Rehabilitation Without Reconciliation
It will take more than politics as usual to save Haiti.
This morning, Haiti’s Presidential Transitional Council was installed. The all-male, seven member body (attached to which are two non-voting “observers”) was midwifed into existence by the regional body CARICOM and is officially tasked with setting Haiti on the path towards elections, with the last vestige of democratic rule in the country having expired along with the life of President Jovenel Moïse, assassinated in July 2021. The terms of most of Haiti’s elected parliament had expired more than a year before when, in a repeat of an earlier crisis under the 1996 to 2001 first presidential term of the late René Préval, the government and the opposition couldn’t agree on a process to hold elections.
The installation of the transitional council comes in the context of a homicidal uprising that began in late February by a coalition of armed groups under the self-bestowed banner of Viv Ansanm (Live Together) in and around Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. The revolt among these groups that had historically existed because of their close patronage links with various political and economic actors in Haiti, but who have acted with increasing independence in recent years, has seen the murder of police and civilians, the displacement of large numbers of people and repeated attacks against the international airport and the Palais National. The council will replace the unelected, unconstitutional government of Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who had served since Moïse’s murder nearly three years ago - a crime to which Henry’s possible links remain unclear and troubling - and whose resignation was one of the gangs’ primary demands after he signed off on a long-delayed Kenyan-led peacekeeping force for the country. After years of chaos, political dysfunction and criminal anarchy, Haitians would be forgiven for hoping that this new chapter might bode for smoother sailing in the near future. However, the backgrounds of many of the groups on the council, which I will examine in detail here, would do well to give pause to any thoughts that it might be a silver bullet to cure Haiti’s ills.
In the role of representing the Collectif du 30 janvier, we find Edgard Leblanc Fils, a veteran politician from the Organisation du peuple en lutte (OPL) political party co-founded by the late author and politician Gérard Pierre Charles. In addition to OPL, this Collectif includes the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale (PHTK), to which both Jovenel Moïse and former president Michel Martelly belonged. Several of PHTK’s members have been sanctioned by the governments of the United States and Canada (including Martelly himself in the latter case) for alleged financing of armed gangs and drug trafficking and former officials of PHTK governments have been accused of involvement in a 2018 massacre in the Port-au-Prince slum of La Saline. Also under its umbrella is the Ligue Alternative pour le Progrès et L'Émancipation Haïtienne (LAPEH) party previosly led by former Préval government official Jude Célestin - who has a dubious history of his own, controversially failed to reach the second round in Haiti’s 2010/2011 presidential elections and was defeated by Jovenel Moïse in the first round of the 2016 ballot - and several other entities.
The Fanmi Lavalas political party, founded by former president Jean-Berrtand Aristide, will be represented by Leslie Volatire, who served as a government minister during the former’s second mandate and then as part of a tripartite transitional commission after Aristide’s February 2004 overthrow. The fact that Lavalas in the early 2000s created the template for the politically-aligned armed gangs currently rampaging through the capital, has been linked to acts such as the February 2004 massacre of at least 27 people in the northern town of Saint-Marc and that Aristide himself has been frequently been publicly linked to events such as the April 2000 murder of the journalist Jean Léopold Dominique - for which 9 close associates of the former president were indicted and responsibility for which Aristide’s chief of security, Oriel Jean, pointed the finger at the former president before his own March 2015 murder - appeared to be no bar to the party’s participation.
Representing the Accord du 21 Décembre which the Henry government - which local human rights groups have accused of its own links to the gangs - hammered out with several political entities in late 2022 and which created a (now defunct) transition council led by former First Lady and presidential candidate Mirlande Manigat, is Louis Gérald Gilles, a former senator and previously longtime member of Fanmi Lavalas who quit the party in 2019 to form his own political entity, the Nouvelle orientation unifiée pour libérer Haïti (NOULHA). Another one of Henry’s erstwhile collaborators, the attorney André Michel, who leads something called the Secteur Démocratique et Populaire (which is neither democratic nor popular), promised in 2016 to “destroy the country” if Jovenel Moïse was ever inaugurated as president, and spent several years trying to do just that.
Acting on behalf of the Pitit Dessalines party of former senator and presidential candidate Moïse Jean Charles (who in January also urged demonstrators to “destroy” the country) will be Emmanuel Vertilaire, a former judge in the northern city of Cap-Haïtien. Representing the Engagés pour le Développement (EDE) party formed by Ariel Henry’s immediate predecessor as Jovenel Moïse’s Prime Minister, Claude Joseph, and the Résistance Démocratique (RED), formed by a number of close allies of Moïse, will be Smith Augustin. Augustin took the role after Dominique Dupuy, Haiti’s representative to UNESCO - who gave a rousing cri de cœur against the “macabre dehumanization” of Haiti’s suffering at that body’s Paris headquarters only last month - resigned after receiving “threats of all kinds.” Advocating on behalf of the private sector, which includes such bodies as the Association Des Industries d'Haïti (ADIH) and the Association Touristique d'Haïti (ATH), will be Laurent St Cyr, who had also been a member of the Ariel Henry-created previous transition council.
