Haiti:The land that wouldn't lie

Peter Hallward
Published 28 January 2010

Go to Original (New Statesman) >
http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2010/02/essay-haiti-france-colonial

The Haitian people overthrew slavery, uprooted dictators and foreign
military rule, and elected a liberation theologian as president. The
west has made them pay for their audacity.
After weeks of intense media attention, some of the causes of Haiti's
glaring poverty are obvious: years of chronic underinvestment,
disadvantageous terms of trade, deforestation, soil erosion.

What is less well understood is that -- natural disasters aside -- the
fundamental reasons for Haiti's current destitution originate as
responses to Haitian strength, rather than as the result of Haitian
weakness, corruption or incompetence.

Haiti is the only place in the world where colonial slavery was
abolished by the slaves themselves, in the face of implacable
violence. As historians of the revolution that began there in 1791
have often pointed out, there is good reason to consider it the most
subversive event in modern history.

Independent Haiti was surrounded by slave colonies in the Caribbean
and flanked by slave-owning economies in northern, central and
southern America.

The three great imperial powers of the day -- France, Spain and
Britain -- sent all the troops at their disposal to try to crush the
uprising; incredibly, Haitian armies led by Toussaint l'Ouverture and
then Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated them one after the other. By
late 1803, to the astonishment of contemporary observers, Haitian
armies had managed to break the chains of colonial slavery not at
their weakest link, but at their strongest.

This extraordinary victory provoked an extraordinary backlash. The war
killed a third of Haiti's people and left its cities and plantations
in ruins.

When it was finally over, the imperial powers closed ranks and,
appalled by what the French foreign minister called a "horrible
spectacle for all white nations", imposed a blockade designed to
isolate and stifle this most troubling "threat of a good example".

France re-established the trade and diplomatic relations essential to
the new country's survival only when Haiti agreed, 20 years after
winning independence, to pay its old colonial master enormous amounts
of "compensation" for the loss of its slaves and colonial property --
an amount roughly equal to the annual French budget at the time.

With its economy shattered by the colonial wars, Haiti could repay
this debt only by borrowing, at extortionate rates of interest, vast
sums from French banks, which did not receive the last instalment
until 1947.

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's request that France pay back some
of this money, in the run-up to the bicentennial celebration of
independence in 2004, encouraged the former colonial power to help
overthrow his government that year.

New plantations

The slaves who won the war against the French were determined, above
all, to avoid any return to a plantation economy or its industrial
equivalent.

Over the course of the 19th century, large parts of Latin America, as
well as much of Europe and Europe's colonies, were ravaged by the
systematic expropriation of peasant farms, and of collectively or
indigenously owned land and resources.

In Haiti, however, there was significant resistance to such trends,
nourished by exceptionally resilient forms of communal solidarity and
popular culture -- for instance, a reliance on collective work
(konbits), widely shared religious affiliations and a rich tradition
of oral history.

This resistance in turn solicited powerful countermeasures, including,
from 1915 until 1934, the first and most damaging of an apparently
unstoppable series of US military occupations.

The Americans abolished an irritating clause in Haiti's constitution
that had barred foreigners from owning Haitian property, took over the
national bank, reorganised the economy to ensure more regular payments
of foreign debt, imposed forced labour on the peasantry, and
expropriated swaths of land for the benefit of new plantations, such
as those operated by the US-owned Haitian American Sugar Company.

As many as 50,000 peasants were dispossessed in northern Haiti alone.

Most importantly, the Americans transformed Haiti's army into an
instrument capable of overcoming popular opposition to these
developments.

By 1918, peasant resistance gave rise to a full-scale insurgency, led
by Charlemagne Péralte; US troops responded with what one worried
commander described as the "practically indiscriminate killing of
natives", "the most startling thing of its kind that has ever taken
place in the Marine Corps".

The next phase in the "modernisation" of the Haitian economy was
contracted out to the noiriste dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier,
who came to power in 1957 through a rigged election in which he won
only a quarter of the votes garnered by his main rival.

Four years later, Duvalier ripped up the last shreds of the
constitution when he arranged for his re-election, winning 1,320,748
votes to zero.

Duvalier's determination to gain complete control over the country
encountered resistance not only among the rural poor, but also among
more cosmopolitan sections of the elite.

He overcame both problems by supplementing the army he inherited from
its US patrons with a more home-grown paramilitary force, nicknamed
the "Tontons Macoutes" after a child-snatching bogeyman from Creole
mythology.

The paranoid ferocity of Duvalier's regime has long been the stuff of
legend. In the autumn of 1964, for instance, after a dozen young men
in the south-western city of Jérémie launched a reckless insurgency,
Duvalier's militia publicly slaughtered hundreds of their kin.

By the mid-1960s, nearly 80 per cent of Haiti's professionals and
intellectuals had fled to safety abroad, and most of them never
returned.

Estimates of the total number of people killed under Duvalier vary
between 30,000 and 50,000. "Never has terror had so bare and ignoble
an object," reflected Graham Greene (whose 1966 novel, The Comedians,
is set in Duvalier's Haiti).

The CIA was impressed with the result, noting that by the 1970s "most
Haitians [were] so completely downtrodden as to be politically inert".

