From newsamericasnow:
AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Sat. May 15, 2011: Haitian-born, Grammy singer Wyclef Jean, has likened Michel Martelly to Barack Obama.
Jean’s comments came as Martelly, a Kompa singer known for mooning the crowds, was sworn in as the 56th President of the Republic of Haiti, replacing Rene Preval in the post.
Jean, who was among the many gathered for the swearing in on the lawns of the ruined National Palace earlier today, said Martelly’s dynamic promise of change has resonated with the people.
“It means a new start … the people want education not handouts. Now they have a leader who will mobilize then,” Jean told Reuters, comparing Martelly’s election victory with that of U.S. President Barack Obama in November 2008.
Ironically, during Martelly’s swearing in, in the country’s makeshift Parliament, the lights went out.
But the swearing in continues in the dark while Martelly went on to repeat his promises to transform Haiti from a development basket case into a new Caribbean destination for investment and tourism that will provide jobs and better lives for its 10 million people.
“Haiti has been sleeping,” Martelly, 50, said as dozens remained nearby in tent cities close to the former Palace. “Today she will wake up, stand up.”
He pledged to provide free education to the widely uneducated population and swore to bring to justice anyone who brings disorder to the country. Martelly also proposed restoring Haiti’s disbanded army to eventually replace the more than 12,000 U.N. peacekeepers in his country.
Several foreign dignitaries including former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Jamaica PM Bruce Golding and DR President Leonel Fernandez attended the swearing in. Though invited, neither former Presidents Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier or Jean Bertrand Aristide attended.
newsamericasnow
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Showing posts with label Jean Bertrand Aristide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jean Bertrand Aristide. Show all posts
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Haiti, the big picture
By Jean H Charles
The Haitian people, after the birth of democracy some twenty-five years ago (the Haitian Constitution was adopted on March 29, 1987), have put their faith in three leaders to lead them on the road towards development. Michel Joseph Martelly is the last one.
There was first Gerard Gourgue, who never made it to the balloting box as the election was disrupted by gunfire on the sad day of November 28, 1987. The military regime in place then, allegedly under international directive (the Reagan government mistakenly attributed leftist leanings to Gerard Gourgue) opened fire on innocent people in line for voting, committing the crime of lese democracy. Dozens were killed, the proceedings were disrupted, and Gerard Gourgue, a fiery human rights lawyer, never made it onto the altar of the national frontispiece.
The convulsion brought in a slew of de facto governments until the election of 1991, when the Haitian people chose a fiery anti-American cum leftist leaning, former Catholic priest Jean Bertrand Aristide as their leader. The experience was cathartic. Aristide turned out to be a divisive personality bent on pulling apart the very fabric of the Haitian national ethos. Twice ejected out of the country, he is now back home, allegedly as a private citizen interested mainly in the area of education.
There was in between Rene Preval, a nemesis of Jean Bertrand Aristide, the beneficiary of choice of the international community. He was not, because of his persona and his lack of commitment to the welfare of the people, a popular choice.
Some twenty-five years later, after the departure of the dictator Jean Claude Duvalier, the Haitian people have chosen an iconoclast music band leader, Joseph Michel Martelly, to avenge the country and to create a nation that shall become hospitable to all.
The birthing of this dawn of democracy was not easy. As elaborated in my previous columns, the government as well as a large section of the international community tried to convince the electoral board that the popular voice should be ignored to the benefit at first of the candidate of the government in power (Jude Celestin). Later, in the second round, the call was to shake the numbers for the benefit of the wife (Mirlande Manigat) of a former president, elected twenty years ago under a cloud of illegitimacy.
The big picture is: Haiti and its people for the past five hundred years have been seeking its own place in the sun. During the first three hundred years, a bloated colonial class has been living off the land like princes and princesses from the slave labour of the masses who will become the citizens of the first black independent nation in the world.
During the last two hundred years, special interest groups, have succeeded as would have said Alan Beattie (False Economy) to halt and even send in reverse all economic progress in the country.
The literature on sustainable development is now interested in seeking out why some countries succeed and why others fail. I have been for a long time perusing the reasons why Haiti has been and has remained a constant basket case. Some of the reasons are deep and structural. Some are circumstantial.
