The Great Experiment: A Recipe for Failure

Without a doubt the road to recovering Haiti’s sovereignty and dignity will not be an easy one under the Great Experiment which is essentially structured to protecting the interests of the local elite and the multinational corporations operating in the country. As detailed in the Wikileaks cables recently published by the NY-based Haitian weekly Haiti Liberté, those interests supersede any consideration for the welfare of the Haitian people and constitute a crime against humanity, the very precept that serves as basis for the UN Security Council’s interventionist policy in the internal affairs of sovereign states. It also explains the IMF-imposed directives whose primary purpose is to institutionalize that genocidal policy on behalf of these two groups. When fully implemented, a possibility under the present government, it would open Haiti to the kind of blackmails enumerated in the cables and condemn the Haitian people to an unending cycle of poverty, instability and penuries.
What is the Great Experiment? It is a policy conceived in the dark rooms of the IMF and World Bank centering on a comprehensive integration of the Haitian economy into the global economic system (read neo-liberalism). One of the Caribbean region’s most populous countries, Haiti, a nation of 10.5 million of souls, theoretically offers great opportunities to many multinational corporations seeking to monopolize markets share in an increasingly competitive world. The policy however is inherently flawed, because Haiti is actually the poorest country in the western hemisphere with 80% of its population either unemployed or underemployed. It defies the most basic of economic principles (you can only sell goods to people with money). This fact notwithstanding, the country is beset with a host of intractable problems ranging from structural deficiencies (political and administrative) to overpopulation and the erosion of its fertile soil that could ultimately turn parts of it into desert. The Great Experiment is therefore a containment policy rather than a concrete development plan since it is not expected to produce the kind of results that would lift the country out of the abyss it founds itself in after 207 years of existence.
Once referred as “The Pearl of the Antilles”, Haiti simply does not deserve its present-day condition, which is the cumulative effect of two centuries of concerted actions by the western powers seeking to nullify its impressive victory over slavery in 1803. Aptly the invasion and occupation of Haiti in 2004, the year of its bicentennial, was not only a premeditated act but also a crowning achievement of that policy. With images of Haiti’s extreme poverty, compounded by the January 12th, 2010 earthquake, beaming in most of the world’s living rooms, Haitians are now reluctant to refer to that glorious past in the hope of not having to answer this relevant question: What happened? No matter how one eloquently and methodically articulates the reasons behind Haiti’s incredible story, which naturally highlights the western powers’ punishing attitude toward the proud little country, the interlocutor always leaves with the impression that Haitians are ultimately responsible.
Naturally, this misconception or pre-conceived notion about Haiti and its people has endured through two centuries as the international community has become proficient at blurring the line of ultimate guilt, which could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt the duplicitous nature of its policy. Through the balkanization of Haitian society (marginal groups competing against each other), the international community is institutionalizing a pyramidal system on top of which sits the light-skinned elite and the multinationals. As you would expect, a fragmented and powerless Parliament upon which the Executive Branch and the foreign-dominated Haiti Interim Reconstruction Commission (HIRC) can easily impose their distorted agenda becomes the central pillar of that policy. Its forceful interference in the last presidential and legislative elections was never about alleged or proven electoral fraud but an all out effort at influencing the outcome. Determined not to allow a one-party (INITE) total domination of Parliament, which would have thrown a monkey wrench in the process, the international community, as its forceful interference in the election process has proven, adopted an “Either you are with us or against us” attitude.
The across-the-board revocation of US visas of many members of the Electoral Provisional Council (CEP) and a number of the officials of the former government, René Préval and wife included, epitomizes that attitude. Even the former president’s daughters and his wife’s sons were not spared; a tactic that is likely to win over a number of recalcitrant politicians and pave the way for a smooth execution of the Great Experiment. With the MINUSTAH as enforcer and a government ideologically prepared to implement the perverted design of the international community, the doomsday clock is ticking. No less than a coordinated resistance of all concerned Haitians can stop Haiti’s inexorable march toward oblivion seeing that the multitude of competing political lords, a derivative of Democracy, the Trojan Horse of the international community, cannot be counted on to stem the tide.
Questioning the wisdom of the international community’s effort in Haiti should not be equated with “blind nationalism”, as the uninformed public is instructed to believe, because the facts speak for themselves. Commandeering a Medical School and expulsing its faculty and students manu militari for the purpose of garrisoning a detachment of the occupation force could not conceivably be altruism. As much as Haitians wholeheartedly honor their friends, they also remember their enemies. Bat chen-an, tan’n met-li.
ddjougan@gmail.com