Photo: Oxfam

International aid agencies have issued emergency appeals about the rising famine in the West African nations of Niger and Chad, which could eventually threaten millions. The Guardian reports today: 

Starving people in drought-stricken west Africa are being forced to eat leaves and collect grain from ant hills, say aid agencies, warning that 10 million people face starvation across the region.

With food prices soaring and malnourished livestock dying, villagers were turning to any sources of food to stay alive, said Charles Bambara, Oxfam officer for the west African region. “People are eating wild fruit and leaves, and building ant hills just to capture the tiny amount of grain that the ants collect inside…

In Niger, which the United Nations classifies as the world’s least developed country, starving families are eating flour mixed with wild leaves and boiled plants. More than 7 million people – almost half the population – currently face food insecurity in the country, making it the hardest hit by the crisis. According to UN agencies, 200,000 children need treatment for malnutrition in Niger alone. “Niger is at crisis point now and we need to act quickly before this crisis becomes a full-blown humanitarian disaster,” said Caroline Gluck, an Oxfam representative in the country.

The real tragedy–and travesty–lies in the fact that there is food available in Niger, but starving people cannot afford to buy it.

With food prices spiralling, people are being forced to slaughter malnourished livestock, traditionally the only form of income. “When you walk through the markets, you can see that there is food here. The problem is that the ability to buy it has disappeared. People here depend on livestock to support themselves, but animals are being killed on the edge of exhaustion, and that means they are being sold for far less money. And on top of that, the cost of food basics has risen,” explained Gluck. Compounding the crisis, thousands of animals have starved to death as villagers use animal fodder to feed themselves…

“This is just the beginning of the traditional hunger period, and people have already been forced to sell their livestock. This is very early for the alarm bells to be ringing, before Niger has even reached the start of the most critical part of the food calendar. You can imagine three to four months down the line how shocking the situation will be,” said Gluck…”West Africa has traditionally not been very high on the developed world’s priority list. The question now is how many people do we have to see die before the world will act?” she said.

In “Freemarkets and Famine in Niger,” the Guardian‘s Jeevan Vasagar writes that during the most recent famine in Niger, in 2005, ”free market dogma stopped the government giving out free food to the starving.” He warns that this disaster could easily be repeated. Other analysts blamed the 2005 famine in large part on the economic policies of the IMF and EU, which contributed to a precipitous rise in the prices of staple grains.

This year, global economic factors, combined with a recent coup in Niger, are once again compounding a crisis caused by drought, and the toll in lives will be high. Just how high depends upon what the international community and Niger’s government do next.  One aid official told the Guardian that if relief does not come quickly, the crisis could reach the proportions of the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, “during which an estimated 1 million people died due to drought and a slow response to the crisis both within the country and internationally.”

Photo: Rachel Palmer/Save the Children

The photographs already making their way out of Niger are heartbreaking and horrifying. Like the news reports, they tend to focus on children, who make up half of Niger’s population. Nearly 380,000 children are at risk of starvation in the next few months, according to Save the Children. 

In the 2005 Niger famine, the UN identified the elderly and the sick, along with children, as the “most vulnerable groups,” who would be “on the brink of being wiped out” without substantial aid. The Guardian reported that older people were often the last to be fed even when help arrived: “As aid agencies focus their scant resources on saving malnourished babies and children, the elderly are the forgotten victims of the crisis in Niger.” Older women, in particular, usually fell at the end of the line.

Oxfam is taking donations for its emergency response in West Africa here. Save the Children’s emergency appeal for Niger is here. To support emergency aid programs specifically targeting the needs of old people, donations can be made to HelpAge International.

