Haiti deserves a chance to rebuild
JULIAN FANTINO’S threat to freeze aid to the earthquake-ravaged nation doesn’t take into account the work already done there
S peaking of garbage — which Canada’s International Co-operation Minister Julian Fantino was last week when he criticized Haitians for the state of their streets — Oxfam Quebec’s director in Haiti, Claude Saint-Pierre, 56, described the situation in the small town east of Quebec City in which he grew up:
“People used to put their garbage bags in the trunk of their cars. They’d drive a short way out of town and throw the bag in the ditch by the side of the road. It has taken 45 years of education and laws and signs to go from throwing garbage out the window to recycling. If you throw a can of Coke out the window today, that will be a very expensive can of Coke.” (Fines for littering in Quebec today can reach several hundred dollars.)
Saturday marks the third anniversary of the earthquake that killed at least 250,000 people in Haiti and left a further 1.5 million homeless. It’s a milestone that Fantino suggested Canada might mark by freezing all future aid projects to the desperately impoverished country.
The 2010 earthquake left the country’s fragile infrastructure in ruins, its food-supply network and medical services in tatters. But Fantino, according to an interview he gave to La Presse, thinks that three years should be enough time for Haiti to get its act together. Never mind the cholera epidemic that has since killed at least 7,000 people, or the two monster storms, including hurricane Sandy, that hit Haiti this year. To say nothing of a deadly drought that destroyed its crops.
Few people other than Fantino believe that three years was long enough for Haiti to rebuild and its government to turn into a model of efficiency and accountability. Officials with the U.S. State Department and the United Nations Development Program this week urged Canada to change its mind, the Canadian Press reported.
“Haiti is not going to become a middle-income country overnight,” Eileen Wickstrom Smith, a senior official in the U.S. State Department’s Haiti office, told CP. Jessica Faieta, a deputy director for the UN program’s Latin American bureau, told the news service, “It is not, in our opinion, a time to pull the support from Haiti. On the contrary, it is time to recog- nize the efforts, to recognize the achievements, and to keep supporting Haiti.”
In a telephone interview from Haiti, Saint-Pierre said that no one can be opposed to “looking at what has been done and learning from it, and to question(ing) what has been done with what resources.” But he added that “an amazing amount of work has been done since the earthquake.”
“The debris is not completely cleared, but more debris has been cleared in Haiti in a year than in New York a year after 9/11 at the World Trade Center site. In Haiti, after the earthquake, there were 1.5 million displaced. Three years later, 350,000 are still living in camps. It took Japan — Japan! — 10 years to move all the people displaced by the Kobe earthquake in 1995.”
And contrary to what many people would like to believe, money cannot resolve everything quickly, he said. “A country does not go in a straight line from emer- gency to rehabilitation and reconstruction to long-term development. At the moment in Haiti, we are still in a humanitarian situation. The food supply is very fragile.” Lack of proper environmental and agricultural policy has led to only two per cent of Haiti’s land mass being under forest cover, he added.
Progress in Haiti, the Northern Hemisphere’s poorest nation, has to be measured against what it was before the 2010 earthquake struck, Saint-Pierre said. “After the earthquake we were not starting from zero; we were starting from a minus position.” To say, as Fantino did, that little has been done, “is very unfair,” he said.
Under the crush of humanitarian work — trucking clean water to camps, building latrines to stave off further cholera outbreaks, and constructing houses — there has been little opportunity to build the infrastructure to deal with garbage collection.
Former Quebec politician David Payne, who dug out bodies from Haiti’s parliament building in the days after the earthquake and whose efforts helped lead to the parliament’s regrouping within four days of the disaster, said he finds Fantino’s remarks “primitive and pathetic” for a minister of the Canadian government: “Some officials come in as tourists, have a quick look and they’re gone. It’s not helpful.”