17759: radtimes: Haiti's bicentennial symbolized by unrest (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

31 Dec 2003
Haiti's bicentennial symbolized by unrest

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/NCU435256.htm

By Amy Bracken

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Dec 31 (Reuters) - As Haiti prepares to celebrate its
bicentennial on Thursday, many Haitians say demonstrating against their
government is the most appropriate way to kick off their third century.

After 200 years of independence, Haiti is tormented by extreme poverty,
popular dissatisfaction with the president and a mounting death toll from
political violence.

The unemployment rate is over 70 percent, the average income less than $1 a
day and the average life expectancy 50 years.

Thousands are taking to the streets almost daily to call for the departure
of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And dozens have died in political
violence since mid-September, many of them in the town of Gonaives, where
Jean Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti's independence from France on Jan.
1, 1804.

Haiti has since been ruled by a long line of often-brutal dictators.
Finally in 1990, Aristide, a wildly popular priest, became the first
democratically elected president, winning by a landslide. But he was soon
ousted in a military coup.

After his return from exile three years later, with the assistance of U.S.
and U.N. forces, Aristide's popularity began to wane. His party handily won
parliamentary elections in 2000 and he was re-elected later that year, but
opposition leaders questioned the legitimacy of both elections.

Former supporters accused him of betraying allies and ignoring promises.
International lenders wondered where their money had gone as critics at
home and abroad suspected corruption.

And the more people showed open opposition to the president, the more
police, party aides and gangsters responded with threats or physical abuse.

PLANS FIZZLE

The movement to depose Aristide got a major boost on Dec. 5, when his
supporters stormed a demonstration at the state university, beating at
least 20 people. Since then, thousands of academics, doctors, lawyers and
others have been protesting against the president almost daily.

Aristide's government has accused journalists of focusing on the protests
while ignoring shows of support like one on Monday, when thousands of
pro-government demonstrators marched peacefully in the capital.

Still, many say the social upheaval is an appropriate marker for the
bicentennial.

Barbara Prezeau Stephenson, director of the Port-au-Prince arts and
cultural center AfricAmerica, wanted the government's collaboration in a
bicentennial arts project.

She attended a planning meeting in 2000 with the minister of Haitians
living abroad and 50 Haitian artists, with ideas for dances, plays, street
performances and war reenactments. They were told to present their ideas to
a commission.

But a commission was never established and none of the artists' ideas has
been realized, Stephenson said.

In Paris, the chief of cultural affairs at the Haitian Embassy worked to
establish French-Haitian partnership projects, including a museum in
Breste, a book festival, and a history project with the town of Nantes,
once Europe's biggest slave port.

Then Aristide demanded restitution from France for money Haiti paid its
former colonial masters in the mid-1800s as compensation for the loss of
their colony. The French canceled the projects.

Maxon Guerrier, the mayor of Delmas and president of the national Cleanup
Committee 2004, vowed that his committee would pay residents of heavily
populated areas to clean up the trash in the streets for the bicentennial.

But on Dec. 26, there was so much trash at an intersection in a crowded
Port-au-Prince neighborhood that traffic was gridlocked and vehicles
immobilized by piles of rotting debris.

STRENGTH THROUGH UNITY

"L'Union Fait La Force," or "Strength through unity," are the words on the
Haitian flag. Dessalines created the blue and red flag in 1803, when he
tore the white stripe from the French flag, symbolizing the eradication of
the white imperialists and unification of blacks and mulattoes.

In 2000, the Historical Society of Haiti decided the bicentennial should
"fold together the past with present concerns with an eye to the future,"
said society president Michel Hector.

This, he said, is what Haitian citizens will be doing when they take to the
streets on Jan. 1 to call for Aristide's departure.

"Haiti has returned to a former system of presidential despotism and of not
respecting the rights of the citizens," he said. "One can say that, like in
1804, we are again mobilized to achieve a great undertaking," he said.

.