Times Radio Feature - Focus on Haiti 1/2

Latin America Correspondent Jon Bonfiglio speaks to Darryl Morris for Times Radio, for a special two-part interview on Haiti. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Okay, let's move on to Haiti next. Um, John Ponfinger, who's a man we hear from a lot, uh, he's our Latin American correspondent. He's in Haiti at the moment because there's a fascinating story emerging there. I thought it was worth our time and a bit of a chat on this tonight. And just to set the scene, they've recently qualified for the World Cup this week, just a couple of days ago. Haiti, against the odds, have qualified for the World Cup. The man who coaches their national team, though, has never been to the Caribbean island because it's so difficult, dangerous, so much unrest. That I think sets the scene for the conversation we're about to have. We'll get into that on Times Radio next.

SPEAKER_00: 0:35

Darrell Morris on Times Radio.

SPEAKER_01: 0:38

Hello, even thank you for being with us. Kind of a fiery debate after 11:30. Not a particularly fiery subject, you wouldn't have thought, but it did get quite heated about whether or not pupils in primary schools should be tested. We'll come to that shortly. Firstly, tonight, um, Haiti, of course, qualified for the World Cup this week. It's an exciting moment, isn't it? Only the second time in history. Quite tellingly, though, the man who coached the squad has never been to Haiti. And the squad is playing their home matches 500 miles out away, uh away, out of the country. Haiti is in turmoil. It has been since 2010 and the earthquakes there. Now, armed gangs have taken control of large swathes of the country, and an international security force has been brought in to try to bring about peace. Um, uh one of our regular contributors, John Borfolio, is there for us. He is in Haiti this week. So we thought we'd spend a bit of time with him checking on what he's seen. John, thank you for for being with us. Um that that sets the scene for us quite nicely, doesn't it, John? That that World Cup qualification um by a team that cannot play their matches in Haiti.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38

It absolutely does. And Tuesday night here in Haiti saw an incredible outpouring because Haitians are not only regularly battered by gangs, by international indifference, by hurricanes and by earthquakes, but they're also battered by being the source of bad news. So when they qualified for the World Cup, when Haiti qualified for the World Cup uh on Tuesday night against all odds, it was viscerally felt, uh it was a viscerally felt counter-argument to them to the prevailing narrative. It's worth remembering that Haiti has not had elections now in nearly 10 years, and that what little state presence exists is overseen by a transitional presidential uh council, which had an agreed mandate to organize elections by mid-November last weekend, which actually is the reason why I'm here. The World Cup thing was an accident. It was because, in theory, elections were to be held here, but they failed to manifest. The the council has now given a date for next August, almost an entire year away for the for the delayed poll. But it is a country which continues to struggle across so many different parameters. What few exports exist are being hit by US tariffs, immigration raids in the US, disrupt remittances to the countries. That's another important source of income. And what hasn't been disrupted uh at all, uh, Darrell, which we spoke about last year, as a remarkable story, is the flow of guns that is arming these gangs. And in the last few months, these gangs have continued to control most of the capital, despite the presence of this UN security mission, but they are now spreading into peripheral territories outside of Port-au-Prince.

SPEAKER_01: 3:10

Okay. And I feel there's a lot to unpick from that, but but but uh help us understand the dynamic of a sort of a sort of absence of a state here, um UN peacekeeping forces, but a sort of a sort of ambivalent international community.

SPEAKER_00: 3:25

It really is ambivalent at best. I always think it's interesting when because you don't when when a state doesn't exist, you don't see it that obviously straight away. My experience of collapsed or absent states is that things do function, but they sort of function in completely unknown, parallel, constantly shifting ways. So uh just to give you an example, in Zimbabwe in 2008, where inflation reached, get this, 75 million percent. Uh, people spent money immediately. The moment they got money, they they just had to get rid of it, they had to buy something because whatever you bought would retain value uh more than currency. The currency was just valueless. In Venezuela a couple of years ago when I was there, there were no medicines anywhere, but there was. But you had access to uh uh to medical uh compounds treatments if you had a particular WhatsApp number and you had access to foreign currency. If you had the capacity to pay, it was there, delivered by a private driver, uh, but there was almost nothing in pharmacies. And the same is true of um of Haiti today. In the absence of state infrastructure, economics become kind of hyper-specialized, they transition, they evolve incredibly quickly. I would add to that that I think there are some really striking visuals where where there is no state presence. Uh, the most obvious thing here that I've been experiencing over the course of the last week is uh waste collection or an absence of waste collection. There is none, there has been none for years now. Every street corner has a pretty substantial rotting pile of waste, which is which way just beyond the sensory nature of the issue, of course, is a vector for sickness and disease. Um and the more you scratch around, the more it's really clear that an absence of state presence uh just manifests across almost everything that anybody sort of lives with on a minute-by-minute uh basis.

SPEAKER_01: 5:16

Okay. You set the scene quite well, John. I reckon we put we put a bit of a dot dot dot there. We'll come back and we'll we'll uh we'll at some point in in the future consider what comes next for Hiti and keep an eye on this story. Um, John, thank you for being with us. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 5:29

No problem at all. Take care. Thank you. Hi everyone, just wanted to add a couple of things uh on the back of that Times radio piece with uh with Darrell Morris. Um Eric Prince, uh the absence of state control infrastructure and financing multiplied by widespread international indifference, as Darrell said, has sort of paved the way for the entrance of private military companies in Haiti. Most infamously, this individual, Eric Prince, formerly of Blackwater and the killing of Iraqi civilians in 2007, has a contract with the Haitian government to deploy mercenaries and drones to fight gangs. Casualties to date have actually included, not only included women and children, but women and children have exceeded the numbers of gang members that have been killed. And that's of course in a landscape of zero transparency and oversight. The UN human rights chief Volker Turk has said that, and I quote, most of these drone strikes are likely unawful, unlawful under international human rights law. What's especially marked, I think, is that these processes are using Haiti and mechanized warfare as a laboratory for future international peacekeeping, use that term advisedly, actions. And then just yeah, uh question on what's next for Haiti. Well, the UN has authorized this enhanced force of numbering 5,500 in order to address security challenges and pave the way to stability, but it really feels like a token gesture. I mean, those numbers are not gonna cut any mustard here. And at the same time, the World Bank has launched a new partnership until 2029 to support economic and social recovery. Now, that fund is worth$320 million. Now that sounds like a lot, but that is the total equivalent cost of the temporary peer which was built in Gaza, which lasted days. That is not even going to achieve any kind of minimum percentage of difference across what Haiti needs. Added to which these commitments, even if partially tangible, are medium term at best. The fact is that Haiti is in the middle of a devastating food and security crisis, as well as social, economic, and political complexities. Uh I'm using that term advisedly, and there is very little international interest in actually getting anything done here.