Why Haiti’s Debt Should Be Forgiven

A friend of mine recently asked me why Haiti, among all countries, deserved to have its international debt forgiven, as the Inter-American Development Bank recently did to the tune of $479 million.

Aside from the reason that I personally find most compelling - that Haiti has suffered one of the worst natural disasters in history, we have the means to help them and it is simply the right thing to do - there are, in my view, other compelling reasons why Haiti’s debt should be forgiven. Haiti is in far worse shape than quite a few countries I have seen in Africa, with over half of it’s people living on less than US$1 a day, with only the people of Somalia and Afghanistan suffering from higher rates of hunger, and with 90 percent of its tree cover gone (these are statistics from BEFORE the earthquake). But there are also arguments for debt forgiveness that, in my view, go to explain how, though Haiti’s political class has done a handy job of wrecking the country over the last two hundred years, they have had plenty of help from the international community.

In 1825, only 21 years after on independence, a French fleet appeared in Port-au-Prince harbour and threatened to bomb and destroy the Haitian capital unless the country agreed to pay an indemnity for the “intemperance” of having seized its freedom and having outlawed slavery. Haiti was forced to accept a debt of 150 million francs in exchange for France accepting the nation’s independence, a debt that took decades to repay and economically ravaged the country.

One of the reasons that the death toll in the earthquake was so large was that, in recent decades especially, tens of thousands of people have been migrating from the countryside into Port-au-Prince, where they lived in shockingly substandard housing that made them especially vulnerable to natural disasters such as the one that occurred. But why, we must ask ourselves, did they come into the capital in the first place?

In 1980-83, when tests showed nearly a quarter of Haiti’s pigs were infected with African Swine Fever, the U.S- Canadian funded Program for the Eradication of Porcine Swine Fever and Development of Pig-Raising (PEPADEP) succeeded in destroying the 1.2 million Kreyol pigs (kochon kreyol) that formed one of the backbones of the peasant economy. PEPADEP officials paid for the pigs before they slaughtered them, or, in many cases, promised to pay for them or replace them and never did. Most of the replacement pigs that were delivered soon died, unable to adjust to the rough world the Kreyol swine had grown so accustomed to, and an already difficult peasant economy suffered another blow.

Further undermining Haiti’s ability to feed itself, in typically duplicitous fashion in 1995 then-Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, implementing an economic adjustment plan mandated by the IMF and further turning the screws on the peasantry that he could never win over, cut tariffs on rice imports to the country from 35 percent to 3 percent. This further undermined the peasant economy despite the fact that Haiti for many years had produced low-cost, inexpensive rice for domestic consumption. After 1995, that is, after implementing the economic policies of the international community, it effectively lost the ability to do so.

In my view, “we” in the international community have helped get Haiti into its current sorry state, and debt relief is one tool at our disposal to help try and get it out. Given our dubious history there, it would be downright immoral not to use it.

President Obama signs historic health care bill

The 44th President of the United States does what presidents for 100 years have been unable to do. One of the happiest moments that I have witnessed in American political life and, hopefully, a step towards a slightly more human and compassionate nation. Perhaps some of the 45 million Americans (like me) without health insurance will now be able to get some.

MD

Michael Deibert interviewed on KPFK Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles

I sat down for a fairly wide-ranging interview about Haiti with Suzi Weissman on her show Beneath The Surface on KPFK Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles this week. The podcast of the entire show can be found here. My segment appears about 17 minutes into the program.

From rubble to recovery

From rubble to recovery

Published: February 13, 2010

Foreign Direct Investment

(Read the original article here)

A huge recovery challenge lies ahead for Haiti after its devastating earthquake, but could the rebuilding programmes bring about an essential economic restructuring? Michael Deibert reports from Port-au-Prince.

The incremental economic progress that Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean nation of 9 million people, had been experiencing over the past several years was brought to a cataclysmic halt late on the afternoon of January 12, when a 7.0 earthquake centred just south of the capital city sent the pillars of state and industry crashing to the ground in a heap of dust.

In a matter of seconds, Haiti’s Palais National, Palais de Justice, Parliament and many government ministries were either totally or partially destroyed. The top command of the UN mission, whose troops had been supporting the government of president René Préval since his 2006 election, lost their lives, along with an estimated 200,000 Haitians. Factories collapsed onto their owners and workers alike, and entire neighbourhoods tumbled down the brooding mountains that surround the capital city’s bay.

Further devastation

Haiti, already desperately poor but having experienced its first sustained period of political calm and stirrings of foreign investment interest in many decades, seemed as if it would be reduced to an even graver level than it had been before: mortally wounded, traumatised, ungovernable. In addition to the buildings destroyed, Haiti had also lost some of those best placed to aid its tenuous economic recovery, among them one of the country’s most respected economists, Philippe Rouzier, as well as Jean Frantz Richard and Murray Lustin Junior, the director-general and director of operations, respectively, at the Direction Générale des Impôts, the country’s main tax office in the capital.

According to the International Organisation for Migration, as of early February at least 460,000 people were still living in 315 spontaneous settlements throughout Port-au-Prince, while the World Food Programme said that more than 1.6 million people had received ­supplies since the start of the earthquake response.

Economic focus

But Haiti’s industrious population knows a little something about struggle and perseverance, even in the face of such a devastating tragedy. Within days of the earthquake, the country’s market women, taxi drivers and other labourers had returned to the streets, resuming commerce among the hundreds of thousands camped out between the shells of ruined buildings. Capital residents began to flow back into Haiti’s countryside, seeking family solace among the loss.

