Transcript: Is there a way out of Haiti’s nightmare?

This is an audio transcript of the Rachman Review podcast episode: ‘Is there a way out of Haiti’s nightmare?’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Henry Mance
Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Henry Mance, chief features writer at the Financial Times, and I’m standing in this week for Gideon while he’s on holiday. This week’s podcast is about Haiti. My guest is Robert Fatton, professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia and author of books including The Guise of Exceptionalism: Unmasking the National Narratives of Haiti and the United States. After months of violence, Haiti’s president, Ariel Henry, resigned on Monday. But with armed gangs now in control of large parts of the capital, Port-au-Prince, what hope is there for restoring stability in the Caribbean’s most populous country?

Haiti crashed back into global headlines last week when gangs attacked two jails, releasing more than 4,000 prisoners on to the streets. Here is the main gang leader, Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, threatening civil war and genocide if Henry didn’t step down.

[AUDIO CLIP OF JIMMY “BARBECUE” SPEAKING]

Henry Mance
Henry was away in Kenya at the time of the attacks, talking to President William Ruto about drumming up support for an international peacekeeping effort. An unpopular, unelected leader, he was unable to get back into Haiti and ended up losing the support of key international players. Here’s US secretary of state Antony Blinken at a meeting of regional leaders on the day of Henry’s resignation.

Antony Blinken audio clip
We support the plan to create a broad-based, inclusive, independent presidential college that would in particular, first, take concrete steps to meet the immediate needs of the Haitian people. Second, enable the swift deployment of the multinational security support mission. And third, through that deployment through a reinforced Haitian National police, create the security conditions that are necessary to hold free and fair elections, to allow humanitarian assistance to get the people who need it, and to help put Haiti back on a path to economic opportunity and growth.

Henry Mance
So can the US and Caribbean leaders come up with a solution to the crisis? Robert Fatton, welcome to the podcast. Haiti is two-hours flight from Miami. It’s also by far the poorest country in the Americas. Today, hundreds of thousands of displaced people. We’ve seen roadblocks and gun battles, one of the highest murder rates in the world. We’ve seen gangs setting fire to the interior ministry. We’ve seen the US evacuating non-essential staff. And politically, there haven’t been elections since 2016. And even then, turnout in those elections was only about 18 per cent. So, Robert, I know you grew up in Haiti and you followed the politics for many decades. I wonder how bad is this crisis?

Robert Fatton
This is really the worst crisis in my memory. This one is absolutely, there’s no other word to put it but amazing, you know, very negative sense. There is no government. Essentially all institutions in the country have collapsed. And you are talking about armed bandits attacking the national palace, attacking the international airport, and ultimately having superiority over whatever is left of the police and the army in the country. So it’s a total collapse of the institutions in the country.

Henry Mance
And how did we get here? One precursor to all this is the assassination in 2021 of the previous president, Jovenel Moïse. Is that the immediate cause of today’s disorder?

Robert Fatton
Well, it is not the cause as such, but it precipitated the crisis that we have now. I mean, Jovenel Moïse was perceived by the vast majority of Haitians as an illegitimate president. He had been accused of corruption. He had been accused of being elected in a rigged elections. So he had very little legitimacy. But his assassination precipitated the events that have led to what we have today. In addition to that, it’s very clear that since his assassination, the gangs have increased their violence. And what is more alarming is that the different gangs seem to have united in order to topple the current regime of Prime Minister Ariel Henry.

Henry Mance
Talking about Henry, he was the choice, really, of the international community after the assassination of Moïse. How does this reflect on US policy? The fact that someone who turned out to have very little legitimacy among the population was chosen?

Robert Fatton
Well, this is really a reflection of the foreign policy towards Haiti, which is in disarray. And the appointment of Ariel Henry was rather incredible because at the time of the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse, Claude Joseph was the then prime minister. And in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the international community seemed to have ratified Claude Joseph. But a few days afterwards, the UN representative — we presented actually the core country and mainly the United States, and then kind of down France — decided that Claude Joseph had to go, and the new prime minister had to be Ariel Henry. So his appointment is clearly something that comes from some form of magical realism, really.

