It is now a week since the catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti. Yet despite massive international aid efforts, precious little food and water, let alone medical help, has got through to the millions of survivors. What on earth has gone wrong?
The single airport runway in the capital, Port-au-Prince, has been swamped by flights bringing help and assistance from around the world. With the control tower badly damaged in the first 48 hours after the quake, it was clearly a challenge to land and turn aircraft around. The first priority were flights carrying specialist search and rescue teams who appear to have been deployed with relative speed. Thereafter, even though the United States took control of the airport, the arrival of much-needed medical teams, to say nothing of food and clean water, has been shamefully delayed.
It did not help that two precious landing and take off slots had to be given to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Indeed, Clinton’s flight took priority over a plane carrying a French mobile field hospital. Although well-intentioned, neither high profile visit was at all necessary and both were serious errors of judgment.
It seems that everyone involved in this huge humanitarian effort is working from the very highest of motives. But the sheer muddle and logistical snarl-up raises yet again a key question, which this newspaper has sadly had to ask too many times in the past. Why is it that every time some region of the world faces a natural disaster, the global response is so uncoordinated and piecemeal? It took days to mobilize the rescue and aid effort following the 2004 Asian tsunami. A year later, the same thing happened after the Pakistani earthquake. The wretched truth is that time and again, when disaster strikes, the world community must reinvent the wheel when it comes to organizing its response. It is high time this amateurish muddling was stopped and genuine planning took its place.
The answer is to establish an international force, trained and equipped to move immediately to confront emergencies wherever they may occur. Obviously this needs to come under the control of the UN. It needs to have contingency plans, ready and waiting, so that every potential disaster can overcome just the sort of logjam we are seeing in Haiti. Had it existed today it would have moved immediately to Port-au-Prince and both sent out its own rescue teams and doctors and supplies of food and shelter, while coordinating the assembly of further help at a satellite airport away from the disaster. Had this been the case, international aid could have arrived and been distributed in an orderly manner.
Given the authority, mobility and equipment, this UN disaster relief force could be working within hours of a catastrophe. The international community is well-acquainted with international peacekeeping. For a fraction of that cost, it could establish international lifesaving. It is time the world had the vision to act.
