Aristide: You Can't Go Home Again

Ed's Note: Sometimes events catch up with you. Case in point, the post below, which I had written for The Mantle. I was about to post it when the news came out that Haiti had decided to finally issue former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide a passport so he could return to the country, which is the central argument of this piece.  But, I decided to publish it here anyway because it does give some background as to why things in Haiti are so bad today (hint: it's not just because of the earthquake). - E.

On its face it was one of the stranger political decisions of recent times: the sudden return of Haiti's notorious and brutal former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier from a quarter-century of exile ostensibly to help his people recover from the massive earthquake that struck the nation - a full year after the temblor devastated Port-Au-Prince and killed 300,000 people. At the same time though, another Haitian political drama was unfolding much more quietly: the decision to prevent Haiti's former democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from making a similar return to his homeland. According to diplomatic cables unearthed in the Wikileaks document dump, following the January 2010 earthquake, the United States supposedly pressured Brazil – the nation heading up the United Nations-backed security and relief efforts in Port-Au-Prince – not to allow Aristide to return from exile in South Africa. Author Gwynne Dyer contends that the United States had long kept tabs on the exiled Duvalier, who traveled back to Haiti on an expired diplomatic passport; it's hard to imagine that airport security in Paris would have missed the fact that his passport was now invalid, meaning that both countries likely knew of Duvalier's travel plans and did nothing to intercede. This of course begs the question as to why the United States would feel the need to slap such an injunction on a deposed democratically-elected president yet not on a former dictator.

Sadly it seems a case of that old maxim attributed to President Franklin Roosevelt in action: “he may be a bastard, but he's our bastard.” For nearly 40 years the Duvalier clan – first Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, then after his death in 1971, his son Jean-Claude - ruled Haiti with an iron fist. But while the years of Duvalier rule may have been ones of oppression for average Haitians, brutally enforced by their secret police, the Tonton Macoute; for Haiti's elite and international business interests from the United States, Canada and France, it was something of a golden age. After a decade and a half of misrule, Baby Doc was overthrown and driven into exile in 1986, a chaotic time followed. Finally in 1991 Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic priest, was elected president. When Aristide was subsequently overthrown, the United States actively supported his return to power as the “democratically-elected” leader of Haiti in 1994. By 2004, during his second term in office though, the United States' opinion of Aristide had changed. At this point, Aristide was making good on some of his populist pledges to try to lift the majority of Haiti's population out of poverty (Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere) at the expense of the nation's elites and international business interests. He had also disbanded Haiti's army, which most Haitians viewed not as an instrument of national protection, but rather national oppression, and had become the head of the Fanmi Lavalas, a populist/socialist political movement that enjoyed wide support from Haiti's underclass. When Aristide was deposed for a second time, the United States' official position was that this was a “domestic matter” for the Haitians themselves to resolve.

Aristide though has long contended that his second deposal was not a Haitian-led revolt, but rather one organized and funded by the United States (specifically the CIA) because of his attempts to reign in international business interests in the country and lift the rank-and-file Haitians out of poverty. It is tempting to dismiss Aristide's charges as mere sour grapes, that his powerful neighbor to the north provides a too convenient scapegoat for his own removal from power. What makes Aristide's claims even more compelling is the decision taken by the Haitian electoral commission ahead of the 2010 election, again supposedly at the urging of the United States, to not allow his party the Fanmi Lavalas to participate. Since Aristide's overthrow, the Fanmi Lavalas has not been allowed to run candidates in any national election, they were barred from the 2010 vote on the grounds that their official electoral paperwork was not in order.

