June 21, 2017
The End of the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti
What It Means for the Country's Future
By Michael Deibert
Foreign Affairs
(Read the original
here)
Under an ash gray sky threatening rain this past April, dozens of
people in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Cité Soleil (Sun City)
gathered across the street from the local police station to survey a
flat patch of earth where goats normally graze. As surveyors in helmets
and green vests took measurements of the land, residents discussed their
plan for this corner of a desperately poor quarter of this impoverished
country: the construction of a new library, the Bibliyotèk Site Solèy,
funded by small donations from hundreds of Haitians and with books
contributed from both within Haiti and abroad.
“This is not just a
library. This symbolizes a lot for us,” said Louino Robillard, a native
of the northern town of Saint-Raphaël who moved to Cité Soleil with his
father when he was three and grew up in the district’s Ti Ayiti
section. Robillard is the driving force behind the Konbit Solèy Leve, a
social movement whose name refers to both the tradition of volunteer
community work in rural Haiti (
konbit) and the neighborhood’s name (
solèy leve, meaning “rising sun”).
“This symbolizes unity,” Robillard said. “This symbolizes hope.”
A
little more than a decade ago, Cité Soleil was a war zone where daily
survival, let alone long-term planning, was a Herculean task. It was,
and to some degree remains, a redoubt of the armed political pressure
groups known as the
baz (base) in Haiti, who maintain an uneasy
and ambiguous relationship with the country’s political factions.
Today, however, grass-roots organizations such as Konbit Solèy Leve and
the Sant Kominote Altènatif Ak Lapèhave been working to put the
konbit model
into practice, gathering residents to clean the fetid canals and other
areas of the district and trying to sow connections between the
sometimes fractious groups in the zone. The grass-roots nature of such
initiatives is especially significant given what Haiti has witnessed
over the last decade.
MINUSTAH'S BEGINNINGS
In February
2004, then Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a democratic icon
who had decided years before that he was not beholden to the rules of
democracy, fled the country into exile amid massive street protests and
an armed rebellion against his increasingly despotic rule. He left
behind a nation devastated by political warfare and environmental
crises, with a treasury virtually emptied by years of corruption and
theft. After the brief presence of the U.S.-led multinational interim
force, in June 2004 the United Nations established the UN Stabilization
Mission in Haiti, known by its French-language acronym, MINUSTAH.
The
Brazilian-led mission that came for an initial period of six months
would stay on for 13 years, tasked with “stabilizing” this often
tumultuous country of glittering Caribbean beaches, mist-shrouded
mountains, and the syncretic vodou religion. Haiti also boasts the
distinction of having conducted the only successful slave revolt in
history, which saw it gain independence from France in 1804, making it
the second independent republic in the Western Hemisphere after the
United States.
Although MINUSTAH oversaw three consecutive
presidential elections, each more turbulent than the last, the UN
Security Council voted unanimously this April to end the mission by
October. Yet many of the problems that afflicted Haiti’s tentative
democratic gains before the mission landed remain and, in fact, have
been codified into practice.
When MINUSTAH arrived, Haiti (and
Port-au-Prince in particular) was violently factionalized between
Aristide supporters and the former members of Haiti’s disbanded military
who had helped oust him, both heavily armed. The unelected interim
government in power at the time cut off supporters of the ancien régime
from the meager government funds they had been accessing, while some
members of the country’s economic elite advocated a policy of repression
and revenge against the ousted president’s partisans.
The
tensions spiraled into a period of violent anarchy known as Operation
Baghdad, which ground on for two bloody years that also saw the suicide
of MINUSTAH’s military commander, Brazilian Lieutenant General Urano
Teixeira da Matta Bacellar. The chaos lasted until the election of René
Préval in 2006, for what would be his second tenure as Haiti’s
president.
