by Dahney Corielan
Monday April 29, 2019 ((rezonodwes.com)) – Haiti has often been perceived for decades as an exceptional country. Besides being the poorest country in America, it is also the country of all the abominable experiments in this hemisphere. We come to justify, invent, reinvent, support, apply everything, even the unthinkable and the unacceptable in this country. But, beyond this exceptional bias, it is possible to think about most of the major questions of the contemporary world from this country which, better than anywhere else, the imagination of the best has not remained prisoner of the experience of the worst (R. Edouard: 2019).
Thus, following this logic, Seitenfus (2015)1 in his analysis of the question of international aid after the 2010 earthquake tells us that Haiti has become a real laboratory for experiments in the name of international cooperation. Haitian leaders and senior international dignitaries build their fortunes to the detriment of the people who are floundering in poverty and filth.2. The misery of the Haitian people or the poverty of Haiti is in no way a choice. It is a social construction, a macabre plan carved out of the pillory3 since 1804.
However, we are not going to talk about the poverty or misery of Haiti in this article but about one of these results: insecurity. The latter can be defined as a lack of security or worry caused by the possibility of danger. It is therefore a climate, an impression, a feeling which does not inspire a confidence of security (Barrès: 1911).
In Haiti, insecurity as a social phenomenon has taken on several dimensions for some time. We can cite, among others, social, food, economic, political, legal insecurity, etc. This phenomenon, since the rise of the rural exodus and the ghettoization of certain neighborhoods, has been crossed by several political contexts over the years to, finally, take on a multifaceted scale. Among these forms, the “gangsterization” is the tip that hides an iceberg at the bottom of it.
Considered as the result of a complex whole, it has taken shape in Haiti since the appearance of the “tonton macoutes”, passing through state-controlled popular activism (appearance of the “chimè”) up to the «phtkisation»4 of power, which is its most radical form. The latter is constructed according to several logics: electoral holdup and intimidation5.
The first form (Tontons macoutes6) consists for the dictatorial regime of the Duvaliers in keeping their bases in every corner of the country7 (in rural areas as well as in cities) and in neighborhoods (created under the regime) inside large cities specifically in Port-au-Prince and which today bear the name of “Ghetto” or neighborhoods of non -right.
The second form (popular activism) arose in the struggle for the conservation of power by the Lavalas regime in the face of the reactionary oligarchy which had not digested the orientation of power towards the people. Thus, leaders translating the chimerization from certain areas of the country such as “tree and sun” and still others have emerged.
After the coup d’état or the kidnapping according to the supporters of the regime, the vocabulary of Haitian Creole continued to be enriched with indicators in the poor neighborhoods (chimè, rat pa kaka, smile pa pise, etc.) . The class battle in Haiti therefore took another form because on the other side, there was the GNB “Gren’n nan Bounda”, made up of the reactionary economic and political elite, bearer of a so-called pact social and aware of the merits of their struggle and people from the civilian population (largely students and socio-professionals) who call themselves middle class and who move, for the most part, in the most abject unconsciousness .
The third form is the phtkization of power (Bandi legal), led by former supporters of the economic sector who are part of the GNB movement and certain political leaders of this same movement, carriers or allies today of the political party of men and women with shaved heads. They are the current beneficiaries of power since 2011. Some benefit from major economic contracts, others are or have been in turn president, prime minister, ministers, directors general, secretaries of state, parliamentarians, etc.
Who benefits from this “gangsterization” from the country ? One thing is certain: the people are the big losers. Become the social norm8 currently, the gangsterization is destroying young people from poor neighborhoods, victims of this Leviathan system put in place by the country’s economic and political elites. I do not cite the social, academic and moral elites because they are swimming in a form of intellectual insecurity9 by very often trying to understand reality for what it is not, knowledge for what it is not, morality for what it is not. But, they are not innocent!
Thus, the question of insecurity in Haiti, which for several years has been one of the major questions facing society, has experienced, as everyone knows, a new outbreak since the last presidential elections of 2011, which occurred following political unrest, organized and widespread disorder. By becoming a central issue in the political debate, insecurity and more precisely gangsterization has since then been the subject of a real virus which is rotting Haitian society. And on this point, the international community has its role in this decline and chronic instability of the country by trying many times to impose its logic and its pawns.
