Last Straw

U.S. Defence Sec­ret­ary Robert Gates on the 15^th Jan:

It seems to me that without hav­ing any struc­ture on the ground in terms of dis­tri­bu­tion, that an air­drop is simply going to lead to riots as people try and go after that stuff  … It seems to me that’s a for­mula for con­trib­ut­ing to chaos rather than pre­vent­ing it.

People are dying of star­va­tion and dis­ease but they’re not allowed any sup­plies because the head of the armed ser­vices of Amer­ica, now the con­trol­ler of Haitian air­space, thinks they can’t be trusted.

This is what hap­pens when you leave author­it­ari­ans in con­trol of a human­it­arian mission.

The lack of air­drops in these crit­ical few days has also helped to cre­ate a self-fulfilling proph­ecy of dis­order, to be “fixed” by out­siders. They’ve already mil­it­ar­ised this relief effort and based on their his­tory in Haiti I don’t think the the Amer­ic­ans can be trus­ted one bit. Unfor­tu­nately Haitians don’t have much choice at the moment.

Lim­ited air­drops finally began yes­ter­day but it will be too little too late for many.