7 February 2010
By Vijay
Prashad Though
fallen thyself, never to rise again, –
William Wordsworth, HAITI is
in agony. The largest earthquake in two centuries,
measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, shook its capital
city, Port-au-Prince, and took with it at least a
hundred thousand lives. The devastation is complete.
Infrastructure, preciously built, is ruined; bodies
remain below debris; starvation and frustration among
the survivors rise to the surface. The weak government
of Rene Preval does its best to deliver the basics in
a situation where it was unable to act even before the
quake. The best
of Atlantic liberalism emerges. The United States
dispatches its Caribbean arsenal; aircraft carriers
fasten their bombs and send forth bundles of
ready-to-eat food. Crews of disaster relief
specialists fly in to unburden the city of its chaos.
An emergency room doctor from my hometown hastens onto
the next flight to Haiti. She wanted to go and help
after the 2004 tsunami, but the distance to Asia was
too much. Haiti is closer. She takes her skills to the
scene of desperation. A Facebook friend reports that
his grandmother, herself a refugee from Vietnam to the
U.S., has assembled her friends into a fund-raising
group. It is not the Red Cross, but it is something.
Established aid agencies report that the donations are
at record levels. The disaster touched a chord. Would
that the good feelings of these thousands of people
who represent the best of Atlantic liberalism be the
policy of their governments! But it is not so. Their
concern for Haiti mirrors the words of Wordsworth,
drawn as he was to the great tremor from the Caribbean
when Haiti under Toussaint threw itself out of the
slavery machine. The Haitian revolution of 1791-1803
redeemed the false promises of the French Revolution
of 1789; the latter had proclaimed the rights of man
but said nothing about the slavery that continued to
sustain France from its colonies. Haiti’s actions put
pressure on the Atlantic liberals of the 19th century,
such as William Wilberforce, whose moral exhortations
only then had any force. When Wilberforce spoke of the
abolition of slavery, the memory of Port-au-Prince’s
rebellion made his option reasonable. It was Haiti’s
example from 1791 that pushed the world to abolish
slavery, and it is this that Wordsworth celebrated in
song. It is this tradition, from Wilberforce onwards,
that moved Atlantic liberalism to stretch its hands
out to the island. From the
murky corners of American conservatism comes another
reaction. Here, there is largely silence about the
tragedy (Fox News almost ignored it) or else there is
scorn for it. The radio personality Rush Limbaugh has
had a long track record of off-colour remarks about
the island. In 1994, Limbaugh pilloried Haitian
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide as a zombie, a figure
in Haiti Vodou (“I think he blinks once every five
minutes,” Limbaugh told his vast radio audience,
alluding to the idea that zombies don’t blink). When
former U.S. President Bill Clinton was appointed the
Special Envoy to Haiti by President Barack Obama,
Limbaugh said, “I’m just gonna tell you, if I was
named envoy to Haiti, I’d quit government. Envoy to
Haiti? You can’t even pick up a prostitute down there
without genuine fear of AIDS.” If this is not enough,
after the earthquake, Limbaugh offered his view that
the Obama administration conjured it up to help its
slipping ratings. Why provide more aid to Haiti,
Limbaugh pointed out; “we’ve already donated. It’s
called the U.S. income tax.” Limbaugh
was not alone. The tele-evangelist and former
Republican presidential candidate Pat Robertson went
one step further. Robertson has a history of peculiar
statements, from his view that the September 11
attacks should be blamed on “the pagans and the
abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the
lesbians” to his belief that Hurricane Katrina was
retribution for legal abortion. With Haiti, Robertson
went back to the revolution.
“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and
people might not want to talk about it.” Robertson
went on to blame the earthquake on a “pact with the
devil” made by Haitians to throw off the French yoke
in 1791. The end to slavery, then, required a deal
between the slaves and the devil; God would have been
on the side of the slavers. This is a tradition of
thought that goes back to the U.S. reaction to the
Haitian revolution. South Carolina Senator Robert
Hayne put it plainly in 1824, “Our policy with regard
to Hayti is plain. We never can acknowledge her
independence. The peace and safety of a large part of
our Union forbids us even to discuss it.” Haiti was a
challenge to U.S. slavery; its freedom could not be
allowed. George Washington’s government sent $400,000
to support the white planters.