Representing the Montana Accord (named after the hotel in which its participants meet), a disparate coalition of political and civil society groups that in August 2021 signed an agreement vowing to find a “Haitian solution” to the country’s problems, will be Fritz Jean, a former Prime Minister and governor of Haiti’s central bank who also served as a member of Aristide’s cabinet particulier after the latter’s 1994 return from exile, a time that was marked by a controversial programme known as the petits projets de la présidence, which Aristide described as a development programme but which many considered little more than a slush fund of corruption, including the slain journalist Jean Dominique, who in a famously contentious 1996 interview, grilled Aristide about it. [Fanmi Lavalas had also been a member of the Montana Accord before withdrawing in January 2022.] In January 2022, the Accord claimed - rather farcically - to have already “elected” Fritz Jean as interim “president” of Haiti based on the votes of a few dozen of its members. Jean subsequently fell out with the group, who accused him of being part of a “plot” to undermine them, but the two sides have apparently kissed and made up since then.
So what we have, then, is a body not entirely composed of but certainly dominated by the same political currents who have spent the last 25 years driving Haiti over a cliff, taking advantage of impoverished young men in the slums to be used as political bludgeons before - bloated on the proceeds from kidnapping, extortion, drug trafficking and other criminal enterprises - these groups outgrew the necessity of their patrons, who now roundly and indignantly denounce them in the public square. One is reminded of this passage from the the Haitian author Lyonel Trouillot’s 1996 novel Rue des pas perdus:
Long live democracy! Messocracy, bureaucracy, slumocracy, shamocracy, stupidocracy, kleptocracy, all the squalor & ineptitude, all the bigwigs and their filthy tricks, all the civilo-military decorum, so they can feast themselves on our illusions and desperation. All they have to do is change the color of the uniforms or scrap them completely. As though painting the rope blue would make a hanged man feel better!
The terrible conditions in the most deprived quarters of the capital that helped give birth to the first leaders of the armed groups, known as the “chimere” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of whom I knew personally, have gotten far worse in the years since. The template has now become standard practice. What we are seeing is the terrible flowering of years of politicians believing that armed groups from the most desperate quarters of the capital and elsewhere in the country would always be their pliable hammer against their enemies. But much of that hammer now has a mind of its own. Though it may be shocking to realize that employees of Haiti's Ministries of Interior, Commerce, Agriculture and Communications, Supreme Court, Hôpital de l’université d’État d’Haïti, Bibliothèque Nationale and other entities have all been driven from downtown Port-au-Prince by gang violence, it could also be fairly said that it is merely the logical conclusion of the state’s attitude to the neighborhoods where the gangs proliferate, which it abandoned long ago.
To those of us who have closely followed the trajectory of these armed groups and reported from these neighborhoods, it has been clear that some kind of alliance was in the offing for some time, as I wrote in The Guardian in 2015. The gang leaders themselves - Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier in lower Delmas, Johnson “Izo” André in Village de Dieu, Renel “Ti Lapli” Destina in Grand Ravine and others - are merely the latest iterations of a model that has now existed in Haiti for years and there are dozens of would-be successors ready to take their place unless the material conditions on the ground in Haiti’s most deprived neighborhoods change. Military might alone will not fix what ails Haiti. Nor will yet another transition in a country where virtually every electoral result is routinely rejected by the losing side. There needs to be a dialogue. What kind of country will Haiti be? For whom? And when? What will justice look like for those who have suffered for so long and in what form and from whom will it come?
Attempting to grasp the genesis of the gangs is not an excuse for their behavior, as they have committed some sickening crimes. But what the gangs - fortified by a steady supply of weapons from the United States, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere - are now saying, in the most terrible way possible, is “You created us. You funded us. And now we’re a problem you think you can just erase? Not so fast, you have to deal with us.”
As we look on aghast at the activities of the gangs - such as the ransacking of Haiti's Bibliothèque Nationale, whose director has warned that fate of “all the established Haitian knowledge from the 19th century” including rare novels, newspapers, periodicals and other documents is unknown - we also must acknowledge this is not the first time in history when such things have happened. When, to slow the advance of the French army, the communards set fire to the Château des Tuileries in May 1871, resulting in the burning of part of the library of the Musée du Louvre, Victor Hugo penned in his volume L'Année terrible, released the following year, an interrogation of those who who do such a thing, no matter the cause, with the poem’s narrator asserting (translation by me)
It’s your own torch that you’ve just blown out!
