Here’s the good news: this commentary won’t be accompanied by photos of a crying black baby or a maimed granny.
I’m sure those few who have watched TV programs other than Entertainment Tonight or TMZ will have noticed that an earthquake hit Haiti a week or so ago, killing scores of people and destroying much of what was left of the country’s dilapidated infrastructure.
I don’t know whether you cried while helplessly watching the tragedy unfold. I did.
But the mayhem that ensued outside Haiti sickened me in equal proportion.
There, we had aid agencies vying desperately for our hard-earned cash.
They were all leading or spearheading the efforts in Haiti but there clearly wasn’t much leadership to be seen for about a week.
It seems their TV commercials were faster produced than the actual humanitarian response.
What’s news? The aid industry is immensely lucrative. The monies donated in the aftermath of the tsunami in Southeast Asia still haven’t all been spent.
Do-gooders are still living off the interest generated on our donations—well, mea culpa, I did actually donate at the time.
Worse still, many donations will go to ideologically motivated do-gooders. Religious organizations trying their best to convert Haitians to their particular ideology rightly see a unique growth opportunity.
Before you ask, they will donate rice and build a well.
Their multi-coloured brochures will show you that much, just in case you had any doubts. There will also be images of black babies randomly splashed across their fundraising literature.
The cash people will send—to a significant extent—will be utilized to grow their infrastructure and ideological power-base in Haiti, including, for instance, the building of schools aimed indoctrinating Haitian children in their particular religious beliefs.
You can see how successful they’ve been when you watch Haitian folks on television—who have lost everything—thanking their creator for being alive, instead of blaming their creator for inflicting that much pointless suffering.
So, here’s my first message to you: don’t donate to aid organizations that also have an ideological agenda beyond providing aid, unless you also happen to believe that abusing the desperation of the Haitian people in this manner is fair game.
Be more discerning with regard to who gets your hardearned money.
From what I gather from the news today, the large sums of money for international effort aimed at rescuing people from the rubble translated into 150 or so people rescued.
Good for those who were rescued. However, it’s worth pointing out the same amounts of money could have preserved many more lives—even in Haiti—had it been used differently.
Before you donate, ask yourself whether, in catastrophic circumstances and in terms of lives preserved, your particular donation, no matter how large or small it is, is likely to make the largest possible impact.
Not every aid program is as good as any other. For example, a U.S. based aid organization’s request that we donate for solar-powered audio bibles seems frivolous.
The same do-gooders cashing in on Haiti have withdrawn any assistance from Somalia—a desperate and hugely violent country with about the same population size.
Darfur slipped off the radar, and the list goes on and on.
It’s a shame Anderson Cooper couldn’t make it there. I wonder if we need a natural disaster a year to spur us into humanitarian action.
What does this tells us about our common humanity? Nothing too confidence-inspiring. Last but not least, don’t lose sight of the bigger picture here.
The same earthquake in Japan wouldn’t have led to tens of thousands of deaths.
The reasons for the large number of deaths are directly linked to the poverty in that country.
Building standards have been low to non-existent. The last hurricane that destroyed large parts of Haiti led to negligible international aid efforts.
Nobody cared.
But a simple case for reparations can be made in favour of Haiti.
Countries like France, its former colonial masters, as well as the U.S. have interfered with the country’s governance throughout its history.
Just look at the evidence of external interference with the Haitian self-governance.
Surely this wretched nation is owed compensation for the damage the colonial powers’ policies have caused—compensation that’s morally owed as opposed to Bono type do-gooding.
It will be interesting to see whether those countries largely responsible for the plight of the Haitian people will step up to the plate and do what needs to be done in order to repair the damage their policies have caused.
Perhaps “aid” will be all that’s left, organized by window-dressing organizations such as the UN—and its fleet of Toyota land-cruisers—and, of course, the international do-good industry.
Udo Schüklenk is a Queen’s philosophy professor, a recently appointed Ontario Research Chair in Public Policy for Bioethics and the joint Editor-in-Chief of Bioethics & Developing World Bioethics.
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