23098: Simidor: Haiti and the US elections (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <karioka9@mail.arczip.com>

Some Thoughts on Haiti and the Upcoming US Elections

The Haitian-American community by and large remains on the sidelines of the current US elections, hoping that voters have been sufficiently spooked for an anti-Bush “lavalas” to “send one particular idiot back to his village in Texas” (Playtell Benjamin).  People, however, tend to forget that although Bush is not the brightest of the bright, he was handpicked by the power structure that runs the US Empire for a job that is still unfinished.  Additionally there is a constituency for superpower politics in this country, people who believe the US belongs on top of the world, and who look on the victims of the Bush-Cheney regime at home and abroad as the scum of empire.

There is on the other hand a sizable group of wealthy Haitians who are rooting for a Bush victory.  They are called Saliba, Saati, Boulos, Apaid, etc, names that are barely Haitian, people who make their money in Port-au-Prince and their shopping in Miami, and who hold no allegiance to the land and the people who sweat every penny that funds their exotic lifestyles. It doesn’t matter to them that Bush and Ashcroft discriminate against Haiti with their policy of indefinite detention against Haitian refugees. They proudly support Bush who handpicked them over Aristide as his most loyal servants.

An even larger group of pro-Aristide activists are hoping and praying that a Kerry victory will do for their cause what Clinton did ten years ago for Aristide.  The two sides, taken together, are a measure of how far Haitians have come into accepting their country’s new subordinate role as a pawn in US party politics.  As both sides are apt to point out, Haiti has been a US dominion since the First World War.  Two decades of military occupation transformed the largely self-sustaining Haitian economy into a weak satellite of the US market.  Beyond that, US policy toward Haiti was one of “benign neglect.”  As long as the Haitian military would keep the people and the “communists” in check, the country could cook in its juice.  The year 1994 changed all that.  The first “democratically-elected” president of Haiti begged his “friend” Bill Clinton to invade Haiti on his behalf.  That historic invasion opened the door to future invasions, in Haiti and elsewhere, as the US was and remains intent on using their new humanitarian image to impose their desiderata on the rest of the world.  The point is that whether it’s Bush or Kerry in the White House in 2005, US policy toward Haiti will be strictly on US terms, to protect US interests.  The question is when will the so-called Haitian elite begin to act in terms of Haiti’s interest.

Ray Hammerton Killick, a Haitian commentator who believes in the civilizing mission of capitalism, castigates the Haitian bourgeoisie for their retrograde and unproductive comportment.  “Standing at every crossroad of influence and power, they monopolize and corrupt, and feel no compulsion to be creative or to boost industry or trade.”  Killick has a pretty turn of phrase in describing what he calls the bourgeois’ conscience: “You can measure it repeatedly, each time you get a different result.  He exhibits a changing and diverse nature in his role as a citizen.  Yesterday he prostituted himself with the powers-that-be and enriched himself most vilely.  Today he’s a democrat and the champion of a new social contract.  And tomorrow?”  He urges the bourgeoisie to leave the political arena in the hands of a “modern political leadership committed to a pragmatic capitalist revolution, with the aim of emancipating the masses and expanding the middle class and a strong and civic-minded bourgeoisie, without a transition to socialism.”  According to this ideal scenario, the Haitian bourgeoisie would invest more, would boost the economy and become more competitive on the global market.  The author concludes that the Haitian diaspora must help to defeat Kerry, among other reasons because socialism and a state-controlled economy are “against human nature!”

The main problem with this rosy picture is that the Bush White House has no commitment “to revigorate the Haitian private sector,” just like the Haitian bourgeoisie is not the least bit intent on developing a national economy.  In reality, and with few exceptions, the Haitian bourgeoisie produces next to nothing.   Jean Luc (Yves Montas) and Benoit Joachim in their writings on the political economy of underdevelopment have mapped out the processes by which an import/import bourgeoisie, based in Port-au-Prince and a few coastal cities, have traditionally exploited the poor peasant as both producer and consumer, and how in turn this commercial bourgeoisie served as the driving belt in making Haiti ever more dependent on the imperialist centers.   The handful of factories and mills that operated from the 1940s to the 1970s were state enterprises.  When the state was forced to privatize those assets in the 1980s and 1990s, the private sector chose to shut down the plants in favor of juicy monopolies on import.

