By Michael Deibert*
Submitted to AlterPresse [1]
Jake Johnston’s new book, Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti (St. Martin’s Press), is a work that exists with a historical and moral tension at its core. On one hand, some parts of the book are a sober and valuable autopsy of the myriad of ways the international community has failed Haiti, particularly since its devastating 2010 earthquake. This laudable achievement however, coexists uneasily within a frequently shrill and highly ideological polemic that shows a shaky grasp of Haiti’s tangled history, employs questionable sourcing and too frequently makes demonstrably false claims in an attempt to bolster many of its arguments.
A number of Johnston’s critiques of the interaction of what is broadly called “the international community” with the Haitian state and its people are well-considered. The 2009 United Nations report on Haiti by the Oxford University economist Paul Collier, which would serve, to a great degree, as a lens through which foreign powers would view the country’s potential, comes in for a fair drubbing, as does the focus by some sections of the foreign media on non-existent “looting” in the wake of the January 2010 tremor. The book’s detailing of the ineffectiveness of successive U.S. aid programmes to Haiti is useful, as is its tracing of exactly where some of that aid went and how much of it ended up back in the coffers of U.S. entities. The light that it shines on the immense influence that relatively obscure figures such as Hillary Clinton’s Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills had on U.S. Haiti policy in the aftermath of the earthquake is very enlightening, as are its revelations about the byzantine network of shell companies used by former president Michel Martelly (who governed from 2011 to 2016) and his entourage.
Where the book runs into trouble, though, is when Johnston - who works as an analyst for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-wing Washington, DC think-tank - begins to pull back from the fruits of his labours as a researcher and tries to make broad claims about Haiti, its people and its history, something that is always dangerous to do about any place, let alone a political and social landscape as tangled as Haiti’s is.
Though Johnston frequently refers to the Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti (MINUSTAH), the 2004 to 2017 United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti, as an “occupation,” it was in the country at the invitation of an elected government beginning in May 2006 under the presidency of René Préval. Johnston does some useful work examining the chicanery of the international community during Haiti’s 2010/2011 election (though much of it has been reported elsewhere before), but unfortunately largely ignores evidence that Préval - a multifaceted figure with both good and bad qualities - was trying to rig the November 2010 ballot in favour of his chosen successor, Jude Célestin, with Johnston characterizing those opposed to Préval’s plotting as “those opposed to the election,” which is not the same thing at all.
At the time, the Haitian human rights organization Réseau National de Défense de Droits Humainsn (RNDDH) issued a scathing report on the vote in which they wrote that “due to the gravity, and the systematic and repetitive nature of fraud and violence ... RNDDH believes that this was a premeditated operation on the part of the executive powers.” Haiti’s Conseil National d’Observation des Elections (CNO) also criticized what it called “systematic irregularities” in a vote during which, in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti’s second largest city, for example, one supporter of Préval’s INITE party displayed a purse containing “at least” 50 identity cards needed to vote, while others descended on voting locations elsewhere and stuffed ballot boxes. Willot Joseph, the former mayor of the Plateau Central town of Maïssade who was linked to an attempt to assassinate the peasant leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste (a winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize) in 2000, distributed t-shirts emblazoned with Célestin’s likeness and fired in the air at a polling place in that town, destroying some voting materials and carting others away as those inside fled. [Joseph would later join the eventual victor Michel Martelly’s party, the Parti Haïtien Tèt Kale or PHTK). In the impoverished Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Cité Soleil, armed self-described INITE supporters took one ballot box away only to return it later, filled.
Préval and INITE were by no means alone in trying to skew the electoral field to their advantage, and none of this, of course, excuses the depredations of the presidency of the Martelly government that followed or the means by which it came to power, but Johnston’s desire to see the complex kabuki theater of Haiti’s political culture in simple black-and-white (or more often left-right) terms often leads him astray. Though anyone can make an honest mistake or two in the course of writing a long book, factual errors are present in Aid State to such an extent that I am not sure how they made it past fact-checkers and editors, and are so numerous - and generally so supportive of Johnston’s general thesis - as to raise, at least for me, some serious questions about his reliability as a narrator.
