Last week started with a con­fer­ence in Mon­treal, called by a group of gov­ern­ments and inter­na­tional agen­cies call­ing them­selves Friends of Haiti, to dis­cuss the long and short term needs of the recently dev­as­tated Caribbean nation. Even as corpses remained under the earthquake’s rub­ble and the gov­ern­ment oper­ated out of a police sta­tion, the assem­bled “friends” would not com­mit to can­celling Haiti’s $1bn debt. Instead they agreed to a 10-year plan with no details, and a com­mit­ment to meet again – when the bod­ies have been buried along with cov­er­age of the coun­try – some­time in the future.

A few days later in Wash­ing­ton, Tim­o­thy Gei­th­ner, the US trea­sury sec­re­tary, came before the house over­sight com­mit­tee to explain why he paid top dol­lar for $85bn worth of toxic assets when he bailed out the insur­ance com­pany AIG. Gei­th­ner said he was faced with a “tragic choice”. “The moral, fair and just choice is to pro­tect the inno­cent,” he said.

There is no con­nec­tion between these two events. But in the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion maybe there should be. The world can­not yet find $1bn in debt relief for Haiti, the poor­est coun­try in the west­ern hemi­sphere, a coun­try that spent more in 2008 ser­vic­ing its debt than it did on health, edu­ca­tion and the envi­ron­ment com­bined and that has now been flat­tened. But, over a week­end, a sin­gle coun­try could rus­tle up $85bn to keep a sin­gle com­pany in busi­ness. It is an obscene reminder that, in the world of global cap­i­tal, dis­tressed assets are still more val­ued than dis­tressed people.

The scale, urgency and deter­mi­na­tion with which west­ern gov­ern­ments moved to sal­vage a bro­ken sys­tem stands in stark con­trast to their lag­gardly, inad­e­quate and neg­li­gent approach when it comes to res­cu­ing a bro­ken soci­ety. I refer here not to the emer­gency aid oper­a­tions in Haiti, which, given the logis­ti­cal obsta­cles of oper­at­ing in a crushed nation, have been impres­sive. Nor to the char­i­ta­ble dona­tions from all over the world that prove that peo­ple are far more gen­er­ous than the gov­ern­ments they elect. But to the resources and long-term sys­temic solu­tions that Haiti needs and the west could sum­mon – if it so desired.

The recent earth­quake was an act of nature. But the mag­ni­tude of the dev­as­ta­tion, the con­se­quent human toll and the inabil­ity of the coun­try to recover unaided are the prod­uct of its polit­i­cal and eco­nomic mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion. Haiti was not so much a dis­as­ter wait­ing to hap­pen as a dis­as­ter that kept hap­pen­ing, but that too few cared about. Haiti needs a bailout. And if it does not get one the dis­as­ters will never end.

A recent UN study on the impact of 21 nat­ural dis­as­ters on heav­ily indebted poor coun­tries con­cluded that rebuild­ing costs leave long-term finan­cial bur­dens. The UN’s trade and devel­op­ment body found that a nat­ural dis­as­ter leads to a 24 percentage-point increase in a country’s debt-to-GDP ratio.

“Shocks on such a scale can lead to a vicious cycle of eco­nomic dis­tress, more exter­nal bor­row­ing, bur­den­some debt ser­vic­ing and insuf­fi­cient invest­ment to mit­i­gate future shocks,” it said.

Like a movie­goer walk­ing into a thriller halfway through, those unfa­mil­iar with Hait­ian his­tory could be for­given for mis­tak­ing the vil­lains for the vic­tims and bene­fac­tors for male­fac­tors. For it was not sim­ply a mix­ture of bad gov­er­nance and even worse luck that got Haiti to this place (though they have played their part). Haiti is not a failed state; it’s a state that has been failed since its birth, and pre­cisely because of the nature of its birth.

Haiti gained its inde­pen­dence from France in 1804 through a slave rebel­lion – the first post­colo­nial, inde­pen­dent black-led nation in the world. For this audac­ity they would pay for gen­er­a­tions. Napoleon told one of his min­is­ters at the time: “The free­dom of the negroes, if recog­nised in St Domingue [as Haiti was then known] and legalised by France would at all times be a ral­ly­ing point for freedom-seekers of the New World.” The US pres­i­dent Thomas Jef­fer­son was sim­i­larly con­cerned that Haiti would set a bad example.

The US refused to recog­nise the new coun­try for more than half a cen­tury, and would then go on to occupy it for 20 years between the wars. The French bur­dened it with a puni­tive debt the coun­try shoul­dered for over a century.

Both the US and France backed the Duva­liers’ bru­tal dic­ta­tor­ships and when demo­c­ra­tic gov­ern­ment did arrive it was hogtied by terms imposed by the IMF and the World Bank. Among other things, rigged trade agree­ments trans­formed Haiti from a self-sufficient rice pro­ducer to import­ing the bulk of its rice from sub­sidised grow­ers in the US. When Haiti fined Amer­i­can rice mer­chants $1.4m in 2000 for allegedly evad­ing cus­toms duties, the US responded by freez­ing $30m in aid. With friends like these, Haiti does not need enemies.

So Haiti’s bailout would not be an act of char­ity, but reim­burse­ment and repa­ra­tion. This is not a hand out but a hand back. In terms of Haiti’s needs, it would be the begin­ning not the end. The coun­try needs invest­ment in its social and civic infra­struc­ture so that it can shape its own future. It needs the kind of long-term inter­est from hon­est bro­kers that does not arrive for a coup or dis­as­ter and then leave when the cam­eras are gone.

A few months after Pres­i­dent Betrand Aris­tide was ousted in a coup in 2004, Kofi Annan, the UN sec­re­tary gen­eral, told the UN forces: “The stakes are high. This time let us get it right.” A month later I vis­ited the town of St Marc to find the Red Cross cen­tre had only one (bro­ken) ambu­lance; the chief inspec­tor of police had no walkie-talkies and one car; the town hall had no phones, and few tables or chairs; and its unelected deputy mayor had not been paid for four months. The stakes were high. But they did not even come close to get­ting it right.

The west owes Haiti. And yet still it keeps try­ing to extort more from the mis­ery. The liv­ing had not yet been pulled from the debris when the vul­tures started cir­cling. A day after the earth­quake The Street, an invest­ment web­site, pub­lished “An oppor­tu­nity to heal Haiti”, claim­ing: “Here are some com­pa­nies that could poten­tially ben­e­fit: Gen­eral Elec­tric, Cater­pil­lar, Deere, Fluor, Jacobs Engineering.”

James Dob­bins, a spe­cial envoy to Haiti under Pres­i­dent Clin­ton and direc­tor of the Inter­na­tional Secu­rity and Defence Pol­icy Cen­tre at the Rand Cor­po­ra­tion, saw other pos­si­bil­i­ties. “This dis­as­ter is an oppor­tu­nity to accel­er­ate oft-delayed reforms,” he argued. The reforms included “break­ing up or at least reor­gan­is­ing the government-controlled tele­phone monop­oly”, and restruc­tur­ing the ports. In other words, pri­vatis­ing what lit­tle is left of the country’s state enterprises.

It is dif­fi­cult to see what more the west could extract from a coun­try where half the pop­u­la­tion strug­gle to eat once a day and peo­ple pay to have their ­chil­dren sold to fam­i­lies in the neigh­bour­ing Domini­can Repub­lic. Tragic choices indeed.

When they believe some­thing to be a pri­or­ity, west­ern gov­ern­ments can for­give bad loans, pump out money and ease restric­tions on credit. They have done it to save the wealthy from them­selves; now they must do it to save the poor from the wealthy.