Presentation of Senator Boulos at The Brooking Institution on April 13,2010

The PSSN in Washington. Senateur Rudolph H. Boulos

Since this plan was being introduced for the first time in the United States at a Washington think tank, it was appropriate to begin by quoting another think tank analyst, Dan Erickson of the Inter-American Dialogue. Erickson said at a 2008 meeting that Haiti had a "hollow state." A number of Haitians reflected on that term and the truth of that observation. Out of that came the Patriotic Meeting for a Strategy of National Salvation, a marathon brainstorming session the Haitians held last August in Santo Domingo. Altogether thirty-three Haitian experts convened, twenty from Haiti and thirteen from the Dominican Republic, United States, Canada, and France. From Haiti came leaders of peasants' leagues, universities, political parties, think tanks, business, women's associations, and churches.

The meeting found that not only was the government an empty shell, but the state itself was nonexistent or empty. The reality of that became evident to all on January 12, 2010.

After the meeting in Santo Domingo, eleven intellectuals received a mandate to formulate a plan to salvage the nation-state. Five months later the Strategic Plan for National Salvation was finished with a broad and detailed road map of how to build the Haitian state.

The plan was sent out to forty-four thousand e-mail correspondents and in fifteen hundred hard copies in Haiti and the Diaspora thanks to Bob Benodin.

The next step for the drafting and publicity committee was to make three thousand audio CDs. Sixty percent of the Haitians could not read. A focus group would advise on how to present it to the grassroots and public in all 570 communal sections in the ten departments.

Will conclude that the plan with its broad appeal is becoming the most unifying factor within Haitian civil society today.