On 12th January 2010, at about 5 o’clock in the evening, a powerful earthquake jolted the small island nation of Haiti in the Caribbean Sea, just about 1200 kilometers from the United States. Over 2 lakh people died and another 4 lakh sustained injuries. Estimates say that over 30 lakh people, that is, one third of the country’s population, became homeless.

Haiti lies on a fault line where two giant plates – the North American and the Caribbean plates – meet and often slide against each other. So, it is right on top of a very dangerous zone. The last major quake was in 1770 when the country was under French rule. Scientists had been warning that a major earthquake was due any time, and that there would be very severe casualties because nearly a third of Haitians live in the capital city of Port au Prince. Deaths are more if density of population is more. Haiti is also on the direct channel of most hurricanes originating in the Atlantic Ocean. In 2008, four hurricanes swept through Haiti – Fay, Gustav, Hannah and Ike. Between them, they killed 800 people, and devastated more than 70% of Haiti’s agricultural land. As if this were not enough, Haiti has also suffered devastating floods in 2002, 2003 (twice), 2006 and 2007.

All this has led people all over the world – receiving blanket coverage from sensation hungry media – to believe that Haiti is perhaps an unlucky place. And hence, there was a warm sense of relief when TV channels showed US planes landing with troops, people being pulled out of rubble and food packets being thrown from choppers.

What has perhaps been conveniently forgotten in this cloud of ‘do-gooding’ (and feel-gooding) is that Haiti’s tragedy is not just a horrific natural disaster. It is true that you cannot stop an earthquake or a hurricane. But natural disasters become a hundred times magnified when they strike impoverished people. And, the poverty of Haiti is not due to ‘bad luck’ – it is man made. This is the part of the Haitian tragedy that is not talked about by our news channels and papers, nor does it figure in high level meetings of ‘concerned’ country’s leaders.

Haiti is one of the world’s poorest countries, ranked 149th in the Human Development rankings of 184 countries. It is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Nearly 80% of the country’s population lives at less than $2 per day which is the definition of ‘poor’, and about 56% of the people live on less than $1 per day, which makes them ‘extremely poor’. It is located on the mountainous western third of the island of Hispaniola, the other two thirds being another country called the Dominican Republic. Some 66% of Haitians work in agriculture, but this is mainly subsistence farming contributing less than a third of the country’s small GDP. The unemployment rate is 75%. Foreign aid accounts for 30%-40% of the government budget. The average salary is $70 a month and inflation tops 14% a year. Life expectancy is just 52 years, 10% of infants die before age 4, almost a third of the population is either ill or underweight, almost half are illiterate.

Colonisation

The tragedy of Haiti begins with its discovery by Christopher Columbus in 1492. There was no Haiti then – it was just one whole island. Columbus named it Hispaniola and it became a colony of Spain. The island was inhabited by Taino people (they called their beautiful land Aiti, from which the present name is derived). Spanish conquerors mined gold and silver from the western mountains for a few decades, getting rid of the Taino by either massacring them wholesale or transmitting diseases to which the Taino were not immune. As Spain discovered enormous gold and silver in other parts of South America, they lost interest in the rugged mountains of tiny Hispaniola and moved to its eastern plains. The western one-third –present day Haiti – became a war zone between various colonialists eying a foothold in the Caribbean – the Dutch, the British and the French. In 1695, the Spanish formally handed over the region to the French, who renamed the island Saint-Domingue.

In about 100 years of direct French rule, Haiti became a major centre for wealth creation and the richest French colony. The ruling French imported about 8 lakh slaves in this period and set them to the task of cutting down the lush forests, planting sugarcane and coffee and sawing up the magnificent trees for timber. At the height of the Haitian boom, 60% of Europe’s sugar and 40% of coffee was coming from Haiti. Over 50% of France’s GDP came from this tiny island. This wealth was created at a mind-boggling cost, typical of colonial rule: the average life expectancy for a slave in Haiti was 21 years. A former slave was to write this later: “Have they not hung up men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat excrement? Have they not thrown them into boiling cauldrons of cane syrup?” The land also paid a price: the forests were torn off to be cut into timber for chateaux in France, beginning a process of soil erosion that is today causing those severe floods.

Slave Rebellion

Then the darkness was broken. After the 1789 French Revolution, as the French were still debating whether the Declaration of the Rights of Man were applicable to coloured people or not, a rebellion broke out in 1791 among Saint Domingue’s vast slave population. Led by slave leader Touissant L’overture the slaves fought against the colonial rulers and defeated the British in 1799, when they came in trying to fish in troubled waters. Napoleon, who seized power that year, was aghast. He told one of his ministers: “The freedom of the negroes, if recognised in St Domingue and legalised by France would at all times be a rallying point for freedom-seekers of the New World.” The US president of the time, Thomas Jefferson, was similarly concerned about the bad example.

