By Jean H Charles:
The story of Haiti is tragically the story of a wrong turn at each transition. Strangely this wrong turn has been micromanaged by a long hand with foreign gloves with good or bad intentions for the people of Haiti.
It all started in 1800 when Toussaint Louverture was at his apogee as the founding father of a possible nation that could be a model for a world where slavery was the order of the day.
According to J Michael Dash in Culture and Customs of Haiti, Toussaint emerged in 1799 as “the absolute authority of the whole island of Espanola, where the violence and anarchy of earlier years ended and prosperity was restored.”
CLR James in the Black Jacobins completed the picture of Haiti at the beginning of the nineteenth century: “Personal industry, social morality, public education, religious toleration, free trade, civic pride, racial equality was the corner stone of the emerging nation. Success crowned his labors. Cultivation prospered and the new Santo/Domingo/ aka Haiti began to shape itself with astonishing quickness.”
One would have thought that this Haiti could have been left alone to grow into a flourishing nation for the benefit of the entire world. The long hand of Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Emperor, with the support of the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, had other plans. A fleet of the best European soldiers was dispatched to Haiti to stop the nation building process.
Toussaint was captured and send to jail in France, where he died of pneumonia, but the roots of liberty were already too strong to wither. Still quoting Dash, “By the end of 1803, Napoleon had abandoned his now catastrophic New World adventure, his general, Rochambeau, gave up this futile struggle, retreating to the Mole St Nicholas, the same point at which Columbus had landed 300 years earlier, inaugurating European domination of Hispaniola.”
The transition of Haiti into a free, independent and prosperous nation was to last only the span of a blooming rose. Charles X, king of France, exacted a massive indemnity of 150 million francs, the equivalent 23 billion in today’s money, to compensate the French planters after 300 years of free labor. It took Haiti more than a century to complete the payment, forestalling crucial investment in education, agriculture and infrastructure.
In addition, France’s intervention in Haiti’s national politics facilitated the division of the country into two governments, the kingdom of Henry Christophe in the north, well organized and prosperous, and the republic of the west, disorganized, dysfunctional and bankrupt, run by Alexander Petion. Haiti has adopted the Petion model of governance.
His successor, Jean Pierre Boyer, continued the culture of ill governance throughout the island. At the death of Henry Christophe, the massive treasure of the kingdom was put into a kitty outside of the national budget, starting the process of corruption in place now with the Preval government -- the Petro-Caribe account is outside of the purview of the Finance Minister.
According to Dash, “The seeds of national disaster were planted in this period as politics increasingly became a game of rivalry among urban elites and marked by insurrection, economic failures and parasitism.”
It did not take long for the Americans to intervene, as Haiti was descending into chronic disorder. It was occupied from 1915 to 1934 by the American government. In the end, using Dash’s language, “The United States simply exacerbated a phenomenon that had plagued the Haitian economy since 1843, the extraction of surplus from the peasantry by a non productive state. Perhaps the greatest single lasting effect of the occupation was the centralizing of state power in Port au Prince.”
Dash put it best: “The occupation left Haiti with very much the same destructive socioeconomic problems that it inherited from its colonial past. Beneath the veneer of political stability lay the same old problems of a militarized society; the ostracism of the peasantry and an elite divided by class and color rivalry.”
The decade of the 70s ushered in a wrong turn for Haiti after the rather peaceful governance of Paul Eugene Magloire. On his return from an adulated visit to the United States, where he was received by both branches of Congress, hubris or unfortunate advice settled in. He tried to remain in power beyond the constitutional mandate, throwing the country into a social, economic and political crisis that has now lasted fifty years.
The transition from Duvalier pere to Duvalier fils, causing thirty-five years of failed growth under the dictatorial regimes, was orchestrated by the very American Ambassador in Haiti. It took all the courage and the bravura of the Haitian people to root out the Duvalier government from the grip of power.
The populism concept of governance in place since the 90s has completed the final descent of Haiti into the abyss. Jean Bertrand Aristide was returned to power from exile under the principle of constitutional stability by a 20,000 American army troops under the leadership of Bill Clinton as commander in chief.