So could this “revelation” in fact be an Obama administration PR campaign to buttress U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan? For years, we were told of Afghanistan’s potential valuable oil prospects. When oil faded from the picture there was no economic reason to be there. The place wasn’t like Iraq, where the international oil companies got their hands on a huge oil reserve. But now, with the Times apparently swallowing the Pentagon’s bait, we’ve suddenly got a new reason to fight: Getting our hands on a lucrative mining colony. James Risen in the Times reports : 

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

Running counter to the claims of a huge discovery is an existing undated  report called Minerals in Afghanistan, prepared by the Afghan minining ministry  jointly with the British Geological Survey and easily obtained on the web. The report has  this to say on the subject:

In central Afghanistan occurrences of rare metals have been identified in sediments below several lakes and depressions where lake brines contain higher than average metal concentrations. Trial pits have indicated that salt deposits covered by clay and loam layers contain high concentrations of lithium, boron, lead and zinc.

In a 2006 special edition on Afghanistan of Mining Journal, pre-eminent publication in the field, the mining minister, Hon.Eng. Ibrahim Adel, writes in the introduction,

It is a privilege for me to draw your attention to this Mining Journal special supplement on Afghanistan. Mining in Afghanistan has a history dating back over 6,000 years, and despite all the upheavals over the past 25 years, mining has continued to operate. The main task facing us now is to expand the industry from its present small base. The Government regards the development of Afghanistan’s natural resources as the most important driver of economic growth, and essential to the reconstruction and development of the country…For example, construction minerals production has grown dramatically with the increased need for raw materials to feed road building and reconstruction. I expect this will be followed shortly by further investment in the coal, cement and hydrocarbons industries. The first signs of grassroots mineral exploration for gold have started, and with the appointment of Tender Advisors for the future development of the world class Aynak copper deposit, I expect this to lead to really significant investment in the mining sector of the economy in the very near future. Aynak is one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper deposits and it has already attracted interest from a wide spectrum of international companies.

Mining Journal provides an in depth account of the history and potential for mining all sorts of minerals. Here is the Journal‘s overview: 

Afghanistan has some of the most complex and varied geology in the world. The oldest rocks are Archean and they are succeeded by rocks from the Proterozoic and every Phanerozoic system up to the present day. The country also has a long and complicated tectonic history, partly related to its position at the western end of the Himalayas.

This diverse geological foundation has resulted in a significant mineral heritage with over 1,400 mineral occurrences recorded to date. Historical mining concentrated mostly on precious stone production, with some of the oldest known mines in the world established in Afghanistan to produce lapis lazuli for the Egyptian Pharaohs. 

More recent exploration in the 1960s and 70s resulted in the discovery of significant resources ofmetallic minerals, including copper, iron and gold, and non-metallic minerals, including halite, talc and mica. The bedrock geology of Afghanistan can be thought of as a jigsaw of crustal blocks separated by fault zones, each with a different geological history and mineral prospectivity. This jigsaw has been put together by a series of tectonic events dating from the Jurassic up to the present.

Among other things, Afghan emeralds are generally considered to be among the most beautiful in the world, rivaling the emeralds produced in Colombia. They were mined and sold for arms during the time of the Northern Alliance; the famous Mujahideen leader Ahmed Shah Massoud funded his campaign by selling emeralds from the Panjshir Valley. More recently, sources with first hand knowledge of the business have reported that Afghan emeralds were blocked by the Colombian emerald cartel, though there are reports of Afghan emeralds being traded on the sly through Eastern Europe.

The New York Times reported on the Grannies last week, after the team played an exhibition game.

From the team’s meager beginning [five years ago], Vakhegula Vakhegula have become well known in the region, and news of the team has spread to the United States. The team received an invitation to compete in the Veterans Cup, a tournament for teams with players 30 or older, next month in Lancaster, Mass…

The grandmothers will not be mistaken for a national team; they play at a deliberate but purposeful pace and with plenty of passion. They play on a modest park field, a world away from the new stadium, named after Mokaba, in nearby Polokwane, which is hosting four first-round World Cup games.

[Beka] Ntsanwisi’s decision to found the team came out of her own sense of personal challenge.

In 2003, she learned she had colon cancer; by 2005, she was using a wheelchair. In the process of her treatment, Ntsanwisi visited a number of public hospitals and was disturbed by the level of treatment of elderly patients, especially women. Many were despondent or confused. She thought that regular exercise would be beneficial. That exercise evolved into soccer.

