On Haiti-Hungary, Police Action, Black Magic (Transcript Excerpt)
Delivered by Colonel Muammar Marius Rogér al-Fortier,
representing the Central African Republic
as Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution
Colonel al-Fortier 84 minutes into his 15 minute speech
[TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT]
[session resumes]
...and I want to — yes, I want to come back to that. I will come back to that. But first I need to address something that is, uhm. That is perhaps more urgent in the context of why we are all here today, which is —
[pause]
Which is the question of Haiti.
Now. [clears throat] I have exceeded the given fifteen minutes. I want to acknowledge that. Fifteen minutes is what was offered, and I want to be respectful of this Council's time, and so I will —
[pause]
I will try to be brief in my remaining remarks.
[laughter]
The permanent members of the Security Council were given instruments to police. Tribunals. The mechanism of sanction. The authority of intervention. These instruments were forged — and I want to be precise here — they were forged to protect the integrity of this world against those who would break it. That is what this Council was assembled to address.
It was not — and I am reading now, because I want to be accurate —
[papers]
It was not assembled to audit the internal decisions of functioning governments. It was not assembled to reverse the outcomes of democratic processes because the outcome offended someone's theory of who should benefit.
A moderator who reviews a congressional vote for ideological compliance is no longer a referee enforcing a rule-based world order.
He is a commissar.
This Council was not built to be a commissariat. And yet.
[turns to chairman]
I want to include you in this, Chairman https://app.warera.io/user/6813b758efecdf9bab195068, because I think it is important that you are included in this critique. Not as a target of it. But as the man who is responsible for what happens in this room.
You chair a body that was given instruments. And those instruments were sound. The mandate was sound. And I would ask you, with respect, whether what was done in Haiti is what you understood that mandate to be when you accepted this chair. Whether a congressional vote, held in a functioning government, by individuals who have governed longer than some nations in this chamber have existed, whether the reversal of that vote's outcome is what you imagined when you agreed to preside over this Council.
Because if it is, I would like to hear you say so.
[pause]
And if it is not —
[turns to chamber]
Then we have a problem that the Chairman and I perhaps share.
But... anyway... Mr. Chairman, what has grown in this room, in your absence, or — or perhaps with your, uhm, with your tacit — I want to say permission, though I do not think you intended it as permission — what has grown here is something different. What has grown here is orthodoxy.
A body of interpretation. Precedents decided quickly, in private, without deliberation, hardening into doctrine faster than they were ever examined. And like all orthodoxy — all orthodoxy, I have seen this in many rooms — it does not present itself as interpretation. It presents itself as truth.
The zealot does not believe he is imposing his model. He does not believe in divine inspiration as enlighten — no... a precursor to enlightenment. He believes he is describing reality already.
The secular fundamentalist — and this is the most dangerous man, more dangerous than the man with a god, because the man with a god can at least be contradicted by scripture — the secular fundamentalist has only his own reading of events. His own theory of motivation. His own conviction that he can see, from above, what the people below truly intended.
This is an act of magic — greater black magic in the oldest sense. The rituals, and uhm, ceremonies don't change the world but the man performing them, and do so until the world and his beliefs about it are indistinguishable.
And the accused never gets to explain intention. Motive. Because the orthodoxy has already determined it. Him.
[pause]
Scripture would have helped. I want to say that clearly. Not just clearly written rules, but publicly debated, consistently applied — that would have helped. What this Council has instead are, uhm... hastily drawn... precedents. Applied selectively. By permanent members who were never elected to interpret anything.
The anarchist reading of this — and I am not, I want to be clear, I am not an anarchist in the — in the classical sense, I am an agrarian, there is a distinction, though perhaps not a useful one for this particular —
[pause]
The reading, in any case, is simple. A body that claims authority it was never granted, enforcing standards it never published, has no authority. It has only the willingness to act, and the power to make the action stick. Every system that has called itself governance while operating this way has eventually had to account for the difference.
Eventually.
[water]
Now. Haiti.
I want to begin — and I think this is important — I want to begin not with the nation but with the people. Because the nation is, in the mechanics of the world, a vessel. A container. It is, and I mean this with no disrespect to the other masons— masters of statecraft in this room, it is little more than a placeholder awaiting occupants. What matters is the people inside it.
Free people move. They always have. They cross borders. They follow opportunity. This is not infiltration. This is — this is civilization. The freedom to settle, to associate, to collaborate, to build something with your hands in a place that was empty before you arrived. And I don't mean empty to mean devoid of, but in a minimalist sense, a negative space wherein we find opportunity to create or improve. This is the oldest liberal principle there is.
The Hungarians who went to Haiti did not conquer it. They did not displace anyone. They only governed for themselves.
To call this a proxy operation is to say that people carry their nationality in their blood. That a Hungarian in Haiti is always a Hungarian first and a Haitian never. I hear these accusations in Africa too. By the people who would call out my whiteness publicly and in polite English, but privately, and in their own language, refer to others as—
[pause]
They mock people with words I should not repeat. I just mean to say... these words and narratives are used to explain why some communities could never truly belong to the places they too had built. The Council should be careful whose company it keeps when it reaches for lesser magic. I needn't explain to those present here that black magic of a lesser kind might be of greater consequence. A label applied with enough confidence, repeated with enough authority, until the target begins to perform the role assigned to them.
