From: Dan Craig
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
Haiti’s New Catastrophe
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
OCT. 7, 2016
(Excerpt)
Hurricane Matthew battered Florida and points north on Friday, having
already wreaked deadly havoc in the Bahamas, Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti. All
those along its path need aid and protection and, when the wind and rain
end, swift help in rebuilding.
But Haiti needs it most.
The southwestern part of the country, already isolated before being cut
off by the storm, has been ravaged. In the city of Jérémie, about 80
percent of the buildings were flattened. The aerial photographs are
heart-wrenching: What last week was an urban grid is now a smear of
sticks, bricks and mud. The rough estimates of the nationwide death toll
on Friday fluctuated — 200, 500, 800. All that seemed certain was that the
number would rise.
Natural catastrophes are tragically familiar in Haiti, which was
devastated by an earthquake in 2010 — an acute emergency laid cruelly upon
chronic poverty and underdevelopment. But equally familiar is the
tragically misguided disaster response. Charity flows in all directions,
many of them wrong. It is sent to organizations with shallow connections
in the country, to be managed by and for the benefit of non-Haitians,
soaked up in overhead or misspent on projects that languish and
development that never comes. Much pledged aid never arrives.
The pressing needs now, before the rebuilding, are clean water, food and
health care. Among the most fearsome imminent dangers is the spread of
cholera, the disease that the United Nations inflicted on Haiti, through
the recklessness of its troops, then spent years shrugging off its
responsibility for. With more than one million Haitians affected by the
hurricane, the United Nations Population Fund has also been calling
attention to the needs of pregnant women, more than 8,400 of whom are
expected to give birth in the next three months.
The man who is expected to take over as United Nations secretary general,
António Guterres, will inherit a special obligation to develop and fully
fund a plan to bring clean water and sanitation to Haiti, and to revive a
languishing effort to eradicate, not just contain, cholera.
The organization’s member nations, meanwhile, need to answer the urgent
appeal for relief aid, and then deliver on their promises. The United
States government has another responsibility, beyond humanitarian relief:
The Department of Homeland Security should immediately reinstitute
temporary protected status for Haitians in the United States, and suspend
efforts to deport unauthorized immigrants back to the disaster zone.
People who are moved to help should temper generosity with caution, and
consult guides to effective, reputable charities. Hard experience shows
how donations go astray: The Red Cross raised $500 million in appeals
after the Haiti earthquake, but reporters for NPR and ProPublica, in an
exhaustive investigation, searched in vain for where all that money went.
A version of this editorial appears in print on October 8, 2016, on page
A20 of the New York edition with the headline: New Catastrophe in Haiti.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/opinion/haitis-new-catastrophe.html?emc=edit_tnt_20161007&nlid=372084&tntemail0=y
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