Criticized for years for its perceived passivity in the
face of relentless violence, MINUSTAH seemed to find its footing under
Préval, who had a volatile but ultimately productive relationship with
the UN mission’s chiefs, first Guatemalan diplomat Edmond Mulet and
later Tunisian diplomat Hédi Annabi. With MINUSTAH as a reserve force
insulating him from the coups that had marked Haiti’s history, Préval, a
savvy politician, could set about the work of trying to unite a divided
country and attracting foreign investment. To a surprising degree, over
the next three years, he largely succeeded. Even when unrest roiled
Haiti in 2008, there seemed to be no fear that Préval would be ousted.
All
that changed on January 12, 2010, when a 7.0-magnitude earthquake
struck Port-au-Prince and the surrounding regions. Tens of thousands of
Haitians and 101 UN employees, including Chief of Mission Hédi Annabi,
died. This was the largest single-day loss of life in the organization’s
history. The stability that had been so carefully nurtured over the
preceding three years vanished within seconds.
After the
earthquake, the tense relationship between Préval and Mulet (who
returned to head MINUSTAH after Annabi’s death) became even more so. In
the words of the Haitian economist Ericq Pierre, foreign aid and
organizations poured in with “too many propositions, too many resources,
too many promises, too much knowledge, and not enough know-how,” and a
sense of drift and curdling directionlessness became palpable.
PEACEKEEPING SCANDALS
The
culture of impunity within Haiti’s body politic is one of the country’s
most destabilizing problems. Yet following the earthquake, MINUSTAH
chose to avail itself of this culture rather than combat it.
After
video evidence surfaced in September 2011 that Uruguayan peacekeepers
might have raped an 18-year-old boy in the southern town of Port-Salut, a
local human rights organization, the Réseau National de Défense des
Droits de l’Homme, charged that the contingent had been leading “a life
of debauchery” for some time. (Four of these peacekeepers were later
convicted of “private violence” in the case by a Uruguayan court.) It
was one of several sexual assault scandals that rocked the mission,
including others involving Pakistani and Sri Lankan peacekeeping forces.
When
I visited Haiti around this time, I witnessed a group of surly,
well-fed men who identified themselves as Canadian police advisers drink
themselves into oblivion and splash around in a hotel pool. Only feet
away, in a tent encampment of earthquake victims, thousands sat in
darkness through long evenings of pounding rain, creating the perception
of a fraternity party amid an apocalypse.
Also in 2011, at a base
set up by MINUSTAH peacekeepers from Nepal, a broken PVC pipe was
pouring raw sewage into a tributary that fed directly into the Boukan
Kanni and Jenba Rivers, which then flowed into the larger Artibonite
River, the main water source for the eponymous lush agricultural region.
This would lead to a cholera epidemic that has so far killed over
10,000 people. After years of denials, and despite multiple reports
conclusively linking the cholera outbreak to the mission, the UN would
not admit culpability until August 2016. To this date, it has
compensated none of the victims.
MARTELLY'S MIXED RECORD
Along
with the U.S. government, MINUSTAH played a decisive role in Haiti’s
acrimonious 2010–11 elections. Préval tried to impose upon a weary
nation his successor, the highly unpopular Jude Célestin. But through a
combination of international diplomatic pressure (including that of
Mulet and then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) and violent
street protests, he was forced to back down and assent to a runoff that
eventually saw singer Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly inaugurated as
Haiti’s president in May 2011.
The record of the Martelly
government, whose rise MINUSTAH aided, was a mixed one. It made advances
in terms of infrastructure and tourism, and the country’s spirits were
often buoyed by the president’s charisma. But many of the salutary
effects were undercut by the violence surrounding last year’s aborted
election, and the government, like many before it, was marked by a high
degree of corruption and impunity.