The team’s center and the oldest member, 83-year-old Nora Makhubela, told an Al Jazeera reporter: “I have had stroke six times, before I started playing, I couldn’t walk properly, my legs used to ache a lot, now I feel better, I can even run faster than you!”

Other members of the Grannies told the Times that the team had become their family, helping them through difficult times. One had lost a husband; another, eight of her twelve children. [Beka] Ntsanwisi’s cancer is remission, “but even if I die, I just want to leave a legacy, something that people will remember me by,” she said. “Even if I’m not here, somebody will say, ‘Beka started this.’ ”

This video provides a glimpse of Vakhegula Vakhegula in action. (Now, here’s a subject they ought to make into a reality TV show about elders. Fat chance.)

Ya think? If this isn’t a textbook example of closing the barn door after the horse is out, I don’t know what is. In fact, it isn’t even closing the door so much as acknowledging that the barn actually has a door, which we might want to consider using once in a while if we don’t want the horses running wild. What the President’s statement reminds me of most is Alan Greenspan’s admission, after the economic meltdown took place, that there just might be a tiny ”flaw” in his approach to financial regulation. “I made a mistake,” Greenspan told Congress in October 2008, “in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”

In the aftermath of his press conference, political pundits seem to be focused on whether Obama–and by implication the federal government–was taking too much responsibility for the spill, or not enough. Only a few have pointed out the patent absurdity of believing in the first place that the oil companies could be trusted to “have their act together” when it came to either preventing or dealing with massive spills. The history of global oil spills over the last half-century shows a pattern of carelessness and ineptitude on the part of the industry–and of failure on the part of governments who tried to intervene after the fact.

When the tanker Torrey Canyon drove straight into the rocks off Land’s End in Britain in 1967, spilling its 31-million-gallon cargo, chemical dispersants were spread on the expanding slick with no result. According to the “Report to the Committee of Scientists on the Scientific and Technological Aspects of the Torrey Canyon Disaster,” the British Air Force was called in to set the oil afire by bombing it. Some of it eventually caught fire; most of it did not. A Dutch salvage team  thought they could fix things by pulling the ship off the rocks, but the tow cable broke. The spill ended up killing marine life and spreading glop all over the beaches of Southern England and some in France as well.

In 1969, a well on the outercontinental shelf six miles off Santa Barbara, California, went out of control. All initial efforts to control the spilling oil were as futile. When the flow was finally stopped after 11 days, 3 million gallons had escaped and coated the pristine beaches of Santa Barbara channel. (At the time it was considered a devastating disaster, and helped fuel the fledgling environmental movement in California–though the numbers sound almost quaint compared with the current BP spill.) After the Santa Barbara spill, the U.S. government came up with a plan to keep teams of experts from different parts of government on standby, so they could fly in and assess damage in the event of a spill.

In 1969 alone, the Coast Guard was reporting 1,007 oil spills in U.S. coastal waters. Many others were not reported. (It was standard practice for ships to pump waste oil into the water on approaching port.) That same year, a Woods Hole Oceangraphic research project in the Sargasso Sea, reported “quantities of oil-tar lumps up to 3 inches in diameter were caught in the nets…It was estimated that there was three times as much tar-like material as Sargasso weed. Similar occurrences have been reported worldwide by observers from this as well as other institutions.’’

In 1970 an Onassis tanker called the Arrow hit Cerberus Rock off Nova Scotia.  It was the Torrey Canyon all over again. Detergents were sprayed with no effect. The U.S. Army dispatched teams armed with  flame throwers to burn it up, which didn’t work. Chemists from Pittsburgh Corning Glass arrived with bags of little glass balls intended to act as wicks for burning the oil, but these did not ignite. Fiberglass collars set up to keep the spreading oil out of a fish processing plant also failed. Attempts to pull the ship off the rocks were futile. Eventually a gale broke the tanker’s back and the stern sank in one hundred feet of water with one million gallons of congealed crude oil aboard. In this case, by pure luck, the remaining oil stayed inside the tanker until a salvage team pumped it out a few months later.

