Haiti: "We Have No Idea What’s Coming"

On the night of 14 August 1791, in the course of a complex invocation of the Vodou religion that had been created as a syncretic combination of Catholic and African beliefs by the enslaved population of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, a towering black overseer from Jamaica named Boukman led a pledge in which those in bondage swore to rise up against their masters at Bwa Kayiman (The Woods of the Crocodile) on the northern plain of what would later become the nation of Haiti. A week later, thousands did and over the course of a nearly 13 year war of independence that followed, eventually succeeded in defeating the French military and abolishing slavery, the first nation in the Western Hemisphere to do so. Since then, Haiti has lived more than 220 years of nearly constant tumult, the most recent chapter of which began with the assassination of the nation’s president, Jovenel Moïse, five years ago as part of a sprawling international conspiracy that - despite the trials and convictions of some in the United States for their role in it - the world still hasn’t gotten to the bottom of. Since then, Haiti has been ruled by a series of ostensibly temporary interim regimes, the most recent of which has been led solely since this past January by Prime Minister, Alix Didier Fils-Aimé. Much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding areas are controlled by a coalition of armed groups calling themselves Viv Ansanm (Live Together). The International Organization for Migration counts well over 1 million people as internally displaced due to both the violence of Viv Ansanm and its sporadic clashes with what pass for the forces of order, which include elements of the national police force, the Police Nationale d’Haïti (PNH), the nation’s resurrected army, the Forces Armées d’Haïti (FADH), and, until last autumn, an ineffectual, United Nations-sanctioned Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) force. Last September, the United Nations authorized a Gang Suppression Force (GSF) to replace the MSS with a mandated personnel ceiling of 5,550 consisting of both military and police personnel. Like the MSS, however, the GSF has been glacially slow to get up and running. Despite all this, Haiti’s interim authorities and the country’s sprawling (and largely discredited) amalgam of political parties have announced that elections for president and parliament are to be held in the coming months, with the first round to be held on 13 December and the runoff on 21 February. To discuss where Haiti finds itself today and where it may be heading, we are joined on Notes From the World today by three longtime experts observers of the country: Louis-Henri Mars, who for many years served as the Executive Director of Lakou Lapè, a group whose mission was the promotion of a culture of non-violence and dialogue in some of the most marginalized neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince. Lorraine Mangones, the Executive Director of the Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (FOKAL), a Haitian foundation working throughout Haiti in the fields of education, development, arts and culture, and in support of local civil society organizations; and Louino Robillard, a social activist who was has been the driving force behind a number of organizations in Haiti and currently serves as the Program Director of Rasin Devlopman, which seeks to strengthen the capacity of community leaders and locally elected officials on the Haitian island of La Gonâve.