New York Times on Haiti

Updated: Jan. 19, 2012

One of the poorest and least developed countries in the world, Haiti in recent years has struggled with problems ranging from near-constant political upheaval, health crises, an annual barrage of hurricanes and the worst earthquake in the region in more than 200 years.

The quake that struck on Jan. 12, 2010, reduced much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, to rubble.  A study by the Inter-American Development Bank estimated that the total cost of the disaster was between $8 billion and $14 billion, based on a death toll from 200,000 to 250,000. That number was revised in 2011 by Haiti’s government to 316,000; the government has never explained how it arrived at its death toll figures.

An estimated 634,000 people live in displacement camps, according to the International Organization for Migration. International donors promised Haiti $5.3 billion at a March 2010 donor’s conference. But reconstruction involving better buildings and roads has barely begun. Officials’ sole point of pride six months after the earthquake — that disease and violence had been averted — vanished with the outbreak of cholera.

More than a year after the disaster, there were signs of impatience with the limping recovery and the waning international sympathy for Haiti’s enduring troubles as the neighboring Dominican Republic began deporting refugees. Haiti and its international donors were far behind in helping the hundreds of thousands still living in makeshift camps and the millions without formal jobs.

In March 2011, two conservative rivals faced off in a runoff election for the presidency. In April, it was announced that Michel Martelly, a performer with the stage name Sweet Micky, had defeated Mirlande H. Manigat, a former first lady and college administrator.

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Verdicts on the Anniversary of a Massacre

On Jan. 19, 2012, seven of 13 Haitian police officials who stood trial for a prison massacre that occurred a week after the 2010 earthquake were found guilty in the southern city of Les Cayes. An additional 20 officers tried in absentia were also convicted.

On the second anniversary of the massacre, Judge Ezekiel Vaval handed down sentences ranging from one to 13 years of prison and hard labor. The stiffest sentences were awarded to the former Les Cayes prison warden, Sylvestre Larack, who got seven years, and to the city’s riot police chief, Olritch Beaubrun, who got 13, although he was not present for the proceedings, having reportedly fled the country.

The officers were charged with murder, attempted murder and other crimes for killing and wounding dozens of detainees when, in the aftermath of a disturbance on Jan. 19, 2010, they opened fire “deliberately and without justification,” according to an independent commission.

The commission, run jointly by the Haitian government and the United Nations, was appointed after an investigation by The New York Times in May 2010 contradicted the official explanation for the deaths at the prison.

Police and prison officials had maintained that a single detainee, a troublemaker nicknamed Ti Mousson, had fatally shot the inmates and then escaped. Defense attorneys for the officers made the same argument at trial.

But The Times, and then the authorities’ investigations, found that prison and police officers had shot unarmed prisoners, then sought to cover it up, in part by burying bodies in unmarked graves.

The prosecutor, Jean-Marie J. Salomon, said 20 detainees had died but the precise number of deaths and injuries is not known.

Taking the Rural Road to Recovery

In the countryside, there is a small tendril of success for an ambitious program being promoted by aid workers, government officials and international donors: saving the country by developing rural areas.

When the earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince, a few planners and visionaries saw an opportunity to fix some of Haiti’s chronic structural problems. An idea that won early support was to shrink the overcrowded, underemployed, violence-ridden capital and revive the desiccated, disused farmland that had long been unable to feed the country.

But the vision has run up against Haitian reality: myriad economic and infrastructure deficiencies, the lack of credible opportunity in rural areas and the fading of international interest and funds.

Reviving rural Haiti would wean the country off an overreliance on imported food while creating jobs in the countryside, helping to discourage mass migration to urban sinkholes like Port-au-Prince. Before the quake, nearly a quarter of the population lived in the capital, where two-thirds of the labor force had no formal jobs and overcrowding was considered a major contributor to the quake’s estimated death toll of 300,000.

New factories are also part of the plan. A South Korean-run industrial park in the north, partly financed by the United States, is expected to open in 2012, providing at least 20,000 jobs.

But experts say agriculture is the nation’s biggest need. Farming has declined to 25 percent of the economy today from 40 percent a decade ago, making Haiti more dependent on imported food. Today, the government says, 52 percent of the food Haitians eat comes from abroad, compared with 20 percent a few decades ago.

Yet there have been signs of a potential turnaround. In December 2011, the World Bank approved $50 million for agriculture projects. Signature Haitian products like mangoes, coffee, cocoa and sugar are getting a burst of overseas attention.

But the challenges are staggering, and most concern money. Irrigation is lacking, and poorly constructed ports and roads disrupt the delivery of produce to domestic and international markets. Foreign aid has slowed to a trickle. Only 43 percent of the $4.59 billion promised has been received and disbursed, according to the United Nations.

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the body created to coordinate and prioritize aid, closed in October 2011, when its mandate expired, with little sign that it will be renewed. The panel, led by former President Bill Clinton, was set up to provide some assurance to international donors, wary of channeling aid to a historically corrupt Haitian government, that their money would be well spent.

Its departure raises questions about whether the remaining pledges will ever be fulfilled.

