Haiti commemorates the memory of the more than 200,000 victims of the earthquake that struck the capital and its surrounding areas on January 12, 2010, where bitterness over the failure of reconstruction and political instability dominates.
The thirty-five seconds of the magnitude 7 quake had transformed Port-au-Prince and the cities of Gressier, Léogane and Jacmel into fields of ruins, resulting in the death of more than 200,000 people, injuring 300,000 others .
Over one and a half million Haitians were left homeless, placing the authorities and the international humanitarian community before the colossal challenge of reconstruction in a country without land register or building rules.
A “lost” decade and untraceable billions
"It’s a lost decade, totally lost", asserts the Haitian economist Kesner Pharel. "The capital has not been rebuilt but bad governance does not depend exclusively on local authorities: internationally, we have not seen this aid management mechanism to allow the country to benefit from it", he emphasizes.
The impossible traceability of the billions of dollars in aid that international donors had promised to donate in the weeks following the disaster accentuates the bitterness of the survivors, remaining at the mercy of a disaster that does not prevent.
"Ten years later, we see a greater concentration in the metropolitan area. If we were to have the same earthquake, the same situation would happen again because there was no follow-up for most of the reconstructed houses ", laments Kesner Pharel. "The refoundation of the country has not taken place and we are back to square one".
Hundreds of thousands of homes, administrative buildings, schools collapsed during the earthquake which also destroyed 60% of the Haitian health system. Ten years later, the reconstruction of the country's main hospital is still not complete and the work of non-governmental organizations remains essential to make up for the shortcomings of the state.
"In the aftermath of the earthquake, we had a great response to all that was trauma since there were a lot of injured", recalls Sandra Lamarque, head of mission of Doctors Without Borders in Haiti. "Today what we see is that we have just reopened a trauma hospital. The injuries do not have the same origin: unfortunately more than 50% of the injuries we receive are gunshot trauma ", she notices.
A worsening political crisis
Without managing to meet the challenge of its reconstruction after the earthquake, Haiti has, in ten years, plunged into an acute socio-political crisis which clouded people's minds and hampered all work of mourning.
In the summer of 2018, the corruption scandals, involving the current president Jovenel Moïse as well as all the governments which have followed one another since the earthquake, provoked a citizen awakening. The majority of the young Haitian population lives without job prospects and faces the growing insecurity born from conflicts between armed gangs.
Protests against the ruling power have multiplied across the country's cities to the point of completely paralyzing activities between September and December 2019. The weakness of the Haitian state, spread on the international scene in the aftermath of the earthquake, has worsened over the decade.
The legislative elections which were planned for November not having been organized, the Haitian Parliament will lapse this Monday. Without a functioning legislative power, the head of state, hated by his opponents and a large part of civil society, will have the possibility of governing by decree.
