'The Ebony Phoenix' & 'The Second Enlightenment' | Part 01

(Rush Written)
To be Continued...

Part 01
The Ebony Phoenix & The Second Enlightenment

The OlderQuake, The OtherQuakes, The Others'Quakes, 
The EarthQuake & Quaking The World!

The Portuguese Empire through its own science joined by Islamic and Jewish sciences working together, and other European brains (Dutch, Spanish, Italian) made really come true the old idea of a spherical Earth.

Portuguese Sea

“Oh salty sea, how much of your salt

Are tears of Portugal!

Because we crossed you, so many mothers wept,

So many sons prayed in vain!

So many brides remained unmarried

That you might be ours, oh sea!

Was it worthwhile? All is worthwhile

When the spirit is not small.

He who wants to go beyond the Cape.

Has to go beyond pain.

God to the sea peril and the abyss has given 

But it was in it that He mirrored heaven.”

Fernando Pessoa (Portuguese Poet)

Through the opened Oceans a New World was born.

Together with it – as always, within the onus-bonus-onus wheel of History – from light, darkness was born: brute colonialism as the second ugliest son of feudalism, and ethnic slavery as since then and forever the ugliest one.

One place in the New World detached from the rest: the colony of Saint-Domingue, the richest source of the French small Elite wealth.

Darkness had conquered Europe through the fires of Inquisition and the cooling of thoughts (when the “all is well” philosophers begun to appraise that world as the best possible world “under God”).

As always, within the bonus-onus-bonus wheel of History, when unanimity emerges, contradiction installs.

And some new few thinkers had begun to put some tiny new light on that status quo.

Suddenly, the earth and brains big shake came without advice.

Lisbon, Portugal, 1755, November 1st, “All Saints Day” celebration, around 10½ in the morning.

An unprecedented earthquake came, followed by an enormous Tsunami.

Tears everywhere sunk lives, rules and dogmas.

Fires everywhere enlightened brains, hearts and souls.

All-Saints-Day! All the churches were plenty of people.

Most of them, unaware, made their lives last pray.

It was the most devastating earthquake from the history of Europe.

It would change the World forever.

As today, the World was living at the edge, at a crossroads.

By one side, the Philosophy of Optimism, the full domain of the Church, the Feudal system and a very small noblesse’s immense affronting wealth.

By other hand the emerging power of a new class so-called Bourgeois, and arising questionings about Imperial powers and its rulers, and about the Rome’s Church truth-owning omnipotence, and presence.

The impact was tremendous within the Portuguese Empire and elsewhere.

It could not be different as the big Metropolis of five continents possessions was destroyed by an earthquake followed by innumerous aftershocks and an enormous Tsunami whose waves could be watched in some parts of Americas.

The Portuguese catastrophe awakened a myriad of controversies about religion, nature, philosophy, government and launched the first stronger lights towards the 'XVIII Century Enlightment'.

The Inquisition saying that the tragedy was due for the Portuguese’s sins, while the French future Encyclopaedists arguing how it could be if most of the people – about 200,000 – died exactly because they were in the places for seeking salvation, The Lord’s Homes, that fallen down on their heads.

Voltaire, and Kant – amongst many others intellectuals - were some of the most active questioners. Tons of writings and debates were produced.

Remarkable was the reaction of the French philosopher Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet).

Voltaire responded to the Lisbon cataclysm, coming shortly after another deadly earthquake in Lima, Peru (1746), in a series of letters, a lengthy poem and the novella Candide, questioning blind faith in god and the fatalism that the then-dominant philosophy of “Optimism” engendered.

In the preface to his “Poem on the Disaster in Lisbon” (1756) Voltaire wrote mockingly:

“All is well, the heirs of the dead
will increase their fortunes,

masons will make money rebuilding the buildings,

beasts feed off the bodies buried in the debris:

this is the necessary effect of the necessary causes; 

your particular misfortune is nothing, 

you will contribute to the general welfare.”

In Candide (1759), Voltaire reported how, “After the earthquake, which had destroyed three-fourths of the city of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to preserve the kingdom from utter ruin than to entertain the people with an auto-da-fé [faith ritual], it having been decided by the University of Coimbra, that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible preventive of earthquakes.”

Candide’s mentor, the optimist philosopher Pangloss, opines that it is all for the good, “all this is for the very best end, for if there is a volcano at Lisbon it could be in no other spot.” But when Pangloss is hanged for heresy, the earth shakes again. Candide laments:

“If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?”

All those debates lead to an emergent comprehension of ‘the nature of the own nature itself’.

That it could happen elsewhere where no one would be there to suffer or even notice the quake.

The earthquakes and other nature’s manifestations begun to be studied through evolving methods leading to our days' Geology and Earth Sciences so forth.

Religion, philosophy, politics, private property and everything related to life and society begun to be questioned.

A boiling brainstorm flowed alive until culminating on the reported as the most important fact alone of the whole following centuries.

Which was actually completed five years later, and somewhere else.

Coming at a time when bourgeois forces were growing strong enough to burst the straitjacket of feudalism, the Lisbon disaster played a key role in the Enlightenment, intellectual forerunner for the French Revolution of 1789-1804.

1789-1804. The Fall of Bastille, and the victory of The French Revolution whose endurance could not be kept for so long, and few years later the dream seemed to be over under Napoleon ruling.

1791-1804. The seeds of The French Revolution floated over the Atlantic (on maybe the same waves that crossed the ocean when of the Lisbon Tsunami) and arrived in an island that gave them good soil, better climate to grow, and brave gardeners.

The dream reborn “noir” and The French Revolution, actually, only could come true within that land and by the deadlock-tied hands of the oppressed by the own France.

The Liberty Flag regained the skies carried by the Negro strong hands of Saint-Domingue in The Haitian Revolution.

After years of restless fighting against the most powerful empires on earth – as England, Spain, and France - the dreamers won, the dream was not over.

The ideals once expressed in the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” could breathe again.

1804. 

‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’, 

‘L’Union Fait la Force’ 

et L‘Independence ou Mort’!

All burning hearts and minds came to light through 'The Only Successful Slaves’ Revolt of History’, which could proclaim ‘The First Free Nation of The New World’.

A new Nation was born, freed from external and internal rulers: no more a colony under a Metropolis, no more slavery under the heavy wills of ‘people that owned people’.

And an enormous influence, a loud dense voice – not only inspirational but also material and pragmatic -, arose soaring and being spread around the whole Western Hemisphere towards the ears of the entire Old World.