Rene Preval, who succeeded Aristide, was returned for a second term into power by the strategic maneuvers of Edmund Mulet, the United Nations chief representative in Haiti. After five years of poor, ineffective leadership, the same Mulet is orchestrating the concept of Preval after Preval. He has perfected, after the earthquake, the concept of disaster profiteering. Vast pieces of land that belong to the State of Haiti are being now subleased to well-connected affiliates of the government, to be resold at inflated price to the Reconstruction authority.
Will the people of Haiti succeed in stopping the political, economic, social and environmental abyss through this transition? Or will a sector of the international community continue to have the upper hand in preserving and incubating the status quo?
“Have no fear!” should be the mantra for those who forecast doom for Haiti without Preval!
The Haitian Constitution foresees that the Chief of the Supreme Court shall take command in case of presidential vacancy. To help him govern, Haiti has a range of qualified experts to facilitate the international community to come to the rescue of the refugees and rekindle the recovery.
They range from veterans in rural development expertise as Pierre D Sam, formerly a FAO expert with stints in Burundi, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Togo, Senegal, Lesotho, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Haiti. Or Haiti has young lions such as Dore Guichard or Jean Erich Rene, economists and agronomists, who drafted, with the support of luminaries from the Diaspora and the mainland, a twenty-five-year plan for Haiti’s recovery.
A select committee of the Committee of Foreign Affairs of the United States Senate has recently made a finding that “Haiti has made little progress in rebuilding in the five months since its earthquake because of an absence of leadership, disagreements among donors and general disorganization… the rebuilding has stalled since the January 12, disaster. President Rene Preval and his Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive have not done an effective job of communicating to Haiti that it is in charge and ready to lead the rebuilding effort.”
Vent viré! The wind is turning in the right direction!
Marc Bazin, a Haitian political leader who has tried for the last thirty years, to change the culture of nihilism from inside, is an indication that the assault against the status quo from outside must regain strength until the dismantling of the squalor politics to usher in the politics of splendor.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I should have been in the Preval camp. His newlywed wife is like my little niece. Our family is entangled with strong bond spanning more than a century of close relationships. Her great-grandmother was the companion of my grandmother in business, social and family links, her late grandmother and my mother of ninety years old have continued these bonds, her mother is like an elder sister. Hopefully, the children will continue the tradition of friendship and support. as such this is not a personal vendetta.
Yet the cries and the anguish of 9 million people, including 1.5 refugees under tents at the eve of a pregnant hurricane season, demand a break from the past to usher in a government hospitable to the majority.
June 26, 2010
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Showing posts with label Duvalier fils. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Duvalier fils. Show all posts
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Haiti and its flawed electoral process!
By Jean H Charles:
The Haitian Constitution stipulates that regular presidential elections shall take place every five years on the last Sunday of November, with a presidential inauguration to take place on the following February 7, to correspond ab eternum to the day the Haitian people delivered themselves from the Duvalier dictatorial regime.
The earthquake of January 12, 2010, has destroyed the capital city of Port au Prince as well as surrounding cities of Jacmel, Leogane, Petit Goave and Grand Goave, with more than 1.7 million people sleeping under a tent, sometimes in the rain amidst squalor and the mud. Vital records have been destroyed, the dead have been cremated without proper state sponsored identification and the Preval government has exhibited a culture of deception, corruption, and perversion of the electoral process. It is a perfect storm to create a disaster in lives lost in the next few months. It is also the perfect tool for maintaining the status quo through a flawed electoral process.
Yet the international community, through the voice of the OAS Assistant Secretary General Albert Ramdin, the United Nations representative Edmond Mulet, the CARICOM delegate PJ Patterson, is pushing full speed ahead for a flawed election to take place under the baton of Rene Preval, a master mind of cunning, double talk, and plain disregard for the plight of the majority of the Haitian people.
He personifies the man Paul Berman would qualify in his recent book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, as the Pretender, saying different things to different audiences with no truth and no conviction to either. He is neither a capitalist, nor a socialist, nor a nationalist. He is “a dark smudge of ambiguity”. Here are some relevant facts on Preval’s past election records.
* The election of April 6, 1997 was set for the renewal of one third of the Senate; he forced upon the electorate Fourell Celestin, a recently drug convicted. There was opposition from the Electoral Board, causing its president Leon Manus to be spirited by an American helicopter to safer pasture abroad to avoid injury to his person.
* The election of May 2000 as well as the election of November 26, 2000 was mired in irregularities and disfranchisement of the majority.
