Haiti Earthquake Relief: Overview

Introduction

On January 12, 2010, a massive earthquake struck the island nation of Haiti, with a minimum of fifty-four aftershocks occurring over the next twelve days. The massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake toppled buildings, destroyed bridges and infrastructure, and resulted in the loss of an estimated 230,000 lives. The casualties of this natural disaster included nearly 300,000 injured, with an estimated 1 million Haitians left homeless. Beyond these immediate losses of life and shelter, as well as injuries, there were secondary risks of infections from untreated wounds, lack of sufficient medical care, lack of or limited food supplies, and lack of clean drinking water. Poor sanitary conditions for human waste threatened a variety of diseases, which would result in further deaths. The final major problem for Haiti was the incapacity and inability to adequately dispose of human remains in order to prevent the spread of disease.

Any nation facing a natural disaster of this level would be challenged to meet these needs and concerns. All of these issues faced Haiti, a nation with little or no discernible resources, and a government infrastructure that is ill-equipped to deal with any disaster, let alone a catastrophic earthquake. The government of Haiti lacks the resources to provide the minimum levels of assistance, or even the resources to organize such an effort. For Haiti and its people, dealing with the earthquake and its aftermath proved an overwhelming task.

Understanding the Discussion

Intergovernmental organization (IGO): An organization developed by multiple governments to work cooperatively in the pursuit of common goals.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF): Also known as Doctors Without Borders, an organization that offers medical care for inhabitants of areas subject to natural disasters, famine, plague, poverty, and war. Medical personnel, doctors, and nurses volunteer their services to care for victims. The organization was started in 1971 by a group of French physicians.

Nongovernmental organization (NGO): An organization that is not aligned with any government or nation state. The organization may provide a variety of services or programs. There are NGOs created specifically for disaster relief and humanitarian assistance.

United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF): An intergovernmental agency created by the United Nations in 1946, in response to the need to provide healthcare and food for children in various countries devastated by World War II. In 1953, it became a permanent department in the United Nations, with a mission to provide healthcare and food for children and families in need. The agency receives two thirds of its resources from governments and the remaining third from private contributions.

History

The Republic of Haiti is an island nation in the Caribbean Sea. The nation of Haiti occupies the western portion of the island of Hispaniola, which it shares with the eastern nation of the Dominican Republic. The Columbus expedition of 1492 landed on the island in December of that year, claiming it for Spain. The island was inhabited by American Indian tribes of the Taíno people. The combination of Spanish enslavement, malnutrition, and the introduction of diseases by Europeans, such as smallpox, led to the demise of the Indigenous inhabitants of the island.

The decline of the Indigenous population made it difficult for the Spanish to find a sufficient labor force to work the very profitable mines discovered there. These mines were rich in several mineral ores, with gold being of primary interest to the Spanish government. Under Charles V, the Spanish governors began to import enslaved Africans to replace the American Indian labor force.

Over time, enslaved Africans and their descendants escaped to the unoccupied western portions of the island, living with the remaining American Indian population. Eventually, the western portion of the island also became home to the French buccaneers raiding the various shipping routes in the Caribbean. This multiracial assimilation created new categories in this mixed society. Descendants of American Indian women and European men (Spanish and eventually French) would be identified as mestizo, while descendants of African women and European men were identified as mulâtres, and the descendants of American Indians and Africans were identified as zambos. As generations of these groups continued to assimilate, these groupings became even more mixed and less identified with their original groupings.

Tobacco and sugar plantations were introduced into the economy of the island in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, expanding the island's economic base. This required more property for the massive plantations, and resulted in a lower number of settlers emigrating from Europe. The combination of vast agricultural assets and French settlers did draw the attention of France. The Treaty of Ryswick, which ended the Nine Years War in 1697, granted France control of the western portion of the island of Hispaniola, which was identified as Saint-Domingue. In 1791, a slave revolt occurred in Saint-Domingue, which prompted the French revolutionary government to send three commissioners and troops to stabilize the unrest. The British responded with an invasion; the French commissioners worked to build a consensus between the enslaved population, the multiracial population, and white colonists, which eventually resulted in abolishing slavery in the colony.

The leader of the slave revolt, Toussaint Louverture, organized an effective military force that was able to force both British and Spanish forces out of the colony, establishing peace and order. Under Napoleon Bonaparte, the French government decided to reestablish control over the colony, sending military forces to the island. Toussaint Louverture was captured and imprisoned in France, where he died of disease. Under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the revolution continued, with Dessalines defeating the French and becoming a military dictator in 1804. Dessalines became the first leader of an independent Haiti.

The United States invaded the island in 1915 and occupied it with a contingent of US Marines over the next twenty years in order to provide stability to the government. The US Marines finally withdrew in 1934. One of the primary acts of the US occupation was the establishment of a permanent border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Historically, the nation of Haiti has suffered from a great deal of corruption, more recently under the administration of the Duvalier family from 1957 to 1986. Haiti ranked as one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere over much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As a result, the country suffered from a poor infrastructure and a lack of essential services.

