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Haiti’s Rule of Lawlessness
Why a military intervention would only entrench the island’s problems.www.foreignaffairs.com
The article reiterates what those of us who have followed Haiti over the decades know, its an unholy mess, rife w/corruption and extreme poverty, and has been, more or less continuously, for decades.
The piece suggests that UN/Foreign military intervention is not the answer here; I certainly agree that by itself, or done only for short-term stability any success would last no more than a few months after the foreign soldiers with/without blue helmets pull out.
The recommendation suggests an attempt to deliver 'The Montana Accord' a political manifesto of sorts among Haitian advocates for democracy and civil society reform.
I wish the piece delved into how they propose to achieve this goal.
There is some time spent on the suggestion that there is precedent for appointing a non-corrupt, Haitian Supreme Court justice as an interim ruler, which is true enough. However, the article itself notes that neither of those regimes lasted, and/or the democratic governments that succeeded them didn't make it though one electoral term. To be clear this has everything to do w/the U.S. (and others) who have consistently empowered the corrupt in Haiti and/or turned a blind eye.
I'm left uncertain as to why this time would be any different.
Transforming Haiti into a functional, sustainable, democratic, nation-state with strong institutional capacity is, at the very least, a generational project. Its one that will be enormously expensive, and ultimately be focused on the civil society side of things,.
However, one needs to calm in the streets in order to build and operate schools, to replace slums with affordable housing, to remove housing from floodplain and vulnerable coastal areas, to literally and figuratively rebuild the courts, the police, the civil service etc etc.
That is not a short-term project. While I'm not one to champion foreign military adventurism or colonialism, I don't see how you rebuilt Haiti without some measure of both. I'd be happy to endorse an alternative, but only one with evidence of its credulity .
I also oppose any 1/2 measure intervention here, as that just seems like a way to put foreign soldiers at risk, at considerable expense, in order to either prop up corrupt governance directly, or to provide too little support to any nascent democracy to allow it to establish let alone flourish.
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