Thinking of Haiti in the Night I am Robbed of Sleep

THINKING ABOUT HAITI IN THE NIGHT I AM ROBBED OF SLEEP[1]

By James V. Arbuckle, O.M.M., C.D.


Introduction
The Haiti earthquake is not quite the greatest catastrophe, natural or manmade, which has occurred since World War II: the death tolls in Bangladesh in 1970, China in 1976 and 2004 and on the Indian Ocean in 2004, probably exceeded the presumed deaths in Haiti this week[2]. Much has or should have been learned form these earlier tragedies about disaster relief and about reconstruction, and these early days of inevitably and excusably frantic and uncoordinated efforts must now be giving way to more effective and sustainable programmes. Detailled planning for the next stages must begin now.

We have learned in the course of that calamitous 20th Century to think of disaster response as having three phases:

Rescue;
Relief; and
Reconstruction.

The distinctions among these phases may be less apparent than conceptual; certain it is that each is heavily influenced by the others and that they must be planned with this interdependence in mind. Indeed, it will be useful if planning for all three phases begins immediately and concurrently.

Before we proceed to examine each of these clusters of issues, we need to pause to take cognizance of four Leitmotifs which will run throughout this article; these are:

Security. This is no longer a chicken-or-egg question – restoring and maintaining a positive security environment, without which all efforts may be frustrated, and will at least be severely hindered, will be a vital function of the intervention.

Interagency Cooperation. This is neither the time nor the place for the various agencies who will respond to the emergency to compete with or attempt to ignore each other. Still less may they take the time and the effort to jockey for position or a share of the limelight. This is an extremely complex situation, and it can only be approached in a spirit of collegial cooperation and effective coordination of resources and capabilities. The grim reaper has no sympathy for omissions or for duplications. And the people care very little who helps them.

Indigenous Capabilities. These can neither be ignored nor romanticized. Haiti has not had in the best of times a very effective government, nor for that matter much else in the way of functioning institutions. This is not to deny the courage and the intelligence of many Haitians, and individuals will have much to contribute. Collectively, however, Haitian society is a very different story. The most should be made of local institutions, but they must be viewed realistically.

Public Information. Much harm can be done in the very early stages of the intervention by poor passage of information, especially to the local population, and this is exacerbated by the collapse of the infrastructure. Nevertheless, disinformation, rumour and unrealistic expectations are the vermin which emerge spontaneously at the scene of a disaster and, like vermin, these must be brought under control from the very outset. The overall coordination of the information programme must be done by the highest level of authority in the country.



Rescue
Timely and effective reconnaissance will be essential to the entry and operations of rescuers, and their findings will also heavily influence subsequent relief operations. Of course Haiti is well known – the U.N. has been operating there since 1994, and satellite imagery of the current situation has been shown on television around the world. Clearly however there is no substitute for detailed on-site reconnaissance of harbours, landing fields and roads. Whatever the urgency of the situation, it makes little sense to dispatch supplies which cannot be delivered effectively and quickly, nor stored securely. Most importantly, the capacity of Haiti to absorb aid, which was in normal times limited, was assuredly severely downgraded by the damage sustained, and this does not appear to have been initially as realistically considered as it ought to have been. The saying, “Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted”, has as its corollary that time not spent in reconnaissance will almost always exact a price later, and the price of rushing in unprepared can be very high.

Rescue operations will also normally take place in three stages; these are:

Surface Casualties. These will be those on the surface to whose rescue and removal there are few or no physical obstacles. This in no way indicates the seriousness of their situation: surface casualties may have fallen there or been injured by falling rubble, and they may have been or be in danger of being injured by more falling debris.

The Lightly Trapped. These casualties are usually on or near to the surface. Again, they may be very severely injured or dead, but they can usually be removed by manpower with simple tools. Great care must be taken in this rescue, which may be the first entry into the rubble, not to trigger secondary collapse.

The Heavily Trapped. These casualties will usually be fully buried. Their location may not be immediately apparent, their rescue will usually involve tunneling, and major equipment and specialist personnel will be needed. These more heavily trapped may, on the other hand, have escaped serious injury in the initial disaster, but their enemies are nevertheless shock and dehydration, and these may alone prove fatal.

