As Haiti suffers, the world dozes

Saturday, November 6, 2010; 6:50 PM

LEVELED BY AN EARTHQUAKE, staggered by a cholera outbreak and, now, lashed by a hurricane, Haiti remains a country in dire need of critical care and sustained aid. Instead, it has been shoved once again onto the backburner of international neglect and left to its own misery.

Rebuilding Haiti after the cataclysm of last January's earthquake was never going to be easy or quick. The Haitian government, already feeble, was decimated; 28 of the 29 ministry buildings in Port-au-Prince were destroyed. At least a third of the nation's civil servants, and an even higher percentage of senior officials, died in their offices when the afternoon quake struck. The finance minister reported for work the next day despite the fact that his school-aged son had been killed. the rest

The heart of the problem, in Washington and in other donor countires, is that rebuilding Haiti has been treated as a routine development task, akin to improving an irrigation system or extending rural electrification. This makes no sense given the extent of ruination, the scale of needed reconstruction and the ongoing humanitarian suffering in Haiti.