Consider This from NPR - Haiti In Turmoil

Episode Date: February 11, 2023

Haiti, a country long besieged by political turmoil, was plunged further into chaos in 2021 when then president Jovenel Moïse was assassinated. Today, gangs run large swaths of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. Schools and businesses have shuttered, food, water and gas shortages have spiraled, and Haitians desperate to leave the country have overrun immigration offices hoping for a passport.Prime Minister Ariel Henry has been the de facto ruler since Moïse's assassination. There have not been official elections in the country since 2016. In January, its ten remaining senators left office, leaving no single regularly elected official. Henry, whose rule is heavily criticized by many Haitians, says there cannot be new elections until the country is made safer.Amidst the chaos, calls have risen for the US to help stabilize the country, but a fraught history of US intervention in Haiti has created a climate of mistrust.Host Michel Martin talks to Pamala White, former ambassador to Haiti, about what options are available to Haiti to quell the country's unrest. And Marlene Daut, a professor at Yale of French and African-American studies, unpacks the history of US intervention in Haiti.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The island nation of Haiti is moving closer to the brink of collapse. Poverty, unemployment, crime, political chaos, and the cholera outbreak cast a shadow over the whole country. Haitians are dealing with shortages of food, fuel, and water, and the government there is pleading for military assistance from the West. This is just some of the frightening news coming out of Haiti in recent weeks, much of it at the hands of gangs who are wreaking havoc, kidnapping with impunity, staging blockades at will, waging gun battles with police in broad daylight. The violence has caused schools and businesses to close, creating shortages of food, water, and gas. Haitians are pouring into immigration offices hoping for a passport, desperate to leave the country. The U.N. has the estimate of 60 percent of the cities controlled by gangs. If you ask Haitians

there, they're going to tell you it's more like 100 percent. Megan Janetsky covers Cuba and the Caribbean for the Associated Press. She says this latest violence can be traced back to the ongoing political instability that Haiti has been unable to overcome since the 2021 killing of President Jovenel Moïse. Janetsky recently spent two weeks in Haiti and what she found was harrowing. You walk in the street and there's just a feeling that anything could happen at any moment, which is just how Haiti is nowadays. You have rampant kidnappings with ransoms up to a million dollars. You have horrifying stories of gang rapes, people getting caught in a crossfire between

gangs and police that are incredibly under-equipped to handle the situation. Haiti has long been besieged by turmoil, but many foreign policy experts fear the country is at a tipping point, with its chances of regaining a functional democratic government and a stable civil society slipping out of reach. And now, you know, with what some people describe as a de facto dictatorship, basically a skeleton government in Haiti, you have these gangs kind of assuming a role of even like a government in a lot of these areas. They're the ones that control the day-to-day lives of most Haitians now.

At the time of his assassination, Moïse was widely unpopular. He was ruling by decree, having failed to hold elections in 2018 and 2019. Amid calls to step down, Moïse appointed Dr. Ariel Henry, a former government minister, to serve as prime minister. Henry became the de facto leader after Moise's murder. While Haiti's constitution mandates that elections be held within 120 days of a presidential vacancy, that period ended more than a year ago. And without elections having been held for years, Senate and legislative seats are now unfilled, leaving Henry as the sole major ruling

official in the country. Henri has said that no new elections can be called until the country is made safer. I think the inaction by the international community has just added to the chaos there. They've allowed the gangs to take over. That's Pamela White. She served as United States ambassador to Haiti from 2012 to 2015. We'll hear more from her later on. She feels the situation is too dire for the U.S. to stand by and do nothing. The Haitian people feel totally abandoned by the international community. They're starving. The humanitarian outcry is huge. The food's not getting to who it needs to get to. The water's not getting to who it needs to get to.

