15712: (Chamberlain) Haiti Searches for Itself (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(from Caribbean Update website, May 27, 2003)


Haiti Searches for Itself

By Jane Regan



PORT-AU-PRINCE -- Two hundred years ago, on May 18, 1803, as the ex-slaves
on the French island colony of Saint Domingue were delivering their final
blows to Napoleon's invading army, Gen. Jean Jacques Dessalines ripped the
white middle out of the French tricolour and pieced together the blue and
red to make the flag for what would soon be the world's first black
republic.

Legend has it Dessalines - remembered for his vehement hatred of white
plantation owners - said France would never regain control of the nation
that was to proclaim its independence seven months later, on Jan. 1, 1804.

Today, Haiti is still independent, but her population of 8.5 million is
living through times that raise questions about how far the country has
gone since slaves threw out the French.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former priest turned president now serving his
second term after the first was truncated by a brutal three-year coup
d'état (1991-1994), maintains that while the country has its "political
liberty", crushing poverty and debt have prevented "economic liberty".

On Flag Day, 200 years after Dessalines shredded the French flag, standing
before a crowd of thousands of students and supporters waving blue and red
flags under a bright Caribbean sun, Aristide condemned the global poverty
caused by mounting Third World debt and then turned to Haiti, citing a
proverb to whip up a patriotic fervor.

Two hundred years after the victorious slave revolution, he said, "the bull
that turns the mill doesn't get to drink the sugar syrup!"

A group of Aristide supporters, bussed up to the flag's birthplace
Arcahaie, 40 kilometers north of the capital, and wearing new T-shirts
emblazoned with the slogan "Paying one's debt doesn't spoil a friendship",
chanted in response: "Twenty-one billion! Twenty-one billion!"

Earlier this spring, on the anniversary of the death of another Haitian
revolutionary hero, Toussaint Louverture, who died in a French jail,
Aristide launched Haiti's bicentennial celebrations by demanding its former
colonial master pay more than $21 billion in restitution and reparations
for the "debt of independence".

The president calculates that France owes Haiti the money for 200 years of
exploiting the "Pearl of the Antilles", as the metropole's richest colony
was nicknamed. Aristide's tally also includes restitution of the 90 million
francs, plus interest, which Haitian President Jean Pierre Boyer agreed to
hand over to King Charles X in 1825 to reimburse former French plantation
owners whose properties were confiscated by Haitian rebels.

France, formerly considered one of Haiti's staunchest supporters, did not
wait long to reject Aristide's demand.

"Since President Aristide's return to power (in October, 1994), the
international community has lent Haiti nearly two billion euros, some 200
million from France. Unfortunately, in spite of this massive assistance,
there have been few results," a Quai d'Orsay spokesman said, condemning
Aristide's "bad governance".

Given the dire straits in the former jewel in France's crown, it is no
wonder Aristide and his government are looking for money wherever they can
find it.

Standing on the brink of its bicentennial, Haiti's economy is on its knees
- foreign reserves are one-tenth of what they were three years ago and the
national currency lost 60 percent of its value over the past 10 months -
and the country has never been more dependent.

The state budget depends on aid and loans for its 60-70 percent shortfall
each year, the government is counting on free trade zones and foreign
assembly industries for what it dubs an "economic rebirth", and only about
one-half of the country's food needs are met by national production.

Ironically, even as he decried foreign debt as a version of "economic
slavery" in his Flag Day speech, Aristide demanded the release of blocked
loans, which would push Haiti's debt above $1.5 billion - to end what the
National Palace calls an "economic embargo".

For over two years the United States, the European Union, and multilateral
lenders have been holding up some $500 million in aid and loans because
they say Aristide's government and Lavalas Family party have failed to
reach a compromise with opposition parties, which boycotted the 2001
presidential race after protesting allegedly fraudulent parliamentary
contests in 2000.

Haiti's "friends" as the United States, France and a handful of other
powerful countries are called, also want the Aristide government to address
serious governance, human rights and security issues before the aid spigot
is fully opened.

But while Lavalas politicians blame King Charles X and bankers in
Washington for their economic ills, and as opposition politicians jockey
for power, others point to more structural causes of Haiti's problems, like
faulty economic vision, poor planning and rampant waste and corruption.

Wherever one wants to pin the blame, Haiti is living a "silent emergency"
and the population is suffering its consequences, the United Nations
programmes working in the country said in April. Life expectancy, primary
school enrolment and agricultural production have all declined, while
malnutrition, poverty and deforestation have all gone up.

Every year, Haiti's rank on the U.N. Development Programme's "human
development index" slips; it now sits at 146 of 172 countries.

The United Nations is seeking to address the situation with 128 projects
that total $84 million and which range from tuition fees for children (most
of the country's schools are private) to small business loans to irrigation
systems.

"Unfortunately this is little more than a joke," said economist Camille
Chalmers, executive director of the Haitian Platform to Advocate
Alternative Development (PAPDA), which promotes sustainable, nationally
oriented development and is also a vocal critic of the Lavalas government's
neo-liberal economic policies.

Calling the 128 U.N. projects "top-down" development, Chalmers noted that
earlier rounds of similar projects - ones funded by France in the 1990s,
for example - have done little for the country.

"To the contrary, in many cases they have destabilised grassroots
organizations," Chalmers said. "This is just another distribution of cash
to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), with no debates in the
communities where the projects are to take place, no participation of the
people who live there."

Rather than more loans or reparations, Chalmers and the groups that back
the PAPDA platform are calling for broad and deep reforms to Haiti's
economic and political system, which would promote national production,
protect the environment and permit popular participation.

"You could say we have gone backwards, or that we are still where we
started," said Yolette Jeanty, executive director of Women's House (Kay
Fanm), an NGO that promotes women's rights and works with victims of abuse.

"I don't think we should be celebrating the bicentennial. I think we should
sit down and reflect, as Haitians, on how to orient the country so that we
can truly progress."

Jeanty, an active member in Haiti's democratic movement since before the
coup d'état, feels that the focus on the political parties' power struggle
and on the "economic embargo" is misplaced.

"This is more than just a political crisis and the little comedic solutions
proposed by the OAS (Organization of American States) won't get us
anywhere," she said.

On Aristide's demand for billions of dollars from France, Jeanty agreed
that "the West owes us Haitians a lot, but it is not only a monetary debt.
It is also moral."

Historians and politicians, both Lavalas and opposition, are divided on the
president's call for "restitution and reparations", which have become
buzzwords on radio talk shows in the capital.

But on the reality of grinding poverty, it would be hard to disagree with
Aristide, who intoned to the flag-waving fans from his podium, as he once
did from his pulpit, "We refuse to be slaves to subhuman misery."