Global Insight: Quake can transform Haiti
By Shawn Donnan
Published: January 17 2010 18:40 | Last updated: January 17 2010 18:40
It is hard to look beyond the human suffering in Haiti. Tens of thousands have died because of nature’s seismic fury. A number of those who survived the quake subsequently perished because the country’s devastated government could do little to help. International aid has been frustratingly slow to arrive.
But if you want to understand how the Biblical disaster visited on its people could, with hard work and plenty of international help, end up changing Haiti’s lot, there is no better example than what happened in Indonesia’s Aceh province. Five years after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami left 160,000 dead there, the horrific disaster has been turned into a transformative event.
There, too, international aid was initially maddeningly slow to arrive, often for all the wrong reasons.
When, three days after the disaster, the first Australian aid flight landed, it received a wary welcome. Group Captain John Oddie, the officer leading the Australian airlift, strode across the tarmac of the provincial capital’s airport to meet the Indonesian military’s top man on the ground and offer forklifts and the other makings of a badly needed emergency cargo handling operation. “I can bring everything we need,” he told General Bambang Darmono. And he could have it there within hours.
Gen Darmono listened politely as the eager Australian laid out the offer for badly needed logistical help. Nearby, Indonesian soldiers sat idle. Small piles of drinking water and instant noodles had accumulated at the airport. But there was little sign of the urgent and huge operation needed.
Eventually the Indonesian general gave his answer: he had only just landed from Jakarta, he explained. “Could you come back tomorrow?”
Strange as it seemed to those watching at the time, Gen Darmono’s bumbling response was actually evidence that huge change was already under way.
At the time of the December 26 tsunami, Indonesia was battling a decades-old insurgency in Aceh that seemed nowhere near a resolution. Foreigners were all but banned and martial law had been reintroduced following the collapse of an internationally mediated peace effort. The man in charge was Gen Adam Damiri, who years before had been indicted by UN prosecutors for his command role in the Indonesian military’s brutal, scorched-earth exit from East Timor.
Gen Darmono had been flown in that morning, partly at least, to offer the international community a more acceptable interlocutor than Gen Damiri.
Within days, legions of foreign aid workers had descended on the province. By the end of the first week the once sleepy airport of the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, was a buzzing logistical hub. Within a month a peace agreement that still holds today was being negotiated. Within six months a reconstruction agency now touted as a model for bureaucratic reform and governance in the developing world was up and running.
Like Aceh before the tsunami, Haiti has for decades been home to intractable problems that have resisted international efforts to help. It is grindingly poor, volatile and ranks high among the world’s most fragile states. The World Bank says more than half its 9.8m population live on under a dollar a day and almost 80 per cent exist on under $2.
There will inevitably be local complexities. But there are clear lessons to be drawn from Acehs experience.
The rebuilding effort needs rigorous co-ordination and a single agency must be in charge. Building houses on the scale needed takes years and you can only ask people to live in tents for so long.
Rebuilding an economy also takes time and you need to do what you can in order not to leave a big hole behind when aid agencies begin to pull out.
But if Haiti is not home to a multibillion dollar reconstruction effort within months it will only increase the tragedy. And if, as the development mantra went following the tsunami, a major effort to “build back better” both physically and institutionally is not undertaken in Haiti then the country’s leaders and the international community will have made an unforgivable mistake.
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