Although the media initially made much of supposedly declining survival rates after 72 hours, and speculated about bulldozing the ruins at about that time, this was simplistic and premature. In the event, there were two successful rescues on Day 10, on 22 January, another on Day 11 and as we go to press on 28 January there has been one more live rescue on Day 15. In the Day 11 rescue, the man had been doing maintenance work in a hotel which collapsed on him. He was not seriously injured and was working in the hotel storeroom; he survived on beer and coke.

In fact, not all collapsed buildings collapse alike, and spaces and shelters will exist depending on the type and nature of the collapse.

This is not the place to elaborate on the architecture of collapse. Suffice it here to say that floors usually do not simply descend as parallel layers, but they fall at angles, forming spaces and shelters, such as close to a wall or a doorway, or under a stair well. A building plan will indicate to an experienced rescuer where these pockets might be, and will form the basis of the entry plan.

Too soon, however, the line on the chart indicating diminished life expectancy of those still trapped, will intersect the line indicating rising probability of disease due to decomposition, and it may be necessary for that and for other reasons to commence clearing the rubble. Although several rescue organizations have vowed to continue searching, that point of diminishing returns for effort appeared  to have been reached on Day 11, 23 January, and that might well be the end of large-scale rescue operations.


Relief
Apparently, the rescue phase has now ended, but even before that, relief efforts will have become the dominant theme and activity. It is now that such issues as public information and inter-agency coordination will become most important, and the relations with the host country which are formed in this phase will be critical to the longer and more difficult reconstruction phase. There are already signs of strains and worse in several aspects of coordination and public information management: bickering and blaming, mostly to the media, about any aspect of the effort judged by someone to be somehow inadequate, are becoming a staple of the homeward appetite for bad news. Now is the time to establish clear guidelines for coordination and management of relief efforts, and not only for relief efforts, for relief and reconstruction must be a continuum, and the management architecture established now must be effective for the very long term. Coordination, probably best by the U.N., must be “true and comprehensive”, not just as a mediator among the NGOs and U.N. agencies, who are already squabbling among themselves and bashing the Americans, especially the American military. It seems at this time of writing that the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is moving into this role. It will be here that the long-term role of and relations with the Haitian government will take shape, and it is important to that relationship that it is clear that the international community is in this for a very long run. It is just as important that the Haitian authorities are prepared to accept what will at least at the outset amount to tutelage.

The “take-over” of the airport by U.S. military forces was immediately the subject of resentment and criticism, even though it was done at the urging of the President of Haiti. Nevertheless Brazil and France lodged official ­protests with Washington after US military aircraft were given priority at Port-au-Prince's congested airport, forcing many non-US flights to divert to the Dominican Republic. Brazil warned it would not ­relinquish command of United Nations forces in Haiti (this had not been suggested by anyone, and Brazil does not at any rate “command” the peacekeeping force), and the French Foreign Minister complained that the airport had become a “US annex”. The Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières also complained about diverted flights.

It is not recorded that any of these complainers addressed their complaints to the U.S. forces in Haiti – most seemed content to speak about the U.S. forces rather than to them. Said Jarry Emmanuel, air logistics officer for the World Food Programme, to the New York Times, "… most of those flights are for the United States military. Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync." [3]. Just so, but what the critics seem to have missed was that, as of Day Four, there were over 100 landing slots per day at the airport, compared to about one-third that number in normal times. By 22 January, OCHA reported that that figure had again risen to 150 landings per day, although there were on that day over 1000 aircraft waiting to land. U.S. Engineers had by that time cleared the harbour of its most severe damage, and were receiving up to 250 containers per day; that figure is expected to rise to 350 per day by 25 January. Moreover, it seems that all-weather, day-and-night landings and take-offs, not normally available in Haiti, were being controlled from the U.S.S. Vincent. Finally, the priorities established by the U.S. military were 1) water, 2) distribution equipment, 3) food, 4) medical personnel and 5) medicines. All of which makes perfect sense, and it is unlikely that anyone else – French, British or, for that matter, the Brazilians – would have done it much differently. It is at any rate just this sort of direction which is vital to any operation, let alone one this complex, and it really matters much less who issues the direction than that there is effective direction. And of course to the people it matters not in the slightest who is in charge.

