[R-G] Haiti's new PM and the power of NGOs

[Anthony Fenton]

Haiti's new PM and the power of NGOs

by Nikolas Barry-Shaw

http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/9_30_8/9_30_8.html

Haiti Information Project (HIP) - Coming to office in the midst of a
hurricane-provoked humanitarian crisis, Haiti's new Prime Minister
Michele Pierre-Louis clearly has her work cut out for her.
Paradoxically, one of the biggest obstacles her administration will
face is the blight of foreign-funded NGOs eagerly trying to "help"
Haiti. The new Prime Minister acknowledged as much recently, stating
that "the channelling of hundreds of millions of dollars of
international aid through NGOs poses serious problems for the
country," according to the Agence Haitienne de Presse.

Over the past decade, a tidal wave of NGOs have come to blanket Haiti.
According to the World Bank, there are today over 10,000 NGOs working
in Haiti, the highest per-capita concentration in the world. These
organizations occupy every possible sector of activity, their budgets
sometimes dwarfing those of their governmental counterparts.

Agriculture provides a telling example, as Nazaire St. Fort reports:
"[M]ore than 800 NGOs work parallel with the agriculture ministry, but
most define their own priorities." The Association National des
Agro-professionnels Haïtiens (ANDAH) explains that of the "3.4 billion
gourdes (91 million dollars) budgeted for public investment in
2006-2007, 3.2 billion (85 million dollars) are managed by NGOs."

Ironically, Michele Pierre-Louis made her career participating in the
long ascendance to power of the NGOs in Haiti. Prior to becoming Prime
Minister, Pierre-Louis headed FOKAL, the Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète
in Creole, the Fondation Connaissance & Liberté in French, a
foundation created in 1995 by billionaire George Soros' Open Society
Institute (OSI). In a report on FOKAL, OSI President Aryeh Neier
points out: "The Open Society Institute founded FOKAL that year to
take advantage of the transition to strengthen democracy and open
society values and practices." With an annual budget of over $4
million (US), FOKAL was widely know as one of the most influential
NGOs in Haiti.

All would not go according to OSI's plan; "[T]he second coming of
Aristide proved a disaster. He was more concerned with retaining power
than enacting reforms." That is to say that Aristide was concerned
with recovering the 3 years of his mandate lost to the 1991-1994
Cedras dictatorship and resisting the neoliberal demands made by the
Americans and the rest of the "donor" countries. In the following
years, foreign funded NGOs such as FOKAL would be mobilized against
such outrageous violations of democratic norms.

FOKAL's primary focus is a library program, along with educational and
cultural activities, serving Port-au-Prince's upper and middle-class
students. "Some of them go on to attend university in Haiti, to study
law, medicine, education, agriculture, and computer science. Many
leave the country for the United States and Canada. In 2002, Canadian
computer companies recruited some 20,000 Haitian young people with the
lure of permanent visas."

FOKAL also operates a program in Martissant, a peripheral slum of
Port-au-Prince, as well as giving "general support to peasants'
associations, community radio stations, human rights organizations,
women's groups, and other non-governmental organizations."

The founding of FOKAL was but one instance in the creation of the NGO
nexus by the "international community" (read: the imperialist
countries) in Haiti. The NGO nexus aims to succeed where repressive
force has failed, "killing with kindness" in an attempt to suffocate
the vibrant grassroots activity that overthrew the Duvalier
dictatorship and brought the Lavalas movement to power. As one Haitian
peasant told anthropologist Jennie M. Smith, "They call it
development, but it is more like envelopment!"

This is hardly an overstatement. The tremendous resources disposed of
by these organization cannot but have a massive impact on the
political scene, operating as they are amidst such extreme
deprivation. If you want to get your daily bread, why bother building
a powerful socio-political movement to press your demands on an
impotent state? Why become involved in a democratic process
increasingly hollowed-out by neoliberal reforms?

This approach has met with some success. As Stan Goff notes, "a number
of the formerly militant popular organizations, like Tet Kole and the
MPP (Papay Peasant's Movement) have been slowly co-opted by the steady
trickle of project dollars flowing through the almost interminable
list of NGOs infesting every corner of Haiti." However, the continuing
strength of the Lavalas movement has demonstrated that Haiti's popular
classes are not so easily coopted.

Yet the same cannot be said of those recruited by the NGOs to act as
their local administrators. Who are the administrators? They are
people like Pierre-Louis who, "as a member of the affluent, educated
elite, could have left Haiti, but . . . stayed to work for the
improvement of [their] country." Pierre-Louis's trajectory is
emblematic of the journey taken by large segments of Haiti's educated
classes across the political spectrum.

Like virtually all of Aristide's elite "left" critics, Pierre-Louis
was at one time a close ally of the popular movement, radicalized in
the course of the struggle against the Duvalier regime. And like many
such critics, her split with Lavalas came when the expected spoils of
power did not come her way. As Kim Ives notes, "Pierre-Louis was
previously considered for the post of Prime Minister by President
Aristide in 1993, although he chose instead publisher Robert Malval."

