ARTICLE - WHY HAITI DOESN'T WORK

WHY HAITI DOESN'T WORK
(Toronto Start) - By Kenneth Kidd

PORT-AU-PRINCE - The police officers round a corner in the road, forming a thin khaki line in full riot gear. There is smoke in the air, and red flares shoot out toward a rock-throwing crowd.

The police move quickly forward, shields side-by-each, until the crowd breaks into ragged flight.

A dozen metres down the road, the would-be rioters suddenly stop, and the pursuing police lower their shields. The training exercise is over, its lessons imparted in an otherwise leafy corner of Haiti’s only police academy.

After such supplemental training, some of these Haitian National Police officers will return to the regions, where they’ll be expected to share crowd-control techniques with fellow officers at home.

They are full of good intentions, notes André Menoche, the affable RCMP officer from Montreal now serving as the academy’s chief of training. But in the provinces, such hopes often founder on the sharp rocks of circumstance.

“They’re facing the difficult task of not having any support over there, because there is limited ammunition, they have no shields, no helmets, no pads,” says Menoche. “How do you train an effective anti-riot team when you don’t have these?”

Welcome to Haiti, where even the most basic forms of state governance can sometimes subside into Pythonesque parody, where aid shipments can be held up for weeks at Customs and elections dance through chaos.

This is now the final year of a 5-year plan that was to establish a fully trained national police force of 14,500. The current roster: about 9,000.

But there is progress. Training used to be done almost exclusively by officers from other countries serving under the Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haiti (MINUSTAH). Now the face of basic training is the Haitian National Police, though under a delicate balance.

“We have to make sure they deliver what they’re supposed to be delivering,” says Menoche, who worked as a schoolteacher before joining the RCMP 18 years ago. “At the same time, we must not be just at the back (of the class) checking them.”

So a MINUSTAH officer is now paired with each Haitian instructor to act as a kind of mentor, making sure standards are met, while increasingly acting more like a junior partner. The MINUSTAH officer can still be active as needed, says Menoche, but has to ensure that the Haitian teacher “keeps his dignity at the front of the class.”

That notion of partnership extends to weekends, when Haitian officers and their MINUSTAH counterparts form mixed teams for a regular game of non-contact road hockey. Were it organized differently, laughs Menoche, it might become “like Habs versus Leafs.”

What Menoche has so far managed to navigate at the police academy is, in a sense, the central paradox of all governance in Haiti.

Even before the earthquake, which cost the lives of nearly one-fifth of all government employees and saw 27 of 28 government buildings collapse, the Haitian state was a weak and corrupt vessel, its resources and competence almost microscopic by western standards.

Whoever wins the ongoing presidential election, with preliminary results due Tuesday, will start out working from a large tent behind the ruined Palais National.

How does the international community meet the post-disaster needs of Haitians, yet involve the government enough that you also work toward leaving a more lasting legacy — a functioning Haitian state?

Can the government be trusted?

The difficulty in answering those questions partly explains why the many billions of dollars pledged by other countries have yet to flow in earnest, why so relatively little has changed in the lives of ordinary Haitians.

Cautionary tales about corruption, after all, are fairly thick on the ground.

Anthropologist Gerald Murray, emeritus professor at Florida State University, recalls how, not long after the earthquake, officials from a UN program descended on a village, aiming to distribute food for 500 families.

“The UN, in its infinite unwisdom, figured they had to go through the local authorities, so they brought the mayor out and handed him the 500 vouchers,” says Murray. “They took pictures and everything. When the advance team left and the cameras were turned off, the mayor passed out 40 vouchers.”

He pocketed the rest for friends and family.

“It was standard Haitian government behaviour,” says Murray, who’s been studying the country since the 1970s. “Nothing shocking. It’s outrageous, it’s infuriating, but it’s just a standard example.”

Thoughts of simply bypassing the Haitian government are scarcely new. It was U.S. President Ronald Reagan who first cut off all direct funding of the Haitian government in the face of rampant corruption. Aid, from then on, would be delivered directly by NGOs, non-government organizations such as charities.

But this had unintended and damaging consequences.

“The remedy was worse than the ailment because what’s happened is that the NGOs became a state within a state,” says Jean-Marie Bourjolly, a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal who sits as one of the Haitian appointees on the board of Bill Clinton’s Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission.

Over time, the NGOs ended up providing so many services normally associated with the state — from clean water to medical care — that the Haitian state “has been weakened to the point that it just can’t do anything on its own,” says Bourjolly. “The government has been infantilized.”

The seismic events of January simply removed any pretence that anything else was the case.

“We observed through the earthquake that there isn’t any state in Haiti,” agrees sociologist Laënnec Hurbon, a professor at Haiti’s l’Université Quisqueya as well as director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. “We have no bureaucratic organization.”

Nor does Haiti itself have the resources to rebuild the state, especially now, with the economy in tatters and most of Haiti’s day-to-day commerce traditionally of the “informal” and untaxed variety.

Before the quake, Haiti was already one of the poorest countries on earth, with per capita GDP of only $1,300 — roughly 3 per cent of what it is in Canada. In 2008-2009, the Haitian government had to rely on the international community, chiefly through loans, to cover 60 per cent of its operating expenses.

So the Haitian government now finds itself needing precisely the kind of financial injection that the international community has long been wary of providing. Of the $5.7 billion in aid pledged by international donors in March, only $350 million was headed directly to the Haitian government — earmarked to cover the unpaid salaries of state employees.

