The murder of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse left, not just a bitter taste, but a sense of uncertainty surrounding a nation that has been through so much it may not have the right to remain standing. The response has to be regional and The Gleaner, aware of this, penned a particularly insightful response itself.

Published July 9, 2021

CARICOM mandate in Haiti

ITS RECENT disarray over foreign policy will make sceptics of many people that the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) can play “a lead role” in helping Haiti back to stability in the wake of this week’s assassination of the country’s president, Jovenel Moïse. After all, Haiti has been wracked by a political and constitutional crisis for the better part of a year, with CARICOM being unable to assert itself as a leading player in the elusive search for solutions.

But the shock of Mr Moïse’s murder may just be the catalyst – after its debacle over Venezuela and divisions at the Organization of American States (OAS) and other hemispheric policy questions – that drives the community to a rational, or rationally coordinated approach, to foreign affairs. Or, in this case, not so much foreign policy, but resolving problems in the extended family, given Haiti’s membership of CARICOM.

In the event, we would expect Jamaica to rediscover its political leadership and, as it has done in the past, such as during the 2004 crisis over the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, assume a pivotal position in the engagement of Haiti. Our Government, and CARICOM more broadly, should, in the circumstances, draw on the skills, experience and contacts of some of the people across the region who were involved in those earlier episodes, including retired foreign policy hands. P.J. Patterson, the former Jamaican prime minister, and K.D. Knight, his foreign minister who led CARICOM’s effort to protect Haiti’s constitutional order during the Aristide affair, might be tapped for quiet backroom counsel. The Trinidadian diplomat, Reggie Dumas, who, at the time, served as Kofi Annan’s representative to Haiti, is another whose experience and insights would be valuable.

LARGER ROLE

The larger point here is that while President Moïse’s assassination, and the events leading up to it, provide an important point of departure for CARICOM’s offer to facilitate a national dialogue in Haiti, the community should conceive for itself a larger role of institutional-building and support effort, upon which it embarked in 2004. Or, to put it another way, CARICOM should be invested in helping Haiti to move beyond the caricature as being the region’s poorest, least educated and most unstable country. That, perforce, is a long and complex project.

And, as CARICOM leaders suggested in their statement on Wednesday, it starts with working for the creation of institutions for effective and democratic governance; systems that allow for the resolution of political disputes and disagreements through dialogue and debate and free and fair elections, whose outcomes are respected and abided by. Haiti, unfortunately, has not been allowed to build and/or sustain such institutions in the 217 years since its slave population defeated Napoleon’s army and declared their country the world’s first Black republic. Immediately, the new country suffered political isolation and economic sanctions.

Internal dynamics, too, have contributed to Haiti’s problems. Divisions on the basis of colour, mainly black versus mulatto, and efforts by the country’s elite to maintain its economic hegemony have created tensions that remained unresolved in the absence of accommodating and durable institutions. The system has been incapable of genuine compromise.

This environment, therefore, has encouraged political tendencies that see-saw between authoritarian impulses and populist, reform-minded leadership, without producing a leader with the skills to forge a genuine national consensus. The upshot: Haitian institutions crack quickly when stressed.

In that sense, it is true to form that the system was incapable of solving the dispute over whether President Moïse’s term of office ran from the date of his election, or the date, a year later, when he assumed office because of myriad disputes over the legitimacy of the ballot. These institutional weaknesses have no doubt been exacerbated by the slew of natural disasters, worsened by the fragile state of the environment, that have beset the country.

PUSHED BACK

It was the appreciation of the essentiality of constitutional and democratic norms and of strong institutions of the state, which aren’t overthrown at the first crisis, that CARICOM, led by Jamaica, pushed back against, at the United Nations and elsewhere, to the 2004 putsch against President Aristide (packaged as a resignation), a process that was supported by the United States, France and Canada. It was also to Jamaica’s credit that it pointedly, against the wishes of the USA, gave Mr Aristide refuge after his brief banishment to the Central African Republic.

After the coup, CARICOM promised institution-building support for Haiti. For a time, during the relatively calm presidency of René Préval, it appeared to be following through. But it backslid. To be clear, institution and capacity-building support is not the same as providing assistance during catastrophes, which CARICOM, with Jamaica at the forefront, did so admirably after the 2010 earthquake. It is about helping Haiti to fashion its institutions of state, and of governance and understanding that Haitians are not the ‘other’ in CARICOM.

This is hard, unsexy, long-term work which must be done if the heads of government are serious that Haiti’s membership of the community amounts to “family ties that bind the people of Haiti and CARICOM together”. 

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