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Haiti's social services sector is controlled by non-governmental
organizations. These NGOs are better described, using Peter Hallward's
phrase, as “other-governmental,” since they are financed by, and beholden
to, foreign donor countries. With daily welfare in the hands of a totally
decentralized NGO economy, there is no prospect of any sort of national
or regional coordination. This has real, and deadly consequences.
Hurricane Sandy in 2012 provides an example. Cuba's early warning
system and national government enabled that country to evacuate a huge
hurricane-affected area before the storm hit, with hundreds of thousands of
people being efficiently moved out of danger and back to their homes after
the storm passed. With every NGO in the world, and half of the world's
countries participating in MINUSTAH, the international community could
not manage such an orderly evacuation in Haiti. This is one of the reasons
Haiti, under international tutelage, loses more lives than sovereign
countries do every hurricane season and why it lost more lives during the
2010 earthquake than countries like Chile or China (that were hit with
severe earthquakes around the same time).
A final feature of dictatorships is impunity, a situation in which
crimes committed by the regime go unpunished. There is now irrefutable
scientific evidence that the United Nations brought cholera to Haiti, and
that cholera has killed over 7500 people since it was introduced.
MINUSTAH's initial position was to claim that there was no proof. Now
that there is proof, MINUSTAH insists that it is not to blame because it
was not done on purpose, even though no one ever claimed it was. But if
the effective government of a country causes thousands of deaths and
insists that no one is to blame, shouldn't it raise questions about how the
country is governed? Read More
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