The Culture of United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH)

Brazil, Haiti and the MINUSTAH

By Jean H Charles:




I visited Brazil twenty years ago, as a globe trotter who cherished the joy of travelling, despite my trip to Brazil. I told my travel companion Eddy Harper at the end of our journey, one should not visit a country just because a plane can bring you there. I was warned before my departure that one should be very careful of your belongings, including your own ears or eyes.

They could be taken for sale as fresh organs. My bracelet that I held tightly in my hand to prevent its theft, was stolen anyway. The carnival in Rio, with a public relations machine well oiled all over the world, was for me a deception. It was a fine orchestrated exercise for the tourists (contrary to Trinidad and Tobago) with no personal participation.

I flew to Salvador de Bahia to taste the remnants of the black culture; I was not deceived. Yet my conclusion that one should not travel to a country just because a scheduled airline made the journey there was confirmed in Salvador. In the middle of the night walking around the colonial streets of the city, I was surprised to found the bustling business of the hour was the sale of coffins. An epidemic in the area was killing the citizens by the thousand.

Back in Rio, amidst the splendor of the beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana, the squalor of the hills surrounding the city was threatening and menacing. The hypocrisy of the slogan: one nation, one people was mining the ethos of the society. A part of Pele, known all over the world for his skills in the sport of football/soccer, amidst the large black population one cannot find a single emerging black star in politics, the arts, science and education in Brazil.

The larger society was not in better shape, I remember my conversation with a young white teacher on the beach of Ipanema, doubling her life as a school teacher with one of a part time prostitute because her salary was not sufficient to provide a decent living.

Things have improved since in Brazil, with the advent of Ignacio Lula, who recognized social integration and upward mobility as a government policy.

Brazil was in an enviable position to help usher into Haiti a climate of hospitality for all, with the big brother holding the hands of the junior one. Passionate about soccer, the Haitian people have adopted Brazil as their idol nation. There were deaths of passion in Haiti following a football match between Argentina and Brazil. (That passion has been transmuted today onto Messi of Barcelona in Spain, revered as a demi-god.)

Brazil, with its size and its limitless resources, had hemispheric hegemonic ambition. Lula planned to use its leadership of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) in Haiti, to help his country obtain a seat on the Security Council. That goal has been a complete failure and disappointment. After the questioning suicide of the Brazilian general in Haiti, Brazil could not find another national to succeed at the helm of the mission. The Guatemalan, Edmund Mulet, whose arrogance equals only his excellent command of French, is decried on the walls of Port au Prince with the same intensity as Rene Preval, the despised Haitian president.

The MINUSTAH culture is one of make believe in most of the operations concerning its mission of stabilization of the country. A mammoth military operation in a nation at peace with itself is as out of place as an elephant moving around in a small living room.

Small countries like Nepal are competing and bidding against big ones like China to get the prime risk funding just for parading on the street of Port au Prince, forcing children to wake up at 5.00 am to reach their school destination on time amongst the crowded streets of Port au Prince.

The police as well as the military unit operates a vast cottage industry designed to provide employment to expatriates from forty nations, while providing absolutely no service or at least limited service that impacts the Haitian population in security, police, training and education and development.

The talk around the water cooler at the headquarters in Geneva or in New York is that a tour of duty in Haiti is a plum placement. You will find sun, sand, docile and attractive women, tasty food, strong and exotic culture during combat and prime risk duty while feigning to stabilize the country with words instead of action. An astute anthropologist or sociologist would have a field day studying Haiti at the age of its colonization by the United Nations.

As a detached or interested observer, I am watching the complete disintegration of Haitian society under the watch of the UN Mission of Stabilization. Starting with the women and the young people that represent the fragile segment of the nation, they exhibit coping mechanisms with pathological manifestations that will compromise the foreseeable future of the nation.

The aftermath of the earthquake and the cholera epidemic (brought by the UN into Haiti) should have been an incentive to rebuild a new Haiti hospitable to all, where the security of the environment, public health and public security would be the hallmark of the government.