And then he was completely ineffective, and he was kept there because the international community gave him juridical recognition. Without that recognition, I don’t think that it could have lasted very long. He had promised all kinds of things and he never delivered. And actually, the plans that are being discussed now about the presidential college had been put forward by many groups in the opposition at the time of the assassination of Jovenel Moïse. So we have basically wasted two and a half years, and we’ve come to the same conclusion that a presidential council, a transitional government, is necessary.

Henry Mance
You know, people who follow international affairs, they’ve seen Haiti in very difficult situations before, perhaps not as difficult as this moment. And I wonder how easy it is to say that, you know, Haiti as an independent nation, you know, had never really had a chance that these problems that we see today have a direct link back to the way in which Haiti won independence from France in 1884 and was then forced to pay reparations over a very long period of time to France. Is it right to see Haiti as having an unusually or an especially difficult colonial legacy that explains today’s difficulties?

Robert Fatton
Yes, I think the colonial legacy is still very much part of the current history. It is absolutely true that when Haiti declared its independence in 1804, Haiti was treated as a pariah nation because obviously, at the time, the great powers were all essentially white supremacy states, and Haiti was the first black independent nation. So there was that burden, a heavy burden. And you are right in pointing out the indemnity that the Haitian government had to pay to the French government, and that was a significant amount of money. It’s been calculated to be about $23bn.

On the other hand, the reality is that that terrible legacy of colonialism was not the only fundamental reason for Haiti’s problems. The other main cause was clearly the Haitian ruling classes. Because even the indemnity, it was initially proposed by the Haitian leader who follow by the name of Pétion. The leaders of Haiti wanted the recognition of France because they wanted to make sure that their property was in fact protected if France recognised Haiti. And ultimately that was the bargain, you know, a terrible bargain. But the people who really paid for the consequences of that bargain were not the ruling groups in Haiti, but the peasantry who had to pay for the indemnity in terms of taxation, in terms of forced labour. So we have a situation where you have a mutually opportunistic convergence of interest between Haitian leaders and, if you wish to call them that way, imperial nations.

Henry Mance
And you mentioned $23bn. Just to put that in context for listeners, that’s just slightly bigger than the annual size of the Haitian economy today. So a significant amount.

Robert Fatton
It’s a significant amount. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was arguably the first freely-elected president of Haiti in 1991. And some people have argued, for instance, in that particular case, one of the reasons Aristide had to leave the country in 2004 was because he had made it very public that the French government owed Haiti $23bn just before his departure. Aristide had flustered the capital city with posters saying that French imperialism owed Haiti $23bn. And very clearly, the French did not particularly like that kind of assertion from Aristide. Now there were clearly other problems related to Aristide. But in terms of his alienation from the international community, that played a significant role.

Henry Mance
And we fast forward to today, the gangs that control much of Port-au-Prince. Where does that power come from?

Robert Fatton
Well, the gangs are an old phenomenon in Haitian politics. But in the modern period, the gangs crystallised immediately in the aftermath of the first coup against Aristide in 1991. You had militias that were created by the army to repress people who were supportive of Aristide. He spent 27 months in the national palace in his first term. And then he was, after two years of negotiation, put back in power by the United States on the back of about 25,000 marines. But the program that he had, which were essentially social democratic programs, some redistribution, etc, they were all jettisoned because he needed the support of the United States to come back. And when he came back, he signed a series of agreements with the World Bank and the IMF, essentially structural adjustment programs, which were absolutely not what he had wanted for the country. And when Aristide came back to power in 1994, he disbanded the army. And when he disbanded the army, you had all kinds of political factions, including Aristide himself, who started to create armed groups that would defend the interests of those particular groups. And I’m talking about a wide variety of people in the business community, people in conflicting political parties, etc.

But the gangs started to have a certain degree of autonomy, and that autonomy would become very significant in the last year or so. So much so that it’s difficult to see who is in fact controlling the gangs, and whether, in fact, the gangs have become powers unto themselves. In other words, the gangs are becoming the kind of a mini-mafia state. They extract money. They tax people when they travel to the country. They impose ransoms on all kinds of activities. They kidnap. And they are linked also to money laundering. They are linked to the illegal trafficking of small weapons. And clearly, the drug cartels have connections with the gangs, and this is where they get most of their money now. And last week was a significant event because the gangs were being engaged in turf wars united. And that unity led to the attack on the national palace, on the international airport, the port, etc. So we have a situation where the gangs may unfortunately be the arbiter of the immediate future of Haiti.