As a result, actors from the economic, political and international community elite as well as the eternally submissive of civil society all participate in the descent into Haiti’s underworld. However, beyond all these considerations, we cannot reject the responsibility of the actors used (the bandits) in the construction of insecurity in Haiti. Because insecurity always raises a debate on the responsibility of delinquent subjects “to be responsible is to have to answer for one’s actions”10.
But, by agreeing to build a democracy based on fraudulent elections with candidates financed by the mafia sector operating in Haiti, with offspring of the prison system of certain great economic powers, we can in no case hope for the best. Nowadays, we live in an imported Haitian state11, with a manufactured insecurity, in the past, with “Ti pyè, ti jak,…” and, today, with “ti je, ti anel, ti lepè, etc.” used or which have been used in contexts of taking and maintaining power, illicit trafficking, electoral struggles, intimidation, settlement of economic and political conflicts, for illicit enrichment and for the creation of disorder.
Insecurity is not inevitable because it exists almost everywhere. However, that present in Haiti, in poor neighborhoods, on the Haitian-Dominican border, in the markets and in the streets of Haiti is not only a phenomenon linked to poverty and misery, it is a construct of different actors fighting for their hegemony. Actors who are aware of their interests and who, even at the cost of the people’s blood, will not hesitate one day to safeguard them. It is a real conspiracy against the people that many people at the national and international level do not dare to say or write. In this respect we can see the game that reigns in particular in the case of the seizure of illegal weapons at the port of Saint-Marc in September 2016 and in the files of the so-called mercenaries that the national police had apprehended with weapons of large caliber in February12 last and the recent disappearance of containers in the Lafito port, mainly loaded with weapons of war13. Authorities are clearly involved up to their necks. To date we have the case involving the relationship between Senator Garcia Delva and the most wanted individual by the PNH, Arnel Joseph14. Insecurity is in full swing!
However, one thing is certain, it is that the awakening of this tortured, exploited, paralyzed population is not far away. The system may still continue to make Haiti the miserable and unlivable country it is today, but a nation that changed the course of more than five hundred years of history in the early 14th century is not going to die. A conscious generation is being forged, it will put aside the thugs, the traitors, the invertebrates, and, in war as in war, it will fight towards and against anyone who prevents or will prevent this great nation from assuming and to secure its destiny.
Dahney Corielan,
Haitian rebels
Lawyer- Anthroposociologist
[email protected]
Quebec, April 29, 2019.
Bibliography
1.- Ricardo Seintenfus, The failure of international aid in Haiti. Dilemmas and errorsEditions of the State University of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, 2015.
2.- Dahney Corielan, The State and corruption in Haiti: a real agreement of dependenceLe Nouvelliste, Port-au-Prince, April 12, 2019
3.- Jean-Mary Louis, The invention of Haiti as a poor society: the hermeneutics of poor Haitian society, doctoral thesis, UQAM, 2010.
4.- A form of gentrification of power
5.- See the confession of deputy Arodon Bien-aime, elected from the PHTK in the 2015 elections and the various declarations of certain former members of the CEP.
6- Member of the paramilitary militia of National Security Volunteers (VSN)
7.- Bernard Diederich, Papa doc and the uncle macoutes1time publication, 1970.
8.- As perceived by Nicole Dubois in her article « Around the social norm » published in The notebooks of political psychology, 2002.
9.- See Jean Lacroix in Marxism, existentialism, personalism, 1950.
10.- Manuel Tostain, Insecurity: ideological inscriptions and psychosocial approachesSocial psychology notebooks, n0 2, 2002.
11.- Concept dear to Bertrand Badie (1992) because the Haitian State, like any postcolonial State, is an imported State whose transplant has not been successful.
12.- Arrest occurred on Sunday, February 17 in the vicinity of the Bank of the Republic of Haiti (BRH)
13.- See the online media article Loop Haiti of April 24, 2019
14.- See the revelations made by Senator Jean Renel Senateus, president of the Justice and Security Commission of the Senate on this issue on April 23, 2019.
photo capture video Franciyou Germain (AloLakayTV)
