Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti

Mark Schuller

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813574257
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de desarrollo global

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was one of the deadliest disasters in modern history, sparking an international aid response—with pledges and donations of $16 billion—that was exceedingly generous. But now, five years later, that generous aid has clearly failed. In Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, anthropologist Mark Schuller captures the voices of those involved in the earthquake aid response, and they paint a sharp, unflattering view of the humanitarian enterprise.  
 
Schuller led an independent study of eight displaced-persons camps in Haiti, compiling more than 150 interviews ranging from Haitian front-line workers and camp directors to foreign humanitarians and many displaced Haitian people. The result is an insightful account of why the multi-billion-dollar aid response not only did little to help but also did much harm, triggering a range of unintended consequences, rupturing Haitian social and cultural institutions, and actually increasing violence, especially against women. The book shows how Haitian people were removed from any real decision-making, replaced by a top-down, NGO-dominated system of humanitarian aid, led by an army of often young, inexperienced foreign workers. Ignorant of Haitian culture, these aid workers unwittingly enacted policies that triggered a range of negative results. Haitian interviewees also note that the NGOs “planted the flag, ” and often tended to “just do something, ” always with an eye to the “photo op” (in no small part due to the competition over funding). Worse yet, they blindly supported the eviction of displaced people from the camps, forcing earthquake victims to relocate in vast shantytowns that were hotbeds of violence.
 
Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti concludes with suggestions to help improve humanitarian aid in the future, perhaps most notably, that aid workers listen to—and respect the culture of—the victims of catastrophe.

1

Haiti’s Unnatural Disaster

Neoliberalism

My parents didn’t have the means to raise all of us kids. They sent us away. They sent some of us to Port-au-Prince and others to Jacmel. I came to Port-au-Prince. I used to live somewhere else, but then I couldn’t afford it. So I came here. People pile on top of one another. Garbage piling up. Even if you clean up today, there will be more garbage to pick up tomorrow. That’s how life is here. Life is bad. Bad for our health, for our economic problems, and bad for our material needs. This is how it is; our living conditions are not good at all.

I created a little store in the house that helped me pay for rent. After January 12, the store was destroyed. I didn’t have anything anymore. After January 12, we slept several days in the street. Our brother came to look for us. We went to live in the provinces for a couple of months.

People say that we’re just abusing the system but it’s not true at all. If I had the means I would leave. I could leave if I had a job that amounted to something. So now, for me to rent a one-room house in Port-au-Prince, I will need at least 50,000 gourdes (about $1,150) in my hand to rent for a year. Before January 12 you could rent a house for 20,000–25,000 gourdes.

In Nazon where I used to live, it was 30,000 a year. I paid for it every six months. I could never scrape up enough to pay for one year.

What explains the increase in rent? A lot of houses were destroyed. The people are in the street. That’s why when President Martelly and all the NGOs moved people out, many people took the 20,000 gourdes ($460) from them to rent a house. Really they couldn’t find a house. It’s the same thing, people who are displaced from this camp just go to another camp. Because they can’t find a house. That’s why even now many camps are still full because there aren’t really any houses. And some landlords don’t really give the house to rent.

So I have a choice to return to Bainet, Mark, you hear? My mother is dead. I don’t have any children in the country. I have a brother and a sister you just visited. You saw how things are. You saw the state of my brother’s house three and a half years after January 12, that he’s living in a house that’s destroyed. You saw it’s not possible.

What needs to happen? We are almost ready to leave but we would need to have a place to live. And after a house, people need the ability to earn money to meet their needs. The earth is tired: it is starting to die, to no longer give. Today you plant and tomorrow the crops burn. There’s nothing. No economic activity at all. You can believe me.

For the youth over there to stay, they should open a high school. Kids from the provinces come here for high school. If there was that, Port-au-Prince would never have gotten overcrowded like this. They should also open a health clinic. If someone has a problem they have to go to Jacmel (two- to-three-hours walk). If there was a clinic or a hospital, a university hospital, do you think people would die en route? People would be saved.

