A last chance to make things right for Haiti

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The view from the air was both startling and sad.

Startling because so many buildings remained standing in Port-au-Prince. Media coverage suggested the city had been razed. But as our Canadian Forces Griffon helicopter floated over the city, the flat-topped houses and seamless shanty towns seemed remarkably intact. It looked more like someone had thrown a shovel of gravel on top of the city. At ground level, a closer examination revealed the sadness: cracks, crumbling walls, twisted rebar. Many larger structures -- hospitals and schools in particular -- had totally disintegrated.

Also visible from the air were the enormous tent cities that had been established to give the homeless somewhere to escape evening rains. These stood out as brilliant blue patches against the light grey of the demolished city. The blue was emergency tarps provided by the United Nations.

It was a surreal site. With the naked eye, we could see clearly the throngs of prospective refugees crammed outside the gates of the Canadian Embassy. Nearby, a dozen soldiers, their nationality a mystery, toss food aid off the back of a military truck into a group of Haitians.

Outside Port-au-Prince, where the population isn't nearly as dense, the destruction was no less startling. Small clusters of homes with lush green yards and small stone walls seemed, at first examination, to be largely intact. In fact, only the roofs were mostly intact, but they lay on the ground, the walls underneath having simply evaporated.

My visit to Haiti was brief and hastily arranged. The Free Press had been invited to accompany Maj.-Gen. Yvan Blondin, commander of Canada's air force, to witness first-hand a remarkable "air bridge" established to supply Haiti with humanitarian aid. Against the odds, Blondin found a way of getting C-130 Hercules planes in and out of a tiny airstrip in Jacmel, on Haiti's southern coast, doubling the number of Canadian aircraft landing each day. It was not my first experience in this troubled country. I visited Haiti in 1996, when Canada was leading a United Nations mission to bring stability to the chronically unstable nation.

Despite the better efforts of former president Jean Bertrand Aristide, there was little hope among Haitians. The police were in shambles. Unable to get their weekly wages with any regularity, those few police officers who did show up for work often communicated their anger by arriving in civilian clothes. They would go out on patrol in rusty Suburbans, with a dozen or so of them packed into the lumbering truck, the barrels of their sidearms pointed out the windows.

After nearly two weeks of patrols and visits to aid projects, it was hard not to feel despondent. The country was barely functioning. There was no reliable provision of water or electricity. Garbage had been left unattended for so long in Port-au-Prince streets, it was not unusual to find entire streets blocked off by metres-high mounds of rotting waste. I was with Canadian peacekeepers when they swept inner-city parks for preying pedophiles, or patrolling the cemeteries where the more desperate among the homeless sometimes moved into crypts that had been emptied by grave robbers.

I have often replayed those images as Haiti moved from one political and economic crisis to another. And while there have been some improvements in health care, education and the economy, the pace of progress seems out of step with the magnitude of the investment by foreign nations.

It is mostly true Haiti has been hurt as much as it has been helped by our best efforts to fix it. From the indiscriminate kindness of countries like Canada, to the more self-interested meddling of the United States, Haiti is a product of all that is good and bad about humanitarian aid.

If there is hope to be found in this horrible disaster, it is the suggestion an event like this is an opportunity to rebuild the country from the ground up. The big question facing the world is what authority will oversee this reconstruction. Haitian President Rene Preval's administration seems woefully unprepared to undertake a campaign of this magnitude. In Washington, there is talk of "a receivership" that might put the reconstruction efforts in the hand of an as-yet unidentified international organization, or coalition of organizations. Canadians familiar with the concept of "co-management" of First Nations know stripping an afflicted people of self-determination is a desperate measure that has no immediate prospect for lasting success.

There will be money, and there will be good intentions. Two trips to Haiti, 14 years apart, suggest to one observer this is the best, but perhaps last, chance for the world to make it right.

dan.lett@shaw.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 8, 2010 A4