Lining up in Port-au-Prince for drinking water provided by a local charitable group.
Many children never even set foot in the slum’s poorly equipped school.
Haïti
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Timeline
1804: Haiti
becomes the first independent country of former slaves in the world.
1957: François “Papa Doc” Duvalier elected president, a title extended
for life in 1964. He rules with an iron fist until his death in 1971,
killing thousands.
1971-86: Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier succeeds his father as “president-for-life”.
A general revolt forces him to flee to France in 1986. The army takes over
and promises constitutional government.
1986-December 1990: A succession of mostly military regimes, until the
landslide election victory of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a left-wing Catholic priest.
September 1991: The army overthrows Aristide. International sanctions are
imposed on Haiti.
1993: The UN orders an oil and arms embargo. The army agrees to allow Aristide
to take power again, but prevents his return from exile.
1994: On September 19, U.S. troops peacefully occupy the country and restore
Aristide to power on October 15.
1995: A UN peacekeeping force takes over from US troops. An Aristide protégé,
René Préval, is elected president virtually unopposed.
1996-98: Violence and killings increase and the ruling Lavalas party splits.
An electoral dispute leads to the resignation of the prime minister in 1997, but
parliament refuses to approve any successor.
1999: Préval appoints a new government independently of parliament.
2000: Parliamentary elections in May are won by Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party,
but disputed results draw international criticism and an opposition boycott of presidential
elections in November, which Aristide wins (92%) against minor candidates.
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We
need government to do for the people what they cannot do for themselves.
Abraham
Lincoln, 16th U.S. president (1809-1865)
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Key
figures
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Population:
7.9 million (1999)
GNP per capita:
$460 (1999)
GNP per capita
annual growth rate:
–3.2 % (1990-98)
Life expectancy
at birth:
54 years (1998)
Adult illiteracy rate:
52.2 % (1998)
Sources: World Bank, UNDP. |
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The
inhabitants of the Port-au-Prince slum of Martissant have created a mosaic of community
groups to fill in as best they can for a crying absence of public services
Things are going from
bad to worse in Martissant. It’s the same all over the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince,
but the situation is even more acute in this sprawling slum that stretches up the
side of a hill south of the city. At the last count, in 1996, about 25,000 people
lived here. And the number is growing all the time because of the high birth rate
and the exodus of people from the countryside.There’s filth everywhere—puddles of
dirty water in potholed streets, gutters choked with garbage, buildings erected without
any planning. The inhabitants, who lack even the most basic public services, call
themselves “people on the outside.”
But they have laboured, since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986, to build
up alternative services enabling the community to live, or rather, to survive. Today,
jobless youngsters just out of school, others who have learned a trade, unemployed
people and women are all involved in running a variety of community groups dedicated
to different goals.
Édouard, a father of three, is an active leader of the Youth Association of
Saint Bernadette and Malet Streets (AJSM). “Our first concern is the garbage,” he
says. AJSM members, most of whom have no job, pick up the rubbish and take it down
the hill to the main road. The garbage trucks don’t pass through the teeming streets
of Martissant.
The group has submitted a $900 project proposal to the Port-au-Prince city authorities
to buy gloves, wheelbarrows, picks and shovels, and even megaphones to keep people
informed. So far, there has been no response. “We’ve been shunted from one office
to another,” says Malherbe, an AJSM member. “If this goes on, we’ll call everyone
together and stage a demonstration.”
Garbage disposal and other sensitive problems sometimes set off bloody disputes between
people who live higher up the hill and those lower down who suffer as a result of
the rubbish dumped there. Calling the police doesn’t help: they refuse to get involved
and advise people to deal with it themselves.
When neighbourhood quarrels erupt, people turn to the older and wiser inhabitants
of the town—often natives of Martissant or homeowners—to mediate and restore peace.
When this happens, two or three elders put their heads together to find a satisfactory
solution rooted in common law. Recourse to the state legal system is rare. “It’s
a waste of time,” says one man. “Justice can be bought here, like rice and peas at
the market.”
Demanding that a neighbour be taken to court could also be risky. Would the bailiff
dare come face to face with the chimères, the gangs of jobless youths in the
pay of the ruling party? Confident of their unbridled power, these youths use intimidation
to control access to the slums they hold sway over.
The young people of Martissant have also formed “vigilance brigades” of 10 to 15
people to defend themselves against robbers and prevent crime after dark. Not a full-time
force, they are mainly active after an upsurge of crime.
“We look out for trouble from the rooftops,” says Charles, who belongs to one of
these groups. “As soon as we see a zenglendo [Haitian Creole for a thug], we alert
everyone by blowing into a lambi [a giant sea shell].” The inhabitants immediately
spring into action, catch the zenglendo and take him to the police, who often let
the culprits go free. “So sometimes he gets lynched by an angry crowd,” says Charles.
During the day, Martissant hums with activity. Vendors wander the streets hawking
their goods while others set up shop along the main road by the seashore, often spreading
their wares out in the middle of the street. Sometimes the authorities send out men
to force them back on to the pavements.
Most of the women in Martissant work outside the formal economy. They have no ready
access to credit, so they turn to money-lenders who “stab” them with exorbitant interest
rates that can reach 30 percent a month. Lenders resort to any means, including armed
force and violence, to make debtors repay their loans. But there is no protection
to be found: victims have little faith in the state’s capacity to address their grievances.
