Read Online Haiti After the Earthquake by Paul Farmer - Free Book Online Page A

most of them military peacekeepers. My chief interlocutor was the Secretary-General’s special representative, an oldschool diplomat named Hédi Annabi. We got along well despite different views on Haitian politics. A native of Tunisia, Mr. Annabi had been working in tough settings for decades. He was courtly and reserved, spoke several languages fluently (Creole not among them, as he once pointed out sharply when I began speaking to President Préval in the Haitian language), and followed protocol to the letter. When he invited me to address him by his first name, I did, but felt impertinent.
    Annabi’s second-in-command was a tall man named Luis da Costa, who was to my thinking very Brazilian: warm and witty and unreserved. By nature a peacemaker, he sought to patch over debates and discord, the coin of the realm everywhere the UN deploys stabilizing forces. The two of them were somehow complementary. Da Costa also represented influential Brazil, which had invested heavily in peacekeeping in Haiti. The Brazilian general who led the peacekeepers, especially when it came to development, was another ally in this work. “We should do more to help the poor,” he said to me the first time we met. “Too much time is wasted in meetings in Port-au-Prince and on protocol.”
    Early on, I told Annabi and da Costa that I’d been chosen for the job because of my knowledge of Haiti and of health care, food security, and education. I made it clear that I’d have little to contribute about peacekeeping, security, or Haitian party politices. (I had my doubts about the peacekeeping mission in Haiti, stemming from the events of 2004 and after.) It was a fraught topic and far afield from clinical medicine. The Special Envoy, Clinton, would be the leader and I, his deputy, would focus on what I knew best. On this first official trip, Annabi and da Costa listened carefully to my comments, trying to figure out where I fit into the complex UN structure. Sometimes I thought they were thinking, “Why on earth has an academic physician been chosen for a diplomatic role?” But no one ever said anything of the sort.
    I also had the impression that some fraction of the UN leadership,
which surely knew of my concerns about law-and-order approaches to security, was disappointed to hear my views. After all, security and local politics were the principal focus of UN peacekeeping missions. But others in the humanitarian-assistance machine seemed relieved when I emphasized human security. The food riots the previous year had led many UN officials to push for a shift in the focus on military peacekeeping toward development efforts, including providing basic services to the Haitian majority. Many Haitians noted the irony that this had long been the platform of the popular movement that arose in the mid-eighties. It was unclear, however, how widely the irony was appreciated within what was termed “the international community,” which included not only the UN but representatives of many nations, international organizations, and nongovernmental groups. The United States had far and away the largest presence in Haiti, with a new ambassador and new leadership for USAID, its lead development agency.
    This new, human-security-based approach had been long agreed upon but never really implemented. In espousing this approach—security will follow investments in basic social services and freedom from want—I was only trying to be honest. I’d long before concluded that jobs and such services, along with full political participation of the poor, were the best (and perhaps only) way to lessen violence and discord in the places we’d worked. But this was not an agenda I could push forward alone. The incoming UN development coordinator, Kim Bolduc, a Canadian born in Vietnam who had barely survived the destruction of UN headquarters in Iraq, shared this view. On a preliminary visit to Haiti, Bolduc had pushed