The Betrayal: Haiti in the Shadows of the United States of America’S Foreign Policy Debacle in the Last Decades

By Dr. Jacques-Raphaël Georges

There is a thought that has been attributed to the Haitian Molire, or Alcibiade: All countries are developing while Haiti is enveloping. When one reads the following 1903 letter written by the nationalist physician Dr. Rosalvo Bobo, it could be easy to swear it was just written a minute ago. It is hard to believe since its independence was officially declared on January 1, 1804, that not much has changed in Haiti. Indeed, not much has changed. The following letter is a vibrant testimony to our societal stagnation and to our national degradation, both of which are symptomatic of the sum of our individual failures as citizens. Nations do not fail. Their citizens fail them. Personal successes are irrelevant to concerned citizens. Haiti has sadly become a country without elites. Most, alas, have become pitiful racketeers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524512996

Dr. Jacques-Raphaël Georges

Born in Port-au-Prince, Jacques-Raphaël Georges owes his primary and secondary education to the State of Haiti. Firstly, he was a pupil at L’Ecole Nationale des Casernes Dessalines, a school opened to the offsprings of the members of the Haitian armed forces. Georges began his teaching career at Centre d’Etudes d’Haïti, -where he was also a student-, as a Greek and Latin instructor while he studied at the Faculty of Ethnology before emigrating into the United States. He served in the US Navy. Honorably discharged, he attended Rhode Island College, where he obtained a B.A., a master’s in French pedagogy, and and a certificate in African and African-American studies. Thereafter, Georges crowned his accomplishments with a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. Doctor Georges presently teaches French and Francophone cultures at the University of New Hampshire, at Manchester. A defender of black cultures, Dr. Georges travels extensively throughout Africa, and Latin America, giving conferences on the topic.

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Copyright © 2016 by Dr. Jacques-Raphaël Georges.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 06/29/2016

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Contents

Foreword

Standing Firm: The Tyranny of Geography

By Gérard Georges, Esq.

Part I    Haiti and American Military Interventions and Occupations Worldwide

Dr. Jacques-Raphaël Georges

Part II    Haiti in the Shadow of the United States of America’s Foreign Policy Debacle in the Last Decades

Dr. Jacques-Raphaël Georges

Part III    Dantès Bellegarde: A Titan from a Line of Giants

Dr. Jacques-Raphaël Georges

Part IV    The Republic of Haiti and the United States in Front of the International Judicial Court

By Dantès Bellegarde (Translated from the French by Dr. Jacques-Raphaël Georges)

Part V    Afterthought

Bellegarde (Notes)

Adjunct

Bibliography and References

Biography

A Letter from Beyond the Graves

To my father, Jean Gesner Georges, my uncles Jean-François Guzman, Arnold Laporte, my dear friends, professors Jean Renès Marseille, Marc Roland Thadal, my niece Ansy Georges and my spiritual father, gran frè/ti fre, as we enjoyed saying, the Caco, Dr. Gérard Etienne.

All, alas, left for the Guinea Ancestral!

I do not create the facts or invent history.

I simply evoke the former and allow the latter to speak.

—Dr. Jacques Raphael Georges

L’une des choses que j’admire le plus chez Dr. Georges, c’est ce petit je ne sais quoi qui l’inspire à dire des vérités qui font bondir les hypocrites.

One of the things that I admire most about Dr. Georges is that je ne sais quoi that empowers him to say things that force the hypocrites out of their skin. (my translation)

Dr. Gérard Etienne (Montréal, June 24, 2003)

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

—Albert J. Nock,

Our Enemy, The State (1935)

Foreword

Standing Firm: The Tyranny of Geography

Know yourself and know your enemy, and you need not fear the result of one hundred battles. Know yourself and not the enemy, and for every victory gained, you will suffer a defeat. Know neither the enemy nor yourself, and you will succumb in every battle…

—Sun Tzu,

The Art of War

Standing Firm: The Tyranny of Geography

Nearly everyone who is literate can write on a topic. Prior to being on paper, the text already exists in our mind. Right from the start, it evokes our moral character.

I have had a brief romance with philosophy forty-three years ago, at the Lycée Alexandre Pétion in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. There, I discovered that we should not always expect to come to a consensus on social, political and moral issues.

While research can often be useful, we cannot afford to brush aside the role played by intuition and imagination completely in literary conception and production, especially when you have lived with a writer and witnessed his evolution throughout the years. Seen from that angle, this preface to Dr. Jacques-Raphaël Georges’ The Betrayal: Haiti in the Shadows of the United States of America’s Foreign Policy Debacle in the Last Decades will expand on some personal impressions concerning American foreign policy and diplomacy in Haiti.

It is one of the paradoxes of intellectual history that a veteran of the United States of America’s navy and a professor of French and francophone cultures would produce so fundamental a study of American foreign policy and diplomacy in the impoverished Caribbean republic. Indeed, Haiti has been in dire need of someone to interpret its current problems and its historic role and destiny to itself as well as to Notre grand voisin du nord, as Anténor Firmin liked to put it.

When Dr. Jacques-Raphaël Georges gave a lecture on Anténor Firmin (who occupies a remarkable place in the pantheon of Haitian history) at the American embassy in Port-au-Prince on the morning of October 26, 2007, he was already in for a painful foreign policy experience (a diplomacy of stagnation and despair) that can only be best described as a drama or a tragic comedy written from beyond the grave by Molière and Voltaire whose characters are hiding behind their masks while their names are written in large bright glittering letters on their foreheads.

The title of the present work, The Betrayal: Haiti in the Shadows of the United States of America’s Foreign Policy Debacle in the Last Decades, may suggest that a full understanding of American foreign policy around the world could be explained literally in black and white. It is not the case. Our late friend —the literary critic, professor and journalist— Marc Roland Thadal explained that eloquently in his foreword to Dr. Georges’ booklet titled Poésie noire en vers blancs. Talking about the recurrence of the semantemes black and white in Dr. Georges’ poetry (Poésie noire en vers blancs), Thadal wrote that it "is a double paradigm, an example of oxymoron, a figure of speech defined by Morier as a kind of antithesis in which one word seems to logically exclude the other". (Georges, 1990, p. 29)

In The Betrayal, Dr. Georges’central theme is that the United States of America is beset by an apparent paradox: the nation’s commitments to universal justice and equality are contradicted by the way it treats the Negroes in the impoverished Caribbean island.

Diplomatic Nihilism

After Poésie noire en vers blancs, Dr. Georges had published Cacoïsme littéraire ou la fonction du personnage américain dans le roman haïtien à partir de 1915 (How I wish the latter be translated into Thomas Jefferson’s language!), The Betrayal is his third published work. This new volume leads us into the corridors of power and privilege, of poverty and pageantry in the Washington cartel.

In The Betrayal, Dr. Georges clearly recounts the escalation of their ideals as they become a horrible reality. In their view, civil rights should not be granted to the Negroes. Societies are engaged in a perpetual war for existence in which the strong preys on the weak. In this respect, the use of force and violence becomes a legitimate means. In the United States, it is translated into blues against blacks. As a black man driving on the streets of America, Dr. Georges knows the last point very well. Most blues being former servicewomen and servicemen, his newly acquired veteran license plates —the ex-US Navy noncommissioned officer is quick to point out!— do win him a well-deserved respect.

It is very difficult to deny the fact that from Jean-Claude Duvalier through Jean Bertrand Aristide and René Préval to the pathetic Sweet Micky (a creature of the Clintons!), every single American ambassador has been like a senior CIA case officer who has been told to turn a blind eye to even gross violations of the rules of law.

I am bitterly disappointed and a bit angry at both myself and the Haitian political clans for never digging out a more exacting explanation, a clear statement of every American diplomat in Port-au-Prince of reasoning and motivation.

Peter Gay, one of Sigmund Freud’s biographers, attempted to reduce Freud’s insights to a single idea and came pretty close. Gay wrote that personality is not really the resolution of an individual’s various impulses. It is, rather, the organization of those impulses. So contradictions abound. Any attempt I might make to explain or resolve or fully make sense of those diplomats’ behavior in Tabarre would probably fail. All in all, this is diplomatic nihilism. This is a scary tragedy!

It is a capital mistake to theorize before having data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to fit theories instead of theories to fit facts.

Facts, leads and even rumors about the nomenklatura in power in Port-au-Prince and diplomatic dirty tricks come to Dr. Georges’ desk and ears. He can draw on the raw data inside the American embassy in Tabarre. He is able to provide all kinds of clues, ultimately giving us the schematic diagram of the massive failure of American foreign policy or at least pointing to it.

Dr. Georges reveals the struggles of a patriotic scholar, an admirer of Anténor Firmin, the encyclopedic and cartesian author of De l’égalité des races humaines. He brings to light the ongoing clash between temporary political power in Washington DC, and the permanence of corrupt regimes in Port-au-Prince (Dr. Georges prefers to say the recycling of bastardized politicians).

The Betrayal: Haiti in the Shadows of the United States of America’s Foreign Policy Debacle in the Last Decades chronicles, in intimate details, the democracy of miseries in Haiti. Democrats and Republicans own the new plantations of diplomacy