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How NGOs are Profiting Off a Grave Situation
Haiti
and the Aid Racket
By Ashley Smith
It's now more than a month since the earthquake that laid waste
to Port-au-Prince, killing more than 200,000 people and thrusting
millions of people into the most desperate conditions.
But according to the U.S. government, Haitians have a lot to be
thankful for.
On February 12, the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Ken Merten boasted,
"In terms of humanitarian aid delivery...frankly, it's working
really well, and I believe that this will be something that people
will be able to look back on in the future as a model for how we've
been able to sort ourselves out as donors on the ground and responding
to an earthquake."
Bill Quigley, the legal director for the Center for Constitutional
Rights, had a simple response to Merten's claim: "What? Haiti
is a model of how the international government and donor community
should respond to an earthquake? The ambassador must be overworked
and need some R&R. Look at the facts."
What are the facts? The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (OCHA) reports that "more than 3 million people--one
in every three Haitians--were severely affected by the earthquake,
of whom 2 million need regular food aid. Over 1.1 million people
are homeless, many of them still living under sheets and cardboard
in makeshift camps. The government of Haiti estimates that at least
300,000 people were injured during the quake."
So far, the relief effort has only managed to provide 270,000 people
with basic shelters like tents. More than 1 million people still
have little access to food and water and have to scrape by to find
sustenance. Even worse, because the relief operation is so inefficient,
Haitians report that some of the food spends so long at the airport
that it is rotten by the time it gets to the hungry.
On February 7, thousands of Haitians marched in the Petionville
suburb of Port-au-Prince to protest their desperate circumstances
and the failure of aid delivery.
Those conditions will only worsen as the rainy season approaches.
Médicins sans Frontières (MSF) summed up the grave
situation:
It's hard to believe that four weeks after the quakes, so many people
still live under bedsheets in camps and on the street...One can
only wonder how there could be such a huge gap between the promise
of a massive financial influx into the country and the slow pace
of distribution. MSF is concerned that with the onset of the rainy
season, we'll be facing new medical emergencies, when people who
are living without shelter come to us with diarrhea or respiratory
infections.
*
* *
THE U.S. ambassador couldn't be more wrong about the relief operation
in Haiti.
While some NGOs like Partners in Health have done and are doing
amazing work to provide services for quake victims, overall, the
catastrophe in Haiti revealed the worst aspects of the U.S. government
and the NGO aid industry.
As many analysts have noted, the U.S. in fact used its "relief"
operation to disguise a military occupation of Haiti, intended to
prevent a flood of refugees reaching the U.S., impose even greater
sweatshop development on Haiti, and signal to the rest of Latin
America, the Caribbean and the world's most powerful governments
that U.S. aims to reassert its power in the region.
As a result, relief aid from the U.S. has played second fiddle to
its imperial ambitions--and the NGO-centered aspect of its response
is an important part of its strategy.
Instead of aiding the Haitian state and building up its capacity
to handle the crisis, the U.S. is funneling $379 million in aid
through its own agencies and then through NGOs. According to the
Associated Press:
Each American dollar roughly breaks down like this: 42 cents for
disaster assistance, 33 cents for U.S. military aid, nine cents
for food, nine cents to transport the food, five cents for paying
Haitian survivors for recovery efforts, just less than one cent
to the Haitian government, and about half a cent to the Dominican
Republic.
Most of the privately raised funds have been funneled to NGOs that
have a checkered history in Haiti, not ones with a real commitment
to invigorating Haitian self-organization. As Bill Quigley writes:
Donations for Haiti to private organizations have exceeded $644
million. Over $200 million has gone to the Red Cross, which had
15 people working on health projects in Haiti before the earthquake.
About $40 million has gone to Partners in Health, which had 5,000
people working on health in Haiti before the quake.
The big NGOs, which are getting the bulk of the money, see the crisis
as an enormous opportunity to raise funds and their profile. Thus,
instead of a centralized and logical relief effort, something only
a sovereign state could provide, the NGOs are competing with one
another, literally branding areas they serve with their logos. As
a result of this competition, they provide spotty and chaotic relief
provision. According to the British medical journal The Lancet,
the NGOs are:
jostling for position, each claiming that they are doing the most
for earthquake survivors. Some agencies even claim that they are
"spearheading" the relief effort. In fact, as we only
too clearly see, the situation in Haiti is chaotic, devastating
and anything but coordinated.
Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavory characteristics
seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed
with raising money through their own appeal efforts. Media coverage
as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing
and branding have too high a profile. Perhaps worst of all, relief
efforts in the field are sometimes competitive, with little collaboration
between agencies, including smaller, grassroots charities that
may have better networks in affected counties, and so are well
placed to immediately implement emergency relief.
Even worse, the NGOs, because of their close collaboration with
the U.S. military, have adopted a paranoid obsession with security
to the detriment of providing actual help. According to Sasha Kramer,
a co-founder of the non-profit Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods
who was in Haiti at the time of the earthquake and remains there
today:
One friend showed me the map used by all of the larger NGOs, where
Port-au-Prince is divided into security zones: yellow, orange,
red. Red zones are restricted; in the orange zones, all of the
car windows must be rolled up, and they cannot be visited past
certain times of the day; even in the yellow zone, aid workers
are often not permitted to walk through the streets, and spend
much of their time riding through the city from one office to
another in organizational vehicles.
The creation of these security zones has been like the building
of a wall, a wall reinforced by language barriers and fear, rather
than iron rods--a wall that, unlike many of the buildings in Port-au-Prince,
did not crumble during the earthquake.
Fear, much like violence, is self-perpetuating. When aid workers
enter communities radiating fear, it is offensive, the perceived
disinterest in communicating with the poor majority is offensive,
driving through impoverished communities with windows rolled up
and armed security guards is offensive...
Despite the good intentions of the many aid workers swarming around
the UN base, much of the aid coming through the larger organizations
is still blocked in storage, waiting for the required UN and U.S.
military escorts that are seen as essential for distribution. Meanwhile,
people in the camps are suffering, and their tolerance is waning.
* * *
THE U.S. policy of bypassing the Haitian state to fund NGOs is nothing
new--this has been U.S. practice in the Third World since the turn
to neoliberalism in the 1970s.
The U.S. has used IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs
to force Third World governments to privatize government industry,
cut wages and government programs, lower trade barriers, and open
economies to U.S. trade and investment. At the same time, the U.S.
and corporate donors started funding NGOs to address the social
crisis created by neoliberal policies.
As David Harvey argues in his book A Short History of Neoliberalism:
The rise of advocacy groups and NGOs has...accompanied the neoliberal
turn and increased spectacularly since 1980 or so. The NGOs have
in many instances stepped into the vacuum in social provision
left by the withdrawal of the state from such activities. This
amounts to privatization by NGO. In some instances, this has helped
accelerate further state withdrawal from social provision. NGOs
thereby function as "Trojan horses for neoliberal globalization."
The NGOs are, in fact, businesses in their own right. They sport
well-paid bureaucrats that raise money off of the disastrous impact
of neoliberalism around the world. They are not accountable to the
local populations they supposedly serve, but instead to the international
donors that fund them--most often, corporate-backed formations like
George Soros's Open Society Institute and capitalist governments.
Moreover, given that NGOs can pay local leaders more than either
the government or social movements, they often recruit people who
would traditionally lead leftist movements. As Mike Davis in The
Planet of Slums:
Third World NGOs have proven brilliant at co-opting local leadership
as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied
by the Left. Even if there are some celebrated exceptions--such
as the militant NGOs so instrumental in creating the World Social
Forums--the broad impact of the NGO/"civil society revolution"...has
been to bureaucratize and deradicalize urban social movements.
Davis argues that NGOs are, in fact, a form of "soft imperialism."
They play a role very similar to the one that missionary religious
institutions played in the earlier history of empire. They provide
moral cover--a civilizing mission of helping the hapless heathens--for
the powers that are plundering the society. And just as religious
institutions justified imperial war, many NGOs, abandoning their
traditional standpoint of neutrality in conflicts, have become advocates
of military intervention.
Nowhere is this pattern more clear than in Haiti. The U.S. convinced
the dictator Baby Doc Duvalier in the 1980s to implement a neoliberal
development plan which Haitians call "the plan of death,"
which dropped tariffs on American agriculture, encouraged sweatshop
development in Port-au-Prince and opened tourist resorts for the
international elite.
