It was a pleasure to attend the fund-raiser for Haitian relief co-sponsored by St. Joseph’s Catholic Church and the Farmington Rotary on Thursday. It was crowded with people anxious to help and the food was prepared with much care and skill.
There are some points I would like to make about this event. The help will be handled by the Catholic Church which has an organized structure in that devastated country and by the Haitian Rotarians. This is the best assurance that the aid will reach those who desperately need it.
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Let me illustrate this point. When our local Rotary sent aid to the Sri Lankan Rotary we received back in pretty short order photos of new fishing boats bearing the Farmington Rotary name, while hundreds of millions of aid materials were still deteriorating and rotting in warehouses, waiting for the international and local governments to sort out their tangles of red tape.
The official line of our Secretary of State and American officials on the spot is that the relief down there is “Haitian-led.”
If they are referring to the Haitian government then the situation must be pretty hopeless. I’d like to believe that the official line is a convenient fib to fend off accusations of American imperialism.
Various efforts to associate the Haitian disaster with American villainy were predictable and inevitable. Danny Glover, who studied climatology and seismology in acting school, assures us that the US government’s failure to take charge of the earth’s climate caused the catastrophe. Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s prophet and pope of “Twenty-first century socialism,” announces he has secret information that the event was caused by an American earth-quake machine. Prof. Slavick, who gathered a few thousand votes from Maine’s minority population of kooks, cranks and lunatics in his race against Susan Collins, blames the depths of the disaster on American influence on the island. The president of Nicaragua, a French cabinet minister and some others point quivering fingers of alarm at the deployment of our military forces.
I’ve read interviews of Haitian-Americans and Haitian immigrants by the Washington Post, the Miami Herald and the Associated Press, which make it clear that few have any hope that the government down there will be any use at all. I assume that they know what they are talking about.
The deployment of US military forces follows from two elementary facts. They alone have the capability and the equipment for immediate humanitarian intervention. If the French decided to deploy their forces to assist in relief, they would have to charter a fleet of Corsican ferry boats. The second fact is public security is a precondition for effective relief operations. Without US and UN units there would be very little. Not surprising to read of vigilante action against looters.
In truth, the governmental and political history of Haiti has been one long horror show and the United States can’t make much difference one way or another.
Reading two or three books on Haiti doesn’t make me any kind of expert, but I know something obvious that seems to be overlooked in the talk stimulated by this tragedy. The country’s history is unique in the Western Hemisphere and probably in the world.
The native population of that part of the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo was wiped out by disease and mistreatment. The Spanish settlers had moved on to richer fields of exploitation, leaving the territory open to occupation by French buccaneers. France took it over and imported tens of thousands of Africans. These slaves arrived without social structure, no family, no clans, no tribes held them together. Their only “communities” were the plantations on which they were forced to work and the French governmental structure which presided over the plantations.
This is not different from the other “sugar islands” but the other republics in the Caribbean evolved from emancipation to independence over generations. They had time to develop social institutions and a middle class. They inherited a structure of legal and governmental institutions from the colonial powers.
The Republic of Haiti was founded by a bloody slave revolt, that swept away the plantations, the laws, the church, and all governmental structures. It ended up with no political culture except the irregular military bands held together by charismatic and capable military leaders, The first and greatest of these, Toussaint L’Ouverture, was willing to play the nominal role of Governor General ‘obedient’ to the French revolutionary government. He was able to maintain a measure of order and even reconstituted the plantations under military control. But the French double-crossed and imprisoned him.
Then Napoleon attempted to re-institute French government and slavery with a military expedition Furious guerrilla resistance, the yellow fever and the British Royal Navy ended that scheme.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, born in African, emerged from the chaos as military dictator. He proclaimed formal independence on Jan. 1, 1804, massacred most of the whites who had not already fled, forced the population back to work on the plantations, and proclaimed himself emperor. He was killed in 1806 during a mulatto revolt in Port-au-Prince.
Following his death the mulattos set up a government under Alexandre Petion in the south, while Henri Christophe ruled as a king in the north until committing suicide in face of revolts against his policy of continuing compulsory work on the plantations. Petion reunited the country and abandoned compulsory work on sugar plantations. Sugar cultivation ceased and the country’s primary export became coffee beans picked from tree growing wild on the abandoned plantations.
No need to prolong this record. It amounts to this. You don’t need the fingers of one hand to count the number of Haitian rulers who died of natural causes, avoided exile, or served a full legal terms. Your ears will be sufficient. In short, the whole political history has been a series of lurches between despotism and anarchy. Add to this the perpetual tensions between the mulatto elites and the black masses. and the you have a situation which makes it difficult for a stable and healthy political culture to grow up under those circumstances. It may even be impossible.
President Woodrow Wilson thought he knew how to “teach those people to choose good leaders” a delusion which led to an American protectorate over Haiti between 1914 and 1935 after a massacre in Port-au-Prince. This was the first American venture in nation-building. The results were not encouraging. It not enough to build roads, irrigation systems, port facilities, and schools; advance loans, train a professional constabulary and advance large state loans.
This is an appropriate time to review this lesson in failed “nation-building.”
When I read the first paragraph, I though, oh no, Mr. Bill, I’m about to agree with John Frary. Then I couldn’t and breathed a sigh of relief. The op ed piece became just another rant about a lesser people unable to govern themselves and the foolish efforts of liberal Presidents (he conveniently forgets El Dubya and Richard Millstone Nixon) to nationbuild.
I don’t know why I thought that John had turned a page and become a rational observer rather than Glenn Beck with a dictionary.
If there was a point-missing contest in the Olympics then Tony in Wilton would be a cinch for the gold medal. All the facts provided—mostly accessible in any decent reference work—is that Haiti’s circumstances are completely unique. it is NOT like any other third world country, or any country.
Every nation state in the world evolved from a social structure, clan, tribe or what ever. The Haitians were rounded up by slave traders as individuals. If they were seized as families the “units” of that family were sold off individually. These atomized masses were socially organized on only conceivable basis, in plantattions, apart from the freedmen, perhaps 5% of the population.
Some kind of nuclear family inevitably reasserted itself, but every other social structure.was wiped away. Henri Christophe and Toussanit L’Ouverture attempted to reconstruct the plantations by military force for economic purposes and failed.
There is no way that any ethnic group could have evolved a stable political culture from such origins. The alternation of anarchy and despotism was inevitable.
As i’ve said, most of the plain facts can be found in a decent reference work. Tony in Wilton has not make the slightest effort to verify them, not will he. All he has to offer is a “plug-in” opinion with no more weight than a cloud of vapor. It would not be worth a response except that it is so commonplace.