Haiti Goes From Bad to Worse

One year after the earthquake, former dictator Baby Doc has returned to Haiti. Expect more misery ahead.

What to do about Haiti?

How can Canada improve the situation, a year after the earthquake and the return of Baby Doc Duvalier?

The answer: Nothing. More devastation ahead.

In Haiti, some 95% of the rubble resulting from the quake has still to be removed. Without moving the rubble, how can reconstruction begin?

The answer: It can’t, and won’t.

A million are living in tent cities a year later. About the only significant change is a surge in pregnancies after the quake – two-thirds of them unexpected, or unplanned. And a plunge in the age of these mothers.

Some predicted this as soon as word of the catastrophic quake  got out. No amount of humanitarian aid will change things. Haiti seems one of those corrupt, basket economies that defies improvement.

Worse, now, that Baby Doc is back.

Aside from blaming Nepalese troops on UN duty for the cholera outbreak, there’s very little evidence of accountability in Haiti.

Regardless of how cholera started, lack of clean water is an invitation for cholera and  other water-born diseases.

We are told that two-thirds of $5 billion pledged ($1.5 billion from the  U.S.) to Haiti for reconstruction, has not reached the island, is unspent or has been stolen.

There’s no evidence that Haitians are taking it upon themselves to rebuild their country. The regime wants aid money more than it wants outsiders telling them what to do.

Since it became the first black independent country in the Western hemisphere via a slave revolt (1804), Haiti has stagnated.

The success of the Dominican Republic, which shares the island (and which Haiti once sought to conquer), is a rebuke of Haiti’s failure as a productive state.

Even before the earthquake, Haiti was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the greatest recipient of foreign aid. It is also one of the hemisphere’s more corrupt regimes.

Perhaps this reputation deterred many from providing aid -- and those who initially pledged financial aid from delivering it. Unknown millions have been diverted from reconstruction projects into individual pockets and bank accounts.

While those in charge in Haiti prefer money to bodies coming to help them, they have got to be persuaded that more money is unlikely. The only constructive form of aid is people who know how to build and who are willing to show Haitians how to do it.

Haitians as people are able, witness all those who make successes of their lives in Canada and the U.S.

For the past year, newspapers and media have become sob-sisters for Haiti, seeking to touch heartstrings in a way that will loosen purse strings. The Toronto Star worships a Haitian child named “Lovely,” while the Sun waxes eloquent about a child called “Lily.” It’s as if gushing over these endearing children helps Haiti rehabilitate itself.

The solution to Haiti’s future welfare should lie in Haiti itself, guided by Haitians. Its leaders have tended towards tyranny and corruption.

Haiti doesn’t need a modern Jean-Jacques Dessalines who won independence for Haiti in 1804, declared himself emperor, killed thousands and was assassinated in 1806.

But it could use another Toussaint l’Overature, a military genius who led the slave revolt after the 1792 French revolution, and who died neglected in a French prison in 1803 (“I was born a slave with the soul of a free man”).

Now Baby Doc is back in Haiti – more misery ahead.

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