Ja: Seaga is wrong!

Jamaica's Opposition Leader, Edward Seaga, has said two significant things concerning the Haitian civil war. 1) Aristide must go, and 2) a United Nations peacekeeping force should be sent in to keep the peace and prepare for new elections.

Seaga's position is based on his evaluation that "[t]he weakness in the accord is that Aristide does not have the political strength to sustain his position, and international political support by way of multilateral consensus will not enable him to survive." The underlying assumption of Seaga's pragmatic stance is that the international community is willing to talk rather than act to support a democracy. (Whether or not one agrees with Aristide's actions, it cannot be denied that he was elected via a process that the international community deemed to be fair.) In this, Seaga is quite right, as the world body has so amply demonstrated with Iraq. However, what is at stake here is not Aristide's power as president, but the process by which a people decide who will govern them. If Haiti changes its government by guns, machetes, and blood this time, as it has in the past, then there can not be much hope that Haiti will not do so in the future. Any powerful Haitian who has some fantastic dream can then rise up and spearhead a bloody revolution to redress whatever grievances he may have. For Haiti to have a future, the civil war must be put down and Aristide must not be forced to leave at gun point. Thus, in order for Haiti to survive, the international community must abandon its penchant for endless debate and act swiftly and surely. However, the international community lacks the will to act (case in point is Iraq); therefore, it is likely that history will repeat itself, this time with Aristide, and later with someone else. For Haiti, such recycled history means that it will lose any hope of restoration of the land, redevelopment of infrastructure, and becoming an independent and viable state in the community of nations.

Seaga's second point pertains to the role that the UN should play in Haiti. He states that "[a]s anarchy increases and rebel groups proliferate and expand, a multilateral force from the UN should be recruited to restore peace on condition that President Aristide resigns." At worst, Seaga is ignorant of or ignoring UN history; at best, he is delusionary. The UN has no record of restoring peace in any country. Should full-fledged civil war come to Haiti, the UN is highly unlikely to function according to the doctrine of peace through strength. Therefore, the UN's response to Opposition's slaughter of Aristide's supporters would be vain hand-wringing.

Rather than the UN, Caricom, though financially strapped, would be better off acting in conjunction with the US and providing soldiers who would be truly willing to shoot, if necessary, to preserve the peace. Once peace has been restored, what then? The position of this blog is that with the restoration of peace, neither Aristide nor anybody belonging to the Opposition should be in power once peace is restored. Instead, Aristide, like the Opposition, must be asked to stand down and abandon any attempt to return to or assume power. Instead, Haiti must be established as an under-developed partner of a country, such as the US, which has the will and the means to restore Haiti's political, economic, and physical infrastructure. During this period of partnership, Haiti can be re-educated into democratic ways and processes. In this time, while Haiti should have a governor, the people should be encouraged to select lower level functionaries via the electoral process. As time goes by and the process becomes more engrained, then, a Haitian governor should be elected and monitored by both Caricom and the US. Only after Haitians have become accustomed to peaceful change via the voting booth, should they, now cognizant of their rights as citizens, be left unfettered to govern themselves.

As for France, which has indicated an adventuresome willingness to act unilaterally in Haiti, that must be discouraged. France has had no connection with Haiti for 200 years, and France ought not to use Haiti to support its absurd claims of being a power to rival the US.

Democratic institutions are vital to political stability and economic growth in the Caribbean. History has shown us that. Therefore, Seaga would better serve both Jamaica and the Caribbean by lending his voice in support of such. Haiti does not need careless words right now.