Sadly the United States has a long history of involvement with Haiti that has seldom worked out well for the Haitians. Take for instance the impact the United States has had on Haiti's agricultural sector. As part of a package of neo-liberal economic reforms in the mid-1990s, the United States insisted that Haiti open up their agricultural sector to international competition. The effects on Haiti were devastating: their sugarcane industry all but collapsed and the country went from being an exporter of rice to relying on imports from the United States, which thanks to American farming subsidies, sold in Haitian markets for far less than the domestic product. Haitian agriculture was dealt another heavy blow when the United States insisted that Haiti cull all of their native hogs over misplaced fears that a swine-born illness could jump from the island to the United States mainland and decimate the American pork industry. The Creole Pig was uniquely adapted to thrive in the heat and harsh conditions of the Haitian hinterland, they also formed the basis of the rural economy: a farmer's wealth was often measured in large part by the number of hogs he owned. In return for killing the Creole Pigs, the United States offered to replace them with domestic stock, but these hogs, bred for life on American farms, were ill-suited to Haiti, needing special shelters to protect them from the tropical sun and special feed that was out of the budget of many small Haitian farmers (Creole Pigs foraged for most of their food). As a result, large numbers of farmers were forced to simply give up their land and move to the city – many to the poorly built slums that collapsed so readily in the January 2010 earthquake. President Bill Clinton himself seemed to have a change of heart about forcing open the Haitian agriculture market based on his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last March: “it may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake…I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did.” Aristide and the Fanmi Lavalas staunchly opposed the neo-liberal economic reforms imposed on Haiti in the mid-90s.

Of course history and international relations are complex things, which perhaps is why conspiracy theories – especially the darker ones – about the interplay of nations, seem to find such fertile ground. It must be noted that in the days and weeks immediately following the quake, no other nation arrived in Haiti with as much material and support as the United States. Yet at the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that for much of Haiti's existence, the involvement of the United States in their affairs has arguably done more harm than good. One has to ask if that pattern is not continuing with our apparent insistence that Jean-Bertrand Aristide not be allowed to return to his homeland, especially while Baby Doc sits in Port-Au-Prince.

Baby (Doc) Come Back

In what's either the biggest act of political hubris in a long, long time, or the execution of a cunning plan to retake power, Haiti's former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier returned to Port-au-Prince last week after two decades in exile. His sudden arrival threw the country's already shaky political establishment into turmoil; for his part, Duvalier said he was returning to help his country rebuild after the massive earthquake that leveled large parts of Port-au-Prince and killed perhaps as many as 300,000 people – though he offered no explanation on why then he waited a whole year to make his return.

And that has people speculating that Duvalier is hoping to take advantage of the political vacuum which currently exists in Haiti. The presidential elections held last November have been marred by charges of fraud and vote-rigging; a run-off between the two top candidates still hasn't been held. Meanwhile, Port-au-Prince remains a city of rubble and refugee camps with an out-of-control crime rate. This seems to have spurred former Duvalier loyalists to lobby their boss to fly in from exile in Paris to try to retake the reins of power, a motivation at least partially confirmed by Duvalier's lawyer, Reynold Georges, who said of his client in an interview with al-Jazeera: “he is a political man. Every political man has political ambitions.” Georges added that under the new Haitian constitution that he helped to draft, Duvalier has the legal right to stand for election.

So far though, Duvalier has only stood before a Haitian judge to answer charges of corruption and embezzlement dating back to the end of his reign in 1986. Baby Doc Duvalier ruled Haiti from 1971 to 1986, taking over for his father Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. The rule of the Duvalier clan was marked by authoritarian rule and widespread human rights abuse; the Duvaliers kept power in large part thanks to a brutal militia known as the Tonton Macoutes. When Baby Doc was finally overthrown in a popular revolt, he is said to have taken a large chunk of the national treasury with him into exile, nearly $6 million of which still lies frozen in a Swiss bank account. A Haitian judge now has three months to decide whether the criminal case should continue against Baby Doc Duvalier; meanwhile he'll likely be staying in Haiti whether he wants to or not, his passport was seized by Haitian authorities.

As for the question of why would Haitians even want a brutal dictator back in the first place, it is likely an expression of just how frustrated people are over the slow pace of reconstruction in Port-au-Prince. Despite pledges of billions of dollars in foreign aid, little work in the capital has actually been done. Much of the money is tied up in political and bureaucratic red tape, and Haiti's current political turmoil isn't helping the situation. It is worth noting that the crowd who met Duvalier at the airport included a fair number of young people, all of whom were likely born after he fled to Paris. They don't remember the brutality of the Duvalier regime, but have only heard the stories of how Haiti was once not an economic basket case. Given the current sorry state of affairs, it is a powerful image.

