mardi 3 novembre 2009

A few notes on the dismissal of Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis

By Michael Deibert

(Read the original article here)

It was said that during the reign of Jean-Jacques Dessalines - liberation icon, military dictator and “emperor” who ruled Haiti from 1804 until 1806 - a certain level of corruption was tolerated and dismissed with the phrase plumez la poule, mais ne la faites pas crier. Pluck the chicken, but make sure it doesn’t squawk. That tradition of corruption has been a woeful constant in Haiti’s political life since Dessalines was assassinated over 200 years ago.

Another chapter in the disregard for honesty and transparency that infuses the marrow of Haiti’s political class was written last week with the ouster of Haitian Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis by a parliament dominated by the allies of Haitian President René Préval, who appointed Pierre-Louis to the position a little over one year ago.

Since she assumed office in September 2008, Pierre-Louis was probably more responsible than any other single individual in beginning to restore some level of confidence in Haiti’s government and in encouraging the stirrings of international investment in a nation of industrious but desperately poor people all-too-often written off as an economic basket case. During her tenure, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the the Inter-American Development Bank collectively canceled $1.2 billion of Haiti’s debt, while the latter institution approved an additional $120 million in grants to aid Haiti to improve such sectors as infrastructure, basic services and disaster prevention.

Having previously led FOKAL, a civil society group supported by businessman and philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Institute, Pierre-Louis was well-regarded both at home and abroad for her personal incorruptibility, and displayed a surprisingly adroit political touch on the international diplomatic stage.

That being the case, one might then ask why Haiti's senate, dominated by partisans of Préval’s LESPWA political current, chose this moment to oust Pierre-Louis under the almost-laughable rationale that, in her year in office, she had not solved the problems caused by two centuries of what Haitian writer Frédéric Marcelin in 1904 called “civil strife, fratricidal slaughters, social miseries, economic ignorance and idolatrous militarism.”

With the ouster of Pierre-Louis spearheaded by such LESPWA stalwarts as Senators Joseph Lambert and Jean Hector Anacasis, and with René Préval himself remaining publicly silent as the plot to remove his Prime Minister came to its inevitable and absurd conclusion, there appears to be an explanation as simple as it is depressing for removing Pierre-Louis at a moment when Haiti finally appeared to be gaining some international credibility: The Prime Minister was standing in the way of some powerful people making quite a lot of money.

Government insiders speak darkly about millions of dollars in aid money being siphoned off via the Centre National des Equipements, a body established by the Préval government to aid in Haiti’s efforts at reconstruction after a trio of hurricanes killed at least 600 people last year and further devastated the country's already fragile infrastructure. The machinations of the Groupe de Bourdon, a cabal of allegedly corrupt businessmen with firm roots in Haiti’s elite who have the president’s ear, are also mentioned as culprits. Many of the leaders of the drive to oust Pierre-Louis in Haiti’s senate are also individuals around whom allegations of corruption - and worse - have swirled for many years.

Pierre-Louis’ assertion to me when I interviewed her in Haiti this past summer that “chaos is good for a few sectors” and that Haiti's political system would reject anyone who would not allow themselves to be corrupted now appears to have been prophetic [1].

After his return to office in 2006, René Préval succeeded, against all the odds, in bringing relative peace to Haiti after years of bloodshed, something for which he should be lauded in no uncertain terms. However, the weight of corruption, along with a tradition of impunity, is continuing to strangle Haiti under his watch, and the ouster of Michèle Pierre-Louis is a worrying sign for Haitians who have long sought in vain for decent leaders who would build a government responsive to the nation’s poor majority.

The fact that Pierre-Louis’ replacement, Jean Max Bellerive, served in the personal cabinets of both Jean-Marie Chérestal and Yvon Neptune, Prime Ministers during the 2001-2004 tenure of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an era that was marked by both widespread corruption and political violence, is cause for further concern. Bellerive has more than once been described to me with the rather nasty Kreyol phrase se yon ti poul ki mare nan pye tab yo, an allusion to someone who essentially does whatever they are told.

So the forces of disorder have won this latest round in Haiti. No doubt Haiti’s parliamentarians and perhaps even Préval himself are congratulating themselves at their cleverness, with the country’s corrupt bourgeois no doubt equally thrilled to now have a government with a popular base that will more or less allow them to continue unmolested with their nefarious activities.

But, as Haiti’s politicians strut around in expensive suits and travel over decaying roads in SUVs with impressive armed escorts, they seem not to realize that they should take no pride to occupy the position that they occupy with their country in such a state, a fact that remains equally true for many of Haiti’s economic elites.

Since the deployment of an international peacekeeping mission in Haiti in February 2004, almost 50 members of the United Nations mission in the country and thousands of Haitian civilians have lost their lives to political violence, criminal banditry and environmental catastrophes whose severity is directly linked to the inability of the country’s political class to create some semblance of a state to serve its people. This despite the presence of 7 UN missions to Haiti over the last two decades. Haiti’s long-suffering people deserve better than the country successive generations of leaders have bequeathed to them.

In his finest novel, 1955’s Compere General Soleil, Haiti greatest novelist, Jacques Stephen Alexis (who would be slain by agents of dictator François Duvalier in 1961), wrote of the journey of a pair of Haitians home from near-slavery in the neighboring Dominican Republic that “the closer they came to the promised land, the more they felt the net tightening around them.”

The net of corruption has been tightening around Haiti for far too long, and one hopes that those remaining honest people in Haiti’s political and business sectors, and Haiti’s genuine friends abroad, may find the tools to cut free that confining web that has succeeded in almost choking the life of the country that once taught the world so much about freedom.

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti. His blog can be read here.

[1] "The Elites Are Like a Huge Elephant Sitting on Haiti," Michael Deibert interviews Haitian Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis, 3 July 2009, Inter Press Service

A conflict of interests?

Published: October 15, 2009

Foreign Direct Investment

(Read the original article here)

A corruption case in France against three African leaders has thrown into question the economic relationships between developed countries and their former colonies, reports Michael Deibert.

A court case brought against three west African heads of state by an anti-corruption group has sparked debate in Europe on the economic relationships between European governments and their former colonial possessions.

The case was brought in December 2008 by the French branch of anti-corruption group Transparency International. It alleges that president Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of Congo, president Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea and president Omar Bongo Ondimba of Gabon (who died in June 2009) looted public funds to buy luxury homes and cars abroad. Though representatives for the three leaders were unavailable for comment to fDi, they have denied the accusations in their respective local media.

The accusations have set up a tense legal wrangle in France, which claimed both Congo (often referred to as Congo-Brazzaville to distinguish it from the far larger Democratic Republic of Congo) and Gabon as colonies until 1960. Though a French magistrate agreed in May to launch a probe into the leaders’ assets, the Paris prosecutor’s office has appealed in an attempt to have the investigation halted.

“It shows that not all judges in France are willing to abide by governmental or diplomatic interests, and that they are willing to find out how these people were able to buy these assets,” says Jacques Terray, vice-chair of Transparency International France. “We hope that this will be a precedent for other countries.”

A decision regarding attempts by the Paris Public Prosecutor’s office to halt the investigation – arguing that Transparent International does not have the right to file it as the organisation itself was not a victim of wrongdoing – is scheduled to be issued by a board of inquiry on October 29.

Turbulent history

The trio of countries at the heart of the case all tell a similar story of a surfeit of natural resources and stunted political development that has kept most of the region’s citizens politically disenfranchised and economically impoverished to the benefit of a select few.

Gabon’s former president, Mr Bongo – who was Africa’s longest-serving ruler – was educated largely in Congo, at the time called French Equatorial Africa. A political chameleon, Mr Bongo shifted from running an authoritarian one-party state to participating in relatively free, if flawed, elections.

Accusations of government corruption in Gabon’s oil industry, which accounts for more than half of the country’s GDP, have long been rife, and a 1999 US congressional investigation into Citibank revealed its personal accounts held more that $130m of Mr Bongo’s money. A 2007 French investigation of real estate owned by the president and his family turned up holdings in France worth an estimated $190m.

For its part, Congo saw a series of coups and assassinations from independence onward, with the country ruled by the Marxist-Leninist Marien Ngouabi from January 1969 until his murder in March 1977, and current president Mr Nguesso finally seizing power in 1979. In 1992 he lost a democratic election to Pascal Lissouba but by 1997 had returned to the presidency with the support of the Angolan army in a civil war estimated to have claimed at least 10,000 lives. A peace agreement signed by the Nguesso government with various rebel factions in 2003 is still considered to be fragile.

Equatorial Guinea, meanwhile, gained independence from Spain in 1968, at which point Francisco Macías Nguema assumed power. In August 1979, Mr Nguema was ousted and executed by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has ruled the tiny nation ever since, setting about creating a cult of personality to rival anything seen in Africa.

While state radio praises Mr Nguema as being “in permanent contact with the Almighty”, earlier this year gunmen attacked the national presidential palace. A 2004 plot by foreign mercenaries ended in some people, including British nationals, facing jail sentences of more than 30 years.

Though the three nations are all major oil exporters, foreign investment in the region is hardly limited to the oil sector.

The German energy utility Eon and Spain’s Union Fenosa have recently inked agreements to turn Equatorial Guinea’s Bioko island into a centre for gas exports, not only for the country itself but also for neighbouring Nigeria, the seventh largest holder of natural gas reserves in the world.

Because of a facility constructed by Houston’s Marathon Oil in 2007, Equatorial Guinea at present exports nearly 3.7 million tonnes of liquefied natural gas a year. Such substantial foreign investment could be jeopardised if the lawsuit calls into question the legitimacy of trade with Equatorial Guinea.

Diamond industry

In a further diversification of the region’s economic role, in 2007 Congo was readmitted to the Kimberley Process, which aims to stem the flow of conflict diamonds, after having been expelled from the then year-old process in 2004 for falsifying certificates of origin and exporting diamonds from its war-wracked neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo. The case is politically sensitive in France, as well, given the country’s long and tangled history with sub-­Saharan Africa.

During the 1981-95 government of François Mitterrand, France was the main international backer of the ethnic Hutu dictatorship of Juvénal Habyarimana, the Rwandan leader whose assassination in April 1994 served as the opening shot in the genocide that swept through Rwanda that year. Policy towards Africa under Mr Mitterrand’s successor, Jacques Chirac, was also marked by a high degree of French business interests, with only muted calls for economic and political reform.

During a 2007 trip to Senegal, French president Nicolas Sarkozy called for an end to Franco-African diplomacy based on personal relations between leaders and rather for a “partnership between nations equal in their rights and responsibilities”. However, in the five trips Mr Sarkozy has made to Africa in the past three years, his criticism of corruption in regions where French companies have extensive investment has been minimal.

Changing relationships

“In a larger context, this case is in a sense an end of the France-Afrique foreign policy which has gone all the way back to the time of DeGaulle,” says Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, west Africa analyst for the Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm based in New York. “Apart from Guinea, all the countries [in west Africa] more or less agreed to remain within the Francophone zone, and the French government had to protect or have a paternalistic relationship with these people.”

Haiti - Back to life

Published: October 15, 2009

Foreign Direct Investment

(Read the original article here)

The violence, poverty and corruption that has blighted Haiti over the past few years has given way to an air of peace, efficiency and optimism. Michael Deibert reports.

Politically aligned gangs warring across the ramshackle capital of shanty towns and gingerbread houses are a thing of the past in Port-au-Prince, the capital city of Haiti, and visitors cannot help but be struck by the feeling of change in the air.

An airport previously staffed by political cronies, where passengers sweated in boiling halls, is now a model of air-conditioned efficiency. Streets once deserted after sunset now teem with life, with upper-class restaurants in the hillside Petionville district and the kerosene-lit roadside stands of the ti machann (vendors) downtown luring customers late into the evening, something unthinkable only a few years ago.

Peace has been brought to this Caribbean country of 9 million people through the work of president René Préval’s government, and the 9000-member United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, known as MINUSTAH.

Haiti was previously ruled by the erratic priest-turned-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide from 2001 until his ousting in February 2004. This was followed by turmoil under an interim government that ruled until President Préval’s inauguration in May 2006.

From a police force of just 3500 at the start of Minustah’s mandate, Haiti now boasts 9200 police officers, a number projected to grow to 10,000 by the year’s end, and to 14,000 by the end of 2011. Recent mid-term parliamentary elections passed largely peacefully – no small feat in a country where ballots often threatened civil order.

In addition, the World Bank, the Inter­national Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) collectively cancelled $1.2bn of Haiti’s debt in June, erasing almost two-thirds of the country’s outstanding debt in one stroke. The IADB went even further, approving an additional $120m in grants to help Haiti improve its infrastructure, basic services and disaster prevention plans.

“Haiti has a lot of potential,” says Michèle Pierre-Louis, the country’s prime minster and a respected civil society leader before she joined President Préval’s government. “But we have a very fragile civil society, and we’ve never thought of social mobility and prepared for a middle class.”

Positive outlook

Many observers and investors feel a guarded optimism about the country’s political and economic prospects.

“The investment climate in Haiti is far better now than it was during the [interim] period or the days of President Aristide, that can be said without any doubt,” says Lance Durban, a US businessman who first arrived in Haiti in 1979 and now runs Manutech, an electronics manufacturing company employing about 450 people. “You’re close to the US market, you have a lot of people who speak English and you have the lowest wages in the Americas.”

Last year, Haiti boasted modest-though-respectable GDP growth of 2.3%, and at the beginning of 2009, President Préval created the Groupe de Travail sur la Compétitivité, a body designed to increase Haiti’s competitiveness in attracting global businesses.

Beyond the manufacturing sector, new avenues in Haiti’s potential for investors are also opening up. The garment industry, once a lynchpin of Haiti’s economy, could help the country’s economic revival, if given the right incentives and support. In the US, the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act of 2008 (HOPE II) built on a 2007 measure that provided certain Haitian textiles with duty-free status when entering the US. Mining is another area of interest (see In Focus, below).

Tourism targets

Also on Haiti’s business landscape is the OTF Group, a competitiveness consulting firm credited with breathing new life into Rwanda’s tourism, coffee and agro-industry sectors following the genocide in the country in 1994. OTF has found encouraging evidence that Haiti might be ripe for a similar renaissance.

“In terms of the business opportunities, I am amazed by what I think is possible,” says OTF director Rob Henning. “And our role is to facilitate a process by which the Haitians, both the public and private sector, take ownership over industries and try to create a prosperous Haiti where poverty is reduced through wealth creation and the creation of businesses.”

Though Haiti currently ranks 154 out of the 180 countries covered by the World Bank’s Doing Business Index, substantial improvement has been made in cutting down the red tape that once made investing in the country an inexplicable maze for foreign capital.

It generally now takes a maximum of 40 days to incorporate a company in Haiti, as opposed to the 202 days that it took as recently as 2003.

However, the challenges the country faces remain substantial. Weak infrastructure, environmental degradation and deforestation contributed to conditions which saw a trio of hurricanes kill at least 600 people in 2008. After Haiti’s Senate passed a measure in May raising the country’s minimum wage to a rate of about $4.90 a day, a 300% increase from its current level, President Préval balked at signing the measure, fearing that it would jeopardise Haiti’s already fragile employment sector.

In unison

Despite this, however, Haiti’s business class and its poor majority have learned some hard lessons about working together.

In the once-violent Port-au-Prince neighbourhood of Saint Martin, member’s of Haiti’s private sector and local community leaders have been meeting with the support of the Irish charity Concern Worldwide since 2007. A ‘peace and prosperity’ committee in the district boasts three members from Haiti’s private sector and 12 representatives from the community of Saint Martin. A recent general assembly to address community concerns attracted nearly 150 people.

“You can no longer put a business in a community where it is built against the community,” says Ralph Edmond, the president of Farmatrix, which has manufactured pharmaceutical products in the district since 1994, and who is active in the debate. “If we are to live in this country, then we have to live differently than our fathers did before.”


COUNTRY PROFILE

HAITI

Population: 9.03 million
Pop. growth rate: 1.84%
Area: 27,560 sq km
Real GDP growth: 1.3%
GDP per capita: $1300
Current account: -$611m
Largest sector (% of GDP): Agriculture 66%
Labour force: 3.64 million
Unemployment rate: na
Source: CIA World Factbook, 2009

IN FOCUS

MINING INDUSTRY TO STRIKE GOLD?

Eurasian Minerals, a Colorado-based mining company, in association with Newmont Mining Corporation, has initiated exploratory prospecting procedures at several sites in the north of Haiti, where there could be substantial gold and copper deposits.

In the neighbouring Dominican Republic, the Pueblo Viejo gold deposit has proven to be one of the largest in the Western Hemisphere, with proven and probable reserves of 570,000 kilograms of gold, 3.3 million kg of silver and 192 million kg of copper.

“Mining could represent a substantial investment in the country, its economy and its infrastructure,” says Eurasian Minerals CEO David Cole, noting the potential for “very large” gold deposits in Haiti that have never been properly explored.

Challenges to Haiti’s Security Gains

Saturday 10 October 2009

By Michael Deibert

Presented to the Applied Research Center and the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, August 2009

(Read the original article here)

At present, Haiti is passing through a delicate and significant period, one which, while giving hints of hope, also provides ample grounds for caution.

Though there have been significant and laudable improvements in the country’s security situation under the mandate of Haitian President René Préval, inaugurated in May 2006, these gains remain fragile and Haiti’s political situation relatively tenuous, and two stubbornly recurring factors of Haiti’s political life will have to be addressed in order to concretize them.

Though he has been criticized in some quarters for ineffectiveness, I believe that it is hard to overstate the impact the restoration of relative peace around the country since Mr. Préval took office has had on the life or ordinary Haitians. Whereas only a few years ago the authority of the state extended little even in the capital, Port-au-Prince, where entire neighborhoods were held in the sway of various politically-affiliated armed gangs, citizens of the capital, including those in poorer quarters, can now largely go about their business without the ever-present fear of being kidnapped or being caught in an exchange of fire between the gangs, Haitian police and forces of the 9,000 member Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti, known by its acronym MINUSTAH. 
 Haiti’s long-crumbling road system is being gradually rehabilitated, especially in the country’s south, and its ever-erratic electricity situation has also improved somewhat. The appointment of Michèle Pierre-Louis, a respected and independent-minded civil society leader who formerly directed the Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (Knowledge and Freedom Foundation or FOKAL), as Prime Minister in September 2008, should also be viewed as a positive sign in a country where the Prime Minister’s office, technically the head of government according to Haiti’s 1987 constitution, has often meant little more than a rubber stamp for the presidency.

On the economic front, there has also been some good news, with the June announcement by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the the Inter-American Development Bank collectively canceling $1.2 billion of Haiti’s debt, in one broad stroke erasing almost two-thirds of the country’s outstanding debt. The latter institution went even further, approving an additional $120 million in grants to aid Haiti in improving sectors such as infrastructure, basic services and disaster prevention.

Also, in the United States, the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act of 2008 (HOPE II), with strong support in the U.S. congress, built yet further on a 2007 measure that provided certain Haitian textiles with duty-free status when entering the United States, perhaps a boon for Haiti’s long near-moribund textile industry.

The amelioration of Haiti’s security situation is, in my view, due to several factors, not the least of which has been the steady and principled leadership of Mario Andresol at the head of the Police Nationale d’Haiti (PNH), bringing back competence and accountability to an institution that, during the 2001 to 2004 rule of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and to a lesser extent the 2004 to 2006 interim government that ruled Haiti before Mr. Préval’s election, was viewed chiefly as a highly politicized bludgeon used by Haiti’s executive branch against its enemies, real or perceived.

A projected five year UN-supported police reform program is now in its third year of implementation, currently providing Haiti with 9,200 police officers, with that number projected to grow to 10,000 by year’s end. For a police force that numbered only 3,500 at the start of the UN mission (of whom over 1,500 had to be dismissed), the target of 14,000 police officers by the end of 2011 would not seem overly optimistic. This surge in police recruits is a far cry from the situation between September 2004 and June 2005, during which a PNH officer was being murdered every five days in Haiti. On the judicial side of law enforcement, Haiti has recently re-opened its school for magistrates after being shuttered for many years.

However, there are some structural problems to Haiti’s political culture that need to be addressed if the calm that we have seen in Haiti over the least few years is to be anything but cosmetic, and if a longer process of both political and economic development can occur.

By now everyone is no doubt familiar with the litany of woeful statistics that so often get repeated about Haiti in gatherings like this: The fact that over 4 million of Haiti’s nearly 9 million people live on less than US$1 a day, that only the people of Somalia and Afghanistan suffer from higher rates of hunger, that 90 percent of Haiti’s tree cover has been destroyed for charcoal and to make room for farming, resulting in erosion that has destroyed two-thirds of the country’s arable farmland and leaves it vulnerable to torrential floods such as those caused by a trio of hurricanes that killed at least 600 people last year.




As already noted, some steps are being taken at an international level to address Haiti’s economic woes and, though far from adequate, small steps to try and address Haiti’s environmental disaster are being taken by such indigenous groups as Tèt kole ti peyizan Ayisyen and the Mouvman Peyizan Nasyonal Kongre Papay.

Despite this, though, I believe that the two hard grains in Haiti’s political culture that must be addressed, both by the Haitian government and by the international community, if the changes I have outlined are to be anything more than temporary. These grains are those of impunity and corruption, the continuing presence of which have the ability to undermine all of the progress that we have so far seen.

The guilty pleas this past May of two Miami telecommunications executives, Juan Diaz and Antonio Perez. in connection with their roles in a conspiracy to pay and conceal more than $1 million in bribes to former Haitian officials during the Aristide’s government’s tenure is a step in the right direction, but it unfortunately has yet to be see reciprocal prosecutions on the Haitian side for those who accepted the bribes.

Despite the ratification of the UN Convention against corruption by Haiti’s parliament in 2007 and a vigorous speech about the problem of corruption in Haiti by Préval in May of that year, as a Haitian friend of mine recently told me, corruption is a low-risk, high-return initiative in Haiti, one has every chance of becoming very rich, and very little chance of being punished.

Going hand-in-hand with a culture of corruption and impunity, historically in Haiti, armed government loyalists with no formal law enforcement role have essentially became contractors of the state, a phenomenon that held true with the Tontons Macoutes of the 1957-1986 Duvalier family dictatorship, the attaché of the 1991-1994 defacto era and the chimere of Aristide’s 2001-2004 mandate. Under the aegis of the state, such affiliated members, rewarded irregularly through various forms of government largess, were allowed to exist as a competing armed group to the official security forces, and given free reign to commit some sickening crimes, such as the April 1994 killing of Aristide supporters in the northern city of Gonaives and the February 2004 massacre of Aristide opponents and civilians in the central Haitian town of St. Marc, the latter a crime for which no one has as yet been tried.

Though this phenomenon, as far I can tell, is no longer present at the heart of Haiti’s government today as it has been in the past, the aba/a-vie option of mob politics remains an attractive one to many of Haiti’s political and extra-political actors, as we saw with the riots of May 2008 and recent chaotic protests in favour of raising the country’s minimum wage. Legitimate grievances can quickly be manipulated by those seeking instability in Haiti for criminal or political gain.

Though there is a palpable difference now from the years of the second Aristide government and the interim government, when police and security services were objects of fear and distrust in the country and brazen corruption existed at the very pinnacles of power, the Haitian public now needs to feel that the police and judiciary are responsive institutions, not simply commodities that, like so much in Haiti, are for sale to the highest bidder and out of reach of the ordinary citizens.

By my count, there have been 7 UN missions in Haiti over the last 17 years, all of which had been requested by the Haitian government in power at the time. There can be 7 more over the next 17 years, but I believe if these two core issues are not aggressively and substantively addressed, the international community risks only solidifying the already deep and decidedly deserved skepticism that many Haitians have for the political process as it currently exists in the country, as evidenced by recent feeble electoral participation, and the institutions propped up by it, both local and foreign.

The people of Haiti, and by this I mean the poor majority, need to feel that they have some sort of stake in the kind of society that Haiti’s politicians, business elite and the international community are trying to create, because without the reality of a power structure that is responsive to the needs of its citizens and transparent in its governance, the window of opportunity that we are currently provided with will shut rapidly, and those hoping for its closure, and along with that continued drift and anarchy in Haiti’s political system, will once again step into the void, to the detriment of Haiti and its people.

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti. His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot...com.

HAITI:  "We Have Never Had Justice"

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

(Read the original article here)

ST. MARC, Jul 21, 2009 (IPS) - Amazil Jean-Baptiste remembers when they came to kill her son.

"They killed my boy and burned my boy," says Jean-Baptiste, a careworn 49-year-old who lives in a dilapidated structure without running water in this bustling port town 80 kilometres north of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. "And I am still suffering."

It was February 2004, and Haiti was in the midst of a chaotic rebellion against the government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. North of St. Marc, a formerly loyal street gang known as the Cannibal Army had risen up against the president and, joined by former members of the country's disbanded army, proceeded to overrun police barracks and seize control of towns throughout northern Haiti.

On Feb. 7, a lightly-armed anti-Aristide group, the Rassemblement des militants conséquents de Saint-Marc (Ramicos), based in the neighbourhood of La Scierie where Amazil Jean-Baptiste lived, took advantage of the chaos to drive government forces from the town, seizing the local police station, which they then set on fire.

Two days later, the combined forces of the Police Nationale de Haiti (PNH), the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National (USGPN) and a local paramilitary organisation named Bale Wouze ("Clean Sweep") retook much of the city. By Feb. 11, Bale Wouze - headed by a former parliamentary representative of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party named Amanus Mayette- had commenced the battle to retake the La Scierie.

What would follow would raise questions about Haiti's ability to give justice to victims and punish the guilty that persist to this day.

As Amazil Jean-Baptiste returned home, she found her son, Kenol St. Gilles, a 23-year-old carpenter with no political affiliation, groaning with a bullet in each thigh. Taking him to the home of a local pastor for aid, she watched as seven armed men, including three dressed in police uniforms, accused St. Gilles of being a Ramicos militant who had shot at them. He was dragged from the house, beaten unconscious and thrown into a burning cement depot, where he died.

Residents of the town tell of other crimes - the decapitation of unarmed Ramicos member Leroy Joseph, the killing of Ramicos second-in-command Nixon François, the gang rape by Bale Wouze members of a 21-year-old woman in the ruins of the burned-out commissariat - that were allegedly committed during or immediately following the recapture of St. Marc by pro-Aristide forces.

Witnesses recount how several people were slain and tossed into the burning remnants of the Ramicos headquarters, while still others were gunned down by police firing from a helicopter as they tried to flee over a nearby mountain, Morne Calvaire.

"They came here and they massacred people," says resident Marc Ariel Narcisse, 44. "A grenade thrown into my mother's house exploded, and the house caught fire. My cousin, Bob Narcisse, was killed there."

Following those dark days, the victims of the St. Marc killings formed the Association des Victimes du Génocide de la Scierie (AVIGES) to advocate on their behalf. But their struggle has exposed the highly politicised and often unresponsive nature of justice in Haiti, a country struggling to build democratic institutions after decades of dictatorship.

Links between armed pressure groups and the spheres of official power have long been a fact of political life here.

