Peter Hallward, Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek. © Foto Zizek: Andy Miah

Ik heb in 7 delen de geschiedenis van Haïti proberen samen te vatten. Het was een nogal brave vertelling. Sommige dingen bleven onduidelijk. Met name één vraag bleef aan me knagen. In het werk van Peter Hallward, Noam Chomsky en Slavoj Zizek vind ik een antwoord op die vraag. Haïti voor de ramp, deel 8: Een onwelkome interpretatie.

De aanleiding

In de documentaire waarmee deze week begon, zei adviseur Patrick Elie van president Préval van Haïti:

“For decades, all has been done to weaken the Haitian state, and now everybody is screaming bloody murder, [because] the Haitian state is too weak to handle this [post-earthquake] situation.”

All has been done to weaken the state. Wat bedoelt hij daar? Deze vraag stuurt in de richting van het waarom. Ja, Haïti is staararm, corrupt, zwak.

Maar waarom?

Om te beginnen geeft de documentairemaker Avi Lewis daarop een kort maar krachtig antwoord:

“The state in Haiti used to include major public companies—rice, flour, electricity, telephones. Today, after decades of privatization and pressure from the US and international financial institutions, control of those businesses has moved offshore. Haiti is dependent on expensive imports for food and other essentials. Facing a reconstruction project of epic proportions, the country is poorly positioned to build its own future.”

Dat is een begin van het waarom. Privatisering onder druk van buiten.

What else?

Hoogleraar Filosofie Peter Hallward van de Middlesex University weet meer.Hij deed uitgebreid onderzoek naar Haïti en schreef het boek Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. In het 480 pagina’s tellende werk geeft Hallward een meer controversiële geschiedenis van Haïti.

Dat is er een van Amerikaanse inmenging met desastreuze gevolgen. Van systematische pogingen om de Haïtiaanse regering zwak te houden. Van een machtige Haïtiaanse elite die geen verandering wil. Van neo-liberaal beleid, ingevoerd op verzoek van het IFM en de VS, dat ervoor zorgt dat Haïtianen nog steeds geen donder verdienen.

In Democracy Now gaf Hallward onlangs een interview over een aantal van die zaken.

Op de website van Democracy Now is een volledig transcript te vinden. Hieronder belangrijke citaten van Peter Hallward gesorteerd per onderwerp. De cursiveringen zijn van mij.

• Onder de citaten komen Noam Chomsky en Slavoj Zizek aan bod.

Hallward over Haïti

Over de koloniale tijd
Peter Hallward: “[Haiti] was established as a colony designed to extract a maximum amount of wealth from slave labor. And it was extremely successful at that. It was more profitable than the whole of the United States combined at the time of American independence.”

“[It] worked because you had a very brutal system of exploitation. It was really exceptionally brutal by—even by colonial standards.”

Over buitenlandse inmenging en de zwakke overheid

“The Haitian government basically [does] what it’s told, largely.”

“The government is very, very constrained. Their funding is dependent almost entirely on international support. There’s a lot of pressure around issues like keeping minimum wages low, adhering to neoliberal reforms, as they’re called, which essentially open the country up to international investment and have locked the country into a kind of systematic cycle of disempowerment and impoverishment.”

Over Prévals rol daarin

“Préval has basically gone along with that. If you look at the things that he’s done in the last year, he vetoed a move to increase the minimum wage to $5 a day, so it’s locked down at $3 a day, roughly. He continued to push through a really disastrous privatization policy that’s, as we speak, is in the process of breaking up the phone company and selling that off. There’s pressure to sell off the last remaining public resources that Haiti has, the ports and other things.”

Over buitenlandse inmenging en de zwakke overheid (2)

“[The] government was already very weak, largely because of international pressure, the pressure to cut public spending; to lay off public servants; to funnel all international investment, or at least the vast majority of it, into—not into state-based enterprises or state-based investment, things like a national health service or a national education system, that kind of thing, but instead into fragmented NGO-type projects that, in many ways, compete and sometimes replace what should be a public service, I think.”

“So there’s been, systematically, a whole set of policies that have weakened the government, deprived it of any real capacity, for example, to collect anything like the tax revenue that it should, deprived it of a capacity to invest in the public services, even basic infrastructure like water, rubbish removal, that kind of thing.”

“These things have never happened, and they haven’t happened since the international community has been essentially ruling Haiti, more or less directly since 2004.”

Over het afzetten van de populaire Aristide in 2004

“So you have a situation here for the first time where you have a popular movement that’s still relatively strong, despite all the violence that it had survived in the mid- and early ’90s. It has a popular president. [Aristide, JM] It has clear leadership. It has a clear program. It has a massive majority in Parliament. There’s no extra-political military mechanism waiting to overthrow it. And it’s at that point that this massive international campaign starts to destabilize the government, to misrepresent it, to starve it of funds, to push it into the corner that eventually, as you say, leads to this coup d’état at the end of February 2004.”