At one point, Johnston writes that General Prosper Avril was “the head of the military junta that ran Haiti following [Jean-Claude] Duvalier’s fall,” though immediately after the Duvalier regime collapsed in February 1986, Haiti was ruled by the Conseil National de Gouvernement (CNG), which was headed by the General Henri Namphy, not Avril, which was followed by the brief presidency of Leslie Manigat (February 1988 to June 1988), then a return of Namphy (June 1988 to September 1988) and then finally - more than two years later - an interim government run by Avril from September 1988 to March 1990. Evans Paul, who served as Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s campaign manager during the latter’s first run for the presidency in 1990, became the mayor of Port-au-Prince, then a vehement Aristide critic and eventually Prime Minister under Martelly, is described as “a former Lavalas mayor,” even though Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party wouldn’t even be formed until years after Paul had left office and he was never a member of it. Johnston incorrectly identifies Louis-Jodel Chamblain, one of the cofounders of the Front pour l’Avancement et le Progrès Haitien (FRAPH) paramilitary group and subsequently one of the leaders of the armed aspect of the rebellion that ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide from his second presidency in 2004, as “a military general,” though Chamblain never rose beyond the rank of sergeant.
Johnston also appears to repeatedly confuse Chamblain with Guy Philippe, the former soldier and police officer who engineered a December 2001 attack on Haiti’s National Palace, and frequently refers to Philippe’s “paramilitaries…spreading terror across” Haiti in the latter part of the 2003-2004 uprising against Aristide, even though Aristide had become such a repellent and unpopular figure by that point Philippe’s rebels were in fact, as mystifying as it may seem to outsiders, greeted with applause in the cities they took over, as the personal experience of journalists like myself in Haiti at the time and news footage demonstrates. This may be inconvenient for the narrative Johnston is trying to paint, but it can’t be ignored, no matter how much he wishes to do so.
Johnston claims that Haiti’s participation in the Venezuelan low-cost oil program known as Petrocaribe began in 2008, but it in fact began in 2006 and was famously Préval’s first official act in office once he returned to the presidency for his second term. Johnston also goes on to claim that the politician Moïse Jean-Charles “had risen to national prominence leading protests against [Prime Minister Laurent] Lamothe and Martelly” in 2014, but in fact Jean-Charles had been a senator since 2009 and had been both a member of Préval’s private cabinet and the well-known mayor of the northern town of Milot before that. He later claims that in December 2016, Jean-Charles was “associated with Lavalas,” even though he and Aristide had famously fallen out, leading Jean-Charles to tell Radio Kiskeya in a July 2014 interview that Aristide’s chosen stand-in in presidential elections, Maryse Narcisse, had been “imposed” by “the U.S. Embassy and USAID” and that Aristide was “under the control of the imperialist countries.” While Johnston suggests that Jovenel Moïse, Haiti’s president who was slain in July 2021, only began criticizing Haiti’s exclusionary economic system shortly before his death, he had in fact been attacking it for years, including in a long [interview- https://soundcloud.com/michaelcdeibert/michael-deibert-interviews-haitis-president-jovenel-moise?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing] in Haitian Creole I conducted with him in the autumn of 2019.
Johnston’s sourcing of many of his claims about Aristide’s second term in power - a theme he returns to frequently in the book, thus warranting the detailed examination that is about to follow - unfortunately also raise serious questions about his reliability as a researcher.
Though there are literally thousands of contemporaneous reports about the era from Haitian and foreign media outlets, human rights organizations, press freedom organizations and other sources, Johnson appears not to have bothered to consult most of them. Perhaps he was afraid he wouldn’t like what he found. Instead, Johnston’s largely bases his assessment of the time period on two English-language books: Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (2007) and Jeb Sprague’s Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti (2011).
[The vast majority of sources Johnston consults are in English, while the work produced by Haitian journalists and organizations in French and Creole is sparingly referenced and often not referenced at all.]
Hallward, a Canadian philosophy professor who freely admitted in the book in question that had “visited Haiti only twice” and had “no special interest in the peculiarities of Haitian society” produced a book that was viewed by many veteran Haiti observers as a deeply-flawed and often factually-challenged polemic that sought only to exculpate Aristide and Lavalas. Upon the book’s publication, Paul Knox, the veteran foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail and who covered the overthrow of Aristide for that publication, characterized it in The Literary Review of Canada as “a Fanmi Lavalas manifesto” which was “only incidentally a book about Haiti.” Sprague, who is thanked by Johnston in the book’s acknowledgements, is an occasional researcher and even more occasional journalist with a history of making false claims, whose brief tenures at U.S. universities have been dogged by controversy and recrimination and who is a contributor to the conspiracy theorist website The Grayzone, an outlet that regularly [engages- https://medium.com/muros-invisibles/grayzone-grifters-and-the-cult-of-tank-fbd9b8e0dbe2] in atrocity denialism. That Johnston would base his account of such a key period on Haitian history on two such deeply-flawed sources says a lot, I think, and none of it good.
