Can Haiti’s diaspora save it?

Haiti’s president has been assassinated. Despite there being 30 seats in the Senate, only 10 Haitian senators are legally in office. Various groups are vying for power. The resultant political vacuum could soon beget a full-on constitutional crisis.

The success of the upcoming transitional Haitian government is highly dependent on solutions created by and for the Haitian people.

What Haiti needs is not heavy-handed intervention from the U.S. or United Nations but an International Congress made up of its diaspora to work with Haitians on the ground. Again and again, we have seen foreign donors, governments and international development organizations use their expertise and money to help the Haitian people with what they think are the right solutions. Yet all too often, this creates more dependency. Because their intervention isn’t rooted in a trauma-sensitive or anti-racist approach, it prevents the well-meaning benefactors from understanding the rich yet complex past and recent history we Haitians have endured.

In 2004, my family and I left Haiti to move to the United States. The same year, the Haitian coup d’état deposed President Jean Bertrand Aristide. Soon after, the UN Security Council established its Stabilization Mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, a several-dozen-country coalition of peacekeeping forces.

The MINUSTAH focused most of its efforts on training and increasing the police presence in Haiti. Yet it largely ignored the socioeconomic problems that fueled the conditions of violence and a staggering unemployment and poverty rate.

After the 7.0 earthquake toppled Port-au-Prince in 2010, my grandma and uncles were among the displaced. They lost their entire home in Carrefour Feuille and were lucky enough to flee to the United States, while many didn’t have that opportunity. As the MINUSTAH grew in size for the recovery efforts on the island, hundreds of MINUSTAH soldiers had been accused of acts of sexual exploitation and abuse against Haitian children. To make matters worse, MINUSTAH soldiers from Nepal introduced cholera to Haiti, which affected more than 900,000 Haitians and killed more than 10,000. Even after the Institute for Justice and Democracy filed a lawsuit in New York against the UN and 19 members of the U.S. Congress petitioned UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to acknowledge their involvement in the outbreak, it took six years for the UN to admit its involvement.

I was an intern at the United Nations in 2015 as a graduate student, studying conflict transformation and peacebuilding. Sitting through the Security Council session that was set to discuss the renewal of

MINUSTAH’s mandate in Haiti, as most diplomats stood there reading from pieces of paper, I was disappointed by the lack of discussion regarding the Haitian dilemma and its full context. More than $13 billion in humanitarian aid had been donated to rebuild the entire country. NGO workers from around the world came with their PhDs, their research on poverty alleviation and urban design. Even so, the vast majority failed to engage local Haitians in the Haitian Creole language.

Haiti has come to be called the “a republic of NGOs.” It had the most non-governmental organizations working in any country on the planet. NGOs came to provide more than 80% of social services in the country, creating a dependency that not even Haiti’s civil society or government could match.

To be sure, international aid has alleviated severe poverty and provided critical healthcare to Haitians who desperately need it. Thousands of hardworking aid professionals have dedicated their lives to the Haitian cause with no end in sight, simply doing what has been done before. At this point, however, Haitians also need to take responsibility for the corruption that plagues the country and the elite who have a vested interest in keeping their wealth.

We have reached a point of no return, and the way we have done things in the past simply isn’t working anymore. We must think very carefully about whether we are to send military troops or humanitarian aid money to Haiti to fix the problem. Our current international model lacks imagination and is no longer suited to meet the demands and complexity of tomorrow — especially in Haiti. We need bold, new ideas that uphold Haitians’ dignity.

There are more than 4 million distraught Haitians living across the world, and they all have been impacted by the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. These Haitians now await foreign donors, governments and international development organizations to commit the same mistakes that they always do in the wake of a Haitian crisis. These Haitians are scientists, surgeons, engineers, novelists, software developers and entrepreneurs who have deep creative insights and knowledge regarding what it means to be Haitian. Forming an International Congress of the Haitian Diaspora — one tasked to work with Haitians on the ground, exploring solutions across industries — might just be the radical plan that Haiti desperately needs to give true power back to its people.