21942: Kalra: Short Changing Haiti to please Washington (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Monika Kalra <monika@rfkmemorial.org>

Todd Howland
Short changing Haiti to please Washington
May 16, 2004

By TODD HOWLAND
Globe and Mail Update

It looks like Canada's policy toward the troubled Caribbean country is more about pleasing the U.S. than helping average Haitians, says Washington human-rights activist.

Is Haiti Canada's Iraq? Okay, not exactly, but stay with me.

Canadians, and most others, see Canada as an international do-gooder motivated by principles of human rights and international law. In the case of Haiti, Canada's recent inaction and action is more about appeasing the United States than about the human rights of the Haitians. O Canada, we expected so much more from you.

While there are no moves afoot to beatify the twice-ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide, part of the reason for your muddled policy regarding Haiti is that Canada's Haitian diaspora was and continues to be divided: Canadian policy-makers have both camps - Mr. Aristide's Lavalas and Opposition stalwarts - to please. So diverse were constituent opinions in the Haitian expatriate community in Canada, that Ottawa apparently could do nothing until the U.S. facilitated the ouster of Mr. Aristide and invited you people in.

I lived in Rwanda for two years directly following the genocide, working with the UN to help pick up the pieces, and in my opinion, the fact that diaspora Rwandans or Haitians bring their political differences with them is no excuse for Canadian inaction.

In any case, the Haitian story started long before Paul Martin became your Prime Minister. In early 2001, the new administration of George W. Bush pushed the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to violate its own charter and stop disbursement of funds to the Haitian government - funds that had been earmarked for clean water, sanitation, education, and health-care projects. There wasn't a peep from the principled IDB member from the North.

True, there was corruption in Mr. Aristide's Haiti. But the IDB did not stop its disbursement because of corruption, for the IDB itself stated that it hadn't lost money to corruption in Haiti since Mr. Aristide's return from exile in 1994. The stoppage was politically motivated.

How many Haitians have died from waterborne diseases because Canada thought it more convenient to give the new Bush administration a bit of a honeymoon than to stand on principle? You chose a slippery slope of selective human-rights advocacy and let your principles slide faster than a puck on freshly Zambonied ice.

Now that Mr. Aristide has been flown out of the country on a U.S. jet, the U.S. wants to turn Haiti's chaos into a standard UN blue-helmet policing mission, as if Haiti's poverty, institutional collapse, and basic need for basics could be reduced to a police solution. Canadian policy wonks know very well that the idea is silly, and that the new UN mission shouldn't repeat the mistakes of past interventions in Haiti (a decade ago, when the UN went in to maintain order, it failed to help build solid, autonomous institutions). Unfortunately, the present U.S. position points squarely in this direction once more.

Ideally, the UN mission should have the financial and personnel capacity to measurably contribute to improving the human-rights situation for Haitians. This includes the rights to clean water, health and education - as well as contributing to "security," due process and physical integrity. Canada knows peace-keeping and peace-building missions need to move in the "rights" direction.
Typically a peace-keeping mission becomes operative after two warring factions have reached a peace accord. But that is not the situation in Haiti.

Contrast this with the approach taken by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). By refusing to recognize the transitional government that has taken over since Mr. Aristide's exile, CARICOM is acting responsibly and with principle. In an attempt to forestall civil war, CARICOM worked out a political framework involving a power-sharing agreement between the Opposition and Mr. Aristide's elected government. This was done to provide a framework to avoid moving from bad government to worse.

But the compromise was ignored - and now exile, force and unnecessary destruction and government dysfunction are the pillars upon which the new transitional government is being built. To make things worse, the only money in the pipeline is for projects being promoted by Mr. Aristide's ministers, and the new government seems allergic to embracing anything from the previous regime.

Canada joined Washington's simplistic, short-sighted "regime change" approach to Haiti's problems by failing to back the CARICOM solution. At the same time, it sat on the sidelines as the IDB squeezed the Haitian government dry (your foreign-policy people must have known that the new Haitian government has no money. Ironically, one of the last acts of the Aristide government was to use its last reserves to pay IDB debts).

Washington says that it is opposed to "peace-keeping mission creep" in Haiti. What it is really against is developing sensible UN peace-building interventions designed to meet the needs of the Haitian people. There will only be money for blue helmets and some police training, not for addressing Haiti's systematic violations of human rights to clean water, education and health. The U.S. is imposing a peace-keeping model designed for monitoring a ceasefire between two warring armies. While it's true that Haitian society is polarized, sending in the troops is not in any way what is truly needed.

In the period before Mr. Aristide's forced departure, multilateral aid and international financial institutions basically followed the U.S. lead and stopped direct support to the Haitian government. It will take months for them to get up and running again; development proposals will be drafted and redrafted over the next 18 to 24 months. Until then, the transition will get plenty of rhetorical support, but (we can predict) it will also become frustrated by the fact that there is cash for well-equipped blue-helmeted troops and little for trash removal, salaries of state workers, or nurses.

Response to a recent UN appeal for funds - for humanitarian aid, not the Haitian government - has been dismal. For Haiti, compassion fatigue exists even before the heavy lifting of creating functional public institutions has begun. This is another reason why the UN peace-keeping mission should arrive with the capacity and cash to address - not watch and report on - the significant human-rights problems facing Haiti.

O Canada, what happened to your support for UN reform and the human-rights agenda? Is Canada willing to push the UN bureaucrats who are busily creating a budget based on the recent Security Council resolution establishing the peace-keeping mission to Haiti in the "rights" direction? Is Canada willing to step on U.S. toes and call for a progressive interpretation of the resolution? Will Canada push for a budget that will allow the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti to put program money on the ground immediately to help address systematic human-rights abuses?

Haiti may not be Canada's Iraq. But - like another wealthy country in another part of the world - you are now sending your soldiers into a quagmire, a violent and dysfunctional state, rather than helping that state heal itself and become autonomous and truly free.

Todd Howland is director of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights. He previously worked with human-rights NGOs in El Salvador, Guatemala and Ethiopia, and with the United Nations in Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda and Angola. He spent three years with the UN peace-building effort in Angola, running its human-rights division.