Haiti: Need for Self-Empowerment

That Haiti was devastated by a massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake – the largest to strike the small Caribbean nation in more than two centuries – on Tuesday, January 13th, is already well known. Since then, we have been confronted with a veritable deluge of distressing news and disturbing headlines, as the extent of the disaster is assessed and more and more bodies are dug out of the rubble.

The one thing repeatedly stressed by the media, and what makes this tragedy all the more difficult to stomach, is that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. That is why the damage from this earthquake has been overwhelming. That is why Haiti now looks like a war zone whereas a  more developed country would’ve fared better in an equally disastrous situation.

What hasn’t been addressed by conventional media outlets, however, is this fundamental question – why is Haiti so poor? What caused it to become known as a “symbol of utter misery” even before the earthquake had transpired?

Poverty – especially such acute, encompassing, far-reaching poverty – is not inevitable, unlike natural phenomena like earthquakes, hurricanes, or floods. It is not an act of God. It is man-made. And in the case of Haiti, I believe it is the direct consequence of a long, punitive history of colonial and post-colonial exploitation, of decades of US-backed dictatorships and foreign intervention in national affairs.

Haiti, being the producer of half the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe, was once Europe’s most profitable colony. In 1804, though, what had begun as a slave uprising led by Toussaint Louverture a decade earlier, culminated in freedom from French colonialism. Haiti thus became the world’s first free black republic and the first of the Latin American colonies to gain its independence. It did not, however, manage to garner support or recognition from its neighbor to the northeast, the United States. At the time, the United States was naturally opposed to the idea of a republic of free Africans because slavery was still an integral part of its economy. Furthermore, France, insisting that Haitians pay reparations as compensation for the slaves that were freed, shackled the country with a huge debt that took much of the nineteenth century to repay.

Haiti was then subject to an invasion and occupation by the United States, under the President Woodrow Wilson, from 1915-1934. Noam Chomsky, in a talk called “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours” at the Riverside Church in Harlem last June, referred to this occupation as “murderous, brutal, and destructive.” Laws restricting foreign ownership were overturned and US businesses were able to take over Haitian lands at will. Haiti became increasingly dependent on the import of heavily subsidized American products, which led to the breakdown of its economy. Working people- mostly women- were forced to submit to miserable conditions in US-owned assembly shops.

After this occupation, Haiti suffered through a series of brutal dictatorships that were supported by the U.S. because they demonstrated a favorable attitude towards U.S. corporate interests. However, after a series of rampant protests forced the last of these dictators out of power, Haiti’s first free elections in 1990 saw the appointment of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist priest. He was voted in by Haiti’s poor majority who were enticed by his platform advocating land reform and reforestation, aid to poor farmers, increased wages and rights for sweatshop workers, etc. However, Aristide’s economic reforms, such as “the coordination of rice production, seed, and fertiliser to poor farmers, and management of imports to alleviate the impact of cheaper US-grown rice on the local market,” angered the country’s elite and U.S. corporate interests, and Washington sought to undermine this regime.

A few months later, Aristide was overthrown and forced into exile. He was restored in 1994 under stringent conditions that stressed his compliance with neoliberalist policies which, as Chomsky noted, “destroyed and dismantled what was left of economic sovereignty and drove the country into chaos.” In 1995 USAID even published a report that described how “the export-driven trade and investment policy” that was being forced onto Haiti would “relentlessly squeeze the domestic rice farmer.” But when Aristide started to exhibit signs of defiance in the face of these ill-meaning reforms, France and the U.S. joined together to back a military coup and exiled him to South Africa, where he remains today.

Since the 2004 coup, Haiti has ultimately been in the hands of the international community. As Peter Hallward in a piece called “Our role in Haiti’s plight” in the Guardian has noted, “[t]he same countries to send emergency help to Haiti now, however, have during the last five years consistently voted against any extension of the UN mission’s mandate beyond its immediate military purpose. “ Measures devoted to alleviating poverty or encouraging agrarian development have been thwarted, “in keeping with the long-term patterns that continue to shape the distribution of international ‘aid.’”

This is the Haiti that had to contend with the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck on January 13, 2010. Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti postulates that when the debris finally clears, we will find that “most of the people who have died will have done so in shantytowns perched on the hillsides.” What led people to build houses in the hillsides is the fact that their parents and grandparents were pushed out because of neoliberal policies that Haiti was forced to adopt 30 years ago, after the occupation, “when it was decided by the international experts that Haiti’s economic salvation lay in assembly manufacture plants.” In order to further that ideal, it was agreed that Haiti ought to have a “captive labor force in the cities.” Thus, an amalgam of aid policies, trade policies, and political policies got created, with the purpose of moving people from the countryside to the hills. Because the houses were built in “giant bowls with one house on top of each other,” when the earthquake struck, they fell into one another because they were “built in places where they shouldn’t be built.” The same policies are also why there is now such a distressing lack of the bare necessities like hospitals, ambulances, fire trucks, rescue equipment, food and medicine. Haiti is completely organized according to the needs of foreign interests, not its own people’s.

President Obama says USAID and the Departments of State and Defense will be collaborating on a relief effort for Haiti and has also enlisted the help of former Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. These same entities and persons are, in large part, responsible for the detrimental economic and military policies that ran Haiti to the ground even before the earthquake hit. We also need to be wary of whether the aid that gets sent to Haiti is in the form of loans or grants, as Naomi Klein, speaking at the Ethical Culture Society in New York, has said. Haiti is already staggering under the weight of overwhelming debt and because it is “desperate for any kind of aid,” it is not “in a position to negotiate fairly the terms of that exchange,” which can make pushing through unfair economic policies that much easier.

Right now, student groups all over campus are struggling to raise money for Haiti. The international community is coming together and making all sorts of noble declarations. That aid will not help Haiti unless we implement deeper, structural reforms. We need to stop our exploitation of Haiti’s national resources and relinquish our vise-like grip of their government. What Haiti really needs right now is support, yes, but more fundamentally it needs to be set on the road of self-empowerment through which growth and prosperity can finally transpire.

(And maybe we can start paying Haiti the reparations we owe while we’re at it.)