Coordinating mechanisms for multi-agency operations in a humanitarian emergency are entirely consensual and rely on the good will of the actors. Not surprisingly, such mechanisms are quite fragile. Interestingly, the United Nations had early and successful experience of this, inter alia in Haiti; as I wrote in my book:

The CMOCC (Civil-Military Operations Coordination Centre) of the United Nations Mission in Haiti (UNMIH, 1994-99) was housed in a hangar at the airport, and was like a trade fair: one entered the hangar to find an information desk, a diagram of the Centre’s layout, and around the hangar were the booths of all the organizations and agencies who wished to be there. The area was secure and you could drink the water. Each day there were completely open briefings which might be attended by almost anyone who had any business there at all. At those briefings one might hear the most frank and intimate details of such issues as road and bridge states, de-mining, and health and security issues.[4]

If there is not at this moment a functioning CMOCC in Haiti, it is high time to reinvent it. It is hard to imagine anyone serious about their work who would stay away from that party.[5]

Clearly, a vigorous and pro-active public information campaign will be vital. There are already signs of the frustrations which arise from unrealistic expectations, which are the principal bugbear of a mission start-up. Inevitably this mission will like others before it suffer greatly from misapprehensions of what is intended and achievable, and in what time frames, and according to what priorities. People to whom nothing is happening at the moment tend to conclude, in the absence of information to the contrary, that nothing is just what is happening. If they happen to have their feelings of neglect and helplessness confirmed by the media – and there have already been more than enough media stories to just that effect – their patience may be the more quickly exhausted. The Americans especially are rather vulnerable to retellings of their history in Haiti, and those who usually do not want to see a relief operation “militarized” may at the same time question why the military are not doing more and doing it sooner. Thus an American military operation in Haiti must take great care with its message, both to the local and to the international audiences.

An important aspect of relief and reconstruction will be financial, and the international community, governments, NGOs and charities of all sorts are raising large sums, and there is confidence that this will be well spent and accurately accounted for. I will return to this last issue under “Reconstruction”. We must also however consider the matter of diaspora remittances.

Diaspora remittances around the world average from 10-25% of GDP in several developing nations. They often amount to over 80% of official development assistance. Migrants typically may be sending 10-15% of their incomes to their relatives. In the case of Haiti, about one million expatriates, 99% of whom earn less than $35,000 per year, remit $1.5 Billion annually, or nearly 30% of the GDP of Haiti; it is estimated that one in five Haitian households receives money transfers from overseas.[6] At the moment, these transfers are interrupted, and it is vital that they be resumed. However, the institutions making the transfers are unofficial, and not subject to regulation as banks are. But people who live below the poverty line do not deal with banks, and those with whom they are forced to do business charge commissions which can reach 20%. The movement of these remittances is now slowly recommencing, , but there are reports that the transfer agencies are charging a special "danger" transfer fee of 10%.  Serious consideration should be given to some form of regulation of the transferring agencies, the largest of which is in fact an American company.

It is in this stage of operations that the relationship between the hosts and guests will have to be worked out, for it is these relationships which will largely determine the form and the scope of the reconstruction. For certain, the Security Council must consider carefully the direction to be given to operations in Haiti. The role of the peace force in subsequent operations must be considered carefully: a peace force has a very minimalist structure and a very specific mandate – need these be changed, and how? Now is the time to resolve these issues, carefully and objectively – this is not the time for ad hoc structuring, nor for mission creep tasking.

Reconstruction

Haiti is a failed state. We have known this for several years, and Haiti is not the only failed state in the world. However, the international community, despite its awareness of the problems of work in failed states, has not formally defined this term, there is no typology of failed or faltering states, nor is there any real set of procedures for working with such a government. Attempts to graft the necessary institutions onto a weak or non-existent government are usually sooner or later met with a “host” demanding respect for their “sovereignty” or their “domestic jurisdiction”, even – perhaps especially – when those terms have quite ceased to have any real meaning. The media will often take this up with cries of neo-colonialism or cultural imperialism. As host consent to operations remains the sine qua non of any intervention[7], the international community will demand of the intervention agencies that they respect and utilize indigenous capacities, often with no realistic appreciation of just what those capacities might – or might not – be. The catastrophe here has not been entirely natural – it has been exacerbated, and relief efforts are being hindered, by local government incompetence and corruption. The intervention agencies, if denied a realistic appreciation of their starting point, may find themselves in a can’t-get-there-from-here situation. When there is nowhere to go but up, having your feet on the ground is better than having your head in the clouds.

