– watch the politics of new top US Congresswoman
FROM THE very beginning, when the monstrous earthquake disaster hit Haiti a year ago this past week, it would have been quite evident to all and sundry that there would be severe limitations on the practical assistance the Caribbean Community as a whole could offer for economic recovery and national reconstruction.
In the wake of the horrendous human suffering that has unfolded, CARICOM, nevertheless, did make concerted efforts to mobilise and dispatch humanitarian aid, including medical personnel and supplies, food, water and clothing. Much of the material assistance was organised and contributed by a combination of public and private sector agencies, non-governmental organisations and civic-minded citizens in general, with cooperation from the region’s media.  
When CARICOM identified the former Jamaican Prime Minister, P. J. Patterson — a recognised elder statesman of CARICOM — as its Special Representative for involvement with the international community on post-earthquake Haiti, the initiative was applauded.
It came with an awareness that despite its disadvantages of  financial and material resource limitations, the Community’s intellectual and diplomatic skills would be carefully employed to help honour a moral obligation for Haitians to get the most practical and timely responses from the international community to rise from the ruins of the earthquake devastation of January 12, 2010. 
Envoy Patterson and the Community Secretariat have been offering occasional reports and comments that revealed some of the disappointment and hurt shared with the government and people of Haiti over the shocking and disgraceful responses from the rich and powerful nations to Haiti’s dilemma.    
Nevertheless, it remains a pity to note an apparent timidity on the part of CARICOM governments, in general, to take advantage of the sense of outrage among the people of this region, and go on the offensive with an aggressive campaign to push the international donors to honour their firm pledges for Haiti’s national reconstruction and economic recovery. 
Neither our geographical size nor limitation of resources should be used to rationalise a failure to vigorously speak out against an evident betrayal by the donor nations to do what they promised Haiti.
Why the hesitancy to be militant, when our governments well know how the immense suffering of the mass of Haitians is being so rudely mocked by the words game of the rich and powerful  to excuse their failure to deliver on pledges solemnly made?

Enter US lawmaker
In this situation, while comparative band-aid responses are being made in the face of the nightmare of suffering of a viciously neglected poverty-stricken people, it is difficult to dismiss as irrelevant, claims of lingering racism and contempt for Haitians by those with the money and political power, and who think THEY hold the solutions to deal with the persistent poverty and crises in that Caribbean nation, long the victim of foreign interference and exploitation.
Now, as Haitians continue to lament the consequences of that earthquake disaster of horrific destruction to infrastructure, homes, offices, schools and hospitals, and resulting in further mass human degradation,  there came the recent outrageous position of a highly-placed American lawmaker on future funding for Haiti by the USA.
Newly-elected House of Representatives chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, well known for her strident rightwing notions about governance and political culture in countries in the Greater Caribbean, has lost no time in declaring that future US and international support for Haiti would “depend on concrete efforts to curb corruption…”
Conscious of the influence of the now Republican-controlled House of Representatives, she was quoted by BBC Caribbean as saying that “real recovery and development [in Haiti] depends on accountability and strong leadership by the Haitian government.” Further, that she plans to re-introduce legislation to “increase oversight of US funding” to that Caribbean nation.
Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen is evidently out of touch with the Haitian reality, in the wake of the horrors unleashed by the earthquake, and followed nine months later by a cholera epidemic. Then, for Haitians to painfully discover how disappointing the US and its international allies have proven to be in failing to deliver on pledges for economic recovery and national reconstruction.
It seems politically absurd and culturally slanderous for the Haitian people and what currently passes for a ‘government’ in Port-au-Prince, for the Congresswoman to wave the charge of  ‘corruption’, and warn of resorting to the weapon of ‘control’ by the Foreign Relations Committee to determine funding for Haiti’s national reconstruction.
Did she bother, for a start, to speak with former President Bill Clinton, who co-chairs the 26-member Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) of equal representation from the international donors and Haiti, but which forum is dominated by non-Haitian policymakers and management to the point of provoking complaints over ‘sovereignty’ from the Haitian cabinet?

Haitian sociologist
President Clinton would have told the Congresswoman of some of his own deep disappointments over the US’s failure to match DELIVERY of aid with PLEDGES made. By last yearend, an official assessment had pointed to a mere ten per cent delivery, at best, of the original US$9B identified as ‘recovery’ aid from the US and its allies.
The Haitian Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University and author of ‘The Prophet and Power–Jean Bertrand Aristide, the International Community and Haiti’, noted in a recent article in the ‘Washington Post’ that of the estimated US$267 million doled out so far in more than 1,500 contracts, only 20 of those, worth US$4.03 million, or $1.60 out of every $100 have gone to Haitian firms. The rest went to US firms, with 23 per cent awarded to two large American firms in “no-bid contracts…”
In the meantime, the BBC, as well as CNN and other leading US media, continues to report on the nightmare life that an estimated one million Haitian earthquake victims continue to face every day and every night. They exist in the most dehumanising living conditions in make-shift tents, where women and girls are routinely raped and unable to get protection from whatever the designated security arrangements. 
In more recent reports, Amnesty International and the UK-based charity, Oxfam have expressed deep concerns about the hellish survival conditions for more than 800,000 Haitians huddled in these tents that offer no proper security, and where criminality and sexual violence against women and girls have become a way of life.
Congresswoman Ros-Lehtinen should inform herself of the magnitude of human suffering in Haiti today, and the daunting challenges for survival and recovery being faced before she moves to introduce, as threatened, legislation to “increase oversight” of US funding for that crisis-plagued Caribbean nation.
For its part, CARICOM needs to rethink its strategy on helping Haiti. It should consider the usefulness of monitoring and exposing why the donor nations, including the USA, continue to do so very little for Haiti while claiming commitment for the rebuilding of a nation destroyed by a nightmare natural disaster, after being among the wretched of the earth for too many years to remember.