300,000 Dead Haitians Later, Billions Have Been Pledged But Little Spent In Haiti Recovery Effort

Young Haitian Girls, Trying To Maintain Normalcy
(photo by Leslie Alessandro)

Three months after donors at a U.S.-sponsored conference pledged more than $5.3 billion to rebuild Haiti, just a small fraction of the money has been disbursed and a special reconstruction commission has barely started to function, according to U.N. and aid officials.

U.S. lawmakers and international aid officials have expressed mounting concern about the slow recovery in the hemisphere's poorest country, where about 230,000 people died (Associated Press puts the number at around 300,000) and about 2 million were displaced in January's earthquake.

Despite ambitious plans to "build back better," as U.N. and American officials have promised, the reconstruction has been hobbled by a lack of coordination and cash and a virtually incapacitated Haitian government, officials and experts say.

The United States has not yet disbursed a penny of the roughly $900 million it pledged for reconstruction this year, according to the U.N. Web site www.haitispecialenvoy.org. Although the U.S. government has spent hundreds of millions on short-term emergency aid, the rest of the funds are in a supplemental budget bill that has been held up in Congress by an unrelated dispute over state aid.

"There are worrisome signs that the rebuilding process in Haiti has stalled," said a recent report issued by Sen. John F. Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Indeed, about 180 million square feet of rubble is still piled where it sat after the Jan. 12 quake, according to U.N. estimates; only 5,000 of the 125,000 temporary shelters promised by the international community have been built.

To be sure, there have been some successes: the provision of thousands of tents, as well as clean water, food and medical care for more than 1 million people. There have been no widespread outbreaks of disease.

U.S. officials point out that even a successful reconstruction after a disaster can take years. They noted that it took about eight months to set up an international reconstruction commission in the Indonesian region of Aceh after the 2004 tsunami. But Indonesia's government had far more money and expertise, and its capital wasn't destroyed, experts say.

"The Haitian government is not really capable of providing the kind of leadership that is required here, unlike the Indonesian government," said Robert Perito, a Haiti specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Already weak before the quake, the Haitian government lost 30 percent of its public employees in the disaster, as well as many of its buildings and sources of tax revenue, officials say.

The March 31 donors' conference at the United Nations was supposed to launch Haiti on the path to recovery. Its president, Rene Preval, unveiled an ambitious plan to rebuild infrastructure and decentralize jobs and homes away from the overcrowded capital.

A centerpiece of the plan was to be the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, which would coordinate donor aid with the Haitian government's plans and monitor for fraud. U.S. officials saw the commission, which was to be co-chaired by former President Bill Clinton and Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and staffed with technical experts, as a sort of stand-in for the shattered government.

But Preval was slow to warm to the commission, U.S. officials say, and it took weeks to get Haitian government approval and assemble a staff. The commission's board has held only one meeting, on June 17, at which it approved $31 million in projects.

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