Kevin Edmonds is an Assistant Professor in Caribbean Studies at the University of Toronto and a member of the Caribbean Solidarity Network. Grace Wu is an interdisciplinary researcher and a member of the Caribbean Solidarity Network. Her current project, Remembering Refuge is a digital oral history archive supported by the National Geographic Society and highlights the experiences of people from El Salvador, Guatemala and Haiti.
The Caribbean, and Haiti specifically, has always been a testing ground to see how deep the principles espoused by Western powers really are. Whether it is the idea of democracy, freedom, sovereignty and self determination or the demand for human rights, a quick glance at the region’s history reveals a clear double standard in practice, demonstrating a consistent pattern of contradictions when it comes to the struggles of Caribbean people to turn these ideas into reality. Currently, we are seeing the selective use and abuse of the Haitian people for self interested political purposes all across the Americas – alongside a total media blackout about the wider context of the economic crisis, violent political instability and government repression, rooted in a longer history of foreign intervention driving people to leave.
Considering the intense damage wreaked by the long-standing pattern of direct political interference of the United States (the1991 and 2004 coups; backing of the Duvalier dictatorship; US military occupation from 1915-1934), one might have thought a Trump policy of non-intervention towards Haiti would be less damaging, but this has not been the case. Instead of “championing” the Haitian diaspora in the US as he promised, Trump manufactured a political crisis via unconventional attacks against the diaspora, compounding domestic problems in Haiti by interrupting remittances, which the World Bank estimates accounts for 30% of the GDP, job creation and migration flows which have kept many households afloat. Trump’s attacks against Haitians stood as an early litmus test for how far and how hard he could push his anti-immigration line.
On November 20, 2017, the Trump administration announced that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians would end in July 2019, at which point some 59,000 Haitian immigrants with legal status in the United States would face deportation. TPS for Haitians began after the 2010 earthquake displaced tens of thousands of people. Suspecting that President Trump would discontinue their legal status since he was elected, over 8,000 Haitians fled to Canada between 2017 and 2019.
Haitain diaspora communities living in Florida, New York, and New England crossed the Canada-US border at an entry point in Hemmingford at the New York-Quebec border, also known as Roxham Road. In Canada, right-wing politicians and media have used Haitians as “Exhibit A” in the federal election that takes place today, as a racist, xenophobic example of why the immigration system and the border are “broken” and mismanaged. For example, on October 9, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer campaigned at Roxham Road, vowing “to get tough on immigration”. Scheer’s choice of Roxham Road was a symbolic dog whistle, since that border has been widely publicized as the entry point for many Haitians who have been accused in the media of taking advantage of Canadian immigration “loopholes”; in actuality, Haitians were a fraction of 45,000 people who crossed to seek refuge.
Outside of the usual fear mongering, the lack of media coverage and analysis leaves the dominant racist and decontextualized narrative unchallenged. Despite the 13-year occupation of the country by a United Nations military force, Haitians are repeatedly portrayed as undeserving “irregular” immigrants, who are not worthy of refugee claims upon arrival because they are fleeing poverty and not what is typically considered by the US and Canadian governments as politically motivated violence. In Canada, this has created a resurgence of violent anti-immigrant groups like the Northern Guard, who vowed to launch armed patrols of the border and track down undocumented Haitians within their respective communities.
In response to the demonization of Haitian refugees, approximately 15 members of Solidarité Québec-Haiti #Petrochallenge 2019 occupied the campaign office of Justin Trudeau on September 30. Jean St. Vil, an activist and organizer with the group remarked that “The Canadian government is an active participant in the return of Duvalierism in Haiti, first through their collaboration with the coup in 2004, the continued involvement in militarizing the police force, which is essentially a way to reintegrate the former right wing paramilitaries into their service”.
Adding more political context, St. Vil says, “At the political level, Canada is a very visible force in the CORE Group. The CORE Group is essentially the same thing in the FOCAL Report published in April 2004 “The Role of Canada in Haiti After Aristide” which identified what at the time was called the ‘Donors Group’ consisting of Canada, the US, Brazil, Europe, the OAS and the UN… As such, Canada is an effective member of the occupation and have facilitated the return of an oppressive dictatorship, which is something that we do not think is acceptable Canadian foreign policy.”
