Greece in the Mediterranean, like Haiti in the Caribbean, needs to start creating a new generation of citizens who accept the concept that duty is the reverse side of privilege... ...The nation will move forward when each citizen does his part, in paying taxes, in volunteering for the common good, and forsaking the vain desire of spending what you do not have...

Haiti, the Greece of the Caribbean

By Jean H Charles


St Lucia dubbed herself the Helen of the Caribbean.   Helen was that goddess of Greek mythology, daughter of the god Zeus and the goddess Leda.  She was so beautiful that she had hundreds of suitors, including king and princes.  Wedded to Menelaus, prince Paris of Sparta abducted Helena, causing the mythical Trojan War.

Because of the beauty of the land and the charm of its people, St Lucia was abducted by France and England successively some forty times, justifying the legendary surname of Helen.

Haiti’s connection with Greece has more to do with modern Greece than with Ancient Greece.   I was inspired by two recent columns in the New York Times to draw the comparison between Haiti and the debacle happening these days in Greece.

Russell Shorto in a New York Times Magazine essay: The way the Greesk live now laid down the underpinnings of the economic setback that caused social disruption in Greek society.

It all started with the legacy of the culture adopted during the Ottoman Empire.   Greece, abducted by the Arabs, tried to defend herself the way she knew best.   To fight the distant ruling of the Caliphate against paying taxes, the Greeks adopted the concept of fakelaki (little envelopes) for bribery or looking the other way.

The culture of faking the sentiment of patriotism according to Aris Hadjigeorgiou (a Greek writer) is now ingrained in insidious ways where upper echelons of Greek media intertwined with the political structure prevented reporting of financial mismanagement that may cloud any hope for resolving the crisis.

In business as in politics, mismanagement leads to debacle.   In such a situation, still citing Aris, the people who can, angle for escape routes abroad and the peasants flee to the cities.

National political leadership is at a low web.   The Greeks keep talking about Sarkozy, Merkel and Obama as the guiding lights to get them out of their mess.   Yet Greece was the mother of democracy where, before Christ the concept of collegiality, hospitality and patriotic instinct was the norm in the res-republica.

Patriotism or the lack thereof is not only the province of the Greek boundaries.  An article in the New York Times 1 March edition described how some Russian immigrants who settled themselves in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn have organized themselves to bilk successively the health system, the housing industry and the insurance business.   (Who says the communist system produce good citizens?)

According to a senior law officer prosecuting the case, “The Russian mind set is: if you are not scamming the government, you are not doing what you are supposed to be doing, you are looked upon as a patsy.”   The Soviet system helped to groom a generation of post Soviet criminals in the United States with a culture that breeds disdain for the rules and a willingness to cheat to get around them.

Transporting ourselves into the Caribbean, we find the same scenario in Haiti, the motherland of nation-building.

There is a huge discrepancy between the concept of liberty, equality and fraternity enshrined in the Haitian flag and the reality on the ground.

Jean Pierre Boyer, the third president of Haiti, introduced a rural code in article 19 and 20th that prevented any store to operate wholesale or retail in any of the rural counties of the country, as such blocking national commerce in the hinterland.

While it is not the law of the land today, it is still the practice.   The majority of the people who live in the rural areas are regarded as marginal citizens who can be exploited on a whim.   Boyer, who agreed to pay to France the indemnity debt of 15 million francs, laid upon the peasants and the Dominican territory, then part of Haiti, the tax earmarked to pay the ransom.  The Dominicans rebelled, leading to their independence on February 27 1844.

The Haitian peasants are still under the yoke of that political, economic and social discrimination, which explains why Haiti is so poor.

The rest of the population, akin to the Greeks, develops a fake patriotism culture that makes the country an easy prey for foreign meddling.   Successively, the French, the Germans and the Americans, through usury loans to satisfy the debt, contributed to exacerbating the contradictions that nourish unpatriotic sentiments in Haiti.  The Haitian governments were almost without exception predatory governments that used state resources to either remain in power or to terrorize their own population.

The promotion of common good, the very essence of government, is replaced by the naked search for individual interest and advantages.   This practice vitiates even the altruistic motivation.   The non-profit organizations, national and international, established in the country found it easy to engage in the fake service mode, compounding the misery of the population.   The United Nations, with its gargantuan scheme, the MINUSTHA, is one of the biggest culprits.   Haiti, under the guise of prime war assignment, is one of the most coveted foreign posts.

The perversion of the term of democracy is pervasive.   From the former president Rene Preval, who prescribed the doctrine of each for thyself to the present legislature that puts roadblock at each step of the executive because entrenched interests have not been satisfied, we have a country that keeps failing to become a nation.