After a brutal war with the French forces, the slaves were victorious. On 1st January1804, the first successful slave rebellion declared Saint-Domingue free and a republic. The US refused to recognize the new republic and the French, after they got free of the Napoleanic wars, sent a punitive force to Saint-Domingue to reconquer it in 1825. In exchange for recognition by France, Haitians were forced to agree to pay 150 million francs in gold, valued at $20 billion in current prices (without interest). Although this was reduced to 90 million francs in 1838, but Haiti was paying this so-called ‘debt’ till 1947. It became the foundation for Haiti’s poverty.

Exploitation and Dictators

To pay this ‘debt’, Haiti took enormous loans from American, German and French banks at very high interest rates. This put Haiti into a death trap. By 1900, 80% of Haiti’s GDP was going towards repaying the bank loans, even as the country became an economic wreck. A series of dictators ruled Haiti through these years, most of them nothing but agents of Western powers, intent on looting the hapless people. In 1915, scared that Haiti would be unable to repay loans to the bankers, the US invaded the country and occupied it for 20 years. The Great Depression further devastated Haiti, which was dependent on exports. The Haitians, poor and desperate as they were, still bravely fought back the US occupation under the leadership of Charlemagne Péralte. The Haitian resistance was brutally suppressed, with the US using aircraft to kill rebels. Death toll: 13 US soldiers and 3,071 Haitians. The US finally left in 1934, installing an army general in power.

Then followed two more decades of power struggle between various army men, while hungry Haitians rioted in the streets. The countryside was so impoverished that everybody wanted to migrate to the capital Port-au-Prince. In 1957, a doctor named Francois Duvalier was elected as president, with strong US backing. Popularly known as ‘Papa Doc’ he declared himself lifetime president in 1964. After his death in 1971, his son ‘Baby Doc’ became president.

Papa and Baby Doc ruled Haiti for 28 long years, establishing one of the most corrupt and brutal dictatorships the world has known. Papa set up a personal militia called Tonton Macoutes to terrorise the people through killings, rape and threats of voodoo magic. An estimated 60,000 people died during the father-son rule. The country was sold out to multinational corporations. Even agriculture was discouraged – rice from US companies was sold at a subsidized price in order to finish off local production. International aid was also siphoned off by the Duvaliers. It is estimated that when Baby Doc was finally forced to flee Haiti in 1986, he took away $900 million with him.

Democracy denied

After a series of military coups, rigged elections and counter coups, Haiti’s first free election was held in 1990. Jean-Bernard Aristide, a popular leader, was elected. The US was not too comfortable with him and engineered protest movements against him. Within less than a year, he was overthrown by the military. The US was fully involved again and in 1994, US forces arrived in Haiti, claiming to bring about stability, but in reality trying to foist a more pliant leader. Ultimately, Aristide was allowed to come back on popular demand and Rene Preval (the current president) was elected president in 1996. In 2000, Aristide won the election again, much to the discomfort of the US, which engineered a blockade of the country. After 4 years of this isolation, the country was in ruins and rioting spread. The US sent in its armed forces, ostensibly to provide ‘stability’ but in fact to ensure that a friendly person takes over. Aristide was ousted and flown out to Central African Republic. The UN was maneuvered by the US into sending a peace keeping force so that it is not criticized for occupying Haiti like Iraq. Again, because of popular pressure, Preval from Aristide’s party was elected president in the elections in 2006.

This brief history of the unfortunate people of Haiti shows how the island has been the playground of some of the most greedy forces in the world. Over 80% of Haitians own some land as a result of the first slave rebellion. But successive rulers have ensured that no self-reliant economy could ever develop. The Haitians were forced to subsist on the forests that they owned, in the absence of any other income. This led to 98% deforestation. The hillsides are denuded, and the topsoil has washed away, leaving the surface barren.

So, the next time you see or read about Haiti’s tragic earthquake and its aftermath, spare a thought to the 500 years of suffering that have led to it. Then we can understand the reason why the US is in such a big hurry to get in with their forces – it wants control, and it wants to divert the attention of its own people from a 10% unemployment rate in the US.

How serious the US or France or even UN is in helping Haiti becomes clear from a small event which took place in Montreal, Canada, a week after the earthquake. In a meeting of ‘Friends of Haiti’, consisting of US, France and 9 South American countries, the demand that Haiti’s $1 billion debt be cancelled was summarily turned down. A few million in aid is good publicity for the West. Cancelling $1 billion debt would be a very bad example. Remember, the US government gave $85 billion to save first one company, AIG!

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