Haiti: the land where children eat mud

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http://preview.tinyurl.com/ogxxu2
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article62816
14.ece

Haiti: the land where children eat mud

Haiti is mired in historic debt and in danger of complete collapse. It
is stricken by flood and famine, and kidnap, rape and child abuse are
rife. So what is the West doing to rescue the ?nightmare republic??

By Alex von Tunzelmann.
From The Sunday Times
May 17, 2009

If you ever hear of Haiti, it is usually because of something
frightening. It is famous for hurricanes, deforestation, poverty, drug
smuggling, violence, dictatorships, voodoo and slavery. Half a century
ago, when it was under the tyranny of François ?Papa Doc? Duvalier and
his ?zombie? militia, Graham Greene called Haiti the ?nightmare
republic?. Though Papa Doc has long gone, the nightmares have never
ended in this Caribbean dystopia. Haiti is the poorest country and only
Third World nation in the western hemisphere, and it?s getting worse.

Two centuries ago, the political economist Robert Malthus postulated
that a society in which the population grew too fast could reach a point
where people simply could not be fed, leading to a total collapse. Over
the past five years, Haiti has not only met but exceeded the conditions
for a Malthusian catastrophe. The only things keeping the country from
absolute disaster are imported food and charity. With a global economic
crisis afoot, the question is how long that can be sustained. I had
plenty of reservations about going to Haiti. It is a place born out of
the darkest days of slavery: a country where white people have always
been regarded, with some reason, as the enemy, and where, in some areas,
half of all women and girls have been the victims of rape.

I am a historian, not a foreign correspondent or aid worker, but I
wanted to see for myself what life was like in this haunted nation.
Notables including Ban Ki-moon, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have
visited Haiti in the past couple of months, highlighting the fact that
the country is poised on the brink of what could be a humanitarian
crisis of terrifying proportions.

In the 1960s, Papa Doc decorated the ?Welcome to Haiti? sign at Port-au-
Prince?s airport with the dismembered corpses of his enemies. At least
they?ve taken those down. Instead there?s a calypso band playing for
tips, and a swarm of hustling taxi drivers. Immediately I hear the
epithet by which I will be known for the next week: la blanche, the
white woman.

At the hotel in the relatively affluent suburb of Pétionville, there is

a long list of rules. Don?t go out alone. Don?t walk more than two
kilometres in any direction. Don?t go out after dark at all. If you hear
gunshots, stay inside. Smile at the man toting an assault rifle who
stands at the hotel entrance. He?s here for your protection.

Just why is Haiti in such a dire situation, so much worse than any other
country in the Americas, and as bad as anywhere on Earth? Some blame the
United Nations. Some blame the Americans. Some have theories about the
collision of global warming with global capitalism. All are careful to
point out that the Haitian elite deserves its reputation for being
greedy, negligent and kleptocratic. ?I think the Haitian people have
been made to suffer by God,? Wilbert, a teacher, tells me, ?but the time
will come soon when we will be rewarded with Heaven.?

History tells a different story. The appalling state of the country is a
direct result of having offended a quite different celestial authority ?
the French. France gained the western third of the island of Hispaniola
? the territory that is now Haiti ? in 1697. It planted sugar and
coffee, supported by an unprecedented increase in the importation of
African slaves. Economically, the result was a success, but life as a
slave was intolerable. Living conditions were squalid, disease was rife,
and beatings and abuses were universal. The slaves? life expectancy was
21 years. After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world,
and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon?s forces in 1804
and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs,
in gold.

For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the
end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it
was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was
the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay
a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of
its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original
reparations, further loans were taken out ? mostly from the United
States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this
deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave
up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it
instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus
interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in
investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward
spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains
hopelessly in debt to this day.

