ANALYSIS: US military deployment stirs tension in Haitian tragedy

By Veronica Sardon Jan 23, 2010, 3:40 GMT

Buenos Aires - The growing US military deployment in Haiti is provoking mixed feelings in the Caribbean country and beyond.

There is relief that someone might actively combat lawlessness on the streets of Port-au-Prince in the wake of last week's devastating earthquake. But there are serious concerns that the quake-related aid operation could become an open-ended military intervention.

Help is still desperately needed with an estimated 200,000 dead and 1 million homeless, but even aid is subject to political and ideological interpretation.

'We fully support military involvement in logistics and security, but it needs to be under the umbrella of the UN,' Penny Lawrence, aid and development charity OXFAM's director for Britain, told the German Press Agency dpa.

'The rhetoric on coordination is right, but in practice it is proving challenging.'

Benoit Leduc of Doctors Without Borders more bluntly said that his organization was concerned about the 'militarization of aid' and 'the extreme confusion of distributing food with a gun.'

On the ground, many Haitians are happy about the arrival of US Marines.

'The Americans are our only hope. I think they will deactivate the gangs,' said Wawa, a 38-year-old former gang member who commands respect in Port-au-Prince's dangerous shantytowns.

Yet even Haitians themselves are afraid that once American troops are in place their own needs might be relegated. By Thursday, there were rumours of a plan to oust refugees from Haiti's national stadium in Port-au-Prince to make space for US troops to land helicopters, for example.

Critics have denounced US forces in control of the city's airport for prioritizing military flights over civilian flights.

Commander Buck Elton, air operations chief for the US military in Haiti, insisted that the landing plan is evenly divided between demands. He told reporters that on Wednesday, for example, there were 43 international aid aircraft, 55 US civilian aid aircraft and 51 military aircraft.

Aid organizations around the world have politely criticized what analyst Seumas Milne defined as the US military's 'shockingly perverse priorities' in the British daily The Guardian.

Loris de Filippi, emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders' Choscal Hospital in the Cite Soleil neighbourhood of Port- au-Prince, complained about a Hait-bound aid plane being diverted to the Dominican Republic.

'We have had five patients in Martissant health centre die for lack of the medical supplies that this plane was carrying,' De Filippi said. 'We were forced to buy a saw in the market to continue amputations. We are running against time here.'

Elton said that a Doctors Without Borders plane on Sunday had a scheduled 3 pm landing but had to be diverted to the nearby Dominican, before returning to touch down at 8 pm in Port-au-Prince.

He emphasized that long delays at Port-au-Prince airport are often beyond control of US forces: waiting for evacuees to board planes and fuel shortages, among other factors, also caused some planes to be diverted.

Taiwanese media called US rescue teams 'bullies' for pushing a Taiwanese search group out of various sites including a UN building, even as the Asian team had located survivors and was working to get them out of the rubble.

Others have claimed that US forces gave preference to the evacuation of US citizens and that they generally favoured security 'rather than humanitarian aid,' as Paris-based Le Monde put it.

Traditional critics of US policy, such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, went further still.

'The United States government is using a humanitarian tragedy to militarily occupy Haiti,' Chavez complained. 'Cuba has more doctors in Haiti than the United States.'

Analysts around the globe were guessing at the intentions of US President Barack Obama in his deployment of US troops in Haiti.

Is Obama trying to clean up Washington's image after messy military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is he trying to underline the benefits of US involvement to give 'American interventionism' a good name?

'Obama has issued (at a speed that contrasts with the indolence of his predecessor in the case of Katrina in New Orleans) extraordinary assistance measures,' Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes said in a column in the Spanish daily El Pais.

The Austrian daily Die Presse highlighted the contrast of US aid efforts in Haiti with Washington's history of supporting dictatorships in Central American regimes.

'If President Obama now commits to stand by poor Haiti as a partner also after the Caribbean republic disappears from the headlines, he has learned a lesson from US history,' Die Presse wrote.

Le Monde stressed less altruistic aspects and noted that, for the United States, 'Haiti is a national security imperative as much as it is a humanitarian imperative.' Washington fears, the daily said, 'an exodus that could push hundreds of thousands of boat people to Florida, just 1,200 kilometres away.'

There may be no right answer for Washington's foreign critics. Obama made the point himself last year, following the coup in Honduras.

'Critics who say that the United States has not intervened enough in Honduras are the same people who say that we're always intervening and the Yankees need to get out of Latin America,' Obama complained in August. 'You can't have it both ways.'

Washington would have at least as much a target for criticism if the US military response in Haiti had been far more restrained.

Its own history of intervention in Haiti makes the US ripe for suspicion now, but specifically France, as the one-time master of the former African slave colony, and the rest of the developed world also bear responsibility for a disaster that has been severely exacerbated by a legacy poverty.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro wrote that 'Haiti is a net product of colonialism and imperialism.'

The challenge for the troubled country lies far beyond quake relief: even before its latest disaster, Haiti was the poorest country in the Americas, with more than 80 per cent of its people living in poverty.

(dpa correspondents Anna Tomforde, Siegfried Mortkowitz, Shabtai Gold, David Chang and Albert Otti contributed.)