Though Aid State has no bibliography, books by journalists who were actually in Haiti at the time - Kathie Klarreich’s Madame Dread (2005), Gerry Hadden’s Never the Hope Itself (2011) and my own Notes from the Last Testament (2005) and Haiti Will Not Perish (2017) - all of which speak frankly of the violence that characterized Aristide’s second regime (and that of some of its opponents), are ignored. So are documentaries such as Arnold Antonin’s GNB Kont Attila (2004), Charles Najman’s La fin des chimères? (2004) and Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cité Soleil (2006). The Haiti witnessed by Trinidadian diplomat Reginald Dumas in his 2008 book An Encounter With Haiti, where he writes that Aristide “[acquired] for himself a reputation at home which did not match the great respect with which he was held abroad” is absent as is a critical work by historian Alex Dupuy, whose The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti (2006) concluded that “when he left in February 2004, Aristide had become a discredited, corrupted and increasingly authoritarian president who had betrayed the trust and aspirations of the poor majority.”
Johnston also often seems to be unaware of the histories of some of the people he quotes. Patrick Elie, for example, a longtime Aristide crony who was jailed in the United States for threatening the lives of the staff of Haiti’s embassy in Washington D.C. after amassing a fearsome arsenal of weapons and then [lying- https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/111/1135/630971/] to U.S. federal agents about it, is described simply as “a pro-democracy activist.” Mario Joseph, a Haitian attorney who has frequently represented Aristide in the multitude of legal proceedings that have swirled around him, is described simply as “a Haitian lawyer and human rights advocate.” Former U.S. ambassador Pamela White, who is widely reviled in Haiti for what many view as her role in facilitating democratic erosion and corruption under Martelly’s regime and who recently gave an interview praising Guy Philippe and gang leader Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, likewise comes off improbably well in Johnston’s telling.
[Two stylistic notes: Johnston also has the strange tic of ridiculing the physical appearances of those he disagrees with. One U.S. diplomat is “balding, slightly overweight,” while a U.N. official has “a rapidly receding hairline,” and a Haitian political operator has “a small gap between his two front teeth, which he continued to show off,” a trait that disturbed Johnston so much he mentions it twice, noting that at a second meeting “the gap between his two front teeth was as visible as ever.” Though it is perhaps regrettable that those Johnston met were not as Adonis-like as he would have preferred - an assessment that apparently does not extend to an oddly lascivious aside about “younger coed aid workers splashing in the pool behind us” during one interview - I’m not sure if these observations add a lot to our understanding of the role they played in Haiti. The term “aid state” is also repeated what seems like every other page and, rather than seeming like somber incantation, reminded me of the character Gretchen in the film Mean Girls trying to make the term “fetch” a thing.]
At one point Johnston claims that Aristide “remained the embodiment of the populist and anti-market forces,” which must come as news to those of us who watched the systematic looting of state industries during his 2001 to 2004 second term in office. Again, Johnston ignores historical details such as the fact that, after Aristide’s flight, Haiti’s Unite Centrale de Renseignements Financiers (UCREF) one of two entities tasked with investigating the government’s corruption, concluded that during his tenure Aristide had siphoned off $21 million of Haiti’s resources to fictitious companies and charities. Johnston also ignores a subsequent U.S. trial centered around $2.3 million of illegal payments made from Haiti’s state telephone company, Teleco, to shell companies, during which The Miami Herald [identified- https://www.haitian-truth.org/miami-bribery-probe-zeroes-in-on-aristide/] Aristide as one of those accused of receiving the illicit kickbacks. Among those cooperating with the investigation was former Teleco chief Patrick Joseph, the son of Venel Joseph, who had been head of Haiti’s central bank during Aristide’s second term. Days after news of his son’s cooperation in the Teleco case became public, Venel Joseph was shot and [killed- https://www.lunionsuite.com/news-ex-official-slain-in-haiti-after-his-son-helps-miami-feds-in-aristide-bribery-probe/#google_vignette] as he was driving through Port-au-Prince, a killing that to this day remains unsolved.
