Archive for novembre 2024

Haitian democracy was born a short while ago. In its short life, this hungry and sickly creature has received nothing but slaps in the face. It was just born, in the holidays of 1991, when it was assassinated by General Raoul Cedras' barracks. Three years later, she was resurrected. After having put in and taken out so many military dictators, the United States took out and put in President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been the first ruler elected by popular vote in the history of Haiti and who had had the crazy idea of wanting a less unjust country.

The vote and the veto

To erase the traces of U.S. involvement in the butcher dictatorship of General Cedras, the Marines took 160,000 pages of secret files. Aristide returned in chains. He was given permission to take back the government, but was banned from power. His successor, René Préval, obtained almost 90 percent of the votes, but more power than Préval has any fourth-rate boss of the Monetary Fund or the World Bank, although the Haitian people did not elect him with even one vote.

More than the vote, the veto can. Veto to reforms: every time Préval, or any of his ministers, asks for international credits to give bread to the hungry, letters to the illiterate or land to the peasants, he receives no answer, or they answer him by ordering him:

-Recite the lesson. And since the Haitian government has not yet learned that the few remaining public services must be dismantled, the last poor refuge for one of the most helpless peoples in the world, the teachers consider the exam as lost.

The demographic alibi

At the end of last year, four German MPs visited Haiti. As soon as they arrived, they were struck by the misery of the people. In Port-au-Prince, the German ambassador explained the problem to them, “This is an overpopulated country,” he said:

This is an overpopulated country - he said - The Haitian woman always wants, and the Haitian man always can.

And he laughed. The deputies fell silent. That night, one of them, Winfried Wolf, looked up the figures. And he found that Haiti is, with El Salvador, the most overpopulated country in the Americas, but it is as overpopulated as Germany: it has almost the same number of inhabitants per square kilometer.

In his days in Haiti, Congressman Wolf was not only struck by the misery: he was also dazzled by the beauty of the popular painters. And he came to the conclusion that Haiti is overpopulated... with artists.

In reality, the demographic alibi is more or less recent. Until a few years ago, the Western powers spoke more clearly.

The Racist Tradition

The United States invaded Haiti in 1915 and ruled the country until 1934. It withdrew when it achieved its two objectives: to collect the debts of the City Bank and to repeal the constitutional article prohibiting the sale of plantations to foreigners. Then Robert Lansing, Secretary of State, justified the long and fierce military occupation by explaining that the black race is incapable of governing itself, that it has “an inherent tendency to savage life and a physical incapacity for civilization.” One of those responsible for the invasion, William Philips, had long before hatched the shrewd idea: “This is an inferior people, incapable of preserving the civilization left by the French”.

Haiti had been the pearl of the crown, the richest colony of France: a large sugar plantation, with slave labor. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu had explained it without mincing words: “Sugar would be too expensive if slaves did not work in its production. These slaves are black from head to toe and their noses are so flattened that it is almost impossible to pity them. It is unthinkable that God, who is a very wise being, would have put a soul, and especially a good soul, in a body that is entirely black.”

Instead, God had put a whip in the hand of the master. Slaves were not distinguished by their willingness to work. Blacks were slaves by nature and lazy by nature, and nature, complicit in the social order, was God's work: the slave had to serve the master and the master had to punish the slave, who did not show the least enthusiasm in fulfilling the divine design. Karl von Linnaeus, a contemporary of Montesquieu, had portrayed the Negro with scientific precision: “Vagabond, lazy, negligent, indolent and of dissolute habits”. More generously, another contemporary, David Hume, had proved that the Negro “can develop certain human abilities, like the parrot that speaks a few words.”

The unforgivable humiliation

In 1803, the blacks of Haiti inflicted a tremendous beating on Napoleon Bonaparte's troops, and Europe never forgave this humiliation inflicted on the white race. Haiti was the first free country in the Americas. The United States had won its independence earlier, but had half a million slaves working on the cotton and tobacco plantations. Jefferson, who owned slaves, said that all men are equal, but he also said that blacks have been, are and will be inferior.

The flag of the free was raised over the ruins. The Haitian land had been devastated by the monoculture of sugar and devastated by the calamities of the war against France, and a third of the population had fallen in combat. Then the blockade began. The newborn nation was condemned to loneliness. No one would buy it, no one would sell it, no one would recognize it.

The crime of dignity

Not even Simón Bolívar, who was so brave, had the courage to sign the diplomatic recognition of the black country. Bolivar had been able to restart his struggle for American independence, when Spain had already defeated him, thanks to the support of Haiti. The Haitian government had given him seven ships and many weapons and soldiers, with the only condition that Bolivar would free the slaves, an idea that had not occurred to the Liberator. Bolivar fulfilled this commitment, but after his victory, when he already ruled Gran Colombia, he turned his back on the country that had saved him. And when he summoned the American nations to the Panama meeting, he did not invite Haiti but invited England.

The United States recognized Haiti only sixty years after the end of the war of independence, while Etienne Serres, a French genius of anatomy, discovered in Paris that blacks are primitive because they have little distance between the navel and the penis. By then, Haiti was already in the hands of butchering military dictatorships, which allocated the country's starving resources to the payment of the French debt: Europe had imposed on Haiti the obligation to pay France a gigantic indemnity, by way of forgiveness for having committed the crime of dignity.

The history of the harassment of Haiti, which today has the dimensions of a tragedy, is also a history of racism in Western civilization.