Haiti is being instead quickly Africanized at its worst, with refugee camps in public places as well as on the golf courses. The indecency in public policy is being plotted, implemented, and applauded by most international institutions.

One hundred fifty years ago (1864) the Vatican stood up as the only entity to support a nation ostracized by the entire world for daring to stand up against the world order of slavery. Haiti needs today one friendly country in the world that would stand up to support with strategies, finance and technical assistance its growing opposition, thirsty for a complete break with the culture of squalor imposed upon the country during the last sixty years.

I have not seen nor heard one nation in the whole world that raises a finger to say that I am ready for the challenge!

February 19, 2011

caribbeannewsnow

Bahamas Blog International

Haiti, a transition from squalor to squalor; or from squalor to splendor

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

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International

It is time to halt the impending disaster in Haiti

By Jean H Charles:


There has been rain every day since the beginning of the rainy season in Haiti. The weather experts have predicted some twenty-three hurricanes till October. More than one million refugees are living in sordid condition under tents that now have holes in them in a setting where torrential rain will pour in from the scorched mountain-land, deprived of trees. Yet the chief of the United Nations in Haiti, embedded with the Preval government. has no other emergency action than the election preparation.

The civil society, the political parties, the masses of Haiti have all decided not to go into the electoral process with this present government. All his elections have been flawed, with the use of political terror as the best instrument to keep opponents at bay. Mr Edmund Mulet has embarked upon the mulette (donkey in the Creole language) of Preval to be the cheerleader for a flawed election that will seal the status quo of squalor for another five years in Haiti.

It is time for John Holmes, the United Nations Humanitarian Chief, to halt the impending disaster. Some sixteen years ago, 800.000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered in Rwanda under the watch of Kofi Annan as the UN representative in that country. Mr Holmes has twice expressed his frustration and his outrage at the slow pace of relief to the refugees in Haiti. Showing his displeasure is not enough. Real life is at risk. Another Rwanda (a former UN trust territory) is on the way in Haiti, caused by preventable natural conditions.

An impartial finding should reveal that the main obstacle to relief for the people of Haiti is the very Haitian government. The largest land owner in the Republic of Haiti is first and foremost the Haitian government, followed by the Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church. By not releasing land for the resettlement or urging the refugees to return to their villages with adequate support for self sustenance, the government is compromising the recovery.

The Haitian government at home and abroad has no idea how to run the business of governance for the benefit of his people. A case at point, I was at the Caribbean Week in New York hobnobbing with the tourism ministers and the directors of tourism from all over the Caribbean.

I asked the CTO coordinator (Caribbean Tourism Organization) why Haiti was not represented at the market place? He told me for years he has been trying to lure Haiti into participating to the exchange. He has sent several e-mails to the minister of tourism. He finally met him; the laconic answer of Lionel Delatour, Haiti’s tourism minister reflects the familiar arrogance of his ministry. “I have received your many e-mails, and, I did not open them.”

A recent editorial in the New York Times, reproduced by National Public Radio, pictures the callous nature and the poor planning of the Haitian government. A temporary shelter built near the old military airport, ‘stands mostly empty with battered tents, flapping in the wind, guarded and waiting for a refugee influx that has not been arranged.’ The facility was visited in March by the writer who returned in June to find out that the camp is still unoccupied.

In the United States, advocacy by politicians and ordinary citizens have forced the American government to grant TPS (temporary protection status) to the Haitian people, as those from Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Poor communication and timid leadership from the Haitian ministry abroad or the Haitian consulates have resulted in a low participation in the program. Out of 300,000 estimated illegal Haitian entrants, only 40,000 Haitian people have profited from the policy that will stop as of July 20, 2010.

The generosity of the world towards the Haitian people is on the verge of going to waste due to the arrogance of the senior UN resident, Mr Edmond Mulet, and the callousness of the Haitian government. The Haitian people will have to deal with its government. It is time for John Holmes to deal with his agent in Haiti and halt the impending disaster!

June 12, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International