When Johnston writers that “unable to rely on state security, Aristide had turned to the baz,” - the Creole term for “base” and referring to the armed young men who eventually morphed into the gangs currently running riot in Port-au-Prince - this is simply false, and ignores the history of Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas arming and empowering young men [many of the first generation of whom I knew personally] in defense of his regime and his party since his return to Haiti from U.S. exile in 1994.
There is no mention of the event where the aforementioned Chavannes Jean-Baptiste was nearly murdered by a pro-Lavalas mob that included elected officials in the central town of Hinche in November 2000, nor that the headquarters of Evans Paul was burned down on three separate occasions by pro-government partisans once he ran afoul of Aristide. Though the December 2001 attack on Haiti’s National Palace is mentioned, the fact that pro-Aristide mobs subsequently murdered and terrorized government critics and destroyed their homes and party headquarters, [including- http://www.oas.org/oaspage/haiti_situation/cpinf4702_02_eng.htm] torching the library of the Centre de recherche et de formation économique et sociale pour le développement (CRESFED) and burning down the private library of the author and politician Gérard Pierre-Charles, destroying hundreds of books, is omitted. The December 2003 attack on Haiti’s state university (an attack which resulted in the crippling of the university rector there after he was beaten by iron bars), witnessed by the Fondation Connaissance et Liberté (FOKAL) - headed by Michèle Pierre-Louis, who would go on to serve as Préval’s Prime Minister - is ignored despite the organization’s own account of “groups of pro-government militia…in front of our building [displaying arms] ranging from firearms, wooden and iron sticks, rocks and other objects capable of hurting and killing [and] police…acting as accomplices to the militia...We saw children aged between twelve and fifteen, some in school uniforms, used by the Lavalas militia to throw rocks and attack the students with firearms.”
Though you wouldn’t know it from Johnston’s telling, it was from the pro-government gangs themselves, not from the meddling of foreign governments or the likes of Philippe and Chamblain, that the armed rebellion against Aristide first began after the murder of Amiot Métayer, the leader of a particularly fierce armed group known as the Lame Kanibal (Cannibal Army) from the Raboteau slum in the northern city of Gonaïves in September 2003. Metayer, a longtime Aristide partisan with a history of brutalizing government opponents in the city, had been briefly arrested by the Aristide government in August 2002 as a sop to some of his critics before being broken out of jail by his gang in spectacular fashion shortly thereafter and returning uneasily to the government fold. With the Organization of American States still clamoring for Métayer’s arrest, the Aristide government made several entreaties for the gang leader to return to jail in exchange for money which Métayer refused, and threatened to “tell everything” should he be incarcerated. On 21 September 2003, Métayer drove off from his base in Raboteau in the company of a former official of the Ministry of the Interior. The following day, his body was [found- https://metropole.ht/assassinat-de-amiot-metayer-puissant-chef-dop-des-gonaives/], his eyes carved out. Believing Métayer had been murdered by the regime, mass demonstrations erupted in Gonaïves, only to be brutally [dispersed- https://www.alterpresse.org/spip.php?article752] by government forces. During Métayer’s funeral, hundreds of protesters chanted “Down with Aristide!” and clashed violently with police. A 2 October 2003 [raid- https://www.alterpresse.org/spip.php?article792] on Raboteau and nearby Jubilé killed at least 15 people. Lame Kanibal then [transformed- https://www.alterpresse.org/spip.php?article808] into the Front de Résistance des Gonaïves. The Front fought vicious battles against government security forces in Gonaïves until, in February 2004 - three months later - a group of rebels led by Philippe and Chamblain crossed into Haiti from the Dominican Republic and joined their cause.
Perhaps, though, Johnston’s most grievous bit of historical sleight of hand concerns his description of a mass killing that took place in the La Scierie neighborhood of the central Haitian city of Saint-Marc in February 2004. Though Johnston footnotes a source that clearly accuses a pro-Aristide armed gang, Bale Wouze (Clean Sweep), of involvement in the massacre and which correctly locates it as having taken place in Saint-Marc, Johnston inexplicable writes that the massacre occurred in the city of Gonaïves, 35 miles away, and that Aristide’s Minister of Interior, Jocelerme Privert (who subsequently served as Haiti’s interim president from February 2016 to February 2017), “traveled to the region and called for calm,” when it was in fact Yvon Neptune, Aristide’s Prime Minister, who did so. Johnston then appears to dismiss the research of the RNDDH human rights groups (at the time called the National Coalition for Haitian Rights and elsewhere quoted respectfully in the book) and presents the killings in the context of “the government’s subsequent efforts to retake control of the city.”
