Well, Andy, Maybe Some Of Them Shouldn’t Take The Opportunity To Behave That Way…

Andy Kershaw in the ‘Indy’ asks that we stop treating Haitians like savages:

There has now solidified a consensus among aid organisations that the relief they are bringing is itself a liability; that distributing what Haitians are dying for – literally – will bring on a second nightmare. So, supplies pile up at the airport because, apparently, the Haitians need to be fed and watered at gunpoint.

Do they?

Well, as an infamous picture earlier in the week showed, yes, they do:


But Andy is the typical armchair general, convinced he can do better.

He does have some good points to make:

The crisis, for more than a week now, has been not about the shortage of donated food, water, fuel and medicines but the distribution of those essentials that are piling up, obscenely, at Port-au-Prince airport. On Monday evening's Channel 4 News, Jon Snow, at that same airport, interviewed the head of Oxfam in Haiti. Snow remarked that he and his team had been to areas around the capital that had not had any NGO visits, never mind material aid. The Oxfam woman spoke authoritatively, but emptily, about how her teams were all over the city conducting "assessments".

Sounds a lot like any local council or major government department to me. All they are missing is the PowerPoint seminars…

Andy, from the comfort of his air-conditioned office in the UK, decries the aid agencies for thinking of their own safety:

The alarmingly unanimous priorities of the spokesmen and women of aid organisations and the military, have been with "issues" (for they love that word) of "security", "procedures", and "logistics" (what we used to call "transport" or "trucks"). These obsessions indicate not only a self-serving and self-important careerist culture among some, though not all, aid workers (although wide experience of the profession in Haiti and across Africa tells me it is more common than donors would like to think), but that the magnitude of the crisis has paralysed them into a gibbering strike force of box-tickers.

And what are you doing to help alleviate the crisis, Andy?

Oh. That’s right. Nothing. Just suggesting that they be left to sort it out themselves…

This self-imposed blockade by bureaucracy is a scandal but could be easily overcome. The NGOs and the military should recognise the hysteria over "security" for what it is and make use of Haiti's best resource and its most efficient distribution network: the Haitians themselves. Stop treating them as children. Or worse. Hand over to them immediately what they need at the airport. They will find the means to collect it.

And if they don’t?

If the strong rise to the top, and the weak go without, as happens in every single disaster known to man where discipline isn’t enforced, what then? Will Andy be screaming from the safety of his newspaper that the West should ‘do something!’ again?

Of course he will…

And I’m struck by the difference in this article (which basically claims that Haitians are pure, noble souls beset by evil circumstance) and all those articles on the film ‘The Road’, which was lauded by many for the way it ‘showed the true reality’ of global warming and how it’d turn us all into ravening cannibals scrambling for survival…

And oh, look what's in the news today...