Aristide Returns to Haiti

Jean-Bertrand Aristide has returned to Haiti, two days before the presidential election (which excluded members of the Lavalas party). From the LA Times:

Aristide left Johannesburg late Thursday, accompanied by his wife, two daughters, actor Danny Glover and the former leader's Miami-based lawyer. Soon after landing, Aristide delivered philosophical remarks in five languages in which he spoke of his love for Haiti and repeatedly denounced what he called the problem of "exclusion."

"Today may the Haitian people mark the end of exile and coup d'etat, while peacefully we must move from social exclusion to social inclusion," Aristide told reporters.

No matter what you might think about Aristide, his return is definitely a step forward compared to the return of 'Baby Doc' Jean-Claude Duvalier last January.

Haiti's Right to Self-Determination: the Imperial Context

Reading about the unfolding catastrophe that has struck Haiti I am taken aback with the complete lack of context with which American media has approached the problems therein. While I have read repeatedly about the relationship which Haiti had to the late French Republic, I have read virtually nothing about former American involvement there other than that of the recent flood of aid. Devin Z. Shaw's review of Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood illustrates this aid has great potential to assume a less than neutral role. So, with this critique in mind I turned to Mary A. Renda's Taking Haiti: Military Occupation & the Culture of Imperialism, published by The University of North Carolina Press in 2001. Because I simply couldn't write a better synopsis I will simply rip the opening of her first chapter:

"The United States invaded Haiti in July 1915 and subsequently held the second oldest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere under military occupation for nineteen years. While in Haiti, marines installed a puppet president, dissolved legislature at gunpoint, denied freedom of speech, and forced a new constitution on the Caribbean nation – one more favorable to foreign investment."

These words represent a damming indictment of the behavior of the United State in Haiti during the last century.

Renda argues that an important feature of U.S. history is missing, namely the myriad of gunboat diplomatic engagements that the U.S. has entered into abroad. Renda contends that the military occupation of Haiti that began in 1915 was no sideshow. It was one of several important arenas in which the United States was remade culturally through imperial ventures with bureaucrats, military personnel and others participating in empire building in Haiti and elsewhere. Put differently, the various actors coming from the United States were changed by their interface and involvement in the occupation of Haiti. Renda's book seeks to contextualize the cultural interface of 'U.S. Americans' in the construction of an overseas empire.

Renda explains that marines coming from different regions of the U.S. had different sets of ideas of what it meant to be U.S. Americans but that paternalism served as a foundation for the justification of U.S. military intervention in Haiti for most if not all of them. Renda examines various actors and how they used the justification that it was their duty to help the Haitians that brought on and maintained the unwanted occupation there. Paternalism, or a perceived notion of necessary stewardship, drove American actors to decide the structure of political affairs for people abroad. This same culture of hubris moved U.S. citizens to occupy and reorder Haitian affairs.

While it is easy to get whipped into patriotic zeal over the immense aid flowing from the U.S. into Haiti at the moment, it would seem there is good reason to be somewhat careful as to the uses and affect this aid will have. While, it is easy to see an opportunity to rebuild Haiti on our ideals, isn't this another paternalism? No one, including myself wants a dearth of help to plague a people in need but we should be careful of the nature of the U.S. involvement in Haiti's affairs and not attempt to treat the Haitian people as in need of American political interventions. Too often I have recently read and heard a call from the elites in America for a revamping of Haitian economic and political systems such that the island nation would be open to U.S. interests. To risk oversimplification: let the Haitian people decide what economic and political systems they want.

Damming the Flood

Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment (Verso, 2008) is a powerful indictment of imperial intervention as it seeks to destroy popular resistance to globalized exploitation (which includes forcing open local markets and the production of cheap goods through an exploited and non-unionized labor force). Much of the content has been discussed in recent posts (here and here) and so this isn't going to be a traditional book review. Instead, I want to focus on three points in which Hallward's analysis is incisive:

1) The Haitian people are the subject of their history and not the object. Nowhere in the text does Hallward treat them as victims. Instead, when their political gains are temporarily reversed by intervention (read: well-funded coups), Hallward treats these reversals according to the amount of effort required to temporarily halt popular movements.

2) Violence will not be judged against a neutral background. Hallward refuses to accept a framework that judges the violence of Lavalas against a background that assumes that exploitation and imperial intervention happens in a non-violent context. Hallward repeatedly shows how any pro-Lavalas or pro-Aristide violence takes place in a context where a much better armed opposition act as aggressors. In fact, the remarkable point is the relative lack of violence committed by the state under pro-Lavalas leaders.

3) Non-governmental Organizations are not neutral. This is a difficult point to get across. First, it probably has to do with the neutral sounding name, when many of these groups could properly be called, in the case of Haiti, Ideological Counter-state Apparatuses. Hallward shows how the operation of NGOs allows 'rich countries a morally respectable way of subcontracting the sovereignty of the nations they exploit' (179). While some of these groups do respectable work with the poor and exploited, the problem remains that their primary responsibility is to the sources of their funding, which means that they function according to a mandate set not by the people of Haiti, but to rich donors outside of the country. Instead of directly giving foreign aid to the government, where it has the possibility of being utilized according to a plan (here health, there jobs, there education), these tasks are privatized, fragmented, and often rely on elite contacts for local distribution, which reproduces class inequality.

This last point is especially important as NGOs (or ICAs) swarm Haiti after the earthquake, although when reading about the situation it is important to consider how non-Haitian aid and intervention makes victims of Haitians, that is, makes them objects of their history and not subjects through the destruction of local solidarity.

More on Haiti

A few more articles, from various perspectives, on 'disaster capitalism' in Haiti. And since this is a Sunday, a link to Devin's review of Badiou and Zizek's Philosophy in the Present.

Peter Hallward on US Imperialism:

Most credible journalists have emphasised the remarkable levels of calm and solidarity in the midst of this catastrophe, but the UN and the US emphasise the dangers of looting and rioting. They talk about the need to avoid another “Somalia”.

Very soon this starts to look like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the more desperate things get, the more likely it is that the whole reconstruction effort will unfold as a military operation, with UN officials and American commanders – rather than the Haitian people – in charge.

Jeb Sprague, on Haiti's Classquake at Counterpunch.

Benjamin Dangl, on how corporations and mercenaries are viewing the disaster. He takes an example pointed out by Naomi Klein about the Heritage Foundation, which as

"one of the leading advocates of exploiting disasters to push through their unpopular pro-corporate policies," issued a statement on its website after the earthquake hit: "In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti's long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region."

And some youtube:

Haiti and Imperialism

I just want to add to our two previous posts (here and here), one more statement about disaster capitalism and imperialism, really some more background to Haiti's place in the Western world (I've deliberately used this term), or more specifically, how it is understood within Western ideology. Haiti, we should recall, won its independence as the first successful slave rebellion in 1804. When the country established diplomatic ties with France in 1825 it came at the cost of 150 million francs. Zizek summarizes the situation (in a review of Hallward's book Damming the Flood):

Denounced by Talleyrand as "a horrible spectacle for all white nations", the "mere existence of an independent Haiti" was itself an intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus had to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other countries from taking the same path. The price - the literal price - for the "premature" independence was truly extortionate: after two decades of embargo, France, the old colonial master, established trade and diplomatic relations only in 1825, after forcing the Haitian government to pay 150 million francs as "compensation" for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, was later reduced to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy drain on Haitian resources: at the end of the 19th century, Haiti's payments to France consumed roughly 80 per cent of the national budget, and the last instalment was only paid in 1947. When, in 2003, in anticipation of the bicentenary of national independence, the Lavalas president Jean-Baptiste Aristide demanded that France return this extorted money, his claim was flatly rejected by a French commission (led, ironically, by Régis Debray).

Then, there was a coup led by the United States, France and Canada (See Engler and Fenton's Canada in Haiti)-- can you guess one of the reasons?, and continuing impovershiment ever since, partially through forced neo-liberal structural adjustments. My concern is not that they will become a victim of disaster capitalism, because there is a long history of that already, but that they will again be forced into continuing "structural readjustment" that will continue to constrain their ability to undertake political reform. That is, when foreign soldiers (peacekeepers) aren't their to constrain them. Nevertheless, we should not call, as Hallward and Zizek stress, Haitians victims. Instead, as Zizek writes,

The Lavalas movement [which included Aristide] has won every free presidential election since 1990, but it has twice been the victim of US-sponsored military coups. Lavalas is a unique combination: a political agent which won state power through free elections, but which all the way through maintained its roots in organs of local popular democracy, of people's direct self-organisation. Although the "free press" dominated by its enemies was never obstructed, although violent protests that threatened the stability of the legal government were fully tolerated, the Lavalas government was routinely demonised in the international press as exceptionally violent and corrupt. The goal of the US and its allies France and Canada was to impose on Haiti a "normal" democracy - a democracy which would not touch the economic power of the narrow elite; they were well aware that, if it is to function in this way, democracy has to cut its links with direct popular self-organisation.

It's a familiar story; change the names and we have been told the same things regarding violence and corruption about Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and even Brazil. Now that a natural disaster has opened Haiti to international aid, let's hope it doesn't come at the cost of already existing political solidarity.

Update: See also this short article on the role of USAID in these structural adjustments.

Partners in Health and the crisis in Haiti

Regarding the ongoing crisis in Haiti, I recommend that people wishing to donate check out the Boston-based group Partners in Health (http://www.pih.org/home.html). PIH has been on the ground in Haiti for over two decades, has seen significant small-scale successes in its operations and aid models, and is thus in a great position to help. The group is also notable for espousing a community-centred, solidarity model of aid, not simply a top-down charity model. From the web site:

At its root, our mission is both medical and moral. It is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone. When a person in Peru, or Siberia, or rural Haiti falls ill, PIH uses all of the means at our disposal to make them well—from pressuring drug manufacturers, to lobbying policy makers, to providing medical care and social services. Whatever it takes. Just as we would do if a member of our own family—or we ourselves—were ill.

As Devin pointed out in the previous blog of the day, there is a danger that the situation in Haiti will become another case of "disaster capitalism". It's vital that groups and approaches focusing on community organizing, solidarity, and the overcoming of the crisis by Haitians themselves be given a fighting chance - especially in a situation which may all too easily degenerate into a nightmare of misery-fueled primitive accumulation.

Peter Hallward on Haiti's Plight

Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment (Verso, 2008), has published a critique ("Our Role in Haiti's Plight") of the policies of neo-liberalism and interventionism in Haiti's politics that have contributed to human cost of the recent earthquake. Hallward writes:

The country has faced more than its fair share of catastrophes. Hundreds died in Port-au-Prince in an earthquake back in June 1770, and the huge earthquake of 7 May 1842 may have killed 10,000 in the northern city of Cap ­Haitien alone. Hurricanes batter the island on a regular basis, mostly recently in 2004 and again in 2008; the storms of September 2008 flooded the town of Gonaïves and swept away much of its flimsy infrastructure, killing more than a thousand people and destroying many thousands of homes. The full scale of the destruction resulting from this earthquake may not become clear for several weeks. Even minimal repairs will take years to complete, and the long-term impact is incalculable.

What is already all too clear, ­however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the "poorest country in the western hemisphere". This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.

The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

Now, I know what some of our readers may think of this kind of criticism. They will ask, is it not time to put aside our political differences and contribute to the poor and downtrodden, to the victims of this disaster? However, we should reject this false dilemma: to help the victims it is necessary to grasp their historico-political situation: a long series of Western interventions and concomitant impoverishment of a majority of Haitians.

One wants to hope that Haiti will not be forced, at some point in the process of receiving aid, to accept more neo-liberal reforms as a condition for receiving it. If this seems outlandish to you, read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, especially page 487 (Chapter 19) and following.