Faustin Soulouque, who crowned himself emperor of Haiti in 1852, was supported by groups of impoverished partisans called zinglins, while the Duvalier family dictatorship that ruled from 1957 until 1986 utilised the Tontons Macoutes, a murderous paramilitary band named after a traditional Haitian boogeyman.

The government of Aristide, who returned to office in 2001 after ruling the country for two periods in the 1990s, allied itself with his own armed partisans, often referred to as chimere after a mythical fire-breathing demon.

Of these latter groups, Bale Wouze had a reputation as one of the fiercest, and, by February 2004, its links with Haiti's National Palace were largely indisputable, especially given the presence in St. Marc of the USGPN, a unit directly responsible for the president's personal security.

On Feb. 9, as St. Marc was retaken by government forces, and as security forces and Bale Wouze members patrolled its streets together, Aristide's prime minister, Yvon Neptune, also serving as the head of the Conseil Superieur de la Police Nationale d'Haiti, flew into the city, giving a press conference during which he stated that "the national police force alone cannot re-establish order".

Witnesses in La Scierie describe how one of Bale Wouze's leading members, a government employee named Ronald Dauphin, known to residents as "Black Ronald", patrolled St. Marc in a police uniform, even though he was in no way affiliated with the police.

When the author of this article visited St. Marc in February 2004, shortly after Bale Wouze's raid into La Scierie, he interviewed USGPN personnel and Bale Wouze members patrolling the city as a single armed unit in tandem the PNH. A local priest told IPS matter-of-factly at the time of Bale Wouze that, "These people don't make arrests, they kill."

Interviewed by the Miami Herald in St. Marc in February 2004, Amanus Mayette was surrounded by Bale Wouze members and proclaimed his affiliation with the organisation.

"Amanus Mayette, Black Ronald, Somoza, these people killed my son," Amazil Jean-Baptiste explains in a trembling voice, listing the names of some of those who she says took part in her son's slaying.

Following Aristide's overthrow later that month, several members of Bale Wouze were lynched as they tried to flee St. Marc, while Yvon Neptune turned himself over to the interim government that ruled Haiti from March 2004 until the inauguration of President René Préval in May 2006.

Held in prison without trial until his May 2006 release on humanitarian grounds, a May 2008 decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Haitian state had violated 11 separate provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights in its detention of Neptune, though stressing that it was "not a criminal court in which the criminal responsibility of an individual can be examined".

After being jailed for three years without trial, former Bale Wouze leader Amanus Mayette was freed from prison in April 2007. Arrested in 2004, Ronald Dauphin subsequently escaped from jail, and was re-arrested during the course of an anti-kidnapping raid in Haiti's capital in July 2006. Despite several chaotic public hearings, to date, none of the accused for the killings in La Scierie has ever gone to trial.

"In our system, the criminal becomes a victim because the system doesn't work," laments Pierre Espérance, director of the Réseau National de Défense des Droits Humains (RNDDH), which has pushed for criminal prosecutions in the La Scierie case.

Espérance himself survived a 1999 assassination attempt for which no one was ever prosecuted.

"But historically, the authorities here are so involved in corruption and human rights violations they feel very comfortable with impunity," he says.

According to RNDDH figures, nearly 81 percent of Haiti's prisoners are waiting for their cases to be heard before a judge, a situation that some hope may be improved by the re-opening of Haiti's school for magistrates, which recently renewed activities after being shuttered for many years.

Frustratingly for the people of St. Marc, however, the events of February 2004 have become a political football among Haiti's various political actors.

The United Nations independent expert on human rights in Haiti, Louis Joinet, in a 2005 statement dismissed allegations of a massacre and described what occurred as "a clash", a characterisation that seemed unaware of the fact that not all among those victimised had any affiliation with Haiti's political opposition.

Conversely, a member of a Human Rights Watch delegation that visited St. Marc a month after the killings concluded that at least 27 people had been murdered by pro-government forces between Feb. 11 and Aristide's flight into exile.

Their claims are treated with shrugging indifference by the Préval government and the United Nations, and the people of La Scierie appear to be resigned that their struggle for justice will be a long, though hopefully not fruitless, one.

"We need justice, we demand justice, because we have never had justice," says Amazil Jean-Baptiste, as another member of AVIGES stands nearby, wearing a t-shirt reading 'We won't forget 11 February 2004' in Haiti's native Kreyol language.

"I just want justice for my son," she says.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Tentative calm brings optimism to a 'failed' Haiti

Michael Deibert

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

(Read the original article here)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti | The dark afternoon clouds that gradually roll over Haiti's capital herald the beginning of the rainy season, but the early-morning bursts of sunshine might more accurately capture the national mood these days.

While the country remains desperately poor, it is more peaceful than it has been in years - no small feat in a place with a volatile political history. Some of the credit goes to the United Nations and President Rene Preval.

A few years ago, the authority of the state did not extend much beyond Port-au-Prince, where armed gangs controlled neighborhoods. Since the inauguration of Mr. Preval in May 2006, however, a fragile calm has prevailed.

The capital's boisterous population again feels safe enough to patronize downtown bars and kerosine-lit roadside stands late into the evening. Billboards that once extolled the infallibility of a succession of "maximum leaders" now carry messages about the importance of respect between the population and the police as well as decry discrimination against the disabled.

Ruled by priest-turned-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide twice in the 1990s and from 2001 until his ouster in February 2004, Haiti saw violent urban warfare between heavily armed Aristide partisans and security forces, who inflicted collective punishment under an interim government in power from 2004 until Mr. Preval's inauguration.

Working with a 9,000-member U.N. peacekeeping mission, known by the acronym MINUSTAH, Haiti's government has made great strides in recent months in professionalizing security forces that were historically brutal and corrupt.

"The capacity of the police has improved quite significantly ... and the image of the police has begun to change within the society," says Hedi Annabi, a Tunisian diplomat who heads MINUSTAH.

"The level of respect for basic freedoms, such as freedom of the press, is at a historically remarkable level," he said.

In addition, according to MINUSTAH, the number of kidnappings has fallen dramatically, from more than 500 in 2006 to about 50 during the first six months of this year.

A projected five-year U.N.-supported police-reform program is in its third year of implementation, providing Haiti with 9,200 police officers - a number projected to grow to 10,000 by the end of this year and to 14,000 by the end of 2011.

The force began with only 3,500, of whom more than 1,500 had to be dismissed for poor conduct.

The surge in police recruits is a far cry from the situation that existed between September 2004 and June 2005, during which a police officer was killed every five days, according to U.N. statistics.

Some observers here credit the leadership of Michele Duvivier Pierre-Louis, a respected civil society activist, who was appointed prime minister in September 2008.

Ms. Pierre-Louis lauds the U.N. mission, which is heavily Latin American, for helping to stabilize the country.

"It's a new paradigm for regional cooperation," she told The Washington Times. "They have their own interests, of course, but let's make the best of the opportunities that are offered to us."

In a country where voting has sometimes boded ill for civil order, midterm elections in April, with a runoff in June, for Haiti's Senate were poorly attended but largely peaceful, with poll workers and observers directing voters and tabulating votes in a professional fashion. The desultory participation, however, led Mr. Preval to warn that Haiti's "political class should wonder about this abstention" as he cast his own ballot at a Port-au-Prince school.

Haiti still faces massive challenges. Largely deforested, the country was battered by Hurricanes Hanna and Ike in 2008, which collectively killed at least 600 people.

Beyond the capital, after the shabby-chic resorts on the Cote des Arcadins, Haiti's Route Nationale 1 is a pot-holed, crumbling wreck long before it reaches the northern cities of Gonaives and Cap-Haitien.

Poverty and the scramble to find basic necessities remain a constant fact of life for the majority of the 8.5 million population. The social peace that has been restored is fragile and could easily fray if tangible gains are not seen in the day-to-day lives of Haitians.

One exception to the national calm are noisy and occasionally violent demonstrations by university students and other political pressure groups in the capital.

Haiti's Senate voted in May to support a law raising the minimum wage to about $4.90 per day, a 300 percent increase. Mr. Preval has not signed the measure, citing his fear that it would jeopardize Haiti's already fragile employment sector. In response, students have held regular protests, during which dozens of cars have been burned and protesters have squared off against U.N. troops and Haitian security forces. Two demonstrators have been killed.

"They chose not to listen to us, and we were obligated to peacefully mobilize about our concerns and the question about the minimum salary," said Beneche Martial, a student at the state university's medical school.

Nevertheless, there is a tenuous hopefulness here for the first time in many years.

In June, the Inter-American Development Bank approved $120 million in grants for 2010 to help Haiti improve infrastructure, basic services and disaster prevention.

Also last month, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank collectively canceled $1.2 billion owed to them by Haiti, erasing almost two-thirds of the country's outstanding debt.

The scourge of HIV/AIDS is also diminishing, with the rate of infection among pregnant women halved from 6.2 percent in 1993 to 3.1 percent, according to the U.N.

A U.N. report in December suggested that revived garment production might point the way for economic revival, saying that "it is striking how modest are the impediments to competitiveness, relative to the huge opportunities offered by the fundamentals" in the country.

For a nation viewed as a potential "failed state" not long ago, such news cannot help but be encouraging.

HAITI:  Deportees from U.S. Face Culture Shock, Retain Hope

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

http://www.ipsnews.net/news...asp?idnews=47589

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jul 8, 2009 (IPS) - In the shadow of the Eglise Sainte Claire in the Petite Place Cazeau neighbourhood of Haiti’s bustling capital, Frantz Saintil is visiting his daughter and reflecting on the more than two decades he spent abroad before finding himself back in his native country of Haiti seven years ago.

"It didn’t take me long to become very Americanised," says Saintil, 34, who left Haiti for Canada and eventually the United States with his family when he was six years old.

"I like baseball and apple pie and everything American. I didn’t want to be identified as Haitian and discriminated against. I didn’t understand their way of dress, their musical preferences. I was more into rock, some R&B, country music. I didn’t identify with them at all."

Saintil is one of 3,250 Haitians that Department of Homeland Security figures show were deported from the United States back to Haiti on the basis of criminal convictions between 1997 and 2005. A soft-spoken man who was a permanent legal resident when a nolo contendere ("no contest") plea to an assault charge in Colorado landed him in prison at 19, after serving his sentence Saintil was subsequently deported to Haiti, a country he barely knew.

"When you don’t identify yourself as an immigrant or a foreigner, it’s when you get in trouble that all these things come to fruition," says Saintil of his experience with the U.S. justice system, speaking a measured, American-accented English in contrast to the boisterous Kreyol being shouted at a nearby football match.

"When you realise that you’re detained to be deported, then you start to identify (as Haitian), at that point you can’t deny it," he said.

Saintil is not alone. A recent study by the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) found, upon analysing deportation data from Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, that almost 30,000 criminal offenders had been deported to those countries between 1990 and 2005.

Even more strikingly, according to migration data in El Salvador, between 2006 and 2008 some 14,608 deportees with criminal records were sent back from the U.S. to the Central American country of 7 million, home to such transnational criminal syndicates as the Mara Salvatrucha and a nation with one of the world’s highest homicide rates.

It is thus a delicate issue, with deportees who have left their birth countries at very young ages - and having become culturally and linguistically American - being digested through the U.S. prison system and then spit out to their familial homelands only to confront a wall of mutual misunderstanding.

According to figures supplied by the Centre Oecuménique des Droits de l'Homme (the Ecumenical Centre for Human Rights or CEDH), a Haitian human rights group, the average age of deportees when they left Haiti was between four and seven years old.

Having become assimilated in the United States, deportees suffered severe culture shock when returning to Haiti, where a lifestyle unfamiliar to most is expressed in a language that only a few had been able to master with any degree of proficiency while abroad.

"What we request from the authorities of Canada and the U.S. is to take into account the family factor when considering the nature of the delinquency which leads to the decision of deportation," says CEDH’s director, Jean-Claude Bajeux. "And it is essential that the governments involved in a policy of returning people to Haiti make an evaluation of the precarious situation in this country."

Add to the mix Haiti's dire economic condition - with 80 percent of the population living under the poverty line and GDP per capita of just 1,300 dollars per year - and periodic political unrest that sees politicians only too willing to use pools of jobless young men as muscle in the country’s political wars, one quickly sees how the deportees, or dp’s, as they call themselves, marked with the stigma of forced exit from a country that many Haitians regard as the promised land, have a tough row to hoe once they step off the plane in Port-au-Prince.

In December 2006, for example, with no hard evidence supporting his claim, then-Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis blamed deportees from the U.S. for helping to spur the country's at-the-time spiraling kidnapping rates. The fearsome reputation of such gangs as Florida’s Zoe Pound, a Haitian-identified clique that specialises in robbing drug dealers of their product and money, often with extreme violence, only adds to the trepidation with which local Haitians view the deportees.

It is a reputation that some among their number feel is undeserved.

"If there was a way to integrate us into society, it wouldn’t be such a hardship on us," says Junior Telusca, who moved with his family to Florida at age three and was returned to Haiti after doing two years in prison on a drug conviction. "There’s only one thing I want, and that’s to integrate into this society, to get a job, pay for my child’s school and live my life."

Deportees often mix a certain wistfulness for the land they have been exiled from with a stated desire to try and gain some sort of advantage, both spiritual and material, from their particular status. In recent years, local organisations such as the Fondation haïtienne des familles des rapatriés have attempted to build some sort of solidarity among the newly-returned.

In tandem with Haiti's Ministry of Social Affairs and Ministry of Interior, the International Organisation for Migration has recently developed a program focusing on deportee reintegration into Haitian society that focuses on such aspects as micro-enterprise support and language training.

But for many, it has been anything but an easy lesson.

"Life in the States is great, in all senses of the word," says Frantz Saintil. "But if you get a second chance to be free, then you’ve got to make the best of it. If I can affect the life of even one person, even it is by teaching them English, to me that is a big step. There is no telling what that person might become."

"And I am hopeful that one day I will get to see the United States again," he added.

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press).

Manufactured diversity

Published: June 12, 2009

Foreign Direct Investment

The economies of north Africa’s Maghreb region – Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia – are branching out into manufacturing as the demand for hydrocarbon exports continues to decline, writes Michael Deibert.

A ribbon of countries along Africa’s northern expanse have begun to make their mark on the world’s manufacturing landscape. It is a development occurring at the same time that the export value of the region’s hydrocarbon exports has taken a dip.

Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia – often collectively referred to as the Maghreb (meaning ‘place of sunset’) – along with Libya have a combined population of 84 million people. They have all proved adept at attracting a combination of transportation and electronics manufacturers, a development that could significantly diversify the region’s economy and opportunities for foreign investment.

Read the full article here.

Q&A: "The Elites Are Like a Huge Elephant Sitting on Haiti"

Michael Deibert interviews Haitian Prime Minister MICHÈLE PIERRE-LOUIS

Inter Press Service

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jul 3, 2009 (IPS) - Haitian Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis assumed office in September 2008. Born in the southern city of Jérémie in 1947, she left Haiti with her family in 1964 following a pogrom by dictator François Duvalier against his perceived enemies in her town.

Studying in the United States and France before returning to Haiti in 1977, she has been a close confidante of Haitian President René Préval for over 40 years. After having worked in a variety of private and public sector jobs in Haiti, she and Préval opened a bakery which catered to the poor in Haiti’s capital in 1982.

Active in the first government of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Pierre-Louis was among the first to denounce the 1991 military coup against Aristide during an interview with Radio France Internationale.

After Aristide’s return by a U.S.-led multinational force in 1994, Pierre-Louis opened the Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (Knowledge and Freedom Foundation or FOKAL) in 1995 with support from businessman and philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

An organisation conceived to support sectors in Haitian society most likely to bring about social change, FOKAL has been responsible for the creation of a network of over 50 community libraries throughout Haiti, a cultural centre and library for economically disadvantaged children and youths in Haiti’s capital, a debate programme for young people, and an initiative to supply running water to the nearly 80 percent of Haitians who don’t have regular access to it.

Since her installation as Prime Minister, Pierre-Louis has presided over a stabilising of the security situation in this often politically unstable country, weathered the fallout and relief efforts after a trio of hurricanes killed at least 600 people last year and traveled both within Haiti and internationally to plead her government’s case.

IPS contributor Michael Deibert sat down with Prime Minster Pierre-Louis in Port-au-Prince on Jun. 21 to hear her thoughts about where the country is heading.

Read the full interview here.