In order to take part in the Haiti blogswarm initiated by CNTodd at Freiheit und Wissen, I've been trying for two days to put together some insightful post about what's happening in Haiti. I can't do it. Haiti mystifies me. I mean, I understand plunging a country into civil war so that multi-national corpofascists can capitalize on the chaos. That's US History 101. But the corporate media's nearly complete lack of attention when it comes to a failed state in our own backyard, to say nothing of the suffering that our government is causing to thousands of people, is something I as cynical as I am just don't understand. CNTodd has some good background links here. From the corporate media, BBC does a pretty good job keeping on top of current developments on the island.
So because I'm overwhelmed right now and can only keep coming back to conclusions I was reaching a month ago on this topic, I'm going to re-post something I wrote at the beginning of June about Haiti. After you read the rest of this post and the stuff at F&W, take a minute to write a letter about Haiti to the editor of your local paper. It probably won't get published but it is good to let the corporate media know that people would appreciate learning more about Haiti and that if they ran a story, someone would read it. And if you blog, join the swarm as well.
From 06/08/05 at the American Street:
This quote:
"He is an abuser of democracy, using his popularity and his ostensibly legitimate re-election to take over, in illegitimate ways, most of the organs of the state."
is about which world leader? If you guessed Victor Chavez, you're right! And you're probably keeping up on the news coming out of the OAS meeting that just ended in Florida this week. It's all about Democracy and CAFTA, CAFTA and Democracy - and what a rat that Chavez is.
And then there's Haiti. While we're being distracted with BushCo's shrieking about Democracy sliding off the rails in Venezuala and into the grips of Lefty Chavez, Haiti is already in a ditch, writhing from wounds that are only partially self-inflicted. From the NYT:
Indeed, more than a year after the start of yet another conflict-ridden political transition, it is hard to tell who, if anyone, has taken charge in Haiti.
After an armed rebellion, months of violent political clashes here in the capital, and heavy pressure by the United States forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office in February 2004, the world pledged some $1.4 billion in aid, and the United Nations sent more than 8,000 peacekeepers to help a shaky interim government bring order to this, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
But chaos still reigns. In just the past two weeks, gunmen fired on a United States Embassy van, and the State Department ordered all nonessential personnel to leave the country. A French honorary counsel, Paul-Henri Mourral, was shot to death on the road between Port-au-Prince and Cap Haitien on Tuesday.
...
By the accounts of diplomats and political observers, human rights activists and business people, this remains a country poised for implosion, with almost all its institutions ravaged from the inside out by corruption. Ruthless mobs have risen in their place, led by drug traffickers, former military officers, corrupt police officers and street thugs. They have set off a devastating wave of murders, carjackings, armed robberies and rapes.
...
A report released last week by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group laid the blame for most of Haiti's violence on "spoilers," including drug traffickers, who are well-connected to the political system but have no real allegiances. In a news conference on Friday, Prime Minister Gérard Latortue said many of the leaders of the gangs inciting violence were Haitians who had spent time in American prisons.
"The United States is exporting its crime problems to Haiti," Mr. Latortue said. " Many of the criminals in Haiti learned to be criminals in the United States, and when they are deported here, they bring those skills with them."
Danielle Magloire, a spokeswoman for Haiti's temporary governing group, the so-called Council of the Wise, agreed. "There's no real ideological fighting in Haiti," she said in an interview. "The criminals here are not political activists. They are mercenaries."
Still, other observers said, the violence in Haiti has its roots in politics. Human Rights Watch said in a letter to the United Nations last month that former members of the military, including many led by those who helped oust Mr. Aristide, were responsible for rampant abuses in the provinces, including illegal detentions and extortion.
Here in the capital, poor slums like Bel-Air and Cité Soleil, dominated by pro-Aristide gangs called chimères, remain almost impenetrable to the police.
...
The United States ambassador to Haiti, James B. Foley, said in an interview that the Brazilian-led United Nations peacekeepers seemed crippled by understandable concerns about casualties among their own as well as among the people they have been sent to protect.
Mr. Foley said Haiti - where most people live on $1 a day, more than 40 percent of children are malnourished, and childbirth is the second leading cause of death among women - faced myriad challenges as it struggled for stability. But, he said, unless the government took control of the streets, it would make no real progress on any other front.
He said that police reforms were crucial to fighting crime, and that the United States was considering a one-time waiver of its ban on the sale of weapons to Haiti in order to approve a request by the Haitian government to buy $1.7 million in equipment for law enforcement.
"Haiti is close to a failed state," Mr. Foley said. "Many people have looked at the current mission as Haiti's last chance to have a huge international effort to help it become self-sustaining."
