President Préval

Last week all heads of state gathered in New York to bring their message to the yearly session of the UN General Assembly. Obviously, the president of Haiti, René Préval, did not stand much of a chance to make his way into the international media with what he had to say, unless he would announce the enrichment of uranium for peaceful export purposes; but that kind of thoughts would lead us too far. He’s not much of a person who is fanatical about long speeches anyhow, to say the least. But more than that the scene was indeed dominated by polemic figures such as the president of Iran, Lybia and the like. Obama did have something to say about Haiti though; classifying it together with Timor Leste and Congo as a by violence ravaged country. Well, there is some unrest and much discontent, but the real issues facing Haitians are of an economic nature and not longer political in the first place. So is Timor Leste as far as I can recall, so I am really wondering why Obama didn’t for example mention Honduras, Guinea or Uganda alongside Congo. Apparently, it’s hard to do away with an image of violence.

But back to Préval. His speech before the General Assembly called for a ‘globalisation of solidarity’. He was tired, he said, of always having to rebuild the same infrastructure and of being victim of materialistic politics imposed by the powerful. He further criticised the current relations between rich and poor people and proposed a globalisation of solidarity in stead of a globalisation of profit, ending his discourse with the question when the rhetoric would make way for action.  At first sight, this aligns him logically with the positions of most of Latin America’s governments, whose discourses are often fraught with demands for a more just structuring of the world economy.

Does this mean Préval was using the GA as a forum to say what he mostly cannot utter in public? It almost seems so, because in Haiti itself, criticism of his choices crystalise around his economic choices and more recently his opposition to raise the minimum wage to 200 Gourdes or 5 US Dollar a day. A compromise was eventually found on 125 Gourdes, exempting however the ‘zones franches’ or export zones. In other words: companies willing to invest in Haiti or already investing in Haiti for the combination of low wages and export purposes would only have to raise the wages of its workers gradually, thus achieving 200 Gourdes in 2012. This of course  rapidly drove Préval into a corner where neoliberalists are still chastised by the left and other social development organisations. Those made the connection with the May 2009 report on Haiti of Paul Collier, prominent expert of Africa’s economies and author of the bestseller ‘The Bottom Billion’. In his plan he proposes quite some privatisation measures aimed at kickstarting exports; especially by making use of the free trade agreement Haiti has with the United States qnd therefore giving the country manifold opportunities to make the best out of its cheap labour.

Back to Préval however, an amusing but silent figure, who – maybe because he can’t be reelected next year – hardly does any effort to work on his popularity. One would wonder how he ever got elected. By not aligning to any party apparently, something he imitates on the international floor. One week, a meeting with Hugo Chavez is sheduled and the next week Washington might be waiting. But in fact, it is not that he has much choice as, for it’s whole history, Haiti has been on the interest agenda of the international community .

He does need to study some more protocol though: