Dominique Anglade is among the many Haitian-Canadians filled with a mix of despair and defiance as their homeland spirals into chaos. Ms. Anglade, former leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, at HEC Montreal on Feb. 19.Andrej Ivanov/The Globe and Mail
Fifteen years after her parents were killed in Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, Dominique Anglade knows the country faces its gravest crisis since.
The former Quebec Liberal Party leader has watched with horror over the past year as gangs seized the capital, any semblance of a government dissolved, and more than a million people were displaced.
She is among the many Haitian-Canadians filled with a mix of despair and defiance as their homeland spirals into chaos. Opinions differ about what Canada and the international community should do, but virtually everyone in the diaspora – one of the world’s largest – believes urgent action is needed.
“It’s as though people aren’t aware of the scale of the catastrophe,” she said. “People say, ‘Oh, Haiti’s always like that.’ No. We’re talking about the dissolution of the state.”
The country’s current gang crisis, which exploded with the forced exile and resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry last April, and saw 5,000 people murdered last year alone, has left Ms. Anglade reluctantly calling for a stronger United Nations military intervention to restore order.
About 800 Kenyan police officers are currently deployed to Haiti as part of a UN-approved mission largely funded by the U.S. That force, combined with American and Canadian sanctions against leading Haitian politicians and business leaders for their alleged gang ties, is woefully inadequate for the country’s security needs, Ms. Anglade argued.
“You can’t stabilize a country with 800 people. Thank you for the sanctions, thank you for the 800 men, now let’s talk seriously,” said Ms. Anglade, now co-leader of the sustainable transition office at HEC Montréal, a prominent business school. “What’s the alternative – you let the country collapse?”
Haiti’s dark history of foreign intervention has mostly blunted discussions of a larger deployment, but Ms. Anglade pointed to the successes of the international peacekeeping mission known as MINUSTAH – launched in 2004 – which she believes brought some stability before the 2010 earthquake claimed some 200,000 lives and destroyed swaths of key infrastructure.
“We always say in Haiti nothing works – it’s not true,” said Ms. Anglade. “I’d prefer to be in 2009.”
The ex-businesswoman and politician has experienced modern Haitian history intimately. Her parents, Georges and Mireille, were prominent academics exiled by the brutal regime of François Duvalier. Georges helped found the Université du Québec à Montréal in 1969 and was later an adviser to the Haitian presidents Jean-Bertrand Aristide and René Préval.
Ms. Anglade was born in Montreal but spent part of her youth in Haiti before rising in the ranks of the management consultant McKinsey & Company, then making the leap into politics in 2012. Grief after the earthquake pushed her to co-found KANPE (“to stand up” in Creole), a non-profit focused on delivering aid to local organizations so Haitians can help themselves.
Besides the political lobbying of community leaders like Ms. Anglade – who says she has spoken with Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly about the situation – ordinary Haitian-Canadians are doing their part by sending money home. The country receives nearly $4-billion annually in remittances from members of the international diaspora, centred in Montreal, New York, Miami and Paris.
“We’re feeding the population through transfer of funds,” said Frantz Benjamin, a member of Quebec’s National Assembly who was born in Port-au-Prince. “There is a great risk of famine in Haiti.”
Despite such practical help from members of the Haitian community in Quebec, the news from home can be paralyzingly bleak. Mr. Benjamin knows an elderly woman who is afraid to pick up the phone because it so often brings word of another upsetting development.
Children as young as eight are regularly recruited into gangs, rape is being used as a weapon of war, the national police are outgunned and corrupt, and now even the country’s few remaining hospitals and clinics are targeted by armed groups. From the outside, it’s possible to see the country as “damned” and believe nothing can be done, said Frantz André, a Montreal migrants’ rights activist who was born in Haiti.
“Many of my compatriots have desisted from interest in the country… They don’t want to protest and organize because they say it’s a lost country.”
Foreigners can’t rescue Haiti, Mr. André said. International military forces have lost all credibility since MINUSTAH, he argued, which was implicated in the sexual abuse of Haitian children and the introduction of a cholera epidemic that has killed some 10,000 people.
Western countries have been responsible for Haiti’s poverty and instability dating back to the colonial period, from France charging reverse reparations for liberated slaves and yoking the country in debt bondage, to the brutal American invasion and occupation of 1915 to 1934.
Asking those countries to help Haiti now in some arm’s-length capacity – like training the Haitian National Police – only amounts to “asking countries who started the fire to help put out the fire,” said Mr. André.
Canada has pledged $100-million to support the national police amidst the current gang crisis and has provided millions to train officers and strengthen border controls, but even such aid can come with pitfalls. Mr. André believes guns that Canada has provided to the Haitian police have ended up in the hands of gangs, a strong possibility in a country where corruption is endemic.
The country will stand or fall on the basis of its own people, the activist believes. Decades of repression under the Duvalier regime forced thousands of intellectuals and business people to flee, leaving Canada and the U.S. full of brilliant engineers, lawyers and doctors who are now eager to help rebuild their homeland.
“The diaspora is our strength,” said Mr. André.