I was living in Haiti, reporting, at the time, and when the photojournalist Alex Smailes and I arrived in La Scierie a few days after massacre (and before Aristide fled), we found the the Unité de Sécurité de la Garde du Palais National (USGPN) – a unit directly responsible for the president’s personal security – and Bale Wouze patrolling as a single armed unit. Speaking to residents there - against a surreal backdrop of burned buildings, the stench of human decay, drunken gang members threatening our lives with firearms and a terrified population – we soon realized that something awful had happened. [These events are extensively chronicled in both my books on Haiti and in an essay from my newsletter, Notes from the World.
Other journalists also reported on the killings in Saint-Marc. The Miami Herald’s Marika Lynch wrote of how the town was “under a terrifying lockdown by the police and a gang of armed pro-Aristide civilians” and that “the two forces are so intertwined that when [Bale Wouze’s] head of security walks by, Haitian police officers salute him and call him commandant.” Gary Marx of the Chicago Tribune wrote of how “residents saw piles of corpses burning in an opposition neighborhood and watched as pro-Aristide forces fired at people scurrying up a hillside to flee.”According to Anne Fuller, a Haiti veteran, fluent Creole speaker and a member of a Human Rights Watch delegation that visited Saint-Marc a month after the killings [and whose work Johnston footnotes but then inexplicably misrepresents], at least 27 people were murdered there between 11 February and 29 February. Her conclusion was supported by the reporting of the respected Haitian journalist Nancy Roc, who wrote at the time “if justice is not rendered in the case of the La Scierie Massacre, we can fear the worst for the future.”
I believe one has to judge a book on its own terms. In other words, it’s not really fair to judge a book for not being something that it is not trying to be in the first place. It wouldn’t be fair to judge Taylor Branch’s masterful trilogy of the U.S. civil rights movement for not being a definitive account of the Middle Passage, for example, or Antony Beevor’s account of the downfall of Berlin as the Nazi regime collapsed for not including an A to Z history of the Weimar Republic. Though Johnston is chiefly trying to write a snapshot of a particular era in Haiti, not a definitive work on its politics, culture or religion, the many factual errors that rear their heads as he tries to connect the threads of Haiti’s highly complex political history undermine many of his central arguments and call into question the reliability and trustworthiness of some of the book’s other conclusions.
Johnston’s admission that he “first started focusing on Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake” and that his “focusing on Haiti began as a lens to better understand US foreign policy” may go a long way to explaining why we see so little of Haiti, the nation - as opposed to Haiti the symbol - in the book. Reading Aid State, the reader would come away with no real sense of Haiti’s dramatic landscape - its mist-shrouded mountains or glittering, palm-fringed beaches lapped by turquoise waters - or of its poetic, proverb-infused Creole language. They would be unaware of its politically significant vodou religion, or of the incredibly high level of cultural accomplishment - in literature, music, cinema and visual art - the country produces. One would get little sense of the tenuous daily scramble for life – chache lavi - that characterizes its quartiers populaires beyond the violence there the book sometimes describes, or of the incredible Haitian capacity for wit and humour. The Haitians one meets in the book often seem to exist with little identity outside of that of being victims. To Johnston, there appears to be only two kinds of Haitians: Left radicals opposed to international interference in the country’s affairs and sell-outs and pawns doing the bidding of their foreign masters. Thus, a kind of relentless pessimism informs the book.
Though looking at the damage wrought on Haiti and its people by the acts of outside powers is vitally important to understanding how destructive policies can be avoided (or thwarted, if need be) in the future, if one only views Haiti in how it relates to foreign actors, one robs the Haitians themselves of their dignity and agency in the success or failure of their national project. There is a lot more to Haiti than the politicians and political operators that we meet in Aid State and, if one looks, there are individuals and organizations all over the country who are working every day against tremendous odds to improve their lives and those of their communities, the kind of people who the Haitian author Lyonel Trouillot once described as les enfants des héros (the children of heroes).
Though there are some good aspects to the book, Haiti does not deserve to have its history mangled in the way it is in Aid State, and it exists as a lot more than a mere prop in the binary conflicts that outsiders have, trying to prove that their political concepts were right all along. It is also more - far more - than any mere “aid state” could ever be.
*Michael Deibert is an author, journalist and researcher who has worked in Haiti since 1997. He is the author of, among other books, Notes From the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press, 2005) and Haiti Will Not Perish: A Recent History (Zed Books, 2017).
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