I was on the phone last night with my family and my mom was asking lots of basic questions about my living and working arrangements in Port-au-Prince; I realized I should probably post the same info here.
I work in an office with 14 employees. The organization is called Reseau National de Defense des Droits Humains - RNDDH. That means National Human Rights Defense Network. Of the employees, all are Haitian save myself, a Belgian named Stephanie, and another MCC volunteer named Jessica. Jessica and I live next door to each other and carpool every day along with her roommate Bethany who works for a sort of Haitian human rights coalition called POHDH with a somewhat broader focus than ours. The way MCC works is that I'm provided with room and board, plus a living stipend of $66 a month. In exchange for this, I work full time as a volunteer.
I'm still getting going here, reading old files and learning about how the organization does things. I've already started translating documents from French into English, and eventually I'll translate from Creole as well. Most of our documents are written in French, but Creole is the language of the office. I'm making steady progress with that too, though of course I still get a little frustrated every time I strain to understand something. I'd give one of my kidneys for the ability to understand French and Haitian Creole effortlessly. But there's a Haitian proverb that says: "piti piti zwazo fè nich." Which means, little by little, the bird builds its nest. The language will come.
Eventually the work gets a lot more interesting. I'll be going on delegations to prisons where we interview the inmates and find out whether they've had charges brought against them, if they've been abused, things like that. We do police trainings where we tell them exactly which human rights laws they're bound by and what could happen if they transgress those laws.
Is it effective? Hard to say. Much more often than not in Haiti, the guys in uniform have been the bad guys. In fact, why not a...
Very, Very Brief and Simplistic History of Uniformed Men in Haiti - 20th Century
The first example of this was the U.S. Marines. They occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. The reason they gave for this was "political instability." The actual reasons had a lot more to do with business interests and keeping Germany - then investing heavily in Haiti - from getting an strategic and/or economic foothold in the region. So it was money. (duh.)
The U.S. Marines reintroduced slave labor to the country. This, over a hundred years after Haiti accomplished the only successful slave revolt in history, and over fifty years after the U.S. had freed its own slaves. The Haitian people hated and fought against the occupation. The Marines eventually left, but not before gifting the Haitian people with a trained standing army. Why in the world would Haiti need a standing army you ask? Surely it was all put in the language of "maintaining order."
Well, the army maintained something, namely a state of brutality and oppression. In literature about Haiti, it is often remarked that this country is a tragicomedy. This institution that is supposed to defend the people was in fact public enemy number one. Sometimes it would chafe against the wealthy Haitian elite, sometimes they were indistinguishable, but always they have been willing to crush, with ruthless efficiency, any challenge to their power. Those challenges came from above and below. The number of coup d'etats in the last century is beyond tragic, it's in the realm of funny. And as if it weren't bad enough that the army was originally created and trained by the United States, the dark alliance continued as new generations of military thugs would go to the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, to learn how to keep the unarmed masses in their place.
The biggest break in the army's dominance came during the Duvalier dictatorship. The first Duvalier, "Papa Doc," recognized that the military was a threat to him, and so he undermined them every way he could. He disrupted the army's leadership while training and recruiting his own private militia, the Tonton Macoutes, of which I wrote in earlier posts. The name literally means "uncle knapsack" and refers to the legend of the Haitian boogeyman who would come at night and stuff naughty children into his woven bag. The macoutes were in reality much worse, but since this is a brief history, I won't dwell on the gory details. I'll just say that their uniform was denim fatigues and a red scarf and shades.
When "Baby Doc" Duvalier was forced from power in the mid 80s, the army finally regained power and, along with the old guard of macoutes, initiated several of the bloodiest years in Haiti's history. They disrupted elections, installed a president of their choosing, then got rid of him after scant months in office. The next era was that of Jean Bertrand Aristide. He was a radical priest, and a proponent of liberation theology. He got 67% percent of the vote in Haiti's first truly free and fair elections in 1990. He gained this popularity by speaking the obvious truth, that the Haitian people had been abused for much too long by the army and the wealthy elite, that the United States had too much power over their lives, and that they would continue in misery unless those structures were fundamentally changed. Eight months later he was deposed by, say it with me, the army. The CIA almost certainly helped.
One of the supposed reasons the army gave for taking him out was that he was trying to raise a militia of his own, as Papa Doc had done. In exile, Aristide fought and fought and fought to get back to Haiti. When Bill Clinton came into office, he finally got an offer: return to Haiti with an escort of 20,000 Marines and finish out your presidential term - but only if you accept a World Bank restructuring plan. It was exactly the kind of thing he railed against while he was running for president, but it was his only chance, and every day he stayed away from Haiti was a day of horror for average Haitians. So he took the offer, and when he returned, the people came out and swept the sidewalks and danced in the streets. But over time it dawned on many of them that he had changed in his time away. Perhaps it was all a lesson in just what it would take to hang on to power in Haiti. In the face of the Marine presence, most of the army abandoned their posts as they weren't able to carry out their campaign of terror any longer. But they didn't abandon most of their guns.
In response to this, Aristide declared the army officially disbanded, and to this day it doesn't exist. But the Haitian National Police, formed after the army was disbanded, contains many of the same old bad guys.
So, back to where I started. The place where I work trains police not to violate citizens' basic human rights. But the people I work with are quite aware that the police continue to be an oppressive force here. Many cases of kidnapping take place only with the assistance of the police, as has been well documented. And that's just one example.
Anyways, more on work later. And next time I'll write about my cool new bachelor pad.
