A massive relief effort limps into gear: Post-earthquake chaos in Haiti

The world’s attempt to aid Haitians stumbles against extraordinary difficulties of transport and communications

eyevine

The Economist | Jan 21st 2010

IN ONE of the ramshackle tent cities that have sprouted in open spaces all across Port-au-Prince, Isa Longchamp, a dishevelled and dejected eight-year-old girl, starts to whimper. After losing her mother when the Haitian capital was devastated by the earthquake of January 12th, she is now struggling to survive. Batted aside when hundreds of desperate victims of the disaster swarmed around aid workers handing out a batch of supplies earlier in the day, she is still hungry. She depends on the charity of her new neighbours. But at least she is alive, and fairly healthy.

Her home now is a precarious lean-to made from a couple of stained, fraying sheets tied to some sticks. She shares it with what remains of her family. Not far away other earthquake survivors wail in agony in a makeshift hospital. Field surgery is performed with rudimentary equipment and morphine is scarce. Many of the injured have died because of a lack of medical supplies.

Like hundreds of thousands of other Haitians, she is patiently waiting for a relief operation that has proved agonisingly slow to get going. Officials at the World Food Programme said that a week after the earthquake, 200,000 people had received ration packs of high-nutrition biscuits. American helicopters, operating from an aircraft-carrier offshore, dropped small quantities of supplies. Canadian troops, the first of some 2,000, arrived in Jacmel, a badly affected town south-west of Port-au-Prince. But aid has so far amounted to “a drop in the ocean” of what people need, admitted Elisabeth Byrs, the spokeswoman for the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

That is partly because of the huge scale of the disaster—a third of the population of 9m were affected and about 1m are homeless. But the main reason was that the earthquake knocked out both the institutions and the sinews of transport and communication on which aid agencies normally rely. So co-ordination—deciding who does what where—has been unusually slow and difficult. The rapid influx of well-meaning aid agencies that now throng the dusty remnants of Port-au-Prince has contributed to the confusion.

Haiti’s elected government is operating from a police station near the airport. The Cabinet meets there each day. But the structure of government has caved in just as completely as the presidential palace itself. The UN mission to Haiti was decapitated with the collapse of the hotel where it was based. Its 49 confirmed dead included Hédi Annabi, the experienced mission chief, his Brazilian deputy and the Canadian police chief. Another 300 UN personnel, including local staff and peacekeepers, are still unaccounted for.

Brazil, which has led the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti since 2004, lost 18 soldiers—the biggest loss of life for its armed forces since the second world war. The Haitian police force, which the UN has been training, lost around half its strength in Port-au-Prince, according to Ms Byrs. Some of the many NGOs already working in Haiti were also impeded by quake damage. Oxfam, a British charity, had 100 staff there. Two were killed, and their office and warehouse of supplies were both reduced to rubble. The UN has dispatched 50 civilian officials to Haiti. The Security Council called for 1,500 more police officers and 2,000 extra peacekeeping troops (Brazil quickly offered 800).

An even bigger bottleneck has been transport. American troops took charge of the airport, and quickly tripled its capacity to 100 flights a day (and to 153 flights by January 19th). France and Brazil initially complained that their flights were turned away while a landing slot was found for Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state. Half of the ten flights that Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), a French medical charity, tried to land in Port-au-Prince were diverted, and with them some 85 tonnes of medical and relief supplies. But France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the UN later praised the huge American effort, and Brazil’s foreign ministry said co-ordination had improved.

By January 19th more than 11,000 American troops, marines and sailors had arrived in Haiti (another 4,000 were on their way). They were trying to open transport links, as well as giving out some aid. They were due to open an airport at Jacmel on January 21st, and were also to use an airbase at San Isidro in the Dominican Republic. They hoped to get the port working again in “a week or two”. Meanwhile, the UN was using minor ports at Cap-Haïtien and Gonaïves. Supplies were also coming in through the Dominican Republic.

The next set of difficulties lie in getting the aid out to those who need it. The main arteries in Port-au-Prince are blocked by rubble. Landslides have severed roads to outlying towns and villages. This week petrol all but ran out. The UN has designated four sites in the capital as distribution hubs for water and food, and 18 local depots. But this network is not yet fully functioning—hence the resort to air-drops. Adding to the problems, telephones and the internet have worked only patchily if at all.

The specialised rescue teams that flooded into Haiti in record numbers managed to extract more than 120 people from the ruins. The problem was that the lack of medical supplies meant that many more among the survivors died from their injuries. This carnage gradually subsided. On January 15th Partners in Health, an American NGO which runs 12 hospitals in rural Haiti, took over the capital’s General Hospital. Foreign teams set up several field hospitals. But some medicines remained in short supply. An MSF doctor was reduced to buying a saw in a market to carry out amputations of gangrenous limbs. The USNS Comfort, a vast American hospital ship, arrived on January 20th.

In most natural disasters, points out Graham Mackay of Oxfam, by day four the aid agencies expect to have set up distribution systems for food, water and temporary shelter. After the Asian tsunami, Oxfam’s first flight left Britain with supplies within three to four days. That also happened this time. The difference was the difficulty of getting them into the hands of desperate Haitians.

It seemed, too, as if some of the lessons from other disasters that could have been applied in Haiti were being ignored. One is that dead bodies are not necessarily an immediate threat to the health of the living. A Haitian official said that some 70,000 bodies had been hastily buried in mass graves. In a society that places great store on venerating its dead, that will add to the trauma of the survivors.

Too dazed to riot

Another lesson is that survivors are generally too dazed and weak to riot. An exaggerated fear of violent disorder seemed to be another reason why aid was slow. A few hundred desperate people scavenged in the rubble in a downtown shopping street. There were reports of gang leaders who escaped when the jail collapsed resurfacing in shanty towns from which they had been flushed out by UN troops in 2006. But generally Port-au-Prince was calm. Haitians were helping each other. Many crowded onto buses to seek refuge with relatives in rural areas.

Brazil’s ambassador to Haiti, Igor Kipman, said that the UN peacekeeping force had security “perfectly under control” and did not need the help of the American troops. The Americans, too, stressed that their job was logistics. But the potential for friction with Brazil remained. Barack Obama’s administration is “trying to pull off a delicate balancing act by offering massive humanitarian relief while avoiding giving the impression that they are taking over Haiti,” says Daniel Erikson of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington, DC. The build-up of troops may have caused short-term delays in aid deliveries, but will pay off if they quickly open transport routes without which nothing would reach the needy anyway. This relief operation was always going to be unusually slow and chaotic. But Haitians cannot afford for it to remain so.

Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010. All rights reserved

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