The
Trials of Haiti
At
the hospital, the morgue, at least, was functioning. I looked
into the one reserved for victims of diseases, mostly diseases
that could have been prevented or cured. The door was made
of corroded metal, like the door to a meat locker. The room
inside was filled with trays on racks, stacked horizontally,
several bodies per tray, the majority children, the little
girls still in their dresses, bows in their hair.
Diarrhea
alone kills sixty-eight Haitian children out of every 1,000
before the age of 5. Did many of the people in the morgue
die because of dirty water? I asked the medical director.
"Oh,
of course!" he said. He also told me, "Sometimes
we have to put more bodies together than we're supposed
to, because there isn't room."
Haiti
is in dreadful shape. No one disputes the fact. So it seems
odd that over the past few years foreign aid to the country
has actually declined. Haiti still receives assistance,
from the United States, the European Union, Canada, Japan
and various United Nations organizations, but the total
amount has been reduced by about two-thirds since 1995.
The United States has cut its donations by more than half
since 1999. The World Bank, meanwhile, has shut down its
lending to the country, for the time being at least, and
has closed its Haiti office, leaving behind only an administrator
and driver.
Then
there is the case of the Inter-American Development Bank.
The IDB isn't as well-known as some of the other IFIs (the
international financial institutions, or "Iffies"
in aidspeak) but ranks as a major player in Latin America
and the Caribbean. It has long been one of the most important
lenders to Haiti. In the late 1990s it made comprehensive
plans for a passel of new low-interest loans to address
some of the country's most pressing needs--$148 million
in all for improving roads, education and the public health
system, and for increasing the supplies of potable water.
But in the spring of 2001, when the loans were about to
be disbursed, the US representative on the IDB board of
executive directors wrote the bank's president asking that
the process be halted. This was unusual. No member nation
is supposed to be able to stop the disbursement of loans
that are already approved. Nevertheless, the IDB complied.
The Haitian government also lost access to loans it could
have received from the IDB over the next several years,
worth another $470 million.
The
State Department seemed reluctant to discuss this matter.
I was granted an interview with a senior department official
only on condition that I not use his name. He told me it
wasn't just the United States that had wanted to block the
IDB loans; it was "a concerted effort" of the
Organization of American States. The legal justification
for blocking the loans, he said, originated at an OAS meeting
called the Quebec City Summit, which produced something
called the Declaration of Quebec City. But that document
is dated April 22, 2001, and the letter from the IDB's US
executive director asking that the loans not be disbursed
is dated April 6, 2001. So it would seem that the effort
became concerted after it was made. The reason for blocking
the loans, according to the official, was "to bring
pressure to bear on the Aristide government, to address
what the OAS itself and other members of the international
community saw as serious flaws in the 2000 electoral process."
The
official was referring to elections held in May 2000, in
which Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Lavalas political party won
large majorities in both houses of the Haitian Parliament.
Each candidate had to win a clear majority to avoid a runoff,
but the election procedures made it impossible to determine
whether some had won majorities or merely pluralities. This
was the case with eight Senate seats, in seven of which
Lavalas candidates had received the most votes. But the
Provisional Electoral Council eschewed runoffs, and declared
those eight the winners. Opposition parties claimed the
elections had been stolen, and many foreign diplomats made
a fuss. Soon, many were calling the entire election "fraudulent."
This seemed rather harsh, given the fact that to a great
extent, foreigners had financed, managed and monitored the
proceedings, and in the immediate aftermath many observers
had declared a victory for Haiti's fledgling democracy.
Sixty-five percent of Haiti's eligible voters had turned
out, many walking miles along mountain paths and waiting
for hours in the hot sun to vote. Moreover, those eight
contested Senate seats didn't affect the balance of legislative
power. Even if they'd lost them all, Lavalas would still
have had control of Parliament.
The
election didn't seem like a sufficient reason for cutting
aid to Haiti. To me the State Department's explanation seemed
like obvious diplomatic obfuscation, what diplomats called
"irregularities in vote-counting" serving as the
pretext for reducing the amount of money that went to Haiti's
government.
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