Haitian horrors

Twenty years ago, in 1991, I was shown round the National Palace in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. A government official led me through long rococo halls crammed with oriental rugs, gilded boule clocks and vases of deep pink roses. Little had changed since Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier had fled Haiti in 1986. The Hall of Busts was lined with bronze heads of other Haitian presidents up to Elie Lescot in 1946. However, the bust of Jean-Claude’s dictator father ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier had been removed to the ‘Dépot de Débris’, where it lay covered in dust.

On 12 January 2010, the National Palace was turned to dust in an earthquake. The convulsions lasted just 60 seconds, but a more graphic image of municipal chaos would be hard to imagine: the heart of Haiti’s national and civic life had been pulverised. An estimated 200,000 people died that day in Port-au-Prince alone.