* The election of April 21, 2009 has repeated the canvass of the election of April 6, 1997, with President Preval incubating with state funds the candidates of notorious human rights violators. There was very low national participation.
He was on his way of forging ahead with his macabre plan of succeeding himself through his newlywed wife or one of his trusted companions when, to quote the malicious Haitian people, God got Himself into the fray and allowed the earthquake the very afternoon after a crucial meeting of Preval in the national palace to seal the election in his favor.
May 18 commemorates the weaving of the flag made with the blue and red piece of cloth from which the white piece symbolizing colonial France has been extirpated. On this very day of celebration, the people of Haiti are demonstrating en masse, on the street demanding the forced departure of the Preval government so they can go on with their lives, and ensure a fairly clean election.
Will Preval and the international community, through misguided policy, succeed in maintaining a status quo that will lead to disaster in the coming months of the hurricane season with millions of people at risk? Or will the Haitian people succeed in forging a new order of business in running the Republic of Haiti?
To solve this dilemma, I will peer into the history of the Haitian Revolution and the story of the United States Black Emancipation for inspiration as to the outcome of this David and Goliath re-enacting the biblical battle.
I am now 64 years old. I have only lived 11 years in my youth in the bliss of the dream of living in a country where hope was part of the staple of the daily life. Yet I belong to the 10 percent minority of Haitian people where the roof was sound, the food was always on the table and the best education was a given expectation and a reality.
For the past 50 years, the mass of Haitian have endured a living hell. Through dictatorial regimes Duvalier pere and Duvalier fils, through military regime, Namphy, Avril and, Regala, through the populism regimes of Aristide and Preval, through government of transition, Malval, Latortue, it has been for Haiti and for the Haitian people: the more things change, the more they remain the same.
The United Nations, through several acronyms:
* MICIVIH February 1993- May 1998 to support the embargo against Haiti
* UNMIH September 1993- Jun 1996 to support the American military intervention
* UNSMIH July 1996- 1997
* UNTMIH August 1997 – November 1997
* MIPONUH December 1997- March 2000
* MINUSTAH April 2004 to present
(Source: http://solutionshaiti.blogspot.com/2009/01/haiti-facts-and-foreign-occupation.html)
have promised that they will stand fast to support and help the Haitian people to gravitate towards a better life. Yet, Haiti has since been sinking deeper into bigger risk in food security, diminution of human life protection and severe environmental degradation. It was Edmond Mulet of the United Nations who picked up Rene Preval from his hamlet of Marmelade to help to catapult him into his second mandate. Mr Mulet has today the odious task of helping Preval to choose his successor.
The Haitian intellectual and political class has for once entered into a holy alliance with the masses to say no to this plan. They have decided that Haiti must enter into a new paradigm where the children will be fed and schooled, where taking a leaking boat to Miami or the Bahamas is a nightmare of the past, where the government will work with the Diaspora to create a land hospitable to all, where the flora will be replenished with precious wood such as mahogany. They also plan to unleash the creativity of the critical mass of Haitian people for their own benefit and their personal wealth accumulation.
The international community has responded with unusual humanity and compassion to the earthquake-stricken Haiti with ten billion dollars, the corrupt regime and the partisans of the status quo will easily sink $100 billion with no apparent result for the Haitian people. They have discovered a brand new concept: disaster profiteering.
It took the advent of Abraham Lincoln after sixty years the American Independence to recognize that “American slavery had been an offense that God was ready to see destroyed”. Frederic Douglass, the black American avenger, saw the Federalist War against the South as a path to the nation’s healing, even “when the cold and greedy earth drinks up the warm red blood of our patriot sons, brothers, husbands and fathers, carrying sorrow and agony into every household.”
Will the deaths of some 300,000 Haitian people be in vain? Parodying Lincoln “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds”! This is the rallying cry of the new Haitian coalition that plans to remake the Haitian Revolution of 1804 in 2011 not with bullets but with ballots. We need a culture of respect for the electoral process.
Indeed, two hundred years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte succumbing to the pressure from the former colonial planters of Haiti, formerly St Domingue, invaded the country to re-establish slavery dismantled by Toussaint Louverture. Napoleon succeeded in kidnapping Toussaint but the roots of liberty were too deep to be uprooted. The Haitian indigenous army rebuilt and energized by the Congress of May 18, 1803 submitted a definitive blow to slavery for the benefit of the entire world. The only predecessor to this epic story of defying slavery was a vain attempt by Spartacus against the Roman Empire in 73 BC!
