Publication: Mark Danner
Issued:
Date: 2010-02-23
Reporter: Mark Danner
To Heal Haiti, Look to History, Not Nature
Publication
Mark Danner
Op-Ed Contributor
Date
2010-01-28
Haiti is everybody's cherished tragedy. Long before the great earthquake struck
the country like a vengeful god, the outside world, and Americans especially,
described, defined, marked Haiti most of all by its suffering. Epithets of
misery clatter after its name like a ball and chain: Poorest country in the
Western Hemisphere. One of the poorest on earth. For decades Haiti's formidable immiseration has made it among outsiders an object of fascination, wonder and
awe. Sometimes the pity that is attached to the land and we see this
increasingly in the news coverage this past week attains a tone almost sacred,
as if Haiti has taken its place as a kind of sacrificial victim among nations,
nailed in its bloody suffering to the cross of unending destitution.
And yet there is nothing mystical in Haiti's pain, no inescapable curse that
haunts the land. From independence and before, Haiti's harms have been caused by
men, not demons. Act of nature that it was, the earthquake last week was able to
kill so many because of the corruption and weakness of the Haitian state, a
state built for predation and plunder. Recovery can come only with vital, even
heroic, outside help; but such help, no matter how inspiring the generosity it
embodies, will do little to restore Haiti unless it addresses, as countless
prior interventions built on transports of sympathy have not, the manmade causes
that lie beneath the Haitian malady.
In 1804 the free Republic of Haiti was declared in almost unimaginable triumph:
hard to exaggerate the glory of that birth. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved
Africans had labored to make Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then known, the
richest colony on earth, a vastly productive slave-powered factory producing
tons upon tons of sugar cane, the 18th-century's great cash crop. For
pre-Revolutionary France, Haiti was an inexhaustible cash cow, floating much of
its economy. Generation after generation, the second sons of the great French
families took ship for Saint-Domingue to preside over the sugar plantations,
enjoy the favors of enslaved African women and make their fortunes.
Even by the standards of the day, conditions in Saint-Domingue's cane fields
were grisly and brutal; slaves died young, and in droves; they had few children.
As exports of sugar and coffee boomed, imports of fresh Africans boomed with
them. So by the time the slaves launched their great revolt in 1791, most of
those half-million blacks had been born in Africa, spoke African languages,
worshipped African gods.
In an immensely complex decade-long conflict, these African slave-soldiers,
commanded by legendary leaders like Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques
Dessalines, defeated three Western armies, including the unstoppable superpower
of the day, Napoleonic France. In an increasingly savage war "Burn houses! Cut
off heads!" was the slogan of Dessalines the slaves murdered their white
masters, or drove them from the land.
On Jan. 1, 1804, when Dessalines created the Haitian flag by tearing the white
middle from the French tricolor, he achieved what even Spartacus could not: he
had led to triumph the only successful slave revolt in history. Haiti became the
world's first independent black republic and the second independent nation in
the Western Hemisphere.
Alas, the first such republic, the United States, despite its revolutionary
creed that all men are created equal, looked upon these self-freed men with
shock, contempt and fear. Indeed, to all the great Western trading powers of the
day much of whose wealth was built on the labor of enslaved Africans Haiti
stood as a frightful example of freedom carried too far. American slaveholders
desperately feared that Haiti's fires of revolt would overleap those few hundred
miles of sea and inflame their own human chattel.
For this reason, the United States refused for nearly six decades even to
recognize Haiti. (Abraham Lincoln finally did so in 1862.) Along with the great
colonial powers, America instead rewarded Haiti's triumphant slaves with a
suffocating trade embargo and a demand that in exchange for peace the
fledgling country pay enormous reparations to its former colonial overseer.
Having won their freedom by force of arms, Haiti's former slaves would be made
to purchase it with treasure.
