From
its inception, and well before it made $10 billion of
earthquake aid money disappear, Bill and Hillary
Clinton’s Interim Haiti
Recovery Commission (IHRC)
was a vicious joke on Haitians. The original name,
Commission Intérimaire
pour la Reconstruction d’Haïti,
should have been simply translated as Interim Commission
for the Reconstruction of Haiti. After all, it was the
commission that was temporary, not
Haiti.
There was also no need to change the word
reconstruction to the vague term recovery, unless one
deliberately wanted to suggest the collection of
something. As the I-HRC, however, the organization not
only acquired Hillary Rodham Clinton’s initials but also
boasted that it would scoop up Haiti’s reconstruction funds and
turn the world’s first black republic into a temporary
construct. If Mrs. Clinton has become a zombie and the
“I” in I-HRC has faded, this could easily be interpreted
as a sign of the Haitian gods’ wicked sense of humor.
The great writer Toni Morrison once described Bill
Clinton as “our first black President,” because of his
background as a poor boy in
Arkansas
from a single-parent home, his fondness for junk food,
and the political attacks on his sexuality. If so, then
he has graduated to being Haiti's first
black-American dictator.
For six years of a full dictatorship of the Clintons and
their surrogates, on earthquake anniversaries Haitians
at home and in the diaspora have made a ritual of
searching through the rubble for the reconstruction
funds that were donated by good people from all around
the world. “Where did the money go?” everyone asks. The
answer is simple: for a while it probably sat in the
Swiss and
Caribbean
offshore banks where dictators stash their loots.
In 2012, the
United States
presidential elections cost a record $2.6 billion. The
Republican challenger Mitt Romney raised $0.99 billion,
and the Democratic incumbent Barack Obama managed to
raise an unprecedented $1.07 billion. Both politicians
are regarded as champion fundraisers because of their
feats. In 2016, by all estimates, the cost of the
U.S. presidential
elections doubled or quadrupled to about $5-10
billion. This is the most expensive presidential bid in
history, and Hillary Clinton has vastly outspent Donald
Trump. Where did the money come from?
As of
Aug. 22, 2016,
Clinton had officially
raised only $436 million, and her top six donors had
contributed about one tenth of these funds. Donald
Trump, for his part, had raised $129 million, and the
money from his top six contributors amounted to $11
million. These sums fell quite short of the money being
spent by the two politicians, especially Clinton, who had already
spent about $100 million on television advertisements
alone by the end of August and had planned to spend $77
million more for advertisements in September and
October. Furthermore, Mrs. Clinton has relied on a large
and well-paid entourage that has probably included
medical personnel, and during her busy campaign
schedule, she has used private airplanes like some of us
take buses and taxis. Most of the money for her campaign
has probably come as “disbursements,” which are not
counted as carefully as money donations. These include
out-of-pocket funds from the candidates and friendly
donations of various services. Such disbursements have
obscured the engine of the 2016 U.S. elections
to an unprecedented degree.
It is not possible to raise billions to tens of
billions of dollars legitimately for political
campaigns. More and more, in the West and in emerging
market economies, these astronomical sums for elections
are extracted from unsuspecting taxpayers. We have
Brazil
to thank for some insights into the machinations of
politicians to finance their campaigns. In
Brazil, the state
energy company, Petrobras, was granting contracts to
construction companies with the understanding that a
percentage of the funds would be applied to the
campaigns of various corrupt politicians. The
money-laundering scandal, which involved more than $15
billion and led to President
Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, is estimated to have
touched every political party and 70% of the country’s
ministers and legislators.
For the
Clintons, the boon from
Haiti’s
earthquake of
Jan. 12, 2010
came while HRC was Secretary of State, and Bill Clinton
was the United Nations Special Envoy to
Haiti. As soon as
massive numbers of Americans began to donate small sums
of money for earthquake relief, Bill and Hillary Clinton
transformed themselves into the face of
Haiti. In their most
calculated compassionate voices, they told stories about
their marvelous honeymoon on the island and implored the
public for donations. In reality, in the U.S. State
Department, the mood was festive. On Feb. 1, the U.S.
Ambassador to
Haiti, Kenneth Merten,
cheerfully titled a section of his situation report, “THE
GOLD RUSH IS ON!”
By
Mar. 8, 2010, Bill Clinton
had applied sufficient pressure on President René
Préval, to force Haiti’s Lower
House to vote yes on a State of
Emergency
that would allow a group of rich donors to run the
country for 18 months via the IHRC. During the same
month, Hillary Clinton went to Montreal to raise money, ostensibly for
Haiti’s
reconstruction, and Bill Clinton went to Davos to
collect the rich donors. The next month, Bill Clinton
worked to push his project on Haiti’s Senate,
where it was ironically called a coup
d’état d’urgence. The Senate voted no on Apr. 8, but
President Préval insisted on another vote. In the next
vote on Apr.13, 10 out of 25 senators stayed home to
prevent a quorum. On Apr. 14, Michelle Obama made a
special trip to
Haiti, and the next day
the deal was done. The vote was 9 away, 2 abstaining, 1
no, and 13 yes. All but one of the yes votes had come
from Préval’s party. Thus slightly more than three
months after the earthquake, on Apr. 21, 2010, the IHRC was inaugurated.
