Bush: AWOL on Haiti

Agence France Presse is reporting today that, six days after storm system Jeanne slammed into Haiti Sept. 18,

    The death toll in northern Haiti’s flooding rose to 1,160, with 1,250 missing, Civil Protection Office spokesman Dieufort Delorge announced Friday.

The BBC is reporting that the dying and desperation are still far from over in Haiti:

    People who may not have had food for days have been gathering around relief centres, hampering the handing out of supplies.
    At one warehouse in Haiti’s third largest city, there were angry scenes as several hundred people surged against the gates of the building, desperate to get inside…
    Survivors have to drink and cook with water from ditches containing rotting bodies and sewage.
    “It’s a critical situation in terms of epidemics, because of the bodies still in the streets, because people are drinking dirty water and scores are getting injuries from debris – huge cuts that are getting infected,” Francoise Gruloos, Haiti director for the UN Children’s Fund was quoted as saying.

For those of us who live in North America– these are our neighbors!
Where is President Bush on this???
Why is the US military not flying shuttle flights of relief supplies and equipment into Haiti around the clock?
Why is the US Navy not offloading field hospitals, food, emergency housing materials, and water-purification equipment at every affected area, even as I write this?
Why are US citizens not demanding action by our government?
These are our neighbors.
I note that State Dept. today announced that the administration has released “approximately $2 million in funding for emergency humanitarian activities” to assist Jeanne’s victims in Haiti. That might be a start. But allocating the funding is far from the same as getting the aid in question actually delivered.
In this context, the actual politics of Haiti is fairly irrelevant. (Except inasmuch as we can say that a responsible, accountable government there would have had far better measures in place to deal with the tropical weather-systems that are totally foreseeable, every year, throughout the Caribbean… As we saw in nearby Cuba, which last week evacuated two million of its people from low-lying areas… )
For now, the people of Haiti need help, pure and simple.
I do note however that just seven months ago the Bush administration helped bring about the removal of the country’s democratically elected President and then installed its own puppet President there…
And even after that maneuver, this administration feels under no obligation to help the people of Haiti?
Shame! Shame!!!
p.s. I have found that this is the best site to get up-to-date info on the humanitarian situation in Haiti.

3 thoughts on “Bush: AWOL on Haiti”

  1. I like you, Helena, but I find you to be, especially in light the breadth of your knowledge and experience, amazingly naive as to how the world works.
    Read Naomi Klein in this months Harper’s on the Neo-Liberal experiment being enacted in Iraq. And the Neo-Liberal experiment is just a refinement of what has always been the unstated goal of American Foreign Policy: Namely, to starve, uproot, and kill the restless natives – then to appropriate their land and resources for our corporation’s profits, and to use the desperate labor pool on an “as needed” basis, with no regard for their security or human needs. If they complain we feed them bullets or jesus to becalm them.
    What is Haiti’s current average wage per day? Do you really bellieve that because Haiti is one of our neighbors, that this should change the goals of our nation’s elite? No, rather it makes Haiti’s value as an example of what will happen to other neighbors that may get any uppity ideas of bettering themselves into their little heads even more important. After all, did Reagan care any more about our other neighbors in Central America during the entire decade of the 80’s?
    Haiti has been a resounding success for the planners of American Foreign Policy: We engineered yet another coup with precious little media fanfare. And the natives are so beaten down that there was little loss of life in the enfeebled resistance. Any aid we dispense will, of course, go through the hands of the small loyal Haitian elite to distribute. There is nothing to see here!
    When you ask “Where is President Bush on all this???”, I can only read this remark as being ironic in tone. It is the whole stew that is found wanting and rotten, not one little foreign spice.

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