Exclusive for DU: Mark Danner on the latest Haitian disaster and recovery effort

EFerrari

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sun Jan-31-10 04:38 PM
Original message

Exclusive for DU: Mark Danner on the latest Haitian disaster and recovery effort

Edited on Sun Jan-31-10 05:00 PM by EFerrari

Exclusive for DU: Mark Danner on the latest Haitian disaster and recovery effort

28 Jan 2010

In order to focus the conversation we�re having here at Democratic Underground about the situation in Haiti, I thought I�d contact Mark Danner for some insight. He graciously agreed to give us a brief interview. Mark Danner is a journalist who has been instrumental in breaking stories which more than one government would have preferred to leave in obscurity. We know about the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, the Downing Street Memo and the Bush Department torture memos because of Mark Danner�s work � and that�s a very short list. His complete bio can be read here: http://www.markdanner.com/living/biography_full

His latest book released in October, Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War, opens with a long chapter on Haiti so I thought, as he has recently thought and written on the topic, he would be a key person to consult. Since the quake, Danner published an article, �To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature� in the New York Times. This short essay sets out briefly but carefully a Haitian history that has led to what he describes as a �predatory state� -- which, of course, is the context in which this new disaster visited the Haitian people.

�HAITI is everybody�s cherished tragedy. Long before the great earthquake struck the country like a vengeful god, the outside world, and Americans especially, described, defined, marked Haiti most of all by its suffering. Epithets of misery clatter after its name like a ball and chain: Poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. One of the poorest on earth. For decades Haiti�s formidable immiseration has made it among outsiders an object of fascination, wonder and awe. Sometimes the pity that is attached to the land � and we see this increasingly in the news coverage this past week � attains a tone almost sacred, as if Haiti has taken its place as a kind of sacrificial victim among nations, nailed in its bloody suffering to the cross of unending destitution.

And yet there is nothing mystical in Haiti�s pain, no inescapable curse that haunts the land. From independence and before, Haiti�s harms have been caused by men, not demons. Act of nature that it was, the earthquake last week was able to kill so many because of the corruption and weakness of the Haitian state, a state built for predation and plunder. Recovery can come only with vital, even heroic, outside help; but such help, no matter how inspiring the generosity it embodies, will do little to restore Haiti unless it addresses, as countless prior interventions built on transports of sympathy have not, the manmade causes that lie beneath the Haitian malady.�

The entire article, which we used as a jumping off point, and which is highly recommended for DUers trying to get up to speed on Haiti or simply wanting Mark�s take may be read here. It�s a short read but it�s packed: http://www.markdanner.com/articles/show/to_heal_haiti_look_to_history_not_nature

Danner and I didn�t discuss the politics of our State Department or their goals in Haiti at this moment. In fact, he seemed a little irritated when I was raising the question because in his view, this isn�t the best question that could be foregrounded at this moment. And he has a point. He ran down quickly all the elements compounding the aftermath of the quake. The poverty, the joblessness, the demolition of an infrastructure already in ruins, the barely existent health care system, the disappeared government, the lack of the very basic necessities of human survival. The lack of water.

In the NYTs' article, Danner says the �single unitary principle� of those that have intervened in Haiti was their �failure to alter . . . the reality of a corrupt state�. When I pushed on this a little, pointing out that Naomi Klein or John Perkins might not see the corruption of the Haitian state as a failure, asked in what sense it was a failure, Danner responded that it was obviously a failure for the Haitian people and not a failure for other interests who profit from this state of affairs in Haiti.

Danner had two suggestions for actually healing Haiti in his article. They are, roughly, that America opens its markets to Haitian ag products and other goods, and that America and others ensure that the vast amounts of money now pouring into Haiti wind up in Haitian hands.

When I asked how likely these suggestions were to be implemented, Danner said the default was that they would not be implemented, given the way things �usually work�. But he also said, it was much too soon to tell. He said there was �a large and incompetent� relief effort ongoing that will means months and years of money flowing into Haiti. The real question is, in his opinion, will all this effort benefit Haitians?

Danner made it very plain that unless the international response ensures by �a creative and concerted effort� that the reconstruction of Haiti is done by Haitians, the healing of Haiti will not happen. And Danner was even more specific. He said that the resources now pouring into Haiti needed to be put into the hands of as many people as possible and not the same old few hands in order to decentralize the economy. And that doesn�t just mean, and this is my iteration not Danner�s, paying Haitians to clean up but also to train skills, to invest in Haitians.

To learn more about Mark Danner�s work or to purchase Stripping the Body Bare
visit his website: www.markdanner.com

Drawing on rich narratives of politics and violence and war from around the world and written by one of the world's leading writers, Stripping Bare the Body is a moral history of American power during the last quarter century. From bloody battleground to dark prison cell to air-conditioned office, it tells the grim and compelling tale of the true final years of the American Century, as the United States passed from the violent certainties of the late Cold War, to the ideological confusions of the post-Cold War world, to the pumped up and ongoing evangelism of the War on Terror and the Iraq War, and the ruins they have left behind.
- From the book jacket

Thank you, Mark Danner, for sharing your time and insight with us at Democratic Underground.