The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

MOST of us would agree that a generation is about the time it takes for us to grow up, get married, have children and begin the process of passing the torch to those children – the next generation. So a generation becomes a measure of time. About 27 years, perhaps.

And that’s just about how long it has been since we last experienced the sort of massive outmigration from our neighbours in Haiti that threatens to overwhelm our ability to manage such an influx of desperate souls seeking refuge from the calamitous events that seem to occur as part of tragic routine in that stricken island nation.

Many older readers might recall 1994 as the year during which Queen Elizabeth II visited The Bahamas, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh and travelling on the Royal Yacht Britannia. That visit was a dazzling occasion indeed and, among other things, seemed to serve as a kind of commemoration of the relatively new administration of then-Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham, whose electoral triumph two years earlier had ended Sir Lynden Pindling’s 25-year reign as Prime Minister of an independent Bahamas.

By the time of the Queen’s visit, the country had mostly completed rebuilding efforts in Eleuthera and elsewhere from the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in August 1992. Andrew had arrived in The Bahamas almost at the exact time as the new Ingraham administration was being sworn in.

During that same period, however, events were unfolding nearby that would lead to a crisis atmosphere here that foreshadowed what we’re experiencing now.

In 1991, reformist progressive Jean-Bertrand Aristide won an overwhelming mandate to serve as President of Haiti in that nation’s first-ever democratic election. Aristide was charismatic and inspirational. But his performance as the head of government in a nation beset by countless tribulations was uneven.

Early in that significant year of 1994, a military coup led by an officer named Raoul Cedras overthrew Aristide and he fled into exile. The Cedras regime quickly took its place in the rogues’ gallery of semi – or altogether illegitimate Haitian administrations that mainly served their own maintenance of wealth and power over the people whose interests they largely ignored. It did not take long for discouraged Haitians to try to escape for a better life elsewhere – almost anywhere within reach, as it turned out.

Many Haitians found ways to escape from their homeland by boat, and large numbers washed up on our shores in The Bahamas. Most were merely “transiting” Bahamian waters en route to the promised land in Florida and the southeastern US. Nearly every day for months brought reports of a new Haitian vessel foundering or beached in one of the Family Islands. Haitian enclaves in Nassau and Abaco in particular saw their numbers swell with new arrivals who managed to penetrate a de facto maritime blockade.

The impact here was profound. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force and various elements of the US Navy and Coast Guard patrolled our waters relentlessly. While some Haitian migrants were eventually judged to have valid claims for admission to The Bahamas as refugees, most of those caught were detained until they could be repatriated.

The Carmichael Road Detention Centre was established and began to fill up with Haitians awaiting deportation. They were joined by Cubans who were seeking asylum in the US after fleeing the Castro regime in Havana and similarly winding up in The Bahamas.

Cooperation between the Bahamian government and the various responsible American government agencies was both generally smooth and absolutely essential to prevent our being inundated.

US President Bill Clinton, like Mr Ingraham relatively new in office in 1994, was also similarly beset by a variety of internal and external crises. The tragic 1993 “Blackhawk Down” helicopter incident in Mogadishu, Somalia resulted in 19 American military deaths and made the US look feckless and impotent. US-led NATO intervention in Bosnia and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia was problematic and fraught with downside risks. Genocide was raging in Rwanda.

Down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington brash new Republican congressman Newt Gingrich from the Atlanta suburbs was leading a Republican revolt against Democratic political hegemony with his so-called “Contract with America". Clinton and the Democrats got walloped in the 1994 by-elections.

So young leaders in Nassau and Washington were both busy. The Haitians kept coming. Eventually, after a prolonged early resistance, Clinton authorized an American military invasion of Haiti by 25,000 troops to rid the country of Cedras and restore Aristide to power. The American move stunned the ruling military junta in Port au Prince and initially seemed to be a great success, especially since there were no US military casualties.

But the intermediate and longer-term lessons of this American action were profoundly cautionary and retain an important influence on current US thinking about Haiti. An American special envoy to Haiti recalled the main lesson was US intervention guaranteed nothing beyond the immediate restoration of peace. Many historians still feel the American actions and their aftermath have sown the seeds of Haiti’s persistent disorder and murderous chaos.

Critics charge that by essentially uprooting the Haitian government and unilaterally replacing it, the US deprived Haitians of the possibility of developing their own governmental and societal solutions to problems that seem almost impossibly obdurate and insoluble. Others point out that Cedras & Company reportedly killed 5,000 political opponents and represented a cancer on the Haitian body politic that needed to be excised. The debate persists.

So now what? The US is now beset by a Haitian migrant problem of significantly broader scope and dimensions than what confronted it 27 years ago. As thousands of Haitians shocked the Biden administration by appearing in Mexico across the Rio Grande River from Texas seeking asylum, the Biden administration certainly seemed to be caught off guard. The image of an American Border Patrol agent on horseback appearing to use his lariat on cowering Haitian migrants as cowboys often cracked whips to herd cattle on the open range was not a good look, to put it mildly.

That unfortunate picture may linger in minds and in newsrooms and TV studios long after the current crisis subsides.

Maritime migration by Haitians is now keeping the US and Bahamian authorities busy. Every day we see new reports. The new government of Prime Minister Davis might well curse its bad luck in facing such a crisis so early in its tenure. There are reports the government might install a new detention centre on Great Inagua island. A Haitian sloop capsized the other day near Ragged Island. We are all being reminded anew that ours is indeed a sprawling island nation whose southern reaches seem both more and less remote during a crisis such as the current one.

Repatriations and deportations eventually had their desired effects in 1994 and the migrant crisis subsided. Temporary restoration of American-imposed law and order in Haiti played a role too. But many Haitians from that era remain here, often as productive members of our society. Others from that time wound up elsewhere in the Caribbean basin or in Central America. Some of them doubtless are among those gathered at the Texas-Mexico border.

It still seems quite unlikely the US will again resort to an armed invasion of Haiti to help end the current crisis. President Biden has a lot on his plate these days, as he faces the resolute challenge of a recalcitrant Republican Party still dominated by his predecessor. International rivals China and Russia stand menacingly by as the US continues to writhe in its domestic politics. And so forth. It’s a complex and competitive world.

But in several ways, the situation now developing with respect to Haitian migration is similar to what faced the American, Bahamian and other regional governments a generation ago. Both Biden and our new Prime Minister were around in 1994. Taking and heeding lessons from the past is a useful habit to develop, especially for national leaders.

But when it comes to the perpetually vexing situation in nearby Haiti, the question becomes which lessons from the past should we heed? Is there any solution that doesn’t involve another enforced regime change in Port au Prince? Surely the lessons of our collective earlier experience in this area are at least cautionary. But what are the alternatives?