Predictably, the plan produced a social catastrophe; it increased
absolute poverty by 60 percent. But the Haitian poor, workers and
peasants rose up to build a mass movement, Lavalas, that eventually
elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide president in 1990 on a platform of
anti-neoliberal reform.
The U.S. saw Aristide's mild reformism as a threat, backed a coup
in 1991 and used the coup regime's reign of terror to crush the
Lavalas social movement. It also convinced Aristide to implement
the "plan of death" as the condition of his restoration
in 1994. Under threat from the U.S., Aristide and his successor,
René Préval implemented much of the plan.
The U.S. used yet another coup against Aristide in 2004 and another
coup regime to force through the rest of the plan. Now, Haiti has
the most neoliberal economy in Latin American and the Caribbean.
Thus, as noted Haitian academic Robert Fatton argues, "The
emasculation of the state is no accident...It is partly the consequence
of the neoliberal regime implanted in the country by the major international
financial institutions. By advocating the withdrawal of the state
from its social and regulating obligations, and by promoting the
supremacy of the market, this regime has contributed to an economic,
political and social disaster."
At the very same time, the U.S., other powers and the international
donors started funding the NGOs. Soon, the World Bank reported that
there were 10,000 NGOs in the country, doing everything from trash
collection to health care and food provision in a chaotic patchwork
of services that have replaced the incapacitated state.
These NGOs are non-governmental only in name. Peter Hallward documents
inDamming the Flood that the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) and other similar government bureaucracies from other countries
provide 70 percent of the funding for NGOs. The other 30 percent
comes from corporate formations and individual contributors.
Unsurprisingly, as Hallward argues, "the bulk of USAID money
that goes to Haiti and to other countries in the region is explicitly
designed to pursue interests--the promotion of a secure investment
climate, the nurturing of links with local business elites, the
preservation of a docile and low-wage labor force, and so on."
Haitians now commonly refer to their own country as the "Republic
of NGOs." But that is a misnomer, since Haitians have no democratic
control over the NGOs. In reality, Haiti has been ruled by an American
NGO Raj.
* * *
WHILE SOME NGOs like Partners in Health have been set up to develop
Haitian grassroots self-organization and control, most major NGOs
have been accomplices in the neoliberal catastrophe the U.S. wrought
in Haiti.
First of all, the NGOs have reproduced and exacerbated class inequality
in Haiti. Since the NGOs can pay much better than anyone else, including
the Haitian state, they have swept up middle class professionals
into their ranks. Haitian actually now call them the "NGO class."
As anthropologist Mark Schuller writes:
In addition to higher salaries, NGO employees have access to many
privileges: clean drinking water, electricity to charge cell hones,
e-mail and the ever-prized U.S. visa. These privileges in turn
plug individuals into the global economy. People's first visits
to the U.S. solidified neoliberal ideologies. This artificial,
dependent middle class--the "NGO class"--thus directly
support a form of economic globalization, accomplishes ideological
work and further stratifies the Haitian population, selecting
a chosen few for privileges denied Haiti's poor majority.
The NGOs themselves are in the business of poverty, not its eradication,
and they have proliferated in lockstep with the collapse in the
Haitian standard of living. This has led many Haitians to rightly
see them as profiting off their crisis.
As Sove Lavi told Schuller, the NGOs "take the illness [of
AIDS] and turn it into a business. They let people die...Thanks
to this illness, many people have become gran neg [bigwigs], many
people have become rich. Many people drive fancy cars, fancy motorcycles.
Many people are achte [making a lot of] money on the backs of people
who are living with the illness. Many people living with the illness,
we continue to die."
These NGOs have left in their wake a litany of projects that, far
from improving the condition of impoverished Haitians, has in fact
worsened it.
Anthropologist Timothy Schwartz documents the disastrous impact
of the NGOs in his book Travesty in Haiti. In particular, he shows
how CARE International--which claimed its mission in Haiti was to
provide food aid to the "poorest of the poor"--not only
failed in its mission, but also actually exacerbated the food crisis.
When the U.S. implemented its "plan of death" in Haiti,
which undercut peasant agriculture and flooded the market with subsidized
U.S. products, it caused a food crisis. Peasants were no longer
able to find a market for their produce, and were therefore thrust
into poverty, often unable to meet their own food needs because
of their collapsed standard of living. They then became dependent
on food aid.
