This Is Not a Crisis—This Is a Rebellion: A Report from the Front Lines of Haiti

Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s opinion.

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan is leading his country’s anti-Palestinian propaganda, this time engaging in pre-emptive hasbara in anticipation of a Palestinian response to the ongoing evictions in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

“Would you consider it a terror attack if a rock like this was thrown at your car while driving with your children?” Erdan asked the United Nations Security Council members, while holding the rock in his hands. “Would you, at the very least, condemn these brutal terror attacks carried out against Israeli civilians by Palestinians?”

This Israeli logic is quite typical, where oppressed Palestinians are depicted to be the aggressor, and oppressive Israel – a racist apartheid state by any standard – presents itself as a victim merely engaging in defending its own citizens.

But Erdan’s selective logic is, this time around, compelled by something else. His UN charade is merely aimed at creating a distraction from the ongoing horrific events transpiring in Sheikh Jarrah and throughout occupied East Jerusalem. On Wednesday, January 19, the Palestinain Salhiya family’s home was demolished by Israel, rendering 15 people, mostly children, homeless. 

A few days earlier, a heart-wrenching event took place on top of that very site, when members of the Salhiya family threatened to set themselves ablaze as they agonized over the imminent loss of their family home. 

“We have nothing left for us in Jerusalem. This is ethnic cleansing. Today me, tomorrow my neighbors. We’d rather die on our land with dignity than surrender to them,” Mahmoud Salhiya, the owner of the house said, before he was dissuaded by neighbors not to set himself on fire. 

These tragic events are being watched closely, first by Palestinians and also by people around the world. If the momentum of Israeli destruction continues, chances are we could witness another popular uprising. Erdan’s spectacle at the UN is a desperate act of propaganda to sway members of the international community from criticizing Israel. 

But Israel is failing at making a case for itself, similar to its failure to defend its horrific violence against Palestinians throughout occupied Palestine in May 2021. Even Israel’s traditional allies are speaking out against the latest round of ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah. 

The US envoy to the United Nations expressed ‘concern’ over the forced expulsion in the Palestinian neighborhood. “To make progress, both Israel and the Palestinian Authority must refrain from unilateral steps that exacerbate tensions and undercut efforts to advance a negotiated two-state solution,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield said, using the usually guarded language. However,  Thomas-Greenfield went on to warn against the “annexations of territory, settlement activity, demolitions and evictions – like what we saw in Sheikh Jarrah.” 

Also on January 19, US lawmaker, Rep. Mark Pocan strongly criticized the Israeli decision to forcefully evict the Salhiya family in Sheikh Jarrah.

“Last night, in the cover of darkness & freezing cold, the homes of the Salhiyeh family in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, were destroyed by Israeli forces leaving 15 people homeless. This is unacceptable and must end,” Pocan tweeted, adding the popular hashtag #Savesheikhjarrah.

For his part, the UN Middle East special envoy, Tor Wennsland, strongly condemned the expulsion of the Palestinian family by Israeli occupation authorities. 

“I call on Israeli authorities to end the displacement and eviction of Palestinians, in line with its obligations under international law, and to approve additional plans that would enable Palestinian communities to build legally and address their development needs,” the UN website reported Wennesland as saying.

Back to Erdan’s display, where he showcased Palestinian ‘terrorism’ by presenting the supposedly damning evidence of a rock. 

It must be said that criticizing or defending Palestinian resistance, however symbolic, allows Israel to engage in a misleading and frivolous conversation that creates a moral equivalence between the occupier and the occupied, the colonialist and the colonized. 

Whether Palestinians use a stone, a gun or a clenched fist to resist and defend themselves, their resistance is morally and legally justifiable. Israel, on the other hand, like all other military occupiers and colonialists, has neither a moral nor a legal argument to justify its oppression of Palestinians, the destruction of their homes – like that of the Salhiya family – and the killing of their children. 

Judging by the growing solidarity with Palestinians everywhere, it is clear that Erdan’s pathetic display is just another exercise in political futility.

