Free Will Classic

10:50 pm, 2/28/04

Banana Republic
The British newspaper, the Telegraph has the Haiti situation more or less correct.

Countries with the worst political records have the best proverbs. They are the wise distillation of the people's bitter experience, which in the case of Haiti has been uninterrupted since the foundation of the country as the French colony of Saint-Domingue, known for a time as the Pearl of the Antilles because of the huge profits generated there, a colony that in the 1780s accounted for a third of France's external commerce.

In Haiti, it is despair that springs eternal. Haitian expressions are mordant: the boat people, who flee Haiti for Florida, are said to be furnished with a passeport requin, a shark passport. (But nine tenths of the population would like one.) There is an ironic Haitian expression, "as pretty as a truck", for Haitian trucks are painted with scenes of a verdant paradise, while the country itself, once almost entirely forested, is now virtually a desert.

Most of the trees have been cut down for charcoal; the soil erosion is almost complete. As you fly over the island, you can see the border with the Dominican Republic: green on one side, brown on the other. To the east of the border, the life expectancy is 15 years longer than to the west of it.

Why is Haiti a permanent festival of political pathology? No doubt the roots extend far back into history. At independence, after all the whites had been slaughtered in revenge for their atrocious cruelty, the Haitians were divided into three incompatible classes: the recently-arrived slaves from Africa, whose working conditions were so terrible before the revolution that a third of them had to be replaced every five years by newly-imported slaves; those blacks who had been manumitted and had themselves become large landowners; and the mulattos, who controlled the towns and commerce.

[Franois "Papa Doc" Duvaliere] was an ethnographer, interested in the popular traditions of the poor people of Haiti, with which he sympathised, and which he contrasted favourably to the inauthentic, non-Haitian francophilia of the elite. He was also a demagogue, a populist who spoke of revolution; he distrusted the upholders of the traditional order, the army, and created his own parallel force, the Tontons Macoutes, which derived its personnel not from the traditional elite but from the disenfranchised populace - a force that soon came to dominate life in Haiti completely, reaching new levels of violent corruption.

The first taste of real power that the populace ever enjoyed, therefore, was deeply tainted with violence and corruption. However arbitrary they were, the Tontons Macoutes were an authentic expression of Haitian society; and while they were detested and feared, every Haitian tried to make sure he had one in his family, to give him protection and possibly even advancement. This explains the survival of Duvalierism for so long; and why, without having wished to do so, Aristide has found himself obliged, by using gangs of supporters, to imitate its methods.

Papa Doc appeared to be a modest little man until he reached power; then he was transformed, according to himself, into "an immaterial being" and "the apostle of collective welfare", among other things. Whether it was power that turned his head, or whether his modesty was all along but a shrewd disguise for his ravening ambition, it is difficult to say.

The same question can be asked of Aristide, of course. He swiftly came up against the terrible realities of Haiti. When, for example, he denounced in public "the Haitian blood that serves to produce the bitter sugar" of the Dominican Republic (an allusion to the use of Haitian labour, at the most miserable wages, to bring in the Dominican sugar harvest), the Dominican Republic immediately expelled thousands of Haitians living in the country illegally, and there was nothing he could do about it. The world is not changed for the better by fine sentiment alone: something more tangible, that Haiti lacks, is necessary.

As the country slides once again into violent chaos, with the distinct possibility that there will be massacres, should the rest of the world intervene? A few hundred troops could certainly restore order of a kind, but what then?

Yes, what then? Haiti's most basic problem seems to be that - are you ready for this? -- it's all fucked up. It's yet another debacle abandoned by the French for the rest of the world to embroil itself in, like Hitler, Vietnam and Cambodia, Libya, and Quebec. Can we unfuck it by storming the shore and letting the "world community" experiment on it for a while? We've been there, done that, several times over the last century. Even the supposed bliss brought about by the theoretically "democratic" elections that brought Aristide to power in 1990 only culminated with Clinton and the UN going back less than 4 years later. What are we supposed to do here? One functional definition of stupidity is "to keep doing the same thing over and over again, even though it does not work". So enforcing the status quo, defending Aristide, is out of the question. Does either side of this equation even have politics or a vision, or do they just kill each other in the hopes that things will change when they coincidentally kill the right people? I wasn't exactly planning a vacation there, but I'd like some kind of commitment that if we're going to go back (or not) that we are prepared to leave behind a real country this time, instead of just slapping some UN-groupthink patch on it.