Justice & Sovereignty for Haiti

Welcome back to Fast Forum! Consider it a “Plenary-to-Go” or maybe an “Insta-Debate!” We pick a hot topic and ask 3 – 6 organizers from across the country to weigh in. They will have about 500 words to make us go “…hmmmmm.” Our hope is to draw out new ideas and to encourage new voices to take a stab at the freshest challenges facing our community. This month, we asked three organizers for their reflections on the question:

As the disaster in Haiti reaches into its second month, what insights can the left offer to influence the mainstream response to Haiti? What strategies for a just and sovereign Haitian recovery should Left organizers in the US take up?

We have incredible contributions from:

• Louis Herns Marcelin, Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development (Port-au-Prince)
• Noelle Theard, FotoKonbit (Miami)
• Daniel Michaud, Political Organizer and supporter of Batay Ouvriye (Miami).

What should we talk about next time? Got something you think people need to hear? Email us.

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TOWARDS NEGOTIATED SOVEREIGNTY IN HAITI

Louis Herns Marcelin co-founded and is Chancellor of the Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Institute has partners across the hemisphere and is one of the only independent research institutes in Haiti that focusing on policy research and rebuilding the academic system in Haiti. Working with community leaders, residents, students and local government, Dr. Marcelin has helped communities conduct their own research into the effects of international aid, community development, and urban violence in Port-au-Prince. As professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, he directs several large-scale studies on gang violence, HIV risk, and the increasing involvement of the juvenile justice system in the lives of Haitian adolescents and their families. His work has been featured in national publications including the New York Times and many academic conferences.

On January 12^th, I was with five of my students in a shantytown community of Port-au-Prince. We were meeting with youth leaders of Cite Soleil’s Community Forum to launch a new initiative when the ground tore beneath us. As night fell, I struggled to comprehend what was happening as the air filled with cries, chants, and ominous silence. The next morning, I took my students to safety inside the US Embassy, which had suffered little damage. Along the way, there lay the signs of Haiti’s devastation: roads blocked–by debris bodies. Twenty hours into the earthquake, there was no response and no communication. Not from government authorities or international agencies. The absence of the state was oppressive. And when the president finally spoke, his first and only words to the nation were: “Even I am homeless.”

As we pass the one-month mark of the Haitian disaster, we must come to terms with the reality surfaced by the quake. There is a gaping schism between the nation and the state in Haiti. The earthquake unveils a series of long-standing delusions and imperatives that we can no longer avoid, namely:

• Haitian leaders have not created the conditions for their own sovereignty
• International agencies and NGOs need to focus on reinforcing state capacity and public institutions instead of undermining them
• A new paradigm of negotiated sovereignty must be developed to leverage international resources and expertise while building the authority of the state and the capacity to govern.

An Autopsy of Disaster

Haitian leaders have to come to terms with their own failures. They have failed to create the conditions for their own sovereignty. The immediate aftermath of the earthquake was instructive. For the first three days, there was no response from the state, no sense of who was in charge nor what people should do. When relief efforts began on day 3, they began only in the most accessible places. These represent less than 20% of the affected areas. 80% of the people affected by the earthquake were in places labeled “inaccessible” and “impassable” even before the earthquake due to poor (urban) planning. In the vacuum of sound policy and planning, slums emerged in the riskiest areas in Haiti, where communities live without sewer systems or waste management. Haitian leaders have neglected the national agricultural system and instead facilitated unsustainable projects and developments. The combination of the state’s lack of investment and persistent negligence amplified rather than prevented the damage wrought by the earthquake.

For decades, NGOs had the dominant role in Haiti’s development. Even now, they play a crucial role in the relief process and provide the only safety net available for millions. For many Haitians, NGOs provide their principal connection to infrastructure, health services, and economic assistance as well as bridge remote communities to ideas, experts, and resources from all over the world. However, NGOs constitute an uneven patchwork of disparate and often competing interests that fragment society and undermine state development. They do this by outsourcing state functions, opting to hire experts rather than develop indigenous expertise. Further, NGOs pay consultants almost ten times what the government or any local agency can afford. This has drained the state of capable personnel. More fundamentally, NGOs form a shadow state that lacks democratic accountability. The aftermath of the earthquake revealed that NGOs neither have the coordination, authority, nor scale to effectively manage a crisis. These are ultimately the responsibilities of a state.

