GUYANA is as concerned about the present and future of Haiti as are all its CARICOM partners and as concerned too that its neighbours do the right thing in these crucial times, to ensure no repetition of past failures and no continuation of the status quo, where the country has not advanced on the democratic path despite several elections and external interventions of political, social, economic and military natures in the past several decades since the military overthrow of President Jean Bertrand Aristide.

Haiti has suffered coup after coup and election after election with questioned results, to this day existing under a questionable administration that has treated CARICOM from a long distance while inviting yet another external intervention.

The problem is that all these external interventions and approaches by CARICOM have tended to exclude any leading role by Haitians at home, always responses to invitations by unelected or unpopular regimes that exclude civil society and the other major players in the troubled country.

The other major problem is that all previous efforts to assist Haiti have been so scarce and insincere that CARICOM leaders have had to appeal to the world not to allow ‘Haiti fatigue’ to get the better of them and wake-up to the real needs for more and better, meaningful and effective assistance to Haiti that reaches people instead of enriching corrupt politicians and influential businesses and families.

As President Dr Irfaan Ali recently noted in an interview with an impetuous English television presenter, Guyana is as interested in ending Ukraine’s problems as Haiti’s, but the inequilibrium of allocated resources is more than like a proverbial mortal sin crying to the heavens for correction.

There’s an ocean of a difference between the US $100 million allocated by the US to the proposed intervention in Haiti after more than three decades of uncertainty and disaster, with CARICOM and Kenyan assistance, vis-à-vis the over-US $100 BILLION allocated to Ukraine in the past year.

But the reality is that Haiti’s problems will not be solved with money or violence, or without engagement of Haitian Civil Society at home and abroad, including political sources that don’t agree with the present administration.

The country is in the grip of its latest crisis and, as always, it requires genuine assistance from near and far, but not of the hurried, knee-jerk kind that seems to believe that violence can only be ended with more violence.

It’s not easy for CARICOM leaders to hammer out a genuine and workable, sustainable solution in the face of the slanted information onslaught that suggests that external intervention is always a better (or only) solution than direct engagement with the people outside of government, military and business or family minority elements, who matter most.

However, instead of trying to make hay while the sun shines, it will be better for CARICOM and the international community to insist that any intervention or engagement with Haiti at this point in the 21st century should be one that seeks sustainable solutions that will last over time and ensure a revival of the democratic and popular structures that all nations and leaders so loudly say they wish to see.

Another short-cut solution will please those who only wish to see the gangs disappear or forced into retreat, but the sustainable social and economic structures that will be necessary to take Haiti and Haitians over and across the current barriers to progress.

Nothing is impossible and, in that sense, the struggle for Haiti’s next liberation simply has to continue until the people are ready to make and mold that change with their own hands.
In that sense, CARICOM needs to ensure that its engagements are well-placed and not in the service of external agendas.

Haiti and Haitians will understandably not forgive CARICOM for the regional community’s mis-steps at this crucial point, particularly since the very future of CARICOM’s oldest republic is again at stake.