Philadelphia Inquirer – May 6, 2010
Michelle Obama’s trip to Haiti last month added another high-profile figure to an informal list my students and I have been keeping of important American visitors to the island nation.
Hillary Clinton arrived in Port-au-Prince only days after the earthquake hit. Since then, Bill Clinton has flown down in the company of George W. Bush. The secretary of state, two former presidents, and the first lady, among others, add up to a lot of top brass.
Why so much high-level attention? There are the obvious reasons: the scale of the tragedy in lives lost and property damaged, the abject poverty of the country, the urgent need for outside aid, and Haiti’s nearby location, only 700 miles off the coast of Florida.
All of that’s important, certainly, but is it enough to justify such a procession?
My students studying 20th-century global history have become accustomed to thinking in terms of realpolitik. They have learned to consider the strategic significance of a particular region and to ask who benefits (or suffers) from a given policy or action.
If we believed the Bush administration, for example, the United States invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a threat to our allies in the region with its weapons of mass destruction, except that there weren’t any. There was oil, however, which brings us back to Haiti.
Having no natural resources for which America hungers and no industrial base, what is Haiti’s strategic importance? Why lavish attention on this country now, when its people have been suffering desperately for years?
Most of the stories about Haiti have understandably focused on the catastrophe itself and the immediate needs of the survivors, but there’s also concern about whether its fragile government can continue to function. My students have spent some time this year studying failed states, and there they found some possible answers:
Terrorism: Extremist groups thrive in areas lacking organized, effective central government. Imagine a terrorist base several hundred miles off the Florida coast.
Piracy: The Gulf of Aden has become the site of frequent attacks on international shipping because Somalia, largely ungoverned, sits alongside it on the Horn of Africa. What would be the economic impact on the Caribbean tourist trade if even one cruise ship were hijacked and held for ransom?
Drug trafficking: We have been losing the war on drugs ever since it was declared. A failed state to our immediate south, conveniently located between Central and South American production points and U.S. markets, would not help.
Disease: In the aftermath of a natural disaster, the risk of dangerous contagions emerging and spreading increases dramatically, especially when infrastructure and organization are lacking.
Regional instability: One failed state could lead to others.
The Haitians deserve our aid simply because they are in distress and we have the means to help them. But we also have pressing selfish reasons to make sure their homeland survives as a viable nation state. That may explain why so many important Americans have made the trip.
I saw your op-ed in today’s Inquirer and I wanted to congratulate you both on the excellent summary you put together for the article and for teaching such sophisticated real life concepts to your students. I hope you used the opportunity also to introduce them to the evils of corruption. The World Bank says, corruption is the single greatest impediment to social progress in developing countries like Haiti. You might be interested in an article on that subject we did for the Washington Times in March,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/26/rebuild-the-right-way/. Good teachers are so important–keep up the great work.
TEXT OF ABOVE MENTIONED ARTICLE –
When international donors meet at the United Nations headquarters in New York on March 31 to continue discussions on rebuilding Haiti, it will present what former Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani calls “an open moment” – a brief period in time that will determine a country’s future direction. Reconstructing roads and buildings is vital, but if Haiti is to use this moment to break away from the poverty, despair and environmental degradation that has plagued it for the past two centuries, it will have to do a lot more. In order to achieve lasting changes, Haiti must rebuild its decrepit government institutions with strong anti-corruption policies and a clean bureaucracy.
Despite more than $5 billion in international aid to Haiti over the past 20 years, this country of 10 million is still the poorest and most corrupt in the Western Hemisphere. It will remain that way unless Haiti can take advantage of this moment to elevate its internal governance. Experience has shown that impoverished countries are especially vulnerable during periods of reconstruction. Dishonest government officials feast on the huge influx of money and establish powerful networks that perpetuate their dominance after normalcy returns. In some cases, up to 30 percent of development aid has been lost to bribery, kickbacks and embezzlement.
Both the Brookings Institution and development economist Paul Collier have called for a temporary development agency with wide powers to manage donated funds. That makes considerable sense, but the devil is in the details.
To earn the confidence of donor governments and the Haitian people, such a reconstruction agency must be managed by individuals of proven competence and integrity from both the international community and the Haitian government. The staff should be composed of outside experts working hand in hand with officials temporarily assigned from the various Haitian ministries. The aid agenda must be worked out in collaboration with donors and government ministries, and all assistance should be coordinated to eliminate duplication, waste and fraud. An important goal will be to ensure transparency for all reconstruction efforts and community participation in project selection and monitoring.
For the next few years, the business of government in Haiti will center on reconstruction. To make sure that reconstruction funds are not diverted illegally into the pockets of dishonest staff, all government employees should be required to submit a list of their assets every year, which will be reviewed promptly. Any false statements or increases in wealth that cannot be explained should result in severe penalties and forfeitures. The agency must have full enforcement powers, including authority to issue administrative fines and prosecute criminal violations before a special anti-corruption court, which must be established by the government as an early order of business. Government employees need to become accustomed to these and other trans- parent-government initiatives during the reconstruction period if they are to be embedded as the accepted method of operation in the Haitian government when the emergency is over.
