What Haitians remember and hope, 15 years after the devastating 2010 earthquake
The remembrance of the 2010 catastrophic event that struck Haiti comes as the country faces major challenges, including gang-driven violence, extreme pockets of poverty, hunger and numerous health issues.
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| Bulldozer clears the rubble of a building that collapsed in the earthquake in Brefet, a neighbourhood of Les Cayes, Haiti, on August 17, 2021 - Reginald Louissaint, Getty Images |
"I remember the day the earthquake happened very very well. That year, I was 19 years old, I was in my final year of high school. I lived in a two-story house. I was working on a math assignment with my cousin, it was about 4:45 pm. when suddenly, the earth started shaking... I had no idea what was happening and I started running," Claudine St Fleur told RFI from Port-au-Prince, despite very poor connection and limited means of communication.
She will never forget this day who took the life of our aunt, who was her only caretaker. "She was everything to me", Claudine says, in a sobbing voice.
She and her cousin lived for weeks under a tent, and only found solace thanks to an uncle almost months later. An American friend of her aunt, who used to live in the same house as them, later helped her to pursue her studies.
Despite her resilience, Claudine is however unemployed now. "I lost my job because of the gangs and violence," she confesses.
Catastrophe
The earthquake with a magnitude of 7.0 took place on 12 January 2010, killing at least 200,000, and displacing 1.5 to 2 million people.
The catastrophe hit and within 30 seconds the city was turned upside down, families torn apart and tens of thousands put at risk of going hungry.
Fifteen year later, scars of the tragedy remain visible in Port-au-Prince, ... according to inhabitants of Port-au-Prince.
Antonal Mortimé at the time was executive secretary of the Platform of Haitian Human Rights Organisations (POHDH). He told Haitian media that the allocated funds by international actors were not actually invested in the reconstruction action plan after the earthquake.
Foreign countries and international groups had said they raised more than $9 billion for Haiti, pledging to rebuild the island and support its people.
"Everything would have been different if the allocated funds had actually been invested," Mortimé reported.
Like him, many Haitians blame the international community and even the United Nations, for their slow response, the focus on western staff in the emergency search, and later on for the cholera crisis, which broke out just a few months after the earthquake and claimed more victims.
It took the UN six years to half-heartedly acknowledge its responsibility for the epidemic.
Generation of 'chaos'
A generation of children is bearing the scars of Haiti’s earthquake, according to the NGO Save the Children, with their futures shaped by repeated displacements, ongoing crises, and persistent disruptions to their education over the past 15 years.
"While Haiti has made some strides in recovery, ongoing violence from armed groups has crippled progress, leaving children’s futures hanging in the balance", the NGO wrote in a statement.
Chantal Sylvie Imbeault, Save the Children’s country director in Haiti, said that “life has been a series of crises for many children in Haiti".
From hurricanes to earthquakes to the rampant violence we’re seeing today, many families we’ve spoken to have been displaced eight, nine, 10 times in the past 15 years, she added.
And "today, armed groups have turned Port-au-Prince into an open-air prison for children," she said, where nowhere in the city is safe. "They can’t safely go to school, play outside, or leave their neighbourhoods. These children’s futures are slipping away.”
One of those children, 17 today, told Save the Children that her education is on hold.
“My mom talks to me about the earthquake and how it affected us. I had bumps covering my skin because we were sleeping outside in poor conditions,” she said.
“I have lost two school years - one because of the earthquake, and another because of the violence. It is painful. I don’t know when I will return to school,” she added.
Multiple crises
The Haitian capital has since been witnessing a spike in violence, especially due to the rule of gangs over the past two years, despite the presence of a multinational security mission from 2024.
These armed gangs are accused of widespread murder, kidnapping and sexual violence.
The United Nations says gangs control around 80 percent of Port-au-Prince, and regularly attack civilians despite the deployment earlier this year of a multinational security mission led by Kenya.
President Jovenel Moise's 2021 assassination exacerbated instability, and consequences of many natural disasters, including the 2010 earthquake but also hurricanes and other quakes, have worsened the crisis.
Nearly half the population now lives in severe hunger and extreme poverty, according to the International Rescue Committee who put Haiti on its list of the top 10 crises the world can’t ignore in 2025.
But Haiti has suffered from political violence for decades, due to political instability, years of dictatorship followed by poor governance, US interventions and the consequences of the enormous debt inflicted by the former colonial ruler, France, since Haiti's independence in 1804.
France thus lost its then-richest colony, and Haitians have had to pay over 112 million francs to France - about $560 million - until 2022, according to research from The New York Times and to academic centres.
The cost of these 'Reparations for Freedom', as many call them, could now amount to about $560 million in today’s dollars.
In his book Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti (2024), Jake Johnston, researcher and writer at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC (CEPR), also showed how long-standing US and European capitalist goals ensnared and re-enslaved Haiti under the guise of helping it.
"To the global West, Haiti has always been a place where labor is cheap, politicians are compliant, and profits are to be made," he writes.
"Over the course of nearly 100 years, the US has sought to control Haiti and its people with occupying police, military, and euphemistically-called peacekeeping forces."
Earthquakes and hurricanes only further devastated a state already decimated by the aid industrial complex, he concludes.
African support
Beyond Kenya, which is already leading the UN mission, Benin is also willing to support Haiti, more than ever before.
On Wednesday this week, the Foreign ministers of the two countries discussed sending troops to Haiti, with Benin saying stability in the strife-torn nation was symbolic to "all black people" around the world.
"For all black people in the world Haiti is symbolic, it is the first black republic in the world," Benin's foreign minister, Olushegun Bakari, said, "and so if Haiti falls all we black people fall."
Benin is one of the countries in Africa where a large part of formerly enslaved people are supposed to have been deported from towards Haiti.
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Link to my piece for RFI:
Haiti's future remains 'hanging in the balance' 15 years after earthquake
Read also my other piece, from 2024:
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