A journey into hell. International aid agencies find a devastated country in chaos on the tiny island. The earthquake destroyed most of the capital city, Port-au-Prince, and have left countless wounded and thousands dead. Photograph by Globovision.
The rush to relieve the devastated people of Haiti is encouraging. It is reassuring to see that people care about Haiti in its most conspicuous time of need in recent memory. The global relief effort, although troubled by logistical, political, and ideological issues, seem genuine. Dartmouth has responded with exceptional vigor and even the self-congratulatory story on the front page of Wednesday’s The D (“Dartmouth’s Haiti response tops other Colleges’”) can’t sully the authentic motivation behind our efforts to help the earthquake victims.
But Haiti was a desperate country before the earthquake, and it will be after we, in our unimaginable comfort, forget about the images of crumbled buildings, grieving Haitians, and starving children.
Even after the immediate effects of the quake pass and the relief effort subsides, Haiti will still be crippled by poverty and the suffering caused by poverty.
In all likelihood, there will still be crumbled buildings, grieving Haitians, and starving children, but we wont see them on TV and Internet news sites.
This past Tuesday, Students for Haitian Relief sent out an article (along with great information about how to help) called “A Long Road to Hell” that was meant to explain how “Haiti’s history has only compounded the current tragedy.”
The article tells at best a half-truth about the history of the poorest nation in our hemisphere. What is predictably absent is also the reason why we should care (in an “I’m willing to do something about it” way) about the fate of Haiti and its people even after the natural disaster relief effort ends. The article leaves out the ways that our countries policies have made it more difficult for Haiti to survive and prosper as an independent nation.
Direct U.S. interference and meddling in Haitian politics for the past two centuries has had a crippling effect on Haitian prosperity. As the article mentions, Haiti ousted its French oppressors and declared its independence in 1804, becoming the first slave colony to do so. As punishment, France demanded an exorbitant fee and the Haitian people were saddled with reparations until 1947.
What the article doesn’t say is that France could not have extracted those unjust reparations without support from America—a country that should have been able to relate to wars of independence against colonial oppressors.
The U.S. later invaded and occupied Haiti in 1915 and disbanded the Haitian parliament so it could force through unpopular pro U.S. corporation legislation.
And if that is too far in the past to resonate, the U.S. has sponsored two coups within the past 20 years against Haiti’s first democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who remains in exile in South Africa. The coups intensified political unrest and precipitated some of Haiti’s worst years both politically and economically. Aristide, however flawed as a president, was popular among Haitian people, but unfriendly to neoliberal U.S economic policies.
The earthquake was a natural disaster, and no country is to blame for the ensuing devastation. But the poverty and lack of infrastructure that leaves a country of almost nine million with only a couple fire stations made the natural disaster far more tragic for humans. If Haiti has been walking “a long road to hell,” it hasn’t been walking alone.