The new nation, its fields burned, its plantation manors pillaged, its towns
devastated by apocalyptic war, was crushed by the burden of these astronomical
reparations, payments that, in one form or another, strangled its economy for
more than a century. It was in this dark aftermath of war, in the shadow of
isolation and contempt, that Haiti's peculiar political system took shape,
mirroring in distorted form, like a wax model placed too close to the fire, the
slave society of colonial times.
At its apex, the white colonists were supplanted by a new ruling class, made up
largely of black and mulatto officers. Though these groups soon became bitter
political rivals, they were as one in their determination to maintain in
independent Haiti the cardinal principle of governance inherited from Saint-Domingue:
the brutal predatory extraction of the country's wealth by a chosen powerful
few.
The whites on their plantations had done this directly, exploiting the land they
owned with the forced labor of their slaves. But the slaves had become soldiers
in a victorious revolution, and those who survived demanded as their reward a
part of the rich land on which they had labored and suffered. Soon after
independence most of the great plantations were broken up, given over to the
former slaves, establishing Haiti as a nation of small landowners, one whose
isolated countryside remained, in language, religion and culture, largely
African.
Unable to replace the whites in their plantation manors, Haiti's new elite moved
from owning the land to fighting to control the one institution that could tax
its products: the government. While the freed slaves worked their small fields,
the powerful drew off the fruits of their labor through taxes. In this
disfigured form the colonial philosophy endured: ruling had to do not with
building or developing the country but with extracting its wealth. "Pluck the
chicken," proclaimed Dessalines now Emperor Jacques I but don't make it
scream.
In 1806, two years after independence, the emperor was bayoneted by a mostly
mulatto cabal of officers. Haitian history became the immensely complex tale of
factional struggles to control the state, with factions often defined by an
intricate politics of skin color. There was no method of succession ultimately
recognized as legitimate, no tradition of loyal opposition. Politics was
murderous, operatic, improvisational. Instability alternated with autocracy. The
state was battled over and won; Haiti's wealth, once seized, purchased
allegiance but only for a time. Fragility of rule and uncertainty of tenure
multiplied the imperative to plunder. Unseated rulers were sometimes killed,
more often exiled, but always their wealth that part of it not sent out of the
country was pillaged in its turn.
In 1915 the whites returned: the United States Marines disembarked to enforce
continued repayment of the original debt and to put an end to an especially
violent struggle for power that, in the shadow of World War I and German
machinations in the Caribbean, suddenly seemed to threaten American interests.
During their nearly two decades of rule, the Americans built roads and bridges,
centralized the Haitian state setting the stage for the vast conurbation of
greater Port-au-Prince that we see today in all its devastation and sent
Haitians abroad to be educated as agronomists and doctors in the hope of
building a more stable middle class.
Still, by the time they finally left, little in the original system had
fundamentally changed. Haitian nationalism, piqued by the reappearance of white
masters who had forced Haitians to work in road gangs, produced the noiriste
movement that finally brought to power in 1957 Francois Duvalier, the most
brilliant and bloody of Haiti's dictators, who murdered tens of thousands while
playing adroitly on cold-war America's fear of communism to win American
acceptance.
Duvalier's epoch, which ended with the overthrow of his son Jean-Claude in 1986,
ushered in Haiti's latest era of instability, which has seen, in barely a
quarter-century, several coups and revolutions, a handful of elections (aborted,
rigged and, occasionally, fair), a second American occupation (whose
accomplishments were even more ephemeral than the first) and, all told, a dozen
Haitian rulers. Less and less money now comes from the land, for Haiti's topsoil
has grown enfeebled from overproduction and lack of investment. Aid from
foreigners, nations or private organizations, has largely supplanted it: under
the Duvaliers Haiti became the great petri dish of foreign aid. A handful of
projects have done lasting good; many have been self-serving and even
counterproductive. All have helped make it possible, by lifting basic burdens of
governance from Haiti's powerful, for the predatory state to endure.