From a terrible misfortune, some hoped that Haiti might still have set in motion the seeds for a new beginning. Despite the ousting of a popular prime minister last autumn, Haiti’s modest economic engine, buoyed by an extended period of relative political tranquillity and an improved security situation, continued chugging along under a new prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, seemingly bearing out a December 2008 UN report asserting that it was striking “how modest are the impediments to competitiveness relative to the huge opportunities offered by the fundamentals” in the country.

Last year, billionaire George Soros’s Economic Development Fund announced plans to create a $45m industrial park in Cité Soleil, one of the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods, while two new hotels were set to open along the country’s lush south coast.

At the same time, the OTF Group, a competitiveness consulting firm credited with breathing new life into Rwanda’s tourism, coffee and agro-industry sectors following the country’s 1994 genocide, praised the business opportunities in Haiti. Focusing on several key “growth clusters” to drive economic development, it hoped to help create 500,000 jobs in Haiti within three years.

Following the earthquake, though reassessed, the group said its conclusions did not necessarily need to be shelved, just pushed back for six months to a year.

“The outmigration from [Port-au-Prince] is a huge opportunity to reverse the migration trends of the past two decades,” says OTF director Robert Henning. “If reconstruction can create opportunities and jobs outside of the capital, this will achieve an important goal of redistributing the influence and economic weight of Haiti.”

Trade possibilities

Though the country’s interior has been severely deforested over the past few decades, local groups, such as the Mouvman Peyizan Nasyonal Kongrè Papay, have worked for years on reforestation and irrigation projects and some areas, such as the Artibonite Valley, remain relatively fertile. With Port-au-Prince’s harbour severely damaged and the likelihood of recurrent large-scale earthquakes extremely high, according to the US Geological Survey, international attention has for the first time begun to look seriously at developing Haiti’s long-neglected interior with manufacturing and agricultural initiatives.

A long border with neighbouring Dominican Republic, which lends itself to the possibility of free-trade zones, and possible ports that might conceivably be expanded around the country – including Miragoâne (in the country’s west), Saint-Marc (in the middle region) and Cap-Haïtien (in the north) – would seem to support this possibility for future investment.

Following a decision last year by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank to cancel $1.2bn of Haiti’s debt – with the latter institution approving an additional $120m in grants for investments in key sectors such as infrastructure, basic services and disaster prevention, the G-7 countries told Haiti after a post-earthquake meeting in Canada in February that the country’s debts to the body did not need to be repaid.

New beginning

None of this in any way minimises the grievous shock – physical, psychological and economic – that Haiti’s people and its government have suffered because of those terrible moments in January. But, day by day, it appears to be picking itself up, dusting itself off and trying to decide where it will head from here.

“The extent of this disaster is also due to the fact that this country has not been managed, or rather has been ill-managed, for the past 50 years,” says Michèle Pierre-Louis, a civil society leader and former prime minister of Haiti. “Maybe after mourning our dead and saving the lives of the survivors, we should start thinking about ways to put together our energies, our solidarity, our creativity to rebuild our capital under some kind of strong leadership… [which] could eventually lead to rebuilding the entire country. Now is the time.”

Haitians Find Help Through the Airwaves

My interview (along with Emilio San Pedro) on WNYC's The Takeaway this morning on the importance of Haitian radio can be heard here.

Thoughts on recent Haiti commentaries

As a progressive reporter and analyst working on the ground in Haiti, I have gotten fairly used to reading ignorant commentary on the Caribbean nation of 9 million over the years.

Last month, the dust had not even settled from the earthquake that destroyed large sections of Port-au-Prince and killed some 2000,000 people when the voices of intolerance and opportunism set about savaging a country that was already on its knees.

The irony of Rush Limbaugh - a man so obese that he can barely stand maligning a nation of the chronically underfed - telling listeners not to support the hundreds of thousands made homeless by the quake met the venomous snake-oil rhetoric of Pat Robertson, who denounced those buried under the rumble for having made “a pact with the Devil.” Further libeling the dead, the American basketball player Paul Shirley wrote that “shouldn’t much of the responsibility for the disaster lie with the victims of that disaster,” a remark that got him wisely fired by ESPN.

Unfortunately, though, the right are not the only ones whose views of Haiti seems to have been colored by political prejudice and misunderstanding. In recent years, a small but noisy sector of the international left has been equally irresponsible in its commentary about Haiti, with some commentators wishing to see all foreign countries in terms of facile good guy-bad guy scenarios

Center for Economic and Policy Research co-director Mark Weisbrot - a man so intellectually lazy he often gets the basic details of Haiti’s history wrong - characterizes despotic former Haitian ruler Jean-Bertrand Aristide as “Haiti's democratically elected president...kidnapped by the US and flown to exile in Africa,” Naomi Klein, interviewing Aristide in his gilded South Africa exile (where the South African government underwrites his expenses to the tune of that of a government minister), wrote that Aristide is proof of her own anti-globalization credo, as she credulously repeats Aristide’s contention that he was ousted because of his resistance to the “privatization” of Haiti’s state industries. Writing in the Guardian after having spent only two months in Haiti and having written of his support of Mr. Aristide before having ever set foot in the country, the academic Peter Hallward concludes that “Aristide's own government...was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment.”