Henry Mance
And the main gang leader is Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier. What do we know about him? Is there anything particularly that has enabled him to bring these gangs together?

Robert Fatton
Well, surely he used to be a police officer and he became very alienated from the police. And the police was corrupt. And Chérizier likes to see himself as kind of the saviour of Haiti. He identifies himself with all kinds of very different historical figures: Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Mandela, Martin Luther King. He has a vision of himself that is a messianic one. And he believes, I think, for whatever YouTube you may see him, that he has a mission in Haiti. And he likes to see himself also as Robin Hood, who is going to take away from the rich and give to the poor.

On the other hand, his armed groups are very violent, and the people who suffered from that violence are basically poor people. You have something like now, over 300,000 internally displaced Haitians because of the violence of the gangs and precisely because Jimmy Cherizier is not really what he claims to be. On the other hand, the territories that he controls are areas where he’s starting to give some assistance to people who support him. This is why I likened his movement to something like a mafia city.

Henry Mance
And Henry’s plan to counter all these was to bring in Kenyan police officers funded by the US. I mean, that’s obviously founded on the fact that he had no legitimacy and the public was pretty tired of him. Now, in the international community, there’s more of a focus on a political solution to work out a successor to Henry. Who’s taking the lead?

Robert Fatton
Well really, the United States is, as it were, the big elephant in the room. And I think the Caricom countries are the lesser group.

Henry Mance
Caricom is the Caribbean group. So that’s Andrew Holness, the Jamaican PM, Mia Mottley, Barbados, etc.

Robert Fatton
The Caribbean nations indeed. And the bulk of the money that would support the Kenyan mission in Haiti comes from the United States. As a matter of fact, secretary of state Blinken announced that the United States would add $100mn so that the Kenyan mission would be deployed. Now, the Kenyan president, Mr Ruto, declared last week that he needed 200mn. So it’s not clear whether that $100mn will suffice. But I assume that if Blinken indicated that they would expedite the mission, that you must have an agreement with Ruto. The problem with the Kenyan mission is that initially it was supposed to be about 1,000 officers. Now it’s down to 400. And it’s not clear when they would be in fact deployed. So it may be a bit late in the ballgame, as it were. When they arrive, they may find the situation that is so dire that they may not have the capability to confront the gangs and to tame the gangs’ violence.

Henry Mance
What’s the US interest, do you think? Is it about stopping a flow of refugees across to Florida?

Robert Fatton
I think this plays a very big role in American foreign policy towards Haiti. Especially in an election year, and especially when immigration is such an important issue among the American electorate. So it would be really a significant problem for the Biden administration if you started to have massive flows of both people and a clear case of the humanitarian disaster in the country that is so close to the United States. And you have to remember that the Black Caucus has been, to some extent, the defenders of Haiti. And if Haiti were to completely collapse, the Black Caucus might have a significant amount of criticism vis-à-vis the Biden administration. And that would not be a good thing for the president in so far as his electoral prospects are very dependent on the heavy support from the black community. And if Haiti collapses, the United States cannot avoid looking at what’s happening 100 miles away from the coast of Miami.

Henry Mance
Yeah, but Biden’s got enough problems with the Arab American vote and what’s going on in Gaza, I imagine. Now there have been two UN missions in the relatively recent past, one in 1993 to 2001 in Haiti, one 2004 to 2017. What are the lessons that they have? Is there anything we can draw from the past UN failures, really, in Haiti that might point to where a good solution would lie?

Robert Fatton
Well, both missions were basically failures in the long term. The first one more or less managed the post-coup period and managed to establish a modicum of order. And when they left, you obviously had the second crisis and the violence that caused the departure of Aristide. And the main UN mission was obviously Minustah, which lasted from 2004 to 2017. And that one, similarly, was capable of establishing a modicum of order. And when the then-president Préval arrived in office, he declared very publicly that the gangs had essentially two alternatives. One was to disarm and to integrate themselves into the larger society in a peaceful way, or they would be killed by Haitian police and the Minustah forces. And at one point, the Minustah forces had to intervene very violently in the slums, so much so that the then-general, who was a Brazilian and I forget his name, but he committed suicide because he was not prepared, in fact, to wage warfare in the slums of Port-au-Prince. Nonetheless, Minustah did and for about a few years, the gangs essentially disappeared or they were underground.