Because of my long and personal relationship with Henry Namphy (the strong man General after the departure of Jean Claude Duvalier) and Gerard Gourgue, I have tried to reconcile both military and civilian leaders for the sake of the nation. I either did not try hard enough, or the animosity between the two men was too deep and to entrenched. The end result, Haiti missed twenty-five years of solace and good governance!
The structural impediments are many and varied. Using a page story from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I would say at the beginning: “Knowing the right thing to do to enrich your nation is hard enough; bringing people with you to get it done is even harder.” The founding fathers, Toussaint Louverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe knew how to transform the mass of slaves into productive and creative citizens.
They could not rally the team of the other generals to conceive and build a nation hospitable to all after winning the war of independence. As such Haiti lapsed during its first century into fratricidal struggles brought about by interest groups that captured the resources of the country and dragged the nation down.
Around 1911, came about Dr Jean Price Mars, Haiti’s own Dr Martin Luther King, who taught the nation it must love itself and engage in nation building. The politicians transformed his doctrine into a clan policy entrenched in the Haitian ethos today.
Haiti suffered also for a long time from the resource curse as depicted in Pirates of the Caribbean. It was first its majestic mountains filled with mahogany trees that attracted the French and the Spanish. Later gold and sugar cane made this island the pearl of the Antilles.
After independence, corruption and mismanagement exacerbated the resource curse whereby Haiti became the failed-state poster child of the Western Hemisphere. Through dictatorship, military government and illiberal democracy, the nation did not deliver any significant services to its citizen.
Joseph Michel Martelly has demystified the last bastion of literati and pundits who could not believe that the Haitian people would identify themselves with a commoner in politics, backed only by his passion for Haiti as his pedigree, on his way to the higher office.
I am predicting the Martelly government will be a success for Haiti and for the region. He will have enough Haitian people at home and in the Diaspora, as well as well intentioned members and nations of the international community who will lend a hand to build a nation that will at last create an aura of hospitability for all.
After five hundred years, it is about time!
April 9, 2011
caribbeannewsnow
The Haitian people, after the birth of democracy some twenty-five years ago (the Haitian Constitution was adopted on March 29, 1987), have put their faith in three leaders to lead them on the road towards development. Michel Joseph Martelly is the last one.
There was first Gerard Gourgue, who never made it to the balloting box as the election was disrupted by gunfire on the sad day of November 28, 1987. The military regime in place then, allegedly under international directive (the Reagan government mistakenly attributed leftist leanings to Gerard Gourgue) opened fire on innocent people in line for voting, committing the crime of lese democracy. Dozens were killed, the proceedings were disrupted, and Gerard Gourgue, a fiery human rights lawyer, never made it onto the altar of the national frontispiece.
The convulsion brought in a slew of de facto governments until the election of 1991, when the Haitian people chose a fiery anti-American cum leftist leaning, former Catholic priest Jean Bertrand Aristide as their leader. The experience was cathartic. Aristide turned out to be a divisive personality bent on pulling apart the very fabric of the Haitian national ethos. Twice ejected out of the country, he is now back home, allegedly as a private citizen interested mainly in the area of education.There was in between Rene Preval, a nemesis of Jean Bertrand Aristide, the beneficiary of choice of the international community. He was not, because of his persona and his lack of commitment to the welfare of the people, a popular choice.
Some twenty-five years later, after the departure of the dictator Jean Claude Duvalier, the Haitian people have chosen an iconoclast music band leader, Joseph Michel Martelly, to avenge the country and to create a nation that shall become hospitable to all.
The birthing of this dawn of democracy was not easy. As elaborated in my previous columns, the government as well as a large section of the international community tried to convince the electoral board that the popular voice should be ignored to the benefit at first of the candidate of the government in power (Jude Celestin). Later, in the second round, the call was to shake the numbers for the benefit of the wife (Mirlande Manigat) of a former president, elected twenty years ago under a cloud of illegitimacy.
The big picture is: Haiti and its people for the past five hundred years have been seeking its own place in the sun. During the first three hundred years, a bloated colonial class has been living off the land like princes and princesses from the slave labour of the masses who will become the citizens of the first black independent nation in the world.
