Haitian Politics: We Don't Have all The Answers, and Neither Do You

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters/article/973841--a-mockery-of-justice-in-haiti

A Letter to the editor published in The Toronto Star (published 4/12/2011)

A mockery of justice in Haiti

Your editorial welcomes and endorses the result of the election of Michel Martelly in Haiti. But your editorial of Nov. 30, 2010 called the first round of this vote a “fraud” and said it should be scrapped in favour of a new and fair election. 

You had it right the first time. Less that 25 per cent of Haitians voted in the two rounds of this electoral exercise. It was organized so as to produce a desired result, namely that one or another right-wing candidate emerge victorious while the voice of sovereignty and social justice be excluded. 

A mockery of justice and democracy has been perpetrated in Haiti, courtesy of nearly $30 million of foreign funding of the exercise. Haiti now has a president with little legitimacy and with ties to Haiti’s Duvalierist past. 

You can bet that the democratic uprising in the Middle East is being closely studied in Haiti. Haitians will not be marginalized for long. 

Roger Annis, Vancouver

Mr. Annis maintains a blog called "The Toronto Haiti Action Committee" (http://www.thac.ca/blog/9)

To be clear, I'm not sure its of any use for me to care much about who is or isn't voted into office. The over-all impression I get from friends is that Michael Martelly was the popular candidate by official and unofficial polls alike, but we all know how subject polls can be to manipulation.

The need is to great and the problems too complex for an outsider to do much. Wailing and railing over injustices, whether actual or imagined, will not fix the problems any more than throwing money at them will. We have a tendency, in North America, to think that we can solve just about any problem if we throw enough money at it or send third party "observers" to run the country for them.

That's pretty arrogant of us. I'm not picking on Mr. Annis, who seems rather well-informed with first hand experience. I'm just using his letter to the editor as an example of how little a layperson, casual social activist or newspaper reporter understands the Haitian plight. I'm also not giving him carte blanche editorial sovereignty or supporting his opinions with any findings of my own. What I do want to make clear is that when we decide that we have all the answers and rush in with our check-books ready, megaphones in hand, or guns blazing we almost inevitably mess things up.

I also would never even attempt to provide an answer to this in a single pithy statement or even a wordy blog. I just want to encourage you to continue to give and pray for Haiti, the NGO's, the Haitian Government, the UN figure heads and advisors and the missionaries over there right now. Material things are part of the solution, that is way we give. Political oversight and activism are part of the answer, that's why we get involved. Loving, caring and earnestly listening to them in a relational setting changes lives. This is why we send our missionaries, doctors, nurses, laborers, pastors and church groups over there. We continue to struggle against innumerable odds, feeling overwhelmed by what's at stake while the missionaries embedded there have been a source of hope for generations of Haitians. Missionaries are God's laborers, there to serve and love.

The missionaries aren't there to just give them the answers or make Haiti into a Carribean Island version of the US, but to show them that its not about making us look good, to patronize and exploit them, or to feel better about our own significance. We go and we send because they are our neighbors, created in God's image just like us. We are loving them because Jesus' first loved them. God began working over there long before the first missionaries or the 2010 earthquake. We are just continuing in the work He started, with humble hearts.