Like all cities, Port-au-Prince has better and worse neighbourhoods.
Unlike all cities, several of its worst neighbourhoods are declared
conflict zones. Some slums are so dangerous that even the United Nations
peacekeeping troops, who carry machineguns, do not venture in. The UN is
not popular here. Peacekeepers are rumoured to have massacred unarmed
slum-dwellers on several occasions. ?A lot of people say the UN soldiers
trade guns and drugs,? a Haitian student tells me while we walk around
Champs de Mars, the park by the National Palace, a line of soldiers just
in front of us. Many Haitians palpably mistrust foreigners. Pedestrians
and peanut-sellers keep their eyes on me but stay back, as if I were a
predator.

Just 10 minutes? drive from the National Palace, past a cemetery filled
with elaborate pastel-coloured tombs, is Carrefour Feuilles. A perilous
stack of breeze blocks, filth and human misery teetering on the hills
overlooking the bay, it is considered to be among the most dangerous and
deprived of the city?s slums. The streets are too narrow and rutted to
drive. I walk up steep paths in between shacks of mud and rusting
corrugated iron. At every turn, the route is obstructed by heaps of
discarded packaging, decomposing rubbish and human waste, over which
goats and children crawl, foraging for food. In the blazing midday sun,
the stench is hard to endure.

This is a place where you come face to face with Haiti?s industrial
collapse. Unemployment, which hovers around 75% nationally, is higher
here. Most people are illiterate, unskilled and unhealthy. The only
vaguely legal option open to the majority of residents is to buy a few
items of cheap produce, and sell them at a tiny profit in the markets.
Unfortunately, the city?s recent effort to clean up the streets in the
centre has meant that many of these traders have been kicked out. The
remaining jobs open to them make an unappealing list: selling drugs,
selling weapons, robbery, blackmail, prostitution and kidnapping. It is
the kidnappings that make headlines.

For the gangs, in a country that produces virtually nothing, terror is
one of the few reliable sources of income. Gang members ambush an
ordinary person, usually someone unlikely to resist, such as a woman or
a child. They saw off one of the victim?s fingers or an ear, and take it
to the family, along with a demand for money. Even if the ransom is
paid, the victim often ends up dead. At one point, kidnappings were
reported five times a day. There was another peak in the first few
months of 2008, but some arrests of gang leaders were made over the
summer, and now the official statistics have stabilised at something
closer to one incident every couple of days.





Foreigners have been targeted, which is why nobody will let me walk
around on my own, but the greatest danger is to ordinary Haitians. Even
slum-dwellers are often abducted and tortured by the gangs, sometimes
for a ransom as little as the price of a cocktail in London.

?Parents in Carrefour Feuilles are happy when their son joins a gang,?
one Haitian woman, who runs an anti-violence project, tells me. ?They
are also happy when their daughters become child prostitutes. It means
the family can afford to eat.? Posters advocating sexual abstinence can
be seen on every street. So far, they do not appear to be having much
impact: population growth is rising. Haiti was considered unsustainably
overcrowded in the 1950s, when the population was 3m. Now it is 9m.
Survival is a daily effort, and these starving slum-dwellers will seize
on any opportunity to earn money, however unpleasant.

The new idea from the UN and the US is Hope II, a programme that would
give Haitian companies duty-free access to the American market for nine
years. The focus is on agriculture and garment factories. A similar
scheme has been running since 2006, and the results look good on paper:
3,000 jobs are said to have been created. On the street, though, the
word is not good. Pay is subsistence level at best, and does not keep
pace with food prices. Conditions are dangerous and unsanitary. Workers
are charged for going to the toilet. Abuse is widespread.

There are people who argue that rich countries, too, once went through a
stage of sweatshop labour, and that this is some sort of necessary
purgatory on the road to improvement. It is an easy argument to make
from a comfortable armchair in the home counties, but it is ahistorical.
Haiti?s path of development has been completely different from those of
the rich countries. The reason it has not become sustainable is that,
for two centuries, rich countries and their banks have menaced almost
all of its wealth out of it. For how much longer should the Haitians do
penance?

The country?s problems were only exacerbated when, in 1957, François
Duvalier became president. Exploiting Haitian beliefs in the traditions
of voodoo (most Haitians still practise it today), he established a
personal militia, the Tonton Macoutes, rumoured to be zombies he had
raised from the dead, who soon gained a chilling reputation for rape and
torture.