From 'The Mountains beyond Mountains’ brigades went to help the United States Independence.

The ‘Black Jacobins’ struggle echoes won the freedom for all the slaves in the vast French colonial possessions.

The ‘Repiblik Dayiti’ took over the neighbor island-sharing Spanish colony and abolished the slavery there.

A defeated Simon Bolivar have found twice in ‘The Pearl of Antilles’, abridge, shelter, rest, support, food, ammunition, money, ships, weapons, and soldiers to come back and make the independence of the Spanish southern colonies in America. In exchange, only one duty: the end of slavery there.

‘The Black Republic’ sent also troops to fight in The United States Civil War with highlighted participation as in the Savannah Battle.

Defeating the frightening Napoleon troops twice Haiti opened the doors for France giving up in Americas and made feasible the Louisiana Province deal when United States bought very cheap what represents around 23% of its today’s territory and without which there would be no path for the West Conquer.

The Saint-Domingue achievements and tales had a strong impact at both the anti-slavery fighters and the slaves-owners around the other countries where slavery still survived, as in Brazil for instance.

The anti-slavery fighters got hope and will strengthening from the Caribbean History. Talks got hotter, riots emerged, and the fight at a whole gained momentum.

The slave-owners, by other hand, felt threatened, and from their fears some slavery-smoothing new rules were designed to avoid what they used to call “The Saint-Domingue Catastrophe”.

And since then, since 1804 – a year avoided by many "official” historians for a long time – the claims against discriminations about race, origin, faith and so on evolved through time and space with crescent energy.

But with all those merits Haiti was awarded with the very strange prize of the outside emptiness and indifference: no trade, no talk, no support, no recognition, no deal.

And this is the best part as the other is fulfilled with sanctions, isolation, invasions, dictatorship sponsoring, trade traps, and the worst kind of the worst prejudice.

Since then until now, the History of Haiti have become the most extreme and perfect synthesis of History both of the West Hemisphere and of the South Hemisphere.

And wouldn’t be that exaggerated to say that Haiti became the most extreme and perfect synthesis of the whole world so-called Modern Era History: the endless struggle between the Ubuntu Spirit and the Colonialist Starvation.

The 2010 tragedy was not a seismic one.

It is a fully historical, social, economic, political, geopolitical, and, uttermost, human tragedy.

The Quake itself was just the trigger for a two centuries along arming bomb.

Aftermath, we should assure that 'The Ebony Phoenix’ will fly again.

And higher.

And we should align our wings together.

As from Lisbon 1755, from Port-au-Prince 2010 here comes the light.

By the second time in history, the Planet is getting smaller again.

Not through ships but through chips.

The Human Kind, again, is living by the edge, facing the crossroads once more.

Nature has been advising us.

Economy has been advising us.

Yet before both big ongoing alerts, some bright people had listened forwards, as elephants on Tsunamis.

Since some years ago those gifted eyes could envision the urge and design some alternatives on paths for achieving this New New World to come.

This is the time for make the changes happen.

The lessons, we still know them in depth.

Time has come for actually learning from them.

Haiti is the Time Mark, the Turning Point, the Energy born from Earth Revolutions, the Energy born from Peoples’ Revolutions, the Energy born from the Resistance of Peoples that unconditionally always refused to fall on their knees, the Energy born from Peoples’ Resilient Self-Determination.

There is the Energy to Empower the ‘Second Enlightenment’.

In Haiti, History planted the deep roots for Humanity growth.

And this growth means a Whole New Breakthrough Framework on Human Relationships (within, with others, and with Earth), and a Whole Paradigm Shift on World’s Socio-Politic-Economic-Environmental Order.

Haiti’s fate to begin again from scratch is the World’s unique chance to begin again for better.

Again, Aysians will be (this time, I hope, hands by hands with everybody else)… Haitians will be 'The Avengers of The New World'.

And then… And so… And so what?

The best planning tools for the best planners and achievers are not inside but outside the head: two ears willing to listen.

As Haiti is beginning again, let’s begin from the beginning...

To be Continued...

Injured Haitian earthquake survivors' fate is unclear after treatment in the U.S.

Go to Original (Washington Post) >

By Darryl Fears

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 16, 2010


MIAMI -- From down the hall, a high-pitched voice speaking Haitian Creole came booming into Clermond Junior's little hospital room. 

"Junior, sak pase?" -- what's happening?

Myrtho Gracia, a Haitian American nurse, sashayed through the door holding a blue plastic-foam box over her head like a waitress and carried on as though she and Junior were in the middle of Port-au-Prince. "we have curried chicken for you."

Junior, 19, smiled for the first time in hours. "I will enjoy this," he said in Creole, turning away from the half-eaten lunch prepared at Jackson Memorial Hospital. He seemed to forget for a second that half of his body was broken, that his useless left arm lay on his lap like a dinner napkin, that he could slide his thin left leg only a few centimeters, that his slowly healing head wounds, opened by the wall that buried him for two days in Haiti, itched like crazy. He eyed the greasy chicken curry. "I never had it, but I know I will like it."

America is another experience that Junior has never known but is certain he will like.

"Haiti is gone. Haiti is no more," he said, describing the rush of emotion he felt while viewing pictures of the devastation on a news Web site. In Haiti, he had few employment opportunities even before the Jan. 12 earthquake, and now his mother sleeps outdoors there because their house collapsed.

He is ready to embrace America, a fabled land that people in his Port-Au-Prince neighborhood could only talk about. In Miami, his life and his limbs were saved by his Haitian American doctor, Angelo Gousse. Haitian American workers, of which there are many at Jackson Memorial, often stop by to chat, treating him like family.

But Junior isn't part of the American family, and there are questions over whether he should stay here. Gracia would like an answer, saying she would take him in if she could. Opponents of illegal immigration would also like an answer. Some say Haitians should not have been brought to the United States for treatment, while others say they deserve medical attention but should be flown back as soon as they recover.

The question -- stay or go? -- could become a major headache for the Obama administration. Unlike Cubans, Haitian immigrants are often unwelcome in the United States, a double standard with roots in Cold War politics. But advocates for the patients point out that Haiti, one of the poorest nations in the world, lacked adequate health care even in the best of times and that the injured who were saved might be sent back to die.

An uncertain fate

The total number of patients brought to South and Central Florida is about 500. Junior, with his wispy, boyish mustache and fuzzy sideburns crawling down his cheeks, is one of 105 Haitian nationals being treated at Jackson Memorial's Ryder Trauma Center. Hospital officials said charges for the Haiti patients total just under $7.7 million so far, nearly two-thirds of which has not been covered by insurance or other sources.

