A year on from the earthquake EDWARD STOURTON


Haitians were paying the price for dia- bolical assistance in their war of independence against the French two centuries ago: “they got together and made a pact with the devil,” he said, “and ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another.” “Pat Robertson missed a great opportunity to shut his mouth,” Max Beauvoir, Haiti’s voodoo high priest, told me. “Imagine when your house has come down and killed your children, your parents, your wife, and you are grieving, and you have to hear such things.” Quite so. Unsurprisingly, Haitians resent this kind of demonisation from outsiders – and Robertson’s startling intervention was by no means the first time they have had to put up with it. The Haitian saying “Les microbes ne tuent pas les Haitiens” – “Germs don’t kill Haitians” – dates back to the early 1980s when Aids first emerged as a major public health issue in the United States. It was a reaction to the way that Haitians – and, bizarrely, their pigs – were widely blamed by Americans for a disease which no one really understood. But the phrase and the sentiment behind it live on, and a popular perception that Haitians cannot be killed by germs is obviously extremely unhelpful in the middle of a cholera epidemic; it undermines all the health mes- sages about washing your hands and drinking clean water. And if germs are not killing Haitians, someone else must be to blame. In the case of the cholera outbreak, there is a readily identifiable villain: the United Nations peacekeeping troops. It is highly likely that the current outbreak of cholera in Haiti was indeed caused by Nepalese soldiers emptying their latrines into a river used for drinking water. But throwing stones at UN convoys and rioting outside UN compounds do not really help. The UN forces represent the best hope of maintaining law and order in Haiti at the moment; it has the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world which is policed by peacekeeping troops even though there has not been a war there. The anger, misinformation and misery


generated by the cholera outbreak are symp- tomatic of the public mood a year after the


4 | THE TABLET | 1 January 2011


Blame game in Haiti S


As the Caribbean island continues to struggle with the scale of last year’s earthquake, popular discontent is increasingly being focused on the agencies trying to help with reconstruction. The Catholic Church and other religious groups are among those facing criticism


hortly after last January’s earth- quake, the American television evangelist Pat Robertson appeared to suggest that


Barricades of tyres burn in front of the National Palace in Port-au-Prince after a run-off vote in the election was announced by authorities in December 2010. Photo: CNS/Reuters


earthquake which devastated the capital, Port- au-Prince, and killed around a quarter of a million people. The anniversary has focused international attention on just how little progress has been made in putting the country back on its feet, and it is being marked by an orgy of blame, self-justification and – to be fair to some of those involved – self-examination. There is plenty to be angry about. More than a million people are still living under canvas, and parts of Port-au-Prince look as if the earthquake hit yesterday, not 12 months ago. The presidential palace, the symbol of political power, is still a mess, its once elegant facade sagging under a weight of crumbled masonry. The park across the road, which used to be one of the capital’s few genuine public amenities, is a city of tents, housing hundreds of those made homeless. It is difficult to reconcile this scene with the huge sums of money and philanthropic energy that have been poured into this relatively small country. There is no easily identifiable single cause for this sorry state of affairs. UN officials point to failings among the non-governmental organisations (NGOs); in the immediate after- math of the earthquake, literally hundreds of charitable organisations piled into Haiti hop- ing to help, but many of them became part of the problem instead. Harassed UN officials found themselves tied up rescuing innocent do-gooders who turned up with big hearts and big cheques, but no idea of what to do. And even since things have settled down, the UN’s “cluster system”, which is designed to coordinate the work of different NGOs, has


had difficulty coping with the sheer numbers operating on the ground. Many of those working in NGOs blame the Haitian Government for fail- ing to create the conditions in which reconstruction can really get under way. Haiti’s notoriously opaque property laws make it difficult to deter- mine questions of land ownership, which is a serious obstacle to large-scale development. And because home - owners often do not have any kind of paperwork at all, it can be testing to establish really basic issues – like the plot size of a house that was destroyed in the earthquake. To complicate matters further, many of those now living in tents were homeless before the earthquake, and have nowhere to go back to. Some do not want to leave anyway. My translator (relatively few people speak French or English, and a knowledge of Creole is essen- tial) was an extremely bright young man who had established himself in a camp in Port- au-Prince city centre; he runs a successful soft-drinks business from his tent, and is happy doing so without having to worry about rent or utilities bills. The Government says its ability to confront these problems has been gravely compromised by the fact that the earthquake hit the capital; a significant proportion of its civil servants were killed, and many ministries were severely damaged. Today, the Government of Haiti provides few of the services we usually expect from a government. Security comes courtesy of the United Nations, and most health serv- ices are provided by NGOs, such as Médecins Sans Frontières. Thoughtful aid workers in the bigger NGOs – like Oxfam, which is the main supplier of water and sanitation in the camps – worry that they are beginning to undermine the Government’s capacity to gov- ern even further, simply because the services they provide are so successful. The sagging presidential palace is one of the icons of post-earthquake Haiti. The ruin of the Roman Catholic cathedral is another. The Cathedral of our Lady of the Assumption was built in the northern European Gothic style; what is left of it looks like the wreckage of a town in Flanders during the First World War, or one in Normandy after 1944. The Catholic Church was perhaps the one non-governmental institution in Haiti which had the organisation and local roots to respond


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