During the last two hundred years, special interest groups, have succeeded as would have said Alan Beattie (False Economy) to halt and even send in reverse all economic progress in the country.
The literature on sustainable development is now interested in seeking out why some countries succeed and why others fail. I have been for a long time perusing the reasons why Haiti has been and has remained a constant basket case. Some of the reasons are deep and structural. Some are circumstantial.
Because of my long and personal relationship with Henry Namphy (the strong man General after the departure of Jean Claude Duvalier) and Gerard Gourgue, I have tried to reconcile both military and civilian leaders for the sake of the nation. I either did not try hard enough, or the animosity between the two men was too deep and to entrenched. The end result, Haiti missed twenty-five years of solace and good governance!
The structural impediments are many and varied. Using a page story from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I would say at the beginning: “Knowing the right thing to do to enrich your nation is hard enough; bringing people with you to get it done is even harder.” The founding fathers, Toussaint Louverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe knew how to transform the mass of slaves into productive and creative citizens.
They could not rally the team of the other generals to conceive and build a nation hospitable to all after winning the war of independence. As such Haiti lapsed during its first century into fratricidal struggles brought about by interest groups that captured the resources of the country and dragged the nation down.
Around 1911, came about Dr Jean Price Mars, Haiti’s own Dr Martin Luther King, who taught the nation it must love itself and engage in nation building. The politicians transformed his doctrine into a clan policy entrenched in the Haitian ethos today.
Haiti suffered also for a long time from the resource curse as depicted in Pirates of the Caribbean. It was first its majestic mountains filled with mahogany trees that attracted the French and the Spanish. Later gold and sugar cane made this island the pearl of the Antilles.
After independence, corruption and mismanagement exacerbated the resource curse whereby Haiti became the failed-state poster child of the Western Hemisphere. Through dictatorship, military government and illiberal democracy, the nation did not deliver any significant services to its citizen.
Joseph Michel Martelly has demystified the last bastion of literati and pundits who could not believe that the Haitian people would identify themselves with a commoner in politics, backed only by his passion for Haiti as his pedigree, on his way to the higher office.
I am predicting the Martelly government will be a success for Haiti and for the region. He will have enough Haitian people at home and in the Diaspora, as well as well intentioned members and nations of the international community who will lend a hand to build a nation that will at last create an aura of hospitability for all.
After five hundred years, it is about time!
April 9, 2011
caribbeannewsnow
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Is Haiti in better shape than a generation ago with the advent of democracy?
Haiti's twenty-five-year flirtation with democracy: A failed experience!
By Jean H Charles
I remember where I was, twenty five years ago, on February 7, 1986. I was leading, along with community leader Wilson Desir, a parade in Brooklyn, New York, celebrating the departure of the dictatorship that had gripped Haiti for thirty five years under Duvalier pere and fils governance.
In the jubilation that engulfed the Haitian community, joy and good wishes were shared by the whole New York citizenry with the Haitian people.
A nurse from the Philippines wanted to see Marcos and his Jezebel wife Imelda thrown out of her country.
“The people power” born in Haiti would spread like wildfire in the Philippines to chase Marcos out of power in September 1986.
An old man from Poland, tears in his eyes, dreamed with me of a motherland without the militarism under Russian leadership. Lech Walesa would come some years later (1989) to deliver Poland from the grip of the Russian army.
As if on cue, twenty-five years later, another wave of people power, this time born in Tunisia, is shaking the entire Arab world. It is demanding the departure of Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt with an iron hand during the last thirty years. He was grooming his son to become the next chief of state, as the people say enough is enough!
Jordan, Syria, Yemen all have their political and social convulsions demanding the advent of a nation that shall become hospitable to all. In this age when the internet, Twitter, texting and other means of fast communication are becoming an effective tool of militancy, the era of dictatorship is fading away at great speed.
The Haitian Constitution promulgated one year after the departure of Jean Claude Duvalier, as well as the successive elections, did not safeguard the nation against the culture of illiberal governance.
