United Nations military interventions in Haiti have failed to provide long-term solutions to the country's political and economic instability, Thomas Urban, a visiting scholar of anthropology at Brown University, said in a Tuesday lecture at the Rockefeller Center. Urban recounted his own experience in Haiti as a former United States army scout.
Urban was stationed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, from 1994 to 1995 during the U.N.'s "Operation Uphold Democracy." The operation, which was led by the United States, aimed to restore order after a military coup overthrew former Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1991.
"The military interventions were completely useless," Urban said. "They've done nothing to help the long-term issues of the economy, of the environment, of the political system. I don't know if [Haiti] can even have a political regime that's stable for more than a few years."
For decades, Haiti's economic and environmental problems have followed a "vicious cycle," Urban said. He said deforestation has devastated the country's economy, 80 percent of which relies on agriculture. When coupled with constantly shifting and often corrupt political leadership, Urban said, this cycle leads to widespread poverty, insufficient health care and persistent crime.
"Port-au-Prince has some of the worst slums on earth in terms of being dangerous and rundown, and that's coming from someone who's worked in Zimbabwe, Congo, Iraq, Bosnia, all sorts of places," he said. "Haiti is definitely, by far, the worse that I've seen."
Urban said the soldiers sent to Haiti were largely unprepared to respond to the situations they encountered, contributing to the intervention's failure.
"Part of the gear we would carry around with us every night were body bags," he said. "There we were, literally picking up body parts and putting them in the bag, just from random street crime. We were 18, 19, 20-year-old kids who had never dealt with this before, but this became commonplace."
Ineffective peacekeeping tactics did little to lower gang and random crime levels, problems that are still rampant today, Urban said.
"In the short term, some violence was slowed down, but [even] with a force of 20,000 on the ground in Haiti, there was still quite a bit of political violence," Urban said.
Although Urban said he believes that military intervention in Haiti continue to fail, he explained that he is not pessimistic about all U.N. interventions.
"It's tough to make one sweeping generalization to say that these interventions are bad," Urban said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "Had we intervened in the Rwanda genocide early on, it may have saved a million lives, who knows. These things are just so hit or miss. Sometimes they just don't work. A lot of times they don't work."
Urban's lecture was sponsored by the anthropology department and Por Latinoamerica.
