The sheer horror of conditions in Haiti six days after the earthquake has traumatised its population and a watching world. This is made worse by the huge logistical and planning problems in dealing with the catastrophe. Tens of thousands of dead bodies wait to be buried, many more injured people need treatment, food and water shortages are severe and disease threatens even more lives. Haiti’s comprehensive ill-preparedness for this disaster stands starkly revealed.
The challenge facing its own people and all those working with them is to plan a sustainable recovery capable of tackling the impoverished human and physical infrastructure making the earthquake far worse than it needed to be. That can only be done in stages. There are first the rescue, medical, clearance, feeding and emergency accommodation tasks essential to minimise further deaths and disease. Governmental authority has all but collapsed, and so have the possible alternative structures offered by the United Nations force there whose leadership was killed. The US is filling the vacuum but faces a logistical nightmare in the capital Port-au-Prince, made worse by uncoordinated and duplicated emergency aid. Unless this rescue stage is tackled effectively and immediately, an even worse humanitarian crisis looms. A way must be found to enable the UN to co-operate with regional powers like the US and Brazil to establish an interim authority capable of working with the Haitians themselves.
Assessing the extent of the damage to Haiti’s society and economy will take months but must begin soon if proper plans for reconstructing them are to be put in place. Before this earthquake it was one of the world’s poorest states, with great social disparities, most people unemployed, its rural landscape stripped of forests. Its political system has been dysfunctional for generations, the occasional surges of radicalism successively submerged by US interference and local corruption. Reconstruction cannot simply reproduce what was there before, but must offer a different future to a people who will be traumatised for a generation by these events. That will mean cancelling external debts, directing aid towards alternative centres of its society and finding new ways to employ its people.
Such an exercise in social engineering and nation-building may look impossibly utopian in the middle of this emergency. But unless some longer term perspective is brought to bear little hope can be held out for a people who have always shown resilience despite their unfortunate recent history.
Thus reconstruction requires accounting for the sorry circumstances that made Haitians so vulnerable to this calamity. So many warnings about its gross inequalities, unsustainable building and rural impoverishment went unheeded. And there was so little progress towards tackling these rooted problems even in the last five years when they received more international attention. Haiti desperately needs emergency help in coming weeks and months. In coming years and decades its needs are equally pressing.