There is an urgent need to decide on the overall goals for the reconstruction of Haiti, and these goals are at the moment more important and more urgent than finances or time lines or – for goodness sake – exit strategies[8]. How would you rebuild Cite-Soleil? What model would you use? Who would live there? For that matter, where should Haitians live: in cities or in the countryside? Can the urbanization of Haiti be reversed? Can agriculture recommence? Can deforestation be reversed?

And it is here that we can use Jeremy Occam’s Razor for the first time, for it is just those foregoing questions which must be answered by the Haitians themselves. The Haitians must create of themselves a steering body to select and maintain the objectives of reconstruction. They must decide if and how the mistakes of the past may be set right, and how their recurrence can be avoided. Just how this is to be done – how financed and administered, how controlled and assessed – will at least at the outset be the tasks of outside agencies. But this work should also be a training vehicle to create indigenous capacities, with the outsiders eventually working themselves right out of their jobs. The key will be that Haitians do what they can, and outsiders do what they must, and neither does more of either.

There must be a fully independent and totally transparent, water tight accounting and auditing programme, to be set in operation very soon and operating for as long as reconstruction takes. Neither the United Nations nor any of its members need another Oil-for-Food Programme, but the sums to be spent in Haiti over the next decades will dwarf Oil-for-Food. A vigorous anti-corruption campaign will be an essential component of reconstruction. There must be an end to flaunting of building codes, and over-building on unsafe sites - whether this results from corruption or incompetence, or both, construction standards must be clear and clearly enforced.

The reconstruction of Haiti, founded on such tragedy and suffering, offers challenges and opportunities which will never come again.

Conclusions
Haiti has about the same population as New York City, where 3,000 died in the 9/11 attacks. If, as is currently being estimated, 200,000 died in Haiti, that is almost 70 times the 9/11 casualties. The Haitian holocaust will mark and shape this nation and these people for all time – but in what shape? and with what markings? What models will be adopted, what goals will be pursued, what means will be employed? These are the vital questions, not what will it cost, how long will it take, when will it end – still less: who will take the credit, who will get the funding, who will have the jobs for their people. The Haitian people have a duty to themselves, to select and to maintain appropriate goals and programmes to rebuild a country they will take pride in forever. The international community has an obligation to help them to achieve these goals, this reborn Haiti. Whatever it takes, for however long it takes.

Perhaps that might be the pledge that Haitians and their supporters around the world would exchange:

Whatever it takes!




[1] With apologies to Heinrich Heine, Nachtgedanken, 1843
[2] Thanks to Don Jazey for providing me with details of these earlier disasters. Of course, China and India have more than 150 and Bangladesh almost 20 times Haiti’s population. Moreover, as Tom DeFaye has pointed out, the disasters on the Indian Ocean and in China were in a relatively small portion of the country, and government, communications and infrastructure remained elsewhere and near at hand to function at their normal effectiveness. The 2004 Tsunami caused about 800,000 deaths in eight Asian and Southern Asian and four African countries whose populations total 1.75 billion. Current estimates of killed, injured and homeless in Haiti equal 25% of the population.
[3] See for example Squabbling hinders aid effort in Haiti, The Mail and Guardian, South Africa, 18 January 2010
[4] Arbuckle, James V., Military Forces in 21st Century Peace Operatons: No Job for a Soldier?, Routledge, Oxon, 2006, pp. 6-7.
[5] … but it has happened: NGOs stayed away in crowds from the UNMIK-KFOR CMOCC in Kosovo in 1999 (see Arbuckle, op. cit., page 7.
[6] Orozco, Manuel, Understanding the remittance economy in Haiti: An Inter-American Dialogue Paper, the World Bank, March 15, 2006
[7] See Arbuckle, op. cit., pp 102-8
[8] The Canadian Defence Minister has estimated that the Canadian Forces relief mission in Jacmel will last a maximum of two to three months.