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My name is Lydia Polgreen, and I’m an opinion columnist for “The New York Times.”
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I think you have a lot of people in Haiti who are ready at this moment to help build this new future. And really, what they need is financial support, security support, and also, the time and space to build their own ideas of what a future Haiti could look like. And just because there is this long history of failure doesn’t mean that success is not possible.
I’ve been traveling to Haiti as a journalist since 2003. It was actually the first big international assignment that I was ever asked to do. And it began, I think, a decades-long engagement with the story of Haiti and its struggle for self-determination, for security, for dignity, and just a deep interest in the lives and culture of the Haitian people.
Whenever you’re talking about Haiti, it’s hard to know where to begin the story because, obviously, the country was born in this extraordinary act of liberation way back in the 19th century, but this most recent crisis, I think, is worth just sort of taking on its own terms. And it really began with the assassination of Haiti’s president, a man called Jovenel Moise, who was assassinated in July of 2021.
And Haiti just hasn’t been able to recover since then. It’s had an appointed prime minister. A man named Ariel Henry ostensibly has been the head of the government, but for the past three years, has not been able to organize new elections to return Haiti to democracy. He’s become a very unpopular figure. The civil society organizations and political parties and others have been pushing him to resign.
And then he was also facing pressure from these armed groups that have popped up in Haiti and have been a very, very big part of the crisis because there’s just real kind of, like, lawlessness and violence happening in the streets. And under some pressure from various regional leaders, and of course, the internal pressure within Haiti, he did agree to resign.
It’s hard to talk about a crisis in Haiti without thinking about the kind of broader global context. The United States has meddled and interfered. They’ve invaded, they’ve occupied, they’ve sanctioned. They’ve restored leaders. They’ve backed dictators. They’ve tried to bring democracy back. And it’s a constant back and forth, almost to the point where it’s sometimes hard to draw a line of where the United States’ policy and action ends and where Haitian agency begins.
The question of what we owe Haiti now, I think, is a really complex one. And I don’t think that there’s an easy answer. Where I ultimately come down is that if, in the past, the United States has had a kind of paternalistic attitude towards Haiti, where you’re kind of trying to tell Haiti what to do, tell Haiti how it should be governed, who should be in charge, that the role that the US should play now is really more of a midwife. And it’s a role of supporting and creating an environment in which Haitians themselves can determine their own future.
I think every American needs to understand that Haiti is not some separate thing from the United States. Our fates, our stories, our histories are deeply, deeply intertwined. The United States owes, I believe, a deep debt to Haiti. And so much of the story of what Haiti has become is a story of our misdeeds and actions over many, many years. So there’s a historic debt there.
Also, one thing that you’ll often hear people say when they say why we should care about what happens in Haiti, they’ll often talk about migration. There is a very, very ugly history of using Haitians as a kind of bogeyman, and deportations continue.
But I think that it goes even deeper than that during the early days of the AIDS crisis. For example, when people would talk about who has HIV and AIDS, it would be homosexuals, Haitians, and hemophiliacs. The United States has a lot to answer for in terms of the relationship that we’ve had with Haiti over a very, very long time. And they’re part of our story.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been tracking these conversations with various political groups and civic groups and religious groups that have just been working tirelessly to come up with a blueprint for what a just transition in Haiti back towards democracy might look like.
And the one thing that was really standing in their way was that the prime minister was refusing to step down. And look, now he’s gone, and there’s an opportunity to take all of that incredibly difficult and hard work that these people have done and imagine a new and different future for Haiti. And that’s the thing that gives me a sense of hope. There are lots and lots and lots of problems on the horizon. There are lots of things that could derail it. But this is a moment for a fresh start for a country that desperately needs one.