Voodoo, Sugar Cane, and Bullets

Publishing date: 03.21.2005 23:51

I read of the recent deaths of Nepalese and Sri Lankan peacekeepers in Haiti. As I was deployed there at a platoon leader for 5 months as part of the UN mission in 1995, I have continued to follow the events there over the years. These are a few notes I've made to a junior officer mailing list over the last year.

Myself with friends Tim Thorton and Ross Scheinbaum outside a police station in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, along with two Haitain police officers.

I think it's worth noting that Haiti is somewhat different than many of the other world hotspots we currently have to contend with. Generally speaking, they are a largely homogeneous (excepting a patrician Creole minority), pseudo-Christian culture. There are no great religious or tribal divisions, at least not on the scale of some African or Arabic countries. Haiti has long maintained close ties and identification with the US, if only through extensive immigration and travel (and military occupation).

Additionally, Haiti has been demilitarized like perhaps no other country in the hemisphere. Notice the distinct lack of anything other than mostly antiquated small arms in the media images. No RPGs, no mortars, no IEDs, no technicals, not even the ubiquitous AKs -- mostly a bunch of punks armed with M1s and pistols tooling around in rickety scooters and pickups. Yes, I'm sure it's still a very dangerous place, but not near as much as Somalia, Rwanda, Balkans, Iraq, etc. There is no well-supported insurgency or fundamentalist reactionary movement linked to a covert third-party belligerent.

What they do have is abject, pervasive, and desperate poverty. After my experiences there, I'm surprised they are still even able to feed their own population -- I don't know how they do it. Their urban areas look like someone just pulled the plug on all infrastructure back in the 1920's -- about the same time the long term USMC presence left. There is no significant natural resource or export, save some textile manufacturing.

I think most of the violence we've seen recently is more an indicator of economic desperation (criminal elements fighting for scarce resources) and a breakdown of civil order, rather than an indicator of some strongly held belief in a political or military alternative to their current form of government. As an aside, the conspiracy theorist in me can't help but wonder if the rebels aren't just trying to force a US intervention, along with its associated stability, aid, and employment opportunities. Nothing makes the sound of small arms clattering to the ground like the KBR hiring rep setting up shop.

The Haiti issue may continue to resonate with minority voting blocks. Keep in mind that Haiti was the seat of one of our hemisphere's only succesful slave revolts, and that there are large and long-standing immigrant populations in many urban US areas, so sympathies run deep.

I guess what is most depressing is knowing that we have had at least 3 major US military deployments to Haiti over the last century. If we haven't been able to fix a relatively "easy" country like Haiti so close to our own coastline, imagine the challenges ahead as we attempt to stabilize much more complex, diverse, and dangerous counties abroad.

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