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http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100121/REVIEW/701219960/1008
Securing disaster: The US repeats past mistakes in Haiti
January 21. 2010
Most Haitians have seen little humanitarian aid so far, reported an
Al Jazeera correspondent. What they have seen is girls. Robert
Stolarik for The National
The American-led mission in Port-au-Prince, Peter Hallward writes, has
put military stability before humanitarian needs in a painful echo of
Haiti’s past.
One week after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January
12, it’s now clear that the initial phase of the US-led relief
operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have
shaped the more general course of the island’s recent history. It has
adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti’s
government and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it
has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between
rich and poor. These three tendencies aren’t just connected, they are
mutually reinforcing – and they look likely to continue to govern the
imminent reconstruction effort unless determined political action is
taken to avoid them.
Haiti is the only country where slaves won their own independence, in
a war that left a third of the population dead and the economy in
ruins. Today it is not only one of the poorest countries in the world,
it is also one of the most polarised and unequal – in terms of wealth
as well as access to political power. A small clique of rich and well-
connected families continues to dominate the country and its economy,
while the vast majority of the population live on less than $2 a day.
Mass destitution has grown far more severe in recent decades. Large
numbers of small farmers have been driven from their land into densely
crowded urban slums, thanks in large part to internationally imposed
“fiscal austerity” measures; a small minority of these internal
refugees are then lucky enough to find sweatshop jobs that pay the
lowest wages in the region.
Haiti’s tiny elite has guarded its privileges for decades with
frequent recourse to violence; for much of the last century, the
country’s military and paramilitary forces have acted principally
against the country’s own citizens. When a massive popular
mobilisation culminated in the landslide election of the liberation
theologian Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president in 1990, the army
countered the threat in the time-honoured way, with a coup d’état.
Over the next three years, the army and its paramilitary auxiliaries
killed around 4,000 Aristide supporters.
When Aristide returned to power in 1994, he took a decisive and
unprecedented step: he abolished the army that had deposed him, in
what one human rights lawyer called “the greatest human rights
development in Haiti since emancipation.”
More than anything else, what has happened in Haiti since 1990 should
be understood as the progressive clarification of this basic dichotomy
– democracy or the army. Unadulterated democracy might one day allow
the interests of the numerical majority to prevail, and thereby
challenge the privileges of the elite. After Aristide won a second
election in 2000, with his party taking 90 per cent of parliamentary
seats, there was no army to depose him.
Instead, the strategy of the Haiti’s little ruling class has been to
redefine political questions in terms of “stability” and “security”,
and in particular the security of property and investments. Mere
numbers may well win an election, but as everyone knows, only an army
is equipped to deal with insecurity. The well-armed “friend of Haiti”
that is the United States knows this better than anyone else.
After his re-election, Aristide’s opponents sought international
support for the destabilisation of his government, setting the stage
for paramilitary insurrection and a further coup d’état, and in 2004,
thousands of US troops again invaded Haiti (as they first did back in
1915) in order to “restore stability”. An expensive and long-term UN
“stabilisation mission” staffed by 9,000 heavily armed troops soon
took over the job of helping to pacify the population; by the end of
2006, thousands more Aristide supporters had been killed.
A suitably stabilised Haitian government, over the course of 2009,
agreed to persevere with the privatisation of the country’s remaining
public assets, veto a proposal to increase minimum wages to $5 a day,
and to bar Aristide’s political party (and several others) from
participating in the next round of legislative elections.
When it comes to providing stability, today’s UN troops are clearly a
big improvement over
