Beyond Relief: How the World Failed Haiti
Many of the decisions about how best to help Haiti, in fact, were conceived well before the earthquake struck. In the spring of 2009, Hillary Clinton, having recently assumed her post as secretary of state, identified Haiti as a top priority. Both she and Bill Clinton shared a deep and difficult history with the country. The former president "fell in love" with the island during his honeymoon there in 1975, and the Clinton homes in New York and Washington were decorated with Haitian art. But his policies only drove the country deeper into despair. Clinton imposed harsh sanctions on the island after its democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was deposed by a military coup in 1991. He also backed an ambitious program of "structural adjustment" designed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to turn Haiti into a Caribbean Taiwan, refocusing its resources away from farming toward more lucrative sectors like export manufacturing. It was known as the "American Plan."
The strategy was a disaster. Small farms were crushed by a sudden influx of subsidized food imported from the United States. No longer able to sell their produce, hundreds of thousands of peasants were driven off their farms and into the cities and shantytowns, mostly in Port-au-Prince, where they competed for jobs at American-owned assembly plants, earning less than $2 a day. Last year, Clinton apologized for the plan. "We made this devil's bargain, and it wasn't the right thing to do," he said. "It was a mistake that I was a party to. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences."
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In Washington, meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was pursuing a Haiti strategy that dovetailed neatly with her husband's efforts. Within the State Department, Haiti was viewed, in the words of one official, as a "laboratory": a petri dish in which America could prove that it could be a force for good in the world. The impulse falls squarely within the Clinton doctrine known as "smart power," which stresses the importance of diplomacy and development to further U.S. interests. For too long, Clinton believed, the West had embraced "development for development's sake," throwing money at poor countries without demanding either accountability or results. Haiti had received so much foreign assistance over the years — more than $300 million annually from the U.S. alone — that it had become a virtual, albeit dysfunctional, ward of the West, and a poster child for the inadequacies of foreign aid.
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Bill Clinton, by all accounts, was equally frustrated with the slow progress of reconstruction. But Clinton himself did not become the semipermanent presence many Haitians had assumed he would. Instead, Clinton's role was taken on, to a large extent, by staffers with little background in development or disaster management. Laura Graham, Clinton's 38-year-old chief of staff and chief point person for Haiti, was his former White House scheduler. Clinton's director of foreign policy, 34-year-old Amitabh Desai, had been one of Hillary Clinton's legislative aides, and before that an intern in Ted Kennedy's office. "It was a dual problem, really," a U.N. official says of the Clinton Foundation staffers. "First, they had no background in development — they didn't know what they were talking about in aid or humanitarianism. Second, they didn't even realize it. They had come to Haiti in their suits convinced they were going to fix the place, and then they looked really confused when we would try to explain to them why the ideas they came up with on the back of an envelope on the plane over wouldn't work."
Graham maintains that the Clinton Foundation has "extensive experience in post-crisis management and development." The foundation's role, she adds, "is to assist the Haitians, not to prescribe or implement solutions unilaterally." But on the ground in Haiti, Clinton's surrogates managed to alienate almost everyone with whom they came into contact. "When you listen to President Clinton, his rhetoric is right on point," says a prominent Haitian. "But his people were incredibly arrogant; they knew nothing about Haiti or Haitians. They acted like, because they worked for a former president, they ruled the world." In one incident, he says, Haitian ministers were shut out of an IHRC board meeting after a Clinton staffer told them their names were not on the list. "These are the ministers of Haiti — it's their country! What do you mean 'not on the list'?"
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-world-failed-haiti-20110804
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