In 1979, Pemex’s Ixtac oil well, in the Gulf off of Campeche, Mexico, suffered a blowout. Through various measures–some of them similar to those currently being used on the Deepwater Horizon spill–the flow of oil from the blown well was slowed from 30,000 to 10,000 barrels a day, but it took nearly ten months for it to be stopped completely. By that time, an estimated 3 million barrels had reached the U.S. Gulf coast. 

The 1970s through the 1990s saw more than a dozen spills larger than the Exxon Valdez, pouring oil into the waters off Trinidad, Uzbekistan, Iran, Angola, South Africa, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Mozambique, Chile, and Sweden.

As for the Valdez disaster itself, its effects still linger nearly two decades after the 1989 spill. During that time, suits against Exxon made their way through courts, resulting in a $5.5 billion jury trial settlement. But the Supreme Court later thought this was too much money, and cut the settlement to $1 billion. No fine ever levied against the oil industry has seriously inhibited its ability to keep doing business as usual–or employing lobbyists, or making campaign contributions. And to my knowledge, no oil company executives have ever gone to jail for the environmental devastation caused by their negligence or greed.

This, perhaps, is the real lesson of history when it comes to oil spills: It isn’t enough, even, to close the barn door, if you allow the horses to keep making hay.

Photo: Eisenhower National Historic Site, National Park Service

On June 5, 1944, the eve of the largest invasion in history, General Dwight Eisenhower visited the English airfield where paratroopers were preparing to take off for their drop into France. “Quit worrying, General,” one of the soldiers told him. “We’ll take care of this thing for you.’’ The following day, 175,000 men landed on the beaches and fields of Normandy.

For children growing up in Washington, D.C., shushed into silence behind the blackout curtains while our parents bent over radios bringing the long-awaited announcement of the attack, it was all beyond  comprehension–save that every little boy was climbing into a tree to pretend he was flying his Spitfire over the Channel, or parachuting into the French countryside.

At age seven, I was one of those boys. Last week I had the good fortune to meet another member of my generation, whose experience of D-Day was something quite different. His name is Pierre Bernard, and he is retired to his family’s farm in the village of Maisons, a stone’s throw from the beaches that became the site of what the French call the Débarquement. In the spring of 1944, Pierre was twelve; with his parents and siblings, he worked the farm and waited for the Allied troops to arrive and free them from Nazi occupation. When that day finally came, Pierre recalls, the Germans simply vanished. British and then American troops soon passed through the village, moving quickly inland. His family was luckier than many others: Some 12,000 French civilians were killed during the battle for Normandy, along with more than 75,000 troops on both sides.

Today, long retired from his job as a cook in Paris, Pierre oversees a bed and breakfast in his old stone farmhouse. He’s never learned to use a computer, so his daughters help arrange who is to come, while Pierre, along with his two dogs, goes out each morning to bring back fresh baguettes and croissants. He serves them along with the jams and pates he makes himself, and sits quietly at the head of the family table, contentedly watching his guests eat breakfast.  And he’ll gladly trade war stories with a visitor who, like himself, is too young to have fought, but old enough to remember.

Normandy today still inspires awe at the courage of the men who stormed Fortress Europe: Omaha Beach, so wide and unprotected; the cliffs of Point du Hoc, higher and steeper than I could have imagined. But by now, the genuine remnants of the war—half-buried German bunkers, wrecked ships, and thousands of well-tended graves—are outnumbered by nostalgic renderings of the real thing: Army surplus stores are filled with Eisenhower jackets, berets, and rucksacks (many of them supplied by German companies). Towns compete for tourists–and a place in history—with tanks on their village squares and little museums dedicated to every aspect of “Jour J.” In Sainte-Mère-Église, where an American paratrooper famously got caught on the church steeple, a dummy is suspended from a parachute to commemmorate  the event. Then there are the British and American visitors tearing around in rented World War II jeeps, windshields down, and even a half-ton olive drab truck.  They look far too young to be veterans; too young even to have been alive at the time. The men and women who fought that war are fast disappearing (some 850 U.S. WW II vets die every day, according to the VA), and those who lived through it as children are now well into our old age.  

