Leaderless, chaotic, shambolic, disgraceful. Just some of the words being bandied about to describe the aid operation.
When disaster strikes most countries there are security forces to deploy from elsewhere, to organise and keep the peace while aid is delivered. It is when the food and water are handed out that violence usually breaks out.
So the US Navy discovered at the weekend when they tried to bypass the shattered roads. The helicopters were mobbed and crowds fought for the few precious supplies, some pulling machetes, until the effort was called off for fear that survivors would be killed in the stampede.
It is a legitimate fear. In the Kashmir earthquake in 2005, a doctor was killed when a mob drove him on to the helicopter’s tail rotor blades and several of the mob were trampled to death. In Haiti, only when UN peacekeepers could secure a site outside Port-au-Prince did the airdrops restart.
This is the real vacuum in Haiti now: security, not aid. The aid is piling up at the airport and other points, but how to hand it out?
Advertisement
Haiti’s Government and security forces were dysfunctional before the quake. Now they are non-existent. Haiti may be a sovereign country but its security is in the hands of the UN peacekeeping force, itself left depleted and leaderless by the quake. Yesterday, eight days after the quake, the Security Council authorised 3,500 more peacekeepers to supplement the overwhelmed force there. That is how the UN works — slowly. It will take many more days until those troops are dispatched to Haiti.
Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, has made it clear that American troops will have no policing role in Haiti — because that would be an invasion. Those who cheered the arrival of US helicopters at the devastated presidential palace yesterday were dismayed to learn that they were there only to secure diplomatic missions.
The US has the speed and expertise to help, but neither the mandate nor the desire for peacekeeping. The UN has the mandate and little else.