History of Disaster Relief

The provision of international humanitarian aid for natural disasters began in the nineteenth century. The first international coordination of resources was focused on the care for casualties of military conflicts. In the aftermath of the Crimean War (1854–56), more public awareness of the human devastation of war developed. Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman, traveled to Italy to meet Napoleon III, emperor of France, about business and trade issues. While on the trip, Dunant witnessed the Battle of Solferino between allied French forces and the Austrian Army. Dunant was amazed at the devastating impact of war in the form of human casualties, and the lack of appropriate medical assistance for the wounded. Dunant worked tirelessly to assist combatants on both sides in recovery from their respective injuries, encouraging and coordinating local inhabitants to assist in the provision of care for casualties of both sides of the battle.

Upon returning to Geneva, Switzerland, Dunant communicated what he observed at Solferino. In 1863, along with four other members from prominent Swiss families, Dunant created the “Committee of Five,” which became part of the Geneva Society for Public Welfare. In turn, this led to the establishment of the International Committee for the Relief of the Injured, in October 1863. In 1864, the Swiss government invited representatives of the United States, Mexico, Brazil, and the European nations to a conference addressing the humane treatment of the wounded and procedures for armies in the field. This developed into the “Geneva Convention,” the rules and standards accepted for the conduct of military engagements and personnel. Noncombatant and neutral personnel, working to ensure the observation of these rules and the provision of care for the wounded, would operate under the symbol of the Swiss Nation, or the Red Cross.

In 1919, the formation of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) occurred, with its mission to move beyond the original provision of the ICRC, expanding to offer assistance in recovery from human-made and natural disasters. The first mission of the new organization focused its resources on addressing the famine and typhus epidemic in Poland that year. A Muslim-based organization also developed under the title of the “Red Crescent,” and worked with the Red Cross in addressing crises around the world. Since the late 1940s, the growth of nongovernmental organizations, which provide assistance in recovery from natural and human-made disasters, has grown. These organizations, in cooperation with governments, assist in the provision of care and recovery for the human casualties of the crises.

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck the island nation of Haiti. The initial quake toppled buildings and homes—as Haiti has no building code standards, reinforced homes and buildings were only built by the wealthy—and destroyed bridges, power lines, and roadways. In the succeeding twelve days, fifty-four aftershocks occurred, further damaging and destroying what was left of buildings and homes. The country's limited medical facilities were also destroyed or severely damaged by the earthquake and its aftershocks, as were the communications and transport infrastructures, becoming unsustainable.

In addition, the lack of shelter for the displaced people, as well as the inability to provide sufficient medical care, clean drinking water, and proper elimination of human waste and sewage, all posed an overwhelming and immediate problem for the government of Haiti. The Haitian government also had the problem of extracting and properly disposing of the estimated 230,000 dead in the rubble of the collapsed buildings and structures. The inability of the Haitian government to be able to resolve these problems could have resulted in additional deaths from infections, dehydration, and disease, as well as an estimated 1 million homeless.

The US and other nations in the Western Hemisphere provided an immediate response, by deploying military resources to care for the wounded, working to recover victims and begin the process of rebuilding needed infrastructure, and providing emergency medical care. British and Canadian military units of land, air, and sea assisted in the disaster relief and recovery for Haiti. NGOs initiated relief efforts, with the Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, UNICEF, and numerous smaller groups, both sectarian and religious.

In October 2010, reports of a cholera outbreak began coming from Haitian officials. Amid the chaos of the earthquake relief effort, the disease spread unchecked, claiming 4,672 lives by March 2011. As of March 2012, 7,050 Haitians had died of cholera, with 531,000 total sickened—a number about equal to 5 percent of the population. After Hurricane Sandy struck Haiti in late 2012, cholera caseloads doubled. Polluted water supplies, insufficient medical resources, and general systemic confusion following the earthquake have all been cited as causes or instigators of the cholera outbreak.

Former US presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were appointed by President Barack Obama as special envoys for the coordination of fundraising for Haiti relief. The special fund raised an estimated $54.4 million through corporate and private donations in the US. The European Union promised $474 million, Great Britain $32 million, and Brazil $210 million for emergency and long-term recovery.

Haitian Disaster Relief Today

The long-term follow through, in the aftermath of the immediate outpouring of assistance, appeared very slow. There remained several issues of concern, including the actual delivery of promised economic assistance, the possibility of corruption and misappropriation of relief aid, and finally, the provision of adequate shelter for those left homeless.

In 2015, several years after the disaster, the Red Cross still had not made clear what was actually done with the $500 million the organization raised for Haiti following the earthquake. Though the organization claimed to have repaired four thousand homes, given temporary shelter to several thousand families, donated $44 million for food, and aided in the construction of a hospital, an investigation by nonprofits ProPublica and National Public Radio found that there was little evidence to support these claims and that the Red Cross had built only six permanent homes in the five years since the quake while other NGOs had built over nine thousand in that time.

Haiti was hit yet again by a natural disaster in October 2016, this time by Hurricane Matthew, a Category 4 storm. One month after the hurricane made landfall, at least 800,000 people were in urgent need of food and more than 170,000 people were without homes. Additionally, areas hit by the storm had already reported more than three thousand new cases of cholera. In the wake of this second disaster, questions were once again raised as to whether the nation was any better prepared to handle such a situation and whether any lessons regarding communication between the government and aid organizations had been learned since the earthquake.

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