Duvalier's return has also prompted speculation that another ousted Haitian leader may stage his own comeback: former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was driven from power by another coup in 2004. Unlike Baby Doc though, Aristide is said to still have broad support among the Haitian population. For his part, Aristide insists that the coup against him wasn't a popular uprising, but rather a manufactured revolt secretly backed by the United States because economic reforms he proposed to fight poverty and improve the lives of average Haitians would have a negative impact on American business interests in Haiti. According to this editorial by Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Aristide's decision to disband the Haitian army also factored into the United States' decision to support his ouster, since the army's main duty was to protect the country's small, but powerful upper class as well as international business interests, primarily from the United States, Canada and France. Weisbrot goes on to cite information contained within the Wikileaks dump of US foreign policy cables that contend to show the United States pressuring Brazil, the nation heading up the UN coalition supposedly providing security in Port-au-Prince, not to allow Aristide to return to Haiti from exile in South Africa.

The official position of the US State Department is that Aristide's return would only confuse the political situation in Haiti. But with near anarchy on the streets of the capital, an indefinitely-postponed presidential election and the return of a brutal former dictator, it's hard to imagine how Aristide's return could possibly make things worse.

Sen. Coburn: Screw Haiti

In March, the United States pledged more than $1.5 billion in long-term aid to help Haiti rebuild from the devastating earthquake that struck the impoverished island nation on January 12. Ten months later, do you know how much of that aid has been disbursed? If you answered none, you are correct, and the man to thank for that inaction is Oklahoma's Senator Tom Coburn.

Coburn insists that he's taking his stand against releasing the reconstruction funds for Haiti as part of his fight against government waste, namely the $1 million that would go towards paying for a manager and staff to oversee the dispersal of the Congressional funds. Coburn asks why can't the United States' ambassador just serve in this role – a statement that shows that Coburn not only lacks basic human compassion but also a knowledge of how the US foreign service actually works. An ambassador's duties are to represent the American state to a foreign government and to provide assistance to American citizens and businesses in a foreign land, not to manage the installation of US-funded sewer pipes in Port-Au-Prince.

Of course Coburn's real motivation is to be able to show his politically conservative base that he's fighting against “government waste”, and Haiti provides him with a golden opportunity for some top-flight political grandstanding without inconveniencing any Americans – the only people who are suffering are the thousands of Haitians forced to live among their own filth and the rubble of their former lives because the funds America promised are not available to help them rebuild. It's worth noting here that paying for a project manager and staff (whose salaries would amount to less than one-one thousandth of the total aid package) would ensure that the Congressional assistance funds were used as intended and not skimmed off by Haiti's notoriously corrupt government – ironically its an effective way to fight against government waste just like Coburn alleges he wants to do.

Perhaps the best way to resolve this situation and fight against waste would be to rescind Coburn's Senatorial salary, this would not only help pay for the aid management staff in Haiti it would also be a worthwhile stand against government waste since the man certainly isn't earning his money.

Opposition Rallies in Haiti

Police firing tear gas canisters met a crowd of more than 1,000 people demanding the resignation of Haiti’s President Rene Preval on Tuesday, according to the BBC. Opposition politicians, who are claiming that Preval is using the earthquake last January that killed more than 200,000 people as an excuse to remain in power once his term in office ends next February, led the protest. Haiti’s parliament just extended Preval’s term in office by three more months because, they say, it would be impossible to hold elections as scheduled because many government electoral records were lost and many civil servants were killed in the quake; opposition politicians though counter by saying that Haiti’s constitution makes no provisions for suspending elections due to a national crisis.