Nothing that Israel can say or do will alter the glaring reality, that a new generation of Palestinians is, once again, unifying the Palestinian discourse, namely around Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation. Whether Israeli oppression is happening in Sheikh Jarrah, in Gaza, or the Naqab desert, Palestinians now collectively respond as one unified political body. Thanks to the May 2021 rebellion, gone are the days in which Palestinians are expelled from their homes in the middle of the night as if a routine event, with no consequence. 

Moreover, the political language that is being used to describe events in Palestine in the international arena is itself changing. Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ is no longer the knee-jerk reaction that is often used to describe Israeli violence and Palestinian resistance. 

And finally, it seems that Israel is no longer the party shaping events in Palestine and controlling the discourse around these events. Palestinians, and a growing international movement of supporters, are proactively shaping global perceptions of the realities on the ground. Neither Erdan nor his bosses in Tel Aviv can reverse this Palestinian-led momentum. His UN display merely reflects the degree of desperation and intellectual bankruptcy of Israel and its representatives.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His forthcoming book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out.” Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is ramzybaroud.net.

Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2020. 

Author Sudhir Hazareesingh is a native of the Indian Ocean island and former French colony of Mauritius, once known as Ile de France. Drawing upon a lifetime of research in the French, British and U.S. archives, the Oxford scholar and expert on French history unearths until-recently untapped primary sources and correspondence, which provide a deeper look at the legendary anti-colonial Haitian figure Toussaint Louverture and his worldview.

Black Spartacus is a rigorous history of Louverture’s undying spirit and prodigious work for his people’s emancipation. A stranger to sleep and personal comfort, everyday the former slave-turned-general and leader of a burgeoning nation, dictated and wrote 200 letters to allies and enemies alike, covered 120 miles on horseback, and convened meetings with dozens of leaders and their communities (page 213). The first chapter examines his coming of age as a slave on the Breda plantation, from which he received his slave name, and the influence of Catholicism and Vodou. He later earned his name Louverture, meaning “The Opening,” on the battlefield inspired by “one of the most revered vodou deities, Papa Legba, the spirit of the crossroads”; a popular kreyol chant at the beginning of ritual ceremonies was “Papa Lega, open the gates for me” (43).

The middle chapters cover his time as a “general in the Spanish auxiliary army [where] he commanded a force of 4,000 men, as a French general who defeated the English invasion of San Domingue and his writing of the 1801 constitution, which outlawed slavery on the island for eternity” (58). A diplomat, he had to maneuver between warring empires with superior armies and navies hell-bent on re-enslaving “the pearl of the Antilles.” Hazareesingh evaluates Louverture’s role in the June 1799 “War of Knives” against André Rigaud and the Generals of Color (the “mulattos”). Supported by the British through their colonial administration in Jamaica, this intermediary class sought to wipe out the white planters and re-enslave Black people. Thoroughly opposed to “the relentless ethnic cleansing,” Louverture dreamed of and fought for a San Domingue for all classes. While protecting the lives of the white propertied class, he returned to rally his base on the plantations with his rallying cry: “I took up arms so that you may be free… and like you I was once a slave.” The battered, oppressed masses of former slaves were always his true source of power.

All books on the Haitian revolution must be held up to C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. The 1938 classic of the historical materialist method continues to be the magisterial account of how the masses of Haitian slaves mobilized themselves into a people’s army and blow by blow, setback after setback, treachery after treachery and massacre after massacre, defeated Napoleon’s sanguinary French empire. 

Hazareesingh’s main critique is James gives too much credit to French Republicanism’s influence on Louverture. Yet, throughout the 427-page book the author himself constantly reminds the reader of Louverture’s loyalty to France. Both James and Hazareesingh agree on the essential components of Louverture’s personality: He never forgot his roots, he was a devout Catholic, a stickler for military and social etiquette and order, and was “incorruptible” (193). 

An admirer of French culture, language and history, Louverture felt San Domingue—the former name of the island now inhabited by Haiti and the Dominican Republic—could never make it on his own. Louverture had a type of neocolonial view that the Mauritian author interrogates. Without returning the former slaves to a bondage they so violently feared, the reader may be surprised to know their very liberator bound them to the plantations in order to continue producing the enormous wealth of the past decades and centuries. The workers in return received one-fourth of their harvest. Aware of the brutal, dehumanizing effects of the slave system, he saw the plantation economy as a necessary evil until the formerly enslaved people could build up their own sense of economy and culture. He saw France as the indispensable mother country that would instill a “Republican” spirit in “her children.” 