These assertions would likely be news to the people I spoke to in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, when the city was still reeling from the impact of the quake, the fires still smoldering and the bodies still perfuming the air with the sickly-sweet decay of human flesh. To the people I did speak to in places like the capital’s crowded Delmas road, along, the busy Route Freres and even in Aristide’s former home of Tabarre, the reaction to the former president’s January offer to be flown to Haiti veered between disparaging comments that Aristide was a criminal to bitter observations that Aristide should buy a ticket and come dig with his hands through the rubble like everyone else, rather than waiting to be ferried home like a returning emperor. During a visit to Haiti’s countryside last summer, I found the response to the mention of Aristide’s name even more hostile. The president’s Fanmi Lavalas party, badly divided and unwisely banned from upcoming legislative elections, can still rouse a few thousand people for street rallies in the capital, but the movement seems largely a spent force and Haitians seem largely to have moved on.

In Haiti, a small, poor country where few people can speak or write English proficiently, the left, like the right, seems to feel that they have found the perfect canvas on which to outline their own theories and agendas, no matter how irrelevant they may be to the struggles of Haitians as whole. This cock-eyed view of history is only heightened by the habit of visiting foreigners to surround themselves with the capital’s political class, a strata of society that the Haitians themselves have learned to despise to such a degree that many poor people I spoke to last month openly hoped for a U.S. occupation of the country (something I think would be a mistake).

Perhaps the palme d'or of recent ignorant commentary on Haiti may belong to Lawrence Harrison, director of the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School of International Affairs at Tufts University and the former director of the USAID mission to Haiti from 1977 to 1979.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Harrison lays the blame for Haiti’s ills at the altar of the country’s indigenous religious construct of vodou, opining that “its followers believe that their destinies are controlled by hundreds of capricious spirits who must be propitiated through voodoo ceremonies...a species of the sorcery religions that Cameroonian development expert Daniel Etounga-Manguelle identifies as one of the principal obstacles to progress in Africa.”

Further, Harrison informs his readers, following the overthrow of the French in 1804, free Haitians “were left with a value system largely shaped by African culture” and quotes the economist Sir Arthur Lewis (“himself a descendent of African slaves”) as saying that former slaves “inherited the idea that work is only fit for slaves."

Let me say this plainly: Lawrence Harrison would collapse of exhaustion if he put in half a day’s work that I have seen peasant farmers and urban laborers put in during the course of a single day in Haiti. In Haiti, securing the most basic necessities of existence is a daily, titanic struggle that people like Harrison, Limbaugh,Weisbrot et al, secure behind their desks and probably never having had to put in a strenuous day’s work in their lives, will never understand as they hide behind their pompous theories.

Vodou and its value system, in the nearly 15 years I have been traveling to Haiti, are no more arcane or nonsensical than the cosmology of Christianity, Judaism, Islam or Hinduism. I have, in fact, seen vodou act as an important spiritual succor for people in a place where death, premature and unnatural, is a blighted daily companion, and a sense of disconnect from one's heritage a real concern.

Several years ago, while chatting with a vodou priest known as Ti Papi in the crowded Bizoton quarter of Port-au-Prince, he told me the following:

When there's tires burning in the streets, when there's coup d'etat, when there's everything else, we are still doing our ceremonies, we are still beating our drums. Politicians come and go but voodoo is always here. If it wasn't for voodoo, we would already be occupied, either by the Americans or the Dominicans. Voodoo? It's been our sovereignty, over the years.

It’s a Haitian point of view, like the political point of view of Haiti’s people, that outsiders would do well to listen to.

Between the corrosive racism of some on the right and the tired rhetoric of some on the left - each based in no way in the reality on the ground in Haiti - we have an irresponsible, ahistorical approach to the country that in no way helps to ameliorate the situation of Haiti’s poor majority. When novice commentators try and shove Haiti into their own unsophisticated binary worldview, it damages, rather than advances, the cause of Haiti’s poor. By attempting to bestow a sheen of legitimacy on a disgraced leader or by maligning Haitians’ spiritual beliefs, these commentators, far from engaging in genuine inquiry and scholarship, are in fact showing the most grievous disrespect to Haiti and its people.

Haiti deserves better than this, and it is time that foreign commentators on the country actually spent some time there, away from their comfortable desks and apartments, speaking to actual Haitians in the back of sweltering camionettes, in crowded shantytowns and in hardscrabble peasant fields, far away from the echo-chamber of the intelligentsia in which so much of the right and the left often marinate.

The Haitians, the everyday Haitians who have struggled so long against such great odds to build a decent country and to provide for their families despite so many obstacles, deserve to have their voices heard without the filter of the prejudices of perhaps well-meaning but ignorant foreigners. We owe them at least that, I think. The Haitians have a lot more to teach us about their country than we can teach them.

Haitian Radio Returns to the Air

Haitian Radio Returns to the Air

By Michael Deibert

Posted Friday, Feb. 5, 2010

Slate

(Read the original article here)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Haiti's radio journalists, many of whom have long experience of operating under dictatorships and elected governments with little tolerance for critical press coverage, know a thing or two about adversity. But nearly a month ago, when Haiti's capital was devastated by an earthquake that leveled large sections of the city and killed at least 150,000 people, local reporters were suddenly faced with a whole new set of challenges.

"We try and orient people to where aid is being distributed, and every day we announce messages about people who are still missing," says Wendell Theodore, the silken-voiced news director of Radio Metropole in the capital's Delmas region. His own home destroyed, Theodore now broadcasts the names of the missing from under a tree in the radio station's yard, next to the tent he has slept in since his house collapsed.