Robertson and Limbaugh provide the hidden transcript
of official U.S. policy. The U.S. government, since
1804, has never allowed Haiti to be independent. In
the last century, it treated Haiti with contempt. Its
army occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and in the
process destroyed the Cacos Rebellion led by
Charlemagne Peralte (1919). From 1957 to 1986, the
U.S. provided unconditional support for the
dictatorship of the Duvaliers, the most brutal regime
in the Caribbean. It was
in this period that the Haitian economy fell apart,
open to U.S. agricultural imports that crushed the
last remaining independent Haitian peasantry. They
fled to the cities, into overcrowded slums with no
employment. It was in these slums that the Lavalas
(avalanche) movement grew, led by Aristide, then a
priest. The
Lavalas wanted to reinvigorate agriculture, introduce
land reforms, reforest the countryside and regulate
the vast export processing zones. The programme was
too radical. Aristide would be removed twice, once in
1991 and again in 2004. Both times he had to go on
Washington’s say-so. Clinton reinstated him in 1994
only when the congressional Black Caucus and others
put immense pressure on the White House. Aristide
returned to implement a neoliberal agenda, not the
Lavalas programme. That was the Clinton bargain. It
was worse than Robertson’s imputed pact with the
devil. Haitians called it the “plan of death”. No
wonder that about three million of the nine million
Haitians live in Port-au-Prince. U.S. agricultural
imports have destroyed Haiti’s rural economy.
Miserable wages in the sweatshop industry did not
help. The HOPE II (Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity
through Partnership Encouragement) Act of 2008 from
the U.S. Congress pushed for more sweatshops, a drive
backed by United Nation’s Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
in 2009. (Ban praised the HOPE legislation as “a
golden opportunity to bring in investors and create
hundreds of thousands of jobs”.) The harsh economic
environment is responsible for the creation of mostly
substandard housing, which crumbled when the earth
shook. The earthquake was a natural disaster of the
highest magnitude, but it did not help that the social
order was ill-prepared to withstand its shocks. A
moderate conservative, David Brooks, came along this
grain. “This is not a natural disaster story,” he
wrote in The New York Times (January 15). “This is a
poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed
buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public
services.” But rather than go into the recent history
of why this is so, Brooks took refuge in culture.
Sure, Haiti suffered from colonialism and
dictatorship, but so did Barbados and the Dominican
Republic, he says. What marks Haiti is “the influence
of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that
life is capricious and planning futile”. But if Haiti
were solely driven by voodoo’s fatalism, it would not
have been able to generate the Lavalas movement, nor
the Cacos rebellion, nor indeed the original Haitian
revolution.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hastened to
Port-au-Prince, intoning the rhetoric of the best of
liberalism. On her aircraft is the head of U.S. aid
efforts, Rajiv Shah, a man given over to the Second
Green Revolution (biotechnology, especially genetic
modification, and private capital investment: both
elements of a U.S. push to continue its domination of
the world’s agriculture). Nothing in this Second Green
Revolution will give the land back to the Haitian
people. The
Obama team has not shifted the century-long U.S.
policy vis-a-vis Haiti. Promotion of tourism and
sweatshops, increase in debt and rural flight: all
this will continue. A $100 million in aid is
minuscule, almost insulting. It was Obama’s first
tranche for Haiti. More will come, but with
substantial conditions, more along the plan of death.
These are inevitable, and they will set the stage for
further suffering. The earthquake and its aftermath
will draw in some relief money and the good feelings
of Atlantic liberalism. But little more. Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner
Chair of South Asian History and Director of
International Studies at Trinity College, Hartford, CT
His new book is The Darker Nations: A People's History
of the Third World, New York: The New Press, 2007. He
can be reached at:
vijay.prashad@trincoll.edu Comments 💬 التعليقات |