13742: Hermantin: Haiti: Paralyzed and punished by floundering and corrupt leadership (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

By Tim Collie
Posted November 17 2002

PORT-AU-PRINCE · Eight years after a U.S. invasion reinstalled exiled
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in an attempt to help rebuild this troubled
nation, Haiti once again is spiraling toward collapse.

Its political culture is mired in dissension, distrust and violence, with
signs that the ruling party is fragmenting while opposition groups are
deeply divided by class, region and personality. Efforts at government
reform have stalled, and a dispute over elections two years ago has not been
resolved. The terms of almost all the country's legislators expire at the
end of November with no solution in sight.

Devoid of investment and significant production, the economy is shrinking.
International aid has been withheld because of widespread corruption and the
political disarray. The national currency has been cut in half by inflation,
forcing citizens whose average earnings barely top $1 a day to scrounge ever
harder for food and work.

Increasing crime, poverty and disease plague the country's streets. Its
cities are swelling with economic refugees from the countryside, where
villages are isolated by a crumbling highway system, electrical shortages
and scant food and water.

Many leaders of the media, church and university have been killed, co-opted
or driven into exile by threats from gangs loosely aligned with Aristide's
ruling Fanmi Lavalas (Lavalas Family) Party.

"What's changed now is the impunity of the violence," said Pierre Esperance,
a longtime human rights activist and director of the National Coalition for
Haitian Rights. "Before, the targets were well-known activists, people who
stood up to the government.

Blaming America

"Now, it's gotten so bad with the government's political gangs, with mob
actions and the crime on the street that ordinary people are being killed,
disappearing," he said. "The government doesn't want any element of society
that doesn't agree with them to be able to speak."

The depth of the despair is best measured in the poor rural hamlets and
shantytowns that were once the bedrock of Aristide's support. Now there is
no shortage of loud, angry denunciations of the priest-turned-president.

"We were all Lavalas supporters here," said Wilfred Ferdinand, a fisherman
in Chou Chou Bay, the small village on Haiti's north coast that launched the
boat of refugees that landed in Miami's Biscayne Bay in late October. "We
believed in Aristide but things are only growing worse. All we have is what
we can grow or get from the sea and that isn't enough. The cost of rice is
now twice what is was a month ago."

In Cité Soleil, the vast slum of about 200,000 people in the nation's
capital, a man angrily cursed a faded mural of the president.

"I'm 41 years old and I've never worked a day in my life," he screamed in
front of a small crowd of onlookers. "Not one real job have I had. How does
that happen? This guy, he promised us so much; now we're worse off than
before."

The potential for a major political disaster is grave, agree Haitians,
foreign experts and diplomats.

As anger builds, U.S. officials fear another massive refugee influx on
Florida's shore like the one that came after Aristide was ousted in a bloody
military coup.

Unlike 1994 -- when Aristide was returned from two years in exile -- there
is no clear solution to Haiti's problems. Haiti is far down the list of the
Bush administration's foreign policy priorities -- it is neither a military
nor economic threat, only a humanitarian one. And there is no Aristide to
replace Aristide -- a charismatic leader who has no comparable rival, and
who still has control over its armed forces.

Lavalas leaders blame the United States and describe their economic
isolation as an "embargo" similar to that of Cuba or Iraq.

They point to the estimated $500 million in aid that has been withheld by
the international community because of the dispute over elections in 2000.

Aid delayed

"There's a campaign inside and outside the country to bring down the
government, and the United States is a big part of it," said Yves Cristalin,
a Lavalas member who serves in the Chamber of Deputies. "They are trying to
paint us as some kind of bete noire [albatross] and then force us to give up
our independence like other countries. You look at a country like the
Dominican Republic, and it doesn't belong to the Dominicans -- it's owned by
multinational firms."

The government insists it has followed through on promised reforms, paying
$1 million in reparations to victims of pro-Aristide political violence,
disarming many of the country's street gangs and backing electoral reform
that has been rejected by opposition parties. Still, the much-needed aid --
loans totaling $146 million from the Inter-American Development Bank and
about $350 million in aid from the European Union -- has not been released.
United States aid to Haiti continues, though it has shrunk from a high of
about $250 million annually just after Aristide's return in 1994 to this
year's $55 million appropriation. The aid doesn't go directly to the
government, but is channeled through humanitarian groups.

