As we know, just before ten o’clock GMT — five in the afternoon local time — last Tuesday evening, a 7.0 scale shock hit one of the most densely populated areas of one of the world’s poorest countries. By Thursday morning there was already a developing narrative of delay and frustration as the first outside journalists to get into the country began to file their reports.
They saw people dying for lack of basic care, heard people crying from underneath the rubble, stepped over dozens of unburied bodies and recorded the cries of the destitute and the bereaved. At home we imagined, I think, that where a piece to camera could be filmed, so too could there be a gigantic relief effort obviously on the ground. When, 24 hours later, there wasn’t, we began to get critical. “We could bail out the banks with billions,” was one favourite refrain, “but we couldn’t find enough to help the suffering Haitians.” There began to be the almost inevitable tinge of anti-Americanism in some of the coverage, suggesting that somehow the Yanks were dilatory or uncomprehending in their actions.
Many of us began to use the word, “surely”, as did two of our three letters page correspondents on this topic yesterday as in “surely our strategists can do better” and “surely it would be better if the various (charitable) organisations were to co-operate”. Surely, in this day and age 200,000 people don’t have to die in an earthquake, or — if they do — the survivors can be given relief in hours, a day or so at the most. Surely this could have been predicted. Surely they could have built better.
In fact, psychologically, the word means its opposite; the one thing we can be sure of is that we are unsure. This was the worst earthquake in Haiti for 150 years — quite an event for a poor country, even a well-run one (which Haiti has never been), to insure against. The scale and the nature of the quake took seismologists by surprise (so no ignored hero-boffin in this picture).
The earthquake’s epicentre was within ten miles of Port-au-Prince, and was very shallow, causing far more damage on a wider scale. Given its location, it destroyed or badly damaged the agencies of state and the offices of the international agencies, with 100 UN employees lost, including the head of mission, when their building collapsed. The main port was largely destroyed, leaving the small airport as almost the only point for the debarkation of aid and relief efforts.
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Haiti in any case possessed only a quarter of the distance of paved roads that serve Iceland’s population, which is one thirtieth the size, and now many of these (perhaps most) were blocked by rubble, destroyed by quakes or — at night — had people sleeping on them because of a fear of further shocks.
All this in a country where 80 per cent live in poverty, much of it rural, where half are illiterate and which had not managed to repair the severe damage from hurricanes and storms in 2008, and where a 7,000-man, largely Brazilian, UN force is still required for peacekeeping, though there has been no war. Haiti has pretty much been subject to continual political violence since its first president declared himself emperor in 1804.
So getting in, though difficult, is the easy part, getting through in such a way as to make a difference, is much harder. I found myself thinking about how, in the battle of Arnhem, XXX Corps, en route for their meeting with the paratroopers, found themselves stuck driving through the streets of Eindhoven by cheering Dutch civilians. Surely . . .
Let us dispose quickly of the Yank-bashing; 71 per cent of Haitian exports go the US, Haiti has tariff-free access to the US market and remittances from Haitians in the United States account for a quarter of Haitian GDP. This crisis is not America’s fault, and the US, though not obliged to, has put in the lion’s share of help and effort in a way that the other parts of our now celebrated multipolar world still cannot or will not match. Perhaps there will be a time when EU or Chinese soldiers take over and run a main airport in a desperate country, or assume responsibility for an entire relief effort, and perhaps then we can criticise them for their occasional gaucheness or failure quite to understand local customs.
So does that mean that this is the best all of us could ever do in this situation? That such terrible things happen and we must just respond as best we can when they do, fill the collecting tin and then forget about it all until the next tsunami or mud-slide or famine?
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That is, after all, our model. Many of those opining loudly about the state of Haiti now have only discovered an opinion in this moment of obvious crisis, and that opinion is that everyone else should have been taking more notice of what happened there. Surely . . .
Like many other middle-aged Westerners, I was brought up on Thunderbirds. International Rescue and its flap-mouthed heroes had a vehicle and a gadget for every situation — under the sea, space, boring holes through mountains, whatever. It leaves you feeling that it shouldn’t be beyond the world’s capacity to create an intervention agency that can be sent in to most kinds of disasters more quickly and more effectively than happens now.
And I don’t see why, in principle, it couldn’t be true. The obstacles, of course, are formidable. One of the reasons that the US can act where the UN can’t is that there is less consultation needed, and less politics. But with the growing awareness of the interdependence of the peoples of the planet, we are having to develop more sophisticated forms of co-operation. Refugees from Haiti or emigrants from the Sahel will end up in the West, environmental degradation will spark mass movements of peoples, movements that only security-states will be able to stem; my carbon-emitting car can lead to your flood, which can lead to your child on my doorstep.
Let’s look again at beefing up existing UN intervention bodies to make them better able to work quickly in the most extreme crises. And let’s also remind ourselves that short-term advantage is a very poor guide to long-term national interest, and that bad government and poverty thousands of miles away continue to be our business all the time, and not just when the TV cameras alight on a woman grieving for her lost child.