Haiti

Mar 16, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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H@rd Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – Many times, I ponder that when certain issues are spoken of publicly, whether it is a pro forma exercise in political correctness.  Or putting a tick in a box, viz., duty done, record will attest.  Haiti stands as a classic.  The neighbor that everyone wishes lived at the other end-the farthest end-of the longest block.  The partner about which most hold their noses and patronize.  I see Americans and Europeans.  I also see regionals and Guyanese.

On a poignant note, during a time of challenge and trauma, there were some Haitians, who were among the most steadfast in their devotion, a willing hand, a calling voice.  Some things stick with some of us.  So, I say a word for them.  On the note of history, I parse pages and a people made an example of, when Toussaint Louverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe rose up against the foreign yoke, the tyranny of the usurpers of liberty.  On the one occasion that the colored man threw off the shackles of oppression, he has never been made to forget it.  Indeed, Haitians have paid a terrible price, stands as a warning to all colored people who throw off the harness. Haitians had their heroes.  Guyanese live with a word with the ‘h’ sound, but it is one that begins with a ‘w.’ Think of escorts and an old trade.

Somebody in America or Europe always declare the best intentions for the people of Haiti.  Somehow the natives always end up in a more precarious predicament.  The French and the Americans have often wielded undue influence in Haiti.  Guyanese should get a grip of this: in 1825, as part of a pact to give Haitians independence, they had to pay reparations to their enslavers to the tune of 150 million gold francs.  The enslaved paying enslavers for their freedom.  I term this sowing soil and soul with salt.  Is this not how it has been done throughout Africa, India, and parts of Central, Latin, and South America, in some form or the other, for centuries? Recall what the Romans did to Hannibal and Carthage.  Then come down through the millennia.

When I point to these things, my own-colored brothers tell me that I am the one with horns in my head.  The white man is so proficient at what he does that it is a piece of cake (a dollar or a quarter) to get many local brownnosers from top to bottom to do his dirty jobs that even untouchables would avoid and deride.  For there was the French with their new enslavement, which was succeeded by the best in Yankee creativity and regional hegemony: anti-communism.  Today, it is energy security, democracy, and free market profitability.  Under the Americans, a monster flourished.  Enter Papa Doc.  The criminal lineage did not end with Baby Doc Duvalier.  Guyanese had better sit-up, come to their senses, and take note.  Who are our leaders?  Who are they selling to?  And who is being sold down the drain under a contract that is as draconian as the one the French foisted on Haiti.  I would make the case with my last breath that Guyanese are paying a ransom by the barrel to Exxon (and America) under the 2016 oil contract.

I ask fellow Guyanese to absorb and interpret the Haitian situation broadly, deeply, then conclude.  Nothing is as it seems.  Who is genuinely for Haiti?  This includes CARICOM compelled to do something about what must be for many in the regional brotherhood and sorority a distraction, a nuisance situation.  Now Haitian gangsters want to be part of the government.  There they all have guns and grievous intent; here the gangsters in office wear suits, a smile, and with ordnances in their briefcases. The results are hardly different when there is scrutiny of who the real powers behind the scenes are.  Any open minded, clearheaded thinker looks at the turmoil in Haiti, and there are sure to note the not so invisible hands, and to where they have condemned a country and its inhabitants.  The gunmen in charge of the streets are a byproduct of the decades of destruction brought about by the policies of foreigners that doom places like Haiti.  Cheddi Jagan lived it, and the troops came here to restore the colonizers-to-be visions of law and order, post-Independence.  The more that places like Haiti seem to have to say, the less say that have with what has some meaning for their affairs, determining for themselves their own destiny.  Two hundred plus years of unrecognized independence wrested at great cost, and almost two hundred years of independence, as blessed by former enslavers, and Haitians cannot find their feet.  Notice the buffers/divisions the outsiders created in Haitian society to protect their interests.  Look at what is going on here.  The recent CARICOM carnival was an exhibition of who is in, and who is out.  Thus, seeds are sowed for later discord. When we lament over Haiti, concernedly or superficially, we must force ourselves to think deeply of our own Guyana.

 

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