"I saw our building shake," says Rotchild Francois, director of the capital's RFM radio in the Pétionville district, who was at his desk in the studio when the earthquake struck and dashed into the street with a dozen other employees. The station lost a reporter in the quake and was knocked off the air for five days. Reporters from Radio Galaxie, Radio Magic 9, and Radio Télé Ginen were also killed.

Francois now spends his days combing the capital, trying to paint an audio picture of what is happening and to get information on the air about where aid is being distributed, the location of feeding and medical centers, and other important information. Many of the station's employees, fearful of aftershocks, refuse to enter the building.

"People come here to send messages to their relatives that they are OK or to have people call to say that they are OK," says Francois. "We do that every day."

Why journalists might be fearful was illustrated vividly when I was in the studio of Radio Kiskeya interviewing its director general, Marvel Dandin. As Dandin explained how the station, which had been knocked off the air for a week, had resumed broadcasting on an abbreviated schedule, a brief aftershock set the damaged, cracked building trembling and sent people running from the studio into the street.

Radio has historically played an important and politically significant role in Haiti's civic life, where newspapers are few and far between and difficult to decipher for a population often unable to avail themselves of proper schooling.

Radio Soleil, a Catholic station, played a key role in spreading information during the ouster of the Duvalier family dictatorship, which ruled Haiti from 1957 until 1986, during which time freedom of the press was practically nonexistent.

Independent journalism was a dangerous business during the revolving military juntas that controlled the country after the Duvalier regime collapsed. Under the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in office from 2001 until 2004, reporters were physically attacked by government partisans while covering demonstrations; they were also imprisoned and forced to flee the country as a result of threats against their lives.

Several journalists have been killed in Haiti in recent years, among them Radio Haiti-Inter Director Jean Dominique in April 2000, Radio Echo 2000 reporter Brignol Lindor in December 2001, and Jacques Roche, a TV host, poet, and an editor at the daily newspaper Le Matin, who was kidnapped and murdered in 2005.

But despite powerful forces arrayed against independent reporting, Haiti's journalists have persisted in the face of such adversity—good preparation, some might say, for today's challenges.

"I ran to my house and found that my wife had died," says Marcus Garcia, director of Radio Mélodie FM, a station that has continued broadcasting with the aid of generator despite the lack of electricity or telephone service. "But life has to continue, and if my wife was alive, she would want me to continue as I am doing, working for the people."

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.

Michael Deibert interviewed on KDVS

My interview on KDVS radio's It's About You, hosted by France Kassing, was broadcast today and can be heard here. The show also features a section about Howard Zinn and an interview with Nick Buxton about the United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen. My portion begins around the 30 minute mark.

The Haiti I love is still there

The Haiti I love is still there

Returning to my sometimes-home, I discovered devastation and friends who died, but the country's heart is beating

By Michael Deibert

Jan. 23, 2010

Salon

(Read the original article here)

One night, only days after an earthquake had leveled huge swaths of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, and killed an estimated 200,000 people there and in its environs, I found myself cruising thorough the city on the back of a moto-taxi.

A crowded, dirty but also irrepressibly vibrant city during normal times, Port-au-Prince that night presented a landscape that could fairly be described as nightmarish.

Visible through the darkness, the ruined shells of buildings destroyed in the 7.0 quake looked over the fragile forms of hundreds of thousands of people reduced to sleeping in the streets, while in the air mingled the corrosive smell of burning garbage and the vomitous, cloyingly sweet stench of human decay.

A city I have sporadically called home since I first visited Haiti in 1997, and whose personality had become deeply ingrained in my soul, Port-au-Prince had never seemed more desperate or defeated.

Then something happened. Despite the terrible suffering that had been visited on this poor nation of 9 million people, it began to dawn on me that, along the streets that I knew so well, life was going on after this terrible trauma.

Next to the shell of Haiti's Palais National, the hypnotizingly white grand dame of the city's architectural jewels that successive Haitian politicians have fought to control even as their country grew ever-more impoverished and ruined, market women were still frying up marinade and fritay in old steel pots. In the Petionville market, despite the late hour and lack of electricity, goods and fried chicken were still being sold by the orange glow of kerosene lamps. By the following day, dozens of young Haitians had begun sweeping with brooms in front of the ruined Cathédrale Nationale, in preparation for the Saturday funeral on its grounds of Archbishop Serge Miot, who perished within its walls.

"I've worked with this moto for my entire youth," the driver, a young man named Emmanuel, told me that night as we headed up Avenue Pan American, passed the ruins of the United Nations compound where scores of United Nations workers, including mission chief Hédi Annabi, and his deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa, lost their lives.

"Tout moun jwenn," Emmanuel told me as we conversed in Haiti's native Kreyol language. "Kounye-a, y'ap domi ak Jesu."

Everyone was hit. Now they sleep with Jesus.

Far from being the looting mobs that some media have portrayed them as, hardly anyone who has witnessed the response of the Haitians to this great catastrophe has not been moved by their incredible resilience and solidarity and their intact sense of humor in the face of an unimaginable tragedy.

As all the pillars of the Haitian state -- a state that has often seemed only able to rouse itself to parasitically victimize its own people when it did make its presence felt -- collapsed around them, the Haitians helped one another, dug through rubble, prayed, sang and showed everyone who has watched them what the meaning of true perseverance in the face of adversity looks like, even though the losses have been tremendous and irreplaceable.

