[News] Haiti - Where a Minimum Wage of $2 a Day is Too Much

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/engler09062007.html

September 6, 2007


Where a Minimum Wage of $2 a Day is Too Much for the Lords of Industry


Haiti and the Responsibility to Protect

By YVES ENGLER

Why did Canada help overthrow Haiti's elected government in 2004? 
That's a question I heard over and over when speaking about Canada in 
Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority, a book Anthony Fenton and I 
co-wrote. Most people had difficulty understanding why their country 
- and the US to some extent - would intervene in a country so poor, 
so seemingly marginal to world affairs. Why would they bother?

I would answer that Canada participated in the coup as a way to make 
good with Washington, especially after (officially) declining the 
Bush administration's invitation (order) to join the "coalition of 
the willing" in Iraq.

It is also worth noting that at the start of 2003 the Haitian minimum 
wage was 36 Gourdes ($1) a day, which was nearly doubled to 70 
Gourdes by the Aristide government. Of course, this was opposed by 
domestic and international capital, but especially Canadian capital. 
The largest blank T-shirt maker in the world, Montreal-based Gildan 
Activewear employs up to 5,000 people in Port-au-Prince's assembly 
sector. Most of Gildan's work is subcontracted to Andy Apaid, who was 
the leader of the Group 184 domestic "civil society" that opposed 
Aristide's government.

It is also clear that some Canadian mining companies saw better 
opportunities in a post-Aristide government (A recent Toronto Star 
article explained, "Another Canadian-backed company recently resumed 
prospecting in Haiti after abandoning its claims a decade ago. Steve 
Lachapelle - a Quebec lawyer who is now chair of the board of the 
company, called St. Genevieve Haiti - says employees were threatened 
at gunpoint by partisans of ex-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.").

Another reason for the intervention came out of the contempt, 
heightened during the country's 200-year anniversary of independence, 
directed at Haiti ever since the country's revolution dealt a 
crushing blow to slavery and white supremacy. The threat of a good 
example - particularly worrisome for the powers that be, since Haiti 
is so poor - contributed to the motivation for the coup. Aristide was 
perceived as a barrier to a thorough implementation of the 
neo-liberal agenda. The attitude seems to have been, "If we can't 
force our way in Haiti, where can we?"

But, I was never entirely satisfied with my answers. That was one 
motivation for spending hundreds of hours over the past year in the 
McGill University library researching the history of Canadian foreign 
policy. So, why did Canada help overthrow the elected Haitian 
government? Here's what I've learned so far:

Historically, countries' foreign affairs were mostly about 
"projecting force" in a hostile world. This meant the use of power 
(military or economic) for protection or to gain advantage. In the 
modern era, the "advantage" to be gained and then protected was 
capitalist entitlement, the ability to make a profit. In other words, 
foreign affairs have mostly been about asserting and protecting the 
"rights" of a country's wealth owners.

The Canadian government, from its beginning, was part of the command 
and control apparatus of the world economic system. At first, Canada 
served as an arm of the British Empire, but, given the country's 
location, quickly became intertwined with the USA. Canada's role over 
the past five decades, as assigned by the dominant power, has 
typically been some sort of "policing" operation, usually called 
peacekeeping. Since Canada has primarily been a "policing" rather 
than "military" power one must look to the language of policing to 
discover the motivations for our Haitian policy.

Over the past decade there has been much discussion of something 
called "pulling our weight" in external affairs. In laymen's terms 
this means spending more of the country's resources on defending and 
expanding the ability to make a profit around the world, for Canadian 
capitalists in particular, but also for the system in general. While 
the less sophisticated neoconservatives have simply called for more 
military spending and a pro-US foreign policy, the more liberal 
Canadian supporters of capitalism have been busy creating an 
ideological mask, called the "responsibility to protect" that will 
accomplish the same end.

The "responsibility to protect" is essentially a justification for 
imperialism using the dialect of policing instead of the old language 
of empire and militarism. It says there are "failed states" that must 
be overthrown because they do not provide adequately for their own 
citizens and because they threaten world order. This is the 
international equivalent of the "zero tolerance" (also called the 
"broken window") strategy of the New York City police department. The 
policy is to aggressively go after petty crimes in order to create an 
environment that discourages more serious law breaking. In the same 
fashion, the international community should go after "failed states" 
that do not directly threaten other countries by invasion but only 
create an environment where "crime" may thrive.

(Noam Chomsky has used the Mafia analogy to explain the less 
sophisticated, older imperialist version of this policy. Any and all 
challenges, even minor ones, must be met with violence until "order" 
is established. The "responsibility to protect" differs in form but 
not in substance.)

The coup in Haiti was a Canadian-managed experiment in the use of the 
"responsibility to protect" doctrine. Aristide was overthrown 
precisely because Haiti is so unimportant to the world economic 
system and because cracking down on it is the international economic 
equivalent of the New York City police cracking down on graffiti 
writers. Once again Haiti was an example to the rest of the world, a 
message from the world's rich and powerful.

The question to answer now is what next? And one can only hope that 
history will not be our guide. The first Haitian revolution was the 
earliest and most successful challenge to the entitlement of 
capitalist wealth owners in the era of slavery. In the late 1700s 
Haiti was home to some of the most brutal large-scale labour 
exploitation the world has ever seen. Stolen and shipped from Africa, 
nearly half a million slaves worked under horrific conditions as the 
"property" of approximately ten thousand white landowners and a few 
thousand property owners of mixed race. Up to 40 percent of France's 
GDP came from Haiti in the mid 1700s. The profitability of Haiti's 
sugar plantations was that era's equivalent of Middle East oil.

The slave revolution from which Haiti was born was a rejection of the 
capitalist system as it then existed. But the country never found its 
way to an alternative economic system. Instead, within three years of 
independence the lighter-skinned plantation owners overthrew and 
murdered the country's liberation hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines (the 
French having killed the famous revolutionary, Tousaint Louverture, 
prior to independence). Excluded from international commerce by the 
world's capitalists, and facing threats of invasion, Haiti promised 
to repay its former exploiters. In 1825 Haiti agreed to pay $21 
billion (in 2004 dollars) to compensate French slaveholders for their 
loss of property (land and now free Haitians). The price for its 
reintegration into the world economic system was extremely high.

Foreign powers, especially Germany, France and the US, repeatedly 
sent gunboats into Haitian waters. The most common reason was to 
press Haiti to pay debts (often to businesses from these countries) 
it was unable to afford. In one instance, US marines secretly entered 
Port-au-Prince and took the national treasury. The 1915 US 
invasion/occupation of Haiti was partly about forcing the country to 
repay its debt. And during that occupation, the US took over Haiti's 
independence debt to France, which was not finally repaid until 1947. 
The Haitian state became dependent on foreign governments, autocratic 
and extremely repressive, because its primary role was ensuring the 
repayment of debt.

Once again the Haitian people and government are being forced along 
an economic path dictated by the world's economic elite and I fear 
the result will be the same as before. Of the $1.2 billion in "aid" 
for Haiti announced at a Washington donors' conference in July 2004, 
more than half was loans, which Haitians must repay. Haitians will 
have to repay this money even though they did not choose the Gerard 
Latortue regime that got most of the money, the US, France and Canada 
did. Much like compensating French slaveholders Haitians will 
(literally) be paying for the coup in the years to come. Already, 
under the thumb of Haiti's debt holders and a foreign occupation, the 
elected government of Rene Preval is privatizing the last of Haiti's 
state-owned companies.

Supporters of capitalism sometimes argue, incredibly, that Haiti's 
impoverishment is a result of the country's lack of capitalism. But, 
as even a short visit to Haiti quickly demonstrates, the country has 
no shortage of entrepreneurs or a willingness to work. Rather, a 
study of history reveals that the economic system commonly called 
capitalism has only ever been interested in profiting from the super 
exploitation of the vast majority of Haitians and ignoring their humanity.

Yves Engler is the author of two books: 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1552661687/counterpunchmaga>Canada 
in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority (with Anthony Fenton) and 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1552661695/counterpunchmaga>Playing 
Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical. He can be reached at: 
<mailto:yvesengler at hotmail.com>yvesengler at hotmail.com




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