On the first anniversary of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, Verso is publishing a new and updated edition of Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment.
On publication, Damming the Flood was called the "first accurate analysis of recent Haitian history" by Paul Farmer, who has since been appointed by Bill Clinton as the Deputy UN Special Envoy to Haiti. This new edition contains a substantive new afterword covering the international response to the earthquake and the run up to the elections.
Published as a new and updated edition to mark one year since the earthquake that devastated Haiti, Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment should be considered the book on the region. To reiterate why, here is an exclusive excerpt from the book's new Afterword, entitled "From Flood to Earthquake," in which Hallward states,
In these intolerable circumstances, nothing short of popular remobilization on a massive scale, more powerful, more disciplined, more united and more resolute than before—nothing, in other words, short of the renewal of genuinely revolutionary pressure—holds out any real prospect of significant change for the majority of Haiti's people.
Peter Hallward gives his analysis of the tuition fees ("one of the most reactionary and ill-conceived pieces of legislation in this country's history") for the Times Higher Education. The piece is also a personal account of the protests of 9th December, including the injuring by police of Middlesex student Alfie Meadows.
My partner and I found him wandering in Parliament Square a little after 6pm, pale and distraught, looking for a way to go home. He had a large lump on the right side of his head.
Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, writes in the Guardian on yet another "shameful betrayal" of the Haitian people.
A new edition of Damming the Flood will be published on 12th January 2010, updated with a substantial new afterword addresssing the international response to the earthquake.
Almost everyone now accepts that the United Nations brought cholera to Haiti last month ... Probably as a result of UN negligence, more than 1,200 people are already dead and 20,000 infected, and the toll is set to rise rapidly over the coming weeks. So is the number and intensity of popular protests against this latest in a series of UN crimes and misadventures in Haiti in recent years, which include scores of killings and hundreds of alleged rapes.