Western Charities Still Pimping Haiti

It's a humanitarian disaster, pictures of black people either dead or dying, fill our screens as aid agencies and well-known celebrities plead for the public to donate serious money. Thankfully we always do, usually in our millions. We've all seen the pictures, we all know the script.

It's the usual type of poverty porn that traditionally exploits the dead and dying Africans whose 'plight' can only be solved by foreign aid intervention. That may be a surprise to some, but there is a western media propensity to show the poverty-stricken.

We usually weep at the sight of starving, naked Africans on our screens, aired on prime time TV in the name of charity. For some of us, this amounts to nothing more than another assault on African humanity and a desecration of the dead. Perversely, this also reinforces the subliminal message that black people can only survive on handouts from the West.

Within British Black communities and beyond, there has been a deeply held suspicion, borne of our historical experience of witnessing high profile charitable emergency disaster appeals in the West, that charities have been profiteering from human misery. What we see is millions raised in the West, whilst seeing nothing really change on the ground in the affected countries.

The view is that some of these big charities are in it for the sole purpose of self-aggrandisement and profiteering from African misery. Or worse acting as a cover for covert military intelligence interventions or medical research teams.

Black communities here in Britain are in daily contact with their families and friends back home and across the world. Even though most of us will be in low paying jobs, we are obliged to send money home on a regular basis. These remittance payments are the life blood for many Asian, African, Latin and Caribbean economies.

One of the most significant humanitarian disasters of recent times was the earthquake that violently shook Haiti in January 2010. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and is ranked 149th of 182 countries on the Human Development Index. In mid-February 2010, the Haitian government reported the death toll to have reached 230,000 and the entire island's infrastructure was devastated.

By 2011, despite huge international pledges of cash, and a global outpouring of public donations, nothing much had changed.

A recent Oxfam charity assessment report stated:

One year on, only five percent of the rubble has been cleared and only 15 percent of the required basic and temporary houses have been built. House building on a large scale cannot be started before the enormous amount of rubble is cleared. The government and donors must prioritize this most basic step toward helping people return home."

In 2011, the Red Cross, one of the world's largest and most successful charities, received hundreds of millions of dollars after a global appeal for people to donate cash. The appeal centred on building permanent homes for hundreds of thousands of homeless and destitute Haitian families.

Red Cross CEO, Gail McGovern boasted of building thousands of homes with the aim of developing brand new communities equipped with homes, hospitals and schools.

Raising a spectacular, half a billion dollars worldwide, some four years later, the appeal was seen as huge success. However according to a report published by ProPublica and US National Public Radio, despite this success, the Red Cross has yet to build a single house in Haiti.

Let's make no bones about it: this is fraud on a gargantuan scale. It constitutes a monstrous, moral outrage. Reflecting the historic reality of donor aid agencies' ruthless exploitation of human tragedies in the most venal and callous of ways.

To add grievous insult to mortal injury, the Red Cross is refusing to account for where this huge amount of money has allegedly been spent. The devastating report details the fact that the Red Cross sent workers and volunteers to the island who spoke no French or Creole. There are also leaks of internal Red Cross emails that show how staff racially stereotyped Haitian co- workers.

The Red Cross predictably blames the Haitian Government for its failure citing, land disputes, shortage of qualified staff and the outbreak of Cholera on the island. Under challenge the Red Cross stated it had helped '4.5 million Haitians get back on their feet and in recent promotional material reporting on five years following the tragedy they boasted:

Millions of Haitians are safer, healthier, more resilient, and better prepared for future disasters thanks to generous donations to the American Red Cross."

Although the authors of the report requested the Red Cross show them these projects on the ground, the Red Cross refused the request, point blank. Having identified the town of Campeche as one of the intended beneficiaries of charity, the authors visited the town to see for themselves the progress made. They were expecting to see the 700 homes Red Cross has boasted about building. The organisation had committed a $24 million budget, vowing to complete these homes by January 2013.

When they arrived, they found a dusty, desolate and desperate community, where not a single home had been built. They spoke to a local community leader Jean Jean Flaubert who headed up the Red Cross community consultations, he told them:

What the Red Cross told us is that they are coming here to change Campeche. Totally change it," said Flaubert. "Now I do not understand the change that they are talking about. I think the Red Cross is working for themselves."

Another $30 million budget programme to tackle Cholera and another to build much needed roads were both spectacular failures. The report goes on to cite internal memos, comments from both former and current employees, Haitians and others aid specialist in the US in what is a damming indictment of the Red Cross.

The Red Cross trustees and the senior employees should face criminal prosecution for the way they have behaved. God knows if they were Africans rather than Europeans they would already be in jail. They should be stripped of their charitable status and their accounts frozen with immediate effect.

These charitable vultures, white collar criminals, chasing ambulances and picking over the bones of our dead, cameras at the ready, should face serious jail time for their foul and disgusting actions. They have lied, stolen and cheated all those millions of beautiful people throughout the world, who put their hands in their pockets to help people in distress. They have besmirched all genuine charities doing great work on the ground in Haiti. They have sullied a humanitarian effort of which we could all have been enormously proud.

Meanwhile, Haitians continue to be the most marginalised people in the world. I believe Haiti has been the subject of Western revenge for having the temerity to be the first African Caribbean nation who in1791, rose up and rebelled against plantation slavery. They slaughtered their slave masters and went onto defeat both, Napoleon's French Imperial Army and the might of the British Empire. Both colonial powers were defeated in attempting to retake the island after the revolution led by the great African revolutionary Toussaint L'Overture.

Some 200 years later and still Haiti has to suffer the predations of the Western colonial mindset, that commodifies Africans and Caribbean victims of tragedies as nothing more than profit centres and publicity opportunities. Red Cross - they should be nailed to it.

Read the full report here https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-half-a-billi...

Lee Jasper