The Western world has succeeded in realigning Haiti to a de facto slavery condition through the connivance of its own leaders after the assassination of the black avenger, Jean Jacques Dessalines, in 1807. Haiti is today, after two hundred years, a de facto apartheid regime. The labeling is cheap but the facts are convincing. Not one of the 565 rural hamlets of Haiti has received any funding for infrastructure and institution building. Seven million Haitian people out of the 9 million population live in extreme misery, neglect and ostracism from their own government.
The holy coalition amongst the Haitian civil society, the masses, the Diaspora, the intellectual class is determined to dismantle that status quo. No amount of intimidation and pressure from the Haitian government and its allies – the so-called friends of Haiti- will stop this new alliance. Haiti needs a café au lait revolution a la Martin Luther King or a la Nelson Mandela to create a culture of inclusion for the majority.
The Vatican some two hundred years ago was supporting slavery! It did oppose the recognition of Haiti! Victory is always on the side of morality. In the long run! There is a Creole proverb that says: la guerre avertie pa tue co-co be. Cicero said it best: Caveat Consules!
May 22, 2010
caribbeannetnews
The Haitian Constitution stipulates that regular presidential elections shall take place every five years on the last Sunday of November, with a presidential inauguration to take place on the following February 7, to correspond ab eternum to the day the Haitian people delivered themselves from the Duvalier dictatorial regime.
The earthquake of January 12, 2010, has destroyed the capital city of Port au Prince as well as surrounding cities of Jacmel, Leogane, Petit Goave and Grand Goave, with more than 1.7 million people sleeping under a tent, sometimes in the rain amidst squalor and the mud. Vital records have been destroyed, the dead have been cremated without proper state sponsored identification and the Preval government has exhibited a culture of deception, corruption, and perversion of the electoral process. It is a perfect storm to create a disaster in lives lost in the next few months. It is also the perfect tool for maintaining the status quo through a flawed electoral process.
Yet the international community, through the voice of the OAS Assistant Secretary General Albert Ramdin, the United Nations representative Edmond Mulet, the CARICOM delegate PJ Patterson, is pushing full speed ahead for a flawed election to take place under the baton of Rene Preval, a master mind of cunning, double talk, and plain disregard for the plight of the majority of the Haitian people.
He personifies the man Paul Berman would qualify in his recent book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, as the Pretender, saying different things to different audiences with no truth and no conviction to either. He is neither a capitalist, nor a socialist, nor a nationalist. He is “a dark smudge of ambiguity”. Here are some relevant facts on Preval’s past election records.
* The election of April 6, 1997 was set for the renewal of one third of the Senate; he forced upon the electorate Fourell Celestin, a recently drug convicted. There was opposition from the Electoral Board, causing its president Leon Manus to be spirited by an American helicopter to safer pasture abroad to avoid injury to his person.
* The election of May 2000 as well as the election of November 26, 2000 was mired in irregularities and disfranchisement of the majority.
* The election of April 21, 2009 has repeated the canvass of the election of April 6, 1997, with President Preval incubating with state funds the candidates of notorious human rights violators. There was very low national participation.
He was on his way of forging ahead with his macabre plan of succeeding himself through his newlywed wife or one of his trusted companions when, to quote the malicious Haitian people, God got Himself into the fray and allowed the earthquake the very afternoon after a crucial meeting of Preval in the national palace to seal the election in his favor.
May 18 commemorates the weaving of the flag made with the blue and red piece of cloth from which the white piece symbolizing colonial France has been extirpated. On this very day of celebration, the people of Haiti are demonstrating en masse, on the street demanding the forced departure of the Preval government so they can go on with their lives, and ensure a fairly clean election.
Will Preval and the international community, through misguided policy, succeed in maintaining a status quo that will lead to disaster in the coming months of the hurricane season with millions of people at risk? Or will the Haitian people succeed in forging a new order of business in running the Republic of Haiti?
To solve this dilemma, I will peer into the history of the Haitian Revolution and the story of the United States Black Emancipation for inspiration as to the outcome of this David and Goliath re-enacting the biblical battle.
I am now 64 years old. I have only lived 11 years in my youth in the bliss of the dream of living in a country where hope was part of the staple of the daily life. Yet I belong to the 10 percent minority of Haitian people where the roof was sound, the food was always on the table and the best education was a given expectation and a reality.