In the aftermath of the quake, many Haitians were upset by Preval’s seeming lack of leadership; some also felt that the Haitian government was allowing foreign militaries - particularly the United States’ – too free a hand in operating within their country while providing relief efforts. During Tuesday’s protest, some protestors called for the return of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was driven from power and into exile in Africa six years ago. For his part, Aristide claims that he was actually deposed by the United States in a coup d’etat for his refusal to sell off state-owned enterprises; at the time, officials from the Bush Administration countered by saying that the US military actually helped Aristide and his family escape the country ahead of an armed uprising by Haitians opposed to his rule, the US hoped, as a way to avoid a full-blown revolution in Haiti. Aristide was flown into exile first in the Central African Republic and later in South Africa. Preval was later elected to the presidency in 2006.

Another UN Fail In Haiti?

Responding to the earthquake disaster in Haiti isn’t turning out to be one of the bright spots in the recent history of the United Nations.

You might remember this story from a week and a half ago about UN peacekeepers ordering doctors to abandon a makeshift hospital, leaving behind more than two-dozen badly injured patients. Luckily for the wounded, CNN correspondent, and medical doctor, Sanjay Gupta happened to be there when the staff left – he and his film crew jumped in and cared for the patients through the night until the doctors returned the next day.

Now two more stories of pretty questionable judgment on the part of the UN have been caught on TV. On Monday a crew from Britain’s ITV network filmed an aid distribution debacle. Trucks from the UN’s Port-au-Prince warehouse arrived to distribute boxes of much needed food aid to a crowd of Haitians, some of whom hadn’t eaten in days. But no sooner had the aid distribution started than the UN Blue Helmets (their peacekeeping troops) providing security got spooked by the size of the crowd. Fearing a riot, they ordered the operation stopped and the aid packages loaded back aboard the truck, which then promptly returned to the warehouse with much of its load of aid supplies intact.

Yesterday MSNBC showed film from another attempted UN food distribution effort. Again, the peacekeepers quickly lost control of the crowd, panicked and this time used pepper spray on the hungry Haitians. At least this time they also managed to distribute one truckload of food, though a near riot erupted when a second truck (an SUV actually) approached – the crowd thought it was also carrying aid packages, though it turned out to have nothing to do with the UN effort (which also begs the question of why did the UN only send one truck in the first place?)

Again, I don’t want to be overly critical of the United Nations, it’s worth repeating that the UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince was destroyed in the earthquake and that the UN suffered its worst single-day loss of life in the building’s collapse. But these are three highly publicized instances where the UN has actually made a bad situation worse, and it is becoming clear that the UN peacekeepers in Port-au-Prince are in way over their heads. If the UN can’t get its act together in a hurry, then perhaps they should step aside and let agencies from other nations/organizations take the lead until they do.

Could An Earthquake Flatten Another World Capital?

While the world has been gripped by the tragic near destruction of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, there’s another world capital also at great risk of being felled by an earthquake – Tehran, Iran. And like Port-au-Prince, in recent decades Tehran has seen a massive influx of new residents, swelling the city’s population to more than twelve million, far more than the capital was ever designed to accommodate. With that in mind, I thought I’d repost a link to this story from last November about steps the Iranians are taking to move their capital to a less quake-prone portion of the country.

The idea of moving the capital has been kicking around for the past 20 years, but was finally given the blessing of the country’s supreme authority, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, just this past November. Iran has had numerous capitals during its long history, so a switch in cities would not be unprecedented. One seismologist suggested that rather than just changing cities though that an entirely new capital should be built in the region near the city of Qom, a part of the country that has not had an earthquake in the past 2,000 years.

But while a new capital would certainly prompt a large number of people, particularly those who work with the government, to relocate, history shows that cities of twelve million people don’t just go away. (I remember reading a study once that showed once a city’s population reaches approximately 400,000, no matter what happens; the city will always survive in some form.) So that still means that potentially millions of people will remain living in Tehran, which sits on top of a web of fault lines and thus will still be in danger. There’s recent precedent to that threat, in 2003 a quake devastated the Iranian city of Bam, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Maybe rather than moving the capital better building codes paired with urban and disaster planning might be a better use of Iran’s resources.