You know, people are being displaced by these gangs. They just go in and take over their house. It's unsafe to go to work. So we need to get in there and save innocent lives. But others fear what U.S. intervention in Haiti might bring. Cécile Axelian was born and spent her childhood in Haiti. She now chairs the Department of African and African American Studies at Kennesaw State University and remains a close observer of Haiti. She says that while Haiti may need outside help to quell the violence and create the stability needed for fair elections, she heavily criticized the U.S.'s past intervention. The U.S. has continuously failed Haiti from the time it occupied Haiti in 1915 until today.

Because the U.S. is often behind what is happening in Haiti. And in fact, there's a joke among many of us, in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora when there's elections. It's like, we don't ask who's going to be the next president. We ask, whom does the U.S. want to be the next president? Consider this. Calls for the United States and its allies to aid Haiti are growing louder as uncontrolled violence and a humanitarian crisis unfold. But there's a long history of foreign intervention in Haiti, interventions that some critics say caused the very problems they were supposed to solve. Can the history of U.S. and Haiti relations show us a better way to help a country on the brink of collapse?

History is not kind to the idea of foreign intervention simply because it's been tried over and over again and hasn't worked. That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin. It's Saturday, February 11th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It is a toxic relationship and it's a very long-term toxic relationship that goes back, you know, decades, centuries actually even.

Marlena Doud is a professor of French and African American studies at Yale. She says the history between Haiti and the U.S. has been fraught since the country's founding as an independent Black-led country where enslaved Haitians revolted against and defeated French colonial rule. So once Haitian independence succeeds with formal independence being struck on January 1st, 1804, the rest of the world reacts in the same way that they reacted to news of the slave revolt and rebellion. How do we keep this from spreading? How do we contain this? How do we punish the people who have put this forward? So one of the ways that the U.S. tries to punish Haiti is by instituting a trade embargo under

President Thomas Jefferson to say, okay, you want to be free, but let's see if we can strangle that independence and freedom, in a sense. And that really is kind of one of the first economic pressures. It was the beginning of a long and rocky relationship between Haiti and the U.S. A doubt says that the first U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915, which lasted nearly 20 years, created the mistrust of foreign intervention that still exists today, and for good reason. The U.S. occupation is when the United States government installs the first kind of puppet presidency. And from that moment forward, they're going to have a hand in either bringing forward a candidate and making sure their preferred candidate wins or making

sure that the people they don't want to win don't win or get overthrown and kicked out of office. Dout says that U.S. influence and interference in Haitian politics can be seen across decades, from the occupation to the backing, supporting and ousting of leaders based on who might best serve U.S. interests in the region. Daud says that history is at the heart of this complex relationship, the friction between Haiti telling the U.S. to butt out on the one hand and asking the U.S. for help on the other. You know, we really can't rely on any other outside power to help us propel democracy forward. It has to come from the grassroots level.

And that's really the thing that Haitians are asking for right now, that they want to get rid of the gang problem. They want to determine who should be the interim leader rather than Ariel Henry, who's deeply unpopular. They want to be the ones to have a say. They don't want the State Department, the core group, the UN to come in and say, here's the best path forward for democracy, because the paths forward they've charted in the past have not worked. Dowd believes there is still a way forward, but in her view, it will only work if the U.S. commits to helping Haiti create its own future on its own terms. We want to be the ones who determine who the interim government is going to be.

And I actually think that is a very practical and a solution that can be put into place right away because all it requires on the part of the United States, the UN and the core group in particular is to say we do not any longer support the interim government of Ariel Henry and we will meet with Haitian civil society members and we, sanction the person that they put forward. Coming up, former ambassador to Haiti Pamela White with her take on what needs to happen now. That's when we return. Pamela White has been a vocal advocate for the formation of an international force to come in and quell the violence in Haiti and establish enough stability for the country to hold free and fair elections.

In October, she testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. As the violence continues to escalate, I asked her her thoughts on the situation now. It just makes me so angry that for months and months and months, the reality of what's going on in Haiti has been there for all to see, and yet no action, no action. What are we going to do? One of the senior diplomats said, well, we'll wait until it gets worse. Worse? How can it get much worse? There's 5 million people nearing starvation. Somewhere between 60 and 80, 90 percent of Port-au-Prince is run over by gangs.

20 percent of the kids are not getting enough to eat day in and day out right now as we speak. I mean, it can't get worse. It is worse. And to not do anything quickly and concretely, in my opinion, is just plain criminal. The UN Secretary General has also said an international force is needed, but there are few takers so far, as you were just alluding to. Jamaica's prime minister recently announced that he would be willing to send soldiers and police officers to Haiti. But what does a strategic intervention look like? We've got to have a transitional group. And that transitional group, in my opinion, should not involve anyone who's had anything to do with politics or gangs in the last

five years in Haiti. We've got to have somebody that's totally above any suspicion of corruption. We need a high, high-level group that no one can deny are the experts in this area to go down there and have a solid, big presence and come up with a transition plan that we can get Haiti, you know, on some kind of strategic plan to go forward. And a part of that plan, obviously, is going to have to be security. If Jamaica is the only one willing to come to the front, let's get them over there, if that's what we can. But we've got to get them everything else that they need. We need to start recruiting immediately for more police, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And are there bad

guys in the police force? You bet there are. Yes. And we need to get them out. When I was there as ambassador, we had NYPD policemen and we had Miami policemen down there inserted into the Haitian police force. And they were fantastic because they were mentors, they were overseers, they made sure that the special teams were trained, they went with them on operations. We can do this again, but we can't do nothing. If you know anything about the history of the country, you can certainly make a moral argument. But what is the geopolitical argument? What is the national security argument? What is your most persuasive argument here? Well, yeah, well, they're leaving.

Schools aren't functioning. The banks aren't functioning. The clinics aren't functioning. You know what's functioning? The passport office. You know, two days ago, there was a massive outbreak of violence in front of the passport office. People are desperate to get a passport because this new ruling by the Biden administration

says that if you can find somebody in the United States that has the means to support you and you have a valid Haitian passport, then we'll consider letting you get into the States legally. And so, you know, they're fighting, they're desperate to get that passport. They're literally, you know, crawling all over each other to get into the office. And that's caused by they need to get out of there. Do we want hundreds of thousands of Haitians on our shores? I mean, I've never liked this argument. I think we should be doing something in Haiti because we're the United States of America. And we have a long history of being involved in that country for good and for bad often, but do something

because we can and we're the country that stands for doing, you know, helping countries that need us out. But if you don't like that argument, if you want to go to the national security argument, okay, I can go there. There's going to be tens of thousands, like you've never, you know, getting into any rickety boat whatsoever or anything else that they can put two feet on, and they're going to be on our shores, and it's going to be a political problem for the Biden administration,

and it's going to be a national security problem. You've got to do something. And by the way, the people that say that all the Haitian people don't want an intervention force, blah, blah, blah, just on March 1st, there was a group called the Diagnostic Development Group issued a really well done study that they had a wonderful cross-section of the population. They have a database of about 5,000 people that they use. In normal times, they go door to door, but this time they went phone by phone.

They used phone calls. And 69% of the Haitian people said, we need an intervention now. This is a brand new study. It really needs to be listened to. 71% of the Haitian National Police cannot control the gangs. 64% of them said that the gangs are taking over more and more and more every single day. You've got to listen to the voice of the people. And I think if we had this top-notch, high-powered mediation group,

that they could use the diagnostic development group to go out and get the voice of the Haitian people unfiltered through their networks. And that would be a huge plus towards any plan going forward. So before we let you go, according to previous reporting by NPR, Prime Minister Henri has called for a new round of elections with the aim of swearing in a new government by early next year. Is that even possible? I mean, I have tons of friends in Haiti, and I talk to them all the time.

There's not one person that I know or any of the experts that I talk to all the time on Haiti that think that it's possible to organize elections, especially not under Henri. Henri is not seen by the Haitian people as a legitimate leader. He's just not. So anything that he comes up with, no matter who says, oh yeah, that's a good idea, the people on the ground are not going to participate as long as he's in the lead. It's just not going to happen.

That was Pamela White, former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin.