Martelly-Clinton Seal Deal for Next Wave of Disaster Capitalism in Haiti
Written by Kanya D’Almeida
(IPS)
- 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 announcement
of the pop star’s victory in the highly-contested Mar. 20 election.
Receiving
the former carnival singer-turned-president-elect ‘Sweet Mickey’ - who
seized 67 percent of the vote 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 confidence in the
Martelly’s ability to rebuild his country.
Despite months of
outrage from scores of human rights, research and advocacy organisations
in and around Haiti regarding the legitimacy, mandate and
professionalism of Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) - which
arbitrarily banned the hugely 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 state to preserve their relationship as
the logical next-step in the U.S.’s age-old practice of profiting
immensely from "aid and development assistance" to the poorest country
in the Western Hemisphere.
In her seminal work ‘The Shock
Doctrine’, journalist Naomi Klein writes, "I call these orchestrated
raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined
with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities,
‘disaster capitalism’," a summation 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 panel 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 years ago I sat in this very room and
expressed a wish that the next time Haiti was on the news it would be
for the right reasons," Pierre-Louis said. "That dream has not come true
- Sweet Micky is vastly unprepared and inexperienced, he did not run
under an established party and thus is yet to present a realistic
programme for dealing with reconstruction and unemployment, and much 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 Organisation of American States (OAS), outlined
at the panel 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 chains of colonial debt.
Ramdin’s
optimism that the post-election climate might generate a hopeful march
forward is not shared by the bulk of analysts, historians and observers.
"I think the ambassador forgets what country he is dealing with
here - you can’t just hand a laundry list to Martelly and expect the
work to be done," Pierre-Louis said.
"Haiti hasn’t invested in
the agricultural sector since the 1990s and continuing the old trade
policies will likely create a food crisis very shortly - if the promised
agricultural reforms are not met, there’ll be demonstrations and
protests and Martelly’s mandate will shift from developing the country
to keeping people in check," he added.
Indeed, if the track
record of international 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 nearly 14 billion dollars in February this year,
was generating a tidy 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 million dollars, have gone to Haitian firms," Dupuy wrote.
"The rest have gone 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
profits are reinvested in the United States."
Nora Rasman,
interim director of Latin America and Caribbean Policy for the
TransAfrica Forum, who worked on the ground in Haiti prior to the second
round of elections, told IPS, "USAID has made very clear to us that
they don’t have the capacity on the ground to carry out everything they
had promised in terms of reconstruction."
"Thus most of the
money allocated to Haiti goes back NGOs in the U.S. that do have the
resources required to implement programmes locally - so it is no
surprise that USAID funding ends up funnelling straight back into U.S.
back accounts," she added.
The meeting between Clinton and
Martelly not only acknowledged this pattern of exploitation, but also
promised to cement and embolden it throughout the new president’s reign.
Perhaps the most frank admission of what the struggling Haitian
people can expect 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 build a new industrial park close to Cap
Haiten.
"It already has its first tenant," Clinton proudly
announced Wednesday, "the global textile firm Sae-A, which alone is
projected to create 20,000 permanent export-oriented jobs."
Countless
books, papers and articles have documented the extent of the
devastation wrought on the Haitian workforce when the economy was
forcibly transformed from a largely 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 criticised these policies. In his essay
‘Disaster Capitalism to the Rescue: The International Community and
Haiti After the Earthquake, Dupuy wrote, "even at the height of it’s
operation 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 labour force."
With unnerving
foresight, Dupuy summed up Clinton and Martelly’s Wednesday meeting
nearly a year 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."
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/3010-martelly-clinton-seal-deal-for-next-wave-of-disaster-capitalism-in-haiti
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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