We will share here articles with excerpts that continue to define the Haitian situation, and welcome you to include your favorite articles in the comments below.

A Carribean academic from the University of West Indies writes one of the most concise reflections on Haiti: The Hate and the Quake: Rebuilding Haiti . He explains why:

I am very keen to provide an input into this exercise because for too long there has been a popular perception that somehow the Haitian nation-building project, launched on January 1, 1804, has failed on account of mismanagement, ineptitude, corruption.

Buried beneath the rubble of imperial propaganda, out of both Western Europe and the United States, is the evidence which shows that Haiti’s independence was defeated by an aggressive North-Atlantic alliance that could not imagine their world inhabited by a free regime of Africans as representatives of the newly emerging democracy.

The evidence is striking, especially in the context of France.

And the evidence is damning: an emacipated people whose punishment for being free was a trade blockade, but first they had to fight off warring colonial masters. Once again, they triumphed:

The people won a ten-year war, the bloodiest in modern history, and declared their independence. Every other country in the Americas was based on slavery.

Haiti was freedom, and proceeded to place in its 1805 Independence Constitution that any person of African descent who arrived on its shores would be declared free, and a citizen of the republic.

The French refused to recognize Haiti’s independence and declared it an illegal pariah state. The Americans, whom the Haitians looked to in solidarity as their mentor in independence, refused to recognize them, and offered solidarity instead to the French. The British, who were negotiating with the French to obtain the ownership title to Haiti, also moved in solidarity, as did every other nation-state the Western world.

Haiti was isolated at birth – ostracized and denied access to world trade, finance, and institutional development. It was the most vicious example of national strangulation recorded in modern history.

For its survival, Haiti signed a pact with the devil, and not the kind that Pat Robertson would make you believe.

Officials [French] arrived and told the Haitian government that they were willing to recognize the country as a sovereign nation but it would have to pay compensation and reparation in exchange. The Haitians, with backs to the wall, agreed to pay the French.

The French government sent a team of accountants and actuaries into Haiti in order to place a value on all lands, all physical assets, the 500,000 citizens whovwere formerly enslaved, animals, and all other commercial properties and services.

The sums amounted to 150 million gold francs. Haiti was told to pay this reparation to France in return for national recognition.

Crooked Timber also has an astute analysis on Haiti's history: Voodoo theology, the Haitian uprising, and economic disparities. CT recommends reading C.L.R. James ' The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), a book that was banned in apartheid South Africa.

After the earthquake, millions  of people around the world have donated time and money to Haiti. Amanda Furness reports that those in the  slums of Cite Soleil continue to be ignored. There are relief workers among them, but,

For me and the thousands of Cite Soleil residents that he serves on a daily basis that would be an enormous loss, but to the rest of the world, men like Robinson simply don’t exist. They are suspiciously absent from the media because their realities lie far from those of the “mainstream.” To see them would require reporters to dig deeply into history and various political agendas but most of all to immerse themselves in places that they are usually unwilling or afraid to go to. Places like Cite Soleil.

Because of the media’s limited perspective, Haiti’s story and the stories of its good, honorable, hygienic and hardworking masses—even in Cite Soleil—never get told on the evening news. I’ve seen this happen again and again as a journalist and human rights advocate. Robinson, who works as a community activist, medical assistant, interpreter and big brother to orphans in one of the poorest places on earth, is not the image of Haiti or even of black men that you will see during the coverage of this disaster—or of any other in the places where poor and black people live. Robinson is not your typical gangster, rapper or athlete. He has no claim to fame, like Wyclef Jean. He is simply one of millions of black men, black people, who have lived and rallied against a torturous existence because of the consequences of slavery and colonialism on their lives and lands. Rather than providing their viewers with an examination of how Haiti came to be what it currently is—a nation of the descendants of slaves who carry with them the generational consequences of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome and all of the political, economic and social insanity that goes along with that—the Western media remains content to share with its viewers only that Haiti is poor, illiterate and incapable of governing itself. Talk about blaming the victim.

You have probably read about a violent, corrupt and voodoo cult peoples. Not so, says Furness:

This is not true. Haiti is a paradise, in parts. Its people have highly developed morals and principles. Even the poorest peasant farmer has a strong understanding of politics and of what democracy should look like. But nearly every Haitian suffers in some way from the colonial legacy in Haiti, which has bred dependency, colorism, rabid individualism and profound poverty.

