WASHINGTON - Miles from his island nation`s earthquake-ravaged capital city Port-au-Prince, Haitian president elect Michel Martelly exchanged warm handshakes and heartfelt promises with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington Wednesday, just prior to the formal proclamation of the pop star`s victory in the highly-contested Mar. 20 election.
Hillary Clinton welcomed Martelly as president as he visited Washington on Wednesday. With unnerving foresight, Alex Dupuy, a professor of sociology at Wesleyan University, summed up Clinton and Martelly`s Wednesday meeting about a twelvemonth ago when he said, "The dual strategy of urban sweatshops and laissez-faire agriculture, which subordinated Haiti in the 1980s, is now it`s reconstruction plan."(AFP) Receiving the former carnival singer-turned-president-elect `Sweet Mickey` - who seized 67 percent of the ballot at an election that drew a record-low turnout of less than 25 percent of the electorate - at the U.S. State Department early Wednesday afternoon, Clinton reaffirmed the solid bilateral relationship between the two countries.
While spotlighting the 750,000 internally displaced persons, rubble-strewn cities, broken institutional infrastructure and the approaching hurricane season as some of the most pressing problems confronting the embryonic new regime, Clinton expressed great trust in the Martelly`s ability to reconstruct his country.
Despite months of indignation from dozens of human rights, research and advocacy organizations in and around Haiti regarding the legitimacy, mandate and professionalism of Haiti`s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) - which arbitrarily banned the enormously popular Fanmi Lavalas (FL) party from contesting, causing tens of thousands of urban working class Haitians to boycott the polls - Clinton happily accepted the results and, alluding to Martelly`s election slogan `Tet Kale`, assured him that the U.S. was behind him "all the way".
Roger Annis, a journalist with the grassroots weekly Haiti Liberte, wrote this week that Martelly`s 6 million dollar campaign cost was largely financed by what the president-elect refers to as his "friends in the U.S.", marking today`s commitment by the two heads of land to continue their relationship as the logical next-step in the U.S.`s age-old pattern of profiting immensely from "aid and development aid" to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
In her seminal work `The Shock Doctrine`, journalist Naomi Klein writes, "I address these orchestrated raids on the world domain in the heat of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, `disaster capitalism`," a sum that perfectly encapsulates the current wave of development, led by the U.S. under way in Haiti.
Questions Abound, Answers Drown in History
Addressing a board on post-election Haiti at the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) yesterday, Francois Pierre-Louis, associate professor of political science at the City University of New York (CUNY), lamented the bleak prospects that Martelly`s election offers to the Haitian people, and posed questions that, in these early days, remain largely speculative.
"Five days ago I sat in this very room and uttered a want that the following time Haiti was on the word it would be for the good reasons," Pierre-Louis said. "That ambition has not come true - Sweet Micky is vastly unprepared and inexperienced, he did not run under an established company and so is yet to give a realistic plan for dealing with reconstruction and unemployment, and lots of his team represents some of the most notorious anti-democratic forces in the country," he added.
Ambassador Albert Ramdin, assistant secretary-general of the Formation of American States (OAS), outlined at the jury a point-programme for Haiti`s reconstruction, including fostering an environment of political unity, developing Haiti`s agricultural sector and "building strong institutions" - a favourite catch phrase of the international community with regards to the country still fighting off the irons of colonial debt.
Ramdin`s optimism that the post-election climate might give a hopeful march forward is not divided by the majority of analysts, historians and observers.
"I mean the ambassador forgets what state he is dealing with here - you can`t just give a laundry list to Martelly and ask the process to be done," Pierre-Louis said.
"Haiti hasn`t invested in the farming sector since the nineties and continuing the old trade policies will likely make a food crisis very shortly - if the promised agricultural reforms are not met, there`ll be demonstrations and protests and Martelly`s mandate will change from developing the commonwealth to keeping people in check," he added.
Indeed, if the course tape of external aid assistance to Haiti post-quake is any yardstick of what is to come, the numbers paint a rather grim picture.
Following the one-year anniversary of the quake, Alex Dupuy, a professor of sociology at Wesleyan University, wrote that the estimated cost of the damage, amounting to about 14 billion dollars in February this year, was generating a hefty sum for U.S. companies.
"Of the more than 1,500 U.S. contracts doled out, worth 267 million dollars, only 20, worth 4.3 trillion dollars, have departed to Haitian firms," Dupuy wrote. "The remainder have departed to U.S. firms, which almost exclusively use U.S. suppliers.
He added, "although these foreign contractors employ Haitians, mostly on a cash-for-work basis, the bulk of the money and earnings are reinvested in the United States."
Nora Rasman, interim manager of Latin America and Caribbean Policy for the TransAfrica Forum, who worked on the earth in Haiti prior to the 2nd cycle of elections, told IPS, "USAID has made very open to us that they don`t give the content on the land to hold out everything they had promised in price of reconstruction."
"Thus near of the money allocated to Haiti goes back NGOs in the U.S. that do own the resources needed to implement programs locally - so it is no storm that USAID funding ends up funneling straight back into U.S. back accounts," she added.
The encounter between Clinton and Martelly not merely acknowledged this form of exploitation, but also promised to cement and recreate it throughout the new president`s reign.
Perhaps the most frank admission of what the struggling Haitian people can carry in the coming years was summed up in Clinton`s praise for the joint effort between the U.S. and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) to establish a new industrial park close to Cap Haiten.
"It already has its first tenant," Clinton proudly announced Wednesday, "the world textile firm Sae-A, which only is relieved to make 20,000 permanent export-oriented jobs."
Countless books, papers and articles have attested the extent of the destruction wrought on the Haitian workforce when the economy was forcibly transformed from a mostly agricultural, self- sustaining model into an assembly-line export processing zone for the U.S. - a fact that Clinton ignored in her remarks.
Commentators running the gamut of the political spectrum have criticized these policies. In his essay `Disaster Capitalism to the Rescue: The International Community and Haiti After the Earthquake, Dupuy wrote, "even at the top of it`s performance in the mid 1980s, the assembly-line industry never employed more than 7 percent of Haitian workers and did not contribute significantly to reducing the underestimated 38 percent unemployment rate of the active urban labor force."
With unnerving foresight, Dupuy summed up Clinton and Martelly`s Wednesday meeting about a twelvemonth ago when he said, "The dual strategy of urban sweatshops and laissez-faire agriculture, which subordinated Haiti in the 1980s, is now it`s reconstruction plan."
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