Squalor in Delhi: what were they expecting?

Published in Sunday Herald on 26 Sep 2010

I have long suspected that athletes are obsessed with their personal sporting best, to the exclusion of much else, but in the last few days their self-absorption and lack of awareness has hit me with all the force of a javelin.

What a bunch. There they were – “Team this” and “Team that” – off to compete in Delhi, blazers crisply pressed, metal buttons gleaming, relishing the chance to go for gold and hang out in a five-star pad in the athletes’ village. Lots of Egyptian cotton towels, body lotion by Chanel and so on. When the word leaked out (literally) about the dirty, “unlivable” standard of their accommodation, the prima donnas among them had a strop, like tourists berating their Thomas Cook representative on Holidays From Hell.

“Not up to western standards”? What did they expect? I’ll hazard a guess that few of them know or care that most Indians live day in, day out, in conditions that are a million times worse. Some 42% of India’s population exists below the poverty line. The country is home to half the world’s poor. The Multidimensional Poverty Index, which takes into account trivial non-sporting concerns such as health, education and whether or not people have access to clean water and electricity, calculates that more people live in poverty in eight Indian states than in 26 of sub-Saharan Africa’s poorest countries. There’s nothing that precious international athletes can teach these people about dirt and squalor, or the desirability of a clean lavatory.

What was meant to happen, of course, was that foreign athletes would be jetted in to the Delhi games and kept in a little bubble. The games would persuade the world that India is Asia’s emerging superpower and showcase a new-look India with that abject poverty airbrushed away. The athletes’ presence would give global legitimacy to this sham.

Now, the Delhi fiasco exposes the lie that high-profile sporting dividends reap rewards for the native population. It gives a flavour of the behind-the-scenes squalor and injustice that underwrite such vainglorious sporting follies. If the accommodation standards in the athletes’ quarters are “shocking”, you can guess what the living and working conditions of the construction workers are like. Some of them are children, notably the lot urgently drafted in over last few days to clean overflowing drains and take away rubble so that VIP visitors are discomfited. Don’t ask what risks they are taking to shore up this PR exercise. I’ll wager that their “health and safety concerns”, as Health Minister Shona Robison put it, are a tad more serious than those being faced by Team Scotland, or any other participants. By August, Delhi games officials admitted that 42 workers had already died. Human rights groups say that figure is nearer 70. Sitting on a clean toilet may be the least of their worries.

The athletes’ trepidation grabs the headlines, but we hear little about the city’s grindingly poor residents whose homes and allotments were summarily bulldozed to make way for concrete tower blocks that would accommodate athletes for a few days, then be sold off to wealthy private buyers. Mind you all the stagnant, dirty water sloshing around at the games village might put off prospective buyers. It isn’t just down to a spot of bad weather. As part of its misguided attempt to host this ruinously extravagant sporting vanity project, the Indian government ignored studies warning that no permanent structures should be built in the area to protect the flood plain of the ecologically sensitive Yamuna river, already badly weakened by construction and pollution. Guess what? The games village is flooding and the area is plagued with Dengue fever, an acute viral disease transmitted by mosquitoes that can prove fatal. Why do we find this surprising?

It is tragic to watch countries where most people are dismally poor blowing ruinous amounts of money, egged on by sporting mafias like the Commonwealth Games Federation and the International Olympic Committee. Look at the bill for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing: some $33 billion spent constructing white elephant stadiums and 1.5 million human beings evicted to accommodate them. In rich countries like our own, politicians are courted by self-serving ambassadors of the sporting elite such as Lord Coe. They commit us to vast expenditures that would be much better spent on almost anything else. An example: the media centre alone at the forthcoming Olympics in Stratford is to cost £308 million of public money and will be demolished after two weeks. As for “lasting legacies”, consider Edinburgh’s Commonwealth Pool. It is badly built, far too big, ridiculously expensive to maintain and arguably, the worst pool in the city.

I suppose it’s too late to get out of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. If they really do regenerate the east end then I’ll be amazed. More likely, it will be the now customary one-off bonanza for construction companies while our public services, ravaged by cuts, rot. Going for gold? Going for broke, more like.