Haiti Latest: Aid, Critiques and Spy Drones

It’s been a little over a week since the devastating earthquake in Haiti, yet some conservative commentators are already using the country’s long-standing problems with poverty as an excuse to call for the end of foreign development aid. In my latest post over at The Mantle, I take on the critics and ask why they don’t also discuss America’s role in causing Haiti’s endemic levels of poverty in the first place?

Meanwhile, if you’re wondering what nations have given in disaster relief to Haiti so far, the Associated Press has compiled this handy list. The grand total so far is estimated to be around $1 billion, with more than half of that total coming from the 27 nations of the European Union and another $130 million from the United States – the single largest contribution by any nation.

And the United States has been providing far more to Haiti than only money. According to Wired.com’s Dangerroom blog, the US contribution to aid efforts has even included a high-flying spy drone. An Afghanistan-bound Global Hawk, which can fly up to 14 hours beaming back hi-definition images to ground controllers, was diverted to Haiti to take pictures of the devastated capital Port-au-Prince that are being used to assist in rescue and recovery efforts. The pictures included images of famous landmarks in Port-au-Prince, like the National Cathedral shown above, which is now little more than a rubble-filled shell. Unlike most Global Hawk images, the US Southern Command has taken the step of immediately declassifying all the pictures taken of Port-au-Prince so that they can be freely used by anyone who needs them.

Senegal Makes Unique Aid Offer To Haitians

While offers of aid to quake-ravaged Haiti have been pouring been pouring in from around the world, Senegal’s is unique. There, President Abdoulaye Wade has offered land and “repatriation” to any Haitians who want to return to their ancestral homeland.

A spokesman for Wade said their country was ready to offer Haitians who had lost everything in the quake a parcel of land in Senegal so they could start over, and if enough Haitians took them up on the offer, they could perhaps be granted an entire region. The spokesman went on to stress that this would be good land in a fertile part of Senegal not worthless land out in the desert.

It’s quite a generous offer for sure, though at the moment I’m sure water and medicine would be more useful. We’ll follow this story and see if any Haitians take President Wade up on his offer.

UN Shuts Haiti Medical Center – WTF?

The news out of Haiti last night was too much to believe. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta was reporting from a small, makeshift medical center operating out of a tent in Port-au-Prince where more than two dozen badly wounded Hatians were finally receiving at least some medical care. That is until a group of UN peacekeepers arrived and ordered the doctors to abandon the field hospital over concerns for their safety. They were ordered to take the doctors away, but not the patients, who apparently were suppose to fend for themselves.

Dr. Gupta was dumbstruck, so too were CNN’s Anderson Cooper and retired General Russel Honore, who helped to bring order back to New Orleans in the days following Hurricane Katrina. To his great credit, Dr. Gupta stayed as the other medical staff were evacuated to tend to the patients they left behind, he even enlisted his camera crew to serve as healthcare aides. They had no problems with “security” during the night (seriously, with the entire city crying out for medical care, why would anyone attack one of the few places providing it?)

By morning, there was a change of heart somewhere and the medical staff was allowed to return to the medical center. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon even issued a statement saying that the UN had not ordered the medical staff to leave, blaming the evac order on “other agencies” – Ban’s story is hard to believe though since the medical staff specifically told Gupta they were being ordered to leave by the United Nations, the CNN film crew has video of a UN-marked vehicle arriving at the tent site and of UN peacekeepers talking with the staff.

I have to say that I support the mission and ideals of the United Nations, and I know that they employ many bright and compassionate people. But incidents like last night at the clinic in Haiti give credence to some of the biggest criticisms of the UN – for example that it is such a massive bureaucracy that it often undermines the good work it is trying to do. Granted, the UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince was destroyed in the earthquake, killing many members of the staff and plunging the UN mission into chaos (it was the largest single-day loss of life ever suffered among UN staff). But Haiti is a disaster-prone nation, in addition to the threat of earthquakes, Haiti is often struck by hurricanes – it was hit by four tropical storms in less than two months in 2008 that caused widespread damage. It would only make sense then for the UN to have had a contingency plan in place should the PAP headquarters be knocked out (the northern city of Cap Haitien for example was not affected by the quake).

