HANDOUTS TO HAITI IS NOT THE ANSWER

Handouts not the answer, says Haitian filmmaker
BILLIONS of dollars in aid for Haiti will be wasted if the international community does not dramatically change its approach to the devastated Caribbean nation, a former minister for culture says.

Award-winning filmmaker Raoul Peck said the world's ''strictly humanitarian approach'' focusing on food handouts in the aftermath of the January earthquake had caused a ''victimisation'' of Haiti's people and did not consider how to empower them and create a sustainable future.

''That doesn't really help the country recover in terms of economical growth,'' he said.

Peck, who was culture minister briefly in the mid-1990s before returning to filmmaking, has worked on international development projects, won a lifetime achievement award from Human Rights Watch and was awarded an Order of Arts and Literature in France.

His visit to Sydney coincides with screenings of his powerful Haitian political allegory Moloch Tropical, selected for the Sydney Film Festival's $60,000 official competition, yesterday and today at the State Theatre. His socio-political films, such as Lumumba (2000), have won widespread acclaim.

The quake left more than 250,000 dead and 1.5 million homeless and Peck said if done properly, rebuilding Haiti was an opportunity for positive change.

But instead of bringing in ''massive aid in terms of rice and oil'' or care packages, giving its people money would have been better, he said.

''We have had experiences before where for each camp of 600 people, you could give the money to a group of 30 women and they organise the camp.They cook, they serve warm meals and make sure that everything goes well … Then you would have brought the economical flow in shape again.''

If aid continued to be just humanitarian - rather than for developing a sustainable future - the billions of dollars being spent would weaken Haiti and have been wasted, he said.

''Unless we are able to reverse the kind of thinking [on aid], we're going to spend the whole $10 or $11 billions on nothing … Haiti will have very little left to show for it.

''As long as you keep [only] feeding people, you're not giving them work, you're not giving them changes to rebuild their life.''

Haiti should be able to put forward its own plan, he said. ''But one should not be naive: it's also about power … and the normal, accepted view that you go the Third World so that you get to decide what's going on.''

Peck acknowledged the situation was very difficult and complex and the government was overwhelmed, but said improvements were taking too long. ''We are almost in the middle of the rainy season and still the majority of the people who were under tents [after the quake] are still living under tents.''

Moloch Tropical, which Peck directed, produced and co-wrote, focuses on the end times of a fictional Haitian president and his inner circle in a regime marked by corruption, torture and thuggery, sexual misconduct and other abuses, as well as self-delusion. The themes were drawn from past Haitian regimes, Peck said, but he depicted a ''democratically elected'' president to make the point that such elements were also present in legitimately elected governments.

''It's a phenomenon that's not only [to do] with Haiti … those are things happening today in our democracies.''