Greece in the Mediterranean, like Haiti in the Caribbean, needs to start creating a new generation of citizens who accept the concept that duty is the reverse side of privilege.   The nation will move forward when each citizen does his part, in paying taxes, in volunteering for the common good, and forsaking the vain desire of spending what you do not have.   It was Abraham Lincoln who promoted the notion that a nation is the aggregate sum of moral citizens working for the common good, providing individual satisfaction for each one.

To conclude, I would like to share this poem posted on the web by the prolific Haitian poet-attorney, Serge H Moise:

These loudmouths
They always know what to do
And once at the helm of affairs
One never sees them hone
What they say they wanted to redo
They grow like leopards
Yet these are just the loudmouths
And once the situation is confused
They meet every empty handed
They can be heard on FM signal
Play to flaunt
They are also at Ramasse
Where the same hackneyed
Verbiage is
As for those in the Diaspora
They do not care that they will
Praising exuberantly all skills
Unable to imitate their bosses
Militating in action and advance their holes
They are intoxicated with their megalomania
They are available as saviors
Always turn out cheaters
And when the situation is confused
They meet every empty handed
With their air of buffoons
Attitudes of cowards
Those who treat us to con
Seem to be right
Despite these claims
Devoid of convictions
The small republic back
Curling up on the ridiculous

March 6, 2012

caribbeannewsnow

Haiti's Election November 28, 2010: I am voting for Michel Martelly!

I am voting for Michel Martelly!
By Jean Hervé Charles



The election of November 28, 2010 represents a seminal transitional corner for Haiti in the Caribbean (it shares that auspicious Sunday with Ivory Coast in Africa). The island country will either go back to the squalor of the past under a new cover or it will leap forward into a renaissance that will bring not only Haiti but the whole Caribbean into a sustainable growth mode.

With its ten million creative and resilient (albeit uneducated citizens), its natural beauty of gigantic mountains surrounding the villages and the cities, Haiti under a proper government can become the Singapore of the Caribbean. The question is whether the retrograde culture of Duvalier, Aristide and Preval that has been the staple politics looming over Haiti during the past sixty years can be uprooted to plant a culture of solidarity and hospitality towards and amongst each other?

2010 can rightfully being described as an annum miserabilis for Haiti. The successive wave of misery started at the dawn of the New Year with an earthquake that shook the land under the capital and the surrounding cities, killing more than 300.000 people and sending 1.5 million citizens to live under tents in fetid condition.

The earthquake during the winter was followed by flooding during the spring, hurricane during the summer and an outbreak of cholera during the fall, causing more than one thousand deaths and sixteen thousand infected and in hospitalization. Under those circumstances, the Haitian people have remained calm, resilient and conducting business as usual as imposed by the obligation of daily survival.

Recently, the people of the northern part of the country, endowed with a culture of defiance inherited from Henry Christophe, the first Haitian king, have embarked into a fight to derail the election -- dubbed a selection -- and to demand the withdrawal of the UN forces – in particular the Nepalese contingent accused of bringing the cholera virus into Haiti and the Caribbean. The same contingent is also accused of the murder by hanging of a young lad who used to do errands for the army personnel.

In that environment, nineteen candidates are vying to become the next president of Haiti. The five front runners represent a canvas of the old guard reconfigured with new color plus two new kids on the block: M for Martelly and M for Manigat.

If the eyes of the world can suffice to protect the ballots against the manipulation of the government for its preferred candidate, I am predicting the last electoral fight will be between the two Ms: Martelly and Manigat.

Mrs Mirlande Manigat, the spouse of the former President Manigat, holds a PhD in political science from the Sorbonne in France; she is the vice dean of a private university, Quisqeya University. She was riding a wave of good will from the populace until a story from a Mexican newspaper indicated she has entered into a secret deal with the Preval government to share the political cake with her, holding the presidency while yielding the prime ministry to Preval.

Joseph Martelly has been the Haitian bad boy, the equivalent of Howard Stern in the Haitian media. As the leader of a musical band named Sweet Micky, he did not hesitate to confront the mores of the Haitian culture that refrain from vulgarity and plain language. Yet as a candidate, he pointed the right finger at the de facto apartheid condition existing in Haiti. On television, in the national debate he accused the other candidates of being part of the problem for presiding one way or the other in the policy making that led to the disastrous Haitian situation prevailing in the last twenty years.

I met Martelly recently as we were boarding the same plane traveling from Kennedy airport to Port au Prince, Haiti. I told him of my fascination for his vision of a Haiti hospitable to all. He should nevertheless send his mea culpa to the people and to the Church for the dirty language used as a non candidate. He was unrepentant. “The other candidates must first send their mea culpa for their disrespect and their callousness in their treatment of the Haitian people!”

