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by Isabeau Doucet
During the build up to and aftermath
of the 2004 overthrow of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s popular
priest-turned-president, the Haitian and international press
reported two conflicting narratives. Even in the left-wing media
office of ZNet, where Justin Podur was an editor, stories filed
from Haiti just “didn’t add up.”
“One is a story about a leader
becoming a dictator and getting overthrown, leaving a
basket-case country in a basket-case condition. The second is
the story of a popular movement being thwarted in its struggle
for democracy and development and ending with a new dictatorship
imposed upon it,” writes Podur, Associate Professor in
environmental studies at Toronto’s York University, in his new
book, Haiti’s New Dictatorship: The Coup, the Earthquake and
the UN Occupation.
Podur offers a timely and
concise political history of contemporary Haiti and a case study
in “how a multilateral violation of sovereignty is organized and
carried out.” He draws on a wide range of academic,
journalistic, and human rights reports, as well as U.S. embassy
cables released by Wikileaks, to document how Haiti became a
laboratory “experiment in a new kind of imperialism.”
Podur shows the total
subordination and outsourcing of a nation’s sovereignty to a
decentralized, multilateral, unaccountable network of foreign
governments, international financial institutions, aid
organizations, transnational investors, and the United Nations,
all working in concert with local elites to rob Haiti of its
hard-won independence and democracy.
Starting with a brief history of
Haiti's successful slave rebellion and founding as the first
modern black republic in 1804, Podur recounts the 1915-34 U.S.
Marine occupation, the Duvalier dynasty’s dictatorship, and the
rise of the popular democratic movement that toppled Jean-Claude
“Baby Doc” Duvalier, eventually sweeping Aristide to power. But
the book centers mainly on the 2004 coup d’état and its
aftermath through to the 2010 earthquake, cholera epidemic, and
illegitimate, deeply flawed elections that brought the current
government of President Michel Martelly to power.
Podur's book emerges from
several years of collecting files on Haiti and wanting to build
on Peter Hallward’s indispensable Damming the Flood: Haiti,
Aristide and the Politics of Containment (Verso, 2007). For
readers who have closely followed Haiti news post-coup, Podur's
book sometimes may seem wanting in original research, reading
like a compilation of news and reports. But what it lacks in
on-the-ground insight is made up for in spot-on analysis, which
will intrigue people interested in Haiti and the geopolitics of
contemporary imperialism. Moreover, Podur’s critique helps show
how western democracy has been rendered so feckless in a world
where globalization is dismantling public state structures and
protections to better facilitate flows of private transnational
capital. The human and environmental damage inflicted by this
new dictatorship is more evident in Haiti, but the country is
merely an indicative microcosm of what privatization and
deregulation are wreaking everywhere in the capitalist world.
Podur shows that the language of human rights, sustainable
development, and humanitarian aid is used to cloak Haiti’s ever
greater penetration by and subordination to transnational
capital.
“There’s a historical
vindictiveness towards Haiti that has to do with the temerity of
having overthrown colonialism and abolished slavery,” said Podur
in an interview. “Haiti and Aristide represent a symbolic
challenge to the international political and economic order.”
According to him, those who
supported the overthrow of Aristide – namely the tiny clique
that owns and enjoys the majority of Haiti’s property and
privileges, as well as the U.S., Canada, France and their
respective military, diplomatic and media corps, using the “old
trick” of branding the coup victim a human-rights-violating
dictator – should not also get to write the history of what
happened. “Where old dictators muzzled the press, the new
dictatorship outcompetes its opponents in propaganda,” writes
Podur detailing how the media was an integral “part of the coup
infrastructure,” framing international opinion to approve of the
overthrow of Aristide at the time.
“All sorts of thing can go on in
the name of human rights” said Podur. “It’s not a robust enough
concept, and in Haiti it was used as a part of the pre-emptive
war doctrine.”
Documenting how the post-coup
government was quantitatively worse than Aristide’s, Podur
tallies up in meticulous and gruesome detail the body count of
thousands and the human rights aberrations carried out by the
U.S.-backed regime of de facto Prime Minister Gérard
Latortue, whose death squads purged the capital’s poorest
neighborhoods in a campaign to demobilize and neutralize the
popular democratic Lavalas movement that had twice carried
Aristide to power.
The reader sees clearly how the
“responsibility to protect” – or R2P in foreign policy lingo –
provided the excuse for a military intervention in 2004,
replacing a democratically elected president with a quantifiably
worse military regime.
Summary executions,
disappearances, political prisoners, and rigged elections all
took place under the watch of MINUSTAH, the United Nations
“peacekeeping” force brought in to replace the U.S., French and
Canadian troops that first arrived in Haiti after Aristide was
victim of what Podur aptly calls “a geo-political kidnapping.”
MINUSTAH not only provided cover for the post-coup death squads,
knowingly incorporated paramilitary putschists into the police
ranks, and systematically ignored any human rights monitoring,
the blue helmets even opened fire on civilians in Haiti’s
popular neighborhoods, effectively consolidating the coup by
acting as an outsourced military force in a country without an
army of its own.
Haiti’s governing institutions
and civil society were effectively paralyzed, well before the
2010 earthquake reduced them to rubble. The 2004 coup has made
each natural disaster and political crisis another opportunity
for greater external control. This is the central dilemma for
Haiti today and the effectiveness of what Podur calls the “new
dictatorship”: without sovereignty, power eschews all
accountability. Foreign donors, NGOs, shareholders, and
financiers hold power to dictate political and economic policies
that have deadly consequences in Haiti, but “the government is
the only organization against which ordinary citizens can make
rights-based claims.”
The cholera epidemic, now the
worst in the world with a death toll around 7,600 since Nepalese
UN troops inadvertently introduced it into Haiti in October
2010, is a case in point: despite half a dozen studies,
including the UN’s, pointing directly to the UN latrines as the
source and cause of the epidemic, the UN has refused to take any
responsibility, let alone apologize for its gross negligence.
“One of the concepts I don’t
think the pro-coup forces in Haiti can co-opt is the concept of
sovereignty,” said Podur. “While it’s great that the world wants
to protect women and human rights, the strengthening of Haitian
sovereignty should be the centerpiece of any intervention.”
Hence, The New Dictatorship
is an important addition to the many books on Haiti coming
out around the earthquake’s third anniversary. Podur clearly
exposes the atrophying effect big foreign NGOs have had on the
Haitian state’s ability to function. Despite the generous and
genuine international outpouring of solidarity after the quake,
Podur reveals the utter lack of accountability that the new
dictatorship’s myriad of institutions, both large and small,
have toward their supposed beneficiaries.
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