The Tribune

By Frederick Smith, QC

THE bulldozers have been rolling in Abaco. When the dust settles and night descends, several families were left out in the rain with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a few garbage bags containing what meagre possessions they managed to rescue from the ruin of their homes.

Video footage widely seen on social media showed mothers wailing in despair as the dream of building some sort of post-Dorian life for their children disappeared right before their very eyes. Abandoned to fend for themselves after losing everything in the mega-storm, they invested blood, sweat, tears and every last penny they could into these structures, the only place in the world they could call home. Now, they once again, have nothing to their name and nowhere to go.

According to reports on the ground, on May 21, 11 homes were crushed by Ministry of Works wrecking crews and around 40 people, at least 16 of them children, were left homeless.

Meanwhile, presumably with the premeditated aim of heaping misery upon misery, terror upon terror, the Immigration Department surrounded the community blocking off both entrances and trapping everyone still inside, then began rounding people up and spiriting them away.

If the FNM is to be taken at its word, this is only the beginning. Wrecking crews are soon to descend on informal communities in Nassau and, if the government has its way in the courts, they will return to finish off the job they started in Abaco, rendering 3,500 people homeless in the process.

None of this should have happened. The Supreme Court is currently considering its decision on whether those very communities being targeted should be covered by an existing injunction preventing demolition while a Judicial Review of the home destruction project remains underway. The authorities are supposed to respect the judiciary and follow due process. Instead, they have acted preemptively, threatening to undermine the courts and render the judge’s verdict meaningless in practice. An injunction cannot protect a community if that community has been wiped from the face of the earth.

A few days before the tractors rumbled in, several United National Special Rapporteurs issued a joint statement urging the Bahamas government not to violate its international obligations and create a humanitarian crisis in Abaco.

“The planned forced evictions and demolitions constitute a serious violation of the human right to adequate housing and will result in arbitrary internal displacement,” they said. But appeals from both international observers and local advocates were ignored. The UN was essentially told to take a hike and mind its own business. Thankfully the UN was on the ground this weekend, taking a look for itself on what is really going on.

The government claims this is all about preventing illegal building and improving hygiene and living standards in the targeted areas. Yet it is doubtful that those who have been pushed into the street, or into the bush, would agree that their standard of living has been raised. Certainly, forcing people into homelessness can only make concerns about sanitation, hygiene, outbreak of disease, even more acute.

Why not make a virtue out of humanitarian necessity? Parcel out the land and sell the lots to the occupants, bring in utilities and promote a the growth of a “Farm Road Town”? But I suppose that’s too simple? After all, let’s be realistic; election fever is ablaze and the government must pander to the xenophobic “Hate-The-Haitian Lynch Mob”!

What this is really about, what it has been about from the beginning, is an FNM administration that finds itself up against the political ropes, a government that must call an election within the year but is not sure it can find a way to win again.

Therefore, in true Trumpian style, it has resorted to agitating the basest fears and prejudices of certain sectors of the public, raising the alarm and warning that we are on the cusp of become a Haitian-style failed state. As the Deputy Prime Minister suggested, failure to act could mean garbage piles and shanty towns everywhere!

This kind of fear-mongering, stigmatising and marginalisation of people and peddling of false emergencies is a classic hallmark of anti-democratic, mob rule governments that seek to circumvent the law in order to stay in power. Manufacture a crisis, and you can swoop in to heroically save the public from the unwashed, unsanitary Haitian hordes – due process and the rule of law be damned!

On a deeper level, this is about our entrenched culture of distain for and dislike of all things Haitian; a culturally reinforced impulse to erase and eradicate all traces of Haitian heritage, customs, language from the face of the modern Bahamas. Around the world, minority ethnic groups thrive and flourish in distinctive communities meant to preserve their culture and identity; every major American city has a Little Italy or Chinatown. The same is true of most urban centres in Europe.

Minority communities and cultural centres often become major tourist attractions and are of huge economic value to the host nations. But not in The Bahamas, we recoil in horror at such ideas. People of Haitian ethnic background must either assimilate, or be driven into the bush.

