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7 Haiti women in conquest of full and total citizenship in an endless transition myriam merlet For some years now, almost all analytic texts on Haiti take as a point of departure the difficult junction of transition that the country has been experiencing. In fact, since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in February 1986, Haiti has been seeking and continues to seek paths leading to democracy. In late May 2005, nineteen years later, Haiti is still bogged down and in an endless crisis. So any attempt to present and to analyze is perforce marked by the parameters of this transition, punctuated by a series of crises. The most recent, precipitated among other things by the contested elections of 2000, is not without economic and social consequences. For several years the Haitian economy has posted disturbing macroeconomic indicators and negative growth in real terms. The longevity of such a crisis increases the difficulties of Haitians living together in a national community where they historically have not enjoyed full citizenship. Poverty, inequality, the permanence of antidemocratic structures, totalitarian temptations, and state violence are among the many motifs that push feminist thought to question the exercise of citizenship in this country, which, for the moment, receives a great deal of media coverage but remains nevertheless poorly understood. A presentation of Haiti, however brief, is indispensable as an introduction. To understand the geopolitical stakes and the terms of the current issue, it is important to also understand the context of the situation. Haiti is a former French colony, which gained independence in 1804 after a long slave revolt and a bloody war of independence. Many believe that it is from this bellicose past that the practices of violence stem, practices that taint social relations both between individuals and between individuals and state institutions. I strongly doubt this. Aside from the fact that similar situations do not necessarily produce this effect, I believe that violence is a cultural phenomenon that results from certain conditions prevalent in a given society, and that is what accounts for its hegemony. In the case of Haiti violence is more likely observed in interpersonal relationships and in relationships that power structures hold with men and women citizens. Since its independence Haiti has had a very stormy political history. From 1957 to 1986, the country lived under the hold of the dictatorship of the Duvaliers. 127 This most bloody dictatorship brought about the massive exodus of thousands of Haitian men and women to Africa and to the large metropolitan areas of North America and Europe. The Postdictatorial Resurgence The year 1986 was the year of all hopes. After about thirty years of dictatorship, the confluent effect of popular pressures and international negotiations forced Duvalier the younger to step down from power. This departure opened a whole era of struggle for the reconquest of fundamental rights. The Haitian women’s movement would itself see a renewal. The ability to mobilize, demonstrated by women during this period, was a signal element on the Haitian sociopolitical landscape. On the occasion of the historical April 3, 1986, demonstration—where thousands of women took to the streets of the capital and of the provincial towns—women reaffirmed under various forms their refusal to be excluded and their wish not to accept that the construction of democracy come about without them, or worse, at their expense. Since then, the women’s movement has not stopped moving, with an expansion of groups and associations of various tendencies. A new constitution was worked out in 1987, which sheds light on the trends of the time. It finally seemed that Haitian men and women were going to afford themselves the means to live together in, what the preamble describes as, a “socially just Haitian nation,” where discrimination is prohibited and the respect for fundamental liberties is postulated as guaranteed from the “right to progress, to education, to health, to work,” and so on. Gender relations are also taken into consideration, inequalities between the sexes are banned, and the principle of the equality of the different forms of union is proclaimed. The ability of women’s groups to organize so promptly comes, as in the case of other social movements, from being rooted in certain ideals. The people as a whole, since the construction of the Haitian state in 1804, have aspired to better their conditions. These aspirations explain an entire set of social movements that from 1987 to 1990 (date of the first democratic elections in the country, allowing...

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