Twenty-five year later, to the question whether Haiti is in better shape than a generation ago with the advent of democracy, the answer is a clear and unequivocal no.
There are improvements in the area of freedom of expression, yet there is a deep deceleration in the area of environmental, food, personal, and public health security in spite of massive foreign intervention.
The western style of democracy, with recurrent elections, has been in Haiti a bad vehicle for dispatching essential services and efficient institutions. The concept of nation-building has not been in the lexicon of governmental praxis.
Haiti is still the land of a wide schism between the vast majority (87%) of the population living in a fragile environment, in extreme poverty, without education and formation, versus a minority (13%) highly sophisticated in full control of the political, financial and social level of the society.
A brief vignette of the governments after the departure of Jean Claude Duvalier reveals a pattern of corruption, foreign interference with bad faith, inadequate leadership, and complete indifference to the fate of the population.
I rushed to Haiti after February 7, 1986, to help the military government establish a Haiti hospitable to all. In spite of my personal relationship with the military leader, I was not received as a friend because I came to reconcile Henry Namphy (the military leader) with Gerard Gourgue (the civilian leader) for the sake of the nation, instead of getting into the gossip of the day. Namphy led by a gang of venal military officers would be chased out of office a year later after the burning of a church packed with worshippers.
The transitional government of Ertha Trouillot introduced in Haiti the complete stronghold of the international community into the Haitian res publica, leading to the UN occupation, the advent of the mobster style government of Jean Bertrand Aristide, followed by his nemesis Rene Preval, who wears a velvet glove while presiding over a nation sliding at great speed into an abyss without end.
In contrast to Haiti over the past twenty-five years, the experience of Singapore, Malaysia, China, Vietnam and even next door Dominican Republic, based on the Renan doctrine, with no foreign intervention in following their own footprint has achieved within a generation the building of a nation with a growing middle class, delivering good services with essential infrastructure.
Haiti, at the dawn of a new generation in its experience of democracy, is engulfed profusely with a foreign intervention that seems to sustain the old culture of squalor for the majority and enlightenment for the minority.
Edmond Mulet, the chief UN resident with its machine of deterrence (MINUSTHA), has sided with Rene Preval, the decried president, to sustain a legislature bent on keeping Haiti in a failed democratic mode, postponing the advent of the emergence of true democracy in the nation.
The timing of the transition from one regime to another, the link that could break the chain of injustice, is once again hijacked by a foreign hand with a strong grip, this time with international glove.
At age 25, the Haitian democracy must take a new turn. It cannot be continued nor replicated beyond Haiti’s borders. The complete absence of governmental leadership, supplemented by the so called force of stabilization, has been a recipe for disaster.
Haiti democracy will grow in age gracefully when it takes charge of building its own army (replacing the MINUSTHA) that will protect its environment and its people; when it will root its population in their localities with ethical institutions and adequate infrastructure and when, last but not least, she will take the national determination to leave no one behind!
This is the formula for a successful democracy. So far, the western democracies, the international institutions have prevented these steps from taking root in the underdeveloped countries like Haiti, while they are the staple policy in Europe and in the United States.
The exceptional models of Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam that rely on their own culture, the strength of their people united as one to defend and to enhance the motherland, while treating each citizen as a potential jewel that should be polished for the glory of the nation will soon become the international canvas copied all over the world!
Thomas Friedman, in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, put it best: “Tharir Square (the site of the protest in Cairo Egypt) will be for now on the wave of the future.” The generation in waiting is fighting for a better standard of living, not for a cause but for Egypt or Haiti, starting with each one of them.
Once again, as two hundred years ago, the failure of the international institutions in the last twenty-five years to incubate on their watch, true democracy in Haiti is a lesson for all nations to learn from.
Note:
A test of the maturity of the Haitian democratic process: In the tradition of Justice John Marshall, the issue of removing or retaining the Haitian president, who remains in power after its mandate can and should be solved not by street demonstrations or a dicta by the UN resident Edmond Mulet but by the judiciary, the Haitian Supreme Court (Cour de Cassation) that will decide whether Rene Preval can remain into power beyond February 7.
