This is Haiti.
And this is how rich cruise ship
tourists - the relatively few who
visit - get to see it.
At a private beach on the northern coast.
And this is the reality just a few
kilometers away in the capital Port
au Prince for most people in Haiti: Violent gangs are in control of
the streets, skyrocketing prices for food mean most people are
hungry and miserable.
This is Jean Samuel Mentor.
He is a freelance
journalist from Haiti.
But did you know the start of Haiti’ story
is quite inspirational?
It had the world’s only successful
slave revolt, leading to
the world’s first Black republic.
So, what happened?
Let’s just say colonialism played
its part and all these big players,
amongst others, were involved.
So, let’s unravel how the world messed with Haiti - and what
that means for today.
This is Haiti’s flag now.
This is what it used to be, when it
was still called “Saint Domingue”.
Yes, that’s the French flag.
When the Black slaves broke free of
their French masters, they removed
the white stripe from their flag, representing an end to
White European power.
A bit of white later reappeared in the flag but with Haitian symbols.
But let’s start at the beginning.
Or at least what Europeans
considered the beginning of Haiti.
It was actually Christopher
Colombus who was the first colonial
player to set foot on the
island of “La Hispaniola”.
He landed in what is now called
Môle Saint-Nicolas on November 6, 1492
claiming it for Spain.
At the time, half a million
indigenous people were living
on the island.
By the mid-17th century, most of
those indigenous people were gone.
Europe was crazy for coffee and sugar – and this Caribbean
Island promised both.
France fought Spain for control.
The two colonial powers ended up splitting the island in two.
The Spanish colony of “Santo Domingo” is today
the Dominican Republic.
And the French “St.Domingue”
later became Haiti.
The French brought in African slaves for the grueling work
on sugarcane plantations.
By 1800 Haiti had a population of more than 700.000.
Overwhelmingly people from West Africa.
That was a very kind of a barbarian system.
Slaves worked, they were beaten, etcetera.
Robert Fatton is
a Professor of Politics at the
University of Virginia.
Born and raised in Port au Prince, Haiti has been at the center of
his research for decades.
The exploitation of slaves was
lucrative: Saint Domingue became
France’s most profitable colony in the Americas.
Slave-labour plantations supplied
roughly 40 percent of sugar
imported to Europe at the time.
It was a brutal system both for the enslaved humans as well
as the ecosystem.
You can still see the effects today: just look at these aerial
images on the border with the Dominican republic.
On the Dominican side you can see lush forests and green lands.
On the Haitian side – the land is barren, trees gone.
Back to the French Colony of St.Domingue.
By the end of the 18th century, the slaves had had enough.
Not surprisingly, they revolted – and made history.
The revolution is something that all Haitians are very proud
of.
I mean, it persists.
I mean this is one of the, as we say in French, …, you know,
the founding myth.
And it's one thing that keeps us going.
In 1804, Haiti became the first Black republic in the world.
So far, so good?
But it came with a price.
A crippling one.
First isolation: nobody wanted to
do business with the new nation.
The new Black republic
was cut off economically.
Surrounded by the colonies
of powerful nations using slave
labor – who feared, their slaves could also revolt.
Haiti was the first Black republic - reason enough for some of it
powerful neighbors to refuse to even trade with the new nation.
Because, you know, racism.
And France?
Republican, revolutionary France demanded Haiti pay
for its independence.
Having lost its lucrative source of sugar, France sought reparations.
A staggering sum of 150 million francs in gold.
Over the next century Haiti paid the equivalent of between $20 and
$30 billion US dollars.
With massive debt, how much of a chance did the young
republic even have?
After independence Haiti suffered.
From the burden of reparations, from isolation.
But also from poor governance: a series of bad governments,
leaders who added to the country’s misery.
I believe that there is such a thing as an opportunistic and
ultimately detrimental convergence of interest between
the Haitian rulers and the international community.
The interests of the Haitians and the interest of the foreign powers
is not necessarily the same.
But the ultimate consequence of that convergent, opportunistic
convergence is that it is detrimental to the country.
So, both domestic and international factors have led to the devastating
status quo in Haiti.
A symbol for that is Cité Soleil.
The densely populated neighborhood of Port-au-Prince is now in near
complete control of gangs.
Nearby is the Fontaine Hospital Center.
In November 2023 a heavily armed gang stormed the hospital and
threatened people inside.
It's an environment of really -people are trying to to survive.
And where violence is completely normalized right now.
Diego Da Rin works at the
International Crisis Group,
a non-governmental organization
committed to conflict resolution.
He recently travelled to Haiti.
The security situation rapidly deteriorated in July 2021.
Back then, Haiti’s president Jovenel Moise was killed
by Colombian mercenaries.
It’s unclear who paid them.
The last time a Haitian president was killed was in 1915.
That assassination opened a chapter of foreign intervention which still
impacts Haiti today.
That same year, US Marines
landed in Port-au-Prince.
Officially US forces
were there to restore order.
But Washington also wanted to block European powers on the island from
tapping into Haiti's resources.
So we owed some money to the US banks, and the instability in Haiti
gave a pretext to the United States to move in with the Marines, and
the first thing they did was to go into the central Bank of Haiti.
Take the reserves of the central bank, put it on a boat and send it
back to New York to Citibank, and that's the way it was.
US troops stayed for 19 years.
But their footprints are still visible today.
What happened with the occupation was
the centralization of power in Port au Prince.
And the most important element was the creation of a centralised army,
which became very much the arbiter of politics for a very long
time in Haiti.
The US occupation backed local elites and trained
local security forces.
Those forces would later back various regimes, including
the brutal dictatorship of Francois Papa Doc Duvalier and
his son Baby Doc.
This led to a situation where Haitians became
suspicious of power.
And up until today, there is a vacuum of power with Haiti edging
closer to failed state status.
A symbol for that: the National Palace.
The official residence of the president was destroyed in
Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010, the ruins were even then
removed – and the Palace never rebuilt.
And they have talked to rebuild, rebuild, but nothing has happened.
The reconstruction that was promised never materialized.
Money was squandered, money was stolen.
And again, foreign influence played its part.
Maybe with good intentions but again with a bad outcome for Haiti.
Foreign powers wanted to bypass corrupt officials and gave
their aid directly to NGOs.
So the state became, you know, kind of a very weak structure and people
were working in the state, they started moving into the NGOs.
So when you have NGOs everywhere, no one controls them.
The government loses its, its essence.
And once you have that, there is no, you know, so we've moved from
a very despotic regime to a regime that has no control over anything.
All this led to the situation today: no president, no functioning
parliament, just the acting prime minister Ariel Henry with
no real power.
One of the worst crises Haiti has ever seen.
That’s why Henry has once again turned to the international
community and asked the UN for help – yet another international player.
The last time the United Nations intervened in Haiti things
went horribly wrong.
This is Haiti’s main water source, the Artibonite river.
And this is precisely where the last UN mission took
a devastating turn.
In 2010 UN peacekeepers mainly from
Nepal set up camp here, just above
a stream flowing into
the Artibonite river.
A few days later close by suddenly
the first Cholera cases appeared.
Investigations later found that the UN soldiers had
unintentionally released infected sewage into the stream flowing into
the Artibonite river, leading to a cholera outbreak that cost 10,000
lives and spread across the country.
And there was never really any type of restitution for those deaths.
So there is a very bad taste in Haiti
for that kind of intervention.
The UN mission that was supposed to bring stability and security to
Haiti left the country in 2017.
So, what does all of this mean for today?
Has the world abandoned Haiti for good?
And are Haitians even glad about it?
Not quite.
In 2022 the prime minister called for a new international security
mission to come to Haiti to crack down on gang
violence and lawlessness.
Kenya has offered to lead a new UN-backed multinational mission
that could soon deploy to Haiti.
But, a lot is still unclear.
The UN and the Kenyans and
the Americans, the Canadians and
the French have said this is
going to be a very different
intervention.
Now I'm not quite sure
that this necessarily is going to
be a very different intervention.
The idea is to send just a small group of highly-trained police
staff to restore order and secure key infrastructure such as
the country’s main airport.
So yes, now the international
community is realizing that it must
change the way it has acted in
the way it has intended to help Haiti
But, gangs control some 80 percent of Port au Prince.
They are well armed and know the terrain.
Even if international forces are welcomed at first,
that could change quickly.
So there might in fact be support for an intervention, but I think
that support may be very short lived if it is not
a very effective intervention.
In other words, they may welcome them, but if they can't establish
order fairly quickly, I think the population would turn against them.
For Haitians the new mission raises once again the question: will it
bring improvement or damage the country in the long run?
A question with no answer yet, but Haitians have a resilient past to
cling on to.
Haiti clearly will face a number of problems for
the foreseeable future.
What do you think?