The Telegraph.L'Onu est venue en Haïti et a laissé derrière elle un désastre. Espérons qu'elle ne fera pas de même aux Philippines

Publié par siel sur 14 Novembre 2013, 15:04pm

The UN came to Haiti and left behind a disaster. Let's hope they don't do the same after Typhoon Haiyan

Earthquake survivors unload food from a UN helicopter. (Photo: Reuters)

In the end, the smell lives on as the strongest memory. Back in January 2010, I was sent to Haiti just after an earthquake had devastated the capital, Port-au-Prince. In the aftermath of this calamity, which claimed as many as 300,000 lives, the ruins of the city were pervaded by a particular smell, combining tropical humidity, pulverised buildings, spilled petrol, filth, sweat and – most cloyingly of all – decomposing human remains.

Today, the scenes in the Philippines must be tragically similar. All emergencies have their own characteristics, but there are parallels between the catastrophe wrought by Typhoon Haiyan and the Haiti earthquake. Once again, a city seems to have borne the brunt of the disaster – in this case Tacloban in the Filipino province of Leyte – and once again, the priority will be to deliver emergency aid through a congested airport.

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A few key lessons can be learnt from the searing experience of Haiti, when no one would seriously deny that the humanitarian response went badly wrong.

First of all, forget about the headline figures for the amount of aid that will now be pledged for the Philippines. Between 2010 and 2012, the world promised $9.3 billion for Haiti, but even on the most generous estimate, only about half of this was ever delivered. Much of this sum was just creative accounting. Countries would write off debts that Haiti was never going to repay anyway, or bring forward aid donations that they planned to make in any event – and all of that was cleverly rolled into the headline number.

Once you cut out the dodges and wheezes, the actual amount of humanitarian aid was $2.5 billion – or 27 per cent of the headline sum. Of this, 93 per cent did not actually enter Haiti, but went directly to the various branches of the United Nations empire or international aid agencies.

When I was in Port-au-Prince, almost 700,000 people were sleeping in the open every night because their homes had been destroyed. Astonishingly, after all the promises, about 300,000 of them are still homeless today.

And that leads to the second lesson: the quantity of aid that gets delivered to the Philippines doesn’t matter: all that counts is the amount that finds it way into the hands of those in need.

In Haiti, hundreds of aid agencies sent supplies to Toussaint L’Ouverture airport in Port-au-Prince – and much of it got no further. In the weeks after the earthquake, prodigious quantities of food and medical equipment piled up at the airport, filling hangar after hangar, while people were dying for want of basic essentials barely a mile away.

No one was in charge and there was no proper organisation. At dawn every morning, I would attend a UN briefing and listen incredulously as highly paid spokesmen tied themselves in knots over simple questions. In a city filled with homeless people, how many tents had arrived? One day, the answer was 20,000. The next day, it became 10,000. A few hours after that particular briefing, the UN’s daily situation report said that 2,000 tents were “in-country”. In truth, it didn’t matter because these tents weren't being distributed anyway. They were just lying in some hangar, if they existed at all.

How did this happen? The UN and many aid agencies are not anxious to publicise this fact, but they tend to be in the wholesale and not the retail business when it comes to humanitarian response. They deliver essential material, but they leave the actual distribution to someone else, usually the national government. That’s fine if disaster strikes in a country with a strong and efficient state. In Haiti, however, the government barely functioned at the best of times. After an earthquake which had pulverised just about every ministry, along with the presidential palace and parliament, the state didn’t work at all.

A few days after the tremor, I accompanied a UN convoy laden with enough blankets and other basic essentials for 25,000 people as it inched its way through the ruins of Port-au-Prince. It was escorted (quite unnecessarily) by Brazilian peacekeeping troops, because we were all told the city was terribly dangerous. It wasn’t, but never mind.

Instead of handing out the stuff out to people who needed it, the entire consignment was unloaded at a primary school and left in the care of a “committee” of a dozen city councillors and sundry other worthies. What they did with it is anyone’s guess. Even if they weren’t minded to steal everything, the idea that this collection of local potentates had the transport and logistics to hand it all out was obviously absurd. Nonetheless, at the briefing the following morning, a UN spokesman proudly announced that enough aid for 25,000 people had been delivered.

Some aid did reach the needy in those early weeks – and it was distributed mainly by the US military. The only people I ever saw in the camps, setting up field hospitals and actually placing food and blankets in the hands of people in need, were the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division. They had the transport and logistics and they could take care of their own security. They also had a clear line of command and a natural focus on getting the job done.

Which perhaps leads to a third lesson: in the early days of a disaster, when the prime goal is to keep people alive, then armies are best placed to do the job. Haiti was fortunate in only one respect: the US military were just the other side of the Caribbean. In the Philippines, however, it may take longer for the US Navy to respond, although fortunately an aircraft carrier is on its way.

An excellent book about Haiti’s tragedy is subtitled How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. Let’s hope that in the years ahead, the same will not be said of the Philippines.

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