Micha Gaillard, a university professor and son of one of Haiti's eminent historians, was one of the first political leaders I met while traveling to Haiti, and I recall him greeting me in his modest home in the Turgeau neighborhood as his charming wife, Katy, prepared us coffee. Katy passed away far too early a few years ago, and Micha died after the Palais de Justice collapsed on him, dying in what must have been agony after having been trapped for many hours. Three of the country's foremost feminist thinkers -- Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin and Anne Marie Coriolan -- also died that day. The damage to the country's artistic heritage, from the almost-total collapse of the Episcopal Cathédrale Sainte Trinité, which boasted stunning indigenous murals by such eminent Haitian painters as Wilson Bigaud and Philome Obin, to the loss of much of the Nader art collection, probably the best private collection of Haitian art in the world, is incalculable.

Sometimes since I have returned to Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, I have felt as if I would be overcome by despair. Looking at block after block of ruins throughout the capital's downtown, or seeing the terrible death and destruction caused by the collapse of the Université de Port-au-Prince, ringed by weeping, desperate relatives of those lost, one almost wants to turn away.

But the Haitians, always the Haitians, keep one going, and seeing their dignity in this moment has made me love them and their battered country as never before.

"Life goes on," a friend of mine who lost his wife in the earthquake told me yesterday, bringing to mind the famous Haitian proverb, deye mon gen mon. Beyond the mountains there are more mountains.

There is time to mourn a loss, and to bury the dead. More aid is needed, and more transparency and coordination to get it out to people, not just now but over the long term. But step by step, I believe that Haiti, a country of personal goodwill and stunning artistic accomplishment as much as it is a place of dysfunctional politics and venal politicians, will indeed rebuild. Perhaps differently than before, but a people who have suffered and endured so much seem, in my conversations with them on street corners under the blazing sun, in tent cities that have sprung up along the roadside, and in grievously affected provincial villages, to be able to withstand even this latest grievous shock and come back swinging.


I hope that we foreigners, who have been so moved by the place, treated so kindly and educated so patiently by its people, will be there to help. Haiti needs its friends now more than ever.

Michael Deibert is the author of "Notes From the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti." He writes at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com.

• AMERICAS NEWS
• JANUARY 22, 2010, 7:40 P.M. ET

A History of Troubles Is Helping Haitians to Endure

By IANTHE JEANNE DUGAN And MICHAEL DEIBERT

The Wall Street Journal

(Read the original article here)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—On a street corner amid a pile of rubble in Haiti's ravaged capital, life goes on. A man calmly polishes his shoes. Children run around dirty from the debris and half dressed but playing and laughing. A group of residents march by carrying mattresses on their heads, followed by another toting plywood.

As many as 200,000 people have died here, according to the government, and roughly one million have been made homeless. The roads from the capital are snarled with tens of thousands more fleeing the city. But many Haitians remain entrenched in the capital, and many are beginning to go about their daily routines, showing a resilience that some attribute to the nation's history of living from one disaster to the next.

"There are no other people besides Haitians who could come back this way," says Nadine Stremy, coming out of a supermarket carrying a bag of groceries. "They have learned through decades to survive."

A group of Haitians gathered around a car radio Wednesday night to listen to President René Préval's first speech since the earthquake that came eight days before. He said telephones were working again, the government is working, and called for courage and solidarity. "Solidarity!" someone shouted, smiling.

The next day, on Thursday, in the Canape Vert neighborhood, the local branch of Uni Bank opened its doors. Thousands of people waited outside, but the bank allowed only a few dozen business customers with whom it had relationships, according to an employee.

Nearby, at a Western Union, vast numbers waited in line to get in, many saying they were hoping for remittances from relatives in the United States.

"It's a terrible thing, but it is also life, so what else can I do but continue?" said Michelet Saint-Preux, who was on the third floor of the Université de Port-au-Prince when the four-story building collapsed, killing students, many of whom were attending after-work classes.

Mr. Saint-Preux's arm was bandaged and he had a deep gash in his chin. The structure still lay in ruins, with students' papers and notebooks scattered under concrete and jagged metal bars. The air reeked of the body that still lay pinned underneath a flattened Suzuki 4x4 jeep.

Near the collapsed palace, a group of men sat on the side of the road with an array of electric generators they were selling. Another man sold shoes and sneakers. In various spots around the city, hoses were set up with nonpotable water. Women with buckets washed their clothes on the side of the road, and children bathed. A ramshackle funeral parlor was open for business, and two hearses were being loaded.

Many Haitians say their resilience is rooted in Haiti's tortured history. Haiti overthrew French domination in 1804 to become the second independent republic in the Americas after the U.S. (Haiti's military victory inspired Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the United States). It later served as a base for South American leader Simón Bolívar, providing material and logistical support in the southern city of Jacmel for his campaign to liberate the Southern Hemisphere from Spanish rule.

But through the ensuing decades, they faced long periods of military juntas, dictatorship, and arbitrary justice. During the 29-year rule of the Duvalier family, Haitians quaked in fear at the bloody work of the dictatorship's paramilitary enforcers, the Tontons Macoutes.

During the more recent era of priest-turned-president Jean Bernard Aristide, the stuff of Haitian nightmares were the "chimere," named after a mythical fire-breathing dragon and comprising desperately poor, heavily armed gangs of young men who did Mr. Aristide's bidding.

"We have gotten through so much as a country," says Ms. Stremy. "This is why we consider each other brothers and sisters. We are survivors."

