It is not an ideological question, related to an irremediable hope, that a better world is, and must be, possible. It is a known fact that the homo sapiens has existed for about 200,000 years, which is no more than a tiny span of the time passed since the emergence of the first basic forms of life on our planet approximately three billion years ago.
Much has been said about the differences between Chile and Haiti - the Haitian quake produced a far higher death toll (300,000) and much greater damage, both in absolute and relative terms. Above all what must be looked at is the political, social and economic explanation of why an earthquake of greater magnitude in Chile had a much smaller impact.
“We plant but we can’t produce or market. We plant but we have no food to eat. We want agriculture to improve so our country can live and so we peasants can live, too.” -
Comment by Mervyn Claxton
Beverly Bell’s article hits the nail right on the head.
Subsidized U.S. rice has flooded Haiti for decades. Now, after the Jan. 12 quake, 15,000 metric tons of donated U.S. rice have arrived.
The resilience, courage and self-organisation of earthquake survivors should become the basis for a development model that avoids the errors of the past.
For too long there has been a popular perception that somehow the Haitian nation-building project, launched on January 1, 1804, has failed on account of mismanagement, ineptitude, corruption. Buried beneath the rubble of imperial propaganda, out of both Western Europe and the United States, is the evidence which shows that Haiti’s independence was defeated by an aggressive North-Atlantic alliance that could not imagine their world inhabited by a free regime of Africans as representatives of the newly emerging democracy.
Caricom needs to take urgent diplomatic initiatives is to get France to honour its moral obligation to repaying the debt incurred by its financial demands for Haitian independence. Leave a comment.
A petition demanding that France repay the indemnity it extorted from Haiti will serve to divert the attention of Haitians and Caribbean supporters from focusing on finding a way forward ; as well as tend to reinforce or validate feelings of dependency Leave a comment
- $21.9 Billion: the 2004 estimate of France’s Restitution Debt to Haiti.
- $13.9 Billion: latest IDB estimate of the probable limit of the economic cost of the earthquake to Haiti. This is twice Haiti’s annual GDP and 63 percent of the Restitution Debt.
- $1.5 Billion: amount of UN’s appeal for immediate assistance to earthquake victims; of which $637 million pledegd up to 18 February.
- $367 Million (EU 270 million) amount of French relief aid to Haiti announced by Sarcozy during his visit on 17 February 2010. This includes a write-off of Haiti’s bilateral debt to France of Eu. 56 million.
The amount promised by Sarcozy is 24 percent of the UN appeal, less than 3 percent of the economic cost of the earthquake; and less than 2 percent of the Restitution Debt. For details, click here.
We call on the people to found an international solidarity network in the same spirit as the Sandinista International Brigades, that helps us in the reconstruction tasks, but also to come out of our social crisis. We are talking of people-to-people solidarity, not of that solidarity that States use in order to dominate the people.
Solidarity is not about charity. It is not about international trusteeship. It is not about recolonization. It is not about military occupation. It is not about telling people what to do. The basis of solidarity is respect.
Featuring Shaggy, Sean Paul/Kingston, Tessanne Chin, Alison Hinds, Etana etc. Proceeds go to Haiti, you can download at Itunes.
Haiti needs to be rebuilt “from the bottom up”. International donors and the Group of Friends of Haiti, must ensure the voices and the perspectives of Haiti’s poor are heard and their rights respected. Haitian ownership and leadership, through the government, civil society, the diaspora, and the majority - women and men, girls and boys living in poverty, must be central in all efforts. With over 159 signatories from the Caribbean and the Diaspora.
Rex Nettleford February 3, 1933 - February 2, 2010
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