I was struck by how different Pierre’s old age in France is from mine in the United States—not because of anything that happened during the war, but because of what happened afterwards. In the postwar years, along with most other European countries (victors and vanquished alike), France implemented guaranteed pensions as well as national health care. Under a social welfare system that epitomizes what’s derisively referred to in the U.S. as the “Nanny State,” the average worker in France retires at age 60 on a full pension with complete medical care and various tax breaks. (And that’s after years of working 35-hour weeks, with two-month vacations.)

And what about aging Americans–including the waning ranks of the “greatest generation” that came before mine, who helped free the French and the rest of Europe, and then financed the continent’s recovery through the Marshall Plan? What can we expect? The most minimal of public pension systems, which was created before the war and has been under attack ever since; a private pension system that is now a shell of collapsing structures; personal savings decimated by Wall Street; and a partial and increasingly expensive health care system. More and more of us plan to work quite literally until we die–that is, if we can manage to keep our jobs, since we have little protection against age discrimination and no job security of any sort. In America, the war fought by “Citizen Soldiers” made our world all too safe for wealth and corporate power, often at the expense of the very men and women who won it.

In France, conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy has been chipping away at the Nanny State. His latest scheme—to raise the retirement age to 62—brought mass demonstrations across the country last week, and threats from the still-powerful unions. But even if Sarkozy’s latest initiative succeeds, as it well may, France’s elders will still be better off than their American counterparts have ever been.

Here in the U.S., we face a political juggernaut—most recently manifested in Obama’s “debt commission”–intent on cutting Social Security benefits, raising the costs of Medicare, extending the formal retirement age from 65 to 67 and beyond, and further tying our retirement and that of future generations to the vicissitudes of the securities markets through 401Ks and IRAs. Few voices are raised in protest against this attack on old-age entitlements. In fact, it seems to be one of the only true examples of bipartisanship in American politics, now that the Democratic Party, which once fought to build what social safety net we have, has collapsed into the arms of Wall Street. I expect it will progress with no more difficulty than “welfare reform,” in which another Democratic administration gutted our meager provisons for the poor.

In a Washington Post op-ed last Sunday, American Enterprise Institute president Arthur C. Brooks declared that “America’s new culture war” is a “struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise–limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution.” If only this were remotely true.  In fact, that battle was lost long ago—if it was ever fought at all.

Perhaps I only imagine that Pierre’s life is more tranquil than mine because he enjoys the security that comes with “European-style statism,” while my own well-being remains “determined by market forces.” But I don’t think so. Sixty-six years ago, as a small boy playing pilot in the lush green trees of a Washington spring, I could not have guessed that Pierre, waiting in his farmhouse nestled in the hedgerows of Normandy for the jeeps and tanks of the First Army, would someday become a symbol not only of my country’s greatest victory, but of its saddest defeat.

Estimates are that below the Beaufort Sea lie 8 billion barrels of oil and 30 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Even if these estimates turn out to be wildly inflated, the lure is sufficient to set off a complex set of conflicts–between the big oil corporations to see who gets what, and among nations–particularly Canada, the U.S., and Russia.

More Arctic gas will require an immense undertaking to build a pipeline down into the lower 48–either straight down into the Northwest and/or through the Mackenzie Delta to the Midwest. Up to now the cost of a gas pipeline has been prohibitive; the Canadian energy industry had planned to use the gas coming up the Mackenzie Delta to turn that country’s plentiful deposits of tar sands  into oil, which could be shipped to refineries around Chicago. But environmental problems have raised questions about this project, and driven by concerns for a clean fuel and overall climate control, the pipeline may now begin to seem more feasible.

There are other reasons Obama’s announcement is important: The rapid melting of Arctic ice has introduced an entirely new factor into this play. To the north and east of the Beaufort Sea, the fabled Northwest Passage hits the North Pacific. At the eastern most end, it meets the North Atlantic, passing between Greenland and Iceland. For centuries this passage has been frozen over for all but a short time during the summer. Now there is renewed speculation the passage will be open and navigable within a decade for big tankers and container ships. This ought to bring a boom in shipping because the passage cuts by one-third the distance from Europe to Asia. Commercial fishing boats will be able to get at vast schools of fish hitherto unreachable because of the ice. The world’s stock of fish has long been predicted to decline due to overharvesting.

In a Vancouver speech in 2006 discussing the Northwest Passage, Michael Byers, an expert in international law at the University of British Columbia, warned of future dangers for Canada:

Canadians should be alarmed. An international shipping route along Canada’s third coast could facilitate the entry of drugs, guns, illegal immigrants and perhaps even terrorists into this country, as well as providing an alternative route for illicit shipments of weapons of mass destruction or missile components by rogue states. And any shipping involves the risk of accidents, particularly in remote and icy waters. An oil spill would cause catastrophic damage to fragile Arctic ecosystems; a cruise ship in distress would require an expensive and possibly dangerous rescue mission. Any new fishery will be highly susceptible to over-exploitation, particularly because of the difficult-to-police location, rapid declines in fish stocks elsewhere and the consequent, excess fishing capacity that now exists worldwide.’

Esther Bejarano says music helped to keep her alive as a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz. Now, 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp, she has teamed up with a German hip-hop band to get her anti-racism message to today’s youth.

“It’s a clash of everything: age, culture, style,” Ms Bejarano admitted in an interview to mark Holocaust Memorial Day yesterday. “But we all love music and share a common goal: we’re fighting against racism and discrimination.”…

The daughter of a Jewish cantor from Saarbrücken in western Germany, Ms Bejarano studied piano at home until the Nazis came to power and tore her family apart. She was deported to Auschwitz, where she became a member of the girls’ orchestra, playing the accordian every time trains full of Jews from across Europe arrived at the death camp.

“We played with tears in our eyes,” Ms Bejarano remembered. “The new arrivals came in waving and applauding us, but we knew they would be taken directly to the gas chambers.” Although she survived, her parents and sister, Ruth, were killed.

For 20 years, Ms Bejarano has played music from the past – Yiddish melodies, tunes from the ghetto and Jewish resistance songs – with her children Edna and Yoram in a Hamburg-based band called Coincidence.

About two years ago, Kutlu Yurtseven, a Turkish rapper from Microphone Mafia, asked her about a collaboration to combat the growing racism and anti-Semitism in Germany. The octogenarian thought hip-hop “was really a bit too loud” but saw it as a way to reach Germany’s youth.

“We want to keep the memories of the Holocaust alive, but at the same time look into the future and encourage young people to take a stand against new Nazis,” she said. “I know what racism can lead to and the members of Microphone Mafia are immigrants and have experienced their share of discrimination as well.”…

Their audiences range from teenage immigrants at urban youth centres to an older crowd that might be expected to favour a more classical approach. “They love it,” Ms Bejarano said. “Even some of the older guests climb on the chairs and dance.” She said it can be exhausting to perform with young people, but she chuckled: “I’ve educated the boys. We’ve lowered the volume and I told them to stop jumping around all the time.”

Mr Yurtseven said: “I asked Esther how she can make music after Auschwitz, and she said if they had taken the music from her, she would have died.”

Actually,  HelpAge International, the international NGO that deals with the needs of older people around the world, appears to have been on the ground helping the patients several days prior to the Post report.  Although its office in Port-Au-Prince was badly damaged, HelpAge announced last Friday:

Medical staff from our partner CARPA have been examining patients in the Municipal Nursing Home in Bel Air, Port-au-Prince. CARPA doctors also visited the UN hospital to collect free medical supplies which will be given out today.

Currently around 600 temporary living camps have been set up in the Haitian capital. HelpAge is aiming to support ten of them, including one near the Municipal Nursing Home. Two of our emergencies team, Sarah Packwood and Margaret Chilcot, visited the home yesterday with two CARPA doctors to deliver medicines including antibiotics. They also brought tarpaulins which they tied to the branches of trees to provide the older people with some shade from the tropical heat.’

