I’m not that smart, but let me try and put things in perspective, and I certainly do not intend to be unsympathetic or callous… What the f*ck difference does it make if 100,000 people died or if 300,000 people died in Haiti? It is still an overwhelming number of deaths in an already poverty-stricken, third-world country.
In case people haven’t noticed, Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue and President Rene Preval are both a pair of lying dirt-bags, who have been stealing from the poor, uneducated Haitian population for years. My point is, how accurate is their estimate of deaths when the God-damn country never even had a census. In plain English, they don’t know who the hell lives in their own country, and worst of all, they don’t care!
The bottom line is that the earthquake apparently spared the lives of the government officials, their cronies, and many of the individuals responsible for oppressing the Haitian people. Truth be told, these are the people who should be rotting away, for filling their pockets with all the aid money that the country has received in the past and is receiving presently. Too bad they’re not, life is not fair. In my opinion, all members of the administrative government in Haiti should be lying underneath the rubble; unable to continue “milking” the country dry.
In terms of Haiti’s future, I don’t see much hope. The United States has already poured millions of dollars in aid and man-hours into disaster-relief, but being that the world-economy (as well as the U.S. economy) is what it is, what’s the point in pouring a billion dollars into Haiti; the investment will never produce tangible results. I’m afraid Haiti will continue to suffer the consequences of “freedom.” They wanted to liberate themselves from the French, but unfortunately, not all people know how to govern themselves. The Haitian people deserve all the credit in the world for overthrowing the French, but without the where-with-all to follow-up, they have created a living hell for their people.
Refer to story below. Source: Associated Press
TITANYEN, Haiti – Haiti issued wildly conflicting death tolls for the Jan. 12 earthquake on Wednesday, adding to confusion about how many people actually died — and to suspicion that nobody really knows.
A day after Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue raised the official death toll to 230,000, her office put out a statement quoting President Rene Preval as saying 270,000 bodies had been hastily buried by the government following the earthquake.
A press officer withdrew the statement, saying there was an error, but re-issued it within minutes. Later Wednesday, the ministry said that due to a typo, the number should have read 170,000.
Even that didn’t clear things up. In the late afternoon, Preval and Lassegue appeared together at the government’s temporary headquarters.
Preval, speaking English, told journalists that the number was 170,000, apparently referring to the number of bodies contained in mass graves.
Lassegue interrupted him in French, giving a number lower than she had given the previous day: “No, no, the official number is 210,000.”
Preval dismissed her.
“Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said, again in English.
Whatever the death toll, there is no doubt it is one of the highest in a modern disaster.
A third of Haiti’s 9 million people were crowded into the chaotic capital when the quake struck just to the southwest a few minutes before 5 p.m. Many were preparing to leave their offices or schools. Some 250,000 houses and 30,000 commercial buildings collapsed, according to government estimates, many crushing people inside.
For days, people piled bodies by the side of the road or left them half-buried under the rubble. Countless more remain under collapsed buildings, identified only by a pungent odor.
No foreign government or independent agency has issued its own death toll. Many agencies that usually can help estimate casualty numbers say they are too busy helping the living to keep track of the dead. And the Joint Task Force in charge of the relief effort — foreign governments and militaries, U.N. agencies and Haitian government officials — quotes only the government death toll.
That toll has climbed from a precise 111,481 on Jan. 23 to 150,000 on Jan. 24, to 212,000 on Saturday, to 230,000 on Tuesday. Preval’s count of 170,000 bodies buried in mass graves may represent only a piece of the toll — but nobody at his office was available to clarify.
It’s common in major disasters to see large discrepancies in death tolls: Governments may use lower figures to save face, or higher figures to attract foreign aid. In Haiti’s case, however, where the very institutions responsible for compiling information were themselves devastated, reaching a death toll is particularly difficult.
Even some officials express skepticism that the government is keeping count.
“I personally think that a lot of information being given to the public by the government is estimates,” said Haiti’s chief epidemiologist, Dr. Roc Magloire.
Many citizens are even more cynical, accusing the government of inflating the numbers to attract foreign aid and to take the spotlight off its own lackluster response to the disaster.
“Nobody knows how they came up with the death count. There’s no list of names. No list of who may still be trapped. No pictures of people they buried,” said shop owner Jacques Desal, 45. “No one is telling us anything. They just want the aid.”
A few days after the quake, the state-run public works department, known as the CNE, began picking up bodies from the streets and dropping them in trenches dug by earth movers in Titanyen, just north of the capital, amid rolling chalk and limestone hills that overlook the Caribbean Sea.
The trenches are 6 meters (20 feet) deep and piled 6 meters (20 feet) high.
Preval said the government has counted 170,000 bodies during those efforts, and that the number does not include people buried in private ceremonies. But at Titanyen on Wednesday, worker Estelhomme Saint Val said nobody had counted the bodies.
“The trucks were just dropping people wherever, and then we would move in and cover them up,” he said. “We buried people all along the roads and roadsides. It was impossible to do a count.”
And although the government death toll jumped by the thousands from Saturday to Tuesday, Saint Val said at noon Wednesday that only one truck had arrived this week, and it carried two bodies. He said workers received 15 truckloads of bodies a day just after the quake, but the numbers dropped off about 10 days ago.
Lassegue, in announcing the Tuesday death toll, refused to say how it was calculated.