“We’ve set up an informal community bank,” says Marie-Eramite, of the Martissant
Organization of Valiant Women (OFVM). About 50 people pay one gourde (four U.S. cents)
each day. After a month, the kitty is handed over as credit to two members of the
group. This works better, she says, than the more traditional system in which monthly
deposits are made.
“The state should do its job and build us a market here,” says Guerda, a single mother
with five children. Like many heads of families, her main worry is paying the rent
for her “house,” a single room for which she pays between $200 and $300 a year.
Bribes
to go to high school
“The
rent was due yesterday and I’m busy lying low,” she says. Guerda earns less than
36 gourdes ($1.40), which is the official daily minimum wage. She knows her landlord
wants to raise the rent by about $80 a year, even though she can barely manage the
current amount. Guerda also points out that landlords in Martissant “don’t pay any
taxes on the rent they collect.”
Only a tiny number of houses or shacks are connected to the electricity grid. Many
people tap into the supply illegally, using special wiring. And some sell the stolen
electricity to their neighbours for about $2 a month.
When there’s a fire, “it’s up to all of us to put it out,” says Marie-Eramite. “Last
summer, we had to form a konbit [a Creole word designating a group of people working
together] to extinguish the flames. The whole neighbourhood helped fetch water in
whatever was at hand. The children helped by throwing stones at the blaze. By the
time the firemen arrived, the fire had been extinguished. At first, they refused
to help, saying the streets were too narrow for them to enter.”
Parents in Martissant dream of being able to send their children to secondary school.
But this is hard to do, says Guerda, “because they ask us for bribes of about $40
per pupil.” The cost of schooling rises every year and the collèges [high
schools] hardly deserve the name. “When my kids go off to school each morning to
Hermann Hereaux, one of the oldest state schools around here, I worry about the walls
collapsing onto them,” says Yolette. There are no toilets or drinking water at the
school. The neighbourhood sometimes goes without water for three months at a stretch.
The parents have decided to get together to buy the materials to build new wooden
benches for the children to sit on. “The carpenters are going to make them for free,”
she says.
Valiant as the efforts of civil society may be, they soon come up against the obstacles
of enormous needs and meagre resources. Take for example the Haitian Women’s Solidarity
Organization, which opened a clinic in Martissant in 1996, the slum’s first medical
facility. “We look after women and children,” says Marie-Yolenne, who works there.
The clinic is open three days a week and has a female gynaecologist who also acts
as a general practitioner. She sees about 30 patients a day, who pay 15 gourdes ($0.60)
for an appointment. But, she says, “they struggle to pay for the medicine.”
Like the inhabitants of other slums, the people of Martissant believed change would
come with the December 1990 presidential elections, which brought the left-wing priest
Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power. But they were disappointed. Far fewer went out to
vote last November 26 when he ran for re-election.
“We still hope things will change,” says Guerda stoically. “Because we just can’t
go on like this.”
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Gérard
Barthélemy*:
“A profound mistrust of the state”
An armed revolt
led by emancipated slaves won independence for Haiti in 1804, at a time when it was
considered the world’s richest colony. Half the country’s 400,000 slaves had been
born in Africa, so they had to fashion an entirely new country, building a nation
and a state structure at the same time. Haiti’s history since then has, understandably,
been neither easy nor conventional.
The former slaves quickly fled the old plantations and in time became owners of small
plots of land. The rural population dispersed as far as they could go, into remote
mountain areas, forming a very small number of villages. Most towns were established
along the coast and continued to be trading posts, as in colonial times. Only now,
they were dominated by the new local ruling class, which quickly took the place of
the departed slave-owners by restoring colonial institutions and practices.
Thus, from the outset, the new state locked itself into the role of a violent and
arbitrary predator. The rural population chose to ignore it or find ways to circumvent
its authority. The state seemed to offer the people nothing of value, and it was
shunned to the largest extent possible.
But as dictatorships and strong-arm regimes succeeded one another throughout the
19th and 20th centuries, Haitians tried to find ways to provide themselves the basic
community services that the state failed to deliver. A local grassroots autonomy
was born, and it functioned and coexisted alongside authoritarian regimes. The state
in fact saw this as a convenient escape from their responsibilities, including funding
for education, health and infrastructure.
The strength of this phenomenon was illustrated in 1986 when the Duvalier dictatorship
was overthrown, revealing the existence of an impressive number of spontaneous social
networks. Hitherto very informal, the structures comprised about 30,000 community
groups and grassroots organizations of all kinds. Only a few of these groups were
openly political. Nearly all of them were set up to take charge of the most basic
aspects of urban and rural life by trying to meet the needs of the community, albeit
with scant resources.
But history still weighs heavily on Haiti. The old fear of state power, heightened
by the military coup in 1991, remains very strong. Local structures remain semi-clandestine
in order to protect their participants when necessary. Also, the historic fragmentation
of Haitian society, which is reflected in its physical dispersion, has left a dearth
of bodies able to bridge the gap between the people and the state.
It is still very hard today to bring together the multitude of groups that have sprung
up in Haiti to defend people against the state or compensate for its failings. And
thus it is hard to lay the foundations of a modern, democratic dialogue between the
government and the people.
* Author
of several books on Haitian society, including the recent Créoles-Bossales:
le conflit haïtien, (Ibis Rouge, 2000, Paris).
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