United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres’ remarks during the recently concluded CARICOM Heads of Government Conference in Port of Spain regarding the need for the protracted travails of Haiti to occupy a more prominent place on the international agenda would, presumably, not have gone altogether unnoticed by the regional movement.
Haiti is a member of the CARICOM ‘family,’ (however much that often appears not, in a functional sense, to be the case) and the obligations of member countries under the Charter dictate that, as a region, we would be jettisoning one of our critical substantive commitments if we were to behave as though Haiti is not ‘our problem’.
In his presentation Secretary General Gutteres also, reportedly, called for the rest of the international community to come to the assistance of Haiti in circumstances where, he says, Haiti “remains largely a forgotten crisis” the protracted severity of its circumstances notwithstanding.
The problem here, of course, is that Mr Gutteres is addressing himself to an “international community” that is likely to contend that it already has its hands filled with various other compelling global challenges, never mind the fact that many of these have been less protracted than the historic tragedy of Haiti. Here, in fairness, it needs to be said that the ordering of priorities that has to do with providing responses to global emergencies, is not a matter in which CARICOM has any really meaningful say.
That apart and, in practical terms, the issue of the extent to which CARICOM, given its surfeit of other compelling challenges, can make any kind of game-changing inputs to the extant circumstances in Haiti at this time, is highly questionable, to say the least. That apart, CARICOM, as we are likely to be reminded by at least some of the member countries of the regional movement, already has its plate filled with a host of other individual and collective challenges, climate change and food security being some examples that come to mind and that throwing ourselves, diplomatically, into an assignment to prove as challenging as Haiti may not be the wisest decision at this time. Those that may not approve of CARICOM undertaking a global diplomatic demarche on Haiti at this time would contend that substantively, such a move is not likely to position us to make a meaningful dent in Haiti’s extant circumstances at this time.
Sadly – and any diplomatic intervention is going to have to deal with this reality – Haiti has, in its contemporary condition, turned inwards on itself so that there is little in the socio-political frame of reference of the English-speaking Caribbean that equips CARICOM, even remotely to successfully navigate itself in and out of what, in diplomatic terms, would be nothing short of a minefield.
The reality here is that contemporary Haiti comprises pockets of both lawful and unlawful ‘power,’ a circumstance that has had the effect of dividing the country into perpetually warring fiefdoms that are largely laws onto themselves. This, in a diplomatic sense, raises the issue as to which parties to engage (and which, not to) in the event of CARICOM (for argument sake) seeking to make some kind of meaningful diplomatic intervention that is likely to have to embrace both the ‘lawful’ and the lawless.’
In global terms the UN Secretary General’s most recent assessment of Haiti as being reflective of a “largely forgotten crisis despite its severity” is on point, though he clearly has no remedial ‘road map’ in his pocket. The reason? There is none. Haiti, for now at least, is not, given the condition of the wider global agenda, what is currently regarded as one of the ‘hotter items’ on that agenda.
Haiti’s Achilles Heel, unquestionably, reposes in the fact that such ‘governance structures’ as obtain in the country comprise what can be described as fiefdoms, divided, not necessarily, equally, between lawful and lawless constituencies, each of which appears preoccupied with either holding on to, or, expanding its power base and here we would have to include the incumbent political administration in Port-au-Prince. As things stand it certainly seems that whole communities in Haiti exist under arrangements that are ‘legitimized’ through allegiance to assorted warlords and their respective agendas. Among these there is no single generally accepted centre of authority. Such pockets of law and order as exist are, in themselves, not just fragile but, as well, restricted, a circumstance that makes diplomatic intervention a nightmarish mission, to say the least.
Nothing, in recent years, more definitively underscores the fragility of law and order and the entrenched nature of lawlessness in Haiti than the July 2021 gruesome murder of the country’s sitting President, Jovenel Moise, in his bed, in what will go down as one of the most bizarre murders of a Head of Government in contemporary history. It was an event to which the rest of the international community, including CARICOM, was able to ‘drum up’ no fitting response save and except the sentiments customarily extended in response to such a horrendous episode in the life of a country. There was nothing in CARICOM’s historical frame of reference that had tutored it to get its collective mind around an atrocity of that magnitude.
In Port of Spain, at the recent gathering of CARICOM Heads, the issue of Haiti yielded a routinized comment arising out of the deliberations that the forum had “deliberated over the complex crisis” which it said was “enveloping” the country whilst expressing “grave concern over the deep humanitarian, security and governance crisis,” in Haiti, sentiments which, as is the practice in contemporary diplomacy, may well have been ‘inked’ into a draft Joint Communique long prior the substantive deliberations on the actual issue had ensued. Beyond that submission the summit, reportedly, “noted the need for the immediate creation of a Humanitarian and Security Stabilization Corridor under the mandate of a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution,” and agreed to “seek support from international partners to help finance its establishment and the strengthening of security in Haiti.” Such sentiments, as we say in Guyana, do little to ‘change the price of bread.’
No less curious was the view reportedly expressed by the Heads of Government in Port of Spain that “approaches should be made to Rwanda, Kenya and other willing international partners to support the strengthening of the Haitian National Police (HNP).” Surely a diplomatic and logistical mission of that magnitude would require an effort that goes much beyond what CARICOM, on its own, can muster. Beyond that, one wonders about the extent to which the term “willing international partners’ can seriously be applied to countries like Kenya and Rwanda, countries that are facing their own challenges at this time.
Prior to the staging of the just concluded CARICOM summit the regional body had announced that it had appointed an “Eminent Persons Group” (EPG) to represent them to extend the Community’s Good Offices to the Government of Haiti and Haitian stakeholders. In the glaring absence of the EPG being equipped with any kind of game-changing clout that offers hope of meaningfully altering the extant socio-political status quo in Haiti what we are probably likely to witness arising out of appointment of the EPG, are periodic pronouncements that would change little, if anything, the outcomes being more than likely to mirror previous assessments of Haiti’s condition.
The fact of the matter is that perusal of the global map of crises that afflict the international community at this time suggests that the travails of Haiti will almost certainly have to join what is already a lengthy queue for remedial attention.
