As his advisors ponder the ever more troubling consequences of regime change in Iraq, Bush is entitled to take some comfort from the far more successful operation just completed in Haiti.footnote1 No brusque pre-emptive strikes, domestic carping or splintering coalitions have marred the scene; objections from caricom and the African Union have carried no threats of reprisal. In overthrowing the constitutionally elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide, Washington could hardly have provided a more exemplary show of multilateral courtesy. Allies were consulted, the un Security Council’s blessing sought and immediately received. The signal sent to Chávez, Castro and other hemispheric opponents was unambiguous—yet it was not a bullying Uncle Sam but France that made the first call for international intervention in Haiti’s domestic affairs.
In Paris, too, there was much satisfaction at the sophisticated fit between the humanitarian duty of a civilized nation and the need (without losing face) to placate Washington for last year’s disobedience over Iraq. The us might well fear this ‘Liberia at their gates’, as Villepin’s Independent Commission report put it—but, wary of domestic reaction among their own black population in an election year, hesitate to act.footnote2 The Quai d’Orsay’s offer of diplomatic protection would guarantee not only safe entry but painless withdrawal, as the proposed un Stabilization Force, took up the burden three months later.footnote3 London would be suavely usurped of its chief attack-dog role. Chirac and Villepin had the virtually unanimous backing of the French media, from Le Figaro to Le Monde and L’Humanité , for military intervention in Haiti. Among the most feverish voices has been that of Libération , which held President Aristide—a ‘defrocked priest turned tyrant millionaire’, ‘the Père Ubu of the Caribbean’—personally responsible for the ‘risk of humanitarian catastrophe’ that was claimed to justify the invasion.footnote4
On 25 February Villepin issued a formal call for Aristide’s resignation. Two days later, France, the us and Canada announced the dispatch of troops to Port-au-Prince. In the early hours of Sunday, February 29 the Haitian president was flown out of his country at gunpoint. Later that same day the un Security Council suspended its normal 24-hour pre-vote consultation period to push through an emergency resolution mandating the us Marines, French Foreign Legion and Canadian forces already converging on the Haitian capital as the advance guard of a multinational un force. In the face of such international backing, the Congressional Black Caucus confined itself to mild rebuke. Libération gloated at the dissolution of ‘the pathetic carnival over which Aristide had proclaimed himself king’. For the New York Times the invasion was a fine example of how allies can ‘find common ground and play to their strengths’. All that remained was for Bush to call and thank Chirac, expressing his delight at ‘the excellent French–American cooperation’.footnote5
The Western media had prepared the way for another ‘humanitarian intervention’ according to the now familiar formula. Confronted by repeated allegations of corruption, patronage, drugs, human rights abuses, autocracy, etc., the casual consumer of mainstream commentary was encouraged to believe that what was at stake had nothing to do with a protracted battle between the poor majority and a tiny elite but was instead just a convoluted free-for-all in which each side was equally at fault. The French press in particular tended to paint a lurid portrait of ‘African’ levels of squalor and superstition, to serve both as a warning to France’s remaining dependencies in the Caribbean and as a challenge that might test, once again, the ‘civilizing mission’ of the international community. As a former colonizer and slave power, France would be wrong to ‘turn its back’, argued the chief reporter of Villepin’s investigative commission on Franco-Haitian relations. The 2004 bicentenary of Haitian independence offered the chance for a mature coming to terms with the past, through which France might ‘shed the weight which servitude imposes on the masters’, and negotiate a new relationship.footnote6
Rather than a political struggle, rather than a battle of principles and priorities, the fight for Haiti became just another instance of the petty corruption and mass victimization that is supposed to characterize public life beyond the heavily guarded gates of Western democracy. Rather than conditioned by radical class polarization or the mechanics of systematic exploitation, the overthrow of Aristide has most often figured as yet another demonstration of perhaps the most consistent theme of Western commentary on the island: that poor black people remain incapable of governing themselves.
The structural basis of Haiti’s crippling poverty is a direct legacy of slavery and its aftermath. The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick had formalized French occupation of the western third of the Spanish possession, the island of Hispaniola, under the name of Saint-Domingue. Over the following century, the colony grew to be the most profitable in the world; by the 1780s, it was a bigger source of income for its masters than the whole of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies combined. No single source of revenue made so large a contribution to the growing prosperity of the French commercial bourgeoisie, and to the wealth of cities like Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille. The slaves who produced these profits rose up in revolt in 1791. Combined British, Spanish and French efforts to crush the rebellion fuelled a war that lasted thirteen years and ended in unequivocal imperial defeat. Both Pitt and Napoleon lost some 50,000 troops in the effort to restore slavery and the status quo.
By late 1803, to the universal astonishment of contemporary observers, the armies led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines had broken the chain of colonial slavery at ‘what had been, in 1789, its strongest link’.footnote7 Renamed Haiti, the new country celebrated its independence in January 1804. I have argued elsewhere that there have been few other events in modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant order: the mere existence of an independent Haiti was a reproach to the slave-trading nations of Europe, a dangerous example to the slave-owning us, and an inspiration for successive African and Latin American liberation movements.footnote8 Much of Haiti’s subsequent history has been shaped by efforts, both internal and external, to stifle the consequences of this event and to preserve the essential legacy of slavery and colonialism—that spectacularly unjust distribution of labour, wealth and power which has characterized the whole of the island’s post-Columbian history.