When asked why the United States had not committed troops, he said that it had sent troops last year and would spend some $200 million helping Haiti this year alone. But he pointed out that the United States was also occupied with its international campaign against terrorism.
The growing insecurity in the capital has raised new fears. Authorities warn they may not be able to protect their people from the coming hurricane season, much less organize them for national elections scheduled to begin in October. The main roads from the capital to the international airport and seaport are considered unsafe. The United States and several other countries, including Britain, Australia and Canada, have issued warnings in recent weeks about an increase in attacks against foreigners and cautioned their citizens not to travel here.
Schools and businesses in the center of the city have closed. Well-to-do Haitians with relatives abroad have begun to leave the country. Those who stay say they are increasingly afraid to leave their homes.
Does it remind you anywhere? Read Naomi Klein's The Rise of Disaster Capitalism for a hint:
Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and then drawing up ad hoc plans to pick up the pieces. In close cooperation with the National Intelligence Council, Pascual's office keeps "high risk" countries on a "watch list" and assembles rapid-response teams ready to engage in prewar planning and to "mobilize and deploy quickly" after a conflict has gone down. The teams are made up of private companies, nongovernmental organizations and members of think tanks--some, Pascual told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in October, will have "pre-completed" contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken. Doing this paperwork in advance could "cut off three to six months in your response time." The plans Pascual's teams have been drawing up in his little-known office in the State Department are about changing "the very social fabric of a nation," he told CSIS. The office's mandate is not to rebuild any old states, you see, but to create "democratic and market-oriented" ones. So, for instance (and he was just pulling this example out of his hat, no doubt), his fast-acting reconstructors might help sell off "state-owned enterprises that created a nonviable economy." Sometimes rebuilding, he explained, means "tearing apart the old." Few ideologues can resist the allure of a blank slate--that was colonialism's seductive promise: "discovering" wide-open new lands where utopia seemed possible. But colonialism is dead, or so we are told; there are no new places to discover, no terra nullius (there never was), no more blank pages on which, as Mao once said, "the newest and most beautiful words can be written." There is, however, plenty of destruction--countries smashed to rubble, whether by so-called Acts of God or by Acts of Bush (on orders from God). And where there is destruction there is reconstruction, a chance to grab hold of "the terrible barrenness," as a UN official recently described the devastation in Aceh, and fill it with the most perfect, beautiful plans. "We used to have vulgar colonialism," says Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-based researcher with Focus on the Global South. "Now we have sophisticated colonialism, and they call it 'reconstruction.'" ... As Deputy Defense Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz designed and oversaw a strikingly similar project in Iraq: The fires were still burning in Baghdad when US occupation officials rewrote the investment laws and announced that the country's state-owned companies would be privatized. Some have pointed to this track record to argue that Wolfowitz is unfit to lead the World Bank; in fact, nothing could have prepared him better for his new job. In Iraq, Wolfowitz was just doing what the World Bank is already doing in virtually every war-torn and disaster-struck country in the world--albeit with fewer bureaucratic niceties and more ideological bravado.
"Post-conflict" countries now receive 20-25 percent of the World Bank's total lending, up from 16 percent in 1998--itself an 800 percent increase since 1980, according to a Congressional Research Service study. Rapid response to wars and natural disasters has traditionally been the domain of United Nations agencies, which worked with NGOs to provide emergency aid, build temporary housing and the like. But now reconstruction work has been revealed as a tremendously lucrative industry, too important to be left to the do-gooders at the UN. So today it is the World Bank, already devoted to the principle of poverty-alleviation through profit-making, that leads the charge.
And there is no doubt that there are profits to be made in the reconstruction business. There are massive engineering and supplies contracts ($10 billion to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan alone); "democracy building" has exploded into a $2 billion industry; and times have never been better for public-sector consultants--the private firms that advise governments on selling off their assets, often running government services themselves as subcontractors. (Bearing Point, the favored of these firms in the United States, reported that the revenues for its "public services" division "had quadrupled in just five years," and the profits are huge: $342 million in 2002--a profit margin of 35 percent.)
But shattered countries are attractive to the World Bank for another reason: They take orders well. After a cataclysmic event, governments will usually do whatever it takes to get aid dollars--even if it means racking up huge debts and agreeing to sweeping policy reforms. And with the local population struggling to find shelter and food, political organizing against privatization can seem like an unimaginable luxury.
Even better from the bank's perspective, many war-ravaged countries are in states of "limited sovereignty": They are considered too unstable and unskilled to manage the aid money pouring in, so it is often put in a trust fund managed by the World Bank. This is the case in East Timor, where the bank doles out money to the government as long as it shows it is spending responsibly. Apparently, this means slashing public-sector jobs (Timor's government is half the size it was under Indonesian occupation) but lavishing aid money on foreign consultants the bank insists the government hire (researcher Ben Moxham writes, "In one government department, a single international consultant earns in one month the same as his twenty Timorese colleagues earn together in an entire year").