The struggle for power has not ended. Nor has Haiti's historic proclivity for
drama and disaster. Undertaken in their wake, the world's interventions
military and civilian, and accompanied as often as not by a grand missionary
determination to rebuild Haiti have had as their single unitary principle
their failure to alter what is most basic in the country, the reality of a
corrupt state and the role, inadvertent or not, of outsiders in collaborating
with it.
The sound of Haiti's suffering is deafening now but behind it one can hear
already a familiar music begin to play. Haiti must be made new. This kind of
suffering so close to American shores cannot be countenanced. The other evening
I watched a television correspondent shake his head over what he movingly
described as a stupid death a death that, but for the right medical care,
could have been prevented. "It doesn't have to happen," he told viewers. "People
died today who did not need to die." He did not say what any Haitian could have
told him: that the day before, and the day before that, Haiti had seen hundreds
of such stupid deaths, and, over the centuries, thousands more. What has
changed, once again, and only for a time, is the light shone on them, and the
volume of the voices demanding that a new Haiti must now be built so they
never happen again.
Whether they can read or not, Haiti's people walk in history, and live in
politics. They are independent, proud, fiercely aware of their own singularity.
What distinguishes them is a tradition of heroism and a conviction that they are
and will remain something distinct, apart something you can hear in the Creole
spoken in the countryside, or the voodoo practiced there, traces of the Africa
that the first generation of revolutionaries brought with them on the middle
passage.
Haitians have grown up in a certain kind of struggle for individuality and for
power, and the country has proved itself able to absorb the ardent attentions of
outsiders who, as often as not, remain blissfully unaware of their own
contributions to what Haiti is. Like the ruined bridges strewn across the
countryside � one of the few traces of the Marines and their occupation nearly a
century ago � these attentions tend to begin in evangelical zeal and to leave
little lasting behind.
What might, then? America could start by throwing open its markets to Haitian
agricultural produce and manufactured goods, broadening and making permanent the
provisions of a promising trade bill negotiated in 2008. Such a step would not
be glamorous; it would not remake Haiti. But it would require a lasting
commitment by American farmers and manufacturers and, as the country heals, it
would actually bring permanent jobs, investment and income to Haiti.
Second, the United States and other donors could make a formal undertaking to
ensure that the vast amounts that will soon pour into the country for
reconstruction go not to foreigners but to Haitians and not only to Haitian
contractors and builders but to Haitian workers, at reasonable wages. This would
put real money in the hands of many Haitians, not just a few, and begin to shift
power away from both the rapacious government and the well-meaning and too often
ineffectual charities that seek to circumvent it. The world's greatest gift
would be to make it possible, and necessary, for Haitians all Haitians to
rebuild Haiti.
Putting money in people's hands will not make Haiti's predatory state disappear.
But in time, with rising incomes and a concomitant decentralization of power, it
might evolve. In coming days much grander ambitions are sure to be declared,
just as more scenes of disaster and disorder will transfix us, more stunning and colorful images of irresistible calamity. We will see if the present
catastrophe, on a scale that dwarfs all that have come before, can do anything
truly to alter the reality of Haiti.
But the most ironic and most diabolical of things are that these French settling
pioneers cooked there own geese by importing hundreds of thousands of slaves,
treating them like dirt, causing them to rise up and kill their enslavors and
them prompting cock-up the whole beautiful island.
In the middle of the last century a few million Semites created a successful
country out of the desert in the period of a decade.
In Haiti, the revolution happened just 206 years ago and the place is in a
bigger mess now than it was then - that's excluding the effects of a magnitude
8.5 earthquake.
Just why there had to be such a catastrophe on to of all the other miseries is
hard to imagine and impossible to explain.
One interesting fact is that our beautiful country provides a safe haven for the
last dictator of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
President Mbeki also sent arms and ammunition to the Haiti Police to assist
Dictator Jean-Bertrand Aristide.