Prisoners on Their Own Island: An Interview With Ashley Smith on Haiti and the NGOs

[Joanne98]

by Mike Whitney

The United States and its allies, France and Canada, are on a neocolonial mission in Haiti, “and in many cases have made conditions in Haiti worse over the last year.” The 10,000 NGOs that infest the country “are part and parcel of imperial domination of third world countries.” Meanwhile, “only 15 percent of the promised transitional housing has been built” and “only 5 percent of the rubble has been removed.”



Prisoners on Their Own Island: An Interview With Ashley Smith on Haiti and the NGOs

by Mike Whitney

This article appeared earlier in Counterpunch.

“The U.S. aims to implement a neoliberal plan of to exploit Haiti's cheap labor in sweatshops, export-oriented plantations, and tourist resorts.”

MW--In your article in CounterPunch titled "Haiti and the Aid Racket", you said that "The catastrophe in Haiti has revealed the worst aspects of the U.S. government and the NGO aid industry". Can you explain what you mean?

Ashley Smith---After the earthquake, the imperial powers and international NGOs collected billions of dollars with the promise that they would provide relief for Haiti's quake victims and then rebuild the country. Today, even mainstream figures are profoundly critical of what the U.S. and the NGOs have done. For example, Ricardo Seitenfus, the special representative from the Organization of American States (OAS) to Haiti, told the Swiss daily Le Temps, "If there is failure of international aid, it is Haiti."

For that moment of honesty, the OAS fired Seitenfus. But he was right. Today, there are still over 810,000 people, essentially quake refugees, trapped in 1,150 tent camps in and around Port-au-Prince. Only 15 percent of the promised transitional housing has been built. Astonishingly only 5 percent of the rubble has been removed. And there has been next to no reconstruction

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/prisoners-their-own-island-interview-ashley-smith-haiti-and-ngos