By Laurie Goering
LONDON (AlertNet) - Perhaps the most daunting task facing international players who have come to Haiti's rescue after a massive earthquake left thousands of people dead and trapped under rubble will be trying to rebuild a country weakened by two centuries of conflict, dictatorship and corrupt leadership.
Foreign powers, international aid agencies and world donors have all rallied to help the impoverished Caribbean island nation after a massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday that left countless people homeless.
Hospitals, government buildings and headquarters of some foreign aid missions, including a United Nations peacekeeping force, were all devastated in the quake. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the extent of the damage "biblical" and "a tragedy".
"The magnitude of this emergency, while we don't know the specifics, may very well approach the (2004) tsunami in southeast Asia," said Rick Perera, a spokesman for aid agency CARE who was flying to Port-au-Prince on Thursday. "The number
of dead is certainly in the many tens of thousands."
The earthquake, the worst to hit Haiti in over 200 years, struck as the country was still struggling to recover from a series of hurricanes and tropical storms in 2008 that killed about 800
people and caused nearly $900 million in damage.
The new disaster is expected to be far worse, aid workers say, not only because its epicentre was near Port-au-Prince, a hilly capital surrounded by slums, but because much of the government's limited capacity to respond to the crisis was
destroyed in the quake.
The literal collapse of Haiti's banks means getting remittance money -- a crucial source of national income -- into the country may prove difficult for weeks or months to come.
Government institutions in one of the world's most unstable nations have become even more precarious after the buildings that once housed them were flattened.
Now "the state is even more of an abstraction," said Eduardo Gamarra, an expert on Haiti and the Dominican Republic at Florida International University.
PERPETUAL UPHEAVAL
Haiti often seems in perpetual upheaval, having struggled for centuries with deep-seated corruption, a string of dictators and repeated foreign political and military intervention. U.N.
peacekeeping forces have been helping maintain order since the last revolt in 2004.
Two centuries after gaining its independence from France as the world's first black republic, it is one of the world's most unequal societies. Desperation, frustration and simmering anger
among the country's legions of poor, not least at the privileges of the very rich, regularly erupt into rioting, gang violence, kidnapping and political upheaval.
Haiti, in many respects, is less a failed state than a country that never fully managed to become a functioning nation, experts say.
"For it to be a failed state you have to assume Haiti had a state. But political instability over two centuries has meant the state has never had any capacity to implement basic public policy and care for its citizens," Gamarra said.
More than three-quarters of its people live on less than $2 a day. Around two-thirds are unemployed and the country scrapes by on a budget largely composed of foreign aid and remittances from Haitians abroad.
With few state-run schools, only three in five children attend classes, and even privately-run schools cram an average of 78 pupils into each classroom. Many rural areas have no schools at
all, according to a 2009 report by the
href="http://www.usip.org/countries-continents/north-america/haiti" target="new">United States Institute of Peace.
"The stateÂ?s lack of capacity to render public services has resulted in the virtual absence of the government as a positive presence in citizens' lives," Robert Magure, a Haiti expert at Trinity Washington University, wrote in the September report.
"CLOSE DOWN THE STATE"
Another worrying sign is Haiti's fast-growing population, which combined with a tradition of dividing already tiny plots of farmland among children, has left the country increasingly
unable to feed itself. Desperate for income, rural dwellers have cut down 98 percent of the country's once-verdant forests to produce charcoal, Haiti's main fuel.
The rampant deforestation has led to widespread soil erosion, worsening the plight of farmers, leaving millions in the hilly nation vulnerable to landslides and flooding, and forcing a
growing flood of rural Haitians into fetid slums outside the country's main cities.
Gamarra believes believes the only effective solution to Haiti's long-term problems may be to put the country into international hands, at least for a time.
"There's only one thing you can do. You close down the state and put it into international receivership," he said.
Wooing foreign investment into the country to better its economic prospects has been a top priority of former U.S. President Bill Clinton in his current role as U.N. special envoy for Haiti.
But is it enough?
Magure, of the U.S. Institute for Peace, says moving Haiti away from its "unacceptable suffering and cycle of conflict" will be
difficult even with financial assistance.
"As prior experience in Haiti instructs, the international commitment of human, material and financial resources alone does not hold the key to success, even when coupled with development
strategies and plans," he wrote in the report.
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