Life and death in Haiti

The massive international rescue mission in Haiti struggled this week to distribute tons of food and other aid, as survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake grew more desperate. The death toll surpassed 150,000, but with corpses piling up in mass graves, death tallies were considered rough estimates. Charity groups are now feeding tens of thousands of people daily, but hundreds of thousands more are going hungry. People at one food drop stampeded aid workers and were beaten back by Brazilian soldiers using tear gas. The U.N. is now Haiti’s largest employer, putting thousands of Haitians to work clearing rubble for $5 a day, plus water. “It puts some food in our bellies,” said crew member Antoine Charles, “and we are doing something good for Haiti.”

Even three weeks later, “it is difficult to fathom the scale of devastation,” said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial. After other recent calamities, international aid groups have rebuilt infrastructure, as in Indonesia after the tsunami, or restored justice, as in Rwanda after the genocide. But Haiti needs everything: “infrastructure, an economic base, and a full-functioning government.”

There is one thing the U.S. could do right away to ease Haiti’s pain, said Michael A. Clemens in The Washington Post. We could “let more Haitians in,” if only temporarily. Current policy allows in only a trickle of Haitian immigrants. Most who try to come here in search of a better life are turned back at sea. Considering the circumstances, that’s no different than if, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we had forced people to stay in New Orleans. It makes us “collectively responsible for the continued suffering.”

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Bill Clinton is certainly doing his part, said Mary Anastasia O’Grady in The Wall Street Journal, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. As U.N. special envoy, Clinton has essentially set himself up as “Haiti czar,” and reports have already surfaced that he has been trying to steer reconstruction work to his old friends and associates. But “if Haiti is ever to develop, it will need less cronyism and more transparency.”