This week we’ve seen Pat Robertson’s pronouncements that Haïti’s woes are the result of a “pact with the devil,” and smarmy, decontextualized smugness from farther left that amounts to basically the same point of view as Robertson’s. The fact is, Haïti is one of those nations that reminds us that the modifier “underdeveloped” in “underdeveloped nation” is actually a transitive verb. Haïti has been “underdeveloped” by Western imperial powers, the US emphatically included, for 206 years.
And now, before the dust even settles, before the victims grow cold, the same forces that underdeveloped Haïti talk about the earthquake as an opportunity to step a little harder on the country’s neck. Less than 24 hours after the first shock, in response to a question by Marketplace interviewer Kai Ryssdal that could have been filched from that same program’s post-Katrina Barbara Bush interview, former USAID Administrator Brian Atwood stated publicly that in order to recover from the quake, Haïti will need to become a “protectorate” of more powerful nations:
Ryssdal: This is a tricky question, but is there—do you think—an opportunity here? Once the rescue and the recovery is done that the rebuilding of Haiti might actually work out for the better, that it might wind up with better infrastructure and better situations for the Haitian people?
Atwood: That is the hope. But the first task is going to be to get beyond the chaos created by this earthquake. And that chaos could mean a lot of people using violent means to survive. It will mean a country that really doesn’t function as a country. It probably will have to be functioning more as a protectorate of the international community for at least a year or two.
I’ve dusted off a piece on Haïti that I wrote for Pandagon in May 2007, updated it and fixed a few links that rotted in the intervening time. Many of the links lead to pages with disturbing images.
At the end of the article is mention of the Lambi Fund. They have been working for years to rebuild Haïti in concert with actual Haïtians, building sustainable, community-based infrastructures that improve qualities of life for the people right there. Their projects have been damaged by the quake, but they continue to work.They need your help.
In the Land of Communist Trees
written May 23, 2007
About a decade ago I did a little bit of peripheral support work in the establishment of a non-profit project to replant fruit trees in Haïti, a neat intersection of ecological action and radical social justice. I say “replanting” because the project was working to replace peasants’ orchards that had been destroyed. As the project’s founder Pierre Labossiere explained it, the oligarchs preferred that their peasants be in thrall as sharecroppers rather than enjoying even a meager self-sufficiency. The militias were therefore dispatched, the Tonton Macoutes and their equivalents, to raze the orchards. When one of the peasants asked, Pierre told me, why their livelihoods were literally being uprooted, he received a Cold Warrior answer: the trees provided cover for insurgents. They were therefore Communist trees.
For centuries, Haïti has been the Western Hemisphere’s dirty little secret.
Founded in 1804 by the only truly successful slave revolt in history, Haïti was the second colonial nation in the Western Hemisphere to become independent. The existence of an independent nation run by rebellious slaves scared the crap out of slaveholding oligarchies in the Americas, and the Haïti policy of US in the 19th Century distinctly resembled the US’ Cuba policy in the latter 20th century. European nations were not quite so standoffish, with France and, later Germany taking full advantage of postcolonial Haïti in all the ways European powers usually treated tropical island nations: cut-rate extraction of natural resources, including human labor.
By 1915 the US grew wary of having foreign corporations reaping wealth so close to Florida. We sent in the Marines. Just one more historical event to keep in mind when you hear someone spout the notion that the American practice of invading countries to benefit US corporations began sometime after Dick Cheney’s election as Vice President. The US toppled the admittedly already tottering government and imposed a progressive liberal system of forced labor for all Haïtians. By 1934, when the Marines left, a rough insurgent army had spring up in the hills, and the forerunners of the Tonton Macoutes — a US-established “National Guard” — were terrorizing the people in response. From that point on the US ran Haïti by way of the CIA rather than the War Department: first a coup to oust the liberal reformer President Dumarsais Estimé, and then a series of military juntas and fraudulent elections culminated in the Duvalier dictatorships. A popular revolution forced “Baby Doc” Duvalier from power in 1986. In the years since, a tug-of-war between the popular will and US-backed elites has propelled left Catholic reformer Jean-Bertrand Aristide into and out of the Presidency three times, his most recent term ending with the US military essentially kidnapping him, flying him in handcuffs to the Central African Republic, while School-of-the-Americas trained dictators unleashed new terrors on the populace.
Of special note among those horrors was renewal of the long-term rape war against the women of Haïti, which had slackened but not ended under Aristide. Police officers, soldiers, and government-backed criminal gangs used rape as a weapon of intimidation and punishment for perceived Aristide supporters. In July 1994 Human Rights Watch [278K PDF] released a disturbing report on the subject of political sexual assault that’s worth reading, and things haven’t exactly gotten better since then. In the words of a study published in The Lancet;
Our findings suggested that 8000 individuals were murdered in the greater Port-au-Prince area during the 22-month period assessed [after Aristide’s 2004 ouster]. Almost half of the identified perpetrators were government forces or outside political actors. Sexual assault of women and girls was common, with findings suggesting that 35,000 women were victimised in the area; more than half of all female victims were younger than 18 years. Criminals were the most identified perpetrators, but officers from the Haitian National Police accounted for 13.8% and armed anti-Lavalas groups accounted for 10.6% of identified perpetrators of sexual assault. Kidnappings and extrajudicial detentions, physical assaults, death threats, physical threats, and threats of sexual violence were also common. [Emphasis added.]
This part of the fertile island of Hispaniola has become a hellhole. Of nearly nine million people, according to the CIA World Factbook, 80 percent live in poverty, with more than half living in what the CIA terms “abject poverty” — think New Orleans in September 2005, a parallel enhanced by the widespread flood damage in both places. Unemployment runs at about 65 percent, and live expectancy at birth is just over 51 years, in part due to the whopping 6.1 percent estimated adult AIDS/HIV prevalence rate, probably the highest rate outside the continent of Africa. And all this takes place a mere one-hour flight from Miami, but unless the flood of refugees peaks or the government must justify sending in more troops, news from Haïti rarely filters into the North American media. It’s almost as if the people of Haïti were invisible for some reason. In fact, how many Americans know that the UN peacekeeping forces have been accused of massacres in Haïti? On July 6, 2005, more than two dozen people were killed in a UN attack on Emmanuel “Dred” Wilmer, who, according to Pierre Labossiere’s Haïti Action Committee,
…was openly hostile to the UN military occupation of his country and opposed the ouster of the constitutional president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He led armed resistance and inspired others to do the same against the brutal Haïtian police and the irreparably corrupt legal system.
On December 22, 2006, UN troops in Haïti again opened fire on members of the public, in an action described by the embattled government of Rene Preval as an attack on “gangs.” Again, from haitiaction.net:
The scene December 22, 2006 was not all that different with the UN feeding the corporate media a story of military intervention against kidnappers and denying once again the disproportionate use of force resulting in the heavy loss of life among unarmed civilians. Another similarity was the UN’s utter disregard in planning for civilian casualties. As in July 2005, not a single medical unit accompanied the UN forces as residents hit by indiscriminate and sustained gunfire bled to death in the middle of the street or managed to crawl back to their homes to die in the arms of their families.
“I couldn’t count all the victims,” states one survivor who asked to remain anonymous due to fears for her safety. “They came in shooting. Look at that pregnant woman they just shot. Look at that young man. Are we all bandits? Are we all kidnappers?” Annette Auguste, who was a political prisoner in Haïti for more than two years added, “We saw young men and women gunned down by UN forces in Cite Soleil. Young people shot dead. Were they all kidnappers too?”
Here’s the thing: The people of Haïti aren’t passive. They aren’t just victims, despite being victimized. They’ve endured incredible oppression and they’re still optimistic. They still fight, and they still have the tools necessary to run their own lives. If you want to learn how, rent Jonathan Demme’s 2004 documentary The Agronomist, a profile of journalist-folk hero Jean Dominique. Dominique founded Radio Haïti-Inter, a militant progressive and populist media outlet (operating out of a perpetually bullet-scarred building) that served to inform Haitians for generations. Given Haïti’s literacy rate of about 50 percent of adults, radio reached millions of people who could not use newspapers. Dominique began, as the title implies, working in the fields with the peasants, trying to lend his botanical expertise to help them better their lives, and through a life of activism his focus rarely strayed far from Haïti’s subsitence farmers.
Unsurprisingly, Dominique was forced into exile several times during the Duvalier years. One of the best scenes in the film takes place on his return to Port-au-Prince in 1986 after Baby Doc’s ignominious departure, when he slowly realizes that tens of thousands of his listeners have shown up at the airport to welcome him home.
Radio Haïti-Inter continued during the Aristide-Fanmi Lavalas Party years, criticizing the government for being too kind to the historic oligarchs. After being targeted by one conservative Fanmi Lavalas politico, Dominique was shot to death at age 69 at the Radio Haïti-Inter building on April 3, 2000. He spent his life working to help the people of Haïti take their lives into their own hands, and he is still revered today.
The Haïti Action Committee is continuing that work, using the Internet as Dominique might have, a huge potential tool given that a typical Haïtian is twice as likely to have access to the Internet as access to a telephone. They could use your help.
And the Communist Trees? The Lambi Fund, a colleague of that Trees for Haïti project Pierre Labossiere started back in the 1990s, is still working to distribute fruit tree saplings to Haïtian peasants, crucial work given that two thirds of Haïtians work in agriculture, most of it subsistence agriculture. Check ‘em out.
Okay, now that we’ve donated to Doctors without Borders for the immediate needs, you’ve convinced me that we should also donate to the Lambi Fund. On their website, it looks like they have good programs. Getting my credit card out now.
There are two problems with Haiti that lead to such catastrophic events like the current one. First and foremost the people of Haiti act more like animals than a civilized community. The second problem is the amount of money other nations just toss at Haiti, which promotes corruption. I worked in Haiti under the Clinton administration to restore Aristide to power. On several occasions I almost had to use a firearm. Once was to keep from being attacked by hordes of people wanted the cheap transistor radios that we were asked to hand out so that they could hear Aristides comeback speech. Yes, we were getting assaulted for cheap transistor radios. On a second occasion we had to pull out weapons to defend a group of injured children. The mob was attacking them like a pack of hungry wolves turning on one of their injured pack mates. Now I read articles that the people of Haiti are blocking aid trucks with dead bodies. Yeah, that will help a lot.
Then there is the problem of throwing money at Haiti. While we were down there the U.S. government was buying diesel for the small diesel generators that are the sole source of electricity for most of Haiti. In accordance with the program we sent the villages in our area to get their fuel. Par for the course, the people in control of the fuel were selling it instead of giving it away. We had to go there every time to force the issue.
Haiti will not function until we leave them to their own or until someone takes over for them.
Tough Love
This is a super-excellent overview and I am linking to it.
Kevin Babcock is ridiculous.
Yes, he is, Mimi, yes he is. Offensively so.
If only he were just ridiculous, Mimi. It’s that ‘tough love’ mentality that’s going to be the end of us all.
Yeah, Haiti’s problem is that there’s just too much help.
(And really - acting like animals? I can’t believe people still use that racist trope in this day and age. Horrific.)
Allow me to expand on my ‘Kevin Babcock is ridiculous’ comment.
1) First of all, the biggest problem that lead to “such catastrophic events like the current one” was a NATURAL disaster. There was an EARTHQUAKE. Or had you forgotten?
2) To say “there are 2 problems w/ Haiti that lead to such catastrophic events like the current one” is incredibly vague and simplistic. Really? Only 2 problems? There is no context, right? They did not suffer for years and years from such nation-altering and life-devastating horrors as dictatorships and military governments, etc., etc. until recently? Well, yes, actually they did. And it is not ancient history.
3) So it’s “the people of Haiti” that act “more like animals…?” Really? ALL of them? Are you sure it’s not ‘SOME of the peopl of Haiti?’ There have to be at least 100 or so other countries in the world that look at the U.S. as some kind of barbarian battleground with the murder rate and death-by-gun that we have compared to theirs. According to your simplistic, broad-brush ridiculousness, that must mean that every last one of us Americans gets up in the morning every day wondering who is out there that we can go murder today? Every last one of us deserves to have our integrity and honor impugned because of what SOME Americans do, right?
4) Did some barely-living people in a horrendously poverty-stricken nation where most people live on $2 per day or less actually try to take your “cheap transistor radios” from you? The nerve. What a social faux pas. Of course, if fifty cents to one dollar is what people have to feed an entire family on for the day, then a product that is just ‘cheap’ to someone like you can take on a totally different meaning. How ridiculous of you to need me to point that out to you. If it is also people’s only way of getting any information about what’s going on in their country, that takes on additional huge importance. But of course someone like you can’t be bothered to take things like that into account. Did they also commit the cardinal sin of setting tables in your presence with the fork and spoon in the wrong position? Did they offend your gentile sensibilities?
5) There you go again: “the people of Haiti are blocking aid trucks with dead bodies.” First, it is not all the people of Haiti. Second, who the @#$%* are YOU to tell starving, dehydrated, injured people who have loved-ones at death’s door what exactly they should be doing on the frontlines down in the deathtraps of that h&llhole;? And from the comfort of your office or home or wherever. People like you make people like me sick.
6) I don’t care what “administration” you “worked” under there once upon a time. I guarantee that for every Mr. Glib such as yourself who once “worked” there, there are at least 2 others who once worked there under similar conditions who are not WHINING about it now and blaming the victims there. If you did not have any idea what the conditions there could be like at the time, then you should have. If you did know what the conditions could be like there at the time, then you accepted it as part of your job before you went there. My cousin is a christian missionary from the U.S. and very often she is living in the Haiti/Dominican Republic areas. She once even got some kind of parasite she had to deal with from doing her work there. Guess what? You won’t find her whining like you do. She knew the conditions before she went there and is there trying to help change them. She does not impugn all of the citizens of any nation because of the rogue actions of a certain element of their nation and is not simplistic in her thinking about solutions.
7) Just like the worst stereotype of the worst of all possible American mindsets - and I say this as an American myself - you typically, simplistically, and INEXCUSABLY assert that there are only 2 possible solutions - leave them to themselves or take over. What a j*rk. In your own words “yeah, that will help a lot.” So there is no possibility at all of simply changing for the better the way in which the international community works there? No possibility at all of improving that? Just take over other people’s country - or abandon them? You’re no better than the slave-traders, slave-owners, emperors, dictators, forced-military-rule j*rks, etc. that have done the same thing to them for so long - the real evil in the whole story. The difference is that perhaps those evil J*rks could not have been expected to know better. But you could have been expected to. For you there is no excuse.
Clinton’s Operation Restore Democracy — which Kevin apparently worked with — was continually targeted by the shock troops of the military regime that had been ousted. Of course one could see certain people “acting like animals” during those times: the Tonton Macoutes in particular made life utterly horrible for anyone who appeared to support Aristide. See the above blockquoted reference to 8,000 politically motivated murders, and 35,000 politically motivated sexual assaults, in Port au Prince in a 22-month period.
And when you live in a situation like that, even if you’re a good person, it has an effect on your behavior. You might, for instance, be less than obsequeiously grateful if some American guy comes in and hands you a radio as an act of charity.
Here’s the thing. There are right ways and wrong ways to talk about the massive violence and corruption that have plagued Haïti for the last couple generations.
Right: Haïtians have had to contend with horrific violence from paramilitary terrorist groups for generations.
Wrong: Haïtians are violent and are like animals.
Right: Due to decades of corruption fostered by dictators propped up by the US and other world powers, aid money sent to Haïti is sometimes stolen.
Wrong: Haïtians are corrupt and we should stop sending them money.
See? It’s easy.
Thank you Rachel Shaw and Space Kitty. We have all at one time or another in our lives said something too glibly or without thinking it through and hopefully we realized it afterward. Let’s hope that Kevin will realize it at least on some level to some degree.
Thank you Chris Clarke. We have all at one time or another had an incomplete or overly simplistic way of thinking of something and then learned better. There are ‘teaching moments’ in all of our lives. I sincerely do wish that for Kevin and others who have that attitude.
Outstanding job of (patiently) teaching Team Coyote Crossing! Here’s hoping Kevin self-aware enough to understand “we don’t know what we don’t know” and seeks to learn vs. merely pontificate.
Although Mimi did an excellent job of pointing out the ridiculousness of the earlier comment by Kevin, there was one particular item that deserves a rebuttal. I saw a CNN reporter try to track down the “bodies in the road” rumor, and very quickly come to the conclusion that it was false. There were a lot of similarly false rumors flying around during Katrina, fwiw.
It’s odd how natural disasters bring out the worst in people. Especially people who aren’t even remotely impacted by the disaster. I hope the radical cleric Pat Robertson and Kevin both manage to stay away from disaster areas, including their mouths, from now on.
There’s one thing I would change about my long comment above. Instead of saying (in #6) “if you did not have any idea what the conditions there could be like at the time, then you should have” I’d say “then you maybe should have.” I do not ever want to be guilty of being glib towards other people myself.
Thank you Kathy F for letting us know about the CNN report. Something sad to report here which I actually just now learned while typing the previous sentence. It feels almost hard to believe and accept at this moment because of something I said in my long comment above. It’s something that brings home one of the points I made there, but I wish it didn’t. My mom walked into the office just now (I’m at home here in Buffalo, NY) and said she was just watching the local news. She said that an employee at a restaurant down the road ON OUR STREET shot and killed the restaurant manager to death and also shot and killed the manager’s son who also worked there.
My heart breaks for this particular ridiculousness in my own country. I have a hard time accepting that my country seems to simply accept this preventable horror on a regular basis. The area where I live on this road does not have a high crime rate. We are not used to this on this road. I can’t help but wonder how the annual death-toll racked up by guns in our country would stack up against the final tally of earthquake victims in Haiti.
Why can’t the people of Haiti pull themselves out of poverty? Is it because they don’t want to? Is it because they can’t? I think it is safe to say that Haiti is the way it is because of Haitians. Some might want to blame it all on interference from outsiders. OK, then why don’t the Haitians resist this interference? Why is it that outsiders are always successful in getting one group of Haitians to kill another group of Haitians? How about overpopulating their island? Are outsiders forcing them to have so many children? Why can’t Haitians farm small plots and feed themselves? Is it that farming is not feasible because of theft and destruction from other Haitians?
Looks like someone didn’t read the post.
Looks like someone didn’t read the post.
Nor none of the comments, either, it seems.
You have to admire (if that’s the word) someone who can scold a suffering people for not doing enough to undo generations of exploitation and poverty, when the fellow can’t even manage to work up the energy and attention needed to read a blog post.
And as an attempt to stir people up, it also gets an F for effort.
Dear Skot German:
* <—- The Point
—-> You
HTH
And incessant thuggery and terrorism.
Just got in and read the tweet. And although pretty much everything that needed to be said has been said already, and certainly in no uncertain terms, why do I think Kevin Babcock got away lightly?
Uh, maybe I should take a little break from hanging out with the Pharyngula crowd.