Haiti: Time To Build a Just Society

i-094fccf609e463cfdd66ade147b0c53d-haiti5.jpeg       Image: Gideon Mendel / The GuardianJournalist William Fisher of the Inter Press Service News Agency has just used my recent work on Haiti for his story on the need for transparency and equality in the development aid that the West provides to Haiti:

Journalist Eric Michael Johnson, writing in The Huffington Post, notes that "Haiti has a historically unhealthy dependence on foreign commerce and finance, from the colonial days of the sugar trade to the current assistance provided by developed countries."

"Now the same politicians and financial elites that helped create this mess are proposing an even larger programme following the same mode," he says.

The story goes on to quote academics and human rights officials who point out the long history of corruption and self-serving economic policy in how the United States and European countries interact with the island nation. Many of the organizations quoted I have been familiar with for some time and I'm very pleased to see their work in this area be made available to a larger audience.

Categories

More like this

Months after a severe earthquake devastated Haiti in 2010, UN peacekeeping troops exacerbated Haitians’ suffering by introducing cholera to the country, via waste that leaked from a UN housing base into the Artibonite river.
It is always hard to grasp the magnitude of suffering in Haiti - a place that should not be so desperately impoverished, that should never be the victim of so much suffering has an almost unending depth of misery.
The earthquake in Haiti is only the most recent in a series of catastrophes stretching back over two centuries.  It was not always like this.  Haiti, in fact, was once the most prosperous colony in the New World.  When it was a French colony, known as