(Port-au-Prince) In the hours that followed the earthquake on January 12, the airport control tower having collapsed, the Haitian government had lost command of its air space at the moment it was most needed.
Who came to the government’s rescue? The Americans did.
It was a good thing; they had precisely the equipment needed to take control of the sky over Haiti and thus installed a temporary tower.
In a single day, air traffic at the Port-au-Prince airport went from 15 to 20 planes a day to 140, even 160, aircraft.
“Only the Americans could have handled that, so we asked the U.S. ambassador,” explained Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive yesterday to the senators who had called upon him to explain the government’s failure to manage the crisis. “In any event, even if we had wanted to do it, we wouldn’t have had the capacity.”*
At the end of last week, when it became clear that the Haitian government did not have a communications plan, who rushed in with a beautiful, ready-made plan? The Americans did, of course.
An employee of USAID (the American equivalent of the U.N.) even openly praised his organization in front of Haitian representatives yesterday, in the temporary Parliament headquarters. “We arrived, and since then there have been three press conferences a day, and today there were 14 television cameras and tons of international media,” said the young man, visibly delighted.**
Who do you think shows up to distribute supplies in the disaster relief camps and certain red light districts? The marines do, of course.
It’s the same in numerous Port-au-Prince hospitals, where American doctors came in right behind the M-16s of their fellow American soldiers to take over the operating rooms. The effort almost turned into a brawl when the Cuban and Brazilian doctors did not want to give up their places.
In fact, the least well-guarded secret in Port-au-Prince is that the most powerful man here is not the president, by far, but rather the U.S. ambassador. It is enough to see the imposing U.S. embassy (intact, of course) and to note the omnipresence of American troops to understand that Haiti is already under the de facto guardianship of Washington.
The government’s smokescreens, in particular President Préval’s numerous declarations that there are not, as rumors say, up to 16,000 American soldiers on Haitian soil, do not fool anyone.
In the Senate yesterday, Prime Minister Bellerive admitted the culpable negligence of the Haitian state.
“We are making daily efforts to improve the situation, not to control the situation, to be honest,” he said, while in the back of the room everyone kept talking and cell phones rang all around, one after the other.
The scene achieved the height of absurdity when a Senate official’s cell phone started ringing right behind the prime minister, blaring out a synthesized version of La Bamba.
The Legislative Palace being almost entirely destroyed, the National Assembly and the Senate meet at the Police Academy, in construction site shacks — a completely appropriate symbol, given the circumstances. It is not only homes and infrastructure that must be rebuilt. Democratic institutions, historically below par here, will also need to be seriously updated.
For the time being, the people have no confidence in their government. They all see that it usually makes no decisions and, in the event that it does, it is to give contracts to friends of the regime.
“To compensate for its lack of leadership, the government tried to organize food distribution operations, but it gave juicy contracts to friends of the president who didn’t know what they were doing,” the young Senator Yuri Latortue told me, standing several meters from the prime minister who was trying to reassure the senators.
A few minutes later in the same place, Enex Jean-Charles, special adviser to the president who had come to witness the interpellation of the prime minister, chimed in with a different opinion.
“President Préval is in control, everything is going well,” Mr. Jean-Charles assured me.
In the meantime, more confusion concerning President René Préval was surfacing. In front of the senators he had announced that the government was going to form a crisis government, a repeated request of the representatives over the past few days. The senators understood this to mean that the number of cabinet ministers would be reduced to five or six from 17 and that the president would appeal to the vital forces of the country, even those of the opposition, in order to revive the country.
No, no, no, erase that and start over.
“We are not talking about a crisis government, but about an urgent situation,” the president’s special adviser corrected in our interview. “For the moment, no changes are foreseen for the government.”
In closing, I will say a word about the infamous 200,000 tents that are still desperately needed by the victims and have still not arrived.
What is the government doing about it?
“Reflecting,” declared President Préval, on Monday. “It’s a question of knowing if it’s better to import the tents or to make them here, a question of giving jobs to Haitians,” he said as he left an emergency meeting.
With whom was the emergency meeting? It was with the U.S. ambassador, of course.
*Editor’s Note: Bellerive’s original quote, accurately translated, has not been verified.
**Editor’s Note: The original quote, accurately translated, has not been verified.
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