February 12, 2011
caribbeannewsnow
By Jean H Charles
I remember where I was, twenty five years ago, on February 7, 1986. I was leading, along with community leader Wilson Desir, a parade in Brooklyn, New York, celebrating the departure of the dictatorship that had gripped Haiti for thirty five years under Duvalier pere and fils governance.
In the jubilation that engulfed the Haitian community, joy and good wishes were shared by the whole New York citizenry with the Haitian people.
A nurse from the Philippines wanted to see Marcos and his Jezebel wife Imelda thrown out of her country.“The people power” born in Haiti would spread like wildfire in the Philippines to chase Marcos out of power in September 1986.
An old man from Poland, tears in his eyes, dreamed with me of a motherland without the militarism under Russian leadership. Lech Walesa would come some years later (1989) to deliver Poland from the grip of the Russian army.
As if on cue, twenty-five years later, another wave of people power, this time born in Tunisia, is shaking the entire Arab world. It is demanding the departure of Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt with an iron hand during the last thirty years. He was grooming his son to become the next chief of state, as the people say enough is enough!
Jordan, Syria, Yemen all have their political and social convulsions demanding the advent of a nation that shall become hospitable to all. In this age when the internet, Twitter, texting and other means of fast communication are becoming an effective tool of militancy, the era of dictatorship is fading away at great speed.
The Haitian Constitution promulgated one year after the departure of Jean Claude Duvalier, as well as the successive elections, did not safeguard the nation against the culture of illiberal governance.
Twenty-five year later, to the question whether Haiti is in better shape than a generation ago with the advent of democracy, the answer is a clear and unequivocal no.
There are improvements in the area of freedom of expression, yet there is a deep deceleration in the area of environmental, food, personal, and public health security in spite of massive foreign intervention.
The western style of democracy, with recurrent elections, has been in Haiti a bad vehicle for dispatching essential services and efficient institutions. The concept of nation-building has not been in the lexicon of governmental praxis.
Haiti is still the land of a wide schism between the vast majority (87%) of the population living in a fragile environment, in extreme poverty, without education and formation, versus a minority (13%) highly sophisticated in full control of the political, financial and social level of the society.
A brief vignette of the governments after the departure of Jean Claude Duvalier reveals a pattern of corruption, foreign interference with bad faith, inadequate leadership, and complete indifference to the fate of the population.
I rushed to Haiti after February 7, 1986, to help the military government establish a Haiti hospitable to all. In spite of my personal relationship with the military leader, I was not received as a friend because I came to reconcile Henry Namphy (the military leader) with Gerard Gourgue (the civilian leader) for the sake of the nation, instead of getting into the gossip of the day. Namphy led by a gang of venal military officers would be chased out of office a year later after the burning of a church packed with worshippers.
The transitional government of Ertha Trouillot introduced in Haiti the complete stronghold of the international community into the Haitian res publica, leading to the UN occupation, the advent of the mobster style government of Jean Bertrand Aristide, followed by his nemesis Rene Preval, who wears a velvet glove while presiding over a nation sliding at great speed into an abyss without end.
In contrast to Haiti over the past twenty-five years, the experience of Singapore, Malaysia, China, Vietnam and even next door Dominican Republic, based on the Renan doctrine, with no foreign intervention in following their own footprint has achieved within a generation the building of a nation with a growing middle class, delivering good services with essential infrastructure.
Haiti, at the dawn of a new generation in its experience of democracy, is engulfed profusely with a foreign intervention that seems to sustain the old culture of squalor for the majority and enlightenment for the minority.
Edmond Mulet, the chief UN resident with its machine of deterrence (MINUSTHA), has sided with Rene Preval, the decried president, to sustain a legislature bent on keeping Haiti in a failed democratic mode, postponing the advent of the emergence of true democracy in the nation.
The timing of the transition from one regime to another, the link that could break the chain of injustice, is once again hijacked by a foreign hand with a strong grip, this time with international glove.
At age 25, the Haitian democracy must take a new turn. It cannot be continued nor replicated beyond Haiti’s borders. The complete absence of governmental leadership, supplemented by the so called force of stabilization, has been a recipe for disaster.