Aristide decried

The government's complaint that the international community is shunning
Haiti doesn't hold water with many of Aristide's former supporters. In
August, thugs wearing T-shirts with Aristide's picture attacked the State
University of Haiti, once another bastion of Lavalas support, when students
and teachers protested the government's removal of the school's popular
president.

"The university was the last institution where there was a democratic
opening, where there was freedom of speech free from government
interference," said Josué Merilen, a professor who represents the national
teachers' union. "The government has slowly erased journalists, other
political opponents and human rights activists.

"I don't think you can blame the international community for this situation
at all -- this is a Haitian problem with Aristide."

Inside its campus walls, the university is covered with graffiti calling for
Aristide's ouster.

"In a country like Haiti that's full of garbage all over its streets, where
half the kids cannot go to school and many live on the street -- in a
country like this Aristide is spending millions on himself and his cronies
and nothing's changing," said Georges Jocelin, 32, a law student and protest
leader.

"I didn't want this to happen--I supported the guy. I went into hiding with
a lot of other people during the coup. I was out on the streets, and I
almost was killed many times," Jocelin said.

"I'm not happy about having to go through this all over again, but he's
becoming another dictator. I don't buy the argument it's going to change if
he gets more international money."

Haiti offers a lesson in both the promises and pitfalls of nation building.
A country of only 7 million people, it was once a premier tourism
destination in the Caribbean despite a history full of coups and other
upheavals.

Half of its people cannot read or write, and almost 80 percent live in
abject poverty under a small middle class and a wealthy oligarch of merchant
families originally from France, Italy and the Middle East.

`A culture of violence'

Its resort image, and much of its income, disintegrated with the beginning
of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. A few years later, the country's
longtime dictators, the Duvalier family, were ousted. A series of political
upheavals culminated in the free election of Aristide in 1990.

Yet despite the return of a popular, democratically elected president backed
by U.S. forces, international troops and hundreds of millions in annual
foreign aid, the country's slide into deeper impoverishment continued,
experts say. Ill-fated schemes by international development organizations
share some blame, experts concede, and efforts to build institutions such as
the police and the judiciary didn't stay the course. In 1996, the United
States pulled out of the country.

But much blame, many say, lies in misrule and political infighting that have
been the rule in Haiti almost since rebelling slaves founded the nation in
1804. Aristide's popularity with the majority of the country's poor didn't
force him to compromise.

Whenever he seemed threatened, he often fell back on his ability to call on
threatening mobs for street justice. Citing the hostile political climate,
the United Nations and the World Bank also have pulled out of Haiti.

The country's political opposition, organized as small parties often built
around a single personality, has been resistant to any negotiation with
Aristide. After a Dec. 17 attack on the National Palace, which the
government described as a coup attempt, pro-government mobs hunted down
opposition members and attacked their headquarters in several cities. At
least 11 people were killed.

"The Haitian political culture is a culture of violence, and that is because
it's long been linked with dictators," said Victor Benoit, a member of the
Democratic Convergence, an umbrella group of about 20 parties aligned
against Aristide. "The people have a strong yearning for democracy. What is
lacking is the leadership that's up to the task.

"Hopefully things are evolving to the point where we don't look to saviors,
just leaders who can work with each other." said Benoit as he sat in the
headquarters of the Convergence, which has not been repaired since being
burned last December.

Election council

In September, the Organization of American States passed a resolution
calling for the creation of an elections council, made up of representatives
from the government, churches, business, human rights groups and political
parties, to oversee a national vote next year.

The OAS also called upon the government to disarm political militants and
arrest suspects in several cases of political violence.

But the Nov. 4 deadline came and went without agreement on the council.
Opposition parties aligned with the Convergence urged a boycott of the
council, while other groups said they wouldn't join until Aristide made
further progress on disarming the pro-Aristide gangs known here as chimeres
(chimeras).

"The long and short of this situation is that key actors have been unwilling
to rise above entrenched personal positions … on terms allowing for an end
to the fragmentation and paralysis that are leading the country as a whole
toward disaster," said Luigi Einaudi, assistant secretary general of the
OAS.

That disaster may come in months, or in years. One diplomat refers to Haiti
as a "the ultimate survivor country" while Esperance said predicting any
course in such a chaotic climate is impossible.

"I don't know how long this situation can last--there is really no
alternative to Aristide," said Esperance, who was shot several times during
political violence in 2000, the last election year. "What's clear is that
the country can explode at any time."

Tim Collie can be reached at tcollie@sun-sentinel.com.



Copyright © 2002, South Florida Sun-Sentinel






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