Overview:
As Haiti faces one more political transition, girls stay excluded from significant management roles regardless of constitutional provisions requiring their participation. The query posed is whether or not Haiti will proceed repeating the identical patterns or embrace a brand new path ahead.
I spend quite a lot of time eager about what number of different nations share the same background, historical past, trajectory, and challenges as Haiti in an try and attempt to perceive and, hopefully, discover options out of the cyclical dysfunction we discover ourselves in.
My searches sometimes lead me to nations like Eire and England, given the geopolitical dynamics of two nations coexisting on one island—just like Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Or nations like Honduras grappling with the identical ranges of gang violence and insecurity as Haiti’s capital.
Final weekend, throughout a panel dialogue held on March 14 as a part of the Fee on the Standing of Ladies (CSW) periods, my eyes have been opened to the teachings we will study from Rwanda. The occasion, organized by the Haitian Women’s Collective, Nègès Mawon and the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, centered on the worsening disaster going through girls and ladies in Haiti and the way it displays the nation’s broader governance failures.
Laura Nyirinkindi, chair of the UN Working Group on discrimination in opposition to girls and ladies, pointed to Rwanda for example Haiti might look to amid its ongoing political instability.
The 1994 Rwandan genocide disproportionately focused girls for sexual violence, mentioned Nyirinkindi, one of many panelists featured through the session. Within the months and years following the genocide, girls performed a number one position in peace and reconciliation efforts regardless of the trauma that they had endured.
“It demonstrates how a disaster could be remodeled into a chance to reinforce girls’s management,” she mentioned.
Like Haiti, Rwanda has a constitutional mandate requiring girls to carry no less than 30% of presidency positions. Nonetheless, not like Haiti, Rwanda enforced and exceeded that mandate, with girls at present making up 60% of its authorities.
As Haiti makes an attempt to tug itself out of the chaos it finds itself in, studying from Rwanda’s historical past and transitional justice processes might be a guiding submit, centering girls in decision-making—a stark distinction to what we see taking part in out in Haiti.
Haitian feminist leaders on the CSW panel warned that ladies’s exclusion from political decision-making in Haiti is exacerbating gender-based violence and social instability.
“Within the CPT, we solely have one girl with no vote within the presidential council,” highlighted Lucia D. Pasacale Solages, common coordinator of Nègès Mawon, and one of many panelists, “and fewer than 20 % of ladies within the authorities of Alix Didier Fils-Aimé.”
How can we transfer ahead once we’re already violating our personal structure on the most elementary stage—and nobody is speaking about it or appears to care?
How can we get previous our newest disaster when forward-thinking management like that displayed by Dominique Dupuy is thwarted?
This important second of transition is the proper time to alter course.
There’s a saying: In the event you all the time do what you’ve all the time performed, you’ll all the time get what you’ve all the time acquired.
So, I ask the powers that be in Haiti: Are we going to proceed doing the identical factor?