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21203: Blanchet: Fw: Haiti: the squandered assets (fwd)
From: Max Blanchet <MaxBlanchet@worldnet.att.net>
From: "Le Monde diplomatique" <english@mondediplo.net>
>
> Le Monde diplomatique
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
> April 2004
>
> 'CULTURE HAS NOT SUFFERED THE SAME BREAKDOWN AS THE STATE'
>
> Haiti: the squandered assets
>
> by René Depestre
>
> MY name is René Depestre. I am a Franco-Haitian writer little
> known in my native land. Only once have I taken part directly
> in its civil affairs, in 1946, when the newspaper La Ruche
> (the beehive) gave hope that democratic renewal might revive
> then-comatose human rights. After my generation failed in
> that fight, I grew other roots to stand firm in many foreign
> lands; then, as an old man, I settled on French soil. My
> native country cries for help. But I have no advice to give.
> From my retirement in France, I do not claim to give
> instruction to destitute people in the Caribbean. My view of
> Haiti's ordeal is inspired by humility, respect and
> understanding for others.
>
> The plea for help that calls me is not the one stricken
> countries usually send to the International Monetary Fund or
> the World Bank. Nor is it the alarm bell shrilling outside
> the White House and the United Nations. What I, and people
> around the world can hear in their conscience, is the
> distress of a desolate, isolated third of an island in the
> Americas. In the bicentenary of their victory over slavery
> and colonisation, Haitians cannot escape painful issues. Two
> centuries after the slaves of Santo Dominique became free, a
> milestone in world political and cultural history, Haiti is
> stuck below the poverty line. Civil violence, political
> unrest and crime, a squalid landscape and domestic
> tribulations worsen daily life. The world calls Haiti an
> endless tragedy of decolonisation: millions of Haitians are
> trapped for life, unable to be themselves.
>
> The IMF or World Bank or UN or the G8's powerful members
> should not have to respond to this disaster. Haitians have to
> devise a strategy to win sustained solidarity from
> international aid donors. The first mutual help must come
> from what Aimé Césaire called "the great storehouses of
> faith, the great silos of strength where, in times of crisis,
> peoples summon the courage to take things upon themselves and
> force the future's hand". Haiti has to mobilise to go foward.
> In opinions, beliefs and expectations, it must radically
> overhaul the symbolism of its resistance to misfortune. It
> has worn a monumental mask on history's stage, a mask that
> implies that Haiti is an unassailable fortress.
>
> Its myth of extreme violence, founded on the idea of race and
> embodied in the stones of the Laferrière citadel (1), was
> meant to show the world a prospect of redemption for
> plantation slaves in the United States. This founding myth
> was justifiable between 1791 and 1804, during the violent
> transition from the racist terror of the pro-slavery regime.
> The myth, contemporary with the Jacobin model of the French
> Revolution, was meant as a revolutionary model of
> emancipation. But, as a later myth of black Jacobinism, it
> went on for 200 years shaping the conduct of a nation state
> that had been left incomplete.
>
> Unlike French Revolutionary ideology, which categorised as
> "republican values" human and citizens' rights, the criminal
> code, a democratic sense of citizenship, the sovereignty of
> the people, secularism and individual freedom, Haiti's black
> Jacobinism became entangled in aimless political violence. In
> Haiti the wheel of history meant that the institutions and
> attitudes of Haitian society were geared to the colonial
> machinery of terror. Haitians remain unable to give up a
> regressive, reality-distorting ideology whose religious
> function (which is a form of fundamentalism) locks their
> destiny into a violent logic.
>
> Under Papa Doc and then Baby Doc Duvalier (1957-86), there
> was an outright return to the terror of the slave
> plantations. The state-sponsored tonton-macoutes completed
> the perversion of Haitians' inner convictions, which were
> more about race than nationalism. The murderous rituals of
> the Papadocracy were copied from bossale (2) and Creole
> nihilism, and for 30 years barred Haitians from democratic
> modernity.
>
> In the early 1980s, after three decades of this fascism of
> underdevelopment, it was rumoured that destitute and
> discredited Haiti, escorted by its Papadocratic gravediggers,
> had reached a nadir of shame and destitution. It was also
> predicted that the post-Duvalier period would soon founder,
> since nobody could imagine Haiti rising from its ruins after
> its destruction by Papa Doc's tribe.
