Haiti: A chance to start again

By Terry Lacey

(January 15, Jakarta, Sri Lanka Guardian) President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia was overseeing the training of the new 3000-strong Indonesian Rapid Reaction Team for Disaster Handling at a local airbase when the Haitian earthquake struck and he immediately ordered an Indonesian team to fly to Port-au-Prince.

“I have ordered an Indonesian contingent to be sent to help the people of Haiti who are victims of this massive natural disaster”. (The Jakarta Post 15.01.10).

Indonesia remembers with gratitude the enormous response of the world community to the devastating tsunami disaster in Aceh.

When the tsunami hit Aceh the province was wracked by a longstanding civil war, social and economic life was severely restricted. There were troops everywhere and the local resistance movement was very strong, and could have kept fighting for years.

The tsunami was a giant catastrophe throwing sea-going ships miles inland. The people of Aceh looked at the power of nature, stopped fighting each other and central government, and started to struggle in a common cause to save lives, and to rebuild.

Much has been achieved in Aceh. There are still big problems including increased religious extremism and some attacks on foreign aid workers, alongside a failure to satisfy some economic aspirations, and these issues are linked.

But important lessons emerged. In the transition from disaster to development in Haiti the local civic and municipal organizations, although weak, should be incorporated to help take the lead from the start, and not colonized as sub-contractors and petty consultants by hugely more powerful international organizations. In Aceh we did not get this quite right, and we did not move to rectify local redistribution issues early enough, and now we are paying for it.

Hillary Clinton showed true political instinct when she cancelled a trip to the South Pacific, although we regret her not coming to Asia-Pacific, so that she could address this, the hugest catastrophe to hit the Western hemisphere in a long time.

Haiti will have to be rebuilt from top to bottom. But Haiti, the land of Graham Greene and The Comedians, was already devastated by environmental degradation, desperate poverty and political incapacity, which could not be addressed without giant efforts.

When I first went there, the plane from Kingston Jamaica could not land in Port-au-Prince in a storm. Then we flew to Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico and Antigua and then all the way back, and on the second attempt we landed.

Then the power system failed in the airport but intermittently. The lights flashed on and off every 30 seconds. When they were on you smiled at the immigration official and gave your passport. The lights went off and there was a row of white teeth in the moonlight. They flashed on again and he stamped your passport. We performed a bizarre son et lumiere ballet to the hypnotic rhythm of the flashing fluorescent lights. Bienvenue a Haiti !

The only other rhythms that worked were with the girls in Petionville under the strobe lights of the discotheques. Everything else was bizarre, distorted and devastated by a history that went back to the heroic, utopian Black Jacobins who tried to replicate the French revolution in Haiti in 1789 to liberate themselves from slavery.

They failed in their almost total incapacity, relapsing into a bizarre fortress of premature black liberation, proud, poverty-stricken, aspiring, hopelessly corrupt and incapable, while the imperial powers danced upon the grave of their failed revolution.

White supremacists in the Southern states of the US, Western Europe and colonial Africa used Haiti to argue black liberation could never work, which many believed until Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King and Huey Newton inspired American and Caribbean blacks, and Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Sam Njomo and Nelson Mandela, and many others, showed that Africa should be run by Africans.

Now is the time for the US, the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, especially the francophone world, but also the Middle Eastern and Muslim countries and of far-off Asia, to pull together to make a giant effort to rebuild Haiti, and to put this legacy behind us. This disaster is so huge that we can start again.

But this time build a Haiti of people, and not just of buildings and bridges, from the bottom up. Build local civic organizations, capacities and administration. Build a new political structure as the Western allies did in Germany in 1945-1950. Find Haitians to lead all this and to rebuild Haiti with a society and an infrastructure that Toussaint L`Ouverture would have been proud of.

(Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.)