Papa Doc himself affected the style of Baron Samedi, the spirit of the
dead, appearing in a black top hat and pinstriped suit. Reports from
Haiti brought forth disgust from the developed world, but the protests
did not turn into action. Instead of moving to condemn and remove these
dictators, the world?s richest countries opened their chequebooks. In
1967, American-owned plantations in the Dominican Republic paid Papa Doc
directly for rounding up 20,000 Haitians to work on their lands. In
1972, his son and heir, Baby Doc?s minister of the interior, was exposed
for literally selling Haitian blood to private American hospitals: $3 a
litre, no questions asked. During the Duvaliers? combined 28 years in
power, up to 60,000 Haitians were ?disappeared? by the regime. The
Duvaliers swindled international creditors and aid agencies for enormous
sums. The American government, via various agencies and banks, lent
millions to both dictators.

Though there was anger in Washington about the Duvaliers and their 80%
rate of aid embezzlement, no action was taken to remove them until 1986.
The Duvaliers were always happy to sign up to new loans, and to give
lucrative contracts to American corporations. Most of the projects went
nowhere. Haiti is littered with half-built and abandoned schools,
hospitals, bridges and roads.

Most of the money lent to the Duvaliers found its way into private bank
accounts. When Baby Doc fled, he took millions with him: estimates go as
high as $900m. The debts incurred by the Duvaliers make up 45% of
Haiti?s total current debt. None of the creditors finds the fact of
their complicity a compelling argument for cancellation. Those creditors
include the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, the IMF and
the governments of the US and France.

Debt relief is at the discretion of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries
Initiative, run by the World Bank and the IMF. Haiti must meet certain
conditions, including poverty reduction and inflation controls, before
any debt can be written off. By international standards, the sums are
small, but for Haiti they are enormous. The World Bank alone demands an
estimated $1.6m a month.

On April 14, in a speech at a conference on Haiti?s social and economic
development, Robert B Zoellick, president of the World Bank Group,
announced: ?We are working closely with the authorities and the IMF to
help expedite debt cancellation while ensuring that monies released go
directly to support poverty reduction.? At the spring meeting of the
World Bank and the IMF less than two weeks later, Haiti was judged again
as having failed to show sufficient progress towards macroeconomic
stability to qualify for debt cancellation. In a surprise move, however,
the US government stepped in to cover Haiti?s debt service payments for
the rest of this year.

Undoubtedly, the American gift is a boon, and Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton do seem to be making a genuine effort to help. Obama?s tax
return for this year revealed a personal donation of $2,000 to a
Christian organisation working in Haiti. Clinton has also announced that
she will re-examine US policy on Haitian migrants. At the moment, unlike
the Cuban refugees who are given asylum, Haitians are considered
economic migrants, and are imprisoned and deported.

Haiti?s record on political freedom is far from spotless, though it is
in theory now a democracy. The most popular party among the impoverished
majority, Fanmi Lavalas, was banned from contesting elections this month
on the grounds that its leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, did not meet a
very short deadline unexpectedly imposed for signing the hard copy of
his party?s lists. He could not have done so: he is in exile in South
Africa, having been ousted in a highly controversial UN intervention in
2004. There is some hope Clinton will award temporary work permits to
Haitian illegals in the US. ?But, at the same time,? she added in her
announcement, ?we don?t want to encourage other Haitians to make the
dangerous journey across the water.? Both George W Bush in 2004 and Bill
Clinton in 1994 justified military intervention in Haiti, partially on
the basis that unmanageable numbers of ?boat people? were turning up on
their shores. ?There is only one solution to Haiti?s problems, and
that?s mass emigration,? one senior American foreign-policy expert told
me. ?But nobody wants to talk about it.? So Haiti remains in debt,
relieved for now, but not for ever. And the question of France repaying
some or all of the compensation it extracted for Haitian independence is
not even on the agenda




The Artibonite valley is the rural heart of Haiti. The potholed road out
of the capital runs north through miles of bleak marshland. We drive
past Titayen, a dumping-ground for the bodies of people murdered by
political groups or criminal gangs. The hot air is oppressive with the
weight of storm clouds. Near the town of Cabaret is a tent-city full of
refugees. On both sides of the road, houses are stoved in, with walls
and roofs ripped off, and whole floors of concrete folded in on
themselves like origami. This is the parting gift left by Fay, Gustav,
Hanna and Ike, four storms that devastated Haiti in three weeks last
summer. All around the valley rise high mountains. Fifty years ago,
these were covered in dense tropical jungle. Now, there is nothing but
brownish scrub. Eighty per cent of Haitians live below the poverty line,
and cook on charcoal from scavenged wood. As the population has shot up,
the forests have been cut down. Haiti is now 98% deforested. The roots
of those trees held the land together. Now, every time a hurricane hits
Haiti, the rains and floods sweep topsoil and soft clay from these hills
down to the valleys and the coast. Arable land is stripped back to
barren rubble, while whole towns such as Gonaives ? until last August a
city of 250,000 people ? are buried under sludge.

At a nearby village, Robuste, dozens of excited children ambush me. Not
many strangers come here, and they are intrigued. Even in the middle of
horrific poverty, the people have not lost their sense of humour. I
raise my camera to take a picture, and an old woman immediately begins
weeping and howling. Shocked, I lower the camera, and she points at me
and roars with laughter. It was a joke, and a clever one: she was
satirising the usual news-agency photos. But most of the devastation
here is all too real. In the hurricanes, half the houses in Robuste were
washed away.

The village pastor takes me into his church, a comfortless hall in which
over 200 refugees have been sleeping rough. One woman lies here,
suffering from unidentified sickness in the aftermath of the floods.
There is no doctor. Her year-old baby is left unattended on the concrete
floor. He crawls up to me, wide-eyed. Slavery did not end with the
revolution. A grim fate awaits many of the children in Robuste. When
destitute Haitian families cannot feed their children, they send them to
the towns. There are 300,000 such children in Haiti, around 10% of the
entire child population. They are known as restaveks ? a Creole word
from the French rester avec, to stay with. Host families provide
restaveks with food, clothing, shelter and in some cases education, in
return for having the child work as a servant. Often these children are
beaten, sexually abused, starved, denied medical treatment. In a couple
of years the baby in front of me could be given up to this modern form
of slavery. Restaveks as young as three have been found in Port-au-
Prince. His mother rolls over in her sleep. She looks desperately ill.
Soon, nobody in this village will have enough to eat. At that point the
sending away of their children will begin.

Even before the hurricanes hit, Haiti was in the grip of a food crisis.
A year ago, when the price of rice soared across the world, Haitians
began to starve. There were confirmed reports of people being reduced to
eating dirt. Cookies made of mud mixed with vegetable oil were all they
could scrape together. In the slums of Port-au-Prince, Oxfam is funding
community restaurants in an attempt to provide something more
nutritious. People bring tin pots and pay 10 gourdes (16p) to have them
filled with rice, beans and vegetables. It is thought that charging a
small sum preserves people?s dignity, and avoids giving them the
impression that they can rely on hand-outs.

The restaurant is at a busy intersection, surrounded by a huge mass of
people, mostly young men, shouting, banging their tin pots and jostling
to get to the front. Food riots are common.

A little boy of about eight wanders up to us. He looks even thinner and
more nervous than the other children, and is barefoot, dressed in a
worn-out black string vest and threadbare shorts. Ian, Oxfam?s British
press officer, is good with children. He leans down, smiles and shakes
the boy?s hand. The boy wanders back to join the people waiting for
food. He goes to a woman in her late thirties. ?Get away from me!? she
screams at him, smacking him across the face. ?You shook hands with the
blanc! Koko rat!? The crowd gasps. The name she has called him is one of
the strongest insults in Creole, literally a crude expression for the
genitals of a female rat, but the implication is worse. The woman means
that the little boy is a traitor. Ian is aghast, but of course it?s not
his fault. The little boy runs off. Moments later, he appears beside me
again. He looks lost, and wears an expression of unbearable sadness. He
had a tin bowl before, but it has gone. ?Where?s his bowl?? I ask my
Creole translator. She asks him. ?Someone took it from him.? ?We?ve got
to find him another one,? I say. ?He hasn?t had any food yet.? ?There
aren?t any around,? she replies.