"Death plan"

Such downtreading was the precondition for international imposition of
the neoliberal policies that began to reshape Haiti's economy when
Jean-Claude Duvalier inherited his father's office as
"president-for-life" in 1971. These policies were designed to turn the
country into the kind of place international investors tend to like;
Haitians soon started to refer to them as the "death plan".

This plan has stifled public spending and forced the privatisation of
Haiti's (often highly lucrative) public assets, while accelerating the
reorientation of the country's economy away from agrarian autonomy and
towards urban hyperexploitation. The case of rice production -- the
staple food for most of the population -- is especially significant.

In the mid-1980s, local farmers were still able to produce almost all
the rice Haitians consumed, but the last tariffs protecting Haitian
farmers were removed in the mid-1990s and imports now account for
two-thirds of consumption. Domestic production is now further undercut
by the vast amounts of additional "free" rice that are dumped on Haiti
every year through the ministry of USAID grantees, in particular the
Baptist, Seventh-Day Adventist and other like-minded churches.

Increases in the garment and light manufacturing sector were supposed
to compensate for agricultural collapse. For a while, the lowest wages
in the hemisphere encouraged mainly American companies or contractors
to employ roughly 80,000 people in this area, while military and
paramilitary coercion kept the threat of organised labour safely at
bay.

By the end of the 1990s, however, a combination of international
competition and local "instability" had reduced the number of people
employed in sweatshops to barely 20,000, and their wages (averaging $2
a day) had fallen to less than 20 per cent of 1980 levels.

Bitter experience has forced the Haitian poor to improvise robust ways
of defending themselves against their oppressors.

Over the course of the 1980s, opposition to both Duvalierist
repression and neoliberal economic policies inspired a powerful
popular mobilisation.

This was able first to "uproot" Duvalier fils and his Macoutes in 1986
and then, in 1990, after an army crackdown that killed another
thousand people or so, to overcome direct military rule.

It forced the army's international backers reluctantly to sanction
Haiti's first ever round of genuine democratic elections, which in
early 1991 brought the liberation theologian Aristide to power on an
anti-capitalist, anti-army agenda.

Haiti was the first country in Latin America to dare choose a
liberation theologian as its president (twice), and this is a crucial
but often neglected aspect of its recent history.

The Catholic Church had long been a solid pillar of the status quo,
and its partial conversion in the 1970s into a well-organised vehicle
for the "self-emancipation of the oppressed" reverberated throughout
the region.

Pentagon officials were quick to realise, as one American military
figure put it, that "the most serious threat to US interests was not
secular Marxist-Leninism or organised labour, but liberation
theology".

Pope Jean-Paul II and his successor, Joseph Ratzinger, reached the
same conclusion as their American counterparts on the religious right.

Thirty years ago, in Haiti, there was only a tiny handful of small
evangelical churches preaching political resignation and passive
reliance on God's grace; today there are more than 500 of them.

Yet Aristide's election in 1990 changed the balance of power in Haiti
for ever. Political violence came to an abrupt and exceptional stop.
"We have become the subjects of our own history," Aristide said, a
couple of years before his election, and "we refuse from now on to be
the objects of that history".

Grotesque inequalities

That refusal remains the key to understanding the course of Haitian
politics ever since. Haiti isn't only the most impoverished country in
the western hemisphere; it is now also the most unequal in terms of
its division of wealth and power. A tiny minority lives in paranoid
luxury, surrounded by millions of the poorest people on earth. From
the perspective of its elite, Haiti's main political problem is very
simple: how, once the door to democracy has been prised open, might it
be possible to preserve such a grotesquely inequitable distribution of
property and privilege?

When Aristide was first elected, it was still possible to solve the
problem in the usual way, by slamming the door shut. In September
1991, another US-backed military coup cut short Haiti's "transition to
democracy". When the US eventually allowed a hamstrung Aristide to
return in late 1994, he still managed to transform Haitian politics
overnight, by abolishing the army that had deposed him.

A central priority for the businessmen and sweatshop owners whose
interests were previously protected by the army has, understandably,
been to restore or replace it. The need to do so became still more
acute when Aristide was re-elected in 2000 with an even bigger share
of the vote, backed up for the first time by a political organisation,
Fanmi Lavalas, which won roughly 90 per cent of the seats in
parliament.

The subsequent ten years of struggle in Haiti are best understood in
terms of this basic alternative: Lavalas or the army. As the conflicts
of the past decade confirm, there is no better way for political
elites to deflect awkward questions than by redefining them in terms
of crime, security and stability -- terms, in other words, that allow
soldiers rather than people to resolve them.

Ruthless application of this strategy after the Lavalas election
victory in 2000 led to the internationally sponsored coup of early
2004, just in time to squash any celebration of the bicentenary of
Haitian independence. Since they could no longer rely on Haiti's own
army, in order to overthrow a duly elected government for the second
time, US troops were obliged to lever Aristide out of Port-au-Prince
themselves.

In mid-2004, a large United Nations "stabilisation" force took over
the job of pacifying a resentful population from soldiers sent by the
US, France and Canada, and by the end of 2006 another several thousand
of Aristide's supporters were dead.

