Haiti's post-disaster disaster

Was there a post-disaster disaster in Haiti? In other words, was the relief operation that followed the 2010 earthquake in "the Republic of NGOs" - a fiasco?

There are now so many well-documented criticisms - the latest is Jonathan Katz's book, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a A Disaster - that surely there's a need for a independent inquiry to attempt an assessment of the performance of NGOs, the United Nations and a government facing an avalanche of uncoordinated advisers.

The problem is that the task is so big that the inquiry itself might be overwhelmed. Perhaps different groups should look at themselves, focussing on specific questions. The UN, for example, on why its response to the charge that the cholera epidemic originated in the UN peacekeepers' camp was so lamentable, or why the agreed claims commission for Haitians' grievances was never established. An international media group could investigate and document whether reporters flown in for a few days to cover the emergency took the easy option by reporting the comments of the NGOs and the UN as gospel instead of treating them as part of the cacophony of voices with their own vested interests.

And NGOs could focus on one of the points made in Pooja Bhatia's review of Katz's book in the London Review of Books: "...that's perhaps the biggest problem with aid in Haiti, both private charity (such as the American Red Cross, which received almost half a billion dollars in private donations) and public aid: it's opaque and unaccountable. It's hard to find out even how much is spent on foreigners' salaries and benefits versus services and goods for Haitians. Many of the sins that Haitian officials are accused of - dishonesty, incompetence, lack of transparency - are manifest in their accusers' own practices."