Some victims are babies without parents. And some are fairly well-known, like Romel Joseph, an esteemed violinist trained at the Julliard School, who survived a three-story fall from his New Victorian Music School during the quake. His back was impaled by carpenter nails in a wall, which crushed his left leg and broke three fingers on one hand.

Their presence in Florida has already generated controversy. Two weeks ago, medical airlifts from Haiti were halted when Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R) complained that, while the state was willing to help, the U.S. military was overburdening it with earthquake victims.

The federal Department of Health and Human Services activated the National Disaster Medical System, which reimburses hospitals for treatment costs. At the same time, the U.S. Agency for International Development started flying patients to Atlanta area hospitals and identified Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Boston as places willing to take patients.

But unresolved is the question of what the future holds for Haitians granted an array of visas to enter the United States. Will they be allowed to apply for Temporary Protective Status, forced to leave, or will some be allowed to walk out of the hospital and blend in with Haitian immigrants in their communities? U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it has yet to determine how to track earthquake victims in this country once they're well.

Protecting her 'baby

Junior said he missed his mother, Suzanna Lindor, and his three sisters, who escaped the earthquake without harm. But, he said through an interpreter, "I would be dead if they had not brought me here." Gousse, his doctor, nodded in agreement.

On Jan. 12, Junior turned on the shower on the second floor of his house and climbed in after checking to see if the water was warm. He was talking to a friend through the curtain when the earth shook. They ran downstairs but didn't make it to the door before a wall and metal grate tumbled down, trapping them for nearly two days.

The falling debris crushed muscle, cracked bones and opened flesh. Dead tissue sent a toxin into Junior's body, causing his kidneys to fail. Gousse came across Junior at the University of Miami medical station set up near the Port-au-Prince airport six days after the earthquake.

"He was swollen," Gousse said. "His face was swollen. He's a thin guy. He was swollen twice his size. He couldn't make urine . . . and the liquid was building up in his body."

Junior needed kidney dialysis. "He didn't need surgery," Gousse said. "You just needed to take over the function of the kidney with a dialysis machine until it's better."

But Haiti couldn't provide that. "The way he looked to me, based on my clinical experience, he would not have made it more than 24 hours. He had difficulty breathing," Gousse said. On Jan. 18, Junior was flown to Miami and placed in Jackson Memorial's intensive care unit.

"He was the baby on my floor," Gracia said. Other Haitian American workers kept popping in to check on him. "We would babysit him," Gracia noted.

Last week, Junior had recovered enough to be released to the hospital's general care unit, and Gracia followed him.

"I have two sons, two grown kids, they're gone," said Gracia, who emigrated from Haiti when she was 18 and has worked at Jackson Memorial for 24 years.

"I am a proud Haitian." She looked down at Junior, a soft-spoken teenager whose future is as cloudy as the dust that shrouds Port-au-Prince.

"I don't mind to get him in my house," she said. "Especially him. He's the youngest guy to come into the ICU. Others have a wife. He's the kid of the floor."

Haiti's business community seeks to help rebuild economy

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Haiti's business community seeks to help rebuild economy 
By Jim Wyss,
McClatchy Newspapers
Stars and Stripes online edition,
Sunday, February 7, 2010

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A few blocks from where men lined up for backbreaking jobs digging corpses from the rubble for about $3 a day, a hotel was selling a ham sandwich for five times that amount.

And as throngs of anxious Haitians jostled for bags of rice being tossed from the back of a U.N. truck, women at a market struggled to find buyers for their overflowing sacks of fruits, grains and vegetables.

Haiti's earthquake pulverized concrete and twisted metal, but it also distorted the nation's economy, as it wiped out thousands of jobs and sparked a rush on humanitarian aid.

Now, as Haitians still dig for their dead and the government struggles to reorganize, the business community is trying to figure out how to jump-start the economy amid a historic opportunity to reshape the nation.

No one knows the exact economic toll of the Jan. 12 earthquake that is thought to have killed 170,000 and left 1 million homeless. But economists speculate that it wiped out at least half of the nation's gross domestic product, or about $3 billion to $4 billion.

In downtown Port-au-Prince, where much of the nation's industry was clustered, about 80 percent of the buildings were destroyed. 'Downtown was the lung and heart of the economy of Haiti and now it's completely a ghost town,' said Reginald Boulos, president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce.

In the days after the earthquake, many businesses saw their stores looted or merchandise lost to fires, he said. Even worse, the administration has failed to articulate a recovery plan. 'We have no idea yet what the government's plans are for downtown,' said Boulos, who lost an auto dealership and grocery stores to the earthquake. 'Not knowing where we are going may be as bad as what happened that day.' Wearing jeans and blue Converse sneakers without laces, Boulos was preparing to host some of the nation's top business leaders at his home to try to begin sketching out a recovery plan.

Among the ideas are bulldozing downtown Port-au-Prince and providing tax breaks for those willing to set up factories in the long-neglected countryside. 'We have to decentralize,' he said. 'This catastrophe is an opportunity to create the new Haiti Inc. where every single Haitian is a shareholder.'

Already the poorest nation in the hemisphere, 80 percent of the population toils under the poverty line.

Unemployment before the quake was thought to be as high as 70 percent and Haiti is heavily reliant on imports and remittances to stay afloat.

But things had been looking up for the country of 9 million. Kidnappings, which had scared away tourists and investors, were dramatically down.

Garment exports were booming under a new trade pact. Inflation was under control. 'I really thought this was going to be Haiti's year,' said Norma Powell, the liaison officer for Brasseire Nationale d'Haiti, which runs the nation's biggest bottling plant and brews the country's only beer, Prestige.

'We were so gung-ho. Tourists were coming back, life was picking up. Now, it's like we crashed and burned.' The quake disrupted the plant's water, milk and beer production lines. Of its 1,450 employees, only about a third have been put back to work. With a little luck, the company hopes to have its factory running at full speed again within two months, she said.

As global aid agencies continue to flood the seaport and airport with food and water, it would be easy to believe that Haiti had lost the ability to feed itself.

While the nation does import food, about 66 percent of workers are involved in agriculture.

And unlike the hurricanes that wiped out crops, the earthquake left farms virtually untouched.

'There are goods and services that are being produced locally, but Haitians don't have the money to buy them,' explained Eric Overvest, the country director of the United Nations Development Program. UNDP has started a work-for-cash program, which hopes to inject money into the economy by hiring up to 220,000 people to clear rubble. But the United Nations has not reached out to the private sector yet, and that is a mistake, said Boulus from the chamber of commerce.

Haiti has water-bottling companies, bakeries and pasta factories, he said, yet aid agencies are flying in many of those products. 'None of these Haitian companies have been used so far to produce things that the international community could have purchased here locally,' he said.

Some also fear that the influx of rice, oil and other staples could undercut local farmers.

Marcus Prior, spokesman for the World Food Program, is sensitive to those concerns and said the rice distribution effort is designed to cover about half the caloric needs of the targeted population. 'We fully expect people to supplement what we give them with other produce,' he said. 'But we are aware that there may also be an associated drop in food prices with this large scale distribution. But that will help the people that have been worst affected by the earthquake.'

Prices may still drop, but a recent stroll through a local market suggested they haven't yet. Vendors said the prices of oil, beans, rice, bread and noodles were increasing, and the price of goods imported from neighboring Dominican Republic have soared. 'Prices are up at least 30 percent,' said Cherlange Rosius, who buys food wholesale and distributes it to local vendors. And a roll of Dominican salami that cost 15 gourdes, or about 45 cents, before the earthquake cost almost six times that much.

Responding to the influx of journalists and aid workers, the service sector has also jacked up prices: $4 Coca-Colas are not uncommon, and at hotels too damaged to rent rooms, guests can spend up to $100 a night to pitch tents in the parking lot.

The massive inflow of aid dollars has also caused the local currency to spike about 25 percent. It has since retreated, but an overpriced gourde could strangle Haitian exports, which may emerge as one of the bright spots in the post-earthquake economy.

There will be other bright spots, too.

Much of the city needs to be razed and rebuilt, which already has local and foreign companies jockeying for contracts, and scrap and cement-recycling companies are eyeing the mountains of rubble the earthquake generated."

Haiti, Forgive Us

Go to Truthdig >

Go to Democracy Now! >

Posted on Feb 9, 2010

By Amy Goodman

The tragedy of the Haitian earthquake continues to unfold, with slow delivery of aid, the horrific number of amputations performed out of desperate medical necessity, more than a million homeless, perhaps 240,000 dead, hunger, dehydration, the emergence of infections and waterborne diseases, and the approach of the rainy season, which will be followed by the hurricane season.

Haiti has suffered a massive blow, an earthquake for which its infrastructure was not prepared, after decades—no, centuries—of military and economic manipulation by foreign governments, most notably the United States and France.

Haiti was a slave plantation controlled by France.

In 1804, inspired by Toussaint L’Ouverture (after whom the now barely functioning airport in Port-au-Prince is named), the slaves rebelled, founding the world’s first black republic.

Under military threat from France in 1825, Haiti agreed to pay reparations to France for lost “property,” including slaves that French owners lost in the rebellion.

It was either agree to pay the reparations or have France invade Haiti and reimpose slavery.

Many Haitians believe that original debt, which Haiti dutifully paid through World War II, committed Haiti to a future of poverty that it has never been able to escape.

(While France, as part of the deal, recognized Haiti’s sovereignty, slave-owning politicians in the United States, like Thomas Jefferson, refused to recognize the black republic, afraid it would inspire a slave revolt here. The U.S. withheld formal recognition until 1862.)

The U.S. Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 until 1934.

In 1956, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier took control in a military coup and declared himself president for life, initiating a period of brutal, bloody dictatorship, with U.S. support.

Papa Doc died in 1971, at which point his 19-year-old son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, took over, maintaining the same violent dictatorial control until he was driven into exile by popular revolt in 1986.

Jubilee USA, a network calling for elimination of debt owed by poor countries, estimates that Baby Doc alone diverted at least $500 million in public funds to his private accounts, and that 45 percent of Haiti’s debt in recent decades was accumulated during the corrupt reign of the Duvaliers.

Loans from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) imposed “structural adjustment” conditions on Haiti, opening its economy to cheap U.S. agricultural products.

Farmers, unable to compete, stopped growing rice and moved to the cities to earn low wages, if they were lucky enough to get one of the scarce sweatshop jobs.

People in the highlands were driven to deforest the hills, converting wood into salable charcoal, which created an ecological crisis—destabilizing hillsides, increasing the destructiveness of earthquakes and causing landslides during the rainy season.

Haiti’s first democratically elected president was Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest committed to the poor.

He was elected in 1990, then ousted in a military coup in 1991.

In 1994, with Haitian refugees flooding into Florida, the Clinton administration was forced to restore Aristide to power, but only with additional structural-adjustment demands.

Aristide was re-elected in 2000, only to be deposed again in a U.S.-backed coup in 2004, Haiti’s bicentennial.

The destruction of Haiti’s rice industry, which was replaced with U.S. government-subsidized rice that Haitians refer to as “Miami rice,” as well as the sale of critical state-owned enterprises, like Haiti’s sole flour mill and cement factory, have left the country dependent on foreign trade and aid, keeping Haiti at a permanent disadvantage.

It is critical now to cancel Haiti’s ongoing foreign debt, so that the country can devote its scant resources to rebuilding and not to repaying debt.

The G-7 finance ministers met in Canada this week and announced the forgiveness of the bilateral debt between member states and Haiti.

But the World Bank, IMF and IDB debts remain (the IMF controversially promised a $100 million loan after the earthquake, eliciting condemnation, and has since pledged to convert it to a grant).

Earthquakes alone do not create disasters of the scale now experienced in Haiti.

The wealthy nations have for too long exploited Haiti, denying it the right to develop in a secure, sovereign, sustainable way.

The global outpouring of support for Haitians must be matched by long-term, unrestricted grants of aid, and immediate forgiveness of all that country’s debt.

Given their role in Haiti’s plight, the United States, France and other industrialized nations should be the ones seeking forgiveness.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
 
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

In Haiti, Practicing Medicine From Afar

Go to Original (The New York Times) >

By MILT FREUDENHEIM

Published: February 8, 2010

In the desperate days soon after the earthquake in Haiti last month, foreign medical volunteers relied on improvised, low-tech devices for consultations and coordination. But American doctors are switching to more sophisticated technology to help improve public health in Haiti, one of the world’s poorest nations.

“We are in this for the long haul,” said Scott C. Simmons, whose title at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine is director of telehealth.

Telehealth, better known as telemedicine, is an offshoot of the space program; it was developed by National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the 1960s to serve the astronauts. In the live, real-time version, it involves a video hookup between a patient on the scene and a doctor or other health professional in a hospital or office. Sometimes a doctor or nurse on the scene will consult via telemedicine with a specialist elsewhere.

At the University of Miami’s 240-bed tent hospital near the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where volunteer surgeons from the United States have performed 1,000 operations since the Jan. 12 earthquake, doctors should soon be able to consult via satellite with specialists in Miami and other medical centers, said Mr. Simmons, an engineer who helped develop portable telemedicine for NASA’s space shuttles.

The satellite connection should provide sufficient bandwidth for telemedicine consultations; meanwhile, the Haiti field hospital is making do with high-speed Internet connections donated by a Miami philanthropist and connections through Access Haiti, a wireless regional network linked through the neighboring Dominican Republic.

It is also getting help from a network of volunteer ham radio operators like Jack Satterfield, a fisherman from St. Petersburg, Fla., who helped get an imperiled day-old infant from Haiti to the Navy hospital ship Comfort offshore. “Their doctor talked to our doctor” via the military’s radio system for amateurs, Mr. Satterfield said.

The Comfort, part of the United States military’s Southern Command, has 82 physicians and 136 nurses. Capt. Miguel Cubano, surgeon general of the command, said he was in “discussions to set up a long-term presence in Haiti.” Among other things, Captain Cubano said, it could provide telemedicine consultations with the Center for the Intrepid, a military rehabilitation hospital in San Antonio.

The ship is no stranger to Haiti. The Comfort provided assistance after the hurricane last year. “Haiti was a priority for us before the earthquake,” said Captain Cubano, who is also a surgeon.

Southcom, short for Southern Command, has a partnership in advanced technology with the University of Miami.

Dr. Anne E. Burdick, associate dean of telehealth and clinical outreach at the Miller school, said the university’s program could be “a hub for connecting Haitian patients with health care providers in several U.S. telemedicine programs around the country.”

In a test with the Southern Command, Dr. Burdick said, the school used live teleconferencing to link kidney transplant patients in Guyana with a surgical team at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

John Linkous, chief executive of the American Telemedicine Association, a trade and advocacy group in Washington, said it was often hard to persuade busy physicians to stay for long in developing countries. After a visit, however, they are often ready to help out with telemedicine consultations.

The video sessions are often prepared in advance with secure Internet messaging, including pictures, X-rays and pathology reports. More often, the exchange is entirely by Internet, with a response sent back within hours.

Dr. S. Ward Casscells, a Houston cardiologist who was assistant secretary of defense for health affairs under President George W. Bush, noted that telemedicine had become simpler and less expensive in the era of the Internet and advanced cellphones.

Dr. Casscells urged the military to leave telemedicine equipment behind when the disaster eases in Haiti and train local medical people to use it.

Why Investing NOW in Haiti is Good Bussiness for You (Excerpts & Videos)

It is a good idea to read the excerpts, watch the videos, and listen (and spread the word) to the Very Special Speakers at the "Haiti Special Session" at Davos’ World Economic Forum:

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> Dr. Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman,
World Economic Forum; 
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> William J. Clinton, Founder, William J. Clinton Foundation;
President of the United States (1993-2001); 
UN Special Envoy to Haiti;
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> Denis O’Brien, Executive Chairman, Digicel, Ireland; 
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> Celso Amorim, Foreign Minister, Brazil;
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> Helen E. Clark, Administrator, 
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP); 
Former New Zealand's Prime-Minister;  
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> Robert Greenhill, 
Managing Director and Chief Business Officer, 
World Economic Forum; 
Former President of Canada’s International Development Agency. 
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PART 01: "...Disasters of this magnitude serve as a harsh reminder of how fragile life can sometimes be, but it is also during these moments that we are reminded of the common humanity which we all share..."

> Dr. Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman, World Economic Forum.

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PART 02: "...The World Economic Forum has agreed, Klaus has, to work with us in partnership to work between now and the Clinton Global Initiative in September and then for the next couple of years to increase private sector involvement in Haiti...." 

   

> William J. Clinton, Founder, William J. Clinton Foundation; President of the United States (1993-2001); UN Special Envoy to Haiti.

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PART 03:

"...the Haitian government had a commitment to modernize the country and the UN said – the UN Secretary General said, ‘We want you to go in there and help them by making sure that the donor nations and international organizations honor their commitment and we get more private investment’. And I said that I would do it, but only if I were helping the Haitians to implement their own plan, that our goal this time should not be helping the country, but helping the country to stand on its own, to determine its own destiny, to be sustainable in a different and fundamentally positive way... Don’t tell me they can’t do this... Here’s the most important thing those of you who are on the outside of this need to know: 97% of the people who came to the investment conference agreed with Denis O’Brien. They said they were surprised by the positive opportunities available there for them. I want ‘them’ to become you..." 

 

> William J. Clinton, Founder, William J. Clinton Foundation; President of the United States (1993-2001); UN Special Envoy to Haiti.

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PART 04:  

"...We’ve invested about $370 million over the last four years. It’s a terrific place to do business, believe it or not. The government policies are very favourably disposed towards foreign direct investors. But more importantly, Haiti has a very young population and, you know, we have 900 staff, they’re a hugely talented people. They’re very committed, they’re very hard-working and, you know, there are 10 million consumers in the marketplace (...) By way of example, just to give you an example of how committed people are, I met a man the other day. He came back to work. He lost five of his family and he still showed up for work. So, you know, I think Haitian workers, Haitian staff, Haitian managers – and most of our business is now run by Haitian managers – are, you know, some of the best people in the world. And, you know, you probably will ask yourselves this morning ‘where are the opportunities for me and my business?’ And, first of all, there’s opportunities in tourism, particularly in the northern part around Cape Haitian, there’s some wonderful beaches, already the cruise liners are coming in there. There’s hotel groups like Choice Hotels, Best Western are coming in there and investing money. But also in the area of light manufacturing, particularly in textiles and apparel, because there is a thing called the ‘HOPE II Agreement’, which allows manufacturers of these goods to have very favorable tariff treatments in the United States and I know the President has been involved in pushing that. There’s also opportunities for food production. In food production, a Taiwanese group are putting 16 million into rice production. But also for people who are in the rebuilding, reconstruction, construction business, property development, I think there’s an enormous opportunity for those people to come in now and make very solid investments. Also, in infrastructure, electricity generation as well. And, you know, we, in the space of four or five years since we been there we’ve never had any problem with our business. We’ve never had any difficulties with the government. And that’s why I actually think that this market is at the doorstep of the wealthiest consumer market in the United States and most of us in this room have investments all over the world, but they’re generally pretty boring, if you like, you know, because they’re all, you know, they’re doing – they’re making money, creating jobs in other countries and that, but Haiti is not boring. It’s challenging, but it’s also a way where you can actually strengthen your management team by actually sending them there and blood them in this new market. And I’d have to say, you know, Haiti is wide open for business and for those of you who are looking for a low-cost manufacturing location right close to the US, please go and register today at the Haiti desk or get in touch with the Clinton Global Initiative, because within the CGI we are really trying to push investment. I will personally go and make a presentation to you, even though I’m not the foreign direct investment agency for Haiti. But, you know, I just can’t strongly, you know, urge you enough to actually do something. And, you know, do it for the right reasons. Not just do it for altruistic reasons, but to do it for economic reasons, because Haiti is a great country and tomorrow it’s going to be even a better country..."

