By Philippe Ryfman
Passage au crible n°19
Measuring 7.0 to 7.3, the earthquake that occurred in Haiti on 12th January 2010 already appears to be one of the most severe in the last twenty-five years. The human toll has reached at least 230,000 dead, 300,000 wounded and 1.2 million homeless in the capital and neighbouring towns. Moreover, there are some 750,000 displaced persons in the provinces. As for material damage, it could reach 120% of the GDP. Confronted with a catastrophe of this extent, the deployment of relief agencies on the island has been massive. However, the saturation of the Port-au-Prince airport, the blocking of the port, the destruction of infrastructures and the intervention of an inefficient administration all had to be contended with.
> Historical background
> Theoretical framework
> Analysis
> References
The international system of humanitarian aid has been characterized since the 1990s by a wide diversity of actors including NGOs, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and UN and state agencies.
Contrary to received wisdom, a natural catastrophe always has an eminently political dimension. It underlines the greater or lesser ability of a country to cope, the ability of the state apparatus or its civil society. The earthquake which occurred in Chile on 27th February demonstrated this with an opposite example. On a regional level, in the case of Haiti, the considerable effort of the Dominican Republic should be noted given the traditionally poor state of relations between the two states. The role played by Brazil should also be noted in contrast to the near total absence of Mexico, which, nevertheless, is geographically nearer. Finally at the crossroads of the regional and international levels, the massive intervention of the United States remains the striking element. However, the positioning of certain actors of the system of aid, the context and the sequence of events of this crisis induce the major risk of seeing humanitarian action reconfigured in the future.
1. Private transnational actors – NGOs and the International Red Cross Movement – or public transnational actors – UN agencies, the European Union – have long occupied essential places in the humanitarian field. After the tsunami of December 2004, despite the usual interactions and partnerships, the idea of a reinforced and rationalized coordination between the different humanitarian actors has progressively imposed itself. This measure would indeed enable aid responses to be more appropriately dimensioned while avoiding a duplication of interventions and optimizing their coverage.
2. This beginning of world governance of relief has been realized under the aegis of the United Nations, entrusted with the management of the entire international structure.
From 2005, a reconfiguration by key sectors – or clusters – corresponding to major operational or transversal areas was promoted. A second effort focused on the reorganization of funding, with the creation of a financial structure, the CERF (Central Emergency Response Fund) which aims at replacing the system of appeals, specific to each UN agency. Moreover, the General Secretariat – with its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs – is empowered to supervise the whole.
In Haiti, however, these coordination mechanisms experienced serious deficiencies, as the Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, john Holmes, admitted. Furthermore, they were immediately in competition with, even ousted by the humanitarian action of states, particularly the United States – all the more so as this was deployed around a military-humanitarian axis. This American choice appears to provide cause for concern. In the first place, because this formula had already been tested in the early 1990s and rapidly abandoned for practical reasons; a series of failures – from Somalia to Rwanda – had demonstrated its inefficiency. It also induced a calling into question of the foundations and principles governing humanitarian action. What has subsisted of this approach – in Afghanistan, particularly since 2001 with the Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) — has confirmed this questionable nature. Secondly, this military-humanitarian presence is not that of the knight in shining armour landing on virgin territory devoid of all aid. Indeed, before its deployment, Haitian or international NGOS such as MSF, ACF and CARE had already come to the aid of the population alongside the IRCC (International Red Cross Committee) and several national Red Crosses. For example, the French arm of MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières), alone deployed in several days four hospitals in containers or inflated structures and treated, from January, several tens of thousand wounded. As for ACF, it daily assists 100,000 people with its water and sanitation (WASH) programs. Finally, Solidarités, Oxfam, CARE, the French Red Cross and various UN agencies played and still play key roles for the homeless and the displaced.
The speed with which the Americans discussed the reconstruction at the international level – during the conference held at New York on 31st March 2010 – seems to substantiate the idea that the humanitarian crisis is over. On the contrary, however, it continues since the post-emergency context cannot be reduced to mere technical factors – the number of the homeless, the wounded, persons displaced to other towns and the countryside, or destroyed buildings – and to a time-scale of several weeks. The crisis will persist for months, even a year or two. The short-term humanitarian needs are still considerable and the present priority consists in foreseeing and budgeting for the funding, as well as the requisite human and material resources. There is a real risk of the rainy season, tropical storms or cyclones constituting factors of deterioration. Needless to say, the reconstruction of Haiti supposes not only the implication of the entire civil society through the NGOs, but also that of the associations of the diaspora and the civil societies of the international partners.
Ultimately, this earthquake has pointed the spotlight at a long-underestimated element, which should henceforth be at the top of the international agenda. On a more and more urbanized planet – 25 cities with more than 10 million inhabitants in 2025, 10 of which exceeding 20 million – with an ever-increasing population, over the coming decades, this sort of catastrophe will provoke considerable human and material losses, particularly in the poor countries. In this respect, Haiti has demonstrated that the more a population lives precariously, the more its vulnerability to catastrophes increases almost mechanically. Consequently, the issue of the coordination of all the participants is all the more acutely raised. Yet, although the control of the world governance of humanitarian action had just de facto passed into the hands of the states, the pivotal role played by non-governmental actors and UN agencies would be the one called into question. The optimum level of aid and assistance to the victims would then be subordinated to political considerations, with the possible risk of aid being split and drastically diminished.
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Adinolfi Costanza, Bassiouni David, Lauritzsen Halvor, Williams Roy, Humanitarian Response Review, OCHA, New York, Geneva, 2005.
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Makki Sami, Militarisation de l’humanitaire, privatisation du militaire, Paris, CIRPES. Coll. Cahiers, 2004.
Ryfman Philippe, Une Histoire de l’humanitaire, Paris, La Découverte. Coll. Repères, 2008.
