13635: Edouard: News- Pezzullo on Haiti Dictatorship (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Felix Edouard <loveayiti@hotmail.com>


Haiti's lessons for U.S. leaders
Iraq: It takes more than bombs and troops to bring democracy and comfort to
a country accustomed to dictatorship.
By Lawrence Pezzullo
Special To The Sun

November 10, 2002



The scenes of Haitian boat people scrambling ashore in Florida 12 days ago
recalls the campaign pledge of then-candidate Bill Clinton in the face of
similar events in 1992 to stop the influx of Haitian boat people to the
shores of the United States.

Clinton recanted after he was elected, committing his administration instead
to restoring democracy and bringing about the return of exiled President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide as an antidote.

Sadly, the Clinton administration failed. As the latest arrival on the beach
at Miami demonstrated, Haitians are still fleeing their impoverished island,
where democracy simply does not exist.

Aristide, who was restored on the back of 21,000 U.S. troops, has failed to
improve the lot of most Haitians despite extensive foreign assistance.
Instead, he has used U.S. support to impose a repressive regime that bears a
strong resemblance to that of Papa Doc Duvalier, the former dictator of
Haiti.

How did this happen? And what relevance does it have to the Bush
administration's obsession with Iraq? The Bush administration talks about
"regime change" in Iraq. Iraq is different from Haiti in one very important
respect: Even after a decade of sanctions, the Iraqi people are better off
economically than the Haitians, who are the poorest in the Western
Hemisphere.

But there are lessons for the Bush administration to learn from the Clinton
administration's failure in Haiti, which also started out from the premise
that regime change would bring positive results.

The incoming Clinton administration in 1993 thought Haiti provided an
opportunity for a quick foreign policy victory: restoring constitutional
government and, through foreign assistance, creating incentives for Haiti to
prosper. Washington could ride the crest of international condemnation of
the overthrow of President Aristide. The new democracies in the Western
Hemisphere were particularly fearful that the military coup that toppled
Aristide after he was elected could whet the ambition of the military in
their countries. So the United States joined a combined Organization of
American States/U.N. negotiating team, quickly becoming the leading partner.

Then Haitian reality muddied the waters.

The strategy of the international negotiations was to force Haiti's military
leadership through sanctions and diplomatic pressure to cede power to a
constitutional government and permit the return of Aristide as president.
Aristide had a different objective: He wanted to return unfettered by the
constraints imposed on the presidency by the Haitian Constitution of 1987,
which established a parliamentary democracy with executive authority divided
between a president and prime minister.

So, as the international negotiating struggled to reach its objective,
Aristide and his supporters played the role of obstructionists.

Nonetheless, in summer 1993, an accord was signed in New York by Haitian
military leader Raul Cedras and Aristide setting a framework for a return of
constitutional government and a date for Aristide's return to Haiti.


U.S. drawn in

One would have expected that an exiled president living in Washington to
have been exultant and would have made every effort to ensure that the
agreement succeeded. Not so. Instead, Aristide was obdurate, and his
supporters obstructed the implementation of the agreement, giving the
military leaders who stood to lose their power an open opportunity to drag
their feet, too.

Aristide's attention was elsewhere. He drew on the frozen Haitian accounts
in the United States made available to him to build a bloc of support in the
U.S. Congress, in Hollywood and among Haitian communities in the United
States to lobby the Clinton administration to support his option of U.S.
military intervention.

The breakpoint came in spring 1994. Frustrated with the failure of both
sides to fulfill their obligations, the international negotiators decided to
increase pressure on the Haitian military through stronger sanctions and to
press Aristide to reach an accord with parliamentary leaders tired of the
political stalemate and deteriorating economic conditions in Haiti.

Aristide balked. He refused to deal seriously with a delegation of
parliamentarians who came to Washington to forge a deal. Instead, he
attacked the Clinton administration for its support of the parliamentarian's
initiative.

At that crucial juncture, political theater took over: Congressmen chained
themselves to the gates of the White House, Hollywood celebrities took
full-page ads in the newspapers and a black activist announced a hunger
strike to press the administration to change its policy.

To its shame, the Clinton administration caved. It abandoned its negotiating
leadership forged with the OAS/U.N. team and made a quiet deal with Aristide
which, in effect, ceded policy control to Aristide in return for an end to
the anti-administration lobbying effort.

Negotiations then moved to the back burner. Aristide's preference, U.S.
military intervention, became pre-ordained. When it occurred, in September
1994, it not only restored Aristide to the presidency, it destroyed the
Haitian army, the only public institution in the country.

The rest is epilogue. Aristide has established an authoritarian regime that
deals harshly, even brutally, with any opposition. Democracy is all but
dead. The economy is in tatters. The majority of Haitians live in misery and
risk their lives to flee to America, not withstanding the billions of
dollars in international assistance poured into Haiti.

Meanwhile, Aristide lives the life of a Pasha.


Iraq not a simple task

There is an ominous echo of a similar simplistic promise emanating from the
Bush administration when one hears of plans of creating a democratic Iraq
after the removal of Saddam Hussein.

The American people deserve better than that from those in positions of
authority during these troubled times. This is not the time to delude
ourselves. If "regime change" in Iraq becomes the only option, the
administration owes it to the American people to offer a more plausible
post-Hussein scenario than the creation of a democratic Iraq, which has even
less experience with democracy than Haiti.

Lawrence Pezzullo is a retired Foreign Service officer who served for a time
as President Clinton's special envoy to Haiti.






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