Surrounded by assasination plots and having been deceived from all sides, Louverture “was extremely reluctant to communicate his intentions even to his leading military officers, or to share power with them in any meaningful way” (291). Again, the Haitian general did not have the insights of future revolutionary cadre. Amilcar Cabral’s maxum, “Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories…” was all too relevant. The cultivateurs (former slaves) must have wondered why their shining prince disciplined them while giving free reign to the colons (the white planters and former slave owners). It was as if Louverture thought he could win over the antagonistic classes and wish away a class conflict based on the enslavement of millions of abducted Africans. 

While in retrospect we can call Louverture idealistic it is important to remember he did not have the advantage of drawing on the lessons of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Vietnamese’s popular resistance to the French and later to U.S. imperialism, or the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Unlike Haitian revolutionaries François Makandal, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Kapwa Lamò, Moyse—an adopted nephew Louverture ultimately executed—as well as other Haitian generals of the people’s war, Louverture was not willing to go all the way. Hazareesingh contrasts the Makandalist vs Louverturian vision for Haiti. Ultimately, Dessaline was the man for the historical job carrying the Makandalist project to its ultimate “No Sellout, No Compromise” conclusion. The scorched earth strategy of “Koupe tèt Boule kay” (Cut off [the masters’] heads Burn down their mansions) was all the invading troops could understand. As 20,000 of French General Charles Leclerc’s soldiers occupied Cap Haïtien in the north, Dessalines and his generals burned down the entire city and retreated to the mountains, so the invaders would have no base to call home.   

While “his capacity to straddle divides across the ideological spectrum” within the anti-colonial camp was a great asset, it was also his hamartia, or flaw fatale (357). Like James, Hazareesingh shows how Louverture, even as he died away in the infamous French dungeon at Fort de Joux in 1803, never lost hope that colonial France would live up to the 1789 creed of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” Louverture remained a true Jacobin as France devolved again into a slave-holding empire. While revolutionary leadership through the ages will continue to debate whether his “non-racialist” view of humanity and progress was correct, they surely agree that his faith in his class and colonial enemies was his downfall. (39)

In a polemic against apologists for colonialism, Guyanese revolutionary Walter Rodney states what Louverture’s humanism, non-racialism and unbounding faith in human nature never allowed him to reach:

“They [defenders of colonialism] would then urge that another issue to be resolved is how much Europeans did for Africans, and that it is necessary to draw up a ‘balance sheet of colonialism’. On that balance sheet, they place both the ‘credits’ and the ‘debits’, and quite often conclude that the good outweighed the bad… It is our contention that this is completely false. Colonialism had only one hand—it was a one-armed bandit.” (205)

Louverture’s tragic fate re-confirmed two classes, with entirely antagonistic class interests, could not co-exist. Napoleon’s deception, kidnapping, torture, imprisonment and murder of Louverture was a most undignified ending for the most upright of men.  

Hazareesingh’s final chapter, “A Universal Hero,” examines the vast array of future revolutions’ tributes dedicated to the Haitian people’s general through art, film, literature and theater. Facing death in a prison cell in 1954, Fidel Castro wrote the Cuban revolutionaries were inspired to “revolutionize Cuba from top to bottom by the insurrection of Black slaves in Haiti, at a time when Napoleon was imitating Caesar, the France resembled Rome, the soul of Spatacus was reborn in Toussaint Louverture.” 

Black Spartacus is a motivating read and its examination of letters and documents from the Haitian revolution compliments the foundational work of C.L.R. James. 

A slightly different version of this review appeared in Haiti Liberté.

Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels to Haiti to stay with the mass anti-imperialist movement. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.

Editor’s Note: The following is the writer’s analysis and was originally published in Eurasia Review.