And that $5.7 billion is itself a kind of fiction, since it covers both 2010 and 2011, and includes roughly $1.1 billion debt relief. The amount of money actually flowing into Haiti this year is a fraction of the total pledged.

Of the $2 billion in non-debt assistance promised for 2010 alone, only 42 per cent had been disbursed as of the latest (November) tally by the UN special envoy for Haiti. Canada’s record thus far: 32 per cent of $205 million.

Perhaps tellingly, of the $1.1 billion pledged over two years by the United States, only a third was even slated for 2010, and the majority of that was debt relief.

Ottawa’s new ambassador to Haiti, Henri Paul Normandin, insists that Canada, at least, hasn’t been holding back. But he’s quick to note how much is at stake in an orderly transfer of power to whoever ends up winning the election after an almost-certain presidential run-off in January.

“Should things go in the wrong direction, should there be violence and so on, that definitely could compromise not only short-term activities, like the fight against cholera, but it would compromise the longer-term undertakings with the reconstruction of the country.”

The gap between international promise and delivery, in other words, might not disappear.

Mario Joseph, the Haitian civil rights crusader who leads the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, argues that regaining the confidence of other countries will require cultural as well as institutional change.

It starts with the rule of law, whose roots in Haiti are both tender and shallow, and the need for a truly independent judiciary, one sufficiently well paid that bribery is not just another word for paycheque.

As Joseph wryly notes, “if you go to the prisons, only poor people are there.”

So entrenched is corruption at all levels that Haiti routinely figures among the most corrupt in Transparency International’s annual ranking. In 2004, the 200th anniversary of its independence, Haiti actually held the title as the most corrupt country on the planet.

Tackling corruption, and the drug trade, has to start at the highest levels of government if there’s ever going to be any serious change in Haiti, says Joseph.

“Our bodies are sick because the corruption is in the head of the system,” he says. “We need to punish the culture and the corrupt people.”

Short-term, alas, he’s not hopeful. “I don’t think the government has the will to stop the corruption.”

The push, says presidential candidate and now-presumed front-runner Michel Martelly, has to come from outside the country.

“Without international help, Haiti would collapse, but the international community should enforce the need to change the structure,” he told a Montreal interviewer earlier this year. “By just giving money, they’re throwing the money away.

“They need people they can trust, they need to identify the right people, because corruption is legal in Haiti right now. You can do anything with the state’s money.”

Which is another way of saying that change will be painfully incremental.

“If we really want to have some irreversible progress, we have to shoot for 20 years,” says Bourjolly.

“The idea is, year after year, we regain a little more control of our life, because we cannot always count on the international community to do things for us.”

Jean Miguélite Maxime is standing crisp and perfectly erect in the midday sun. His black military boots are polished to such a gleam that they resemble glass.

A former, U.S.-trained officer in the Haitian army, Maxime is now inspector general in charge of the Haitian police academy. He’s about to make his way to the parade grounds, where he’ll be handing out certificates to a small group of officers who’ve successfully completed their training in crowd control.

They come in sundry shapes and sizes, and their footwear varies widely, since some opt to buy their own boots.

This is a police force, and an academy, necessarily run on the cheap, and the results don’t always rest easily on Maxime’s shoulders. Every graduating cadet is given a uniform, he notes, but “when they leave here, the standard can go down.”

He mentions seeing police officers on the streets, all with different-coloured T-shirts peeping out from under their uniforms, something at odds with his idea of esprit de corps.

The academy normally takes in about 600 cadets at a time. They undergo training for seven months, and then spend three months on probation.

The earthquake disrupted that schedule, as some cadets and their suddenly homeless families took up temporary residence in the classrooms.

To make up lost ground, the academy has now swelled to roughly 900 cadets, although not all are destined for formal police work. About 300 will end up working in correctional services, and another 100 are headed for the coast guard.

Like the last couple of graduating classes, however, they’ll face the vagaries of an academy that must rely on donations from other countries for much of its material.

In the past, for instance, there have been donations of vehicles, but only rarely have donors coupled that with maintenance and fleet management training.

“It’s not only the donation we should aim for, but the education,” says Menoche.

The problem carries over into weaponry. Ideally, all cadets and officers would be equipped with the same, standard-issue firearm.

Instead, the police academy has a mixed arsenal of weapons and ammunition that vary in make, age and condition. Shortages and compatibility problems are inevitable, so much so that some members of the last two groups of cadets graduated without ever firing their weapons.

In Haiti, says Maxime, “everything is a challenge.”

His own office, for instance, doesn’t possess a photocopier, so his staff has to wander across the academy grounds to make copies at the offices of the UN police. If the print run is large, such as material for all cadets, then the UN police in turn have to arrange for printing at MINUSTAH’s airport compound.

It’s not hard to imagine Maxime’s toes clenching inside his spotless boots every time that happens.

“This is the drawback of being an upcoming police force with a limited budget,” says Menoche.

The ultimate goal for MINUSTAH might be its own departure, but it’s hard to square that, short term, with the obvious lack of sufficient, stable and long-term funding for the Haitian National Police.

No one, perhaps, is more acutely aware of that than Maxime.

“If we want MINUSTAH to leave, we must have good and competent police officers,” he says. “If the status quo stays, MINUSTAH will be here for 20 years.”