 

> Denis O’Brien, Executive Chairman, Digicel, Ireland.  

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PART 05: 

"...The markets are reviving, even the street markets and certainly it’s not boring. And actually, what I would say, just as an aside, I didn’t think to say that, but even in the aspect of art, painting and music, that’s also an area which can bring money and which can be used (...) I always came to this Forum only to speak about trade and WTO and so on. This is the time to show the WTO is not only about profit and greed. This is the time for all the countries to offer – all the countries – all developed countries and all developing countries that can do so to offer duty-free quota-free to all Haitian products which facilitated rules of origin. That is what would really make a difference."  

   

> Celso Amorim, Foreign Minister, Brazil.

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PART 06:  

"...As President Clinton said, there was an economic recovery plan driven by the government of Haiti in place before this catastrophe. That plan must not stop. That plan must be accelerated. There are large parts of Haiti which were not directly physically impacted where, as President Clinton said, the work can go on now. So, I’ve come today representing the Secretary General to be extraordinarily supportive of the initiative that President Clinton and the World Economic Forum are putting to you and to say that the role of the private sector, the role of the foundations, the role of the NGOs, this is just so important, alongside the role that governments can play and alongside the role of the development banks and the multilateral institutions. It’s about unique partnerships where everybody plays a role in supporting Haiti at this hour of need to build back better and to actually renew..." 

 

> Helen E. Clark, Administrator, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Former New Zealand's Prime-Minister.

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PART 07: 

"...I’m very proud of the leadership role of Canada, together with Brazil and the United States and others on this issue. Well, what we’re calling for now goes beyond that. We’re calling for a global partnership and we’re actually calling upon people to go beyond engaging – beyond giving, to engaging. To actually, after the TV cameras have gone, to continue with the hard work of creating work, sustainable work through sustainable jobs for Haitians. And we actually think the power of the international business community could be a major force behind that. So how do we hope to do that? Well, as President Clinton mentioned, we’ll be working under the Haitian leadership with a Haitian economic development plan. What we’ll be doing, together with the Clinton Foundation, is we’ll be working in collaboration gathering together those business leaders here who are interested in engaging and actually committing to procuring, potentially looking at investing, partnering to help build Haitian jobs and Haitian businesses. (...) the theme of this year’s Davos is ‘Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild’ and we’re saying we should rethink how we engage in these challenging situations. We should redesign how we work together and we’re going to be a model of that and together we can rebuild Haiti..."

 

> Robert Greenhill, Managing Director and Chief Business Officer, World Economic Forum, Former President of Canada’s International Development Agency. 

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Related Links:

1. Full Video (ENG|FRA|DEU)
2. Full Transcript (ENG)
3. World Economic Forum
4. Clinton Global Initiative
5. Brazilian Government | Operação Haiti (POR)
6. UNDP - United Nations Development Program (ENG|ESP|FRA)
7. Canada's International Development Agency (ENG|FRA)
8. Embassy of Haiti, Washington D.C. - USA
9. Digicel Group
10. Google for Haiti
    
    

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The Road to Recovery - How Haiti can learn from Indonesia.

Go to Original (Newsweek) >

By Joshua Kurlantzick | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 5, 2010

From the magazine issue dated Feb 15, 2010

As rescue workers frantically try to save Haiti's injured, comfort its newly orphaned children, and prevent full-scale riots over supplies of food and water, few have had time to ponder the country's long-term reconstruction.

Yet it is during the very early days of relief efforts that the foundations for a successful—or disastrous—long-term recovery are laid. Fortunately, there is a recent example of reconstruction success to build upon.

In December 2004 I was in southern Thailand when the tsunami hit, devastating not only Thailand but also Sri Lanka, India, and Indonesia.

With bodies piling up on beaches and shellshocked survivors searching for relatives, it seemed hard to imagine a return to anything like normalcy.

Yet within a year, most of southern Thailand looked as though nothing had happened, and five years after the tsunami, even Aceh, the place hit hardest, had rebuilt its infrastructure, integrated local people in the reconstruction, and ended a decades-old civil conflict that had killed at least 15,000 people. 

There are lessons here for Haiti.

First, the tsunami rebuilding demonstrated the importance of getting survivors involved immediately in their own recovery.

Many organizations operating in Aceh tasked survivors to handle home building, basic medical care, and other jobs.

This kind of strong leadership on the ground in Aceh (and by the government in Jakarta) allowed the reconstruction to be seen as an Indonesian process, and although people in Aceh might not have been thrilled by every element of the rebuilding, they did not see it as an alien process imposed upon them by outsiders.

A similar process will have to occur in Haiti.

Before the earthquake, there was a large coterie of NGOs there, with many of them led by Haitian senior staff.

Despite pleas by some Haitians for the U.S. to save their nation, in the long run these Haitian aid professionals will have to take charge.

Equally important is that the international community moves swiftly to ensure that speculators don't move in and buy up land, as they did in some of the hardest-hit parts of Thailand after the tsunami.

Like most developing nations, Thailand had a weak system of formal land title, which left survivors vulnerable to pressure from developers seeking to buy up coastal property.

Facing similar threats, Haiti should consider a short-term freeze on land sales in Port-au-Prince.

The ultimate success of the reconstruction will depend on effective collaboration among major donors.

In Indonesia, many large donors in Aceh combined their assistance in one pool, reducing waste and ensuring that funding went to needs identified by the Indonesian government, not by outsiders.

Backed by this coordinated donor effort, Jakarta then set up a centralized agency, based in the capital of Aceh, to oversee projects.

Yet in Haiti, lack of coordination has already become a problem.

European relief groups have chafed at what they see as America's dominance of the relief effort and, in particular, American control of Port-au-Prince airport.

Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Bolivia's Evo Morales have accused Washington of using the earthquake as a pretext for occupying Haiti, as it did in the early 20th century.

The bickering bodes poorly for a repeat of the successful post-tsunami effort.

In the long term, there is reason to hope for a political breakthrough.

In Aceh, the devastation damaged the fighting capacity of insurgents battling for an independent state and created an impetus for the government and the rebels to work together on rebuilding, since neither side wanted to add to the tragic death toll.

Within a year of the tsunami, rebels had given up their separatist demands and the Indonesian government had begun drawing down its forces in Aceh, paving the way for a peace deal.

Haiti might reap similar rewards in its relationship with the Dominican Republic, with which it shares the island of Hispaniola.

Far wealthier than Haiti, the Dominican Republic has long feared waves of Haitian immigration, and Haitians have reacted in fury to what they have perceived as the mistreatment of migrants from Haiti to the other side of the island.

But after the earthquake, crowds of Dominicans crossed into Haiti to help.

In the reconstruction, the two nations could cooperate to build Haiti's infrastructure, loosen restrictions on migration, and boost trade.

If they can, it might be another step in Haiti's long road to recovery.

Kurlantzick is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Haiti: the land that wouldn't lie (by Peter Hallward)

The land that wouldn't lie

Peter Hallward

Published 28 January 2010

Go to Original (New Statesman) >

The Haitian people overthrew slavery, uprooted dictators and foreign military rule, and elected a liberation theologian as president. The west has made them pay for their audacity.

After weeks of intense media attention, some of the causes of Haiti's glaring poverty are obvious: years of chronic underinvestment, disadvantageous terms of trade, deforestation, soil erosion.

What is less well understood is that -- natural disasters aside -- the fundamental reasons for Haiti's current destitution originate as responses to Haitian strength, rather than as the result of Haitian weakness, corruption or incompetence.

Haiti is the only place in the world where colonial slavery was abolished by the slaves themselves, in the face of implacable violence. As historians of the revolution that began there in 1791 have often pointed out, there is good reason to consider it the most subversive event in modern history.

Independent Haiti was surrounded by slave colonies in the Caribbean and flanked by slave-owning economies in northern, central and southern America.

The three great imperial powers of the day -- France, Spain and Britain -- sent all the troops at their disposal to try to crush the uprising; incredibly, Haitian armies led by Toussaint l'Ouverture and then Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated them one after the other. By late 1803, to the astonishment of contemporary observers, Haitian armies had managed to break the chains of colonial slavery not at their weakest link, but at their strongest.

This extraordinary victory provoked an extraordinary backlash. The war killed a third of Haiti's people and left its cities and plantations in ruins.

When it was finally over, the imperial powers closed ranks and, appalled by what the French foreign minister called a "horrible spectacle for all white nations", imposed a blockade designed to isolate and stifle this most troubling "threat of a good example".

France re-established the trade and diplomatic relations essential to the new country's survival only when Haiti agreed, 20 years after winning independence, to pay its old colonial master enormous amounts of "compensation" for the loss of its slaves and colonial property -- an amount roughly equal to the annual French budget at the time.

With its economy shattered by the colonial wars, Haiti could repay this debt only by borrowing, at extortionate rates of interest, vast sums from French banks, which did not receive the last instalment until 1947.

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's request that France pay back some of this money, in the run-up to the bicentennial celebration of independence in 2004, encouraged the former colonial power to help overthrow his government that year.

New plantations

The slaves who won the war against the French were determined, above all, to avoid any return to a plantation economy or its industrial equivalent.

Over the course of the 19th century, large parts of Latin America, as well as much of Europe and Europe's colonies, were ravaged by the systematic expropriation of peasant farms, and of collectively or indigenously owned land and resources.

In Haiti, however, there was significant resistance to such trends, nourished by exceptionally resilient forms of communal solidarity and popular culture -- for instance, a reliance on collective work (konbits), widely shared religious affiliations and a rich tradition of oral history.

This resistance in turn solicited powerful countermeasures, including, from 1915 until 1934, the first and most damaging of an apparently unstoppable series of US military occupations.

The Americans abolished an irritating clause in Haiti's constitution that had barred foreigners from owning Haitian property, took over the national bank, reorganised the economy to ensure more regular payments of foreign debt, imposed forced labour on the peasantry, and expropriated swaths of land for the benefit of new plantations, such as those operated by the US-owned Haitian American Sugar Company.

As many as 50,000 peasants were dispossessed in northern Haiti alone.

Most importantly, the Americans transformed Haiti's army into an instrument capable of overcoming popular opposition to these developments.

By 1918, peasant resistance gave rise to a full-scale insurgency, led by Charlemagne Péralte; US troops responded with what one worried commander described as the "practically indiscriminate killing of natives", "the most startling thing of its kind that has ever taken place in the Marine Corps".

The next phase in the "modernisation" of the Haitian economy was contracted out to the noiriste dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who came to power in 1957 through a rigged election in which he won only a quarter of the votes garnered by his main rival.

Four years later, Duvalier ripped up the last shreds of the constitution when he arranged for his re-election, winning 1,320,748 votes to zero.

Duvalier's determination to gain complete control over the country encountered resistance not only among the rural poor, but also among more cosmopolitan sections of the elite.

He overcame both problems by supplementing the army he inherited from its US patrons with a more home-grown paramilitary force, nicknamed the "Tontons Macoutes" after a child-snatching bogeyman from Creole mythology.

The paranoid ferocity of Duvalier's regime has long been the stuff of legend. In the autumn of 1964, for instance, after a dozen young men in the south-western city of Jérémie launched a reckless insurgency, Duvalier's militia publicly slaughtered hundreds of their kin.

By the mid-1960s, nearly 80 per cent of Haiti's professionals and intellectuals had fled to safety abroad, and most of them never returned.

Estimates of the total number of people killed under Duvalier vary between 30,000 and 50,000. "Never has terror had so bare and ignoble an object," reflected Graham Greene (whose 1966 novel, The Comedians, is set in Duvalier's Haiti).

The CIA was impressed with the result, noting that by the 1970s "most Haitians [were] so completely downtrodden as to be politically inert".

"Death plan"

Such downtreading was the precondition for international imposition of the neoliberal policies that began to reshape Haiti's economy when Jean-Claude Duvalier inherited his father's office as "president-for-life" in 1971. These policies were designed to turn the country into the kind of place international investors tend to like; Haitians soon started to refer to them as the "death plan".

This plan has stifled public spending and forced the privatisation of Haiti's (often highly lucrative) public assets, while accelerating the reorientation of the country's economy away from agrarian autonomy and towards urban hyperexploitation. The case of rice production -- the staple food for most of the population -- is especially significant.

In the mid-1980s, local farmers were still able to produce almost all the rice Haitians consumed, but the last tariffs protecting Haitian farmers were removed in the mid-1990s and imports now account for two-thirds of consumption. Domestic production is now further undercut by the vast amounts of additional "free" rice that are dumped on Haiti every year through the ministry of USAID grantees, in particular the Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist and other like-minded churches.

Increases in the garment and light manufacturing sector were supposed to compensate for agricultural collapse. For a while, the lowest wages in the hemisphere encouraged mainly American companies or contractors to employ roughly 80,000 people in this area, while military and paramilitary coercion kept the threat of organised labour safely at bay.

By the end of the 1990s, however, a combination of international competition and local "instability" had reduced the number of people employed in sweatshops to barely 20,000, and their wages (averaging $2 a day) had fallen to less than 20 per cent of 1980 levels.

Bitter experience has forced the Haitian poor to improvise robust ways of defending themselves against their oppressors.

Over the course of the 1980s, opposition to both Duvalierist repression and neoliberal economic policies inspired a powerful popular mobilisation.

This was able first to "uproot" Duvalier fils and his Macoutes in 1986 and then, in 1990, after an army crackdown that killed another thousand people or so, to overcome direct military rule.

It forced the army's international backers reluctantly to sanction Haiti's first ever round of genuine democratic elections, which in early 1991 brought the liberation theologian Aristide to power on an anti-capitalist, anti-army agenda.

Haiti was the first country in Latin America to dare choose a liberation theologian as its president (twice), and this is a crucial but often neglected aspect of its recent history.

The Catholic Church had long been a solid pillar of the status quo, and its partial conversion in the 1970s into a well-organised vehicle for the "self-emancipation of the oppressed" reverberated throughout the region.

Pentagon officials were quick to realise, as one American military figure put it, that "the most serious threat to US interests was not secular Marxist-Leninism or organised labour, but liberation theology".

Pope Jean-Paul II and his successor, Joseph Ratzinger, reached the same conclusion as their American counterparts on the religious right.

Thirty years ago, in Haiti, there was only a tiny handful of small evangelical churches preaching political resignation and passive reliance on God's grace; today there are more than 500 of them.

Yet Aristide's election in 1990 changed the balance of power in Haiti for ever. Political violence came to an abrupt and exceptional stop. "We have become the subjects of our own history," Aristide said, a couple of years before his election, and "we refuse from now on to be the objects of that history".

Grotesque inequalities

That refusal remains the key to understanding the course of Haitian politics ever since. Haiti isn't only the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere; it is now also the most unequal in terms of its division of wealth and power. A tiny minority lives in paranoid luxury, surrounded by millions of the poorest people on earth. From the perspective of its elite, Haiti's main political problem is very simple: how, once the door to democracy has been prised open, might it be possible to preserve such a grotesquely inequitable distribution of property and privilege?

When Aristide was first elected, it was still possible to solve the problem in the usual way, by slamming the door shut. In September 1991, another US-backed military coup cut short Haiti's "transition to democracy". When the US eventually allowed a hamstrung Aristide to return in late 1994, he still managed to transform Haitian politics overnight, by abolishing the army that had deposed him.

A central priority for the businessmen and sweatshop owners whose interests were previously protected by the army has, understandably, been to restore or replace it. The need to do so became still more acute when Aristide was re-elected in 2000 with an even bigger share of the vote, backed up for the first time by a political organisation, Fanmi Lavalas, which won roughly 90 per cent of the seats in parliament.

The subsequent ten years of struggle in Haiti are best understood in terms of this basic alternative: Lavalas or the army. As the conflicts of the past decade confirm, there is no better way for political elites to deflect awkward questions than by redefining them in terms of crime, security and stability -- terms, in other words, that allow soldiers rather than people to resolve them.

Ruthless application of this strategy after the Lavalas election victory in 2000 led to the internationally sponsored coup of early 2004, just in time to squash any celebration of the bicentenary of Haitian independence. Since they could no longer rely on Haiti's own army, in order to overthrow a duly elected government for the second time, US troops were obliged to lever Aristide out of Port-au-Prince themselves.

In mid-2004, a large United Nations "stabilisation" force took over the job of pacifying a resentful population from soldiers sent by the US, France and Canada, and by the end of 2006 another several thousand of Aristide's supporters were dead.

Under pressure

Last year, the current president, René Préval, who ostensibly governs this UN protectorate, agreed to renew its stabilisation mandate, to persevere with the privatisation of Haiti's remaining public assets, to veto a proposal to increase the minimum wage to $5 a day, and to bar Fanmi Lavalas, along with several other political parties, from participating in the next round of legislative elections.

The decision taken by US and UN commanders in charge of the disaster relief effort, to prioritise military and security objectives over civilian-humanitarian ones, has already caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths. Plane after plane packed with essential emergency supplies was diverted away from the disaster zone, in order to allow for the build-up of a huge and entirely unnecessary US military force. Many thousands of people were left to die in the ruins of lower Port-au-Prince, while international rescue teams concentrated their efforts on a few locations (such as the Montana Hotel or the UN headquarters) that could also be enclosed within a "secure perimeter".

For the same reason, throughout the first week of the disaster, desperately needed medical supplies were reserved for field hospitals set up near the US-controlled airport and other "secure zones". Hospitals in "insecure" Port-au-Prince itself, overwhelmed with dying patients, have had to perform untold numbers of amputations without anaesthetic or medication. Still more "insecure" areas such as Carrefour and Léogane -- the places closest to the earthquake's epicentre -- received no significant aid for at least ten days after the disaster struck.

Unless prevented by renewed popular mobilisation in both Haiti and beyond, the perverse international emphasis on security will continue to distort the reconstruction effort, and with it the configuration of Haitian politics for some time to come. As reconstruction funds accumulate, pressure to expropriate what remains of Haiti's public services and collectively owned land is sure to be accompanied by pressure to speed up the growth of Haiti's booming security industry, and perhaps to restore -- no doubt in close co-operation with the current occupying power -- the army that Aristide managed to demobilise in 1995.

What is already certain is that if further militarisation proceeds unchecked, the victims of the January earthquake won't be the only avoidable casualties of 2010.

Peter Hallward teaches philosophy at Middlesex University and is the author of "Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment"