The Haitian Creole State and the challenges of the reconstruction
This is a three short papers serial written in order (a) to make the autopsy of the Haitian Creole State and (b) to synthesis the role of the said Creole State in the failure of the international community’s investments and the abortion of a nation state in the island. The first paper deals with the Haitian Creole State’s ontology, social foundations, structural brutality and chronic instability.
The second focuses on the confiscation of the power, the knowledge and the wealth by the Haitian Creole minority. The third analyses the hurried Creolization of the ONGs’ and UN’s jet-set stationed in Haiti while bossale Bantustans are flourishing around the island’s metropolitan area. Some proposals are formulated both in term of leadership than in term of governance structures reengineering in order to succeed the reconstruction process and change the Haiti’s historical morbid path.
PART ONE OF THREE
The Haitian Creole State: The secret resilience of an unknown and bicentennial segregationist regime
The apocalyptic damages caused by the recent terrific earthquake that broke Haiti have been decoupled by the Haitian Creole State’s own tsunami. In fact, between the international spontaneous solidarity and the emergency organization on the ground, the Haitian State’s chaos fuelled the death engines of the earthquake.
The collapse of this state in the facing of the world in less than one minute culminates two hundred years of political brigandage, earthquake and instability. Few people know that the Haitian Creole State is both the guardian and the custodian of a bicentennial apartheid regime in Haiti. It is equally the wrecker of the Haitian nation, instituting itself as the permanent earthquake for the country’s bossale majority and the exclusive property of its Creole Minority.
In this paper, it is therefore suggested to euthanize what remains of the Creole State and to initiate a double (re) construction process in Haiti. First, a true nation state building process, and then the reconstruction of country’s physical assets. Any (re) construction plan of Haiti, which would exclude such a hypothesis, will inevitably lead to the continuation of past mistakes.
This prediction comes from the nature and the dynamics of the Haitian Creole State.
Briefly, the inception of the Creole State backed after the declaration of the haitian independence from the French empire in 1804. This type of state is somehow the weapon of mass destruction for the Haitian society, mostly, for the Haitian Bossale majority. The latter has been living for the last two centuries under the ongoing state of exception through a predatory policy and an ongoing necropolitics. Antithesis of the Nation State, the Creole State, which is not unique to Haiti, is there one of the most morbid prototypes because of its bicentennial resilience.
It follows that the Haitian Creole State is to some extent and to a lesser degree, the equivalent of the Pieter Botha’s South African segregationist State. Moreover, the Haitian Bossale majority ‘s life leaving condition is not much better than the South African black majority’s under the apartheid regime, if not ten times worse than the Quebec francophone majority’s before the Quiet Revolution in the sixties.
Summing up, the Haitian Creole State is the main obstacle to the emergence of a true Haitian Nation State because of its historical alliance with a nomad and as well as predatory than incompetent elite.
The Haitian Creole State: Both guardian and custodian of a predatory social order
The Creole distinguishes himself by his visceral contempt of the two main markers of the Bossales’ identity: the Haitian Voodoo and the Haitian Creole language. Moreover, the Creole has a tendency to abdicate its africanity. He has never subscribed to the principle of legal equality and that, by virtue of its supremacist ideology. Most foreigners ignore that Haiti is not a homogeneous black society at least in the mind of its rich and well endowed Creole minority (around 5% of the population).The remain 95% of the Haitian population are compounded by the Bossales.
The latter are African-African descendants while the former are African-White progeny (Mulatto), which, associated with the Bossale elite, monopolizes the Haitian State as their own. This Creole elite has been exploiting the country’s Bossale majority for the last two centuries, keeping them almost in a quasi slavery state with an average of two dollars a day as survival mean.
In fact, the multilateral help and financial assistance, for what is transferred to Haiti, have always been more profitable for the Creole elite than they are for the Bossale Majority. This spoliation transforms Haiti in a prison from where the Bossales want and try to evade by any mean and at the price of their life.
The mission assumed by the Haitian Creole State? It is essentially one of perpetuating the status quo. It is in that quality we describe the Haitian Creole State as the antithesis of the Nation State. One of the rare attempts made to break this State to date was under the American occupation and that, beyond its proved violence. Such violence was lower than the brutal one orchestrated by the Creole minority against the bossale majority along firs.
The Marines educated under the Jim Crow’s racist laws were outraged by the Haitian Creole State’s structural violence against the Haitian Bossales. Such violence has had mixed fortunes throughout the twentieth century but remains an historical invariant of the Haitian Creole State. Alongside the” Black Haitian Tuesday’’, there is the bicentennial apartheid of that Haitian Creole state.
(PART TWO OF THREE)
Haitian Creole State: The confiscation of the knowledge, the wealth and the power by the Haitian Creole elite
The Haitian Creole distinguishes himself by his visceral contempt of the two main markers of the Bossales’ identity: Voodoo and Haitian Creole language.
Moreover, the Creole has a tendency to abdicate his African progeny, even pretending to be a Bossalophobe or a Creole Afrikaner. He never adhered to the principle ‘’a voice’’ a ‘’vote,” without which democracy would be an illusion. He has also never subscribed to the principle of legal equality and that, by virtue of its supremacist ideology. The Bossales, on their side, manipulated, ignore the democratic principle according to which his voice and vote are equal to the Creole’s, still less are they equipped to claim their equal rights, having internalized their bicentenary disadvantaged status.
Resigned, they rely on religions, including Voodoo, NGOs, the Haitian Diaspora, the international community. Meanwhile, continued for two hundred years the shameless looting of an elite perched on the hills of Petion Ville, ”the Haitian Pretoria’’.
On the side of the Haitian Creole elite: a lack of civism, civility, good faith, but also and above all patriotism and vision. On the Bossales’ side, prevail ignorance, poverty, deprivation, illiteracy, resignation and exile. Between these two polarities, the Haitian Creole State, phagocyted by a predatory and myopic elite, equally obsessed with the presidential chair and incompetent.
The said elite, including its political component, suffers from an extreme paranoia that makes its members the gravediggers of the Nation State in Haiti.
These were the three forces in the aftermath of Haiti’s independence in 1804: The minority formed by the Creole scholars facing the majority of the illiterate Bossale and between the two, the new fragile emerging Creole state.
Then the latter is a new type of state because essentially reduced to an insurgent group whose revolutionary epic forced Napoleon’s expeditionary army to surrender and this, before the Waterloo humiliation. From the Insurgents of the Independence War, was born an army of brutes headed by the Creole elite.
Thus such an army and the Creole minority have historically regarded themselves as the nation state, keeping the bossale majority under an ongoing cemetery siege. Abortion of the Haitian nation state remains programmed into this paranoid projection of Creoles and Creole army’s officers before their merger in what we call here the Haitian Creole State; a state based on a triple exclusion principle: First and primarily, skin pigmentation, then knowledge and finally wealth. Following the independence, the Creole had both the epidermal advantage and knowledge.
Dessalines himself, the father of the Haitian independence, was an illustrious and illiterate Bossale. The rules of the game are thus at the outset, defined by the Creole according to the Creole’s criterion, the Creole was well equipped to grab later, wealth (equity) of this Pearl of the Antilles that was once Haiti.
This is what actually happened and that what remains in 2010 the Haitian reality. The Haitian Creole State is both the guardian and the custodian of such segregationist order. One has only to compare the Bossales’ inhuman living conditions with the Dominican Republic citizens’ to acquire a fair idea of what the Creole State has done for the bossale majority two centuries after the Haitian independence from French empire.
The Creole State has replaced the French slavery colony by its Creole own with its iron law 80/10 and 20/90. That means 80 % of the national wealth to the 10% formed by the Creole elite. The remaining 20% to the 80% represented by the Bossales. What is intriguing is the hurried acculturation of the transnational UN bureaucratic and NGO jet-set stationed in Haiti and its merging with the Creole elite.
PART THREE OF THREE
From the rapid creolization of the UN bureaucratic and NGOs Jet-set to the proliferation of Bossale ”Bantustans in the metropolitan area’’: Voluntary Ignorance or willful blindness?
Furthermore, what strikes the imagination and intrigues the Observer is the conscious or unconscious but accelerated creolization of the UN and NGO transnational bureaucratic jet-set affected in Haiti. The complexity of the Haitian Creole State seems to elude the understanding of this new technocratic transnational nobility stationed into the island.
The repeated failure of various initiatives sponsored and funded by the international community in Haiti may be partially the result of the acculturation of this transnational technocratic nobility by the Haitian Creole State or the latter’s paradigmatic blindness.
What most of Haitian intellectuals dare very rarely if never, denounce it, that Haiti remains an apartheid society with its Creole Pretoria (Petion Ville and surrounding uptown), its bossale Bantustans (About forty around the capital as ‘’Cite Soleil, Carrefour-Feuilles”) and its SOWETOs (Delmas, Carrefour, Martissant, Gressier, Belair).
About the above epidermal and economic, as well as social than cultural ostracism, most of our intellectuals and mass medias keep a suspected but silent complicity. Moreover, Haitian society is essentially a neo-colonial society and this, both in its structures and in its functioning.
On the one side, the Creole minority , consisting of a nomadic Arab-European bourgeoisie, doing business on the coast and live on the heights of Port-au-Prince, barricaded, walled and protected by barbed wire, security guards and German shepherds trained to kill.
They must have many crimes on their conscience or be paranoid to turn so their family residence in maximum private security prison.
On the other side and face to this hyper protected Creole elite, we found the bossale majority whose members, eternal candidates for external exodus, are ostracized and containerized in ghettos and Haitian Bantustans.
The Bossales are true Homini Saci, famine, death and fate Olympians in any case, survivors of all kinds of calamities. The fracture between the Creoles and the Bossales is the foundation of the non-living together that is Haiti. The above said racial fracture is the fundamental obstacle to the emergence of a true nation state in Haiti and, conversely, the lifeblood of the Haitian Creole State, a predatory state, parasitized by a Creole elite as well as by defectors from Bossales majority.
Any reconstruction project for Haiti, which is not based primarily on a true nation state building project will be another enterprise doomed to failure, just as most international previous initiatives in this rebel island. Those who now see a huge market to conquer first will advocate the rebuilding of the Haitian physical asset.
Those, however, who see Haiti as it is, i.e. a fractured, unjust and segregationist, now orphan state, will prioritize the nation state building process backed by a new social contract and a new truth regime. By nation state, we mean essentially a nation state founded on common values, inclusion, law supremacy, and national solidarity; a nation where living is good and agreeable as well as for the Creole than for the Bossales.
The process must be kept out of any orthodoxy, demagogy and ideological blindness. It must be instead designed according to an eclectic institutional template. Our fears are that the first vision will triumph over the second. In this case, the failure of the reconstruction of the country is planned and preprogrammed in the process itself.
To the global generosity must be substituted unselfishness, lucidity and objectivity of the diagnosis leading to choice of major societal ends and strategic directions. The Haitian Creole State can’t be the architect of such an undertaking. An agreed formula both internally and externally seems to be the designated route to reverse the Haitian historical path.
For that, a transformational political leadership is an imperative prerequisite, as well as a very strong civic ethics than the new salvation triad, formed by the Haitian Diaspora, the international community and some internal leaders.
Wilson Saintelmy is CEO of USI HOLDINGS CORP. GOVERNANCE EXPERT w.saintelmy@usicorp.net