USAID, in turn, funded CARE International to feed the impoverished
peasants. The NGO began to distribute U.S. crops as food aid, during
both bad and good harvests, further undermining Haitian peasants
ability to compete for the market. Often, the food aid was taken
by local elites and sold on the market, with the CARE brand still
affixed to the packaging. CARE seemed to care so little that it
never really followed up on the consequences of its food aid program.
Meanwhile, it put on conferences in fancy hotels inside and outside
Haiti for its U.S. government and corporate backers. Schwartz writes
that this amounted to "a perversion of American charitable
ideals, with its false claims to be aiding 'the poorest of the poor'
when what it was really doing was throwing exquisite banquets at
plush hotels, while carrying out U.S. political policy in the interests
of international venture capitalist and industrialists."
In another example, Schwartz tells the story of NGO-sponsored orphanages
that degenerated into a cover for trafficking in children.
NGOs like World Vision, Compassion International and Christian Aid
Missions collectively sponsor tens of thousands of children in orphanages.
On the surface, this sounds like a benevolent plan. But as Schwartz
shows, the middle-class operators of the orphanages took the money
from the NGOs and ran a scam.
In some cases, these operators housed not actual orphans, but children
of the local elite. In other cases, they offered money to impoverished
Haitians for their children, with the promise that they would be
cared for, educated and given a chance at a better life. The bulk
of actual orphans--impoverished street kids--didn't get places.
The orphanages were filled up with middle-class kids or children
bought from their parents--that is, fake orphans.
Schwartz writes that he "had zero doubt that orphanages for
Haitians and for many Americans who were helping them procure funds
were businesses." He calls it "false charity. I believe
it is tantamount to robbing from impoverished children themselves.
The money is theirs, and they are not, in the overwhelming majority
of cases I encountered, getting it."
Even worse, the most cynical of the people trading in children sell
the poorest of the children into slavery or the sex trade. Often,
these children are marketed abroad. UNICEF reports a conservative
estimate that each year, 2,000 Haitian kids are sold into the Dominican
Republic alone.
Schwartz also shows how the disastrous impact of both U.S. neoliberal
economic policies and the failure or complicity of the NGOs has
left people so desperate that they turned to narco-trafficking as
a source of income. Of course, the U.S. then uses this as a further
justification for its military occupation and imposition of yet
another sweatshop development plan.
Schwartz conclusions are absolutely correct:
The world's largest multinational charities--CARE, CRS, World
Vision and ADRA--executed the political will of institutions,
governments and lobbyists that had identified Haiti's comparative
advantage as low wages--i.e. poverty--and in doing so, these charitable
organization dedicated to helping the poorest of the poor wound
up working to make the people of Haiti even poorer.
* * *
WHILE THE U.S. used the NGOs to help impose neoliberalism in Haiti,
they also manipulated them to build political opposition to any
reform movement. The U.S. stepped up funding for the NGO racket
in the run-up to its second coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide
in 2004. At the very same time that it enforced an embargo on Aristide's
government for alleged electoral manipulations, it escalated the
funding of NGOs that were in opposition to Aristide.
As Hallward writes, they made "use of tried-and-tested tactics
of democracy promotion. In Haiti as elsewhere, the main vehicles
for delivering the policy were USAID, the International Foundation
for Electoral Systems, and the International Republican Institute.
Altogether, from 1994 to 2002, Washington would contribute some
$70 million--a staggering sum by Haitian standards--to 'train' an
appropriate political opposition to Aristide."
Many, if not most, of the NGOs that ended up organized in the elite
opposition's political front, the Group of 184, and that supported
the coup were on the U.S. payroll.
Such NGO collaboration with the coup completes a vicious circle--the
NGOs aided and abetted the "plan of death"; exacerbated
through failure, mismanagement and corruption the impact of neoliberalism
on Haiti; and then supported the coup against the democratically
elected government.
In so doing, they undercut the sovereignty of Haitian people, all
under the gloss of helping people overcome their poverty--poverty
that they, in fact, helped create.
The Marine Gen. Smedley Butler from the early decades of the 20th
century said he served as a "racketeer for capitalism."
The same could just as easily be applied to the NGOs and humanitarian
aid today--it is a racket for empire.
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