What your unholy and mad rage dares to burn,
It’s your property, your treasure, your dowry, your inheritance!
The book, hostile to the master, is to your advantage.
The book has always taken up your cause.
A library is an act of faith…
The book is your wealth! it is knowledge,
Right, truth, virtue, duty,
Progress, reason dispelling all delirium.
And you destroy that!
After expounding on the virtues of libraries and literature and demanding to know how one could do such a thing, the author is met by a confession from one of the radicals that cuts through the reader like a knife:
Je ne sais pas lire, he responds. I cannot read.
Thus, security support alone will not build a durable peace in Haiti. I have long argued that, in addition to support for Haiti’s police and army, the only way forward must also involve several other aspects if it is to succeed, including an international commission to examine the assassination of Jovenel Moïse modeled on the one the examined the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, and an internationally-supported anti-corruption body modeled on the Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) - which was written into the peace agreements that ended that country’s long civil war - tasked with tracking and prosecuting organized crime and armed groups and their links to political actors. There must be an ongoing process, not simply a pause to allow the traditional political and economic malefactors to catch their breath, reorganize and reassert their control over the country.
What is most telling about the entities on the transitional council, too, is that, in all the years that have passed, parties like PHTK, Lavalas and others that have played such a destructive role in covering Haiti in misery have never even acknowledged their misdeeds, let alone asked for absolution from the citizenry. The difference between their behavior and that which paved the way for at least a kind of peace in many other post-conflict societies could not be starker.
After South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 and the end of the apartheid system of racial segregation, the country’s subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, sought a reckoning for the many crimes that had been committed during the previous decades. The Human Rights Violations Committee was tasked with investigating human rights abuses that took place between 1960 and 1994, while the Reparation and Rehabilitation Committee provided victim support and the Amnesty Committee allowed applications for amnesty for “any act, omission or offence associated with a political objective committed between 1 March 1960 to 6 December 1993.” The Register of Reconciliation “gave members of the public a chance to express their regret at failing to prevent human rights violations and to demonstrate their commitment to reconciliation”
When the so-called Combined Loyalist Military Command, comprised of three different Protestant paramilitary organizations who had committed terrible human rights abuses against Catholics in Northern Ireland, issued its ceasefire statement in October 1994, it did so while offering “the loved ones of all innocent victims over the past twenty years, abject and true remorse. No words of ours will compensate for the intolerable suffering they have undergone during the conflict.” It took the Catholic Irish Republican Army several more years but, finally, in 2002, that group, also, issued an apology for the “non-combatants” it had killed during its 30-year campaign of terrorism. With the exception of various splinter groups, both sides agreed to lay down their weapons and pursue electoral politics following 1998’s Good Friday Agreement.
For the most part, Haiti's political and economic actors have even never admitted their role in the country’s catastrophe. Ironically, in a statement last month, it was gang leader Barbecue who, with questionable sincerity apologized to civilians who had been victims of what he called the Viv Ansanm “movement,” and called on gangs to protect the civilian population, saying the battle was against Henry government after which gangs would continue in “another form” for “a new Haiti.”
Haiti’s political class has shown no sign of coming to a settling of accounts with the country’s people yet. In fact, on 5 April. the transition council released a statement where it outlined a litany of tasks beyond its mandate it said it would be addressing, including the “organization of a national conference and constitutional reform,” which it has no legal or constitutional authority to do and which was placed before the organization of elections on its list of priorities.
But ordinary Haitian citizens have a patriotism their leaders seem to shed when they enter the political arena. With no government to even report to, Haiti’s security forces - the Police Nationale d'Haïti (PNH) and the Forces Armées d'Haïti (FADH) - heroically defended the Port-au-Prince airport from a coordinated assault by hundreds of gang members. Into the maelstrom of violence, the 33rd class of the PNH graduated early, young Haitians who wear the uniform of their nation with pride and dignity.
The country’s civil society is full of organizations such Lakou Lapè, the Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (FOKAL), Solidarite Fanm Ayisyèn (SOFA), the Sant Kominote Altènatif Ak Lapè (SAKALA) and many others - struggling against mighty odds every day to build a more just and inclusive Haiti for its citizens. And there are many who already hoping for the clouds to part and for the sun to shine down on a new path for Haiti and its people. More so than the country’s traditional politicians, it is the mass of people who are the fonts from where any new future for may spring. One hopes it is they who will be plotting this new way forward.
“We're broken into pieces,” a friend in Port-au-Prince recently wrote to me. “I have to go deep inside of me to find courage and hope to process this level of cynicism. But I will stay. I think it's important for me to witness this, same as the earthquake, to make sure that if I survive I never forget.”