Humanitarian aid workers, some of them, it seems crave media attention at the expense of Haitians. The Lancet  criticizes relief agencies for doing little else but compete  for resources. Kenya, knows only too well about aid agencies that have flooded the country, but have little to show for their presence. In her  Sunday column, Rasna Warah writes in her latest column about corruption in the UN. Big surprise. From the Lancet:

Politicians and the media make easy targets for criticism. But there is another group involved in disaster relief, which has largely escaped public scrutiny—the aid sector, now undoubtedly an industry in its own right. Aid agencies and humanitarian organisations do exceptional work in difficult circumstances. But some large charities could make their good work even better. The Lancet has been observing aid agencies and NGOs for several years and has also spoken with staff members working for major charities. Several themes have emerged from these conversations. Large aid agencies and humanitarian organisations are often highly competitive with each other. Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavoury characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts. Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile. Perhaps worst of all, relief efforts in the field are sometimes competitive with little collaboration between agencies, including smaller, grass-roots charities that may have have better networks in affected counties and so are well placed to immediately implement emergency relief.

A former Oxfam director, Frank Judd, says, "we were too slow in Haiti, and we need to know why".  And if like me you are disturbed by the loss of dignity when camer crews show dying women and children; injured men and teenagers in torn clothes almost baring their nakedness, then you will understand Judd's sentiments:

What is the dividing line between informing or challenging and morbid entertainment preceded by the titillating X certificates read by the news presenters back home. Should the painful reality of a dying child be filmed for us all to watch? On balance it probably should, but the context must always be that of underlining our responsibility.

Dan Smith, on openDemocracy [#haiti], discusses the world's preparation for the next natural disaster. And on these pages, Patrick Gathara has written on the urgency of East Africa to prepare itself against massive earthquake casualties.

A Psychology Today author wonders if these images are racially motivated. Are they?

Looking back on the footage of the Minneapolis bridge collapse which occured on August 1st, 2007, I see mourning on-lookers, wide shots of destruction, living victims being gingerly placed in ambulances and somber photos of closed caskets. I do not see any grim pictures of the people that perished that day. There were far fewer victims than in Haiti, but the number of dead is not in question, it's the kind of coverage of the death and destruction that is unbalanced. After 9/11 we were inundated with images of the burning buildings, and wide shots of devastation, but we never saw close-ups of the victims who had no choice but to jump, or who were trapped and killed and burned in the wreckage.

Al Jazeera on the media coverage, "One of the ironies of the moderan age is that news agencies could get live satellite images of Haiti before water could be delivered to people who needed them." While crediting the media for giving ample coverage to Haiti's disaster, Al Jazeera rehashes most of the content within this post: that historical context is missing from media reports on Haiti. Graphic images, as we have seen from Haiti, are a new phenomenon.  Watch the first six minutes of the video.

There's a lot more reading on Haiti on the web. Other interesting links: Global Voices compiles anecdotes of teenage Haitian bloggers. And Al Jazeera reports on the plight of expectant mothers. On Open Salon [#haiti ], Haitian poet and activist Ezili Danto writes on deforestation and poverty.

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January 29th Update
The Feminist Network has their own list of fascinating articles from a gendered lens. Most disturbing of these are reports that violence against women, like in most disaster-prone areas around the world, is on the increase. Linked at the very end is an article on the militarization of US help in Haiti. Has the Haitian earthquake killed this Caribbean country's women's movement ? Connie May Flower laments the deaths of Haitian feminists Myriam Merlet , Anne Marie Coriolan, and Magalie Marcelin leaving unfinished work:

[they] had just begun the work of reforming a judiciary that never took rape seriously and creating an infrastructure to protect girls and women against domestic violence and trafficking.

Ben Ehrenreich, at the Slate addresses a question that many of us are asking why is the US focusing on securing Haiti rather than help Haitians ? And guess who turned a blind eye?

The TV networks and major papers gamely played along. Forget hunger, dehydration, gangrene, septicemia—the real concern was "the security situation," the possibility of chaos, violence, looting. Never mind that the overwhelming majority of on-the-ground accounts from people who did not have to answer to editors described Haitians taking care of one another, digging through rubble with their bare hands, caring for injured loved ones—and strangers—in the absence of outside help. Even the evidence of "looting" documented something that looked more like mutual aid: The photograph that accompanied a Sunday New York Times article reporting "pockets of violence and anarchy" showed men standing atop the ruins of a store, tossing supplies to the gathered crowd.

And then there's the heartwarming story about 16yr old Darlene Etienne who was rescued 15 days after the quake and is  now making a remarkable recovery. 

Please share with us below your comments and what you are reading on Haiti.