>
> But that view failed to acknowledge the enlightened side of
> Haitian identity. A French observer once noted that Haitians,
> black or mulatto, rich or poor, labourer or intellectual,
> mystic or atheist - always provided that they were not voodoo
> devotees, their souls not poisonous cacti in Baron Samedi's
> garden (3) - had in their convictions and conduct, "a
> treasure greater than the Kimberley diamond mines or all the
> Middle East's oil fields". He thought they had a unique
> spirituality, gracefully borne, that could yet return Haiti
> to the ideals of justice and freedom that began its saga.
>
> After the debacle of Duvalier fils in 1986, a man of great
> charisma put this spiritual resource to fertile use:
> Jean-Bertrand Aristide's Lavalas movement surrounded itself
> with the first elected political team in Haitian history. It
> was thought that civic maturity would prevail over reckless
> populism. Free elections were held in the rubble. The time
> seemed right for everything to be cleansed of Macoutism. The
> democratic process was so strong that the army putsch of 1991
> failed to sustain its coup: after a three-year forced exile
> in the US, democratically elected President Aristide returned
> to office.
>
> I believe the 1994 restoration was a historic opportunity
> that the political class, irrespective of ideology, should
> not have squandered. Haiti came so close to altering its
> tragic course that year: for the first time it was emerging
> from diplomatic isolation, from the security quarantine
> enforced by civilised nations on the black revolution of
> Santo Domingo. The dialogue between a small, poor, black
> state and the imperial white superstate of the US was
> unexpectedly replaced by a multinational approach to the
> Haitian predicament. Its chaos was no longer a trivial and
> colonial-backyard affair between a black republic in the
> Caribbean and the US.
>
> The UN's member states pondered the case of Haiti. In this
> democratic forum its misfortunes were analysed in depth; the
> world's media looked hard at Haiti too. Haiti enjoyed the
> understanding and even the sympathy of world opinion. Its
> political, cultural, moral and material merits became
> apparent and it was given several hundred million dollars in
> international financial aid.
>
> To re-establish Aristide in his rightful office, General
> Raoul Cédras's junta had to be forcibly dislodged. The UN
> assigned the role of military intervention in Haiti to the
> US. (Did the spectre of the Yankee occupation of 1915-34
> hover?) But the US intervention in 1994 was not a colonial
> expedition, rather one of the first beneficial applications
> of humanitarian intervention, then a fledgling concept in
> international relations: a Security Council ruling provided
> UN aid to a people in jeopardy. Within the framework of UN
> law (bolstered by the regional legal system of the
> Organisation of American States, OAS), the Clinton
> administration in the US was assigned to help Aristide manage
> the post-Cédras period democratically. He pledged to work
> hard, through Lavalas, to rally the nation and serve the law
> and democracy that Haiti had sought since 1804.
>
> After the end of the cold war the need was felt everywhere to
> invent a new, worldwide social contract to rectify
> globalisation's many glitches. After communism, creating
> civil societies around the world would enable the community
> of nations to meet the challenges of the global market
> economy. The rudiments of democratic citizenship made
> available worldwide would give hope to societies in a crisis
> of decolonisation - Haiti's chronic complaint for 200 years.
>
> The dual legal and military authority of the US and UN, in
> close conjunction with Haiti's burgeoning democratic
> awareness, enabled a coalition government capable of
> resolving Haiti's otherwise insoluble problems of law,
> citizenship and development. Instead of the paternalistic
> trusteeship system run by the UN since 1945, the new
> inter-government regime aimed to build in Haiti a pilot
> project for the waning of national sovereignty caused by
> globalisation. But instead of jumping at the UN opportunity,
> Haitians reverted to their two-centuries-old tradition of
> interpreting their tragedy in millions of different ways.
> Riven by fratricidal hatred and haunted by old demons, they
> missed their date with history in 1994. The chance to
> emancipate Haiti was abandoned because of a suicidal lack of
> self-knowledge.
>
> The Aristide years turned the UN's multi national guardians,
> who arrived as friends or allies, into bewildered, disgusted
> observers, discouraged by Haitians' self-destructive
> gestures. In the face of local political strife, the UN, the
> OAS, the Caribbean Community (Caricom) and the US were
> powerless to establish the direct, intelligent and inventive
> cooperation that Haitians needed to change their fate. The
> clearest indictment of the way we have squandered our
> historical assets is that a decade after Haiti's plight
> touched an international audience, sizeable funds lie frozen
> for want of united, resolute, competent and reliable people
> to use them (4).
>
> The 1804 declaration of independence is now lost and without
> meaning. Throughout Haiti's pseudo-national existence, its
> people - descendants of the first blacks in the Americas to
> revolt successfully against the abominations of slavery -
> have displayed themselves to the world as the inhabitants of
> a small, decaying zombie state. Haiti must now change the
> symbolism of its resistance to oppression, distorted by the
> race problems of the plantations. Haitians believe that
> independence is a military and political victory, more racial
> than national.
