The following correction was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday July 19 2010
The 2004 tsunami, which killed 230,000, led indirectly to the end of the conflict in Aceh, not East Timor, as stated in the leader below.
How countries recover from major natural disasters can define their future political and social destinies.
The Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, which killed 230,000 people, led indirectly to the end of the conflict in East Timor. But it also contributed to a renewal of bloody civil war in Sri Lanka. How aid is delivered can mean the difference between salvation and destruction.
It is now six months since Haiti was hit by a catastrophic earthquake that killed roughly the same number of people as the tsunami, and within a far smaller area. The Observer New Review today reports in depth on the country's six-month-old struggle to survive; it is the portrait of a society on the brink of collapse.
There is evidence from many sources – governments, aid agencies and ordinary Haitians – that reconstruction has frozen even before it has begun. Billions of dollars promised by the international community have yet to arrive; the whole effort is caught in leadership vacuum.
An interim reconstruction commission headed by Bill Clinton and Haiti's President Jean-Max Bellerive only met for the first time last month, a disgraceful delay. Mr Clinton has had a higher profile supporting the US team at the World Cup than he has in Haiti.
In the absence of a coherent plan, 1.5 million Haitians – a tenth of the country's population – have been condemned to a miserable existence in more then 1,000 camps. Their frustration threatens already weak social cohesion in the western hemisphere's most impoverished nation. Aid agencies, such as Save the Children, have made no bones about the scale of the challenge, describing it in a report last week as the "most challenging and complex emergency" in the charity's history.
The biggest problems did not arise in the emergency relief phase immediately after the disaster. That response, at least, has been close to adequately funded, receiving some 60% of what had been promised.
Large-scale sanitation projects in the camps, undertaken by organisations such as Oxfam, have prevented a major outbreak of disease – no small achievement. The majority of the displaced, despite considerable delays, do have shelter of some kind. Emergency medical provision, delivered by volunteer doctors in some areas, is now of a higher standard than before the earthquake struck. But things have gone badly wrong in the transition from emergency provision to reconstruction. Only a tiny fraction of the $5.3bn pledged by donor countries for the first two years of reconstruction has materialised. Meanwhile, the reality of life for those displaced by the catastrophe is grim. For many, shelters are still improvised or substandard and at risk from a serious storm now the hurricane season has arrived.
Of 125,000 higher-standard transitional shelters which were supposed to have been built by early this month, only around 3,000 have been completed. Clearance of many badly damaged neighbourhoods has barely advanced at all; there is an acute shortage of land for rehousing.
Along with the physical infrastructure, livelihoods have been destroyed. Each workplace turned to rubble created more unemployment and each wage is vital in sustaining a fragile chain of subsistence. Each collapsed school threatens to leave yet more Haitian children without the skills they might need to build themselves a better future.
Politics did not cause the earthquake, but political will might have softened the impact. But Haiti's battered government has struggled to cope. It was ill-equipped in terms of resources and administrative skills before 12 January and many officials lost their lives that day. Since then, only the flimsiest of reconstruction plans have emerged.
That central weakness has in turn slowed down the work of major aid providers. Although they work under UN co-ordination, they are anxious not to bypass the Haitian state. A national government must be involved in order for aid to be properly coordinated and to have legitimacy. Even if they wanted to, charities cannot start running Haiti without money and without an explicit mandate.
One clear lesson from post-tsunami recovery was that reconstruction worked best when it followed a long-term strategic objective. The guiding notion was to "build back better". An essential element of that process was consultation with the communities that had been affected; not just restoring broken buildings, but reviving broken communities. In Haiti, that principle has so far been ignored. World leaders were quick to express horror at the scale of the catastrophe; many also pledged determination to see Haiti positively transformed. But as yet there is not a blueprint, or a strategy, or even a popular campaign to make it happen. The one thing that everyone piously swore should not happen has happened – the world forgot about Haiti.
The interim reconstruction commission has clearly failed in its task. It urgently needs to be reinforced. The international community must recruit a figure who will show proper commitment and who has the diplomatic skills and global authority to extract from donors the money they have promised and to restore a sense of purpose to the Haitian government.
Some mechanism must be created to draw ordinary Haitians into the process of rebuilding their society. If there is a positive opportunity in this crisis it is that the citizens of the country might, after decades of exclusion and neglect, be given a clear stake in its future. The project is to give Haiti the infrastructure around which it can rebuild itself as a society. With elections due in the autumn, and an impoverished population feeling betrayed, there is a great danger that the country will slip back towards the endemic violence that has plagued it in the past.
Western governments have historically shown few qualms about attempting to engineer new civil and political structures in developing countries when it has suited their strategic and commercial interests. The international community is quite capable of intervening on an epic scale when fired up with sufficient political will. With regard to Haiti, the failure of that will looks like a monument to western dishonesty. Haiti was promised a better future.
It is time to demonstrate that the developed world can actually engage in the affairs of a failing, troubled state, without special interest, without hidden military agendas and without economic pre-conditions. Haiti must stand as proof of the possibility of true humanitarian intervention. The earthquake that devastated the country was a natural disaster. To ignore the suffering in its aftermath is a crime.