Under pressure

Last year, the current president, René Préval, who ostensibly governs
this UN protectorate, agreed to renew its stabilisation mandate, to
persevere with the privatisation of Haiti's remaining public assets,
to veto a proposal to increase the minimum wage to $5 a day, and to
bar Fanmi Lavalas, along with several other political parties, from
participating in the next round of legislative elections.

The decision taken by US and UN commanders in charge of the disaster
relief effort, to prioritise military and security objectives over
civilian-humanitarian ones, has already caused tens of thousands of
preventable deaths. Plane after plane packed with essential emergency
supplies was diverted away from the disaster zone, in order to allow
for the build-up of a huge and entirely unnecessary US military force.
Many thousands of people were left to die in the ruins of lower
Port-au-Prince, while international rescue teams concentrated their
efforts on a few locations (such as the Montana Hotel or the UN
headquarters) that could also be enclosed within a "secure perimeter".

For the same reason, throughout the first week of the disaster,
desperately needed medical supplies were reserved for field hospitals
set up near the US-controlled airport and other "secure zones".
Hospitals in "insecure" Port-au-Prince itself, overwhelmed with dying
patients, have had to perform untold numbers of amputations without
anaesthetic or medication. Still more "insecure" areas such as
Carrefour and Léogane -- the places closest to the earthquake's
epicentre -- received no significant aid for at least ten days after
the disaster struck.

Unless prevented by renewed popular mobilisation in both Haiti and
beyond, the perverse international emphasis on security will continue
to distort the reconstruction effort, and with it the configuration of
Haitian politics for some time to come. As reconstruction funds
accumulate, pressure to expropriate what remains of Haiti's public
services and collectively owned land is sure to be accompanied by
pressure to speed up the growth of Haiti's booming security industry,
and perhaps to restore -- no doubt in close co-operation with the
current occupying power -- the army that Aristide managed to
demobilise in 1995.

What is already certain is that if further militarisation proceeds
unchecked, the victims of the January earthquake won't be the only
avoidable casualties of 2010.

Peter Hallward teaches philosophy at Middlesex University and is the
author of "Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of
Containment"

Depi mwen te wè ke se non Peter Hallward k te siyen anba tèks sa a, mwen te sispèk ke se tan m mwen ta pral pèdi si mwen li l. Efektivman, mwen te genyen rezon. Tèks sa a se yon pwopagann san vègòn ke otè a lage nan figi moun. Mouche trè maladwa nan eseye montre ke li te genyen yon lòt motif apa de fè "lelòj" yon diktatè sanginè tankou Aristide.

Thunder,

Sa w di laa pa yon analiz tèks enpotan saa.

Atake sijè yo pwen pa pwen e montre yo pa valab istorikman oubyen yo se manti.

Atik saa fè yon deskripsyon tout istwa Ayiti.
Se pa de Aristid sèlman li pale.
E si w efase mansyon Aristid yo, gen anpil detay ak enfomasyon ki veridik.
Sinon w kapab demanti yo si w gen lòt enfomasyon kontrè.

Peter Hallward se yon nèg konsekan ke nenpòt moun paka korije:

Peter Hallward teaches philosophy at Middlesex University and is the
author of "Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of
Containment"

Ou gen dwa pa dakò avèk opinyon li sou Aristid, men w kapab konsidere lot pwendvi yo ki favorab a Ayiti.

Sasaye,

Pa fè m sa! Mwen pa te ale dèyè fè yon analiz pwen pa pwen sou tèks sa a. Sa a se yon pwopagann pou Aristide ak tout yon kritik pou Duvalier yo ki maske malman dèyè yon rezime istwa peyi Dayiti. Ide prensipal tèks lan se fè "lwanj" pou rejim sanginè Lavalas lan pandan ke baton ap mete sou tout rès sektè ki pa pran Aristide kòm pwofèt.

Gade ki vokabilè ke misye itilize nan pasaj sa a:
Duvalier ripped up the last shreds of the
constitution when he arranged for his re-election, winning 1,320,748
votes to zero.

Epi gade kisa misye di li menm pou pa Aristide lan:
Aristide was re-elected in 2000 with an even bigger share
of the vote, backed up for the first time by a political organisation,
Fanmi Lavalas, which won roughly 90 per cent of the seats in
parliament.

Come on! ...Pandan tan sa a, nou tout nou konnen ke pa genyen oken chans pou Ayisyen ta lavalas a plis ke 90% an lane 2000 pandan ke menm lè lavalas te sou pik li an 1990 sa te enposib.

Misye pale de "tonton makout", men li pa pale de chimè lavalas. Li pale de Duvalier k ap vyole konstitisyon, men li pa mansyone Aristide ki fè Duvalier tounen yon ti zanj.

Misye ekri toujou:
by the end of 2006 another several thousand
of Aristide's supporters were dead.

Mezanmi ki kote ke mouche an jwenn koze plizyè milye sa a? Wi genyen kèk ki mouri tankou Dread Wilme & Co. ansanm ak kèk inosan, men nonm nan pale tankou se yon jenosid kite genyen. Epoutan se fanatik Aristide yo ankò ki te kontinye ap touye inosan nan koze "rezistans pou retou" ak Operasyon Baghdad.

