Haiti a missed opportunity!

By Jean H Charles:




Haiti, the first and only successful slave revolt experience to become a nation, has been a failed opportunity to polish its raw material and remain the pearl of the islands. After the earthquake of January 12, 2010, Haiti has failed to embark into a mode of development to recuperate the two hundred years of failed opportunity.

Some will say it is too early to tell. Seven months into the process, is not enough for a prediction into the future! Yet it is enough time to indicate the direction of the wind, is it towards change or towards the status quo?

On the ground in Haiti, I am witnessing all the elements are in place for a complete disaster in the coming months as well as the harbinger of years of unrest in the future.

I have developed in this journal, for the past two weeks, the conceptual framework attributing the notion of the failed state business systematically replacing the slaving business. I have also advanced the hypothesis that Haiti was the first nationally and internationally organized failed state entity.

Alexander Petion and his successor Jean Pierre Boyer, in accepting to negotiate the price of French recognition, has set a mortgage so high on the back of the brand new nation, it was designed to fail. When later that mortgage has been renegotiated, it was not to pay the installments but to kill each other in clan politics. This tragedy or that drama lasted two hundred years.

In this modern day era where an event of biblical proportion happened to Haiti, one should expect a new national and international order; it is business as usual in Haiti. Alie Kabbar of the United African organization on CBS today complained that “the American Red Cross that collected 465 million dollars on behalf of the people of Haiti is spending the money on five figure salaries, hotels, car rentals, air-conditioned offices for its staff instead of (or in addition) to spend the money for real people with real needs on the ground.”

Lionel Trouillot, the celebrated Haitian essayist wrote in a piece signed as of today, there is a smell of putrefaction in the air in Haiti. It is the smell of lies, the smell of big salaries of the multinational NGOs mixed with the fetid smell of the camp right across the hotel on the main plaza of Port au Prince.

I would add there is also the smell of resignation, the smell of laissez faire. I was invaded by that smell, because as of yesterday, I could not get myself into writing this essay, I was telling myself, it does not matter to raise the world consciousness about Haiti; things will remain the same.

I have in mind this lady in the camp right across the main hotel of Port au Prince, the Plaza Hotel, who told me not to take her picture. She is tired of people taking her picture and promising to do something for her and for her baby. Nothing has happened.

The machine set by the Haitian government, the United Nations, the OAS and Caricom for a faked election where the three main political parties have been ostracized, with the result, selected by the president, is already in motion. The thousands of NGOs from all over the world faking development initiatives while building mainly latrines and paraphernalia of that sort is suffocating.

The mammoth UN agency MINUSTHA faking support to the people of Haiti with the entire material one can order all over the world used only for its own needs. The city of Port au Prince at night is a ghost town with only the UN complexes lighted as in a developed country.

I am constantly stimulated by the high and down of feeling of anger and bliss – anger, because of the arrogance and the lack of empathy of the UN people vis a vis the displaced Haitians and the populace in general as well as the feeling of bliss for living in a land so lush where the cost of living is so low and the opportunity so plentiful that maybe Haiti is the lost paradise!

Speaking with a an investor friend at the hotel, musing on why Haiti cannot take off, he told me that Haiti needs the creative strength of the United States. I retort that no country in the Caribbean has so many creative people as Haiti! His answer was illuminating:

“They may be creative in arts! They need to be creative in engineering, in machinery, in planting, in soil conservation, in husbandry. Any farmer from the United States can help the Haitian people with those skills you do not need any PhDs for that.

“That is the reason why I am here to show them how to build their own anti-earthquake home. How to recycle the plastic material with scrap wood to produce building blocks stronger and cheaper than the cement block in use in Haiti now.”

He has been looking for an audience with those in authority, so far with not much success. Containers of prefabricated homes have already been secured by those close to the power base!

Will Haiti recover from this devastating earthquake? Or will it surge from its failed state status to an enlightened one? I suspect it will take a critical mass of Haitian people to understand that they have the undeniable right to the pursuit of happiness and to justice in their own land.

