Tuesday, April 23, 2024
News and Views from the Global South
CARIBBEAN: After 200 Years of Freedom, Haiti Searches for Itself
Jane Regan
- Two hundred years ago, on May 18, 1803, as the ex-slaves on the French island colony of Saint Domingue were delivering their final blows to Napoleon’s invading army, General Jean Jacques Dessalines ripped the white middle out of the French tricolour and pieced together the blue and red to make the flag for what would soon be the world’s first black republic.
Legend has it Dessalines – remembered for his vehement hatred of white plantation owners – said France would never regain control of the nation that was to proclaim its independence seven months later, on Jan. 1, 1804.
Today, Haiti is still independent, but her population of 8.5 million is living through times that raise questions about how far the country has gone since slaves threw out the French.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former priest turned president now serving his second term after the first was truncated by a brutal three-year coup d’état (1991-1994), maintains that while the country has its ”political liberty”, crushing poverty and debt have prevented ”economic liberty”.
On Flag Day, 200 years after Dessalines shredded the French flag, standing before a crowd of thousands of students and supporters waving blue and red flags under a bright Caribbean sun, Aristide condemned the global poverty caused by mounting Third World debt and then turned to Haiti, citing a proverb to whip up a patriotic fervour.
Two hundred years after the victorious slave revolution, he said, ”the bull that turns the mill doesn’t get to drink the sugar syrup!”
A group of Aristide supporters, bussed up to the flag’s birthplace Arcahaie, 40 kilometres north of the capital, and wearing new T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ”Paying one’s debt doesn’t spoil a friendship”, chanted in response: ”Twenty-one billion! Twenty-one billion!”
Earlier this spring, on the anniversary of the death of another Haitian revolutionary hero, Toussaint Louverture, who died in a French jail, Aristide launched Haiti’s bicentennial celebrations by demanding its former colonial master pay more than 21 billion U.S. dollars in restitution and reparations for the ”debt of independence”.
The president calculates that France owes Haiti the money for 200 years of exploiting the ”Pearl of the Antilles”, as the metropole’s richest colony was nicknamed. Aristide’s tally also includes restitution of the 90 million francs, plus interest, which Haitian President Jean Pierre Boyer agreed to hand over to King Charles X in 1825 to reimburse former French plantation owners whose properties were confiscated by Haitian rebels.
France, formerly considered one of Haiti’s staunchest supporters, did not wait long to reject Aristide’s demand.
”Since President Aristide’s return to power (in October, 1994), the international community has lent Haiti nearly two billion euros, some 200 million from France. Unfortunately, in spite of this massive assistance, there have been few results,” a Quai d’Orsay spokesman said, condemning Aristide’s ”bad governance”.
Given the dire straits in the former jewel in France’s crown, it is no wonder Aristide and his government are looking for money wherever they can find it.
Standing on the brink of its bicentennial, Haiti’s economy is on its knees – foreign reserves are one-tenth of what they were three years ago and the national currency lost 60 percent of its value over the past 10 months – and the country has never been more dependent.
The state budget depends on aid and loans for its 60-70 percent shortfall each year, the government is counting on free trade zones and foreign assembly industries for what it dubs an ”economic rebirth”, and only about one-half of the country’s food needs are met by national production.
Ironically, even as he decried foreign debt as a version of ”economic slavery” in his Flag Day speech, Aristide demanded the release of blocked loans, which would push Haiti’s debt above 1.5 billion dollars – to end what the National Palace calls an ”economic embargo”.
For over two years the United States, the European Union, and multilateral lenders have been holding up some 500 million dollars in aid and loans because they say Aristide’s government and Lavalas Family party have failed to reach a compromise with opposition parties, which boycotted the 2001 presidential race after protesting allegedly fraudulent parliamentary contests in 2000.
Haiti’s ”friends” as the United States, France and a handful of other powerful countries are called, also want the Aristide government to address serious governance, human rights and security issues before the aid spigot is fully opened.
But while Lavalas politicians blame King Charles X and bankers in Washington for their economic ills, and as opposition politicians jockey for power, others point to more structural causes of Haiti’s problems, like faulty economic vision, poor planning and rampant waste and corruption.
Wherever one wants to pin the blame, Haiti is living a ”silent emergency” and the population is suffering its consequences, the United Nations programmes working in the country said in April. Life expectancy, primary school enrolment and agricultural production have all declined, while malnutrition, poverty and deforestation have all gone up.
Every year, Haiti’s rank on the U.N. Development Programme’s ”human development index” slips; it now sits at 146 of 172 countries.
The United Nations is seeking to address the situation with 128 projects that total 84 million dollars and which range from tuition fees for children (most of the country’s schools are private) to small business loans to irrigation systems.
”Unfortunately this is little more than a joke,” said economist Camille Chalmers, executive director of the Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative Development (PAPDA), which promotes sustainable, nationally oriented development and is also a vocal critic of the Lavalas government’s neo-liberal economic policies.
Calling the 128 U.N. projects ”top-down” development, Chalmers noted that earlier rounds of similar projects – ones funded by France in the 1990s, for example – have done little for the country.
”To the contrary, in many cases they have destabilised grassroots organisations,” Chalmers said. ”This is just another distribution of cash to non-governmental organisations (NGOs), with no debates in the communities where the projects are to take place, no participation of the people who live there.”
Rather than more loans or reparations, Chalmers and the groups that back the PAPDA platform are calling for broad and deep reforms to Haiti’s economic and political system, which would promote national production, protect the environment and permit popular participation.
”You could say we have gone backwards, or that we are still where we started,” said Yolette Jeanty, executive director of Women’s House (Kay Fanm), an NGO that promotes women’s rights and works with victims of abuse.
”I don’t think we should be celebrating the bicentennial. I think we should sit down and reflect, as Haitians, on how to orient the country so that we can truly progress.”
Jeanty, an active member in Haiti’s democratic movement since before the coup d’état, feels that the focus on the political parties’ power struggle and on the ”economic embargo” is misplaced.
”This is more than just a political crisis and the little comedic solutions proposed by the OAS (Organization of American States) won’t get us anywhere,” she said.
On Aristide’s demand for billions of dollars from France, Jeanty agreed that ”the West owes us Haitians a lot, but it is not only a monetary debt. It is also moral.”
Historians and politicians, both Lavalas and opposition, are divided on the president’s call for ”restitution and reparations”, which have become buzzwords on radio talk shows in the capital.
But on the reality of grinding poverty, it would be hard to disagree with Aristide, who intoned to the flag-waving fans from his podium, as he once did from his pulpit, ”We refuse to be slaves to infrahuman misery.”
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