Haiti: A Singularity of Misfortune
The mystery surrounding the successful development of some states and the relative failure of others has produced endless, yet highly contestable, explanations. Nevertheless, there is a source of concurrence on this subject: that endogenous strategies towards states’ economic, social, or political development possess a far greater likelihood of sustainable success than those imposed from abroad. Washington’s attempts at democratic development in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, constitute exogenous strategies and exemplify the weaknesses in this approach. After all, a democracy dependent on a foreign military presence is, arguably, one which can only be as durable as a foreign electorate’s patience. The case of Haiti, however, may be a sobering exception to the rule.
At home, the tale of Haiti’s founding is – justifiably – a source of great national pride; a territory only slightly larger than Wales revolted against one of Europe’s greatest empires to form the world’s first black republic, thereby becoming the first independent territory in the Caribbean and a paragon of anti-colonialism. Since then, however, the nation’s journey as an independent state has been what one journalist described as “a long descent to hell.” Burdened at birth by vindictive French actions during and after its war of independence, the nascent island republic promptly faced dismal prospects. In the words of a US merchant at the time, “I am anxious to quit this gloomy place... said once to have been the handsomest in the West Indies but now almost wholly a pile of ruins.” He refers, of course, to what remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere; a country caught in a disturbing cycle of poverty and hardship stretching over two centuries. He refers, of course, to Haiti.
Despite its chronicle of external pressures and post-colonial traumas, the greatest cause for concern for the development prospects of modern Haiti is geographical. With the entire country sitting on a tectonic fault line and with its major cities located in highly flood-prone, almost entirely deforested valleys, Haiti bears the dubious honour of being one of the worst geographically endowed nations on earth. In 2010, the country’s name once again became synonymous with catastrophe as a magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake brought it, quite literally, to the verge of collapse. The disaster was one of the deadliest in world history, claiming the lives of over 220,000 people. Only two years earlier, the nation had been devastated by five different cyclones in only one year, killing another 800 people. The economic aftermath of this calamity does not make for easy reading. According to World Bank figures, the 2008 cyclones alone swiped 15% off national GDP, while the 2010 earthquake caused economic losses equivalent to 120% of GDP. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, French ‘reparations’ demands had cost the Haitian government an estimated $21 billion in 2004 USD, equivalent to about 147% of Haiti’s current GDP. There are no more reparations payments to make but natural disasters of similar economic consequence will, unhappily, be yet to come. Should Haiti, with its dismal finances and broken industry, be forced to face the next disasters alone, its fate would be sealed as a country condemned to an eternity of poverty and reconstruction.
The solution to the Haitian tragedy, therefore, would have to be sourced from abroad. For the better part of the last two decades, international military and police forces under two consecutive United Nations mandates have helped keep the peace in Haiti. Immediately after the 2010 earthquake, USAID executed its largest emergency food distribution effort in its history, feeding four million of Haiti’s eleven million inhabitants for a period of three months. Another 1.3 million Haitians relied daily on drinking water supplies from the organisation. With the earthquake leaving almost a million Haitians homeless and turning the national capital into rubble, it is understandable that foreign assistance has focused primarily on reconstruction and rehabilitation rather than on long-term disaster prevention and mitigation. In 2019, for instance, the European Union assigned €14 million to combat food shortages but only €3 million in preventative disaster preparations. Now, with the worst of the catastrophe over, international assistance must fight the temptation to declare victory. The military arm of the UN peacekeeping force has been withdrawn and US government aid – one of the primary sources of foreign assistance – has slowed from around $3.5 billion USD between 2010 and 2014 to $46 million in 2020. Haiti is a country policed by the UN, educated by UNICEF, and fed by the US; and one whose primary nemesis is the ground it sits on. The notion that it could possibly survive on its own in the short-term future would be laughable were it not so tragic.
Nevertheless, simply demanding more funds from international donors will not be an exogenous solution in of itself. In a paper written in conjunction with the UN World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER), foreign aid was considered to have failed due to “highly dysfunctional Haitian regimes... [and] domination by economic and political elites who have little interest in advancing Haiti.” This grave institutional flaw helps explain the unwillingness of donor agencies to channel aid funds through the Haitian government. Multilateral donors were among the bravest in this regard and yet assistance through state channels constitutes only around 23% of their total support. It is widely appreciated that many donor organisations are not exclusively altruistic in nature. Those who are well-intentioned, however, raise concerns relating to the manipulation of Haiti’s humanitarian crisis by self-interested Haitian officials. Venezuela’s ‘PetroCaribe’ programme, for example, was designed to provide development aid to Caribbean nations in the form of oil. Ideally, Caracas’ favourable terms would allow recipient states to spend the money they had saved on social projects, yet Haitian auditors have reported the mismanagement of an estimated $2 billion USD in saved PetroCaribe funds. To quote the UN WIDER report:
“Haiti may be... fatally flawed... [due to] endemic corruption at every level... and lack of leadership from any quarter capable of or willing to break the chains binding this dysfunctional society.”
With such dire internal institutions, the solution to Haiti’s misfortune may require the most controversial manoeuvre in the international system: wholesale and exogenous state rehabilitation. The international community has united behind UN reconstruction and stabilisation operations. Whether the suggestion of a comprehensive – and heavily politicised – rehabilitation mission could generate similar consensus remains unanswered. Nonetheless, there is a strong argument for suspending the sovereignty of a nation with such negligible international clout when said sovereignty is abused by the state in multi-billion-dollar aid embezzlement schemes. This manipulation of acute humanitarian needs by the Haitian political elite could, justifiably, be considered tantamount to defrauding the foreign taxpayer. Most significantly, due to the truly global reach of reconstruction efforts, the taxpayer in question will have come from every geopolitical voting bloc in the UN General Assembly. Admittedly, such a wholesale imposition is a diplomatic long shot. The alternative, however, would be the maintenance of Haiti’s cycle of poverty, with all the financial waste associated with the country’s endless reconstruction. Haiti is a singularity of misfortune and a solution to its misery may well require a singularly exogenous approach.
Image courtesy of Logan Abassi via Wikimedia, ©2010, some rights reserved.