Margaret Chilcott said, “We will hire someone to do some cooking and get water points set up. We can see that more caregivers are urgently needed.I saw one man not eating despite his hunger, apparently because he couldn’t eat without help.

We are now responding and trying to get more medical supplies to the older people in the home. We are able to get hold of supplies, but the problem is that delivery and distribution mechanisms are extremely weak.There are also large numbers of destitute people all around the home which makes it difficult to deliver specifically to the care home residents.

About 800,000 Haitians are over 60, and many of them live in extreme poverty even under normal circumstances. Old people tend to suffer disproportionately during disasters, and are less capable of fending for themselves in the aftermath. I suspect they also tend to be disproportionately overlooked by even the most well-meaning relief efforts.

HelpAge is a rare exception. Last week they entered into a partnership with the AARP Foundation to gain more support for their work. “HelpAge has on-the-ground experience in Haiti and is the only international relief agency that focuses on the unique needs of older people in an emergency,” said AARP CEO Barry Rand.

You can donate to HelpAge’s work in Haiti via their Haiti Emergency Fund at HelpAge USA or through AARP Foundation’s Haiti Relief Fund.

Haitian detainees at Guantanamo Bay in the early 1990s. Photo: Ivan Curra on Flickr.

Now, in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, there are signs that Guantanamo may be returned to this chapter in its ignominious history. While the Obama administration suspended deportations to Haiti and granted temporary protected status to undocumented Haitians currently living in the United States, this policy offers no protection to quake victims who try to reach U.S. shores. If large numbers of desperate Haitians begin to attempt the treacherous trip, they could well end up in Guantanamo’s Migrant Operations Center (MOC), operated by the Department of Homeland Security.

Last Friday, Fox News was already reporting that Guantanamo was one of the “options on the table” for dealing with fleeing Haitians.

“Guantanamo is going to be an enormously valuable asset as we go through this,” State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters on Thursday, speaking generally about U.S. efforts to help Haiti. “[Guantanamo] is in the vicinity. … So we’re identifying all of the assets in the region that we can use in order to stage operations.”

One official acknowledged that the center likely would become the most viable option “if there was a mass migration” of Haitians from their country….

Once at the Guantanamo facility, the refugees would be supervised by the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the facility and has contracted the Florida-based Geo Group firm to manage day-to-day operations….

“We haven’t been asked to do anything,” one official said. “No one’s given us any marching orders. … But if they come to us, we’re ready to go.”

On Monday, Tom Barry of the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy reported on the MOC—which, like an increasing number of U.S. prisons, is run by a private, for-profit company.

Today, under a contract with DHS it is operated by Geo Group, a private prison corporation that relies on federal government detention/prison contracts for about 40% of its revenues.

In 2003, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, MOC was upgraded and its operation transferred from the department’s own Immigration and Customs Enforcement to GEO Group, the country’s second largest private prison firm. In part because of the special international standing of the Guantanamo Bay military base, which one official called “the legal equivalent to outer space,” the State Department is cosponsor of the MOC contract.

According to GEO, it manages and operates a detention center with 130 beds but which “can house up to 500 detainees in the event of a surge.” According to the contract, “This dynamic population may consist of single adult males and females, unaccompanied male and female juveniles, and family groups of various nationalities and security levels.” Under the terms of the contract, which was renewed for a five-year period in November 2006, “GEO is responsible for providing all staff, supplies, and equipment to manage and operate the center.”

The 2003 contract was arranged, according to GEO, “at the emergency request of ICE in 2003″ and offered the company “a unique opportunity.” Since responding positively to that emergency request, GEO says that it has “been successfully working with ICE in this unique environment and has developed professional working relationships with all of the federal agencies involved in the operation of the MOC.”

GEO is the company that also runs the largest privately run detention center–and also probably its worst–in Pecos, Texas. As Tom Barry reported last year, the Reeves County Detention Complex has been the site of two recent riots, several suicides, and numerous deaths from inadequate health care. Is this what awaits refugees from the Haitian earthquake?