In Afghanistan, where the World Bank also administers the country's aid through a trust fund, it has already managed to privatize healthcare by refusing to give funds to the Ministry of Health to build hospitals. Instead it funnels money directly to NGOs, which are running their own private health clinics on three-year contracts. It has also mandated "an increased role for the private sector" in the water system, telecommunications, oil, gas and mining and directed the government to "withdraw" from the electricity sector and leave it to "foreign private investors." These profound transformations of Afghan society were never debated or reported on, because few outside the bank know they took place: The changes were buried deep in a "technical annex" attached to a grant providing quot;emergency" aid to Afghanistan's war-torn infrastructure--two years before the country had an elected government.
It has been much the same story in Haiti, following the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In exchange for a $61 million loan, the bank is requiring "public-private partnership and governance in the education and health sectors," according to bank documents--i.e., private companies running schools and hospitals. Roger Noriega, US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, has made it clear that the Bush Administration shares these goals. "We will also encourage the government of Haiti to move forward, at the appropriate time, with restructuring and privatization of some public sector enterprises," he told the American Enterprise Institute on April 14, 2004.
These are extraordinarily controversial plans in a country with a powerful socialist base, and the bank admits that this is precisely why it is pushing them now, with Haiti under what approaches military rule. "The Transitional Government provide[s] a window of opportunity for implementing economic governance reforms...that may be hard for a future government to undo," the bank notes in its Economic Governance Reform Operation Project agreement. For Haitians, this is a particularly bitter irony: Many blame multilateral institutions, including the World Bank, for deepening the political crisis that led to Aristide's ouster by withholding hundreds of millions in promised loans. At the time, the Inter-American Development Bank, under pressure from the State Department, claimed Haiti was insufficiently democratic to receive the money, pointing to minor irregularities in a legislative election. But now that Aristide is out, the World Bank is openly celebrating the perks of operating in a democracy-free zone.
"Insufficiently democratic." I guess that's why the OAS meeting ended this way for the Fabulous Condi:
The Organization of American States (OAS) has refused to adopt a US proposal to monitor democracy in Latin America, at the end of its summit.
Instead, the final statement in Florida re-affirmed the principles of non-intervention and self-determination already accepted by the OAS.
Several countries in South America saw the US plan as potentially intrusive.
And that's where I get stuck because standing up to the US on this point, although encouraging, doesn't do anything to help Haiti, which continues to suffer in new and horrible ways daily as the US stands by, suddenly idle. If Latin America wants to make its stab at independence from US/World Bank domination to mean more than just a poke in the US' eye, it has to find a way to get help to Haiti without forcing her to sell her soul in the process.
Linked you and cited you at Putting Out the Fire
Stay on this topic, eRobin. It speaks to the myopia in our national vision and how some would cloud what must be seen clearly.
Posted by: The Heretik | July 15, 2005 at 12:34 PM
"...as the US stands by, suddenly idle." This is an odd statement given that US troops were the ones who actually extracted Aristide from office and shipped him off to Africa. There has been nothing "idle" about US actions regarding Haiti, indeed, quite the opposite.
Posted by: theBHC | July 15, 2005 at 06:22 PM
Hi BHC. I said that they were suddenly idle, meaning that after the coup, in which we were complicit, we have done nothing substantive to stop the killing and have largely left security up to the inept UN forces. We started a war we don't want to finish - yet.
Posted by: eRobin | July 15, 2005 at 06:51 PM
The BBC is not necessarily a good source of information on Haiti as it represents the status quo.
Below is a list of good source of info on Haiti.
P.S. Feel free to also drop me an e-mail if anyone needs to gain a better understanding of the situation in Haiti.
Znet-Haiti Watch at http://www.zmag.org/lam/haitiwatch.cfm
http://www.blackcommentator.com/
http://www.haitiprogres.com/index.html
http://www.haitiaction.net,
http://www.narconews.com/
http://www.ahphaiti.org/
http://www.democracynow.org
Posted by: margarette rateau | July 17, 2005 at 01:24 AM
I forgot to mention on my previous post 2 books by Paul Farmer for anyone interesting in learning more about Haiti.
The uses of Haiti
Pathology of Power
Posted by: margarette rateau | July 17, 2005 at 01:39 AM
Hi Margarette :) I've started using Haiti Progress and Haiti Action. Thanks so much for leaving those links. I will try to read at least one of those books ASAP.
Posted by: eRobin | July 17, 2005 at 01:51 AM