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

Bahamas Blog International

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

Bahamas Blog International

Trying to deconstruct the surprise visit of the former Haitian dictator Jean Claude Duvalier to Haiti... twenty five years after his forced departure

Cherchez la femme!
By Jean H Charles



Trying to deconstruct the surprise visit of the former dictator Jean Claude Duvalier to Haiti exactly twenty five years after his forced departure on February 7, 1986, I have resorted to the well known French dictum: cherchez la femme, as the most plausible line of inquiry.

The young Duvalier, who grew up in the national palace with the military and the militia at his feet, became an indulgent playboy, who loved fast cars, boats, women and debauchery. He was, nevertheless, less cruel than his sadistic father. The whimsical and witty Haitian people have a recurrent joke which is telling: if you happen to have in one day, fast and decent transportation, electricity, water and telephone functioning at the same time, in the city, for sure Jean Claude Duvalier has returned into the country!

Things have been going so downhill since; the story is amusing and apropos!

Feeble in mind and in spirit, he failed to listen to those who advised him not to take the beautiful but intriguing and Jezebel-like Michelle for his wife. Haiti became the modern day Corinth, where the rich and the powerful indulged themselves in a luxurious and lascivious life in the midst of the squalor and the misery of the masses. The state funds were Michelle and Jean Claude’s private piggy banks, taken or rather stolen at will.

The people were offered, as in Marie Antoinette’s time, cake instead of bread by the lean and svelte Michelle. Their anger took another turn after a strong repression in the city of Gonaives, where three young lads were killed by the militia. The entire country stood up as one to force the departure in the middle of the night of the couple, Jean Claude and Michelle, from the enchanted but rendered despicable land.

They found refuge in France, the home of Marie Antoinette, where the bankers and the lawyers helped them to continue the station of life they were accustomed to in Haiti. But soon Michelle found herself a new paramour more glamorous than the former president; she left Jean Claude penniless ensuring that she took with her the gold, the bags and the children.

There was left untouched 5 million dollars (now 6 million) stashed in Switzerland belonging to the Michelle Benett Foundation. Through a long legal procedure the court in Geneva wanted to return the money to Haiti. But in Haiti, the governments since have been so corrupt and so inept that they could not present a powerful legal argument to convince the Swiss judge that Haiti should get the money.

In the interest of justice, the Swiss legislature has formulated a novel legal theory: the lex Duvalier. As of February 1, 2011, the money will be returned to Haiti unless Jean Claude Duvalier can prove to the Swiss Court that he can return harmless to Haiti without any legal pursuit.

Enter a new woman, Veronique Roy, a nemesis of Michelle and of Jezebel, born in Tunisia, where another dictator has just been chased out by its people. She has developed the dream of becoming one day the first lady of Haiti or packing with Haiti assets in Jean Claude’s trust to live a new life in luxury abroad.

While Jean Claude could not come into the country in the past few years, she was a frequent visitor to Haiti, developing a whole slew of nostalgic followers who dreamt of a nation where the ruler was the master of life and limb.

Frail and febrile, eaten by a pancreatic cancer that will soon consume his life, Jean Claude Duvalier is under the spell of another strong woman, who cannot wait to put her hand into the last stash of funds that would send children to school in Haiti, provide safe water to a population against the looming cholera epidemic.

There are stories that France and the United States conspired to bring Jean Claude Duvalier to Haiti to influence the final results of the election. There are further stories that the very Haitian government facilitated the return of Jean Claude to create an aura of evasion against all the recurring national problems such as inept leadership in the recovery from the earthquake, the cholera epidemic as well as the fiasco of the elections.

I believe, rather, Jean Claude’s return has a personal touch of follow the money or cherchez la femme!

There are two legal theories to build a legal action against the former dictator. The Haitian government could have commenced a legal action in Haitian courts to judge by contumacy Jean Claude Duvalier for the repression, the theft and the revilement of the state funds.

The Haitian government in the last twenty five years has been exceptionally delinquent in pursuing all the legal avenues to bring about justice on behalf of the Haitian people for the crimes and the malfeasance of the Duvalier regime. The Prosper Avril government has also withdrawn the international suit against Duvalier, all commenced under the Henri Namphy regime.

Any victim of the regime could have seized the court of a country friendly to international human rights. Spain, with Judge Balthazar Garson as a knight errant, prosecutes with vigor and passion any and all violation or infringement of rights anywhere in the world. No one has taken that road.

Furthermore, Haiti has failed or purposely refrained from signing the Rome convention allowing the pursuit of crime against humanity ad infinitum. If legal proscription (25 years without a legal action) could muzzle the hands of the state in pursuing Jean Claude Duvalier in Haiti, it could have another avenue offered by the international community any time after.

As such, Jean Claude Duvalier is home free in spite of the legal demagogy of being placed now under Haitian judicial custody.

There is a mood towards reconciliation now in the nation. The youth of today did not know firsthand the repression of the Duvalier regime. They are also the witnesses that the ensuing governments (albeit with improvement in freedom of speech) have been more delinquent in security in the area of public health and environmental and public safety. The international human rights organizations (Amnesty International and all) have exhibited no interest in the right to schooling, decent housing, health care and incubation to employment for the Haitian people in general.

Watch for Veronique being wedded in a civil and secret ceremony in Haiti with Jean Claude Duvalier before his untimely death, so she can go back to Switzerland, claim the money that rightfully belongs to the Haitian people. As Graham Greene has so aptly said about Haiti, the comedy is playing with national and international actors for the delight of the promoters, the confusion of the extras as well as the trepidation and the sorrow of the Haitian people!

Note:
Under the Prosper Avril government I was offered the job of Director of the Michel Bennett Foundation, which ran a modern and efficient hospital. When I asked for a forensic accounting of the 5 million dollars in the budget, the job and the position disappeared. The hospital has since been disaffected and in ruin!

January 29, 2011

caribbeannewsnow

Bahamas Blog International