bcholmes | Haitian Death Count Controversy

There's a bit of a brouhaha emerging regarding the reported deaths in the Haitian earthquake. Here's what's up. There's a guy, Tim Schwartz. He's been doing work in Haiti for some time, usually with NGOs of various stripes. He's written a book, Travesty in Haiti, that's self-published.

I'm kinda ambivalent about Travesty -- on the one hand, I think that its critique of aid models in Haiti are pretty much on target. On the other hand, I think that tends to paint the Haitian people as superstitious and untrustworthy. But in any event, Schwartz has contributed important things to the criticism of aid management in Haiti, and it would be wrong to consider him a toady of the power elites.

Schwartz was hired to write a report for USAID. He says:

As they say in their statement, the USG commissioned the company that hired me to estimate how many people had moved back to their homes. What the US Government wanted to know was what contribution US financed rubble removal programs and household structural evaluations had made to encouraging those people to return.
What no one seemed to realize until the survey was well underway was that to estimate the number of people who returned, we had to know how many of the people who originally lived in the home were still alive. And we couldn't estimate how many people were still alive if we don't know how many people died in the earthquake. So we had to include that in the questions and the estimations.

On June 1st, the AFP reported this:

An explosive report questioning the death toll from Haiti's earthquake has experts slamming "back-of-the-envelope calculations" that artificially inflate figures in times of crisis. "The more deaths, the more visibility an earthquake will get. It's what we call the 'CNN effect,'" said David Hargitt, a data manager at the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) based in Belgium.
The report -- commissioned by USAID but not yet officially released by the US State Department -- contends that between 46,000 and 85,000 people were killed when a massive 7.0 quake struck Haiti in January 2010. Those figures are far below the Haitian government's death toll of 316,000, as well as the more commonly circulated figure of 222,570.

Schwartz has been commenting, publicly, about some of the analysis that went into the figure, although he acknowledges that he's not really sure what he's allowed to say:

This is a response to a report that I wrote for USAID regarding the Haiti earthquake death toll. I don't know if I am even free to discuss the report because it's not official yet. However, what I can do is discuss the validity of the Haiti earthquake death toll count and whether or not a low death toll estimate should come as a surprise. The answer is "no," it should not be a surprise, not to anyone in Haiti. Here's a review of how the government arrived at the death toll and summary of data I compiled from elsewhere and that bears on the death toll.
[...]
On the 14th of January, day two after the Earthquake, President Preval said that estimates of the number dead ranged from 30,000 to 50,000 but concluded that, "It's too early to give a number," (CNN 14).
On the 16th of January the Red Cross estimated 45,000 to 50,000 dead and PADF 50,000 to 100,000. They based it on their volunteers.
On the 16th of January, the very next day, the government tripled the number, issuing an official declaration of 140,000 dead.
On the 23rd, after Belgian disaster response expert Claude de Ville de Goyet noted that "round numbers are a sure sign that nobody knows." The government almost immediately offered a precise figure of 111,481 dead.
But on the next day, January 24th , they upped the figure to an even 150,000 killed, an increase of 38,000 over the day before. The same day, Secretary-General Edmund Mulet of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti, put the figure at 112,350 dead, 194,000 injured. It was not clear what he based his estimate on.
One week later, on Saturday the 31st , the Haitian government added a rather exact 100,000 to the UN figure, saying the death toll was 212,000.
Three days later, Wednesday February 3rd, Ministry of Communications raised the official death toll to 230,000 and then President Rene Preval added another 40,000 to the count, saying that the government had buried 270,000 bodies.
[...]
It seems pretty clear that no one, not the government nor anyone else, had any idea how many people were killed. But the interesting thing is that, while I am not impugning any motivations, almost everyone who had anything to do with any type of official agency or NGO seemed deliberately bent on skewing the numbers as high as they possibly could. And they did so with total disregard for the evidence.
The UN -- which on the anniversary of the earthquake posted on their website,"The quake killed more than 200,000 Haitians and left more than two million homeless"-- lost 101 out of 9,151 international staff in Haiti at the time of the earthquake (1.1%). The US embassy which also repeated the government death toll of over 200,000 lost 1 of 172 foreign staff members (0.58%) and 6 of 800 staff members (0.75%). Of the 43,000 US citizens and residents in Haiti at the time the embassy was able to determine that 104 had been killed; 2,000 they could not locate (not unusual at the best of times). The Canadian Embassy reported losing 58 of 6,000 citizens in Haiti at the time (0.97%). The Dominicans lost 24 of 2,600 (0.92%), some 22 of whom were female sex workers who died in a single building.
The Haitian Government, which to this day issues varying claims of 17 to 30% of all civil servants killed, never has provided precise lists, not to anyone. The only thing we know for sure was that the parliament and the police were hit very hard. In the days after the earthquake, Mario Andresol, the Chief of Haiti's 8,000 member police force had said "We lost 70 police officers, nearly 500 are still missing and 400 were wounded." When all was said and done we know that 77 policemen were killed (that's 0.73% of the 10,544 police in Haiti, and if we figure that 80% are in Port-au-Prince-standard-- then its about 0.9% of those in Port-au-Prince were killed. We also know that two of 2 of 100 senators were killed and no congressman or ministers.
After the second or third week journalists were no longer asking aid agencies about how many staff they had lost and the agencies were deferring to the Haitian Government for their figures. The United Nations, which had early on declared that it would come up with an official estimate, subsequently declined to conduct its own count. The Red Cross was mum. No other NGO ever questioned the figures again. On the contrary, as with the UN and the embassies, they invariably latched on to and restated the government figures.
In June 2010, the home page for Oxfam, which lost one of its 100 employees in Port-au-Prince at the time of the earthquake, was citing the government figure of 230,000; CRS lost none of its 100 employees in Port-au-Prince but was citing the same figures; World Vision lost none of its 95 staff in Port-au-Prince but implied there were more, saying "at least 230,000 dead;" MSF lost 7 of its staff of 800 but said the earthquake, "killed hundreds of thousands of people." The Red Cross was the same, they lost no one. God's Littlest Angels, featured on CBC, ABC, CNN, and Larry King, same, they lost no one either. Most NGOs lost no one. Businesses were the same: Triology lost 5 of 576 (0.9%); Digicel, 2 of 900 (0.02%); CEMEX, 0 of 115; Petion Ville Golf and Tennis Club 0 of 100, not a single employee even lost a home.
Intellectually, I really don't care how many people got killed in the earthquake. The draft report for USAID was simply a job I was performing with a team of some 20 University educated professionals, including two other PhDs. But personally, for me, in terms of the tragedy, less is better. And at about 60,000 dead, that's still a huge tragedy.