It?s true. Nobody has a spare, and everyone here needs to eat. Just down
the street, market stalls display mouldy vegetables and half-rotten meat
crawling with flies. Even rotting food is too expensive for most slum-
dwellers. By now the crowd is getting seriously aggressive. Men are
shoving each other, and punches are thrown. The organiser hurries back
to us. ?We have to leave. Now.? At another roadside stall I see a
painting of a pregnant Haitian woman crying tears of blood, while
demonic white babies with sharpened teeth scramble to suckle from her
breasts.

Graham Greene?s ?nightmare republic? has become a literal fact. The next
morning I board a bus to make the long journey through the mountains to
Santo Domingo, the capital of the neighbouring Dominican Republic.
Driving through Haiti, there are almost no trees to be seen. The roads
are lined with scrub, thorns and piles of refuse. At the exact point of
the border line, the world surges back into life. Suddenly the road is
thick with towering mature trees, their branches heavy with lush green
leaves, fat blossoms, singing birds. It is beautiful but heartbreaking,
a reminder, if any were necessary, that things need not be as they are.

The facts

? last year?s hurricanes devastated more than 70% of Haiti?s
agricultural land

? more than 80% of the population lives on less than £2 a day

? some 3.8% of the population is HIV-positive, according to Save the
Children; among them 17,000 minors. Medical provisions are scarce. There
is one doctor for every 3,000 patients.

? life expectancy at birth is 61 years. The survival rate of newborns

is the lowest in the western hemisphere. One-third are born underweight.

There are 80 deaths per 1,000 live births. The mortality rate for
children under five is 120 in 1,000



New World Order elites see all the world as the see Haiti.

They see humans as useless vermin.

Through Globalist controlled banks the NWO rape and pillage nations
using fiat money.

The criminals are the Globalist elites and their parasitic corporations.
Look no further than the IMF and World bank.

Graham, New York , USA

I'm afraid i have to agree with Gil, This is the way Cuba were untill
Fidel Castro and Che came in and clean the the Mess up, the poor people
of Cuba are eternally greatful.

Wexford Hillman, New York, usa

I am by no means an expert, but I have been there working in a local
hospital in the north of Haiti. What few discussions I had with local
citizens led me to believe these people are no different than anyone
anywhere else. As our fellow humans, we should help.

Edward O'Laughlin MD, Cockeysville, Maryland

If you ask a Haitian if they eat dirt they laugh and ask "why? do you?".
They eat, and have done so for generations, a cookie made from clay,
spices, butter, and salt. The vast majority of people do not eat them.

Tom Braak, Verrettes, Haiti

Some will disagree with me, but what haiti needs is a strong dictator
who is not greedy and has a 10 yr plan to put the country back on it's
feet. A plan similar to the marshall plan. First start with
infrastructure, at the same time housing and moving the populace back to
there respective area.

Gil, Orlando,

Policies are an effect - not a cause, and as such result from a
multitude of factors, not least from the ethnic particularities of
dealing with things. Comparing the Dominican Republic to Haiti is like
comparing Russia to Finland.

Daniel, Moscow (Kadugli), Russia (Sudan)

The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with
Haiti, is much better off. Is this a gift from god? No, but good policy
and a sensible outlook on life. Blaming the French won't help, either.
That happened more than 150 years ago. It's like blaming Queen Victoria
for our ills.

George, Vienna, Austria

Why is Haiti incapable of solving it's own problems?

graham wood, swindon, wilts

What a cruel twist of fate! Despite the Haitians' toppling of the French
to become the first independent country in the Americas, Haiti seems to
have become as squalid as the West African countries from which many of
the Haitians originally came - such a depressing outcome!

Luke, Queensland, Australia

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