Si se pa pwopagann pou Aristide ki se ide prensipal tèks sa a, wou k a di m se kisa? ...petèt se listwa peyi Dayiti? Listwa sa a limenm, se sèl moun tankou Hallward ki te viv li?

Anplis fòk mwen fè remake ke nonb de plòm ak non yon moun p ap anpeche m kritike sevèman sa yo ekri. Paske li se pwofesè filozofi, pa vle di ke pawòl li se levanjil.

Thunder,

Ou konnen lan ki kondisyon Divalye te fè yo vote l.
Li te mete non l sou tout bilten vote depite ak senatè.
Ki fè tout vot ki antre te vote pou li san majorite moun pa t menm rann yo kont sak tap pase.

Alòske lan ka Lavalas la, majorite palman te vote pou FL paske lot pati yo te boykote eleksyon lejislatif yo.

Ou konnen tou ke VSN se te yon entitisyon ki te kreye ofisyèlman pa Divalye kòm yon branch sistèm sekirite gouvènman an.

Chimè se yon mouvman ki pa t legal et pat gen rekonesan ofisyèl gouvenman peyi a.
Non chimè a pa t rekoni, se te yon apelasyon pejoratif ke opozisyon te envante pou òganizasyon popilè yo.

Anpil sous jounal te rapòte ke apre 29 fevrye 2004, plizyè milye moun te mouri lan reprezay kont Aristid.
Te gen la chas kont Lavalas kote boujwa te pran zam epi al tire ti nèg lan katye popilè yo. Yo te mem site non moun ki te konn lan aktivite sayo.

Manti fè san tan ap galope, yon sèl jou laverite trape l!

Loraj la (Thunder) gwonde paske Peter Hallward di verite li pa ta renmen tande..., epoutan, se repete Peter Hallward ap repete sa Ayisyen parèy Thunder ap di depi dikdantan. Se sou baz analiz lojik ki chita sou reyalite verifyab Peter Hallward ekri sa li ekri a. Si yon moun pa kite prejije klas vegle li, nan pwen fason pou ou pa rekonèt verite istorik Hallward layite la yo.

Mwen di nou verite se tankou Lafimen - ou pa ka toufel ! W ap rele anmwey pou Hallward...men Chomsky:

----------
Chomsky: Haiti earthquake a "class based catastrophe"
Aid Should go to Haitian Popular Organizations, not to Contractors or NGOs



Aid Should go to Haitian Popular Organizations, not to Contractors or NGOs
By Noam Chomsky and Keane Bhatt, Thursday, March 11, 2010


For decades, Noam Chomsky has been an analyst and activist working in support of the Haitian people. In addition to his revolutionary linguistics career at MIT, he has written, lectured and protested against injustice for 40 years. He is co-author, along with Paul Farmer and Amy Goodman of Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup. His analysis “The Tragedy of Haiti” from his 1993 book Year 501: The Conquest Continues is available for free online. This interview was conducted in late February 2010 by phone and email. The interviewer thanks Peter Hallward for his kind assistance. This was first published in ¡Reclama! magazine.


Keane Bhatt: Recently you signed a letter to the Guardian protesting the militarization of emergency relief. It criticized a prioritization of security and military control to the detriment of rescue and relief.

Noam Chomsky: I think there was an overemphasis in the early stage on militarization rather than directly providing relief. I don’t think it has any long-term significance...the United States has comparative advantage in military force. It tends to react to anything at first with military force, that’s what it’s good at. And I think they overdid it. There was more military force than was necessary; some of the doctors that were in Haiti, including those from Partners in Health who have been there for a long time, felt that there was an element of racism in believing that Haitians were going to riot and they had to be controlled and so on, but there was very little indication of that; it was very calm and quiet. The emphasis on militarization did probably delay somewhat the provision of relief. I went along with the general thrust of the petition that there was too much militarization.

KB: If this militarization of relief was not intentionally extreme but rather just a default response of the US, is it just serendipity that there is a massive troop presence available to manage the rapidly mounting popular protests post-earthquake? Surprisingly large, politicized group comprised of survivors has already mobilized around demanding Aristide’s return, French reparations instead of charity, and so on.

NC: So far, at least, I don’t know of any employment of the troops to subdue protests. It might come, but I suspect a more urgent concern is the impending disaster of the rainy season, terrible to contemplate.

KB: Regarding relief work, aside from Partners in Health, Al Jazeera noted that the Cuban medical team was the first to set up medical facilities among the debris and constitutes the largest contingent of medical workers in Haiti, something that preceded the earthquake. If their performance in Pakistan [earthquake of 2005] is any indicator, they will probably be the last to leave. Cuba seems to have an exemplary, decades-long conduct in foreign assistance.

NC: Well, the Cubans were already there before the earthquake. They had a couple hundred doctors there. And yes, they sent doctors very quickly; they had medical facilities there very quickly. Venezuela also sent aid quite quickly; Venezuela was also the first country and the only country at any scale to cancel totally the debt. There was considerable debt to Venezuela because of PetroCaribe, and it’s rather striking that Venezuela and Cuba were not invited to the donors’ meeting in Montreal.

