The sluggish international response to the
earthquake that leveled Haiti's capital and wiped out so many of the United
Nations staff holds serious political risks for the U.N. and its secretary-general,
Ban Ki-moon, who has struggled to
restore order to a chaotic relief effort.
Nearly a week after the 7.0 earthquake smashed Port-au-Prince, large numbers of
Haitians are struggling to find food and water or fleeing to the countryside.
As Ban traveled through the Haitian capital Sunday with a 17-vehicle envoy
filled with top U.N. brass and journalists, destitute Haitians pleaded for
food.
The crisis in Haiti is shaping up as the biggest test of Ban's leadership since
he was selected to lead the organization three years ago. As other major
natural disasters have shown, including Hurricane Katrina, failure to step up
to the moment can have steep political costs.
Immediately following the quake, Ban himself
appeared slow to recognize the extent of the devastation. Nearly 14 hours after
the earthquake, the secretary-general faced the U.N. press corps for the first
time, and estimated that the death toll "may well be in the
hundreds" -- not the tens of thousands predicted by one of his own
officials.
The upbeat assessment reflected the tendency of a cautious U.N. leader who has
a habit of downplaying the severity of crises. Over the past 24 hours, Ban's
top advisors have portrayed the situation as calm even as reports of disorder
have dominated media accounts.
The U.N. effort has been hobbled from the outset. The quake severed the U.N.'s
communications, clogged the roads with broken concrete and debris, and severely
damaged the city's main port. Much of the leadership of the U.N. mission in
Haiti was killed or buried under rubble. The U.N.'s top relief coordinator
survived the earthquake, but his wife and children were killed.
Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador
to the United States, praised the U.N.'s immediate handling of the crisis,
saying, "Ban Ki-moon and the entire U.N. leadership team have done
extraordinary work under extremely difficult circumstances. Grieving and
wounded colleagues and officials have risen in this hour of need to provide
assistance to the people of Haiti."
U.S. and U.N. officials say that the surviving U.N. mission in Haiti has performed
heroically in Haiti, and that they are swiftly rebuilding a broken relief
operation that will dramatically increase aid deliveries. A force of some 3,000
peacekeepers has helped maintain law and order.
But some U.N. staffers have been less charitable, saying Ban has strained
during town-hall meetings to comfort staff traumatized by the event. Others
have faulted his decision to take a large entourage with him on his trip to
Haiti, saying it diverted security and attention from the international
response effort, although they appreciated his decision to fly back to the
United States with the bodies of the mission's special representative Hedi Annabi and his deputy Luiz Carlos da Costa, both of whom died
in the earthquake.
Families of the victims of the crisis have expressed frustration as what they
see as the U.N's slow effort to provide psychological support to survivors of
the crisis. Emily-Sanson Rejouis, a
New Zealand relief worker with the U.N. who lost
her husband and two daughters in the earthquake, was assigned a U.N.
contact person only on Sunday -- nearly four days after the quake, according to
her sister Rachel. A U.N. official said that Emily had not made it on to a list
of survivors requiring immediate trauma care.
Inside Haiti, the criticism has also begun. CNN reported
that a team of U.N. doctors abandoned injured Haitians at a makeshift hospital,
leaving CNN's reporter/surgeon, Sanjay
Gupta, alone to tend to the patients. (Update: See editor's note below.) Philippine peacekeepers drove past
armed looters without intervening. A top U.N. official in New York said that
the U.N. leadership in Haiti was concerned that opening fire on a group of
starving looters picking through a destroyed supermarket building would harm
its image. They instructed the peacekeepers to stand back.
Some believe that Ban and his top advisors run the risk of building up expectations
that the U.N.'s relief effort will be unable to meet. Robert Turner, a former U.N. relief official who is scheduled to
travel to Haiti for the International Rescue Committee, said the prospects for a
quick turnaround in the humanitarian situation are slim. He said that the U.N.,
which has strained to highlight the positive, needs to do a better job of
managing expectations -- or it risks being blamed as the mood worsens in Haiti
and the world looks to pin responsibility.
"Security is going to get worse," he said. "We tend
to try to be positive, which is a natural human instinct. My personal view is
we would be better off being realistic, and exceeding expectations. But I think
it's probably too late for that."
UPDATE: CNN's claim that U.N. doctors abandoned Sanja Gupta is incorrect. They were Belgian doctors.
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