On December 16, two Haitian embassy diplomats—Williamson Jean and Jackson Lorrain—were arrested on their way from the Dominican Republic’s capital of Santo Domingo to a farm in the Monte Cristi province, where they were planning to deliver 11 passports for the hundreds of Haitian workers awaiting their arrival. The Dominican military confiscated the passports and computer equipment used to produce personal identification cards—all of which belong to the Haitian state. The arrest took place in spite of Jean and Lorrain showing diplomatic identification, the authenticity of which was later confirmed by a top Haitian consulate official, Francois Guerrier. 

These incidents have occurred against a backdrop of rising tensions between the two countries, with the Dominican Republic tightening border surveillance and implementing a series of measures to curb irregular migration from Haiti.

Colonial Exploitation

Present-day hostilities between the countries that occupy the island of Hispaniola are deeply rooted in the historical soil of racism and imperialism. The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick formalized French control over the western third of Hispaniola—at that time a Spanish asset—under the name of Saint-Domingue. In 1797, Spain ceded the entire island to France. A valuable spigot of wealth, Saint-Domingue supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave trade. It was a greater source of income for its owners than the whole of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies combined.

The half-a-million slaves who propped up the dazzling opulence of the French commercial bourgeoisie rebelled in August 1791—two years after the French Revolution and its ripple effects in Saint-Domingue. Collective British, Spanish and French efforts to crush the rebellion set off a war that lasted 13 years and concluded with the humiliating defeat of imperial powers. William Pitt the Younger and Napoleon

Bonaparte together lost some 50,000 troops in the campaign to restore slavery and the elaborate structures of exploitation. The defeat of the latter’s expedition in 1803 resulted in the establishment of the state of Haiti on January 1, 1804. Frightened by Haiti’s establishment of a black republic resolutely opposed to the barbarism of European civilization, Dominican elites developed a national identity that defined Dominicans as white, Catholic and culturally Hispanic, in contradistinction to Haitians, whom they characterized as black, animist and culturally African. “Antihaitianismo,” or anti-Haitian racism, became stronger with Haiti’s occupation of the Dominican Republic, which lasted from 1822 until 1844.

President Jean-Pierre Boyer—under whom Hispaniola was unified—feared the French would use Dominican territory as a base to try to re-conquer Haiti. His decision also followed a constitutional ideal: Merger of the whole island in the face of foreign aggressions. Though Haiti’s occupation was welcomed positively by poor Dominicans, the Dominican ruling class disliked being ruled by people they considered inferior. Thus, soon after Boyer was overthrown in 1843 and General Charles Rivière-Hérard took power, a small group of activists in Santo Domingo overturned unified rule. Rivière-Hérard tried to oppose the separation and sent troops eastward, but he was more focused on the consolidation of power at home and could not succeed due to domestic instabilities. On February 27, 1844, the Dominican rebels drove the last Haitian troops from the capital, securing independence.

The Myth of the “Indio”

The fight for independence among Dominicans was heavily tainted by anti-Haitian myths. One such myth concerned the Dominican “Indio.” Even though the indigenous Taíno people were mostly killed after the Spanish conquest, Dominican leaders insisted Dominicans’ ancestors were Indigenous and Spanish, not enslaved African laborers. Why were Indigenous people chosen as the central symbol of Dominican identity? Taínos are neither white nor Black—an attribute capable of accommodating the ambiguity of the Dominican mulatto, a slang term for a person of mixed European and African ancestry. Battle lines were now drawn according to this racial schema—the Indio being pitted against the Haitian, who came to be regarded as the real Black.

These conflicts intensified over the subsequent decades, preparing a context of disunity favorable to the imperial project of the United States, which threatened both nations of Hispaniola with the possibility of intervention if they did not get “upheavals and banditry” under control.

Using these pretexts, the U.S. empire invaded the Caribbean island. First in 1915 in Haiti, then entering the Dominican Republic in 1916. The 8-year-long occupation of the Dominican Republic sparked the creation of a comprador class—local people who served as a subsidiary to the foreign corporations that owned Dominican sugar plantations through their dominance in the National City Bank of New York, which managed the country’s finances. A social architecture as rigidly exploitative as this required an authoritarian government—an imperative fulfilled by the Guardia Nacional Dominicana (Dominican National Guard, or GND). The U.S. Marines instructed Rafael Leonidas Trujillo to lead the GND in 1918 and made him commander-in-chief of the National Army in 1927. In 1930, with support from his military, Trujillo supported a coup against then-President Horacio Vasquez.

