Why Has The World Forgotten Haiti?
April 1, 2019.
Humanitarian
conditions in Haiti have significantly worsened over the past year, the
U.N.’s Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Ursula
Mueller warned in
an address earlier this month.
Hunger
levels are on the rise and more than half of Haiti’s population lives below
the poverty line. Access to basic services is very limited and more than a
quarter of Haitians lack clean water to drink. Some 2.6 million people are
expected to be in need of humanitarian assistance in 2019, and more than
300,000 children are unable to get an education.
Yet
the world has largely turned its back on the poorest country in the Western
hemisphere.
In
2018, the U.N.’s appeal for Haiti was funded at just 13 percent, making the
country the site of the world’s most underfunded humanitarian crisis.
“Sadly,
the severe levels of humanitarian need in the country rarely make headlines,”
Mueller lamented.
A Tale of Two Countries
On
top of the dire humanitarian situation, a political crisis is unfolding in
Haiti as well.
Angered
at the country’s ever-diminishing economic prospects, thousands have taken to
the streets in recent months calling for President Jovenel Moïse to
leave office.
But
unlike the ongoing political crisis to the South in Venezuela, the protests
in Haiti have also received little attention from Western leaders and the
major international press.
As
the first country to recognize Venezuelan opposition leader Juan
Guiado’s claim to the presidency, the United States has played a leading
role in efforts to oust President Nicolas Maduro from power.
U.S.
officials claim the 2018 elections that saw Maduro win another term were
“illegitimate,” and that Maduro’s incompetence and corruption are the root of
Venezuela’s sharp economic decline.
With
President Donald Trump’s administration committed to regime
change in Venezuela, major American cable news programs and print
publications have paid close attention to the humanitarian situation there.
Lost Faith
But
questions surrounding the legitimacy of Haiti’s Moïse, as well as
allegations of corruption and mismanagement, have also been persistent.
In
addition to allegations of fraud,
widespread disillusionment and systemic barriers to voting resulted in only
about 20 percent of Haitians casting ballots in the 2016 elections that
brought Moïse to power, Jake Johnston, an analyst at the Center
for Economic and Policy Research, told The Globe Post.
“For
me, the biggest indicator of election’s declining legitimacy is evidenced by
the increasingly declining turnout,” he said.
“Is
it really a surprise when a lot of people don’t actually respect the
government’s legitimacy or mandate when so few people actually participate?”
Marlene
Daut, a professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of
Virginia, agrees.
“On
the U.S. side, we tend to think that as long as there are elections, we can
say someone was ‘democratically elected,’” she told The
Globe Post.
“But
the feeling in Haiti is …they have lost faith in the electoral process.”
Funds, Squandered
Like
in Venezuela, perceptions of widespread corruption have also plagued the
Haitian government.
From
2005 until recently, Haiti received some $4 billion in petrol loans as part
of a program called Petrocaribe that was initiated by former Venezuelan
president Hugo Chavez.
The
loans were intended to allow Haiti and other Carribean countries to invest in
programs like schooling, healthcare and infrastructure, but Haiti’s public
sector ultimately saw little of the money.
Additionally, Moïse
has been at the center of a recent high-profile corruption scandal involving
American “mercenaries” who were reportedly hired
by him to transfer $80 million from the country’s national bank to a personal
account of his.
Geopolitics
So
what explains the vast disparity in responses to the political and
humanitarian crises in Venezuela and Haiti?
According
to Daut and Johnston, the answer boils down to geopolitics.
“I
don’t think that the U.S. government is interested in democracy or human
rights or that those are the motivating factors behind what they’re involved
in Venezuela,” Johnston said.
Venezuela’s
government has pursued a socilaist strand of independent development
following the election of Chavez in 1999, and has since aligned itself with
countries like Russia and China.
Haiti’s
government, on the other hand, has largely played by the rules set out by the
U.S. In some sense, efforts from American administrations throughout history
have ensured this.
U.S.
involvement in Haitian politics dates back to at least to the early 20th
Century when the island was occupied by American Marines between 1914 and
1934. Throughout much of the rest of the century, the U.S. supported the
brutal regimes of Francois Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude.
In
1990, when Haiti surprised Washington by electing the populist liberation
theologist Jean Bertrand Aristide, the George H.W. Bush administration
supported a military coup that quickly deposed him.
Since
then, a line of Haitian governments have generally aligned themselves with
the U.S., embracing Washington’s preferred brand of “neoliberal” policies and
opening the country to foreign investment.
“Haiti,
since colonial times has been built around an extraction of wealth and
distribution to other parts of the world,” Johnston said. “This has been the
economic model in Haiti for centuries that in many ways continues today.”
Continuing Cycle
While
those on the ground in Haiti are largely more concerned with the daily
economic struggles they face, Daut said there is a “strong feeling” among
Haitian Americans that recent presidents have been “installed” by the U.S.
As
protests continue throughout Haiti, Moïse’s relationship with Washington
appears to be stronger than ever.
After
Haiti voted with the U.S. in the Organization of American States to recognize
Guaido as interim president in Venezuela, Trump sat down with Moïse
at Mara Lago last week, and the U.S. is reportedly helping
to broker a debt relief agreement between Haiti and Qatar.
And
though there appears to be no immediate threat to Moïse’s power, Johnston
said he expects popular pressure on the government won’t stop any time soon.
“The
underlying issue is a political and economic system that excludes far too
much of the population,” he said.
“Until
those root problems are addressed, I see that cycle continuing into the
future.”
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Saturday, April 6, 2019
Why Has The World Forgotten Haiti? April 2019
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