My friend Tracy Kidder makes an impor­tant point in today’s Times:

[W]hile earth­quakes are acts of nature, extreme vul­ner­a­bil­ity to earth­quakes is manmade.

For proof of this thesis you need look no fur­ther than the paper’s lead story on the dis­as­ter in Haiti, where you will find this paragraph:

Con­t­a­m­i­nated drink­ing water is a long­stand­ing prob­lem in Haiti, caus­ing high rates of ill­ness that put many people in the hos­pi­tal. Pro­vid­ing san­i­ta­tion and clean water is one of the top pri­or­i­ties for aid organizations.

Long-​time read­ers of DE might recall a report we flagged nearly two years ago that demon­strated how the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion blocked $54 mil­lion in Inter-​American Devel­op­ment Bank loans intended for clean-​water and san­i­ta­tion projects. The report, which was jointly authored by the Center for Human Rights and Global Jus­tice (CHRGJ), Part­ners In Health (PIH), the Robert F. Kennedy Memo­r­ial Center (RFK Center), and Zanmi Las­ante (PIH’s Hait­ian affil­i­ate), con­cluded that

the United States actively impeded the Hait­ian State’s abil­ity to ful­fill the Hait­ian people’s human right to water through its actions, thus breach­ing its duty to respect human rights. Such bla­tant frus­tra­tion of the object and pur­pose of the human rights treaties to which the United States is a sig­na­tory or a State party is a clear vio­la­tion of inter­na­tional law.

Anyway, I can’t second strongly enough Tracy’s endorse­ment of PIH as a des­ti­na­tion for your char­ity dol­lars. I know sev­eral of the people involved in the orga­ni­za­tion, and they are with­out ques­tion the most self­less and com­mit­ted people I’ve ever met. And they have the orga­ni­za­tional capac­ity to match: they have a long his­tory in Haiti, they run a major med­ical center on the cen­tral plateau, and they are work­ing to estab­lish field hos­pi­tals in and around Port-au-Prince. (Also, for what­ever it’s worth, they have lower over­head costs than Doc­tors with­out Bor­ders, the Amer­i­can Red Cross, and Mercy Corps.) Visit this page for con­tin­u­ing updates about their efforts. And donate here.

No, not her. Real news today: the AP reported yes­ter­day on the flood­ing that fol­lowed in the wake of Hur­ri­cane Gustav and Trop­i­cal Storm Hanna (click here to help):

GONAIVES, Haiti (AP) — Enter­ing a flooded city on inflat­able boats, U.N. peace­keep­ers found hun­dreds of hungry people stranded for two days on rooftops and upper floors Wednes­day as the fetid car­casses of drowned farm ani­mals bobbed in soupy floodwaters.

Haiti seems cursed this hur­ri­cane season, with its crops ruined and at least 126 people killed by three storms in less than three weeks. Even as Trop­i­cal Storm Hanna edged away to the north, fore­cast­ers warned that a fourth storm — Hur­ri­cane Ike — could hit the West­ern hemisphere’s poor­est coun­try as a major storm next week.

“If we keep going like this, the whole coun­try is going to crash,” moaned Mario Marcelus, who was trying to reach his family in Gonaives but didn’t dare cross the floodwaters.

And on a more depress­ing note, the Times also has an arti­cle today on a new report (PDF) that describes how the U.S. gov­ern­ment blocked the dis­burse­ment of loans intended to fund clean-​water and san­i­ta­tion projects in Haiti for polit­i­cal reasons.

The rev­e­la­tion of the role the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment played in keep­ing the loan money from reach­ing Haiti is the most dis­turb­ing part of the report–though given our his­tory in that coun­try it would be dif­fi­cult to describe the news as shock­ing–and I’ll get to it in a moment.

But the report’s real effort–and arguably its most impor­tant–is to con­strue this med­dling as a human rights vio­la­tion. Specif­i­cally, the report con­cludes that “it is clear that actions taken by the United States in block­ing IDB devel­op­ment loans ear­marked for water projects in Haiti were a direct vio­la­tion of the U.S. government’s human rights obligations.”

The key con­cep­tual hinge for this argu­ment, which seems fairly novel to me as a legal argu­ment (but what do I know?) is that

the human rights of indi­vid­u­als in many parts of the world—including the right to water—are directly affected by the actions that some States take at the inter­na­tional level through inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions, devel­op­ment pro­grams and, most impor­tantly for this report, IFIs [inter­na­tional finan­cial institutions]” (p. 50).

This opens the path to the report’s con­clu­sion that

the United States actively impeded the Hait­ian State’s abil­ity to ful­fill the Hait­ian people’s human right to water through its actions, thus breach­ing its duty to respect human rights. Such bla­tant frus­tra­tion of the object and pur­pose of the human rights treaties to which the United States is a sig­na­tory or a State party is a clear vio­la­tion of inter­na­tional law.

In any case, here are the para­graphs that describe the U.S. government’s inter­fer­ence with the Hait­ian loans, from pages 11 and 12 of the report, which was jointly authored by the Center for Human Rights and Global Jus­tice (CHRGJ), Part­ners In Health (PIH), the Robert F. Kennedy Memo­r­ial Center (RFK Center), and Zanmi Lasante: