19158: Esser: Haiti needs more aid, less U.S. meddling (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

National Catholic Reporter
http://ncronline.org

Editorial

February 27, 2004

Haiti needs more aid, less U.S. meddling

The concerned, if somewhat innocent, U.S. observer looks at Haiti and
shakes his or her head. More of the same -- violence, instability, a
leader possibly posed in a toppling mode, all as the possible prelude
to United States or Organization of American States intervention.

What’s wrong with Haiti anyway that after two centuries of
independence it can’t fix itself? That’s what the U.S. observer is
left, in innocence, wondering. If Haiti were in Africa it would be
classified with the “failed nations.”

What’s wrong with Haiti begins with what happened the century before
independence -- the mindless exploitation of the most equable
agricultural climate in the world for coffee, sugar, indigo and more.
Haiti by 1791 and the slave uprising was the wealthiest colony in the
world. It was doubling output every three years, regularly spawning
fresh crops of millionaire investors and planters.

It was France’s single largest source of income, producer of most of
Western Europe’s coffee and 40 percent of its sugar.

It was mindless exploitation dependent on the importation of two
essential commodities: slaves and food. Haiti was the New World’s
largest single consumer of slaves.

So heavy was the importation that when the slaves revolted and were
led to victory by Toussaint L’Ouverture in the precursor to
independence, the population was roughly 32,000 whites, 27,000
mulattoes (free people of color), and between 450,000 and 700,000
slaves. The slave count was underreported because the plantation
owners paid a tax on the head count.

At no point during the French colonial period had Haiti been capable
of feeding itself.

Two hundred years later, with a population 10 times that size, with
land eroded and depleted, Haiti’s history is replete with
self-declared emperors, dictators and maximum leaders whose skill in
corruption was in direct proportion to the people’s poverty.

The 1980s produced a phenomenon: a simple, if articulate priest,
borne to lead on the shoulders of popular acclaim. The priest was Fr.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose social democracy offended right-wing
Americans who feared a new Castro. Those Americans, who had a
torturous hold on El Salvador and much of Central America, wanted to
doom Aristide from the start.

They tried. Aristide was ousted. The Vatican, meanwhile, had
blackballed him. It didn’t want priests to be presidents, or
national, political troublemakers. To Rome, Aristide’s proclamations
carried the aura and odor of liberation theology, a state of affairs
no more satisfactory to the Vatican than Aristide’s political views
were to Washington.

But his base of support was so widespread in Haiti that the United
States had solved nothing by expelling Aristide and installing its
own puppets.

The U.S. government changed hands and President Bill Clinton returned
Aristide to office. The U.S. government changed hands again and
President George W. Bush’s administration encouraged Aristide’s
opponents.

And now there is chaos and a fear that throngs of refugees will soon
depart for Florida’s shores (an unhappy prospect for the president,
and his gubernatorial brother, in an election year).

The real story of Haiti is always more complicated on the ground then
it is in the U.S. headlines. The central fact of life is poverty.
Writing in The New York Times, James Dobbins, Clinton’s special envoy
to Haiti, illustrated the point: “This year the United States will
give Baghdad 200 times more economic assistance than it will to
Haiti, which is in much worse shape than Iraq even after the
invasion.”

Said Dobbins: “We must pay greater attention to a desperately poor,
misgoverned nation in our backyard.”

Indeed, we must. And not only at times of maximum political and
diplomatic peril.

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