Gya: So what's the U.S. really doing with Haiti?

Haiti is not, and in the last fifty years has probably never been a state in the modern sense of that term. There are no functioning civil institutions which would allow for bureaucratic government in the traditional sense, let alone any which have ever demonstrated the kind of autonomy necessary to sustain a viable democracy. The situation at the moment is made worse by the fact that there is also no single authority whose reach extends into every community in the land; authority, such as it is, derives from the barrel of a gun, and the authority conferred by one weapon can only be superseded by the authority of a bigger one.

Currently, the country is a patchwork of armed gangs, who protect their own piece of real estate against penetration by outsiders, dispensing 'justice' within their borders with varying degrees of brutality. Superimposed on this, of course, are the 'peacekeepers' with the biggest guns of all, who as yet have not elected to enforce the authority which those weapons confer.

When the Americans zoomed into Haiti for the second time in a decade with the French and others in tow, the argument in favour of their intervention was that they could prevent the descent of the country into anarchy; they could disarm the gunmen; and they could give support to an interim administration which would bring together the polarized political factions in order to create the conditions for another attempt at some institution-building, and for the holding of a free and fair election.

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