Haiti democracy will grow in age gracefully when it takes charge of building its own army (replacing the MINUSTHA) that will protect its environment and its people; when it will root its population in their localities with ethical institutions and adequate infrastructure and when, last but not least, she will take the national determination to leave no one behind!
This is the formula for a successful democracy. So far, the western democracies, the international institutions have prevented these steps from taking root in the underdeveloped countries like Haiti, while they are the staple policy in Europe and in the United States.
The exceptional models of Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam that rely on their own culture, the strength of their people united as one to defend and to enhance the motherland, while treating each citizen as a potential jewel that should be polished for the glory of the nation will soon become the international canvas copied all over the world!
Thomas Friedman, in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, put it best: “Tharir Square (the site of the protest in Cairo Egypt) will be for now on the wave of the future.” The generation in waiting is fighting for a better standard of living, not for a cause but for Egypt or Haiti, starting with each one of them.
Once again, as two hundred years ago, the failure of the international institutions in the last twenty-five years to incubate on their watch, true democracy in Haiti is a lesson for all nations to learn from.
Note:
A test of the maturity of the Haitian democratic process: In the tradition of Justice John Marshall, the issue of removing or retaining the Haitian president, who remains in power after its mandate can and should be solved not by street demonstrations or a dicta by the UN resident Edmond Mulet but by the judiciary, the Haitian Supreme Court (Cour de Cassation) that will decide whether Rene Preval can remain into power beyond February 7.
February 12, 2011
caribbeannewsnow
Saturday, June 26, 2010
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
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
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
The Bahamas Prime Minister, Perry Christie Questions Aristide's Resignation
PM Questions Aristide's Resignation
03/03/2004
Prime Minister Perry Christie on Tuesday stopped short of saying that circumstances surrounding the resignation of Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide were questionable.
"The Americans are saying they did not force him out," said Mr. Christie, who spoke to reporters at the Nassau International Airport before leaving for Jamaica.
Mr. Christie is expected to return home today after an emergency CARICOM meeting to discuss the future of Haiti and CARICOM's role in that future.
"The Americans are providing all of the documentary evidence, resignation [letter], and their accounts of what took place," the prime minister added. "Aristide is saying that he was forced out. All we know is that at 8pm on Saturday, the Foreign Minister of Jamaica spoke to President Aristide and at that stage he had no intention of leaving.
"Throughout that day and the day before he had declared to me that he had no intention of leaving, he would die first. And so, on the face of it, I suppose we are in a position to presume that certain things took place that might not have been consistent with volunteering to go."
But Mr. Christie said that CARICOM was about seeking the facts.
"We have to sit as group of leaders and discuss these things very frankly, agree on the facts if we can," Mr. Christie said.
Mr. Aristide said in a live interview with CNN Monday night that he was forced out of Haiti, but it was a claim U.S. government officials flatly denied.
"I was told that to avoid bloodshed I'd better leave," Mr. Aristide said.
He said he was forced out of Haiti in a "real coup d'etat" led by the United States.
Mr. Aristide's resignation has brought into question the future of an accord between the Haitian and Bahamian governments that officials expected to sign soon. The agreement would allow Haitians who were in The Bahamas before January 1985 to be regularized.
"We expect that from our point of view business to continue and that for the accord to be signed at some stage in the future," Mr. Christie said, "Now, we put a question mark on it. It was negotiated by President Aristide and not by this new group of leaders. We do not know what will emerge...We do not know the extent to which the larger powers involved are directing what takes place in Haiti."
The prime minister also recognized that The Bahamas is in a delicate position given its role in CARICOM and its close ties to the United States of America. He said the interests of The Bahamas must be taken into consideration "for any final course of action we take."
Mr. Christie added that it is important for The Bahamas to "speak to the truth of what took place, but at the same time always recognize that we do not have the liberty to get on our horse and ride into the west with a sword in the right hand and one in the left hand."
"We have a responsibility to understand how events take place in the world and to always keep in balance what [is in] the best interest of our country," Mr. Christie said.
He said he planned to telephone Mr. Aristide some time between Tuesday and Wednesday, if that were at all possible.
Last reports placed Mr. Aristide in the Central African Republic.
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