23 Feb Haiti, occupation, and cultural imperialism

Haiti and cholera have been coming up a lot lately. I have a meeting with an MSc student next week to talk about her dissertation on the topic. Ansel Herz has recently written what i found to be an appropriately critical if  a rather forgiving take on the role of Paul Farmer in Haiti since the earthquake.  And the UN has, yet again announced that it will not take responsibility for the cholera outbreak and therefore owes Haiti nothing in the way of remuneration for the epidemic – evidently invoking “diplomatic immunity.” Dr. Louise Ivers has written a rather scathing op-ed in the NYT against the UN’s shirking responsibility for the cholera outbreak.

As i dig through the archives in the David Nicholls Memorial Library at Regent’s Park College, here in Oxford, i have been repeatedly captured by the events that lead to the UN occupation of Haiti. Between doctoral theses and personal communications, emails, articles written under a nom de plume, and the reports that were being published and others that were classified at that time, a frustratingly Orwellian story is unfolding. One that i’m not sure i can do justice to in the few hours a week that i have access to the library. I doubt, 20 years ago, or even 9 years ago, that when the UN was imagining this peace keeping mission toward the stabilization of the country, anyone could imagine the devastation that would be wreaked by that occupation.

Recently, a young Brazilian woman asked me about my research. She very blithely commented on the number of Brazilians serving in Haiti. “They get along so well – you know, they like soccer.”  I was struck by her earnest conviction about the good will shared between the two nations through MINUSTAH. She seemed so wholly unaware of the anti-MINUSTAH sentiments coming from the governing Workers’ Party, Central Unica dos Trabalhadores and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement) along with the Unified Black Movement. Additionally, there have been countless reports of torture, abuse, murder, and sexual misconduct (including rape) by the peacekeeping forces – not just Brazilian, of course, but certainly under their leadership – for which many of whom there is no punishment. Again, falling under the “diplomatic immunity” clause of their work.

The push against Brazilian leadership is deep and stretches to a complaint that Brazilian interest in Haiti is nothing more than a bid for a permanent seat at the Security Council. A cable from the US embassy in Brasilia from 2008 goes so far as to state, “Brazil has stayed the course as leader of MINUSTAH in Haiti despite a lack of domestic support for the PKO [peacekeeping operation]. The MRE [Brazil’s Ministry of External Relations] has remained committed to the initiative because it believes that the operation serves FM [Foreign Minister] Amorim’s obsessive international goal of qualifying Brazil for a seat on the UN Security Council” (via WikiLeaks).

There is a question, of course, about responsibilization. On the one hand, the U.N., under Ban Ki-Moon, will not take responsibility for the (incredibly destabilizing) cholera outbreak, refusing to fund the cholera program laid out for both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Nepal will not take responsibility, although patient zero of the outbreak has been traced. The U.S. will not take responsibility, although the lack of water and sanitation infrastructure is the long term outcome of U.S. political finagling in development fund disbursements.  MINUSTAH will spend somewhere in the vicinity of $648,394,000 (A/C.5/66/18) this year. According to Dr. Ivers, that is more than enough to take the treatment of cholera seriously in Haiti. Priorities, people. Priorities.

There is this oddly shaped black hole where good will, global political aspirations, human rights violations, and dreams of stabilization fall into a sticky soup of devastation – as though Haiti is a playground for clashing ideologies and outcomes. In many ways, Haiti seems to embody all of the ways in which poorly thought out, badly imagined, strangely executed, and imperially mandated designs get practiced – a kind of dystopic land of self-aggrandized confusion of power. And yet, and this is always the underlying piece that is left missing, it is not an imaginary landscape. Haiti is not a playground. It is the home of millions of people. It is a land where babies are born, people die, hearts are broken, Christmas is celebrated – it is filled with real people, not numbers. It is filled with individuals with hopes and dreams and aspirations, not subjects in a badly designed experiment or a deeply depressing novel.

I recently attended a talk by Rob Norman, campaign manager of the New Internationalist, at the OxFID conference titled “Disaster Relief or Disaster Development.” I was struck by the long faces and the opening comment about “This is not a happy session” and “The history of Haiti is really sad.” And the students responded in kind, making comments about how “sad” or “depressing” the whole thing is.  All that was missing from the presentation / discussion was a dirge. I was, to put it bluntly, disgusted by it all. Once again, a room full of well-meaning People of Privilege playing the tiny violins they keep in their psyches as they defiantly push on and forward with the depoliticized beliefs about the role of aid in all its guises.

At root is, what another speaker at OxFID, John Hillary of War on Want, called a racist cultural imperialism. There is a mobilization of a particular image of the “poor black person in need” toward an end that, in truth, has never been truly about aid, rather, has been about control and access. These imaginations about a people unknown give a kind of messianic purpose to the well-meaning PoPs (for an interesting take on this, see Matt Sparke’s work). And each of these moments in this construction re-inforce the others… from the U.S. Occupation 1915-1934, to the interventions in the 90’s and again in the 2000’s, as well as all the well-menaing aid distributors … I sometimes wonder at the use of young bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, well-meaning do-gooders in the service of aid and development – a kind of Stepford army that keeps open the door for imperialist machinations disguised as good intentions.

Please note that the photo for this post was taken by Etant Dupain, a Haitian photographer.