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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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