Channel 4 News reporter Jonathan Rugman reflects on the scenes he encountered in Haiti.
I am back in London after an extraordinary eight days in Haiti, and I am still trying to make sense of my emotions.
Firstly, there is anger. I am angry that it has taken so long for food and water and medical care to filter across the wreckage of Port-au-Prince. It seems pretty clear to me that the US military’s takeover of the main airport, vital as it was, was accompanied by some extraordinary decision-making on which planes could and could not land.
“There were congestion problems,” a British government official told me, rather lamely I thought, outside the airport last week.
“Congestion” is no excuse for turning back at least eight aid flights organised by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), when the priority in any disaster is saving lives.
The story is well set out by Doreen Carvajal in Saturday’s International Herald Tribune. Lives were lost because the situation was so chaotic, and while I recognise that the Americans were trying to make order out of chaos, mistakes were made.
MSF have been doing a fantastic job in Haiti this past week. The one thing I would have wished for, as I stood in open air hospitals amid the wounded and dying, was for a team of British doctors and surgeons to charter a plane and get out there fast. Perhaps it happened. Perhaps Harley Street’s conscience was pricked. The television pictures certainly spurred aid donations. But what was needed last week was medical expertise on the ground, and quickly.
Another issue which bothers me is the fate of our Haitian fixers Peterson, Robenson and Cleavens. When you work with Channel 4 News colleagues overseas, you share jokes, talk about office gossip, the general banter serving as a way of keeping your team’s spirits up.
Yet everywhere we went, we had a traumatised Haitian fixer in the car. They were not professional journalists and had not worked with the likes of us before. They were affected by the disaster they were helping us cover, because it had happened to them. They had lost friends or relatives. Cleavens was sleeping in the open air, along with his neighbours, in case of another aftershock.
I dread to think what they made of us. We gave them food and water as well as payment, and the last time I saw them they were carting off our petrol-fuelled electricity generator, but the look in our fixers’ eyes as we departed suggested reproach: we could leave, but they could not.