Haiti: Blue Helmets and brown landscapes
Could money supporting UN troops be better spent in the impoverished country?
(Jake Miller photo)
Blue-helmeted UN peacekeeping troops patrol an alley in Port au Prince in 2006.
Maria Aguiar, a resident of Brookline, is Director of Global Programs at Grassroots International, a human rights and international development grantmaker based in Jamaica Plain. She returned this week from Haiti, which she visited with Grassroots’ Eexecutive Director Nikhil Aziz to meet with their Haitian partners.
By Maria Aguiar
PORT AU PRINCE -- Deforestation. Bad schools. Poor health care. Only 15% of people with running water.
Every day, the blue helmets worn by United Nations peacekeeping forces on the streets of Haiti remind the Haitians that I talk with of the country’s seemingly intractable problems.
I was last here in 2004, just 2 months after a band of armed men, led by a former military man named Guy Philippe, crossed the border from the Dominican Republic and on down to Port au Prince, the capital, intending to oust then President Jean Bertrand Aristide. This was a tense period of political turmoil. U.S. troops, along with those of France and Canada, were visible everywhere. Nerves were frayed and volatile emotions were barely kept below the surface. U.N. troops arrived to quell the unrest.
To most Haitians I’ve been talking to in Port au Prince, the benefit of these troops in 2008 is unclear. They tell me that they would like to know what the actual cost of the U.N. mission is per month, and wish that money could be diverted to fill their country's other urgent needs -- for roads, sanitation, health care, and environmental protection.
Why not spend the money on rebuilding Haiti’s cities, potable water for all, or reforestation, one person asked. Each blue helmet is a visible reminder of an unmet need.
Despite this frustration, Haitians seem to be going about the business of their daily lives. In Port au Prince, as well as in the countryside, people are in constant motion -- coming and going to and from markets and work, and riding the brightly colored tap taps. These are dramatically hand-painted and exorbitantly decorated mini-vans and buses, all full to over-flowing with people. Streets, especially near markets, teem with goods.
Compared with 2004, there is more openness and less tension apparent as I walk the streets of Port au Prince. Despite ongoing concerns about violent crime and insecurity in the city, Haitians seem more relaxed.
What has not gone away is the dramatic evidence of deforestation in Haiti. Today only 1.25 % of the country's original forest or ground cover remains. The effects of over-exploitation of the natural environment have created an environmental crisis.
It’s evident when I take a small five-seater plane from the capital to Hinche, a city on the Central Plateau in Haiti’s interior. Most of the mountains that surround Port au Prince -- and that I am crossing to get to the Central Plateau -- look dusty brown from above and devoid of any vegetation. Many have deep white gashes running from their peaks, where limestone quarrying and erosion have left gaping wounds. Rivers (this is the dry season) are wide and dry, speckled intermittently with shallow pools of water.
Haiti’s deforestation began centuries ago, when the French herded African slaves to Haiti to work in the sugar cane plantations. Then they filled the slave ships returning to France with Haiti’s precious tropical timber. Today, Haitians told me, they don’t feel that France has done enough to repay the country, where the land is largely brown and barren.
Hinche, however, is awash in color -- an explosion of red and green on the dry brown landscape. Flags, T-shirts, bandanas, and posters proclaim the convention of the Peasant Movement of Papaye (MMP), which I’ll be attending. The MPP, Haiti’s largest and oldest peasant organization, works in the Central Plateau to organize peasant farmers and farm workers to be strong advocates for social and environmental change -- to have a powerful voice in Haiti’s development. What is encouraging is that all of the major regional peasant organizations in Haiti are working to build a national coalition to protect the land and food needs of rural residents.
In Jacmel, the capital of Haiti's southeast, the offices of KROS (Kordinasyon Rejyonal Oganysasyon Sides), one of the organizations working to build this national coalition of peasant organizations, are located within a large complex of local cooperatives that produce honey, coffee, natural fertilizers, and products based on sugar cane and other crops. Gerald Mathurin, a KROS member, says that one of their most important goals is to strengthen the image of peasants in the national consciousness as valued and productive members of society.
The need for Haiti's more than 4 million peasants to play an active part in the country's future is evident in Port au Prince. The capital's streets are teeming with unemployed farmers who have migrated there; its industry simply cannot absorb them.
Deforestation photo by Daniel Moss. For more information about Grassroots International, please visit their website at: www.grassrootsonline.org. For information on how you can contribute to the Passport blog, please contact the Globe's assistant foreign editor, Kenneth Kaplan, at K_Kaplan@globe.com.