However, beyond the usual suspects of US and Canada engaging in anti-Haitian sentiment, others in the region perpetuate the same lines. In the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, the Bahamian government issued a warning to undocumented migrants (particularly aimed at Haitians who are especially stigmatized) that instead of being allowed to return to the communities of Mudd, Pigeon Peas and Sand Banks to rebuild their homes, they would be subjected to deportation. Prime Minister Hubert Minnis stated, “I serve notice to all those who are here illegally that they can leave voluntarily or they will be forced to leave”, with his government going so far as to directly take over the land upon which these communities once stood and bulldozing all remaining structures, even resorting to the use of drones and helicopters to ensure that nobody returns.
This is despite the fact that Haitians have lived in communities like Mudd for many generations (amounting to an estimated 10 percent of the population), and the undocumented, precarious low cost Haitian labour has always played a large part in ensuring that the tourism, agriculture, construction and domestic worker industries remained profitable.
What these examples demonstrate is that Haiti and its people are facing persecution and stigma at a time when we should be offering refuge, compassion and solidarity. While it is true that the origins of the current crisis in Haiti are complex and rooted in a longer struggle to suppress the popular will of the Haitian people – this is not an excuse to regard the Haitians fleeing escalating political violence and repression as queue jumpers or criminals. Complexity is no excuse for evading moral responsibility.
Haitians are not protesting in the streets by the hundreds of thousands for over a year because of the fear that a future government may infringe on their human rights; they are protesting living under a murderous system led by a corrupt, illegitimate government supported by the United States and Canada, whose economic policies repeatedly violate the right to live in peace or meet their basic needs. As a result, many of them are fleeing for their own safety and survival.
While we are not naïve to the fact that serious news stories related to human rights are nearly always overshadowed by gossip or sports, the deliberate omissions of the killing of pro-democracy protesters by the government in Haiti reveals the deeply racist and dehumanizing nature of the mainstream media in North America, but this is also clearly the case across the Caribbean.
This human and geopolitical double standard is why the media is quick to label protesters in Venezuela or Hong Kong as heroic and noble defenders of democracy, while Haitians are simply rioters and unruly mobs. Haiti is being judged by a very different set of rules. For example, Venezuela’s 2018 elections, which the international mainstream media have labelled fraudulent, with electoral turnout ranging between 46 to 26 percent (depending on whether one goes by the numbers put forward by the National Electoral Council or the opposition), still had a larger turnout than the election that brought Jovenel Moise to power. In the 2016 elections, the Provisional Electoral Council (the national electoral body) revealed that just 21 percent of Haitians voted. Despite this, Moise is considered a legitimate president by nearly everyone but the Haitian people.
If this record low support was not terrible enough, it was compounded by an investigation by Senate auditors that Moise and his predecessor Michel Martelly oversaw the disappearance of $2 billion in PetroCaribe funds. Add this to a country trying to work through failed reconstruction efforts, several hurricanes and a steep rise in the cost of living, leaving the Haitian people with few options other than taking to the street. Yet Moise is supported by the US and Canada because he has supported their position when it comes to Venezuela, and as such they turn a blind eye to his low approval and increasingly murderous tendencies. When the Haitian Police Force were directly implicated in the execution of 71 citizens in the community of La Saline on November 13 2018 (including babies and the elderly), next to nothing appeared in the North American media – and political leaders across the world said nothing. Less than three months later, over the course of 10 days from February 7 to 17 this year, Haitian Human Rights Organizations reported that at least 40 protestors calling for an end to governmental corruption and the high cost of living were killed, and another 82 injured by the Haitian National Police (with 17 executed by gunshots to the head). Again, outside of a few scattered reports of the protests by mostly independent media, coverage was nearly non-existent and international condemnation was nowhere to be heard.
Just 10 days after a young man was shot by police in Hong Kong, news came out that the Haitian National Police were again responsible for the deaths of 10 pro-democracy protesters on October 11. Once again, there was virtually no coverage of the state executions in Haiti, by either regional or international press, to say nothing of the response from political leaders who also remained silent.
That such a troubling pattern of hypocrisy exists tells us that there are very real human and geographic limitations of supposed universally cherished ideals like human rights and democracy. If we are serious about standing up to tyrants, valuing human life and encouraging basic human decency in our societies, we need to make sure that these values extend to Haitians as well. To do otherwise is to engage in a self interested Caribbean version of, “First they came for the Haitians, but I did not speak out because I was not Haitian”. We know how the rest of that story goes.