Under globalization this tendency is only magnified.  Capital-starved, technically and socially backward and lacking the minimal infrastructure required to compete in the global economy, the Haitian bourgeoisie is evolving downward to the status of mere managers and middlemen.  At the same time, the country is being transformed into a sweatshop where repression, combined with the reserve army of the unemployed, maintains wages at starvation level.  This bleak prospect is outlined in the Interim Cooperation Framework document if one bothers to read between the lines.  While much noise is made about human rights, economic recovery and access to basic services, the biggest expenditure projected for to the poor is the creation of 44,000 temporary jobs, mostly in garbage collection and road work.  This precarious employment comes with hazardous health conditions, and barely rises above the infamous “Corvée” or more recent “Food for Work” programs.

Meanwhile $500 million of the expected $1,4 billion of new grants and loans will pay for the wages and upkeep of the MINUSTAH troops, while millions more will be diverted for servicing the external debt.  One understands the rationale of the decommissioned soldiers who are clamoring for ten years of back pay for services not rendered, when so much money is being lavished on a feel good international force.  The Interim Framework document speaks ostensibly of strengthening the private sector, and a huge premium has already gone to the commercial sector in the form of tax breaks and price deregulation.  (The impoverished consumer is paying the bitter price of this generosity.)  But no real resources have been allocated to supporting and fostering real national production.  The few infrastructure works envisioned are designed to shore up the assembly sector, where new US investments under the much-vaunted HERO-Act are expected to create an illusion of growth.  By and large, those who had hoped that the post-Aristide period would translate into a new beginning for the country will soon be struggling with massive frustration and neoliberal indigestion.

But that’s not all.  The Haitian oligarchs are back to their smug selves, holding up their nose and pretending they live on a different planet from the miserable people they exploit.  They applaud themselves for getting rid of Aristide, forgetting how pathetic and pale their protests had been , until the youth in Port-au-Prince, and the general population elsewhere in the country stepped up to the plate, “Grenn nan Bounda!”  Of course Ti-Bush rushed in, just like Reagan rushed in back in 1986, to steal the wind from the people’s uprising.  But the basic fact that the Haitian oligarchs are trying to sweep under the carpet, and which will be their doom one day, is that the people who mobilized to chase out Baby Doc, to chase out Aristide, are even more fed up with their century-old system of injustice and apartheid.  As the saying goes, the stick used to beat the black dog will serve just as well to beat the white dog.

Instead of saving themselves by helping to save the country, the Haitian oligarchs have found common cause with Bush.  They have agreed among themselves that a reconstituted army is the best cost-effective replacement for MINUSTAH, once Latortue’s mandate expires next year.  Whether it is through a democratic transition or a direct military takeover will depend on how things unfold between now and then.  A reconstituted army costs a lot less, and besides Haitian soldiers are far more expendable that UN peacekeepers.  Still, can the old status quo be restored without a bloodbath?  The Haitian oligarchy is quite eager to roll the dice, as long as it is not their blood that flows in the streets.   The real question is how many bloodbaths it will take to bring back the order and security the oligarchy longs for, in the changed landscape of the last 15 years.

The Lavalas movement and Aristide himself to some extent had become captive of a vast racket that cut across classes, and alienated a majority of the population from the government.  At the top, a clique of “Grands Mangeurs” was stealing as fast as they could, providing easy ammunition to opponents of the regime with their nouveaux riches consumption.  At ground level, a spectrum of opportunists, petty gangsters, lumpen youth and corrupted former activists, united by the feeling “Se tou pa nou” (It’s now our turn), were preying on a defenseless and hard-pressed population, in the time-honored tradition of the Tontons-Macoute and other pro-government militias before them.  With corruption rampant and the foreign aid spigot drying up, the unruly Chimères hastened the deliquescence of the state.  That the population of cities like Gonaives and Cayes, bastions of pro-Aristide resistance in 1991-1993, should find common cause with the same military that abused them a short decade ago, provides a sobering sense of how much the people had come to reject and to fear Lavalas’ lawlessness and its militias.  It is also a poor omen for the future of democracy in Haiti, that a bloodthirsty and basically anti-patriotic disbanded army has been able to muster enough prestige to threaten a coup, should the situation deteriorate any further.

On the Left people are prone to say that Democrats or Republicans, it’s the system that matters.  This still holds true.  Regardless of who wins the coming US elections, Haiti will get the same raw deal in the international division of labor imposed by US imperialism on the rest of the world.  With one difference: a Bush win makes a resurgence of the Haitian military much more likely, while a Kerry victory makes an Aristide resurgence relatively certain.  Two equally unpleasant prospects.  A third, and the only viable alternative, is to work to empower the people themselves with the means to change their own destiny.  The future, folks, belongs to independent grassroots politics.

Daniel Simidor,
September 2, 2004
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