holocausts” resulted in fifty million deaths, leading Davis to the conclusion that “we are not dealing, in other words, with ‘lands of famine' becalmed in stagnant backwaters of world history, but with the fate of tropical humanity at the precise moment (1870–1914) when its labor and products were being dynamically conscripted into a London-centered world economy. Millions died, not outside the ‘modern world system,' but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.” Mike Davis.
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World
(London: Verso, 2001), p. 9. See also Amartya Sen's analysis of why no famine has occurred in a functioning democracy. “Any government that is accountable to its citizens,” he writes, “can without great difficulty ration food provisions and prevent death
by starvation; famines occur, instead, in states without the will to provide services for their citizens.” Amartya Sen.
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
(London: Oxford University Press, 1981).

50
Nor could other poor countries. The rich world pays out an estimated $300 billion in annual agribusiness subsidies, while preventing poor countries from doing the same under the banner of free trade. (See “The White Man's Shame.”
The Economist,
September 25, 1999: p. 89.) Tariffs, which are on average four times higher in rich countries, are disbanded in poor countries, and subsidized crops are sold at artificially low prices, making agriculture unprofitable across much of the developing world. This also fuels erosion, deforestation, and urbanization, along with poverty and inequality. See Thomas Pogge.
World Poverty and Human Rights
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008), pp. 15–22.

51
Polman.
The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?,
p. 39.

52
Mark Danner. “To heal Haiti look to history, not nature.”
New York Times
(January 21, 2010). Available:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22danner.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
(accessed April 15, 2011).

53
Philip Gourevitch. “Alms Dealers: Can You Provide Humanitarian Aid without Facilitating Conflicts?”
The New Yorker
(October 11, 2010). Available:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/10/11/101011crat_atlarge_gourevitch
(accessed April 15, 2011), p. 105.

54
Two other accounts Gourevitch mentions of the unintended consequences of humanitarian aid are Michael Maren's
The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), and Alex de Waal's
Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).

55
On restavèks, Mildred Aristide's 2003 book
Child Domestic Service in Haiti and Its Historical Underpinnings
underlines this link. Border conflicts occupy a large place in the Gourevitch-Polman litany, from Haiti-D.R. to Rwanda-Zaire to Cambodia-Thailand. “Consider how, in the early eighties, aid fortified fugitive Khmer Rouge killers in camps on the Thai-Cambodian border,” Gourevitch writes, “enabling them to visit another ten years of war, terror, and misery upon Cambodians.” Gourevitch. “Alms Dealers,” p. 105.

56
Gourevitch. “Alms Dealers,” p. 105.

57
See the long exposé in the
New York Times
by Walt Bogdanich and Jenny Nordberg (2006), “Mixed U.S. Signals Help Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos.” One passage reads, “Haiti has had a long, tense relationship with the Dominican Republic, its more affluent neighbor on the island of Hispaniola. Haitians who work there are often mistreated, human rights groups say, and the country has been a haven for those accused of trying to overthrow Haitian governments. In December 2002, the I.R.I. began training Haitian political parties there, at the Hotel Santo Domingo, owned by the Fanjul family, which fled Cuba under Mr. Castro and now runs a giant sugar-cane business. The training was unusual for more than its location: only Mr. Aristide's opponents, not members of his party, were invited.” Available:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/international/americas/29haiti.html?pagewanted=all
(accessed April 15, 2011).

1
Modern Haitian history surely also bears the imprint of the conquests and genocides visited upon the island between the close of the fifteenth century, when the Columbian exchange began to extinguish Haiti's natives, and the late eighteenth century, when slavery made Haiti the largest source of prerevolutionary France's foreign exchange and its most unstable colony. When Jared Diamond writes that “guns, germs, and steel” play, along with geography, the chief roles in determining why some regions are rich and others poor, he could find few examples more illustrative than the island of Hispaniola, especially its crowded and mountainous western portion; see Jared Diamond.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(New York: Norton, 1997), p. 213. “There is no doubt,” Diamond writes, “that Europeans developed a big advantage in weaponry, technology, and political organization over most of the non-European peoples that they conquered. But that advantage alone doesn't fully explain how initially so few European immigrants came to supplant so much of the native population of the Americas and some other parts of the world. That might not have happened without Europe's sinister gift to other continents—the germs evolving from Eurasians' long intimacy with domestic animals.” Cholera may be the next chapter of this dark saga.