Actually the prime minister of Haiti, Bellerive, went out of his way to thank three countries: the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Venezuela for their rapid provision of aid. What Al Jazeera said about Pakistan is quite correct. In that terrible earthquake a couple of years ago, the Cubans were really the only ones who went into the very difficult areas high up in the mountains where it’s very hard to live. They’re the ones who stayed after everyone else left. And none of that gets reported in the United States. But the fact of the matter is, whatever you think about Cuba, its internationalism is pretty dramatic. And the people who’ve been working in Haiti for years have been awestruck by Cuban medical aid as they were in Pakistan, in fact. That’s an old story. I mean, the Cuban contribution to the liberation of Africa is just overwhelming. And you can find that in scholarship, but the public doesn’t know anything about it.

KB: On that point, you’ve talked about how “states are not moral agents. They act in their own interests. And that means the interests of powerful forces within them.” How does the history of exemplary humanitarian work as Cuban state policy relate to that thought?

NC: Well, I think it’s just been a core part of the Cuban revolution to have a very high level of internationalism. I mean, these cases you’ve mentioned are cases in point, but the most extreme case was the liberation of Africa. Take the case of Angola for example, and there are real connections between Cuba and Angola—much of the Cuban population comes from Angola. But South Africa, with US support, after the fall of the Portuguese empire, invaded Angola and Mozambique to establish their own puppet regime there. They were trying to protect Namibia, to protect apartheid, and nobody did much about it; but the Cubans sent forces, and furthermore they sent black soldiers and they defeated a white mercenary army, which not only rescued Angola but it sent a shock throughout the continent—it was a psychic shock—white mercenaries were purported to be invincible, and a black army defeated them and sent them back fleeing into South Africa. Well that gave a real shot in the arm to the liberation movements, and it also was a lesson to the white South Africans that the end is coming. They can’t just hope to subdue the continent on racist grounds. Now, it didn’t end the wars. The South African attacks in Angola and Mozambique continued until the late 1980s, with strong US support. And it was no joke. According to the UN estimates they killed a million and a half people in Angola and Mozambique, nothing slight. Nevertheless, the Cuban intervention had a huge effect, also on other countries of Africa. And one the most striking aspects of it is that they took no credit for it. They wanted credit to be taken by the nationalist movements in Africa. So in fact none of this was even known until an American researcher, Piero Gleijeses unearthed the evidence from the Cuban archives and African sources and published it in scholarly journals and a scholarly book, and it’s just an astonishing story but barely known—one out of a million people has ever heard of it.

KB: You mentioned the Venezuelan debt cancellation. At the same time, the G7 is in the process of eliminating bilateral debt. Why is that?

NC: Well they’re talking about it, yeah. The Venezuelans were first. And they just completely canceled the debt. G7 refused. In the Montreal meeting, they refused to even discuss it. Later, they indicated that they might do something. Maybe they’re embarrassed by the Venezuelan action. But I’m not sure how it’s playing out. As far as the IMF is concerned—the IMF is basically an offshoot of the US Treasury Department—they’ve talked about it but so far they have not agreed, as far as I can discover, to cancel the debt.

KB: Bellerive, Prime Minister of Haiti, thanked the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Venezuela. The DR has been lauded for its relief efforts: providing food, materials and medical care, for example. But at the same time there are reports from the border of Dominican troops forcibly deporting family members of Haitian patients and sometimes even the patients themselves, in Jimaní, for example. What is your take on these contrary developments taking place and is there any historical context that you would like to add?

NC: Well, what the Dominican Republic does is up to Dominicans to decide, but the much more striking thing from my perspective, is that the United States has not brought in any—barely any refugees—even for medical treatment. And that was harshly condemned by the dean of the University of Miami Medical School who thought it was just criminal not to bring Haitians to Miami where there’s marvelous medical facilities while they have to do surgery with, you know, hacksaws in Haiti. And in fact one of the first US reactions to the earthquake was to send in the Coast Guard to ensure that there wouldn’t be any attempt to flee from Haiti. I mean, that’s atrocious. The United States is the richest country in the world, it’s right next door to Haiti. It should be offering every possible means of assistance to Haitians.

Furthermore there’s a little bit of background here. I mean, the earthquake in Haiti was a class-based catastrophe. It didn’t much harm the wealthy elite up in the hills, they were shaken but not destroyed. On the other hand the people who were living in the miserable urban slums, huge numbers of them, they were devastated. Maybe a couple hundred thousand were killed. How come they were living there? They were living there because of—it goes back to the French colonial system—but in the past century, they were living there because of US policies, consistent policies.

KB: You’re talking about the forcible decimation of peasant agriculture in the 1990s?

NC: It started with Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson invaded all of Hispaniola, Haiti and the DR, the Wilson invasion was pretty brutal in both parts of Hispaniola. But it was much worse in Haiti. And the reasons were very clearly stated.

KB: Racism.

