A desperate humanitarian crisis is underway in Haiti. Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, the country has been gripped by crippling levels of gang violence characterized by regular street battles, kidnappings, sexual assault, and the destruction of life-enabling infrastructure. Moïse’s successor, Ariel Henry, came to power with no constitutional mandate or parliamentary approval (Haiti’s national assembly is defunct), with his only “legitimacy” stemming from the 2021 call of international diplomats for him to resume office.

Now, Henry is effectively in exile. Since travelling to Guyana in late February and then to Kenya (to sign an agreement on the deployment of 1,000 Kenyan policemen in Haiti), Henry has been unable to return to Haiti after gang leaders called on him to resign and vowed to ignite a civil war if he dares to step foot in the country (Port-au-Prince International airport has come under attack from gangs trying to seize control of it). Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, the man making these proclamations, warned, “Either Haiti becomes a paradise or a hell for all of us. It’s out of the question for a small group of rich people living in big hotels to decide the fate of people living in working-class neighbourhoods.”

How did Haiti get here? AIAC contributor Pooja Bhatia once quipped, “What comes first in Haiti: disaster or foreign intervention? The conventional, (mainstream) wisdom has it that “disaster comes first.” In Bhatia’s analysis—much concurred with by others—foreign intervention has created the foundations for dysfunction. The island nation is famously the site of the only successful slave revolt in history, earning a commanding place in the liberation canon as the one place where the ideals of Europe’s enlightenment—freedom and self-determination—were universalized (remember that the French Revolution in 1789 had produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but these excluded the darker peoples and women). Now, even The New York Times can acknowledge that Haiti’s development was hampered by the stranglehold of Western powers, chiefly France and the US. France imposed large reparations on its erstwhile colony Haiti in the 19th century to indemnify former French slave owners in exchange for diplomatic recognition, and the US occupied it from 1915 until 1934.

It didn’t end there, and on two occasions, the US backed the overthrow of Haiti’s first democratically elected president, the socialist Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1991 and 2004 (before Aristide came to power, the US propped up the Duvalier dictatorships of François Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, who together ruled Haiti for 41 years). This is, of course, not simply to portray Haitians as mere stooges, helpless puppets at the whims of foreign powers. Rather, as is the case everywhere else, powerful local elites with their own political and economic interests and limited access to capital engender a cycle of corruption by linking economic enrichment to access to state resources. Even nominally benign outside help—such as the influx of humanitarian organizations in the 1990s—created a “republic of NGOs,” where building state capacity was neglected and aid substituted for government services.

What is to be done? There’s no denying that some degree of foreign support is unavoidable to help stabilize the situation. But the mistake the world has made in Sudan, for example, is insisting that the way forward is “brokered” by figures trusted not to rock the boat too much, hence why the US maintains that the road to a political settlement must pass through Henry, even though he lacks popular legitimacy and support.

Alternatives—such as the Commission for the Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis, a broad civil society platform comprising church leaders, peasant groups, and civic organizations—have received scant international recognition or empowerment. Why is everyone so afraid of political processes grounded in popular participation rather than elite brokerage?

C.L.R. James, who wrote the eminent account of the Haitian revolution, warned in The Black Jacobins that it is when “the masses turn (as turn they will one day) and try to end the tyranny of centuries, not only the tyrants but all ‘civilization’ holds up its hands in horror and clamours for ‘order’ to be restored.”

Will Shoki is the editor of Africa is a Country.

* This was first published as an editorial on the Africa is a Country website. We republish it here as part of a sharing agreement with AIAC.