Haiti still suffering from a history of foreign ‘help’

Published in the Sunday Herald on 17 Jan 2010

Coverage of the Haitian earthquake dominates our news, so look away now if you are troubled by a ghoulish parade of dusty, bloody bodies dragged from heaps of rubble.

And don’t be too hard on yourself if you switch off because you feel you have heard it all before. You have. The highly selective narrative that accompanies any discussion of this Caribbean state never changes.

No-one, apart from US TV evangelist Pat Robertson, has blamed Haiti for having an earthquake (God’s vengeance and all that), but if Haiti was a mess before – which most commentators agree it was – the blame is laid squarely on Haitians.

Haiti, we are told, is a failed state run by a procession of voodoo dictators and gangsters while its superstitious, backward people live in abject squalor. Like Rwanda and the Congo, this Heart Of Darkness script reinforces the deep-rooted, racist view that poor black countries cannot manage to run their own affairs without foreign intervention. In this script, the current international humanitarian effort in Haiti is just the latest chapter in the international community’s ongoing civilizing mission there.

But natural disasters apart, Haiti’s current problems are more accurately seen as the legacy of centuries of slavery and the brutal plundering of its natural resources. This established a pattern of avaricious foreign involvement in the country that still smothers its development.

Haiti has already suffered from repeat doses of foreign “help”. During the Cold War, the US backed the notorious dictatorships of the Duvaliers as an anti-communist counterweight to Castro’s Cuba. Perhaps the crudest example of foreign interference was the Franco-US invasion of Haiti in 2004 when, with the unanimous blessing of the UN Security Council, these countries collaborated with Haiti’s ruling elite to back death squads that toppled the government, kidnapped and deported from office Haiti’s constitutionally elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

This priest, who had worked in the slums of Port-au-Prince, had been elected with 75% of the vote and enjoyed a massive popular mandate because he offered hope and inspiration to Haiti’s poor. Aristide tried to redistribute wealth from wealthy elites and oligarchs who were bleeding the country dry and doubled the pitifully inadequate minimum wage. He started on a programme of land reform, set up schools, established hundreds of literacy centres, tackled HIV infection – a legacy of the sex tourism industry – took steps to limit the exploitation of children and began reforestation (Haiti’s now near-total deforestation began centuries ago with slave ships loading up with wood to take home to Europe after dropping off their human cargo).

Aristide was too radical for the US and the “international community”. He challenged the power elites propped up by global companies which still exploit and amass profits from the Haitian economy. He looked too much like Castro in Cuba, or Chavez in Venezuela. He had to go.

Haiti’s now parlous state is also a product of the imposition of free-market trade policies and foreign debt by foreign countries. International “aid” to Haiti has always come with strings attached. In exchange for diplomatic recognition when it broke away from France, Haiti was forced to pay economic reparations to that country, incredibly, a debt which it was still paying until 1947. To service this debt, it had to take out vast loans from French, US and German banks. It has never got out of the bit since. Further foreign assistance has been predicated on Haiti opening up to unbridled free trade. When Aristide refused, the US imposed an economic embargo that undermined Haiti’s government and impoverished its citizens. No wonder 80% of its people now live in abject poverty.

Haiti has been flooded by US agricultural imports, destroying its agriculture and wrecking food security. With 75% unemployment, people have flocked to the slums of Port-au-Prince to work for pitifully low wages in sweatshops in US export processing zones that supply many of our high street brands. In the past, slavery in Haiti was about sugar, now it is about sweatshops.

The irony here is almost unbearable. Haiti occupies an iconic role in black history. Two centuries ago, against all odds, an extraordinary enslaved black man, Pierre Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, led a slave revolt there against French colonial rule, one that was to prove an inspiration to liberation movements in the Americas and Africa. He set up, in 1804, the first independent black republic outside Africa.

Make a donation to the international humanitarian effort in this unluckiest country, by all means, but be under no illusions. Haiti’s problems cannot be solved as long as it is run from outwith its borders by interests that seek to profit from it. A point that Toussaint L’Ouverture understood only too well.