Myrtha Desulme, Contributor
Haitians wait to register their names for the next presidential elections in the new registration centre in the volatile neighbourhood of Citi-Soleil on October 6.-REUTERS
ONE Of the fundamental questions of our times, which helped to define the 20th century, and continues to define the present one, is the establishment and consolidation of democracy, and the extent to which the democratic process, in any given country, at any given time, can truly be considered to be free and fair, and free from fear.
It is one of the supreme ironies of history that Haiti, the first country in the world to adopt and integrally implement the lofty ideals of the French revolution's 'Dec-laration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen', should today be one of the international litmus tests for the establishment of democracy.
The history of Haiti is the 200-year-old tale of a proud, defiant and freedom-loving people determined to "Live free or die", struggling to stave off the relentless attempts of international superpowers, intent on subduing them, and returning them "under control". In the 1790s and early 1800s, the revolutionary genius, Toussaint L'Ouverture, skilfully manipulated the competing ambitions of the European superpowers and the United States, until he became the undisputed Ruler of Saint-Domingue, which would be proclaimed in 1804, the sovereign and independent Republic of Haiti. While fighting to maintain the integrity of the national territory, and live free of outside interference, the Haitian military and landed gentry hijacked the freedom and democracy the people had fought alongside them for. Having inherited a plantation economy, the prosperity of the minority continued to depend on the exploitation of the majority.
The ex-slaves, however, would have none of it. Rejecting the perpetuation of the plantation economy, they fled to the hills, determined to survive on their own subsistence farming. In his brilliant essay, "Locating Haiti in the Caribbean', distinguished Trinidadian scholar, Lloyd Best, tells us that:
"At the time of Independence in 1804, 50-60 per cent of the slaves were African-born, called negs bossales, the rest being Haitian creoles. Freedom in the rest of the Caribbean was achieved at a later date with an overwhelming number of slaves creolised over an extended period. In Haiti however, the fact of this enormous mass of Africans, suddenly acquiring independence, and creating their own country, constitutes a very special situation, which has existed nowhere else.
"It played a determining and unique role, revolving around the African-born, who became creolised only under conditions of freedom, and who formed the core of a peasantry that did not consist of mere footloose cultivators, creatures of the plantation, but who satisfied the Aristotelian condition of organised householders, engaged on autonomous production for domestic consumption, and only after that, for export trade, and international investment."
Best quotes French anthropologist, Gerard Barthelmy:
"The most important thing about the Haitian case is the very profound economic and social revolution made by the Haitian people, when they repudiated the system of plantation slavery. Everywhere else in America, the system of slavery and the system of the large plantations were preserved. Until official abolition in the Caribbean, Haiti was the only country which achieved this fundamental revolution."
HAITI AND AID
In 1996 Grassroots International (GI), an organisation which promotes global justice through partnerships with social change organisations, began an extensive six-month research and investigation project in Haiti. Given the massive scope of programmes funded by the U.S. Government and administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), GI's primary objective was to understand how these programmes were affecting food security in Haiti, and to see for themselves what impact they were having on Haiti's poor, particularly small farmers and peasants.
Despite glowing reports from USAID that its field programmes in Haiti were succeeding, GI's research found that those programmes were not furthering equitable development, nor were they increasing food security. U.S. policies were undermining, instead of enhancing, the ability of Haitian farmers to grow and market their goods. These policies and aid programmes interfered with the production of local food crops, and created a dangerous dependence on U.S. food imports.
These policies are also contributing to the exodus of Haitians from rural areas. As the World Bank stated in a recent draft strategy paper:
"The rural majority has only two possibilities: work in the industrial or service sector, or emigrate." Forced from the land by subsidised foreign imports, the peasants are compelled to take to the high seas, or swell the urban slums, becoming part of the desperate, unemployed proletariat, for whom exploitation is the only opportunity.
The U.S. Network for Economic Justice reports that:
"The logic of western exploitation of the third world has remained fundamentally the same: dreams of a better life must be crushed by violence and grinding poverty so extreme, that local people will accept any work at any rate, and abandon all notions of improving their lot.
"Whereas corporations receive vast incentives to set up plants in Haiti, returns to the Haitian economy are minimal, and working and living standards of Haitian people, whose wages are generally about 68 cents a day, steadily declined. Decades of public investments and policy manipulation by the World Bank, the IMF and the U.S. have deliberately created an environment, where the exploitation of workers is hailed as an incentive to invest in Haiti."
THE US EMBARGO
In 2000, the U.S. imposed a devastating embargo on Haiti. The official pretext was an electoral dispute stemming from Haiti's May 2000 national elections. At issue was the formula used to calculate the votes for seven senate seats, out of some 110 legislative seats filled nationwide at that time. The seven senators resigned, yet the sweeping financial embargo their election triggered, remained in place until Aristide's removal in February 2004.
Jeffrey Sachs, professor at Columbia University, and Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals, asserts that:
"U.S. officials surely knew that the aid embargo in Haiti would mean a balance-of-payments crisis, a rise in inflation, and a collapse of living standards, all of which fed the 2004 rebellion."
Haiti's economic collapse fuelled rioting and deaths. Political, social, and economic chaos deepened, and Haiti's impoverished people continue to suffer.
In 'The Destabilisation of Haiti', Michel Chossudovsky, professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, and director of the Centre for Research on Globalisation, writes: "Washington's foreign policy initiatives were co-ordinated with the application of the IMF's deadly economic medicine. The country has been literally pushed to the brink of economic and social disaster."
The chaos and violence, which presently prevail in Haiti, are uncharacteristic and artificially engineered. In spite of their revolutionary past, and turbulent politics, Haitians have always been a gentle, even genteel, people. Though the army was always a tool of repression, and government militia used violence for political ends during the Duvalier era, Haiti was never a country which was heavily armed, or where violence was widespread. For the past 20 years, however, foreign aid programmes and the free-market economic policies that they are conditioned upon, have been exacerbating social tensions. Ultimately, such development strategies are threatening to undermine Haiti's chance to build democracy by driving a wedge between the government and the people.
Haitians are a determined people, however. Their commitment to democracy is tenacious, and over the years, they have resisted many brutal attempts, both internal and external, to halt their 200-year march towards democracy. For all its current sorrows, the greatness of Haiti's people is the sole guarantee of better days to come, as they are not likely to abandon the struggle, until the lofty ideals of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen" finally apply to the people who pioneered its application.