The Duvalier Legacy

Haiti occupies an area roughly the size of Maryland on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Nearly all of the 8.7 million residents are of African descent and speak Creole and French. The capital is Port-au-Prince.

The country is the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, with four out of five people living in poverty and more than half in abject poverty. Deforestation and over-farming have left much of Haiti eroded and barren, undermining subsistence farming efforts, driving up food prices and leaving the country even more vulnerable to natural disasters. Its long history of political instability and corruption has added to the turmoil.

In 1791, Haiti became the world’s first black republic and the first independent nation in the region after it won independence in 1804 in a slave revolt against Napoleonic France. Its history has been shaped by profound political disarray, chaotic rule marked by corruption and brutal repression and, beginning in 1915, a two-decade occupation by the United States. Haiti’s most infamous leader was François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, who was elected president in 1957, beginning a long rule known for venality and human rights abuses. His son Jean-Claude Duvalier ruled from 1971 until he fled in 1986 but not before looting the treasury in another Haitian tradition. What followed was another period of alternating civilian and military regimes.

Regime Change and Free Elections

In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide became president after winning 67 percent of the vote, but he was overthrown shortly after taking office in a violent coup leading to a three-year period of military rule that ended only after the intervention of a United Nations force led by the United States. While the 1995 election of René Préval, a prominent political ally of Mr. Aristide, was widely praised, subsequent elections were plagued with allegations of fraud, including the 2000 restoration of Mr. Aristide to his old post.

Over the following years, violence spread throughout the country as the government cracked down on opposition party leaders, holding power in part with the aid of extra-legal gangs. In February 2004, after groups opposed to the Aristide government seized control of cities and towns throughout Haiti and closed in on the capital, Mr. Aristide resigned and fled to South Africa. United States-led armed forces under the authority of the United Nations Security Council were sent to Port-au-Prince to bring order and oversee the installation of an interim government. The United Nations has spent some $5 billion on peacekeeping operations since 2004.

In 2006, Mr. Préval was re-elected president amidst allegations of impropriety.

Despite bouts of optimism brought on by the implementation of a new constitution and the first peaceful transfer of power between two elected presidents in the nation’s history, Haiti’s politics in the post-earthquake era remain as tumultuous as ever.

Political Instability and Natural Disasters

Since 2008, Haiti’s situation has worsened dramatically. It has staggered under the a combination of food riots, government instability and a series of hurricanes that killed hundreds and battered the economy — all of this before the deadliest earthquake in the country’s history.

The January 2010 earthquake left the country and its densely populated Port-au-Prince flattened, its poorly constructed buildings and shanties destroyed or seriously compromised and the government broken. Upwards of 250,000 lives were lost.

By May 2010, the hope that a more efficient, more just Haiti might rise from the rubble was giving way to stalemate and bitterness. Haitians complained that the politically connected were benefiting most from the scant reconstruction work and that crime was returning. Meanwhile, unproductive politicians and aid groups struggled with temporary refugee camps that looked more permanent every day.

Parliament was essentially disbanded; power rested with Mr. Préval, his cabinet and a reconstruction commission led by the Haitian prime minister and former President Bill Clinton. Haiti’s first election since the January earthquake took place in late November 2010, characterized by disorganization, voter intimidation, the ransacking of polling stations and fraud.

Presidential Election

In March 2011, two conservative rivals faced off in a runoff election for the presidency. In April, it was announced that Michel Martelly, a performer with the stage name Sweet Micky, had defeated Mirlande H. Manigat, a former first lady and college administrator who was the top vote getter in the initial round of voting in November 2010. 

In the campaign, Mr. Martelly eschewed the skirts, underwear and other outlandish outfits of his musical career in favor of tailored suits and serious talk of reforming agriculture, streamlining the delivery of humanitarian aid and restoring law and order by bringing back the military, which was disbanded more than a decade ago after a history of human rights and political abuses.

Mr. Martelly faced immediate challenges and hobbled authority. Haiti is heavily reliant on foreign humanitarian aid, dispersed among hundreds of nongovernmental organizations that operate in effect as a shadow government. It also relies on United Nations peacekeepers for security.

When a plan to cut the number of United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti was announced in September 2011, Mr. Martelly sharply opposed it. He said in an interview that he “would not even think of reducing” the force because the country remained unstable and the national police were not ready to take over.

Mr. Martelly’s Military Proposal

At around the same time, in an effort to create jobs and supplement the weak national police force, Mr. Martelly began pressing forward with his plan to reconstitute the Haitian military. The military was disbanded over human rights abuses in 1995 by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide after years of political turmoil, making Haiti one of a handful of countries without an army.

Mr. Martelly submitted a $95 million proposal calling for an initial force of 3,500 personnel to patrol the border, help put down civil unrest and provide badly needed employment. However, even members of Parliament who were supportive of the idea doubted there was support to finance the proposal.

Also, a draft of Mr. Martelly’s proposal circulated to diplomats from donor nations was promptly leaked, a sign of disquiet among many who recalled the military’s involvement in coups and questioned its priority in a country still reeling from the January 2010 earthquake.

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