Peter Espeut | Pots criticising kettles

I have been to Haiti several times, once by boat directly from Jamaica. It’s not that far away; the distance from Dame Marie in southwest Haiti to Port Antonio is only 218 km (135 miles); by comparison, Jamaica is 235 km (146 miles) long. It is even shorter from Tiburon; you don’t even need an engine to cover the short distance; just get in a canoe and the east-west Caribbean current will take you to Jamaica, to land at Port Antonio or Annotto Bay.

And over the years Jamaica has received many boat people from Haiti as refugees, from places like Tiburon and Les Cayes on the southwest peninsula. They claim asylum in Jamaica, but rarely get it; successive Jamaican governments have really not been sympathetic to the plight of the Haitian people. Maybe we see too much of ourselves in them.

Some years ago I went to Haiti on a mission sponsored by the Catholic Church to interview the families and neighbours of a particular batch of refugees claiming asylum; they claimed that should they be repatriated (deported, really), they would suffer physical and bodily harm from the oppressive military government in power at the time.

We went to Les Cayes and Île-à-Vache and did our interviews (including of the parish priest), and as a result, members of that batch were granted refugee status, I believe the only Haitians so blessed over the years.

While in Les Cayes in a rustic sidewalk café eating a delicious meal of stewed lambí, I was approached by some south coast Jamaican fishers – friends of mine. “What are you doing here, Brudder Pete?” I didn’t ask what they were doing in this coastal town far away from Jamaica’s north coast.

On another occasion we went on a mission to Tiburon on the southeast tip (the part of Haiti closest to Jamaica) to visit a group of Haitians recently deported from Jamaica. Concerned for their safety, we wanted to know how they had been treated on arrival by the Haitian authorities.

BRIBE THE POLICE

It was a long and arduous journey over precipitous unpaved roads; at one point I thought the angle the car had to tilt would pass the critical point and we would fall over the steep cliff on to the rocks below. Several times we had to bribe the police to let us pass the many checkpoints. “They don’t get paid very often,” our driver told us. But we got to Tiburon and returned safely; our Haitian friends lived in thatched wattled huts by the beach similar to photos of Jamaican rural folk in the 19th century. Life was hard; you could see why they would wish to leave.

With funding from UNESCO I took about 20 Jamaican south coast fishers to Haiti on a cultural exchange with a group of Haitian fishers; as we approached the Haitian coast, and gazed at the barren deforested hillsides, one Jamaican fisherman insightfully remarked to me: “Brudder Pete: Jamaica soon come like this!”

We learnt a lot of lessons on that trip. We were told that the government was largely a Port-au-Prince phenomenon; social services (including schools) for rural people provided by the government were largely non-existent. The tax base was low. Political corruption redirected public funds into the pockets of public officials; politicians commanded gangs of armed thugs. The small Haitian elite controlled much of the formal economy. The informal economy in Haiti is huge!

Foreign governments, multilaterals and NGOs pump huge sums of development aid into Haiti annually, and they have little to show for it. Haitians flee in droves to surrounding countries in search of a better life.

Sound familiar?

No CARICOM state – least of all Jamaica – has any moral high ground from which to criticise the Haitian government for corruption, cronyism, thuggery, or nepotism. If we are honest, in Haiti we can see ourselves, taken to the nth degree.

The revolution in Haiti, which abolished slavery there, caused shock waves in the Jamaican slave-owning plantocracy; the United States of America and the Christian countries of Europe stood by as France extracted reparations from Haiti for having the temerity to win the war for their freedom; these countries have isolated Haiti, and have imposed sanctions which have made the first independent black nation in the Western Hemisphere into its poorest.

We are complicit in this scandalous situation. But then, we are not much better.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and development scientist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com