Things look like they would be stabilised. But unfortunately, with the earthquake of 2010, things again fell apart. The Minustah forces established the modicum of peace. But the Minustah period led to a trail of sorrows, and at the same time, once they left, things fell apart. So one can only say the ultimate result was failure. And I think what contributed to that failure was not just Minustah, but the type of elections that we had in the country. I mean, as you pointed out, Jovenel Moïse was elected and there were barely 18 per cent of the population participating. And most Haitians thought that that election was, in any case, very much rigged and that there was a significant US-meddling. Whether that’s true or not may be irrelevant, because that’s the way most Haitians view those elections. And they assume that if there is another foreign intervention, that probably it may not have, in the long term, any type of beneficial results.

Henry Mance
So with that history of two failed UN interventions, is there public support in Haiti for another significant intervention?

Robert Fatton
That’s difficult to say. I mean, most political parties say that they don’t want the foreign intervention. But on the other hand, the situation is catastrophic for so many people in the capital city that one can probably assume that if there is a foreign intervention that would be effective enough to stop the violence and tame the gangs, that there would be support. But I would argue that that foreign intervention would need to be very effective, and the effectiveness would need to be achieved in a very short period of time. Otherwise, the population might turn against the foreign intervention.

Henry Mance
Do you see any figure that could command enough respect to hold Haiti together at the moment?

Robert Fatton
At the moment, I don’t see any figure as such. There are plenty of political leaders who want to be that figure, but unfortunately, I don’t see anyone who was the consensus figure. There is that fellow by the name of Guy Philippe, who just came out of American jails in October, and now he wants to be the head of his own presidential council. He’s charismatic but is a fellow who has all kinds of criminal links. He was in jail because of drug dealings, money laundering, etc. So it’s difficult to see someone who would be free of that criminal burden being popular at the moment. Now, it may well be that someone will rise, but I don’t see any figure of stature who could navigate Haiti out of this crisis.

Henry Mance
Haiti is often described as a failed state. The state itself is obviously a very weakened apparatus. And you mentioned the 2010 earthquake. Haiti’s been hit by climate change. What is the prospect for the country? Do you see a path out of this?

Robert Fatton
Well, if you look at it in a cold, analytical way, it’s difficult to see an easy extraction from the crisis. In other words, most institutions have collapsed, the state really doesn’t exist. The judicial system has basically vanished. Political parties tend to be parties of big men, as it were, or big women. So we don’t have the institutions. So from a purely intellectual perspective, the future is rather bleak. You have all kinds of popular organisations that have crystallised. They don’t have power now. But they may eventually become a significant actor, then that would be in the long term. So my hope is that, you know, the surprises of history might save the country. But I’ve been saying that for the last 50 years, and unfortunately, the pessimism of the intellect seemed to prevail over the optimism of the will.

Henry Mance
Yeah. And just to round off, I mean, Tony Blinken said only the Haitians can determine their future. The Fugees guitarist Wyclef Jean, who left Haiti in the 1970s, tweeted out: let’s show the world we can take our destiny into our own hands. I call on the whole diaspora, the people of Haiti need us. I mean, there’s this sense that Haiti could have a better future if the elites and those with power were supportive of international consensus efforts. I mean, is the problem here a really small number of people in Haiti who are thwarting the path to a better country?

Robert Fatton
Well, I think it’s not just an internal problem. I think it’s also an external problem because most of our rulers in Haiti have, to a large degree, been appointed, to put it crudely, by the international community. On the other hand, the Haitian ruling classes have also been part of the problem. The amazing level of corruption that exists in the country is internal. The chasm between the small, well-off elite and the vast majority of Haitians is dramatic. So there is a feeling — at least this is my personal feeling that, as I’ve pointed out before — there is an opportunistic convergence of interests between the Haitian rulers and the international community, and that opportunistic convergence, as there are very negative consequences for Haiti. So you would need to change things in Haiti itself. But in order to do so, you would need also to change the type of foreign intervention that has marked the history of Haiti since really the creation of the nation.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Henry Mance
That was my guest, Robert Fatton, professor of government and foreign affairs in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. And that’s it for this week. Gideon will be back next week, so please join him for another edition of the Rachman Review.