By Fulton Armstrong

A residential neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. / UNICEF Canada / Flickr / Creative Commons

Haiti’s international backers are increasingly leaving the impoverished Caribbean country to its own devices, but Port-au-Prince remains woefully ill-prepared to face its many challenges alone.  Competing priorities and distractions seem to be the main causes of the international retrenchment.  Perceptions that international aid, particularly the billions of dollars in assistance since the 2010 earthquake, has been squandered – as well as general “donor fatigue” worldwide – appear to be secondary factors.

• The United Nations, two months after the inauguration of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in February 2017, determined that Haitian institutions were sufficiently strong for the UN to withdraw last October the remaining 2,300 peacekeepers in the Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) that had been deployed since the 2004 military coup. In its place, the UN is establishing this April a small “Mission for Justice Support” (MINUJUSTH), meant to strengthen the justice system, policing, and human rights protections – leaving all security responsibilities to Haiti’s 15,000-man police force.
• International support for UN efforts to stem the cholera epidemic caused by UN peacekeepers after the devastating earthquake in 2010 has been lacking. About 10,000 Haitians (of an estimated 817,000 infected) have died, including 159 (of 14,000 new cases) reported in 2017.  The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported last month that only $4.8 million out of the $34.5 million requested for cholera response has been funded.
• The United States, Haiti’s biggest benefactor (having disbursed at least $3.9 billion in post-2010 earthquake aid), is pulling back in disruptive ways. The administration of President Donald Trump, who while campaigning in 2016 pledged to be Haiti’s “biggest champion,” in November announced suspension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 59,000 Haitians living legally in the United States since the earthquake – giving them until March 19 to leave the country or face deportation.  Trump’s reported reference to Haiti and Africa as “shitholes” during a meeting with U.S. Congressmen last month also infuriated Haitians.
• Food aid continues to flow, but donors have come through with less than half of the $56 million the UN urgently called for in the wake of Hurricane Matthew last October. The World Food Program reports that 50 percent of Haiti’s 10.7 million people are undernourished – including 1.3 million in “Phase 3 crisis” and 3 million in “Phase 2 stress.”
• Even international partners have disappointed Haiti as well. Reports that Oxfam personnel held sex parties and paid for sex have prompted admissions that some staff’s behavior was “totally unacceptable.”  The group’s Haiti country director has conceded that he made “mistakes” by having a sexual relationship with a woman and was aware of the parties and prostitutes.  Other reports indicate that Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) repatriated 17 employees for “misconduct” that the organization is not willing to discuss.

President Moïse, who two weeks ago completed his first year in office, has had few options for dealing with these challenges.  His appeals for international support are falling on deaf or distracted ears.  It is by now well established that the international community’s “pledges of aid” invariably fall short of stated commitments, but defending his poor but proud nation from being called obscenities by the U.S. President is a task that his hapless predecessors did not have to deal with.  To prepare for the withdrawal of MINUSTAH, he has reconstituted a Haitian National Army – a force of 3,000-5,000 whom he promises will “help the people … not be an army of repression” – but the move has reopened fresh wounds from years of military abuses.  He has condemned the “sexual predator” international staff who exploit “needy people in their moment of greatest vulnerability,” but he needs to maintain good relations with NGOs in general, since they have often become the sole suppliers of public goods that ideally would be provided by the state.  Haitians’ frustration was palpable last week when a fire destroyed much of Port-au-Prince’s famous Marché en Fer (Iron Market), a historic symbol of popular commerce rebuilt after the earthquake which has become a profitable tourist destination – another sign that fate is simply not on their side.

February 20, 2018