Under the ruthless dictatorship of Trujillo—which lasted until 1961—antihaitianismo solidified. In 1937—during what is now called the Parsley Massacre—Trujillo aimed to whiten the Dominican Republic by expelling Haitians. Trujillo, who was known to lighten his own skin with makeup, ordered the deaths of those who refused his order to leave. These Haitians were recognized by their inability to pronounce “perejil,” Spanish for “parsley.” Most Haitians could not make the Spanish “r” sound as the French “r” was different. This massacre killed nearly 30,000 people. These mass killings were followed by the production of propaganda in favor of an anti-Haitian ideology. Dominican history books started over-emphasizing the Haitian occupation—the demonization of the dark-skinned “other” became par for the course.

In 1962, Juan Bosch ran for president under the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), inaugurating the first democratic government of the post-dictatorial era. Seven months later, he was overthrown by a coalition of the oligarchs, the old Trujillist army and the Catholic Church. Faced with a popular revolt, the putschists solicited the support of the United States, which sent its military in 1965, killing 5,000 people. After the defeat of the democratic revolution, Joaquin Balaguer—a disciple of Trujillo—led a repressive government. An anti-communist flunky of the United States, as well as a close collaborator of François Duvalier’s dictatorial regime in Haiti, Balaguer’s 12-year reign was responsible for incarcerating, torturing and murdering 6,000 people.

In the late 1970s, the PRD came to office. After that, the reins of the national government alternated among the PRD, the Dominican Liberation Party (PLD) and, briefly, the Social Christian Reform Party (PRSC)—associated with Balaguer. 

Antihaitianismo Under Neoliberalism

While the PLD became largely dominant, the PRD came to represent the country’s main official opposition. With the growing impact of neoliberal globalization, the progressive legacy of the struggle against Trujillismo and Balaguerismo was abandoned in favor of a rightward shift toward anti-Haitian Hispanophilic identities. In 2010, the formerly center-left PLD called a constitutional convention, largely to exclude a new group from the birthright-citizenship clause: The children of anyone “residing illegally in Dominican territory.”

The injunction was aimed at Haitians and served as a blueprint for the Constitutional Court’s regressive ruling on September 23, 2013. It declared the nearly 500,000 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were illegal, thus subject to deportation. The ruling extended to the descendants of Haitian immigrants who came to the Dominican Republic as early as 1929. Systematic stigmatization has enabled the Dominican bourgeoisie to force Haitians into conditions of semi-slavery on sugar plantations, to deport tens of thousands of Haitians without a court hearing, and to deny citizenship and access to public services to Dominican-born children of Haitian parents. In the en masse expulsions of Haitians, some dark-skinned Dominican citizens have been identified as Haitian and deported to Haiti without being given a chance to prove citizenship. This is emblematic of a wider problem facing the Black and mulatto masses of the Dominican Republic: To either assume the Indio identity and Hispanic culture, or to be ostracized from the body politic.

In 2014, when former president Hipólito Mejía left the PRD to form the Modern Revolutionary Party (PRM), Luis Abinader—a 52-year-old businessman with no previous experience in public office—jumped on the bandwagon. In 2020, he was elected president, ending the 16-year dominance of the PLD. Dominicans of Haitian descent—who make up 7.3 percent of the population—had placed their trust in the administration, hoping it would put an end to their condition of statelessness. 

Abinader, however, has continued to deport thousands of Haitians. He also has begun constructing a 118-mile border wall between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The estimated cost is over $100 million. Taking into account the negative impact of the pandemic on tourism, construction and the flow of remittances, the erection of a xenophobic wall should be the last thing on Abinader’s agenda. The government’s continued maintenance of such an exclusionary project indicates it is fundamentally anti-people in nature, using antihaitianismo to deflect the public’s attention from its destructive, market-oriented economic policies.

Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India. He can be contacted at [email protected].