Remembering the Haiti earthquake, 10 years on
A woman prays amid the wreckage of Notre Dame de l’Assomption, the main cathedral in Port-au-Prince, on January 9, 2011. Image by Allison Shelley.
Ten years ago Sunday an earthquake devastated Haiti. After just several minutes of violent shaking, hundreds of thousands perished in Port-au-Prince and its surrounding regions and many more were permanently scarred.
It is important to commemorate this horrifying tragedy. Yet this solemn occasion is also a good moment to reflect on Canada’s role in undermining the beleaguered nation’s capacity to prepare for, respond to, and overcome natural disasters.
Asked for my thoughts on Canada’s role in Haiti the day after the quake, I told reporter Paul Koring that so long as the power dynamics in the country did not shift there would be little change:
“Cynically, it feels like a ‘pity time for the Haitians’ but I doubt much will really change,” says Yves Engler, a left-wing activist from Montreal who blames the United States, along with Canada, for decades of self-interested meddling in Haitian affairs. “We bear some responsibility … because our policies have undermined Haiti’s capacity to deal with natural disasters.”
Unfortunately, Canada’s response was worse than I could have imagined. Immediately after the quake, decision makers in Ottawa were more concerned with controlling Haiti than assisting victims. To police Haiti’s traumatized and suffering population, 2,050 Canadian troops were deployed alongside 12,000 US soldiers (8,000 UN soldiers were already there). Though Ottawa rapidly deployed more than two thousand troops, they ignored calls to dispatch this country’s Heavy Urban Search and Rescue (HUSAR) teams, which are trained to “locate trapped persons in collapsed structures.”
According to internal government documents examined by the Canadian Press one year after the disaster, officials in Ottawa feared a post-earthquake power vacuum could lead to a “popular uprising.” One briefing note marked “secret” explained: “Political fragility has increased the risks of a popular uprising, and has fed the rumour that ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, currently in exile in South Africa, wants to organize a return to power.” Six years earlier the US, France and Canada helped to oust the elected president.
Canada and the United States’ indifference and contempt towards Haitian sovereignty was also on display in the reconstruction effort. Thirteen days after the quake, Canada organized a high profile Ministerial Preparatory Conference on Haiti for major international donors. Two months later Canada co-chaired the New York International Donors’ Conference “Towards a New Future for Haiti”. At these conferences Haitian officials played a tertiary role in the discussions. Subsequently, the US, France and Canada demanded the Haitian parliament pass an 18-month-long state of emergency law that effectively gave up state control over the reconstruction. They held up money to ensure international control of the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, authorized to spend some $3 billion on rebuilding efforts.
Most of the money that was distributed went to foreign aid workers who received relatively extravagant salaries, or to expensive contracts gobbled up by Western and Haitian elite-owned companies. According to an Associated Press assessment of the aid delivered by the US in the two months after the quake, one cent on the dollar went to the Haitian government (thirty-three cents went to the US military). Canadian aid patterns were similar. Jonathan Katz, author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster, writes, “Canada disbursed $657 million from the quake to September 2012 ‘for Haiti’, but only about 2% went to the Haitian government.”
Other investigations found equally startling numbers. Having raised $500 million for Haiti and publicly boasted about its housing efforts, the US Red Cross built only six permanent homes in the country.
Not viewing the René Preval government as fully compliant, the US, France and Canada pushed for elections months after the earthquake. Six weeks before the quake, according to a cable released by Wikileaks, Canadian and EU officials complained that Préval “emasculated” the country’s right-wing. In response, they proposed to “purchase radio airtime for opposition politicians to plug their candidacies” or they may “cease to be much of a meaningful force in the next government.”
After the first round of the presidential election US and Canadian representatives pressured the electoral council to replace the second-place candidate, Jude Celestin, with Michel Martelly in the runoff. A six-person Organization of American States (OAS) mission, including a Canadian representative, concluded that Martelly deserved to be in the second round. But, in analyzing the OAS methodology, the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, determined that “the Mission did not establish any legal, statistical, or other logical basis for its conclusions.” Nevertheless, Ottawa and Washington pushed the Haitian government to accept the OAS’s recommendations. Foreign minister Lawrence Cannon said he “strongly urges the Provisional Electoral Council to accept and implement the [OAS] report’s recommendations and to proceed with the next steps of the electoral process accordingly.”
A supporter of the 1991 and 2004 coups against Aristide, Martelly was a teenaged member of the François Duvalier dictatorship’s Tonton Macoute death squad. He is a central figure in the multi-billion dollar Petrocaribe corruption scandal that has spurred massive protests and strikes against illegitimate, repressive and corrupt president Jovenel Moïse. A disciple of Martelly, Moïse is president today because he has the backing of the US, Canada and other members of the so-called “Core Group.”
There was an outpouring of empathy and solidarity from ordinary Canadians after the earthquake. But officials in Ottawa saw the disaster as a political crisis to manage and an opportunity to expand their economic and political influence over Haiti. On the tenth anniversary of this solemn occasion it is important to reflect not only on this tragedy but to understand what has been done by Canada’s government in our name and to learn from it so we can stop politicians from their ongoing strangulation of this beleaguered nation.
Yves Engler has been dubbed “one of the most important voices on the Canadian Left today” (Briarpatch), “in the mould of I.F. Stone” (Globe and Mail), and “part of that rare but growing group of social critics unafraid to confront Canada’s self-satisfied myths” (Quill & Quire). He has published nine books.
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