With the IHRC, the
Clintons
established in
Haiti
their dream government, which I described, when I first
observed it, as “pay-to-play,”
meaning: an unelected government where political
participation is based on money invested. In the IHRC,
there were two parts: one foreign and the other Haitian.
Bill Clinton chaired the foreign section, which included
the representatives of 14 donors [US, European Union
(EU), France, Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Inter-American
Development Bank (IDB), United Nations, World Bank,
Organization of American States, CARICOM, the private
donors, the diaspora, and the NGOs]. Each donor had to
pledge to the IHRC $100 million over two years or
forgive $200 million of Haitian debt.
The poorer, Haitian, section of the IHRC had only
seven members. Haiti’s Prime Minister, Jean-Max
Bellerive, formally led it as the nominal Co-Chair of
the IHRC. The other six members were President Préval,
who was allowed only a symbolic veto, plus one per
son each to represent the Lower House, Senate,
judiciary, business sector, and unions. Every Haitian
member had to be approved by the foreigners, and Clinton ran the whole show.
As the reconstruction money poured in, the IHRC
became increasingly arrogant and opaque. According to
the IHRC charter, Clinton and Bellerive gained the right
of final approval over all major construction projects
in Haiti. In
addition, they even gave themselves the power to grant
titles. Meanwhile, Haitian ministers and elected
officials were blocked from IHRC meetings because they
were “not on the list.”
The IHRC is estimated to have collected $5.3
billion over two years and $9.9 billion over three
years, without reconstructing much of anything. This
represents more than five times the money that the
Clintons
have collected by other mechanisms like the Clinton
Foundation or
Laureate
Education. Bill Clinton has claimed at
various times that he only received 10% of the funds
that had been pledged to the IHRC, but even if this were
true, a vast sum of money would still have disappeared.
By July 2011,
Haiti’s Ministry of
Public Works, Transportation and Communication (MPTC)
had approved $3.2 billion of IHRC projects, but only $84
million (2.6%) worth of projects had been completed.
In a meeting of the Senate Public Works Committee
with the MPTC on Aug. 11, 2011, the Senate Committee
Chair, William
Jeanty, said that the IHRC had not only appropriated
for its balance sheets the projects of several Haitian
ministries but also claimed credit for financing MPTC
projects that had been funded by the European Union (EU)
and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) before the
IHRC was formed! To date, the only notable IHRC project
has been the Caracol
Industrial Park, a sweatshop complex in northern
Haiti, far from
the earthquake damage. Its construction was financed by
USAID ($124 million) and the IDB ($105 million), and
its unstated purpose was to force the construction of
modern seaports and airports in northern
Haiti
to support mining.
To create a few thousand slave-wage jobs,
this industrial park, built without regard to its
environmental impact, has destroyed the homes of
hundreds of farmers and polluted a pristine river and
bay.
The IHRC barely lasted through its 18-month term.
After this, Haitian politicians publicly declared it to
be dysfunctional, and the Haitian Senate did not renew
its mandate. On
Apr. 10, 2014, two Haitian lawyers, Newton
Louis St. Juste and André Michel, filed a legal
action against Bill Clinton in
Haiti’s Superior
Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes. On Oct. 13, 2014, the court asked
Clinton to provide an audit of the IHRC funds.
Rather than abide by the court’s request, Clinton claimed immunity based on the fact
that he had been the UN Special Envoy to Haiti.
It is unlikely that Haitians will ever recover
the funds that have vanished into the IHRC, and that are
now probably financing HRC’s campaign. At best, one
might hope that Hillary Clinton will lose the election
and thus be prevented from gathering more power. The big
prize in her sights now is the United States,
where she and Bill Clinton should be able to charge
billions of dollars to each participant in a pay-to-play
government. Political arguments about racial justice and
the lesser evil entirely miss the point that in a
pay-to-play government, those who are poor or even
middle class, will count only for what they can furnish
of themselves to the rich. This will certainly mean low
wages, prisons, and an unprecedented predation on those
who are directly hit by climate-change catastrophes.
For Haitians at home and in the diaspora, who
have seen the devil itself in I-HRC, she could never be
a choice for anything. As for the ancestors: if they
have their way with her, she will come close enough to
the presidency to taste it, touch it and smell it, and
then, she will lose it.
This article was
originally published on
News Junkie Post. Dady Chery is the author of We
Have Dared to Be Free.
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