Just over a week after the quake, roadside markets where many people buy all their produce began to reappear for the first time. Along the capital's Avenue Pan American, an artist strung a fishing line between two trees and hung his wood carvings, against a backdrop of tumbled boulders. Near Champ de Mars square abutting Haiti's ruined National Palace, wood-carved furniture was being sold next to a dead body covered with a purple flowered sheet.

A pharmacy that had opened was mobbed—and robbed. So some stores opened for just a few hours and had security guards keep customers outside, letting just a few in at a time.

All over the city, signs have sprouted up in English, French and Creole. "Help us," says one. "We need food and water," reads another. Some carry phone numbers.

Michele Pierre-Louis, a former prime minister in the government of Haitian President Préval, said that despite incidents of violence, most people "peacefully pray, sing and help each other the best they can."

At a waterfront park on Wednesday, hundreds of Haitians lined up facing the water through a large iron gate. They were watching a Red Cross ship make its way to shore with supplies. On the other side facing them were military guards holding their rifles.

On the grounds of the capital's elite Petionville Club, several thousand Haitians waited patiently behind a rope barrier for food and water packets being distributed by the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division. In the capital's Canape Vert plaza, members of the Haitian National Police supervised the distribution of food donated by private individuals in the Dominican Republic.

"We are waiting to get some food and water," says Lesly Jeudy, who says that almost every structure in his Christ Roi neighborhood has collapsed. "We haven't had any food or water for two days."

Haiti: Tearing Down History

Tearing Down History

By Michael Deibert

Posted Friday, Jan. 22, 2010, at 1:33 PM ET

(Read the original article here)

PETIT-GOÂVE, Haiti—They work all day under the blazing sun, hammers and saws in hand, pulling down the last remnants of a structure that had served as the crowning jewel for this once-picturesque town set along the glittering Caribbean Sea.

Numbering about two dozen, the men are tearing down what little remains of the town's storied Église Notre Dame, which once loomed over the city in gleaming blue-and-white relief. Now, only its foundation and the altar remain.

Along with the capital, Petit-Goâve, some 45 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, was perhaps the most thoroughly devastated municipality in the country after the Jan. 12 earthquake.

As well as the church, the state telephone company building, the mayor's office, a hotel, and scores of houses—all with people still inside—were leveled by the tremor. Dangerous, yawning fissures opened up along the road into town

"This church was here for a long time, for 208 years," said 67-year-old Nathan Leger, pausing as hammers echoed in the background and men milled about wearing surgical masks to protect them from particles of dust and human decay. "It's a catastrophe. We will not have something like this again."

The church collapsed within seconds, burying market women, passers-by, and people who had paused to rest in its shade. Residents estimate that at least 350 died in the town, which was playing host to three large meetings on the day of the quake.

Once, it was known for its particularly fine collection of Haitian "gingerbread" wooden architecture, as well as for its sweet tricolored candy, douce marcosse. Now, Petit-Goâve presents a face of utter destruction, its streets choked with the debris of collapsed buildings. The town was further traumatized by a 6.1 aftershock Wednesday morning, which caused even more damage

"We were injured, we were hit hard, and now we are sleeping in the street," says Andre Zanmi, a white-haired woman camped out in the middle of Rue Faustin with a dozen members of her family, some of whom bear deep cuts and gashes that have yet to receive medical attention.

Sitting in front of a house with half its roof collapsed, the family has strung a blanket between two trees to provide some cover.

Like most people in town, Zanmi said that other than patrols by a Sri Lankan contingent of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti—which itself lost its top command when the organization' s Port-au-Prince headquarters was destroyed—they have yet to receive any outside help.

By late in the week, though, help appeared to be on its way. In a clearing in the town of Carrefour Dufort, near Petit-Goâve, members of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, based in Camp Lejeune, N.C., were distributing food aid by helicopter.

"It's just good to be able to be here to help," Sgt. Claude Barthold, who was born in the Haitian capital, told me. "But it's overwhelming what you see here."

On Thursday, the Red Cross also announced that it had opened two first-aid posts in Petit-Goâve, staffed by Haitian Red Cross volunteers.

The earthquake has been a brutal blow for this historically significant community, which was the birthplace of one of Haiti's most important leaders, Faustin Soulouque. The son of African-born slaves, Soulouque climbed through the ranks of the post-independence military before being elected president by a Senate vote in 1847. Building up an irregular network of armed partisans called zinglins, Soulouque's modus operandi served as a precursor to the creation of the feared Tonton Macoutes paramilitary force of Haitian dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier a century later, as well as that of the chimères, the armed youth groups with which President Jean-Bertrand Aristide sought, unsuccessfully, to cling to power.

After two unsuccessful invasions of neighboring Dominican Republic in search of loot he could use to pay the onerous 150 million franc "debt" that former colonial power France demanded in exchange for Haiti's hard-won independence, Soulouque was overthrown in 1859 and died in exile, the melancholy fate of so many of Haiti's leaders.

In more recent years, Petit-Goâve was the site of one of the first major demonstrations against the Aristide government in December 2001, when the funeral of a local journalist, Brignol Lindor, murdered by Aristide partisans, was fired on by police and flared into a major disturbance.

Now, though, residents are literally picking up the pieces of a shattered way of life.

"Only God knows why this happened," Robert Henry Etienne told me as he walked the dusty streets with a notebook in hand, carefully cataloging every ruined and damaged structure in meticulous handwriting in the hope that they might one day be rebuilt. "But we need the international community to help the Haitian people, who are sleeping on the streets. We need help, from whatever country in the world."