Over de pacificerende rol van de VN na de ‘coup d’etat’ en de populariteit van Aristide’s administratie

“You had this huge UN force there, you know, with a budget of $600-plus million a year, and they spent almost all of that money on military measures to maintain social control, political control, to pacify a population, basically, after a coup that overthrew one of the most popular governments in the world, a government that had been elected with 70, 75 percent of the vote, that was happy to organize a new set of elections with its opposition, and the international community and the small clique of unelectable political manipulators in Haiti refused to go along with this. And the result is a military solution to a political problem, having this huge UN force whose only real contribution has been to maintain a version of order in the streets of Port-au-Prince.”

Over de schuld aan Frankrijk

“[The] simple interest payments on [the] French debt by the end of the nineteenth century was consuming the bulk of the Haitian budget, about 80 percent of the Haitian budget. And these payments went on (…) until 1947.”

Over de schuld van Frankrijk en de VS aan Haïti, en over de Frans-Amerikaanse bijdrage aan de militaire coups in 1991 en 2004

“So, that alone—I mean, when we talk about Haitian debt, the crucial debt is the debt that is owed to Haiti. And this is a point Aristide always made. He made it in his early speeches in the 1980s. He made it in his speeches as president in the early ’90s. And then he said it again, very emphatically, in the run-up to the bicentenary of Haitian independence in 2004, that France should pay this money back and that the United States should pay some of the money that it owes Haiti. After [the US] took over the bank, when it occupied the country in 1915, it expropriated land from tens of thousands of peasants. It ravaged the economy for twenty years. [The US] did the same again in different ways more recently, by contributing to these two disastrous coups, in 1991 and again in 2004.”

“So the debt that France and the United States and Canada also owes Haiti is immense. It would be billions and billions of dollars, not as charity, but simply debt. And Aristide had the temerity to demand this as head of state. It was a policy not by a kind of fringy NGO that can make (…) idealistic speeches and demands, but of a well-documented, serious demand by a head of state to another sovereign power that was very, very uncomfortable. France was clearly rattled by this. Chirac said, you know, “The Haitian president should consider the implications of what he’s saying more carefully.” And it’s very clear, I think, that this demand was one of the key factors that led to the French involvement in the coup in 2004.”

Over de winst vanPréval

“With the last election in Haiti in 2006, there was a real mobilization of people to get René Préval, the current president, elected, very largely, I think, on the basis of the fact that he’s remembered as Aristide’s first prime minister.”

Over de kans op grassroots democratie

“So there is a real popular—there is still a genuine grassroots democratic force in Haiti. The problem is that there’s a real disconnect between that grassroots mobilization and what the government itself can do.”

Over Prévals positie

“So he’s someone who has really cut himself off, in fact, really from the beginning, from anything like a mass-based popular mobilization. And as a result, I think he doesn’t have a great deal of support among at least ordinary people in Haiti now.”

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In Hallwards defense

Is de interpretatie van Haïti’s geschiedenis zoals Hallward die geeft de ‘juiste’? Er zitten nogal wat vooronderstellingen in zijn opmerkingen. Over globalisering, het IMF, de rol van de VS in de wereld.  Er is ook kritiek op deze interpretatie, die veel gewicht toekent aan Aristide’s heldenrol en weinig aan zijn fouten. Maar Hallward is niet alleen in deze interpretatie van Haïti’s geschiedenis, en ook in eerdergenoemde kritiek blijven de feiten overeind. Ik raad iedereen die echt het fijne wil weten van Haïti aan om ook Chomsky en Zizek te lezen (links verwijzen naar online stukken):

• Noam Chomsky – The Tradegy of Haiti. In: Year 501. The Conquest Continues.
• Slavoj Zizek – Democracy versus the people. In: The New Statesman.

Toegegeven, de heren Chomsky en Zizek zijn evenmin ‘neutrale’ experts. Gelukkig bestaan die überhaupt niet, dus wie daarin een reden ziet om hun analyses af te wijzen, doet zichzelf en de waarheidsvinding tekort.  (Dat even in het kader van journalistieke ‘bronbescherming’.)

Mijn Conclusie

Ik denk dat de uiteenzettingen van bovengenoemde heren feitelijk juist zijn, en dat hun interpretatie dichterbij de waarheid ligt dan bijvoorbeeld de Amerikanen en Fransen graag toe zouden geven. Haïti’s tragedie is net zozeer getekend door corrupte Haïtianen als door corrupte buitenstaanders, en misschien wel meer door de laatsten. Telkens is de straatarme bevolking van Haïti het slachtoffer geworden.

• Met die conclusie is de serie “Haïti voor de ramp” afgerond.
• Naar het volgende bericht, een samenvatting van de geschiedenis: Hoezo Haïti?
• Naar het weekoverzicht

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