Of course, this topic is not without political controversy. Glen Ford, a Black Agenda Radio commentator wrote:

As if it were not enough that the United States repeatedly invaded Haiti, propped up dictators, overthrew the country’s first democratically elected president in 2004, and then appointed a government of gangsters, stole Haiti’s sovereignty to make her a protectorate of her worst enemies, then invaded the country again in 2010, under the guise of earthquake relief. After so many injuries to Haiti over so many years*, *the United States Agency for International Development now insults the living and the dead with a report that questions how many people died in the quake, and how many remain in camps for the displaced.
The timing of the report is quite curious, since the Haitian government is desperate to receive some of the $4.6 billion in earthquake relief pledged by international donors. But apparently, there are some in the U.S. government that want to deny the Haitians that money. The USAID report claims that somewhere between 46,000 and 85,000 people died in the earthquake – probably more like 60,000 – while the Haitian government says 316,000 were killed. That’s about a five to one difference. The International Organization for Migration, which is part of the United Nations and specializes in helping displaced persons, says 1.5 million people were forced into camps by the catastrophe. But the American agency claims less than 900,000 moved into camps. Only a few months ago, in March, the International Organization for Migration went from tent to tent, counting 680,000 people still in the camps. But the USAID report claims only 100,000 Haitians remain in camps. That’s a discrepancy of seven to one. Somebody is just too wrong to simply be mistaken. The question is who, and why.
[...]
The Haitian government is soon supposed to take over administration of the national reconstruction program. By throwing doubt on the actual extent of earthquake damage, the report calls into question both Haiti's financial needs and the trustworthiness of its government. Mr. Schwartz's report is all some people need to hear, to convince themselves that Haitians are trying to scam the international donor community. White Americans, especially, are more than willing to believe such racist slander, and withhold their money from Haitian government control. Which, ironically, would leave most reconstruction decisions in the hands of private U.S. and other foreign business interests and their local elite partners – precisely the end result Mr. Schwartz claims to oppose.

Certainly it serves the interests of the usual suspects to assert that Haiti's leaders cannot be trusted, and that the country's needs have been exaggerated. For my part, I'm not yet sure what I think about this topic.

USAID has already started to distance itself from the report.

This article in the LA Progressive discusses the nature of the controversy:

A USAID draft report,"Building Assessments and Rubble Removal" (BARR), in earthquake ravaged Haiti was cited on May 27 by Agence France-Presse (AFP) and promptly picked up by the Associated Press before it went global. Generated on March 15, the 40 page graphic-heavy report contains a potential bombshell in a conclusion contradicting the official Haitian death toll of 200-250,000. The BARR report says, "The number of fatalities that resulted from the earthquake is estimated at 46,190 to 84,961."
The report, conducted for USAID by the consulting firm, LTL Strategies, also reduces the United Nations figure of 680,000 homeless to 68,000. The premature release of this non-peer-reviewed report serves no one, and the State Department has already distanced itself from the findings. According to HaitiLibre:
Mark Toner, spokesman for the State Department says "the first draft of the report contained internal inconsistencies with its own findings," adding "we are reviewing these inconsistencies with LTL Strategies to ensure information we release is accurate."
"The first draft of the report contained internal inconsistencies with its own findings," Department spokesperson Preeti Shah echoed Toner.
She would not elaborate or say whether the report could change significantly once the inconsistencies are resolved. Haitian government officials said they had not seen the report and could not discuss it.
This document should never have been promoted to the public. "Promoted" is a carefully chosen word here. The question that has not been answered is "what is the possible motivation" for the release of this document?" Was it motivated by political expediency? Let's rebrand the "leak" and call it "Public Relations" for the sake of this discussion.
— "Flawed Earthquake Report a Bullwhip On the Backs of Haitians"

Schwartz writes:

As part of the US government's effort to discredit a survey that it commissioned and for which it reviewed and approved the methodology, the Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean for USAID issued this statement on June 4th,
Mark Feierstein of the U.S. Agency for International Development said the report is problematic because the authors used a statistical sampling that was not representative. The study didn't include data from heavily damaged areas in Haiti's countryside or from the number of houses that collapsed and killed people, he said.
'Those are all serious flaws,' Feierstein, USAID's assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

What's flawed here is USAID's understanding of the methodology that it reviewed and approved. The fact is that, as USAID has indicated elsewhere, the survey was commissioned specifically to justify how 100's of millions of dollars of US Government money was spent. But as it turned out, the data also contradicted the erroneous suppositions that every major NGO, UN, US and Haitian Government organization has participated in promoting. Suppositions that have encouraged enormous expenditures and donations from well meaning US and European citizens but with disappointing results.

The timing of all this is kinda pointy, too. As the LA Progressive article points out:

In another AP report, Daniel-Gerard Rouzier, who is nominated to be the new Haitian Prime Minister by President Michel Martelly, said he wanted to do away with the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC), chaired by former US President Bill Clinton and the outgoing Haitian prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive. On May 25, Rouzier said he wanted to eliminate the commission because of slow progress, called it "dysfunctional," and indicated he would replace it with anew government agency. "What I can tell you is that the (commission) as it exists today will not continue," Rouzier said in an interview. "I don't mean to crucify the people who came up with the concept. But sometimes when something doesn't work you have to fix it." This was two days before the BARR report was released.
The IHRC was formed after the January 2010 quake so that international donors would have assurance that reconstruction would be free from corruption, once again blaming Haiti for the mishandling of foreign aid donations, but not scrutinizing the international charities who receive the reconstruction money directly from agencies such as USAID.
Possibly realizing that Rouzier had committed a faux-pas and bitten the donor hand that is supposed to be feeding Haiti, President Michel Martelly did an about-face and said he and Rouzier, are ""very open and willing to begin discussions' with Clinton and the international community about the commission to 'make it more efficient' as its members seek to rebuild Haiti from the devastating 2010 earthquake."
If USAID wanted to slap down the new Haitian government for criticizing the Clinton IRHC, the BARR report would do the job nicely. Play down the death toll and the need for reconstruction and send a message that Haiti must still play by colonialist US rules. It would not matter in the end what the truth of the BARR report is. The headline that will stick in donors' minds is that the earthquake was not such a big deal after all. The threat of diminishing donations replaces the nice carrot and stick approach to Haiti with a bullwhip.

Again: based on what I know about Schwartz, I don't see him as the kind of guy who'd take instruction to create a retribution report. I do think that he's the kind of guy who believes himself right about everything. But what do I know?