Autocrats, Kleptocrats and Populists

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, we are indeed grateful to my noble friend Lord Browne for giving us this opportunity to discuss these important matters. I hope that he and other noble Lords will forgive me for starting in a different place from others, for I lived for 10 years in an autocracy, a kleptocracy with populism pretty much reigning on all hands. It was the 1970s; it was François Duvalier, followed by his son Jean-Claude. I met Papa Doc twice—he died shortly afterwards, but I do not think there was a causal link. Kleptocracy was certainly something I was more than familiar with. The school I was deputy head of had educated Jean-Claude Duvalier. We knew all his inside helpers. I taught members of the Tonton Macoute and of the diplomatic corps, as well as people with no money whose fees were paid by those who had stolen it from somebody else.

In the time available I must speak in headlines, for the democratic world has reduced Haiti to the frazzled rump it is now. From the time of Haiti’s independence, France took it ill and imposed an indemnity that independent Haiti went on paying back until relatively recently—just 20 or 30 years ago. The Americans have played a pretty bad hand in Haiti. I can assure your Lordships that an occupying force of redneck southern marines policing the first black republic in the world left its mark. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, rewrote the Haitian constitution and set up a rigged plebiscite in order that foreigners, previously not allowed to own land, could. American corporations rushed in. Sisal and sugar were exploited, as were minerals and other things. The Haitian national debt was taken from the Bourse in Paris and sunk in Wall Street, and used to leverage loans for a railway system that Haitians did not want but the sugar industry run by American corporations certainly did.

Denmark, Spain and, I am afraid, the United Kingdom played their own bit parts—cameo parts—in the reduction of Haiti to its present state. In particular, a book by a British ambassador in the 1870s vilified Haiti and fed the voyeuristic tendencies of a British readership for a cannibalistic, voodoo-dominated state, which Haiti certainly is not and never has been. I have briefed five consecutive British diplomats who have gone on to serve on the island of which Haiti is a part, and they need to know the full story of exploitation, rape and violation. That is an important aspect of what we are considering now.

I must very quickly say that since the Duvaliers left in 1986, it has been downhill all the way: a President assassinated last July, 250,000 people dead in an earthquake in 2010, 2,500 dead last August in another earthquake, gangs, drugs, insecurity, no democratic norms and no judiciary or criminal justice system. It is simply a mess. I am helping to run the campaign of a man who I hope will soon be the new President of Haiti—God, what a job he will have. After a visit I helped to organise to eastern Nigeria for 12 Haitian leaders just two weeks ago, he was arrested in Miami on his way back to Haiti, interrogated and accused of going to Nigeria to have dealings with Boko Haram—which is ludicrous fantasy—to assassinate his character ahead of the elections, because the Americans certainly do not want him.

All I can say at this stage is that I have become convinced of the situation. I have used Haiti for illustrative purposes because we can think of other people across Latin America and other parts of the world who have been favoured by democracies but turned out to be the kleptocrats and autocrats. With the permission of my noble friend Lord Browne—perhaps I will not ask his permission but impose it on him—I may turn this around and say that I would have loved to have moved that the Grand Committee take note of the impact of countries with democratic norms and values in creating autocrats, kleptocrats and populists.