I have listened to the young people. His voice reasoned amongst them. I have listened to the poor and the deserted; he has a following amongst them. I have followed those who are disgusted of the more things change, more they remain the same, Martelly represents for them a breath of fresh air!

As an advocate of change for Haiti, a change that starts at the bottom to engulf all the citizens, those who live in the abandoned countryside as well as those who live in the squalid cities, I am voting on Sunday for Michel Martelly. I am predicting he will be the wild card who will upset the status quo inside the country as well as the so called friends of Haiti to force the country to embark into the road of modernity as Singapore did in Asia some twenty years ago!

November 27, 2010

caribbeannewsnow

Bahamas Blog International

Haiti 'restavek' tradition called child slavery

By Jim Loney

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) -- Living in a tent after an earthquake left a million Haitians in the streets, Melila Thelusma says she cannot support her two daughters and is ready to give them away to foreigners if she can find a good home for them.

Despite her desperation, Thelusma said she would never turn 11-year-old Gaelle and 6-year-old Christelle over to a Haitian family, as tens of thousands of other poor parents have done.

"Not a Haitian family. Haitians will make them suffer," Thelusma, 39, said. "They ... force the child to work like a animal. They don't really take care of them."

Deeply ingrained in the culture of the impoverished former slave colony, the practice of poor families giving away children to wealthier acquaintances or relatives is known in the native Creole as "restavek," from the French words rester avec, or "to stay with."

The children, they said, are taken in as servants, forced to work without pay, isolated from other children in the household and seldom sent to school.

"A restavek is a child placed in domestic slavery," said Jean-Robert Cadet, a former restavek who now runs a foundation to improve the lives of restavek children (www.restavekfreedom.org).

After the January 12 earthquake, the Haitian government warned that child traffickers could take advantage of the ensuing chaos to prey on vulnerable children. The well-publicized drama surrounding 10 US missionaries caught trying to spirit 33 children over the border seemed to reinforce the threat.

But critics say tens of thousands of Haitian children have been freely given by their own parents to a life of slavery within Haiti.

A 2002 study for UNICEF and other organizations by Norway's Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science said there were 173,000 restavek children, more than 8 percent of the population between 5 and 17. Cadet believes there are more than 300,000.

"When I was a child, the family basically owned me," said Cadet, whose mother died young. He was given away to a wealthy family when he was four.

"I grew up sleeping under the kitchen table. I got up early, swept the yard, washed the car, fetched water, emptied the chamber pot. I went to the market, bathed the children, walked the children to school and I couldn't come to school," he said. "I never ate with the family. I was abused physically. I was abused emotionally with bad words."

The restavek tradition may date to the time when Haiti was a French slave colony, when the children of slaves worked as domestics in the home of the master. Cadet said a relic of that era, a twisted cowhide whip known in Creole as a rigwaz, is still used to beat restaveks.

"It's the same whip that the French used during colonial times to beat slaves," he said. "You can buy them in the markets (in Port-au-Prince) today."

The restavek tradition lives on in part because it is accepted, or at least tolerated, in Haitian culture. Some families school and feed their restavek children, and some argue the children would die if they remained with their poor parents.

A family that has taken in a restavek child, Cadet said, will never admit to mistreating that child, and the government is reluctant to interfere in domestic affairs.

Marie Regine Joseph Pierre calls her 16-year-old charge, Rosaline, her cousin, and says she took in the girl when she was eight.

Rosaline lives "like brothers and sisters" with Pierre's own children, she says, and goes to school.

"My behavior with them, it's like a mother," she said.

Expatriates have carried restavek traditions to the United States, Two years ago, a mother and her adult daughter were convicted in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, of keeping a Haitian teenager as their slave for six years.

The girl, Simone Celestin, described in court how she was beaten, forced to sleep on the floor and bathe from a bucket.

Although Haiti is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Caroline Bakker, a child protection adviser for UNICEF, said it has no laws to protect restavek children.

Haiti needs new laws to protect children in domestic servitude from illegal labor practices, as well as social service programs to help parents who might otherwise give their children away.

"It should go hand in hand, protection and criminalization," she said. "Set up programs ... so that those families are able to keep those children with them, in their family, so that they can go to school (and) have a normal life with their families."

Jean-Robert Cadet said he sang along with his host family at the birthdays of their children, but never knew how old he was and believed that restaveks did not have birthdays.

"It's like a restavek child is not really a person. It's almost like you are disposable cloth," he said. "They use you and they throw you away."

February 19, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International