No more excuses

"Haiti is a land rich in excuses," writes Zev Chafets in the New York Daily News:

It was entirely predictable that deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide would claim that he was overthrown and kidnapped by the United States.

It is equally predictable that some Americans like Reps. Charles Rangel (D-Manhattan) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) deem Aristide a victim. They belong to the Victim Internationale, for whom problems in the Third World are always someone else's fault.

Haiti has been independent for 200 years. It is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. It has no infrastructure, no democratic institutions, no decent government. Right now, only U.S. Marines separate it from total chaos.

But  not all Haitians are so cynical or fatalistic, reports Chafets, citing emigrant Gary Pierre-Pierre, publisher of The Haitian Times out of Brooklyn, who writes that Haitian emigres have the technical expertise Haiti lacks and "need to become involved in nation building."

Pierre-Pierre's idea is based on the French model of dispatching bureaucrats to former French colonies. But it has an American twist. This would be a rebuilding corps drawn from the ranks of people with an instinctive understanding of and emotional commitment to the nation they are sent to assist.

We took at peek at The Haitian Times and found this editorial take on the Haitian situation, past and present:

Haiti was not always the insignificant place it is today, unimportant to the world's major powers. Its independence in 1804 was a devastating blow to France, and not merely to French self-esteem. Economists estimate that in the 1750s, Haiti provided as much as 50% of the gross national product of France. The French extracted sugar, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, cotton, indigo and other products, and grew rich on them. Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Haiti. After Haitian slaves under Toussaint Louverture wrested control of their island, Napoleon had no further use for Louisiana -- which was to have supplied food to Haiti, the hub of France's empire. So he sold it.

Once freed -- Haiti was only the second free country in the hemisphere, after the United States -- the Republic began the fall from riches to rags that has lasted until today. Haiti faced a hostile world, and an international boycott of Haitian goods and commerce plunged the Haitian economy into chaos. The boycott was punitive, no doubt; it was also done to extinguish a paradigm, to stamp out an example of armed slave uprising that might have led slaves in the U.S., as well as in the neighboring French and British Caribbean colonies, to act in emulation. The boycott, therefore, was the slavers' self-defense -- tough, pragmatic, unsentimental. One might even call it racial segregation as realpolitik.

We'd never thought much about Haiti one way or the other.  Is Pierre-Pierre's editorial historically accurate or mostly spin?  We don't know, but it's gotten us interested in learning more.

[via Lucianne]

Comments

[goomp]

My wife and I visited Port-au-Prince once on the QE II. We spent a day touring the island. Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoutes were in power then. It was the most depressing place I had ever imagined. Drugged males standing by the road with their pants open. Homes made of corrugated paper board . . . The Tonton Macoutes standing leaning against the walls of buildings wearing rifles, dark glasses and a cigarette hanging out of their mouth. The water in the harbor looked like yellow pea soup, and the streets were full of litter and dirt.

I buy the boycott idea as deliberate destruction to show "it don't pay to be uppity."