Away from the Rescue Principle, Towards a Negotiated Sovereignty

It is vital that the path of recovery direct Haiti away from the “rescue principle.” The current state counts on external agents and external agents inevitably come to the rescue. Unfortunately, we see that the humanitarian paradigm only perpetuates a humanitarian paradigm. It creates a perverse incentive to embrace crisis, both for NGOs who are invested in their own existence and for the state which is able to draw in substantial funds and resources. If this is the model for Haiti’s current recovery, then we will only recreate the status quo.

The promise of a new generation of policy makers and planners is what will help Haiti govern and regain its sovereignty. At this moment, the Haitian Prime Minister cannot take the lead because he lacks structural power to implement anything. His government will need international guidance and accompaniment for some time. Meanwhile, without an engaged, educated, and empowered civic society, the state will not have the support it needs to govern effectively. The development of civic oversight and community capacity will require a framework for a negotiated sovereignty. In the task of imaging a rejuvenated Haiti, I offer the following guidelines:

• Use basic needs to strengthen state capacity: Basic service provision can be a means to reinstate governance and help rebuild state legitimacy.
• Incentivize delegation: De-concentrate decision making and resource allocation through a multi-nodal governance structure of the country.
• Limit outsourcing of state functions:  Develop indigenous capacity and limit the short-cuts to state governance.
• Invest in institution-building: New universities can create civic leaders for nation-building roles (administration, police and safety, urban planning, etc.).
• Avoid elite gatekeepers and expand leadership: Launch public and transparent initiatives with multi-functions teams that allow for a range of perspectives, skills, and civic priorities.
• Partnership. Partnership. Partnership: By redesigning international relief as local partnerships, we can begin unraveling dependence and fostering sustainable leadership and governance.

In order to move forward, we need to work within a framework of negotiated sovereignty in Haiti. International aid can be an enlightened and accompanied process by engaging in a broad-based, dialogue around Haiti’s development. Negotiated sovereignty leverages the skill base and resource pools of the international community to build a sustainable and accountable state. A dual commitment towards negotiated sovereignty from the international community and local residents allows for measurable and enduring impact.

Over the Horizon

Haitians have not given up hope. Even when completely abandoned and uncertain about their fate, survivors put their lives in their countrymen’s hands. In neighborhoods throughout the capital, people dug through the rubble, rescuing one another, tending their wounds, comforting and praying for the aggrieved. We must appreciate and build on this latent capacity. We can redefine how we work with each other, as Haitian residents, emigrated forces, and international agents to create a positive rupture between the past and the future. This will take place when we acknowledge the failures of our past, erect new and true international partnerships, and together craft terms of negotiated sovereignty for Haiti’s future.

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THE LONG ROAD AHEAD

Noelle Theard is a Miami-based photographer, educator, and director of FotoKonbit, a photography initiative that creates partnerships between socially conscious photographers and local grassroots organizations in Haiti. She holds an MA in African Diaspora Studies from Florida International University, a BA in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and a certificate of advanced studies from the Spéos photography institute in Paris. She was born to a Haitian dad and French mom in the border town of El Paso, Texas in 1979. Her work can be viewed on her website: http://www.noelletheard.com.

Immediate Demands: In the short-term, we should continue to raise funds and get it into the hands of the Haitian people, and that means side-stepping the tax deductible contributions to massive relief organizations and researching and supporting established Haitian foundations and grassroots organizations. These include: the Lambi Fund of Haiti, ORE, Fondation le Mabouya, Hope for Haiti, Fondation Seguin, Bassin Zim Foundation, and the Fondation Fondam.

While at the start of the crisis, dollars were needed more than material goods, now those who can should make efforts to bring or send needed supplies to Haiti–quality clothing, shoes, non-prescription drugs, condoms, feminine hygiene products, and most of all tents are needed now. An international organization that has been doing great work in Haiti since the earthquake is Shelterbox, which provides essential equipment including temporary housing, cooking supplies, and tools to displaced families.