Back in the 1990s, there was an outcry against the conditions for Haitian refugees at Guantanamo, especially a group of about 150 who had HIV. It was during this period that Bill Clinton set the stage for George W. Bush’s Guantanamo by asserting that anyone held there did not have any legal rights. As Brandt Goldstein pointed out in Slate in 2005:

We sometimes forget that during the Clinton presidency, the United States ran an extralegal detention camp on Guantanamo—and went to federal court to defend its right to do so. The camp during the Clinton years was by no means the nightmarish operation it is now; certainly, there weren’t allegations of torture. But Guantanamo under Clinton produced its own share of suffering and abuses—and perhaps most important for today, the court decision that shut it down was eventually wiped off the books, thanks to legal maneuvers by the Clinton Justice Department.

Some of the refugees who fled Haiti back in the early 1990s were eventually treated as asylum-seekers and admitted to the United States. But in 1994, with Haiti supposedly stabilized, the Clinton administration began shipping them home.  And according to a 2005 report cited by Fox News, the George W. Bush administration maintained that admitting Haitian refugees might “encourage other Haitians to embark on the risky sea travel and potentially trigger a mass asylum from Haiti to the United States.”

So unless the current administration reverses policy once again, any Haitians who might be taken to Guantanamo could be there for a while. This surely was not what Obama had in mind when he made his campaign promise to close the notorious prison camp.

In Haiti, home to the poorest of the poor, life for the old is always hard. In traditional Haitian culture, the “gran moun,” or elders, are respected and cared for by their families and communities, but dire poverty makes this difficult–and there is no government safety net for Haiti’s elderly.

AP photo

We tend to hear more about the injured and dying children than we do about the elders. While it’s true that a young life cut short may be the most tragic event of all, the human capacity for suffering is the same at every age. That is clear in a devastating article by Alfred de Montesquiou, with accompanying photographs, put out today by the AP. It tells of a group of nursing home residents in Port-au-Prince who are now without water, food, shelter, or medical care, and are basically waiting to die.

The old lady crawls in the dirt, wailing for her pills. The elderly man lies motionless as rats pick at his overflowing diaper. There is no food, water or medicine for the 85 surviving residents of the Port-au-Prince Municipal Nursing Home, barely a mile (1 1/2 kilometers) from the airport where a massive international aid effort is taking shape. “Help us, help us,” 69-year-old Mari-Ange Levee begged Sunday, lying on the ground with a broken leg and ribs. A cluster of flies swarmed the open fracture in her skull.

One man has already died, and administrator Jean Emmanuel said more would follow soon unless water and food arrive immediately. “I appeal to anybody to bring us anything, or others won’t live until tonight,” he said, motioning toward five men and women who were having trouble breathing, a sign that the end was near….

With six residents killed in the quake, the institution now has 25 men and 60 women camped outside their former home. Some have a mattress in the dirt to lie on. Others don’t.

As it was during Katrina, fear of violence from desperate residents seems to be impeding the aid effort in Haiti. It turned out after Katrina that many reports of violence were false or exagerrated–but the panic they caused cost many lives. Only time will tell whether the same is true in Haiti. But time is something this group of elders does not have.

Though very little food aid had reached Haitians anywhere by Sunday, Emmanuel said the problem was made worse at the nursing home because it is located near Place de la Paix, an impoverished downtown neighborhood.

Thousands of homeless slum dwellers have pitched their makeshift tents on the nursing home’s ground, in effect shielding off the elderly patients from the outside world with a tense maize of angry people, themselves hungry and thirsty.

“I’m pleading for everyone to understand that there’s a truce right now, the streets are free, so you can come through to help us,” said Emmanuel, 27, one of the rare officials not to have fled the squalor and mayhem. He insisted that foreign aid workers wouldn’t be in danger if they tried to cross through the crowd to reach the elderly group….

Jacqueline Thermiti, 71,…was surprisingly feisty for someone who hadn’t eaten since Tuesday. She attributed that to experience with hunger during earlier hardships. “But I was younger, and now there’s no water either,” she said. She predicted that unlike other pensioners, she could still hold out for at least another day.

“Then if the foreigners don’t come [with aid],” she said, “it will be up to baby Jesus.”