“For the moment we count 230,000 deaths, but these figures are not definitive,” she said. “It’s a partial figure.”
U.N. humanitarian spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs in Geneva, who has often cited Haitian government figures, said Wednesday that she said she doesn’t know how Haiti is calculating the death toll: “We cannot confirm these figures.”
Finding someone who can is difficult.
The government says the CNE is orchestrating the count. The CNE referred questions to the prime minister’s office. The prime minister’s chief of protocol referred questions to the prime minister’s secretary-general. The prime minister’s secretary-general could not be reached.
A report by the U.N. on Tuesday attributed the death toll to Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency instead of the CNE. Civil Protection director Alta Jean-Baptiste referred questions to the Ministry of Interior. Interior Minister Paul Antoine Bien-Aime said Wednesday that the Civil Protection toll is “217,000-and-some deaths,” despite the higher number given by his government.
“Civil Protection, before giving out the numbers, really is doing a precise count and the numbers that they give out are numbers that are proven,” he said.
He would not say how that count is being done.
A death toll of 230,000 would equal the number of people killed in the tsunami that devastated a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean following a magnitude-9.2 earthquake on Dec. 26, 2004. That disaster generated an outpouring of international aid — in part because of the number of dead.
An extremely high toll “probably elicits more public sympathy, so it might generate more visibility, more funding,” said Chris Lom, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration.
But Byrs says inflating numbers can backfire.
“Regarding every estimate, we have to be very careful because we could lose credibility with donors, with humanitarian partners,” she told The Associated Press. “If you boost the figure, it’s counterproductive. It doesn’t help when you try to match assistance to needs.”
___
Associated Press Writers contributing to this report included Frank Bajak and Paisley Dodds in Port-au-Prince and Frank Jordans and Bradley Klapper in Geneva.
Can you elaborate, or are you limited to a single sentence?
In 1913 Wilson ordered the Marines to invade the island, which they did, displacing the local government. The military commander even wrote a new constitution, which replaced the democratic constitution in place at the time. He dictated it to his secretary. Of course the document favored U.S. interests in every way, and made the U.S. military the sole contractor for many of the island’s vital services. Haiti remained under U.S. economic veto until 1947, and then again in the 50’s the island was invaded when Duvalier came to power. The Marines returned and assumed control over the civil works, but continued to act as Duvalier’s muscle, even as he tortured and imprisoned his own people. After his death and his son’s assumption of power, the situation became so obvious and so embarrassing before the international community, the U.S. finally decided to remove their dictator. In the chaos that followed—the first freedom the people of Haiti had experienced for seventy years, Aristide came to power. And we all know the rather shameful history of his being chased from power by a bunch of thugs while the U.S. looked on. This is really a classic, tired example of colonial involvement—bleed the place dry, have a proxy terrorize the people into submission, and then abandon the wreckage. It’s only now that the U.S. is taking an interest. How noble.
TOG
Thanks for your input. I haven’t researched Haiti’s entire history to confirm your statements, but I also don’t doubt that they are true. It is known that the U.S. government is not comprised of angels; the Bush administration is certainly an example of that. However, having said that, Haiti’s leaders have exploited the country and its people, irrespective of the United States. Furthermore, when the U.S. invaded the island in 1913 as you state in your comment, it had already been over 100 years since Haiti had won its independence from France; it did so in 1804. Yet in those 100 years, its people did nothing to prosper. It was always a nation comprised of superstitious people, much like most African nations, which despite incredible natural resources, fail to make any progress. Therefore to blame all of Haiti’s woes on the United States is ludicrous. Haiti’s leaders, and to a large extent its general population, are responsible for it being the disaster that it is today, and that it was prior to the earthquake on January 12th.
You are obviously an unfeeling imperialist. There is no reason to speak with someone like you any further.
TOG
No, I am far from being an imperialist, and I certainly feel for the Haitian people and people in general that are oppressed by others; especially by tyrannical governments. However, I try to be objective as well. All I am saying is that the general population of a country, the common people as it were, are also responsible for their fate. For example, in Cuba 50 years ago the Cuban people overwhelmingly (and blindly) supported Fidel Castro. Yet many Cubans blame the U.S. for lack of support during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and therefore blame the 50 years of communism in Cuba on the United States, when it was the Cuban people who put Castro on his throne in the first place.
This sort of thing happens all the time, particularly in Central and South American countries, countries where the people like strong leaders who denounce the U.S. I suppose it gives the people a sense of patriotism and pride that their leader is “standing up” to the mighty U.S. Yet all it is is a strategy to gain the favor of the masses so they can then rape the country of its wealth (as well as the people) and little by little take away their freedoms as well. Hugo Chavez is a classic example of this. He’s followed Castro’s footsteps to a tee, and now the Venezuelan people realize their mistake; but it’s already too late.
Unfortunately this has been the fate of hundreds of millions of people throughout the centuries and across the globe, and it is in most part the general population of a country that is responsible for allowing it to happen. Although I do realize that it is much easier to put the blame on others than to be sincere with oneself and realize that as individuals we are at fault as well.
This is my opinion.
If you don’t want to continue the dialogue it is certainly your prerogative not to.
The United States tortured Haiti for most of the twentieth century. This is a ridiculously ahistorical post. Ridiculous.
TOG