The disappointment of the middle classes' exaggerated revolutionary
expectations by Aristide and the Lavalas project - whose reformist
goals nonetheless threatened the established order - likely also
played a role. Illuminating in this regard is Corey Robin's discussion
of "the inevitable deceleration and disillusionment that consume
failed movements of reform" noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in "one of
his lesser-known writings on the French Revolution":

"After every great defeat comes a great despair. Comrade accuses
comrade of treachery or cowardice, soldiers denounce generals for
marching them toward folly and everyone is soon seized by what
Tocqueville described as the 'contempt' that broken revolutionaries
'acquire for the very convictions and passions' that moved them in the
first place. Forced to abandon the cause for which they gave up so
much, failed rebels 'turn against themselves and consider their hopes
as having been childish - their enthusiasm and, above all, their
devotion absurd.' "

At the same time, the waning desire for transformative social change
competed with other, more particularistic interests for the heart of
the middle class. As Robert Fatton Jr. explains: "In a country where
destitution is the norm and private avenues to wealth are rare,
politics becomes an entrepreneurial vocation, virtually the sole means
of material and social advancement for those not born into wealth and
prestige." Ironically, the political representatives of the middle
class ultimately did the most to advance the neoliberal compromises
forced on Aristide.

These sectors subsequently turned to Soros and other generous funders
of "civil society" from the North, who were busy creating a
multiplicity of parallel state-like structures and looking for
competent - and politically reliable - bureaucrats. By offering better
pay and conditions than Haiti's governement ever could to give to its
civil servants, the building up of these "states-within-a-state"
simultaneously led to the degrading of Haiti's state apparatus.

Perversely, this process played no small part in the ascent to power
of Pierre-Louis. A glowing article on Alterpresse (a CIDA-funded news
website), for instance, cites her experience managing NGO projects
across the country as qualifying her for the post of Prime Minister.

The dovetailing of class interests and political rivalries is typical
of how "democracy promotion" interventions exert their power: "It is
important to emphasize that many individuals brought into US
'democracy promotion' programs are not simple puppets of US policy and
their organizations are not necessarily 'fronts' (or in CIA jargon,
'cut-outs'). Very often they involve genuine local leaders seeking to
further their own interests and projects in the context of internal
political competition and conflict and of heavy US influence over the
local scene." (William I. Robinson)

Administrators such as Pierre-Louis fulfilled the function of
gatekeepers in choosing which popular organizations to support and are
quite aware of the role they played for the donors. "FOKAL vouches for
the organizations it works with. 'If the money is channeled through
us, we will monitor and account for the funds, and issue reports on
the progress being made,' [said Pierre-Louis.]" There is more than
proper accounting at play here.

The OSI report gives us an idea of what "progress" means for FOKAL and
its carefully selected partners. As early as 2000, a peasant group
supported by FOKAL was organizing "a community meeting at which people
vowed not to vote as a protest against the earlier fraudulent
parliamentary elections." The OAS declared the elections "free and
fair" and noted that Haitians "voted in large numbers in an atmosphere
of relative calm and absence of intimidation." Yet since the
hands-down winner of the election, Aristide's Famni Lavalas party, was
seeking to undo some of the damage years of neoliberalism had done to
Haiti, for the OSI and other donors wishing to uphold "open society
values", the results were clearly "fraudulent".

Creating the justifications for the February 29, 2004 coup d'État was
an essential role of groups like FOKAL. As Kim Ives writes:
"Pierre-Louis became alienated from Aristide and his Lavalas Family
party in recent years. In league with the bourgeoisie's 'civil'
opposition front Group of 184, FOKAL played a small but visible role
in late 2003 and early 2004 in characterizing the Constitutional
government as repressive and intimidating." Pierre-Louis would
denounce the Aristide "government's hostility to higher education and
to basic human rights, including the right to demonstrate peacefully"
following a Dec. 5, 2003 skirmish between college students and
pro-government popular organizations at the State University.
Pierre-Louis was also one of the signatories of a petition in 2004
decrying the bicentenial celebrations as a "search for an impossible
legitimacy" by the Lavalas government.

It is also worth noting how tightly-knit the NGO nexus is, even across
nominal "right-left" divisions. Hence, we find on the board of
directors of FOKAL none other than Danièle Magloire, formerly of the
women's coalition CONAP and now director of Rights and Democracy's
Haiti office. The board of FOKAL's fund-raising branch in the US
features a certain Alice G. Blanchet, listed as Director of
Development for Advocacy with the Boulos family-funded Haiti Democracy
Project. Pierre-Louis was also director of the Institut Culturel Karl
Levesque (ICKL), a member organization of PAPDA.

The growth of NGOs and the atrophying of the Haitian state are in
reality two sides of the same coin; the role of government is reduced
to implementing neoliberal policies favorable to foreign capital while
managing the haze of NGOs that effectively run the country, with the
UN occupation in the background, ready to dish out the necessary
repression. Michele Pierre-Louis, well-attuned to "open society
value$", makes a perfect candidate for the job.