[pause]
Like this Haiti was handed a costume.
[pause]
Now. The real proxies.
I want — I want to take a moment here, because I think this is, uhm. Across Eurasia. Across Africa. There are nations whose governments are populated by nationals of the occupying power. Their strategic resources flow to coalition treasuries outside the continent even. But I digress. Their governments do not — they do not legislate against the interest of their occupiers, because their governments are their occupiers, wearing local titles.
These nations do not transfer funds to allied nations the way Haiti did in a time of dire need. They do not need to. The extraction is structural. It is built into the arrangement. And it is called, depending on who you ask, an alliance, a sphere, a partnership. This Council has not convened to examine it.
What I mean to say is, a proxy is not identified by action. A proxy — and I want this on the record — a proxy is identified by inaction. The nation that is subservient. The congress that will not legislate against the hand that feeds it. The government that has been made so dependent on foreign capital and foreign military protection that acting in its own interest is no longer a practical option.
Those are the proxies. They act against the interests of their nation, their own people, every day that they refuse to revolt.
[murmuring]
Now. I want to address the charge on its own terms, before I address the evidence—the absence of evidence.
In essence the charge asserts that Haiti acted against the interest of its own citizens.
What is the interest of a people? And how do we harmonize the interests of a people with that of the state? I mean this as a genuine question, not a rhetorical one. If we are to enforce a standard of national interest, we should be able to define it. And if we define it by the accumulation of wealth, then every nation that has ever gone to war has acted against its interest. War is a net loss. Always. The soldiers sent to the front is destroying his own capital. He will not get it back. An alliance that pools its military against a common enemy is redistributing resources toward a guaranteed deficit.
The theatre of war, as I understand it — and I have governed inside it, so I understand it reasonably well — has no winning condition. It has no end state. It has no moment at which a people is declared to have acted correctly and rewarded accordingly. What it has is governments who have decided, for their own reasons, that certain objectives matter. And they pursue those objectives at great personal cost of their people.
Every act of statecraft in this world is, in the — in the purely economic sense... a losing transaction. The question is only what you believe you are losing it for. And those that do not ask these questions are simply under a spell.
A government that persuades its people to accept that transaction, to spend what they have built for a cause they share, is not committing fraud. It is doing what every government in the history of civilization has done. It is making the case that the cause is worth the cost.
Yet, the council has decided that the cause was not worth the cost. For Haiti. On behalf of Haiti. Without asking Haiti.
That is not an enforcement action. That is a policy preference. And policy preferences require deliberation. Public deliberation. Before they are applied to people who were not in the room when the preference was formed.
Now. Show me — show this Council the instruction. Show it the order from Budapest that the Haitian congress executed. Show it the communication. Show it the subordination. Show it the mechanism by which seven consecutive election cycles of independent governance was in fact directed from a foreign capital.
If the Council cannot show it, then what it has is a theory. And a theory is not evidence. Evidence is required before assets are seized. Before people are —
[pause]
Before a representative of a functioning government is removed from office and held. Without trial. Without hearing. Without a public record of the accusation, the evidence, or the standard applied. He was taken. He has not been brought before any body that would allow him to answer the charge.
The accusation that Haiti abused state funds should not have reached enforcement. It should have been tested first. A public hearing. A record. Open testimony. The accusation should have been examined in the open, found groundless or substantiated, and only then referred for action. Instead the action preceded examina— public examination. The imprisonment preceded the trial.
[pause]
I am not asking for anything. I want to say that clearly. I do not expect anyone in this room to change their position. I have been a journalist long enough to know that the purpose of a speech is not to persuade the room. It is to place something in the record before the room does what it was going to do anyway.
What this means for the Central African Republic... and perhaps also my neighbors in the Congo.
My government has... it can be argued... Belgian roots. We serve in a country that had few public servants before us. In a region where Belgium is openly hostile, and actively aids the Egyptian forces currently occupying my capital. We are not recognized by Belgium. We are not coordinated by Belgium. Despite our shared heritage there is no non-aggression pact between us. The hostility is documented. The hostility often gleefully sought out and satisfied on the frontlines by Belgian officers. The contempt is apparent in both diplomatic cables and in private communications.
The word proxy — and I want to close with this — the word proxy is a poison. Even when it is not deployed in bad faith, it is a construct, prejudice dressed up in structuralist language. It precedes every future interaction with a cloud. It makes every alliance suspect. Every transfer of funds a potential crime. Every act of governance a performance to be evaluated by people who were not present and will not be persuaded by evidence.
We are isolated from Belgium by their hostility. As Haiti was isolated from Hungary but by a more civil indifference. Yet we are regarded with suspicion by African states who consider us outsiders still. Still we conduct ourselves lawfully, but it is my expectation, if this Council does not address the overreach, or at the very least the procedural failure, demonstrated in the case of Haiti, it is inevitable. Not possible. Not likely. Inevitable that we will be next. Or whoever next makes the mistake of transparency, and finds that what they disclosed was not their intentions, but their origins, which this Council then decided were the relevant fact.
I will also note, for the record, that collecting and acting on the ethnic origins of a people is, where I come from, a matter for a different kind of tribunal entirely.
[gathers notes]
The record will show that we said so. Here. Today. Before it happened.
[END TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT — full session recording available on request from the Embassy of Central African Republic in Brazzaville]