Both symbolically and
mechanically, Martelly represented the return of a political strain
associated with the former Haitian dictator François Duvalier and, more
closely, his son and successor, Jean-Claude. Whereas Duvalier père
presented himself as a noiriste dictator enacting a kind of color-based
revenge, the son attempted to portray a more liberal laissez faire image
while promoting foreign investment (a dishonest image, as the country
remained a brutal police state). This strain historically has often
seemed locked in a struggle with the anarcho-populism most vividly
typified by Aristide. When elections were finally held in November of
last year—again delayed, again disputed—Martelly’s designated successor,
Jovenel Moïse, an agribusinessman and, like Martelly, political novice,
won an outright majority.
“Perhaps MINUSTAH served to prevent
coups,” says Laënnec Hurbon, Haiti’s most eminent sociologist and the
author of key works such as
Le Barbare imaginaire. “But, while I
am wary of the nationalist rhetoric of politicians who make regular
criticisms of international interference, I must admit that in the 2011
elections MINUSTAH intervened in the electoral system to impose a
candidate in the second round...When this candidate who came to
power, a whole new layer of neo-Duvalierist politicians took over the
state who were only interested in doing business with the resources of
the state.”
Although relatively peaceful at the moment, despite MINUSTAH’s
long-stated goal of stabilization, Haiti is a country where many appear
to have lost faith in the democratic process, with only the most
desultory electoral participation. Haiti remains a kingdom of impunity,
with political malefactors who are able to reinvent themselves (one need
only look at Haiti’s current Parliament to confirm this) and a police
force whose autonomy, cultivated by Préval and former Police Chief Mario
Andrésol, had eroded under Martelly, despite the best efforts of many
dedicated officers. Many, including the president, speak openly about
resurrecting the Haitian army, extraconstitutionally disbanded in 1995,
which the police replaced.
Moïse
remains an unknown quantity, whose words of commitment to the country’s
long-underserved peasant majority bring hope even as what some say are
authoritarian tendencies give pause. (One of his first acts as president
was to dismiss the head of the Unité Centrale de Renseignements
Financiers anticorruption body.)
“The new government will have to
be careful of its image and ensure the president's staff is impeccable
in terms of honesty,” says Marilyn B. Allien, the president of La
Fondation Héritage pour Haïti, Haiti’s branch of the global
anticorruption organization Transparency International. “This also
applies for cabinet members and members of Parliament. Every effort
should be made to ensure to project an image of honesty and integrity.
If the president is honest and shows no tolerance for corruption, this
will deter those in his entourage and in the government from engaging in
corrupt practices.”
WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS
In Cité Soleil,
fishermen still cast nets into the capital’s polluted bay as
schoolchildren in pressed white and green uniforms amble down the now
quiet streets.
“Right now Cité Soleil is very cool, very calm,”
Phozer Louis, the lead MC for the Haitian rap group Fos Lakay-Majik
kleng and a Cité Soleil native, told me. “The young people here have put
down the gun and picked up the ball, the book, the microphone. . . . We
ourselves have to change Cité Soleil, as no government has ever done
anything for us.”
When the MINUSTAH troops leave this nation where they saw so many
of their number die and where, intentionally or not, they themselves
caused so many deaths, they leave a country where the cost of living is
rising ever higher for average citizens, who lost the ability to feed
themselves thanks to international agricultural policies foisted on
Haiti in the 1990s and where many of the structural problems of its
political reality remain unchanged.
It is true that MINUSTAH
likely prevented both Préval and Martelly from being ousted, a laudable
feat, but the core of the malaise afflicting the Haitian state—the
culture of impunity for anyone boasting political or economic
influence—remains, with a judiciary as corrupt as it ever was and a
police force that has become notably more Balkanized in recent years.
The lives of the moun andeyo—the
forgotten rural masses—have, over the last decade plus, benefited here
and there from a desalination program to make salt water suitable for
human consumption or the restoration of a rural road or other projects,
but they remain essentially unchanged. From the shacks of Cité Soleil to
the elegant restaurants in the hills above the capital to the small
villages that dot the country’s historic Plaine-du-Nord, within this
country still in the grip of largely unreconstructed political and
economic elites, Haitians now hold their breath and wait to see what
will come next.