The national and international apparatus in place now is ensuring that critical mass of understanding does not occur. I am not optimistic for or about Haiti!

The woman who spoke to me at the Camp right outside the Plaza hotel

August 28, 2010

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

Haiti, a peon of international politics

By Jean H Charles:


This connotation seems gratuitous but a preponderance of evidence will convince the reader that indeed Haiti is the quintessential victim of misfeasance and malfeasance from the international community with “centuries of invasion, blackmail, plain robbery of Haiti’s natural resources and the impoverishment of its people”.

The latest manifestation of that malfeasance is happening today. Edmond Mulet, the United Nations representative in Haiti has decided to use the leverage and the prestige of that august body to embark upon the Preval government mulette (a mulette in French or Creole language is a donkey that provides the only means of transportation for rural Haiti) to mortgage the next generation of Haitian children into squalor and ill governance. We will come back to this latest manifestation of misfeasance but, it is imperative to start at the beginning to understand the extent of the wrong committed by governments on both sides of the Atlantic upon the people of Haiti.

I will not dwell into three hundred years of hard labor upon countless generations of Haitian people to produce the sugar, the coffee and the coco sold all over Europe by the French merchants who accumulated enormous wealth on the backbone of men and women who were not paid one cent for their sweat, their tears and their sorrow. Instead “they were hung up with their heads downward, crucified on planks, buried alive, crushed in mortars, forced to eat excrement, cast alive to be devoured by worms and mosquitoes.”

I will start instead with the gallantry of a Haitian Spartacus, the man Frederick Douglass described as the best black known and moving hero of the Western world, Toussaint Louverture. He transcended the weeping and the vexation to become the father of a nation that was hospitable to all, hospitable to the old white masters as well as the newly liberated slaves. He wrote to Napoleon as a black emperor to the white emperor suggesting the building of a French Commonwealth in Haiti akin to the British Commonwealth that we have today, with a semi-autonomous Haiti that would respect the human rights of all the citizens within its territory.

The answer to Toussaint Louverture was an army of some 10.000 French soldiers, facilitated by a grant of $750,000 by the newly elected American President Thomas Jefferson, to re-establish slavery in Haiti. The protracted war and the destruction in infrastructure and in physical assets that followed set Haiti back to a scorched land as it won its independence from France in 1804. Some 100.000 lives were lost during the struggle.

To add insult to injury, Charles X demanded and exacted from the second and the third President of Haiti, Alexander Petion and Jean Pierre Boyer a debt of independence amounting to some 21 billion dollars in today’s money. It was not enough that their forefathers have labored for three centuries without pay; it was not enough they have won their freedom through their own bravura they must pay the planters for the slaves who were their prized possession.

To ensure that the odious contract was signed, French diplomacy took an active part in facilitating the secession of the country. Henry Christophe would have nothing to do with such stipulation; as such, he was denied the authority to rule over the entire country. The culture of acting patriotically internally while plotting externally with foreign powers for the spoils of the country has became the staple of successive Haitian governments until today under the Preval governance.

Haiti’s tradition of service and hospitality to liberators was greeted with a cold reception not a thank you by the same freedom fighters. Miranda and Bolivia received arms, food, and support from Alexander Petion on his way to liberate Venezuela, Bolivia, and Columbia from slavery. Yet at the first international meeting of Latin American States, Haiti was an uninvited guest. Even the Vatican, the pillar of moral authority, refused to recognize as well as sending educators to Haiti.

To repay the French debt, Haiti without financial resources had to borrow money at usurious rate on the French and the American market to meet that obligation. The country has been the theatre of international intrigues by the German, the Dutch and, of course, the French, who armed one faction against the other to ensure that peace and development was never on the agenda. Finally, to repay the First National Bank, the directors convinced the American government to invade Haiti and seize its custom entries as a guaranty for the unpaid debt.