Many of these kinds of provisions were incorporated into the charter for the Badan Rehabilitasi dan Rekonstruksi (BRR), the reconstruction agency created by the Indonesians after the 2004 tsunami. The BRR was especially innovative in its use of foreign experts and early focus on measures to thwart corruption, and it is generally regarded as having been successful in implementing a community-driven program with an atmosphere of transparency and accountability.
Haiti’s “open moment” is now, not because donors are generously opening their checkbooks, but because the amount of funds and international attention opens up an unprecedented opportunity to rehabilitate Haiti’s government institutions. For years the World Bank has taught that “corruption is the greatest obstacle to reducing poverty,” and Indonesia has shown how critical anti-corruption strategies are to the success of disaster recoveries. To ignore these lessons is to court failure in Haiti again. This time, we must get it right.
Jack D. Smith is an adjunct professor at George Washington University Law School. Mark Vlasic is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for Law, Science & Global Security and the former head of operations of the World Bank’s Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative. Gregory Cooper is a Fulbright Scholar.
Thank you, and your students, for your insight into our country’s interest in Haiti. However, you failed to mention a potential source of cheap labor in future sweat shops
My name is Travis Ross. I am an elementary school teacher in Montreal, Quebec. I am also a member of the Canada Haiti Action Network (CHAN).
Seems to be an excellent Unit you’ve put together with your students. It must be challenging to take on subjects like this
I’d suggest one more “reason” to discuss with your students: Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemosphere, largely due to constant interferenc from France, the USA, and more recently, Canada.
Haiti is viewed as a potential hub for garment assembly factories by western business interests. Gildan Activewear is the best example. They view Haiti as the only possible leverage they can use against cheap Chinese/Bangladeshi factories. There are only a few places in the world where western business owners can count on subsistence wages, weak democratic infrastructure, virtually no labor laws, and a desperate population to take advantage of.
Haiti competes with Bangladesh for one of the lowest daily wages in the world (2-3 dollars a day). If companies like Gildan did not have population in Central America and, more importantly, Haiti, to exploit they would not be able to compete with Chinese and Bangladeshi manufacturers in the East.
The businesses are quite open about it. The governments are less so. US lawmakers are already hard at work trying to make Haiti a sweatshop/assembly work capital of the western hemisphere:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/06/1615460/us-house-passes-textile-trade.html
This is in place of helping Haiti become more self sufficient and actually responding to the constant requests from the Haitian people to help them develop their agricultural sector, which was destroyed by cheap US imports thanks to Bill Clinton.
Basically, profit over people.
As a teacher myself, I found it interesting to read your student’s list of reasons of why attention is being lavished on Haiti.
As a follow-up assignment perhaps they might want to interview or contact the people at Global Renewable Energy to ask them why their company is also interested in the island.
Here’s the link: http://www.globalrenewableenergy.org/gre/index.php#
I hope that your students continue to learn more about Haiti.
Happy Haitian Heritage Month,
Thank you for your note.
I took a look at the website.
Fascinating. I had never heard of GRE. Their plans for the island sound a bit like the late 19th century American company towns run by corporations such as Pullman.
Quite paternalistic, right down to the threat to move “the project” to the Dominican Republic if the Haitians don’t give it the go ahead soon.
I will absolutely share this with my students.
Your class made some good and valid points. It’s great that they are thinking that way.
There are some other factors to consider:
The island of Hispañola. Haiti shares the island with the Dominican Republic. Both countries have been run by dictators backed by the US. Both were brutal and as vicious as they come. Both countries are extremely poor, but Haiti even more so. There is a big interdependence between both countries. There is trade, but more importantly there are cheap Haitian laborers who take on back breaking jobs in the DR. The DR has been rumored to be a center for the Latin American CIA. The DR’s second largest city in terms of population is NYC.
The potential spill over of Haitians into the DR is of great importance for the US. It’s one step away from having Haitians flee to our mainland.
The race guilt factor:
The US will have to live forever feeling guilty, and rightfully so, for the great injustice this country committed to people of color. Having a Real African America as president, it was inevitable that we had to do the “right thing” for the victims in Haiti. Haitians have been victims throughout their history. Between Papa Doc, Baby Doc, and the multiple regimes that followed, Haitians have seen so much suffering that even the US couldn’t deal with any more guilt having all these pictures entering American homes through the Internet, TV, and the still functioning print.
Per your column “U.S. interest in Haiti isn’t selfless.” It certainly isn’t. The interest is primarily personal. What would critics/pundits/politicians claim if Hillary, George, Bill and others hadn’t shown up? “They don’t care about Haiti.” “They were too busy elsewhere to bother with Haiti.”
They were there burnishing their own images first, helping Haiti second. For this, I applaud them.
Just make sure your realpolitik students know the basic human/political motivations here.