Another critique the health clinic debacle is bound to bring up again is the charge that UN peacekeepers are often little more than blue helmeted bystanders. Rather than evacuating the doctors, why couldn’t a few UN peacekeepers have provided security for the clinic instead? It’s worth noting again that Dr. Gupta and crew passed the night without incident in this allegedly “dangerous” place. Surely a few peacekeepers would have been more than enough of a show of force to keep order and it is hard to argue, given the health care situation in Haiti at the moment, that they could have been better used elsewhere.

The bottom line is that United Nations projects and programs do great things in many neglected corners of the world. But if they are overmatched in Haiti – and given the losses at their headquarters it’s understandable that they may be – and they are more of a hindrance than a help, then they should step aside and let those who can provide aid in these very difficult times do just that.

O in Canada

Barack Obama took his first foreign trip yesterday, and though if you blinked you might have missed his six-hour jaunt across the border to Canada, he and Canadian leader Stephen Harper talked about a number of important issues.

The main topic of the meet-and-greet was trade - NAFTA and other related issues. Obama wants to have what are currently side agreements on labor and the environment folded into the main body of NAFTA. Harper though is reluctant to go reopening the trade agreement, which took years to negotiate in the first place. And frankly Obama shouldn't be so eager to crack NAFTA open either since many Canadians feel that they got a raw deal in the original agreement.

Past those discussions the two leaders also talked about the need to streamline the process of goods crossing the border - something they say is holding back US-Canadian trade at this point. The environment also made it into the discussion, though they fell far short of even agreeing to talks about a common US-Canadian approach to environmental regulations. Canada is looking to become a larger supplier of energy to the United States, but there is growing concern over Canada's main source of oil, the Oil Sands of Alberta - getting oil from these sands (which is more like a gooey tar) is a complex, and dirty, process. There is concern from environmentalists on both sides of the border about the cost to nature of getting oil from the Sands.

One topic the two leaders skirted was Canada's troop commitment in Afghanistan. Canada is one of the main non-US contributors of troops, but they are planning to withdraw by 2011, just as Obama is lobbying for an increase the number of boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Canada has felt that their sacrifice in Afghanistan hasn't really been appreciated - 108 Canadians have lost their lives so far. Obama was quick to thank Canada for its service and sacrifice, something that seemed to go a long way towards paving over some of those hurt feelings. Past that Obama said talk about extending the Canadian mission didn't come up.

Harper wasn't the only Canadian leader to get face time with the new American President. Obama also met with Canada's Governor-General Michaelle Jean (the Governor-General is the Queen of England's official representative in the Canadian government, since Elizabeth II is still technically the head of state in Canada - just check their money if you don't believe me). Jean is originally from Haiti, so she and Obama spent much of their brief meeting discussing the dreadful conditions in the island nation - the poorest in the Western Hemisphere.

When he arrived in Ottawa, several thousand cheering Canadians greeted Obama. George W. Bush was also greeted by thousands during his last visit to Canada, only they were protesting, rather than cheering, and making some rather un-Canadian hand gestures at the president. Just to show he had a good sense of humor about it though, Bush thanked those Canadians who waved to him using “all five fingers.”

Food prices add to Haitians' struggles

Rising global food prices are only adding to Haiti's problems.

The Caribbean island is already one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere (Haiti's annual per capita income is only $480). Now a sharp increase in world food prices is driving many Haitians to the brink of starvation. Since the middle of last year food prices have gone up by 40%. To make matters worse much of Haiti's farmland has been damaged by tropical storms, erosion and deforestation, making the country reliant on imported food.

The crisis could force President Rene Preval from power. Gunshots were heard in the capital as he addressed the country on the food crisis. His plan to provide government loans to farmers, if even effective, will not produce any results until the harvest season months from now.

Meanwhile Haitians will continue "eating Clorox" - local slang comparing the burning feeling of hunger pains to that you would get from drinking bleach.