The Long Recovery: In the mid-to-long term, we need to keep an eye on how the billion dollars raised for Haiti is being spent. US-educated Haitians, especially Haiti’s elite, will have disproportionate access development funds. Every effort must be made to ensure that peasant groups and those outside the Port-au-Prince have access to money for sustainable development projects, especially those in agriculture. Haiti must grow its own food, and every effort should be made to prevent the dumping of artificially cheap imports from the US, which are supported by farm subsidies here in the States.

Manufacturing is being touted as an answer to Haiti’s chronic unemployment, but fair labor practices must be part of any new factory initiatives, and the important work of the Haitian labor unions like Batay Ouvriye cannot be erased in a quick fix push to make Haiti a bastion of cheap labor.

We also need to keep the story alive in the media, and we should support all efforts to tell this story from the Haitian perspective–not from behind the lenses of journalists who swoop in to Haiti at every disaster yet never during times of relative peace. We must defend the right of Haitians to decide their own future, and we should listen carefully to what they ask of us and respond to their actual needs rather than asserting our own agendas. Most of all, we need to remain optimistic and energized, because there is a long road ahead.

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AID DOES NOT EQUAL SOLIDARITY

Daniel Michaud is a long time political organizer and supporter of Batay Ouvriye. Originally from Haiti he now makes his home in Miami here continues to support workers organizing in Haiti, Miami, and beyond.

The earthquake in Haiti has shaken the conscience of the world. Current estimates of Haiti disaster relief funds range from more than $2 billion of current pledges to the more than $13.5 billion estimated reconstruction costs.  Lost in these figures are the conflicting class interests in struggle.

The January 12^th earthquake was not just a natural disaster, but also one that was exponentially worsened by manmade destructive forces. These same forces are now engaged in a struggle to determine what kind of Haiti will emerge from the rubble. Clearly, there are two different agendas in motion. Our task is to contribute to shaping the perspective of the exploited and dominated classes, the real victims of the disaster, and also to unmask the inhumanity of the dominant, mainstream, already bankrupt plan for so-called reconstruction.

Indeed, the aftershocks still rumbling, Hilary Clinton was saying “we already have a plan,” Bill’s plan is to establish Free Trade Zones and low-wage highly profitable assembly manufacturing sweatshops throughout Haiti, as per HOPE 2, the Free Trade legislation guaranteeing higher profits for US sweatshop entrepreneurs and slave like subsistence wages for Haitian sweatshop workers.

The imperialist high hopes are now stuck in the minutiae of massive relocations, legal land holdings with limited or lost records, 10,000 competing NGOs, an utterly incompetent undermined puppet regime, imperialist powers competing over their spheres of influence, and the coming rainy season.

Unmasked are the paper tiger, the useless MINUSTAH occupation force, the US Army stuck in its inherent, if not deliberate, incompetence to effectively deliver aid, and their puppet Haitian regime.

But on our side, the stakes are even higher. We can forecast the failure of imperialist plans, but we cannot yet forecast our own success, although we know very well that the popular camp holds the only way out of this crisis. That is precisely why international solidarity with the autonomous organized struggles of the popular camp is so crucial today. We are at a crossroads.

The popular camp is engaged in a struggle to take over the distribution of the aid, the organization of the disaster encampments, the organized popular resistance to corruption, malfeasance, insecurity, unsanitary conditions, forced relocations, and to build from this struggle a network of popular organizations, engaged in a determined and uncompromising process to deepen the struggle to its very root. There is an ongoing process of building unity in struggle and through struggle. With all these issues at a boiling point, the need for a new state, a people’s state, structurally beholden to the interests of the popular masses, and guided by the liberating ideology of the working class is becoming more self-evident.

Progressives of conscience must recognize that “aid” does not equal solidarity. Mainstream aid, today, is reinforcing the imperialist agenda, well meaning as it may be. 33% of US relief aid goes to fund US armed forces, less than 10% for food and medicine. Our task today must be to build international proletarian solidarity. We must seek out sister and brother unions, workers movements, peasant and student movements, and neighborhood committees, and lend them our support. But even more, we must join together with them in struggle, because at the end of the day, we are Haiti: One Struggle!