Once again Haiti has been hit with a disaster – this time by Hurricane Matthew – that has devastated its people and its housing stock. Commendably, Guyana has announced it will help and we hope Caricom, of which Haiti is a member, will follow suit and coordinate their assistance to ensure it reaches the people who have actually been affected.
We must learn from the experiences of this poor island on “aid”, offered after the continuous stream of disasters that have befallen it after it followed the US as the second country in this Hemisphere to liberate itself from a colonial power. The latest disaster was in 2010 when a massive earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale hit the island, killing 220,640 persons; injuring 379,572 others; destroying more than 100,000 homes and leaving 1.5 million persons without any means of subsistence.
Through the power of television in the modern globalised world, the pathetic plight of Haitians created such an outpouring of empathy that over US$17 billion was donated by bilaterals, multilaterals and NGO’s to alleviate the situation and rebuild the nation and its infrastructure. In the end less than half of that money actually benefitted Haiti or its people. And this is what Caricom must play a role in preventing in the present scenario, especially when the country does not even have an elected Head of State.
A good example of what may occur is illustrated by the activities of the Bill Clinton Foundation following the earthquake when his wife Hillary, now the Democratic Party’s candidate for the US Presidency, was US Secretary of State. Bill Clinton quickly established a “Haiti Reconstruction Fund” and was made the UN’s representative for aid to Haiti. With his wife directing the US flow of aid to Haiti, the Clintons were critical to Haiti’s reconstruction.
Two examples might suffice to illustrate how there might be a “slip between the cup and the lip” of the aid money and its delivery. To address the housing crisis, the Clinton Foundation selected Clayton Homes, to build temporary shelters in Haiti. This company was owned by Berkshire Hathaway, itself owned by billionaire Warren Buffet who was a member of the Clinton Global Initiative and a large donator to the Clintons as well as the Clinton Foundation. The UN mandated bidding process was ignored and the “hurricane-proof trailers” built by Clayton Homes were structurally unsafe, with high levels of formaldehyde and insulation coming out of the walls. Most were abandoned by Haitians.
Hillary Clinton also directed $10 million in federal loans to a firm called InnoVida, headed by a Clinton and Democratic Party donor named Claudio Osorio. InnoVida’s application was fast tracked and approved within six weeks but in the end, no homes were ever built. At Osorio’s trial, however, it was shown that he did build a Mansion in Florida and was sentenced to twelve years in jail in 2013.
An interesting postscript to the Clintons’ intervention is provided by the New York Times: “To many Haitians, the most significant moment of Mrs Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State was in 2011, when she flew to Haiti to pressure President René Préval to admit Mr Martelly, a popular recording artist, into a two-person runoff for president. Mr Martelly was third in initial voting, but the Organization of American States believed that the man who was second, Mr Préval’s pick, had benefited from vote fraud.”
The night of the runoff, which Mr Martelly won, Mrs Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl D Mills, wrote a congratulatory note to top American diplomats in Haiti.
“You do great elections,” Ms Mills wrote in a message released by the State Department among a batch of Mrs Clinton’s emails. She wrote that she would buy dinner the next time she visited: “We can discuss how the counting is going! Just kidding. Kinda. :)”
Martelly, also known as “Sweet Mickey”, was forced to step down last February.