But the joke is on Bahamians. Because for all the scare-mongering and scapegoating of Haitians, for all the efforts to conflate housing demolitions with illegal immigration, it turns out the vast majority of the people living in these communities are either Bahamian citizens, or have some other form of lawful status in the country.

According to the statistics compiled by the government’s own Shanty Town Action Task Force (SATF), in Abaco 80 percent of residents in the government’s crosshairs have some form of status. AND 560 of those individuals whom the authorities would make homeless are Bahamian citizens.

That is to say nothing of the hundreds who are married to Bahamians and have been granted spousal permits, or the children of these unions, who are all Bahamians in waiting according to the Constitution.

And, thanks to the customary vindictiveness of the Immigration Department, many who have a legitimate right to be here, and perhaps many citizens as well, are being sucked up in raids and round-ups, to be disgorged into the putrid bowels of the Carmichael Concentration Camp, unable to prove their status having lost all documents, passports, birth certificates, etc. in the floodwaters of Dorian, and having been prevented by the government in its aftermath from even going back into the communities to salvage what may not have been washed away. Never mind that the law does not even feature a requirement to be able to produce “papers”.

It turns out that the Shanty Town demolition project is actually a plan to arbitrarily dislocate and send hundreds of Bahamians, and others, into a manufactured humanitarian crisis that can only compound the already dire situation on the ground in Abaco following Dorian.

In the wake of the UN’s statement, the Minister of Social Services sought to sugarcoat the discrimination by claiming the government would find alternative housing for these unfortunate people, in a reversal of an earlier pledge not to subsidise the newly homeless. But it is hard to see how this can happen; the Abaco chain has a severe and well-documented housing shortage across the board. There is physically nowhere to put those who the government insists on forcibly displacing, except of course, “da bush”!

If the FNM was really concerned about illegal home construction, living standards and so on, and if they are really determined to destroy peoples’ homes, there is a perfectly lawful process which they can follow. This must begin with a demonstration of respect for the judiciary by awaiting, and then abiding by, the court’s imminent ruling regarding the proper reach of the injunction. If the ruling goes their way, the government would then have to investigate the individual circumstances of each suspect structure and if appropriate, issue eviction notices based on the facts in each particular case, in accordance with the law.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way either. There was never any need to put thousands of people, including hundreds of Bahamian citizens, out in the street in the first place. All of the issues that are complained of in the Abaco communities – Building Code violations, building on Crown Land, lack of title to land, lack of running water and proper sanitation, illegal electricity hook-ups – feature in many inner-city communities throughout The Bahamas. But those communities are not targeted for demolition, or referred to as harbingers of the “Haitianisation” of The Bahamas.

The FNM‘s Over-The-Hill Revitalisation Project acknowledged the very same issues in traditional Bahamian communities in New Providence, but the solution in those cases was to help the communities do better, support the residents and work with them to find solutions, improve conditions and raise the standard of living.

There is no reason such an approach couldn’t work in Abaco. The only real difference is that the residents there, while for the most part citizens or permanent residents, are perceived as being of Haitian parentage or ancestry. Somehow, this gives us the right to treat them differently.

Well, quite frankly, we need to grow up and get over it. A citizen of The Bahamas is a citizen of The Bahamas, regardless of their background. And culturally diverse or different communities are nothing to be afraid of. If we want people to live within the standards aspired to buy the majority of the population, we should stop stigmatising and marginalising and targeting them. Only with a mature attitude to these issues can we craft a recipe for a healthy and cohesive society out of the various ingredients which exist here.

If we cannot find a way to do this, we will continue to be the target of scrutiny by the international community, continue to shame ourselves as a nation on the global stage and continue to violate the human rights conventions we have signed up to. All at a time when The Bahamas needs as much international assistance and good will as it can get.

Perhaps worst of all, unless we commit to doing better, we will continue to allow blind hatred and xenophobia to drive us into actions that harm innocent people irreparably, including our own fellow citizens.