For the past 50 years, the mass of Haitian have endured a living hell. Through dictatorial regimes Duvalier pere and Duvalier fils, through military regime, Namphy, Avril and, Regala, through the populism regimes of Aristide and Preval, through government of transition, Malval, Latortue, it has been for Haiti and for the Haitian people: the more things change, the more they remain the same.
The United Nations, through several acronyms:
* MICIVIH February 1993- May 1998 to support the embargo against Haiti
* UNMIH September 1993- Jun 1996 to support the American military intervention
* UNSMIH July 1996- 1997
* UNTMIH August 1997 – November 1997
* MIPONUH December 1997- March 2000
* MINUSTAH April 2004 to present
(Source: http://solutionshaiti.blogspot.com/2009/01/haiti-facts-and-foreign-occupation.html)
have promised that they will stand fast to support and help the Haitian people to gravitate towards a better life. Yet, Haiti has since been sinking deeper into bigger risk in food security, diminution of human life protection and severe environmental degradation. It was Edmond Mulet of the United Nations who picked up Rene Preval from his hamlet of Marmelade to help to catapult him into his second mandate. Mr Mulet has today the odious task of helping Preval to choose his successor.
The Haitian intellectual and political class has for once entered into a holy alliance with the masses to say no to this plan. They have decided that Haiti must enter into a new paradigm where the children will be fed and schooled, where taking a leaking boat to Miami or the Bahamas is a nightmare of the past, where the government will work with the Diaspora to create a land hospitable to all, where the flora will be replenished with precious wood such as mahogany. They also plan to unleash the creativity of the critical mass of Haitian people for their own benefit and their personal wealth accumulation.
The international community has responded with unusual humanity and compassion to the earthquake-stricken Haiti with ten billion dollars, the corrupt regime and the partisans of the status quo will easily sink $100 billion with no apparent result for the Haitian people. They have discovered a brand new concept: disaster profiteering.
It took the advent of Abraham Lincoln after sixty years the American Independence to recognize that “American slavery had been an offense that God was ready to see destroyed”. Frederic Douglass, the black American avenger, saw the Federalist War against the South as a path to the nation’s healing, even “when the cold and greedy earth drinks up the warm red blood of our patriot sons, brothers, husbands and fathers, carrying sorrow and agony into every household.”
Will the deaths of some 300,000 Haitian people be in vain? Parodying Lincoln “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds”! This is the rallying cry of the new Haitian coalition that plans to remake the Haitian Revolution of 1804 in 2011 not with bullets but with ballots. We need a culture of respect for the electoral process.
Indeed, two hundred years ago, Napoleon Bonaparte succumbing to the pressure from the former colonial planters of Haiti, formerly St Domingue, invaded the country to re-establish slavery dismantled by Toussaint Louverture. Napoleon succeeded in kidnapping Toussaint but the roots of liberty were too deep to be uprooted. The Haitian indigenous army rebuilt and energized by the Congress of May 18, 1803 submitted a definitive blow to slavery for the benefit of the entire world. The only predecessor to this epic story of defying slavery was a vain attempt by Spartacus against the Roman Empire in 73 BC!
The Western world has succeeded in realigning Haiti to a de facto slavery condition through the connivance of its own leaders after the assassination of the black avenger, Jean Jacques Dessalines, in 1807. Haiti is today, after two hundred years, a de facto apartheid regime. The labeling is cheap but the facts are convincing. Not one of the 565 rural hamlets of Haiti has received any funding for infrastructure and institution building. Seven million Haitian people out of the 9 million population live in extreme misery, neglect and ostracism from their own government.
The holy coalition amongst the Haitian civil society, the masses, the Diaspora, the intellectual class is determined to dismantle that status quo. No amount of intimidation and pressure from the Haitian government and its allies – the so-called friends of Haiti- will stop this new alliance. Haiti needs a café au lait revolution a la Martin Luther King or a la Nelson Mandela to create a culture of inclusion for the majority.
The Vatican some two hundred years ago was supporting slavery! It did oppose the recognition of Haiti! Victory is always on the side of morality. In the long run! There is a Creole proverb that says: la guerre avertie pa tue co-co be. Cicero said it best: Caveat Consules!
May 22, 2010
caribbeannetnews
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