—Frisline, Poto Mitan

Frisline powerfully explains the social construction of risk that produced one of the deadliest disasters in modern history. She was one of the many people who swelled Port-au-Prince in the past several decades because of limited educational and economic opportunities. Frisline also was among the 630,000 who fled the rubble in the capital after the earthquake (Bengtsson et al. 2011). With these “push” factors remaining unaddressed despite billions in aid, she returned to the capital and lived in a camp. Directly engaging a “blame the victim” discourse that became increasingly shrill as hundreds of thousands languished in camps as the years wore on, Frisline identifies the central problem of housing, and skyrocketing of rents, before and after the earthquake. Through her story, we begin to understand that the “disaster” was the result of human action, producing Haiti’s extreme vulnerability, which this chapter details.

Many commentators in Haiti don’t use the word katastwòf (catastrophe) or dezas (disaster) to discuss the earthquake. For a long while people did not use the Haitian1 word tranblemanntè (earthquake) to discuss the seismic event, out of respect for the dead and also to not relive the memories: it was known as various names, including Douz (12), bagay la (the thing), evenman nan (the event), or goudougoudou (an onomatopoeia mimicking the rumbling sound of the earth moving). Haitian scholar Myrtha Gilbert is succinct: the title of her 2010 book is La Catastrophe n’était pas naturelle (The Catastrophe Wasn’t Natural). Many commentators, be they activists, scholars, or people living in the camps, pointedly drew the distinction between “the catastrophe” and “the event.” This language mirrors social science scholarship, which discusses triggering “events” as only one part of the disaster. Haitian intellectuals, including those whom Antonio Gramsci (1971) termed “organic intellectuals,” individuals like Frisline and the dozens of others in this book whose experience and reflection represent marginalized people’s interests, distinguish the kriz estriktirèl (structural crisis) from the kriz konjonktirèl (“conjunctural” crisis, of the intersection of contemporary issues with the structural).

This chapter discusses the kriz estriktirèl, what disaster scholars term “vulnerability,” the socially produced conditions that augment destructive impacts of hazards, either natural phenomena like hurricanes or earthquakes or human creations like oil spills. A key text in disaster studies, At Risk (Wisner et al. 2004), discusses disasters as the combination of hazards and vulnerability. The book also outlines three levels of vulnerability, what the authors call “root causes,” “dynamic pressures,” and “hazardous conditions.” Using this frame, this chapter outlines the production of Haiti’s vulnerability to disasters. However, Haitian people also reinforce local resilience, the ability of individuals and communities to respond and rebuild (Alexander 2013; Gaillard 2007), through collective action. This discussion of resilience concludes the chapter.

Kriz Estriktirèl: Vulnerability

The extreme loss of life and physical damage following the earthquake in Haiti cannot be explained by the sheer power of the earthquake alone. The Haitian government estimated that 316,000 people perished on January 12, 2010, and most donors cite a lower figure of 240,000. Declaring the number to be around 64,000, an unpublished report commissioned by USAID (Schwartz, with Pierre and Calpas 2011) triggered a debate about the precise death toll, bringing up larger issues such as official state recordkeeping. However, there is no question that the event on January 12 was far deadlier than an earthquake 500 times more powerful that occurred in Chile six and a half weeks later and killed 525 people according to official sources. One of the reasons for the dramatic difference in death was the proximity of the quakes to urban centers (Oliver-Smith 2012). For an even clearer example of this difference, in September 2010 an earthquake of similar magnitude to the one in Haiti and similar proximity to an urban center occurred near Canterbury, New Zealand. No one died (Crowley and Elliott 2012). The temblor of January 12 reveals the clearest example of sociopolitically produced vulnerability to disasters.

This chapter traces the factors that led to Haiti’s extreme vulnerability to natural hazards. To begin this discussion, a few words on the concept would be in order. As David Alexander (1997) noted in a twentieth-anniversary issue of Disasters, “vulnerability” successfully entered the conversation in policy and aid circles regarding disasters. However, as Frerks and Bender (2004) point out in the conclusion to Mapping Vulnerability, reducing vulnerability had not been included in development institutions’ stated goals and agendas. Doing so was an explicit advocacy item at the UN’s World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. The resulting Hyogo Framework for Action noted that official development programs can lead to greater vulnerability (Wisner and Walker 2005). Other scholars such as Anthony Oliver-Smith (2010) have made this same observation. Greg Bankoff (2004) offers a critical reading of the concept’s popularity among international agencies. He points out the continuity within discourses of “contagion” with which the global North (he uses the term “West”2) painted the Global South as dangerous or deficient. “Hazard” is the current term to replace the “disease” metanarrative of the seventeenth century, or “poverty” of the “development” era. The “Western” cure is Western science. In the same volume, Oliver-Smith (2004) theorizes vulnerability within a global context, attempting to de-link natural events from sociocultural disasters. Oliver-Smith challenges scholars and practitioners to address the issue of uneven experiences of risk and vulnerability, and particularly the geographical distance between producers of risk—those who reap benefits from exploitation of natural resources—and those who are subjected to increased hazards. In an increasingly global economy, this distance increases, as the headquarters of multinational corporations that emit toxic waste are thousands of miles away from populations—workers and residents near factories—exposed to that waste, often across national borders. The same can be said for climate change (O’Brien et al. 2006). Countries most at risk tend to be tropical areas with large urban centers near coastlines, but they are by far not the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide, an aspect of what Rob Nixon (2011) calls “slow violence.” For example, Haiti is ranked third most vulnerable to climate change (Kreft and Eckstein 2013).

At Risk includes a model for understanding various levels of analysis in vulnerability (Wisner et al. 2004). The authors describe “root causes,” “dynamic pressures,” and “unsafe conditions.” Vulnerability can be thought of like a car: the root causes level is the engine, such as the system of inequality imbedded in colonialism or global capitalism, or the ever-increasing sea temperatures as a result of industrialization. The dynamic pressures are like the transmission, applying forward motion from the pistons to the wheels, for example, how colonialism stoked ethnic conflict, including between the Hutus and Tutsis in a Belgian colony that was to become Rwanda, or a sustained drought there that increased competition over scarce resources. The unsafe conditions occur when the rubber hits the road, the visible decisions by policymakers or an aggregate of households, including the building of settlements along a flood zone because of rapid urbanization and a lack of adequate available land or zoning. Because of the time scale, and because of disasters’ visibility, media coverage tends to focus almost entirely on this level of analysis, obscuring the dynamic pressures and certainly the root causes (Button 2010). The model provided in At Risk is useful for understanding the various factors that translate into Haiti’s high level of vulnerability. The rest of the chapter uses this frame to explain these various levels. I focus more on the “dynamic pressures,” in part because of the rapid changes within the previous two decades, but also because as an anthropologist this is the data I have collected, from interlocutors’ own life histories, like Frisline’s.

Haiti’s “Unthinkable” Position

In the wake of the temblor, televangelist Pat Robertson claimed it was God’s punishment for Haiti’s “pact to [sic] the devil.” Although this wasn’t Robertson’s first such statement following a disaster—he made similar comments following Hurricane Katrina—this discourse gained wide currency. The “pact” Robertson referred to was the ceremony at Bois Caiman, on August 14, 1791, that ignited the Haitian Revolution. Robertson was half correct: Haiti was punished for this act of defiance that ended slavery and frightened the British into abolishing the slave trade three years after Haiti’s independence in 1804. But not by God.

This section of the chapter addresses the “root causes” of Haiti’s vulnerability to disasters, a long-term process of exploitation by foreign powers. This vulnerability began with the violence that went into producing the “pearl of the Antilles,” the world’s most profitable colony. The brutality of the Caribbean plantation system has been well documented,3 if often forgotten in Euro-centric historical constructions.4 The white planter class in Saint Domingue and other French colonies was so brutal that metropolitan France—all the while benefiting from the wealth that slavery had created—had to offer legal frameworks such as the Code Noir (Black Code) to limit the violence. Many within the local white—male—planter class forced themselves on slave women, and from these “monstrous intimacies” (Sharpe 2010) an intermediary class was born, alternatively known as affranchis (enfranchised), sang-mélé (mixed-race), or mulâtre (“mulatto”). Within French colonial society, unlike the “one-drop rule” of the British or the mestizaje of the Spanish,5 such mixed-race individuals could be on either side of the color line, an inherently unstable category (Price-Mars 1956; Trouillot 1994). Many members of the affranchis class inherited the plantations—and slaves—from their white fathers and continued the brutality of the slave system.

Within the slave population there was also a division between kreyòl (“Creole,” island born) and bosal (Bossale, born in Africa). Creoles were products of the plantation system and more Europeanized, with at least some basic capacity in colonial language, and thus greater ability to navigate colonial society and culture. Also important, Creoles did not know any other life besides slavery (Price-Mars 1956, 1983). By contrast, Bossales were born free and remembered the horrors of the Middle Passage, spoke one of several African languages, and kept alive traditional religious practices. It was not by an accident that the revolt began at a traditional drumming ceremony (now solidified at least in the anthropological imaginary as Vodou and in popular discourse, “Voodoo”) on August 14, 1791, led by a non-Christian Bossale.

These colonial divisions were to remain powerfully intact after independence. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1990b) discussed how the proto-state in the revolutionary leadership of Toussaint Louverture, a Creole, began to display tendencies to exclude, suppress, or exploit the formerly enslaved population, the proto-nation.6 Trouillot underscored the continuities between Toussaint’s plan of ostensibly “free” plantation labor and post-independence strategies and disparate development, what he called “State against nation.”7 Other writers emphasized different aspects of this division; David Nicholls (1996) focused on the differences based on color, Robert Fatton (2007) centered his analysis on despotic rulers and the authoritarian habitus (Fatton 2004), and Alex Dupuy (1989) highlighted the role of international capitalist forces in stoking this division and favoring elite populations.

Although Toussaint was able to rise to the level of governor general, effectively ruling over the island nation, he never questioned his colonial status and attachment to a “French” identity that was never fully accepted. In one of the most well-known analyses of the Haitian Revolution, Trinidadian revolutionary C.L.R. James (1989, 288) critiqued Toussaint for his “failure of enlightenment.” The revolutionary vanguard was slow to see the need for independence from France, but it was not coincidental that Bossale slaves first called for independence. Later, the vanguard joined in: Jean-Jacques Dessalines was the general who finally ripped the French from Haiti’s social fabric and declared independence, on January 1, 1804. Vilified by his contemporaries and mulatto historians for his brutality, Dessalines’s response to colonialism was similar to Frantz Fanon’s (1965) at the beginning of his scholarly career, allegedly koupe tèt, boule kay (“Cut the heads, burn the houses”). However, Dessalines also promoted an alternative vision for the State, Leta Byennèt (Lwijis 1993), the “well-being” State, a century before the social welfare state promoted by European social democratic movements and John Maynard Keynes. Haiti’s first coup d’état was triggered by Dessalines’s attempt at land reform, to offer former slaves rights to land. Mulatto leaders recoiled, claiming the titles they inherited, to which his response was, “And those of us whose fathers were slaves? We are to have nothing then?”8 The question of land rights was thus “settled” by reactionary force.

To recap this, what historian Laurent DuBois (2012) called “the aftershocks of history” in terms of vulnerability: Haiti’s state apparatus was in the hands of two competing elite populations, a black military elite based in the North and a mixed-race mercantile elite based in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. After Henri Christophe—whose Sans Souci palace was destroyed by an 1842 earthquake—committed suicide in 1820, his efforts at continuing Dessalines’s Leta Byennèt in providing education and health care died with him.9 Subsequent State leaders were called a “kleptocracy” (Lundahl 1989; Rotberg 1997) or a “predatory” republic (Fatton 2002; Lundahl 1984). The State was used to support elite groups’ exclusion of Haiti’s poor majority, denigrated as moun andeyò, literally “people outside.” In this traditional social hierarchy, following colonial patterns, cities were de facto restricted to elite and middle-class populations, and rural life was dominated by grandon (large landowners, from the French grand homme, literally “big man”) who controlled access to the most arable land. Peasants, heritors of the Bossale tradition, engaged in small acts of resistance, rejecting Creole society, both capitalist and European-ized (Barthélémy 1990; Blot 2012; Price-Mars 1919; Sheller 2004, 2012).

Present-day commentators, particularly foreigners, are quick to point to this “state failure” in explaining Haiti’s vulnerability and justifying the “invasion” of NGOs (Étienne 1997). Missing from this binary state-versus-society analysis of only focusing on the state is a consistent foreign domination. Also missing is the role of elites: the two elite groups had different orientations to foreign capitalist powers, often animated by a barely hidden white supremacy: the black military elite built and maintained a military apparatus whereas the mulatto merchant class—whose interests were directly tied to monopolizing foreign trade—accommodated foreign interests. Mulatto leader Alexandre Pétion offered France an indemnity while Christophe prepared militarily, building the Citadelle, which is still standing today. Jean-Pierre Boyer, a counter-revolutionary mulatto le...