WASHINGTON The fierce earthquake that hit Haiti, causing massive destruction and loss of life, may also have shattered the destitute country's fragile recovery, experts have warned.

“It's not only unprecedented damage and destruction, but it has abruptly stopped what seemed to be a lot of momentum,” said Bob Perito, an expert on post-conflict peace at the US Institute for Peace.

The earthquake, the worst to hit Haiti in over a century, may have killed as many as 100,000 people, according to Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.

It left the capital Port-au-Prince in ruins with some of the city's sturdiest structures, including the presidential palace, ministries and office buildings, damaged beyond repair.

After a history scarred by political violence and natural disasters, including hurricanes and flooding, Haiti's future had started to look brighter.

“There was so much hope about Haiti's future, hope that had not been present for years, and along comes Mother Nature and just flattens it,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The top US diplomat knows Haiti well and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, serves as a UN special envoy to the Caribbean nation.

He stressed in Thursday's Washington Post that Haiti had begun to turn a corner, with international aid groups, foreign governments and NGOs committing to plans for long-term development.

“These efforts will need to be amended because of Tuesday's disaster, but they cannot be abandoned,” Bill Clinton wrote.

“Before the earthquake I believed that Haiti was closer than ever to securing a bright future. Despite this tragedy, I still believe that Haiti can succeed.”

Perito said that before the disaster “people could feel that things were getting better”.

“The economy had begun to show some positive growth, one or two per cent.

“There were some new investments coming in. A hotel chain had announced...that they would build a new hotel. New investments in the textile industry,” he told AFP.

In September 2008 Haiti suffered through four massive storms that killed 800 people and caused billions of dollars of damage.

“In response to that, the UN had led the international community to provide a lot of money and a rather enthusiastic response to rebuild Haiti,” Perito said.

He warned the psychological impact of the quake “is going to be very severe”.

In the short-term, it would likely make it impossible to hold legislative elections planned for February, or presidential elections scheduled for 2011.

Phil Nieburg, an expert on natural disasters at the Centre for Strategic International Studies in Washington, said the long-term consequences for Haiti would depend on the damage to its critical infrastructure.

Noting that Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, he warned that “if the port is destroyed, as someone told me, there won't be elevators to unload ships for weeks or months”.

“In the next six months, a serious challenge will be dealing with the displaced people of the disaster,” added Robert Maguire, a Haiti specialist at Trinity University in Washington.

He said the catastrophic scenes in the Haitian capital were partly the result of dangerous overcrowding in Port-au-Prince.

“This tragedy illustrates the need to decentralise more the investment and people in Haiti,” he told AFP.

Lack of investment in rural areas helped lead to an overcrowded Port-au-Prince “which became an unsustainable ecosystem with people piling on top of each other,” Maguire said.

“To change that would have cost a lot of money yesterday,” he added. “Now the cost will be much worse.”

Maguire nonetheless held out hope that international aid flooding to the nation would be used to tackle the overcrowding.

Haiti has a population of over nine million people and some two million people live in Port-au-Prince.—AFP