Michael Deibert interviewed on WNYC's The Takeaway

My interview yesterday on WNYC's The Takeaway can be heard here.

One Week in, Haitians Are Still Hungry

One Week in, Haitians Are Still Hungry

By Michael Deibert

Posted Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010, at 11:34 AM ET

Slate

(Read the original article here)

LEOGANE, Haiti—When Elvis Cineus rushed to his home in the town of Leogane, 18 miles west of Port-au-Prince, in the aftermath of Haiti's devastating earthquake, he was not prepared for what awaited him.

Under the remains of his home, smashed flat as if pummeled by a giant fist, lay the bodies of his wife, his nephew, his cousin, and a friend, all dead. His 1-year-old son was dangling from the building's jagged facade, injured but alive.

"It was a miracle," he says of the infant's survival. "But I think there are still survivors in the fallen schools, because we still hear them screaming."

This coastal town, once one of the most pleasant in Haiti, was largely decimated by the quake. The International Federation of Red Cross estimates that as much as 90 percent of the town has been destroyed.

Along Leogane's Grand Rue, once-stately concrete buildings lie in rubble, with only a few structures built in Haiti's distinctive wooden gingerbread style remaining. The putrid smell of death wafts through the lanes, helped along by an ocean breeze.

At a ruined dental clinic, a woman cries when she tells how a neighbor died after her leg was severed by falling debris and how the neighbor's child, a little girl, took off screaming down the street.

"It's beyond chaos, beyond catastrophe," says Michael Moscoso, a local businessman. "The losses cannot be numbered."

One week after the earthquake flattened large swaths of central Port-au-Prince, people beyond the capital and closer to the epicenter have grown ever more desperate as much-promised aid has been slow to trickle in or has failed to materialize altogether.

In the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the capital's southern Carrefour neighborhood, several hundred people lay on makeshift surgical tables, on benches, or sprawled on the floor. Half a dozen people groaned with severe suppurating burn wounds caused when a gas cylinder exploded during the great tremor. Nine-year-old Michel St. Franc lay with blood caking his face, his leg in a primitive cast and tears in his eyes.

"This is the worst situation I've ever seen," says Julien Mattar, project coordinator for the hospital. "We have huge needs in terms of human resources, medical supplies, and materials."

Mattar tells me that a supply plane that was unable to land in Port-au-Prince was instead rerouted to the Dominican Republic. From there, the supplies made the seven-hour overland journey to Haiti.

The injured who were able to reach the hospital were the lucky ones. Farther down the road, both the living and the dead waited for respite in the form of assistance from the international community or from the government of Haitian President René Préval, who has faced withering criticism at home for his perceived lax and disorganized response to the disaster.

Along the Route des Rails, almost every home seemed to have been destroyed, and, again, the intense smell of decay intensified under a glaring Caribbean sun. Residents say they feel abandoned.

"No one has ever been here," Vilaire Elise, a 38-year-old Protestant minister, said as he led a visitor and fellow residents to survey homes where his neighbors had died. "We have no water to drink, nor food to eat. We are suffering here."

Though nearly 105,000 food rations and 20,000 tents had been distributed by humanitarian groups on Monday, the effort seemed unable to come to grips with the scale of the disaster. The U.N. World Food Program has said it will need 100 million prepared meals over the next 30 days.

The growing foreign military presence in Haiti, which has played host to a U.N. peacekeeping mission since 2004 and will now house at least 2,000 U.S. troops, also seemed overwhelmed.

Late on Monday, with the sun setting outside Leogane, in a scene reminiscent of others played out in severely war-torn countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, at least 1,500 townsfolk rendered homeless by the quake took over a flat patch of grassy land and constructed fragile shelters from logs, twigs, bed sheets, and leaves.

"Since the disaster, everyone here has had nothing," said Innocent Wilson, a 31-year-old who acts as one of the impromptu camp's spokesmen. "No one is here to help us, so we are organizing ourselves."

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes From the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.

Note from Port-au-Prince

The scale of the disaster here in Haiti is beyond anything I have ever seen. Not just Port-au-Prince, but Leogane and, I hear, Petit Goave and Jacmel, as well. Please keep this place and these people in your prayers and help any way you can. Article following soon.

Haiti Earthquake

To my dear friends in Haiti,

I stayed up until 2am last night before going to bed hoping for the best, but it seems like some of our worst fears may have been realized.

You are all in my thoughts and I wish that I was with you in this time of crisis. I hope that you are all ok.

In strength,

Michael

Michael Deibert interviewed on KDVS radio

Shortly before the end of 2009, I chatted with KDVS radio host France Kassing on a variety of subjects ranging from Guatemala to Haiti to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The full show can be listened to here.

A note on the passing of Daniel Simidor

Daniel Simidor, a Haitian patriot, one of the most eloquent voices of the genuine Haitian left and a man that I hope I will not be overstating to say I considered a friend and a fellow advocate for the kind of just and humane governance in Haiti that its people deserve, passed away this morning in New York City.

