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It is a common misconception, both in Haiti and
abroad, that the country’s president holds executive power. In
fact, his main power is to nominate the man or woman who does:
the Prime Minister.
President Michel Martelly,
after shunning consultations with the heads of Parliament’s two
chambers (as the Constitution demands), saw his first two
hard-line nominees – Daniel Gérard Rouzier and Bernard Gousse –
rejected by the Parliament, which must ratify the candidate.
This stand-off set off alarms in Washington, which saw the
President it had shoe-horned into office still floundering
without a government over three months after his May 14
inauguration.
But now, following
interventions by the U.S. Embassy (see accompanying article by
Yves Pierre-Louis) and UN Special Envoy Bill Clinton with
Martelly and Parliamentary leaders, a “compromise”
nominee has emerged: Garry Conille, Clinton’s chief of staff in
Haiti. Barring any surprises in the all-important background
documents, Conille’s ratification is all but assured.
Garry Conille, 45, is the son
of a Serge Conille, who was a government minister under the
Duvalier dictatorship. He graduated from the Canado highschool
in 1984 and trained as a doctor in Haiti’s State University
Medical School. He then went on to earn a Master’s degree in
Health Policy and Health Administration at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He then became a protégé of
economist Jeffrey Sachs, who runs the liberal Earth Institute at
Columbia University in New York. Sachs is often credited as the
father of the “economic shock therapy” that was applied
to formerly Communist countries in Eastern Europe after 1989.
The “therapy” involved privatizing publicly owned
industries, slashing state payrolls, dismantling trade, price
and currency controls, in short, the same neoliberal “death
plan” policies which Washington and Paris have sought to apply
in Haiti over the past 25 years.
Sachs apparently had
second-thoughts about the policies he spawned after their
disastrous effects on working people and began to propose
poverty alleviation, particularly through the Millennium
Development Goals (MDG) which were put forth in a September 2000
United Nations summit of 191 nations. The eight goals, to be
achieve by 2015, included targets to “reduce extreme poverty
and hunger by half,” “achieve universal primary
education,” and “reduce infant mortality by two-thirds
and maternal mortality by three-fourths” and “stop the
spread of pandemic diseases.” To report on how to
achieve these goals, Sachs directed ten “Task Forces” of
the UN’s Millennium Project, which according to its website
included “researchers and scientists, policymakers,
representatives of NGOs, UN agencies, the World Bank, IMF and
the private sector.”
It is in this MDG work that
Conille became one of Sachs’ collaborators (he is an adjunct
research scientist at the Center for Global Health and Economic
Development of Sachs’ Earth Institute). In May 2006, Conille
co-authored with Sachs a set of recommendations to the incoming
administration of President René Préval that called on the
Haitian government to “establish a clear and consensual path
out of poverty, that builds upon outreach to the business
community,” the same “business community” which had
responded to democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide’s proposed “path out of poverty” with a bloody
2004 coup. (In fairness, Sachs and, according to sources who
have spoken to him, Conille opposed that coup.) They also called
on Haiti “to reach agreements with the IMF and World Bank on
a new three year development program,” the same
international banks whose “development programs” have
been underdeveloping Haiti for decades.
Principally, and not
surprisingly, the prescription of Conille and Sachs was for “Haiti
to establish a development strategy and implementation plan
consistent with achieving the Millennium Development Goals.”
African economist Samir Amin
submits the Millennium Development Goal strategy to a withering
analysis in the March 2006 issue of Monthly Review. “A
critical examination of the formulation of the goals as well as
the definition of the means that would be required to implement
them can only lead to the conclusion that the MDGs cannot be
taken seriously,” Amin writes. “A litany of pious hopes
commits no one. And when the expression of these pious hopes is
accompanied by conditions that essentially eliminate the
possibility of their becoming reality, the question must be
asked: are not the authors of the document actually pursuing
other priorities that have nothing to do with ‘poverty
reduction’ and all the rest? In this case, should the exercise
not be described as pure hypocrisy, as pulling the wool over the
eyes of those who are being forced to accept the dictates of
liberalism in the service of the quite particular and exclusive
interests of dominant globalized capital?”
Amin takes special aim at MDG #
8: “Develop a global partnership for development.”
He responds: “The writers
straightaway establish an equivalence between this ‘partnership’
and the principles of liberalism by declaring that the objective
is to establish an open, multilateral commercial and financial
system! The partnership thus becomes synonymous with submission
to the demands of the imperialist powers.”
Writer Naomi Klein, the author
of the best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of
Disaster Capitalism” also points to the contradictions of Conille’s mentor in a 2007 interview with Oscar Reyes in “Red
Pepper Magazine.”
“A lot of people are under
the impression that Jeffrey Sachs has renounced his past as a
shock therapist and is doing penance now,” Klein explained.
“But if you read [Sachs’ book] ‘The End of Poverty’ more
closely he continues to defend these policies, but simply says
there should be a greater cushion for the people at the bottom.”
In fact, “This is really just a charity model,” Klein
concludes. “Let us be clear that we’re talking here about
noblesse oblige, that’s all.”
So this is what Conille
represents: the liberal wing of the U.S. bourgeoisie as
represented by Sachs and Clinton.
When Dr. Paul Farmer, now
acting as Clinton’s deputy UN Special Envoy, embarked on his new
role in 2009, he had to put together a team. “Jeff Sachs
helped me try to recruit Garry Conille, a Haitian physician
schooled in the ways of the UN, to head the team,” Farmer
writes in his just published book, “Haiti After the
Earthquake.” “But Conille was otherwise occupied, the UN
told us.” At that time, Conille was the UN Development
Program’s Resident Representative in Niger. But then, two months
ago, he became Clinton’s chief of staff with the title “Resident
Coordinator of the UN System in Haiti.”
As Samir Amin points out in his MDG analysis: “The
United States and its European and Japanese allies are now able
to exert hegemony over a domesticated UN.”
It appears likely that they will also be controlling a
thoroughly domesticated Haitian prime minister. |
