Tens of thousands were feared dead this week after a powerful earthquake struck the desperately poor island nation of Haiti, crushing thousands of structures, from shacks and hospitals to the National Palace and the U.N. peacekeeping headquarters. Entire shantytowns were destroyed by the magnitude 7.0 quake, the strongest to hit the area in at least two centuries. Witnesses described seeing buildings crumble in Port-au-Prince, where people covered in dust and blood were clawing out of debris, wailing. Corpses were being piled up in the streets, with expressions of shock frozen on their faces. The toll is “unimaginable,” said Haiti’s president, René Préval. “It is a catastrophe.”
The Roman Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince was among the dead, and the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was missing. The International Red Cross said a third of Haiti’s 9 million people were in desperate need of emergency aid, and U.S. and international agencies scrambled to provide relief. “The hospitals cannot handle all these victims,” said Dr. Louis-Gerard Gilles. “Haiti needs to pray. We all need to pray together.”
This devastating quake “is just the latest blow for a country that can ill afford any more disasters,” said Haiti native Joel Dreyfuss in TheRoot.com. In the past two decades, the poorest nation in the hemisphere has suffered “a series of coups, flawed elections, high crime, and inept government.” That legacy compounds the human toll when natural disaster strikes, since the country lacks such basics as building codes and an emergency rescue system. For those of us who are proud of this former French colony’s “stirring history” and rich culture, “each setback is a blow to the gut.”
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Despite all its seemingly intractable woes, said Mark Leon Goldberg in TheDailyBeast.com, Haiti had actually been making progress of late and was “poised to turn a corner.” U.N. peacekeepers had been overseeing the country’s “transition to democracy,” and lawlessness had been curtailed. Former President Bill Clinton has been a tireless champion of Haiti, and we can fully expect a significant U.S. response. Still, “Haiti just can’t catch a break. Just as the trend lines shift in the right direction, calamity strikes.”
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