Daniel (born Andre Elizee) was the kind of man that Haiti needs more of, someone intimately connected with the struggle of his people from the ground up and yet able to move with ease in the intellectual and political circles of places such as New York, the city that had been his home for many years. Far from being a simple polemicist or, worse yet, a dilettante, Daniel was a man who cared passionately about the state of his native country and its people, a passion that never slackened in the many years I corresponded with him or the few times I met him. With his political activism, Daniel did a great deal to bring the story of what was happening to Haitians both in their own country, in the neighboring Dominican Republic and in the United States to a far wider audience than would have otherwise known about it, and for many years played a very constructive role in the international dialogue on many issues relating to Haiti.

When my grandfather, Jospeh H. Deibert, passed away late last year, I encountered an African-American Lutheran minister from Illinois who had come all the way to Pennsylvania to pay his respects, and said simply that "You've got to give honor to those who deserve it." I wanted to take this moment to give honor not just to Daniel's memory, but to his advocacy while alive. Daniel Simidor taught me a great deal about Haiti in the brief time and tangential way that I knew him, and his is certainly a voice that will be missed in the ongoing debate about the country's future.

Onè, respè, Daniel. Rest in peace.

Bonjour, 2010, from Aït Benhaddou

Books in 2009: A personal selection

During the past year, for the first time, I kept a record of all the books that I read. With the year drawing to a close, I thought it might perhaps be helpful to share my thoughts on some of the more notable ones that came across my path.

Best regards,

MD

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe’s elegiac and tragic story of the clash of cultures between Africa and Europe was every bit as moving now - after I have spent some time in Africa - as it was when I first read it in high school 20 years ago.

Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia by Harvey Arden

National Geographic writer Harvey Arden’s penned this quite beautiful account of his conversations with Aboriginal elders nearly 15 years ago, and when I traipsed through similar terrain earlier this year I found the respect with with it treats its subjects highly apt.

Fulgencio Batista: Volume 1, From Revolutionary to Strongman by Frank Argote-Freyre

This revelatory portrait of the formative years of Cuba’s pre-1959 leader portrays him as self-made, ambitious, ruthless, initially idealistic and then severely corrupted by power. The boy from a dirt-floor shack in Banes here stands as a fully-drawn personality as opposed to a mere slogan.

Reconstruction After the Civil War by John Hope Franklin

The eminent African-American history, who sadly passed away earlier this year, lays bare in an authoritative manner that “reconstruction,” such as it was after the American Civil War, was largely a fraud, with the South almost wholly under the control of reactionary southern whites. Highly relevant today, when a South Carolina congressmen sees fit to scream “You lie!” at the nation’s first biracial president during a congressional address.

Resistance and Betrayal: The Death and Life of Jean Moulin by Patrick Marnham

The riveting story of the man who became the most iconic figure of France’s resistance to Nazi occupation is made all the more poignant by the realization of how isolated the resisters were under the boot of a brutal fascist military occupation and amidst the acquiescence of the French population as a whole. The grotesque excesses of revenge, score settling and ideologically-based brutality that followed the arrival of allied forces in France also make for a somber punctuation to this chronicle of human bravery and duplicity.

The Unknown War: The Miskito Nation, Nicaragua and the United States by Bernard Nietschmann

The gifted geographer Bernard Nietschmann worked strenuously for decades to help indigenous peoples chart their own fates. As a result, the longtime fixture at the University of California-Berkeley weathered criticism from comfortable foreign supporters of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government (whose treatment of said groups within their borders was brutal), but in this book he lays bare the epic quest for survival of this indigenous group in Honduras and Nicaragua, often caught up in power struggles between forces far beyond their control.

Stars of the New Curfew by Ben Okri

This book is a collection of haunting and often surreal short stories by one of Nigeria’s greatest living authors

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

A book as inspiring by its intellectual honesty as for its faith in solutions that common decency demands, Orwell’s account of the life of miners in the north of England - penned shortly before he departed to fight against the fascists in Spain - is also notable for its highly moral thesis that “the people who have got to act together are all those who cringe to the boss and all those who shudder when they think of the rent...Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or a fountain pen.”

Indeed, and well said.

Snow by Orhan Pamuk

A fairly gripping novel of politics and thwarted romantic set in rural Turkey by this 2006 Nobel Prize winner.

Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System by Roberto Saviano

A stunning non-fiction work that earned its young Italian journalist-author a death sentence from Naples’ grotesque Camorra crime syndicate, this book pulls back the veil on the brutal face of Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy

Streets of Lost Footsteps by Lyonel Trouillot

A short work delivered by multiple narrators during the final apocalyptic battle between the cadres of the dictator Deceased Forever-Immortal and the followers of the Prophet, this novel by one of Haiti’s most gifted authors (and winner of this years’ Wepler Prize in France) should be put alongside the writings of Jacques Roumain, Jacques Stephen Alexis and Gary Victor as required reading for those seeking to understand Haiti beyond its bare history. Originally published as Rue des Pas-Perdus in French.

Zapata and the Mexican Revolution by John Womack, Jr.

A highly valuable if somewhat somewhat jarringly passionless account of the storied Mexican revolutionary, this 1968 book nevertheless should stand as an example of genuine scholarship about a politically controversial figure in an era (our own) where academia is often conspicuously lacking in such virtues.

R.I.P Vic Chesnutt

I remember helping Vic Chesnutt offstage in his wheelchair in Galway, Ireland after a solo concert he gave there about 15 years ago. A songwriter of rare power and intelligence, he was one my musical touchstones in my late teens and early twenties, along with such artists as the Clash, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Johnny Cash. Vic Chesnutt passed away, far too early for those of us who appreciated his music, over Christmas weekend.

Thank you, Vic, for all that great music and that very special night in Galway all those years ago.