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Imagining a Stronger Haiti Past the Pain

By JAMES TRAUB    |    Published: January 23, 2010

Until Jan. 12, Haiti was a “fragile state” desperate for help to develop a working economy and effective institutions. Now it is something much worse — a charnel house with tens of thousands of corpses in a capital city laid waste. Relief has superseded development, and languid policy debate has given way to a vast and accelerating mobilization.

Still, it may be only weeks before the bodies have been buried and much of the rubble cleared away. And then the question so urgently pressed in the weeks and months before the earthquake will return: What can the international community do to help Haiti create a future different from the generations of misery it has known?

Scholars, advocates and political leaders agree that to just set Haiti back on its feet and move on would restore it to a dismal status quo from which it plainly can not escape on its own. And the terrible misfortunes the Haitian people have endured have added to this logic a deep sense of moral obligation. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has promised that Haiti will “come back even stronger and better” than before.

The question is: How? State-building or “post-conflict reconstruction” is much harder than disaster relief. Whether in Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq or Afghanistan, nation-builders have been forced to recognize the difficulty of nurturing the institutions, norms and habits of functioning states. Haiti’s own recent history offers chastening lessons to spare. Decades of despotic rule by the Duvalier family converted the state into an instrument of thievery and repression; such creatures do not disappear with their masters.

Haitians and outsiders hoped that Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the populist priest elected president in 1990, would dismantle the Duvaliers’ predatory state. When the army forced Mr. Aristide from power, President Bill Clinton, acting with the United Nations, ordered an invasion in 1994 to restore his rule. Western donors invested hundreds of millions of dollars in state-building. But Mr. Aristide and the new elite he promoted proved as contemptuous of popular welfare as their predecessors. In 1998, the World Bank reported that “political instability, woefully poor governance and corruption” had again frustrated hopes for reform. Six years later, the United States helped drive Mr. Aristide into exile.

Some experts, including the economist Jeffrey Sachs, have insisted that such efforts failed because the United States and others did not care enough or spend enough. Mr. Sachs has now proposed a multibillion-dollar “Haiti Fund” to get it right. But the painful past experience is bound to condition the coming response. Afghanistan can be seen as a counter-model: Corruption on a vast scale has both undermined American efforts at state-building and provoked cynicism about the endeavor itself.

But there are reasons to hope things may be different now. One is that natural catastrophes can create a sense of shared sacrifice and purpose that discredits aggressive self-seeking, if only temporarily. In Indonesia, for example, the state and local rebels reached a peace settlement in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami.

Such accommodations require a government concerned with the welfare of its people. And there is now widespread agreement that the government of President René Préval, elected in 2006, is the most honest Haiti has had in generations. Last year, it presented a two-year development plan that won broad acceptance; at a conference in April, donors pledged $350 million. Crime was falling before Jan. 12, and Haiti’s police, once a source of terror, had become the nation’s most trusted institution. Such progress, though modest, undermines arguments that Haiti’s problems are so deeply rooted in its culture as to doom any state-building effort to failure — a mirror image of the claim that the country bears no responsibility for its own plight.

Relief is already shading into reconstruction: Port-au-Prince’s wrecked port is being repaired, and donors will soon be paying to rebuild roads and power plants. James Dobbins, an official at the RAND Corporation who was President Clinton’s special envoy to Haiti, says institutional reform must begin at the same time as physical reconstruction. He argues that in Haiti, as elsewhere, international donors have focused on building things rather than the institutions of state. “Much of the money should be spent on the state,” he says, through training and employing locals, rather than channeling funds through private contractors or nonprofit organizations. At the same time, he adds, donors must guard against corruption by setting up “systems of accountability” in exchange for loans and grants.

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