I will quote J Michael Dash an expert on Haiti customs and culture to describe the outcome of the American occupation: ‘perhaps the greatest single lasting effect of the occupation was the centralization of state power in Port au Prince, the ostracism of the peasantry and the elite divided by class and color rivalry.’

We are living today the consequences of these policies adopted during the occupation. There was a fleeting moment of peace and prosperity during the Paul Magloire presidency during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. Magloire committed the mistake of trying to remain in power beyond his mandate as Rene Preval is trying to do now, extending his term beyond February 7, 2011. Magloire was forced into exile and the country has been in convulsion since.

The Duvalier father and sons maintained their criminal grip on the throats of the Haitian people for thirty years with the overt support of the American government under the pretext that they were a bulwark against communism in the region.

The Haitian people’s liberation day of February 7, 1986 was of a short stay. The populism of Jean Bertrand Aristide and Rene Preval that followed the militarism of Henry Namphy was concocted in Washington at the White House and in New York at the United Nations.

I was at the meeting at the White House when the Clinton Administration designed the Haitian plan in the 1990s; such a plan destroyed the Haitian rice industry. To my suggestion that Haiti should engage in its natural agricultural vocation, the answer was swift and unequivocal. ‘Agriculture is for Mexico, Haiti is for small assembly industries’. I was again at the White House lobbying for the withdrawal of the embargo against the country. The answer was a stronger embargo, causing major destruction to the flora for future generations.

The international community in spite of its outpouring of financial support (10 billion dollars) after the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010 is charting a dangerous course for Haiti’s rebuilding. With the Strategic Plan of National Recovery (PSSN) an elite group of intellectuals from the Diaspora and the motherland has labored in Santo Domingo to chart a course to rebuild Haiti. Yet through sheer arrogance bordering hubris, neither the Haitian government nor the international community has called upon this select group to share their findings with and incorporate their vision into the making of the new rebuilt Haiti.

The political parties, the civil society, the intellectual elite, the political candidates, the masses have all been united in refusing to go to the polls under the Preval government. The streets of the cities are rumbling with protest. All his elections have been flawed, stolen and disfranchised. He is inimical to the concept of political mouvemance. His claim that he wants to deliver power to an elected president is as hollow and shallow as his ten years of governance. In fact, the only time there was a minimum of decent standard of free and fair elections in recent times in Haiti, was during a transitional government. The transition of Ertha Trouillot produced a free election that gave the power to Arisitide, and the transition of Latortue organized the election leading Preval into power.

As president, Preval has exhibited a glaring indifference to the needs of, and the solutions to the problems haunting the Haitian people. He has never visited Cape Haitian, the second city of the Republic of Haiti. He would have seen an historical city that has sunk into decrepit and physical decay due to lack of public hygiene, population pressure and no minimum care from the national government. With the hurricane and the rainy season on the horizon, countless lives will be destroyed. The camps are a fetid hotpodge of physical and psychological no man’s land, where the unnatural is happening: mothers throwing their children into the garbage because they are so overwhelmed and so despondent.

The United Nations is now the new oppressing force in Haiti, the enforcer behind which the western powers are hiding to continue the malicious practice of doing wrong to Haiti. Having lost some three hundred members, I would like to believe sharing this thought of Frederic Douglass that sharing in common a terrible calamity and this touch of nature would have made us more than countrymen, it made us kin.

This election is a breaking point to change the practice of treating the majority of Haitian people as peons. Handing the baton to Preval to conduct the presidential and the legislative elections will seal Haiti into a life of squalor and ill governance that has been its lot for the past fifty years. It will, as said Andrew Flold, condemn future generations of Haitians to remain enslaved by poverty and desperation.

The United Nations’ credibility is at stake these days. A recent news report has indicated that a major drug dealer, who is consolidating Guinea Bissau as a hub for drug transshipment, has found refuge in the United Nations compound, where he has plotted his next move into power. Facilitating the status quo in Haiti after fifty years of ill governance with a government that has little interest in and little concern for the Haitian people is detrimental to the very essence of what the United Nations should stand for.

Some two years ago, the Haitian people have tried to storm the Haitian palace to force Preval to resign, because they were hungry while the food was rotting at the port. The UN occupation forces repelled the assailants. The critical mass of Haitian people revolting this time might be too large for any UN forces to contain!

I am seeing at the horizon the debacle that happen in Saigon/Hanoi some sixty years ago! History is unfolding in front of our very eyes. Stay tuned!

May 29, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International

Haiti, the last battle!

By Jean H Charles:


This past Wednesday on November 18, Haiti celebrated the 206th anniversary of the victory of its troops: 7,000 men in rags and ill nourished, who crushed the 40,000 well trained soldiers sent by Napoleon from France to re-establish slavery in that rebel island that dared to declare itself the land of the free!

We were in 1800; John Adams, who entertained a cozy relationship with Toussaint Louverture, the mighty leader of the whole island of Hispaniola, was crushed in his attempt to win a second mandate as president of the United States. Thomas Jefferson did win the election, and entered instead into a secret pact with Napoleon to allow the French troops to cross the Atlantic and reach Haiti.

The Haitians, who have tasted the sweet smell of liberty, did not conceive the idea of coming back into slavery. Under the leadership of Toussaint, first, Dessalines and Henry Christophe later, they submitted the French troops to defeat after defeat until the last battle that took place near Cape Haitian, at Vertieres on November 18, 1803. There, one of the generals, Capois La Mort, distinguished himself with bravado and gallantry that the French General Rochambeau ordered the battle to stop to pay homage to Capois. His horse and his hat were hit with a bullet; he regained his composure to call his troops to move with the slogan: En Avant! En avant! Move forward, Move forward!

It was the end of the French fantasia to bring Haiti and the Haitians back into slavery. It was also the beginning of the end of the wide world order of black subjugation. This epic story did not have a long life in Haiti. Dessalines was assassinated two years later by his own comrades in arms. His successor, Henry Christophe, lasted fifteen years, but ruled only the northern part of the island. His rival Alexander Petion and his successor Jean Pierre Boyer delivered on a platter what the French could not get on the battle field. Boyer accepted to pay to the French government the equivalent of 2 billion dollars to compensate the settlers for their loss. Petion and Boyer imprinted the Haitian ethos with the culture of exclusion, which is the imprimatur of Haitian society today. The 565 rural counties of Haiti have not received individually or collectively one million dollars for the past two hundred years in structural infrastructure!

Desolated and left to fend for them, the rural world of Haiti is leaving en masse, building a shanty town at the rate of one a month in the capital and in the main cities. They are also trying to reach the Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos, as well as the Bahamas through clandestine departures. In spite of the international help and concern, Haiti is sinking deeper into extreme poverty. Port au Prince, the capital city has electricity only from 9pm to 6 am. There is no potable water, no night life, no major industry and no tourism.

Yet the forces in power are mounting an armada (with some foreign assistance) to perpetuate themselves into power. Haiti at this juncture must play the same battle that it engaged on November 18, 1803, not with cannon but with its bulletin of vote. In November 2010, the people of Haiti will have a clear choice of remaining in the status quo of misery, arrogance and neglect from its own government or choose a new leader with the vision and the bravura to break down the culture of exclusion against the majority of the population.

It will need, using the words of Professor Kenneth Clark, talking about the black man in American politics, to utilize the election process to change society from an unjust one to a just one. It will also need to transform rhetoric into reality. So far the concept of one man one vote has been prostituted and did not help Haiti. I am observing the Haitian government using the resources of the state and those of the international organizations to organize a so called unity coalition!

The Haitian people have a way of defying the odds. As in 1803; in November 2010, they will survive this attempt to keep them in a de facto bondage. May the spirit of the gallant founding fathers guide them!

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International