>
> Haitians are a Caribbean people of French and African stock;
> Haiti has fantastically blended its constitutional charter
> and ideas on law and citizenship from social and religious
> ingredients, on an anthropological basis that has proved
> false and phantasmagorical. Haitian society should be driven
> by the state, law, secularisation of know ledge and
> behaviour, and the initiatives of the market economy. But
> instead race and improbable religion are omnipresent. Until
> 2004 the political legacy of Haitian liberation was frozen in
> the tableau of its foundation as the first modern black
> republic and the historical cradle of blackness. This legacy,
> up to and including President Aristide, gave Haitians a poor
> opinion of themselves.
>
> The mishaps of the Restore Democracy and Aristide-Lavalas
> operations (1994-2004) compelled Haitians, in Aimé Césaire's
> words, "to wish for and achieve the impossible against fate,
> against history, against nature". This exhortation is more
> topical than ever. Haiti has to take responsibility for what
> happened to it; it must re-find and re-found its
> pyschological and social impulses. Haitians must reconnect
> with their wisdom and with their consensual faith in their
> own creative strength, already tested by the nation's tragic
> timeline. Few places, after two centuries of tragic errors
> and spectacular vicissitudes, have maintained a high cultural
> resist ance to the legacy of slavery and colonisation while
> failing to build modern democratic institutions. But in
> institutional terms, "the Haitian nation has not gelled" (5)
> or even "it does not exist" (6).
>
> Yet the dreamlike jurisdiction that controls Haiti's
> imaginary apparatus should produce a culture of dazzling
> viability, since Haitian culture has not suffered the
> breakdown to which the state, law and justice have succumbed.
> Culturally speaking, Haiti is not the most destitute country
> in the western hemisphere. Despite the political and social
> chaos dominating democratic aspirations, Haitian arts
> transmute mundane discontent into a fine aesthetic. Haiti's
> wonderful realism helped shape the revolution in world
> plastic arts in the 1950s and inspired the music and
> literature of several generations of artists. Its first-rate
> painters, musicians, poets and writers produce work of global
> importance. They do not borrow models from outside but draw
> on the racial experience of the plantation era, live through
> it again, suffer it again, sublimate it again, alone in that
> place that Régis Debray called a "nationless state and a
> stateless society".
>
> Haiti has no oil and no diamonds. If history gives Haiti
> another chance, will Haiti take it? Halted by the
> now-dissolved illusion of Aristide and Lavalas, can Haiti use
> its only resource, its martyred people, for an unprecendented
> revival? Haitians have missed the nation-state train, and
> must now catch the high-speed TGV of socially responsible
> globalisation to take their first democratic journey.
> Toussaint Louverture's 1801 bid for universal human rights,
> scorned by Napoleon, is now acceptable to the new France,
> which no longer sees the world through the filter of its old
> myths.
>
> The new France has embraced the construction of Europe; now
> it must deal with globalisation. The hatred caused by the
> colonial system has not contaminated the language, ideas or
> customs of French society. They are values with a universal
> application and globalisation needs them to survive
> worldwide. Haitians can draw fresh hope in the 21st century
> from the expectations of the French-speaking world. In Haïti
> et la France (7), Régis Debray urges Haitians to excel
> themselves in all fields, backed by the friendship of France,
> so that they may emerge triumphant from their existential
> doldrums.
> ________________________________________________________
>
> * René Depestre, born in 1926, is a Haitian writer and author
> of 'Comment appeler ma solitude' (Stock, Paris, 1999)
>
> (1) A fortress built by King Henri Christophe to defend the
> northern territory in case the French returned to the island.
>
> (2) Bossale: the part of African heritage thought to have
> escaped creolity - the mixing of African and French culture -
> and specific to the culture of Haiti.
>
> (3) An evil voodoo god.
>
> (4) Read Paul Farmer, "Haiti: short and bitter lives", Le
> Monde diplomatique, English language edition, July 2003.
>
> (5) Claude Moïse, La croix et la bannière : la difficile
> normalisation démocratique en Haïti, Cidhica, Montréal, 2002.
>
> (6) Christophe Wargny, Haïti n'existe pas, Autrement, Paris,
> 2004.
>
> (7) Régis Debray et al, Haïti et la France, Editions La Table
> ronde, Paris, 2004.
>
>
>
> Translated by Paul Jones
>
>
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