NC: Yeah. The State Department said, well, the Dominicans have some European blood so they’re not quite so bad. But the Haitians are pure nigger. So Wilson sent the marines to disband the Haitian parliament because they wouldn’t permit US corporations to buy up Haitian lands. And he forced them to do it. Well, that’s one of the many atrocities and crimes. Just keeping to this, that accelerated the destruction of Haitian agriculture and the flight of people from the countryside to the cities. Now that continued under Reagan. Under Reagan, USAID and the World Bank set up very explicit programs, explicitly designed to destroy Haitian agriculture. They didn’t cover it up. They gave an argument that Haiti shouldn’t have an agricultural system, it should have assembly plants; women working to stitch baseballs in miserable conditions. Well that was another blow to Haitian agriculture, but nevertheless even under Reagan, Haiti was producing most of its own rice when Clinton came along.

When Clinton restored Aristide—Clinton of course supported the military junta, another little hidden story...he strongly supported it in fact. He even allowed the Texaco Oil Company to send oil to the junta in violation of presidential directives; Bush Sr. did so as well—well, he finally allowed the president to return, but on condition that he accept the programs of Marc Bazin, the US candidate that he had defeated in the 1990 election. And that meant a harsh neoliberal program, no import barriers. That means that Haiti has to import rice and other agricultural commodities from the US from US agribusiness, which is getting a huge part of its profits from state subsidies. So you get highly subsidized US agribusiness pouring commodities into Haiti; I mean, Haitian rice farmers are efficient but nobody can compete with that, so that accelerated the flight into the cities. And it wasn’t that they didn’t know it was going to happen. USAID was publishing reports in 1995 saying, yes this is going to destroy Haitian agriculture and that’s a good thing. And you get the flight into the cities and you get food riots in 2008, because they can’t produce their own food. And now you get this class-based catastrophe. After this history—it’s only a tiny piece of it—the United States should be paying massive reparations, not just aid. And France as well. The French role is grotesque.

KB: May I ask, regarding Aristide’s languishing in exile, was he right to go back to Haiti in 1994 in the way that he did, with US troops? Also, was he right to agree, under enormous pressure of course, to the neoliberal reforms laid out in the Paris Accords?

NC: Well, I happened to be in Haiti almost at that time—1993. I was there for a while; this was the peak of the terror. And I’ve been in a lot of awful places in the world. Some of the worst, in fact. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the misery and the terror that was going on in Haiti under the junta, with Clinton’s backing at that time. And there was a lot of discussion, I talked for example to the late Father Gerard Jean-Juste, one of the most popular figures in Haiti, who the government recently forced out, he was then underground in a church but Haitian friends took me to him. He was very close to large parts of the population. I talked to labor leaders who’d been beaten and tortured but were willing to talk, and to activists and others. And what most of them said is, Father Jean-Juste for example, what he said is, “Look, I don’t want a marine invasion, I think it’s a bad idea. But on the other hand,” he said, “my people, the people in the slums—La Saline, Cite Soleil and so on, they just can’t take it anymore.” He said, “the torture is too awful, the terror is too awful. They’ll accept anything that’ll put an end to it.” And that was the dilemma. I don’t have an answer to that.

KB: Was Aristide wrong to argue against calls (made by some of his more militant supporters) for armed struggle inside Haiti to restore democracy after the 1991 coup?

NC: Not in my opinion. Armed struggle would have led to a horrendous slaughter.

KB: On February 17th, Sarkozy was greeted to street protests by thousands of Haitians holding up images of Aristide, demanding his return, and demanding reparations for what the French extorted in exchange for recognizing Haiti’s independence. At that same address, Preval was shouted down and he withdrew into his jeep. With this kind of sentiment brewing in Haiti right now, do you see Aristide’s return as an important priority, or is it something that might be desirable but not that pressing?


NC: Well, the answer to that question is going to be given in Washington. The United States and France, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, essentially kidnapped Aristide in 2004 after having blocked any international aid to the country under very dubious pretexts, not credible grounds, which of course extremely harmed this fragile economy. There was chaos and the US and France and Canada flew in, kidnapped Aristide—they said they rescued him, they actually kidnapped him—they flew him off to Central Africa, his party Fanmi Lavalas is banned, which probably accounts for the very low turnout in the recent elections, and the United States has been trying to keep Aristide not only from Haiti, but from the entire hemisphere.

KB: By which way is Aristide compelled to remain exiled? How exactly is his persona non grata status in the hemisphere maintained and by whom? What is preventing him from flying into a sympathetic country near Haiti, like Venezuela, for example?

NC: He might be able to go to Venezuela, but if he tried to go to the Dominican Republic, for example, they wouldn’t let him in. And there’s good reason for that. International affairs is very much like the mafia, and the small storekeeper doesn’t offend the Godfather. It’s too dangerous. We can pretend it’s otherwise, but that’s the way it is. There was one country, I think it was Jamaica if I remember correctly, that did allow Aristide in, over serious US pressure and protest. And not a lot of countries are willing to take the risk of offending the United States. It’s a dangerous, violent superpower. I don’t have to tell you, you know the history of the Dominican Republic. I don’t have to tell you about it—that’s the way it works.

KB: Using, as you’ve said, the historical US legacy in the DR, can we turn to recent Dominican history? As this humanitarian aid is provided on behalf of the DR, and it fills in the vacuum left by a weak Haitian state, if we go back to the events leading up to the coup of 2004, it worked under US aegis to actively destabilize Haiti by training the paramilitary rebels, Guy Philippe and Louis Jodel Chamblain…

NC: I know. And providing a base for them.