2
Reflecting on her experiences working for Médecins Sans Frontières in the Goma (Zaïre) refugee camps, Terry describes “the paradox of humanitarian action: it can contradict its fundamental purpose by prolonging the suffering it intends to alleviate.” See Fiona Terry.
Condemned to Repeat?
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 89.

3
Gourevitch. “Alms Dealers,” p. 105.

4
This book, written in the aftermath of an earthquake in Haiti does not seek to explore competing claims of causality regarding the violence in the Congo. For more on this topic, see the sometimes conflicting accounts by John Pottier (
Re-imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century
[New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002]); Gérard Prunier (
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009]); and Jason Stearns (
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
[New York: PublicAffairs, 2011]), as well as the broader review of postcolonial African history by Martin Meredith (
The Fate of Africa
[New York: PublicAffairs, 2005]).

5
In 1996, Rwanda had a gross national income per capita of 730 (PPP international dollars). See the World Bank's
World Development Report 1996: From Plan to Market
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

6
Jared Diamond.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
(New York: Viking, 2005). In
Collapse,
Diamond interprets the Rwandan genocide as, in part, a Malthusian crisis in which population growth outpaces food production. In the 1990s (and today), it was the most densely populated country in Africa and one of the most densely populated in the world. As trees were chopped down and land overused, disputes—often violent—over land became frequent in the years before
the genocide. “Even before 1994,” Diamond writes, “Rwanda was experiencing rising levels of violence and theft, perpetrated especially by hungry landless young people without off-farm income. When one compares crime rates for people of age 21–25 among different parts of Rwanda, most of the regional differences prove to be correlated statistically with population density and per-capita availability of calories: high population densities and worse starvation were associated with more crime.” (
Collapse,
p. 324–325.) Competition over land and food were important factors, among others, in the lead up to the Rwandan civil war and genocide.

7
See “Rwanda Vision 2020.” (Updated July 2000.) Available:
http://www.gesci.org/assets/files/Rwanda_Vision_2020.pdf
(accessed April 15, 2011).

8
For more on the interim government's anti-corruption campaign see Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, “Collapse, War, and Reconstruction in Rwanda: An Analytical Narrative on State-making.”
Crisis States Working Paper No. 28
(2008), p. 31. Available:
http://www.dfid.gov.uk/r4d/PDF/Outputs/CrisisStates/wp28.2.pdf
(accessed April 15, 2011).

9
For more on the immediate responses of the international community to the genocide and the interim governments, see Gérard Prunier,
The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 336–345.

10
As noted, see the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre's 2011 report “Internal Displacement: Global Overview of Trends and Developments in 2010.”

11
See, for example, D. Hilhorst and M. van Leeuwen, “Emergency and Development: The Case of
Imidugudu,
Villagization in Rwanda,”
Journal of Refugee Studies
13 (2000): 264–280; E. Brusset, “Imidugudu and Humanitarian Aid: The Influence of NGOs on Post-war Conditions in Rwanda.”
Autrepart
26 (2003): 107–121.

12
Stephen Kinzer.
A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It
(New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons Inc., 2008), p. 199.

13
This topic is explored in greater detail by Jason K. Stearns in
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), which details Mobutu's assistance to Juvénal Habyarimana's
government, including its armed forces, before and after the genocide: “The army's flight across the border did not end the civil war in Rwanda but constituted a hiatus in the hostilities. The Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), as the Hutudominated army was called, used the protection provided by the border to regroup, rearm, and prepare to retake power in Kigali. One of their leaders, Colonel Théoneste Bagosura, said in an interview that they would ‘wage a war that will be long and full of dead people until the minority Tutsi are finished and completely out of the country.' Crucially, they enjoyed the support of Zaïre's ailing president, Mobutu Sese Seko, who had sent troops to support the FAR against the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front], and who had been close friends with President Juvénal Habyarimana. In part, what was to play out over the next decade in the Congo was a continuation of the Rwandan civil war, as the new government attempted to extirpate the
génocidaires
and the remnants of Habyarimana's army on a much broader canvas” (Stearns, 2011, p. 15).