AP Photo/John McConnico
DCL
When the Khian Sea sailed the earth in the late 1980s, it was looking for a place to dump its incinerated waste from Philadelphia. After the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Panama, Bermuda, Guinea Bissau and the Dutch Antilles all refused to accept the waste, the barge finally dumped 4,000 tons of what it called "topsoil fertilizer"—when it was too toxic to be used as such, since it contained dioxins, furans, and high levels of lead and cadmium—near the Haitian town of Gonaives.
The power wielding by international financial institutions in the years after, and the already-weak economic infrastructure established in Haiti by the history of colonialism and occupation, directed how the country developed—or didn't develop.
Now, the competition has begun for the lucrative post-earthquake cleanup contracts. For a moment, there was an incredible outpouring of foreign assistance and generosity that gave some hope we would help Haiti reconstruct to a more stable place than it was in before. But incidents like this battle for private contracts, the attempt to "adopt" children who do not need adoption (many Haitian children are trafficked into servitude, and what is the likelihood that this was an exception, especially when one of the women charged has a history of not paying employees?), and Haiti's fading spot in the news despite continued need, do not lead one to think that anything fundamental has changed.
Mark Danner, a journalist who has specialized in studying Haiti, wrote in a New York Times op-ed about the need, in healing Haiti, to take history into account:
The other evening I watched a television correspondent shake his head over what he movingly described as a "stupid death" -- a death that, but for the right medical care, could have been prevented. "It doesn't have to happen," he told viewers. "People died today who did not need to die." He did not say what any Haitian could have told him: that the day before, and the day before that, Haiti had seen hundreds of such "stupid deaths," and, over the centuries, thousands more.
So true. Not to say there is not great work going on in Haiti: groups like Partners In Health and microfinance group Fonkoze have been there for years, are in it for the long haul, and know what gaps need filling. But dumping toxic waste and maximizing business deals in a country in which companies have no previous interest are not going to bring the change Haiti so badly needs.
P.S.
In case the Khian Sea has faded from memory, the rest of that story is that it tried to leave the rest of its toxic cargo in Senegal, Morocco, Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka and Singapore. The name of the ship was changed on the chance that would improve its luck, but both such attempts, Felicia and Pelicano, failed to conceal its identity, and years after the remaining ash simply disappeared en route from Singapore to Sri Lanka in 1988, the ship's captain admitted that they simply dumped the waste into the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