KB: Is there some kind of a contradiction to provide charity for people who you’ve actually worked to dismantle and destabilize?

NC: Well, you can call it a contradiction if you like, but it’s also a contradiction for Sarkozy and Clinton to appear in Haiti without abject apologies for the terrible crimes that France and the U.S. under Clinton, particularly, have carried out against Haiti. But they don’t do it. The head of Toyota has to go to Congress and apologize for hours because some people were killed by Toyota cars, but does Clinton have to go and apologize for what he did to Haiti? He dealt a death blow. Does Sarkozy have to apologize for the fact that Haiti was France’s richest colony and a source of a lot of France’s wealth and they destroyed the country and then posed an indemnity as a price for liberating themselves, which the country was never able to get out of?

A couple of years ago, in 2002 I think, Aristide appealed to France, to Chirac, to pay some remuneration for the huge debt that Haiti had to pay them…

KB: Twenty-one billion dollars…

NC: Yeah, for this huge debt that Haiti had to pay them. And they did set up a commission led by Regis Debray, a former radical. And the commission said that France has no need to give any compensation at all. In other words, first we rob and then destroy them, and then when they ask for a little bit of help, we kick them in the face. It’s not surprising.

KB: Although at the same time there are sources that say that while France put up an indifferent front, it was actually worried about a head of state bringing a legal case with overwhelming documentary evidence for international arbitration.

NC: Well, they really didn’t have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can’t do anything. Look, there’s one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision—that’s the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it?

KB: You mentioned Clinton, now UN special envoy to Haiti, who intends to woo foreign investors and continue on a low-wage textile focus for Haitian economic development. The lens of neoliberal economist Paul Collier, special adviser to the UN in 2009, dominates the UN perspective of Haiti. An advocate of sweatshop-led growth himself, he’s lavished praise on the much-resented MINUSTAH occupation force there, and has even said that the Dominican Republic "is not engaged in the sort of activities, such as clandestine support for guerrilla groups, that beset many other fragile states.” Can a true humanitarian like Paul Farmer—representing a different development model based on fair wages, public health, strengthening the Haitian state—influence the UN as deputy special envoy?

NC: It's a hard choice. I don't blame him for trying. We live in this world, not another one that we'd prefer, and sometimes it's necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people. Like Father Jean-Juste and the marines.

KB: You’ve talked about how the media created an artificial distinction between the South American ‘Bad Left’ and ‘Good Left,’ omitting Brazil's important collaboration with Venezuela in the interest of maintaining this view. However, with respect to Haiti, hasn’t Brazil legitimately earned a secure place within the ‘Good Left’? A center-left government of the South has spearheaded the MINUSTAH occupation and has pledged to increase its presence, after taking it over from the imperial architects of the coup (US, France, Canada). What factors made it so vigorous in supporting another deposed president of an equally geopolitically-unimportant country in recent times (Zelaya of Honduras)?

NC: Good questions. I haven't seen anything useful on Brazil's decisions on these matters.

KB: Any comments on the US media regarding Haiti following the earthquake? For example, Pat Robertson’s ‘pact with the devil,’ David Brooks’ ‘progress-resistant culture,’ pleas with transnational capital to create more sweatshops (Kirstof), Aristide being a despot and a cheat (Jon Lee Anderson). Even Amy Wilentz has compared Aristide to Duvalier in the New York Times.

NC: It's been mainly awful, but I haven't kept a record. The worst part is ignoring our own disgraceful role in helping to create the catastrophe, and consequent refusal to react as any decent person should—with massive reparations, directed to popular organizations. Same with France.

KB: I guess my final question is for the future: there have been a discouraging two decades, from 1990-2010, about the popular mobilization for political change in Haiti, and how to proceed, and I guess now that the Haitian people have struggled so hard through parliamentary democracy for 25 years and have so little to show for it, what are the lessons learned and possible strategies now that they’ve exhausted this parliamentary, democratic approach? Two coups d’etat and thousands tortured and murdered in this process.

NC: The lessons are, unfortunately, that a small weak country that is facing an extremely hostile and very violent superpower will not make much progress unless there’s a strong solidarity movement within the superpower that will restrain its actions. With more support within the United States, I think the Haitian efforts could have succeeded.

And that applies right now. Take the aid that’s coming in. There is aid coming in—we have to show we’re nice people and so on. But the aid ought to be going to Haitian popular organizations. Not to contractors, not to NGOs—to Haitian popular organizations, and they’re the ones that should be deciding what to do with it. Well you know, that’s not the agenda of G7. They don’t want popular organizations; they don’t like popular movements; they don’t like democracy for that matter. What they want is for the rich and powerful to run things. Well, if there was a strong solidarity movement in the United States and the world, it could change that.

