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 loads of time excited about what number of different international locations share the same background, historical past, trajectory, and challenges as Haiti in an try to try to perceive and, hopefully, discover options out of the cyclical dysfunction we discover ourselves in.
My searches usually lead me to international locations like Eire and England, given the geopolitical dynamics of two international locations coexisting on one island—much like Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Or international locations 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 Girls (CSW) classes, my eyes had been opened to the teachings we are able to be taught 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 women in Haiti and the way it displays the nation’s broader governance failures.
Laura Nyirinkindi, chair of the UN Working Group on discrimination towards girls and women, pointed to Rwanda for instance Haiti may look to amid its ongoing political instability.
The 1994 Rwandan genocide disproportionately focused girls for sexual violence, stated Nyirinkindi, one of many panelists featured in the course of the session. Within the months and years following the genocide, girls performed a number one function in peace and reconciliation efforts regardless of the trauma they’d endured.
“It demonstrates how a disaster might be remodeled into a chance to reinforce girls’s management,” she stated.
Like Haiti, Rwanda has a constitutional mandate requiring girls to carry not less than 30% of presidency positions. Nonetheless, not like Haiti, Rwanda enforced and exceeded that mandate, with girls at the moment making up 60% of its authorities.
As Haiti makes an attempt to drag itself out of the chaos it finds itself in, studying from Rwanda’s historical past and transitional justice processes may very well be a guiding put up, 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, basic coordinator of Nègès Mawon, and one of many panelists, “and fewer than 20 p.c of girls within the authorities of Alix Didier Fils-Aimé.”
How can we transfer ahead after 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 vital second of transition is the proper time to alter course.
There’s a saying: Should you at all times do what you’ve at all times completed, you’ll at all times get what you’ve at all times acquired.
So, I ask the powers that be in Haiti: Are we going to proceed doing the identical factor?