The news arrives with the grim predictability of a Greek tragedy: a high-ranking Haitian security official has been spirited away by the very forces he was meant to suppress. The details are sparse, but the message is clear. Haiti, that perennial theatre of chaos and suffering, is once again unravelling at the seams.
And what does the British Foreign Office offer in response? Stabilisation support. The same support that has been offered, dispatched and failed for centuries.
You have to admire the consistency, if not the efficacy. John Stuart Mill once argued that despotism was a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, providing the end be their improvement. We have since abandoned that rhetoric, of course, but the instinct remains.
When a state collapses, the old imperial powers still twitch. They reach for the old tools: aid, advisors, a gentle hand on the tiller of local politics. And yet, Haiti’s woes are not a technical problem.
They are a historical curse, forged in the fires of revolution and compounded by two centuries of extraction, neglect and well-meaning intervention. The kidnapping of a single official, however senior, is not a cause. It is a symptom.
A symptom of a state so hollowed out that its security apparatus cannot even protect its own. The British offer of stabilisation is admirable in its humanity. But let us not pretend it is anything other than a sticking plaster on a haemorrhage.
The real question is whether Mr Barrow, or whoever holds the security portfolio now, will be another name on a long list of failures. Or whether he will recognise that nothing short of a complete refounding of the Haitian state will suffice. I suspect the answer is already written in the blood of the next victim.
And the next. And the next.