-----------------------------------------------------
Brief Chronology of Events in Haiti

adapted from Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, Courtesy Peter Hallward

August 14, 1791 A slave uprising begins in northern Saint-Domingue

Februrary 4, 1794 Abolition of French colonial slavery

January 1, 1804 Saint-Domingue is renamed Haiti, and declares itself independent of France

1825 France recognizes Haitian independence for the payment of 150 million francs (later reduced to 90 million as compensation for lost property)

1915-34 The United States (under Woodrow Wilson) invades and occupies Haiti

September 22, 1957 Francois Duvalier (‘Papa Doc’) becomes president

April 21, 1971 Francois Duvalier dies and is succeeded by his son Jean-Claude (‘Baby Doc’)

February 7, 1986 ‘Baby Doc’ is pushed out of Haiti by a popular uprising; General Henry Namphy takes power

December 16, 1990 Jean-Bertrand Aristide is elected with 67% of the vote; his prime minister is Rene Preval

September 30, 1991 General Raoul Cedras overthrows Aristide, who goes into exile; over the next few years several thousands of Aristide’s supporters are killed

Summer 1993 The paramilitary death squad FRAPH is formed, led by Toto Constant and Jodel Chamblain

September 19, 1994 US soldiers occupy Haiti for the second time; Aristide returns from exile

Early 1995 Aristide disbands Haiti’s armed forces

Mid-1995 Aristide’s party Fanmi Lavalas wins legislative elections

December 17, 1995 Rene Preval is elected with 88% of the vote

Late 1996 Formation of Fanmi Lavalas in opposition to ex-Lavalas faction

May 21, 2000 Fanmi Lavalas wins landlide victories at all levels of government; opponents form a US-backed coalition called the Convergence Democratique

November 26, 2000 Aristide is re-elected with 92% of the vote

July 28, 2001 First of many commando raids on police stations and other government facilities by ex-soliers based in the Dominican Republic, led by Guy Philippe

December 17, 2001 Ex-soldiers attack the presidential palace, provoking popular reprisals against the offices of parties belonging to Convergence Democratique

April 2003 Aristide asks France to repay the money it extorted from Haiti

January 1, 2004 Haiti celebrates bicentenary of independence from France

February 5, 2004 Full-scale insurgency begins, Chamblain overruns Cap Haitien

February 29, 2004 Aristide is forced onto a US jet and flown to the Central African Republic

March 2004 US troops occupy Haiti for a third time, interim government is formed with Gerard Latortue as P.M., the Lancet estimates thousands killed by police and anti-Lavalas paramilitaries

June 2004 US-led force is replaced by a UN stabilization mission (MINUSTAH)

February 7, 2006 Preval wins presidential elections with 51% of the vote

January 12, 2010 Catastrophic earthquake rocks Port-au-Prince

--------

See also Jafrikayiti's 2010 (LAFIMEN) HAITIAN HISTORY CALENDAR (free download of English, French and Kreyol versions):

http://stores.lulu.com/jafrikayiti

Thunder,

Sasaye, wou ka di ki jounal ki te rapòte ke milye moun te mouri nan dat 29 fevriye a? Wou ka di m site non moun sa yo? Mezanmi! ...se premwa fwa mwen wè yon rejim sanginè tonbe epi pou fanatik yo kontinye ap lote viktim inosan.

Nou kapab kontinye diskisyon an san voye woch:
Mwen pa fanatik pèsonn. Epi ki inosan ma p lote?

Menm New York Times te rapote aksyon de nèg tankou Calixte te konn al fè lan katye popilè yo, memjan Ninja yo te konn fè sou Cedras.

Sasaye,

Lè mwen di "fanatik yo" sa vle di chimè yo, mesye ki te pran lòd pou masakre pèp inosan an nan dat 7 mas 2004 lan. Se pa de wou ke m ap pale.

Monchè! mwen ta renmen li atik NYTimes sa a. Si w ka jwenn fè m konnen. Epi fòk mwen fè w konnen ke ni Ninja Cedras yo, ni Chimè Aristide yo genyen menm tagèt: katye popilè yo, se la ke yo bat, vyole ak touye pitit pèp lan. Donk mwen pa wè rezon dyablolize youn epi defann yon lòt.

Wifout,

Yo kidnape nèg lan,li pa konnen si l ap mouri ou byen viv e li te gen tan bay lod pou masakre moun le 7 mas?
Koumanman
Se tankou de "think tank" tankou COHA ,prevwa de entèvansyon de moun tankou THUNDER ap fè e semenn sa a,fè nou sonje sa Divalyeris yo ak makout yo ,te ye vre:

http://www.coha.org/tonton-macoutes/#move-8369

Joel,

Wou toujou nan tyans "kidnape" sa a toujou? Ki moun wou wè ki okipe nou toujou nan koze san sans sa a? Aristide kouri san pantalèt paske li konnen ke li t ap kite po l si l rete. Si w kwè m manti, al mande ansyen 1er Minis li Neptune. Sispann ak radòt sa a atò!

7 Mars se p at yon aza, ni yon ka izole. Se te yon zak ki te byen planifye. Mwen wè ke w vle fè alizyon kòmkwa Aristide pa te ka pase lòd kote li te ye a. Alibi sa a pa kanpe sou anyen, paske sèlman 3 jou apre li te kraze rak, li te rele Neptune nan telefòn pou mande l pou li pa ale nan primati an ankò.

Mwen konnen ke lè se pou makout, w ap mete pou yo. Men, lè se kavalye pòlka w yo k ap koupe rache, wou pare pou mete men nan dife pou yo.