18377: Esser: Haiti's Aristide rides a tidal wave of love - and hate (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. E s s e r <torx@mail.joimail.com>


Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com
Feb. 10, 2004. 01:00 AM

Haiti's Aristide rides a tidal wave of love - and hate
Bloodshed backs resignation calls But president unlikely to go

OAKLAND ROSS
FEATURE WRITER

He's a former Roman Catholic priest who is now married with two young
daughters.

He speaks seven languages, plays the guitar, the saxophone, and four
other musical instruments, and he's both the best loved and the most
reviled human being in the poorest country in the Americas.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide is president of a crowded and beleaguered
Caribbean land called Haiti, now floundering amid violent political
insurrection that has claimed more than 40 lives since Thursday.

Depending on whom you talk to, the 50-year-old Aristide is either the
country's only hope for peace or its most intractable problem.

"Politics in Haiti is so personalized," said Yasmine Shamsie, a
political scientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont.,
and an expert on Latin America. "The big question is, will Aristide
resign? I don't think he's going to resign."

Aristide's political opponents demand he surrender power.

Those opponents have agitated with mounting force and violence since
tainted national elections were held in 2000.

Since then, the Organization of American States has attempted
repeatedly - and so far without success - to broker a political
settlement between the two opposing camps, a settlement that would
clear the way for new legislative and municipal elections.

Aristide himself is entitled to remain in office until 2006, and has
vowed to complete his term despite demands by his opponents that he
step down at once. Since late last year, those demands have
increasingly been backed by eruptions of bloodshed and death. Last
week, the unrest assumed an alarming new dimension as armed rebels in
western Haiti began seizing towns.

As of late yesterday, the rebels controlled 10 Haitian towns,
including Gonaives, the country's fourth-largest city and a hotbed of
unrest.

Although loyal to Aristide, the country's 6,000-member police force
has so far managed to restore government authority in only one of the
towns taken by the insurrectionists, Saint Marc. The country has no
army.

Haiti's main opposition group, known as the Democratic Convergence,
is now distancing itself from the armed rebels, but some observers
question those claims.

There is no doubt that both the government and its opponents have
close ties to shady and often violent gangs of thugs who serve their
political aims in unsavoury and sometimes bloody ways.

The man at the centre of the current Haitian firestorm has been both
the most loved and the most hated individual in his country since the
late 1980s, or shortly before he was first elected president.

Born on July 15, 1953, in the coastal town of Port-Salut, Aristide
soon moved with his family to Port-au-Prince, the country's crowded
and seething capital, ringed by immense slums of unnerving poverty.

The young Aristide studied at a school run by the Salesian Fathers. A
gifted student, he eventually earned a post-graduate degree in
psychology at the State University of Haiti and was ordained a priest
in 1983.

 From the beginning, he worked among the poor and championed their interests.

As curate of a small church perched at the edge of La Saline, the
largest and possibly most benighted of the city's many vast slum
areas, he came to be known as "Titid" to his parishioners and adopted
a Creole folk saying as his personal credo: "Tout moun se moun."

"Every human being is a human being."

In the Haiti of the 1980s, still ruled by an autocratic family
dynasty under Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier, such egalitarian
notions were not merely suspect. They could get you killed.

Aristide survived several attempts on his life in those years, while
he lobbied against Duvalier, who was eventually overthrown in 1986.

A stirring orator with an almost messianic appeal among the poor,
Aristide was elected president of the country in 1990, riding a wave
of populist fervour that was unlike anything seen in Haiti since the
late 1700s, when its African slaves rose up and defeated their French
colonial masters, establishing the world's first black republic and
the oldest independent nation in the Americas after the United States.

With his fiery rhetoric and his support for radical social change,
Aristide unnerved the country's economic and military elite, while
also rattling many policy-makers in Washington.

Few were surprised when he himself was toppled by a military coup in
September, 1991.

Three years later, with a Democrat named Bill Clinton in the White
House, the U.S. forced the Haitian military to surrender power and
then deposited Aristide back in the gleaming white National Palace in
Port-au-Prince.

The former left-wing firebrand seemed to have mellowed by then.

"He was definitely toned down from what he was prior to the coup,"
said Shamsie. "I remember thinking, `He's come back as an old man.'"

The new Aristide proved willing to chart a more moderate course,
agreeing to a range of neo-liberal economic reforms promoted by the
World Bank, for example. But even a watered-down version of the
once-revolutionary priest has been treated as poison by the country's
traditional ruling class.

They are not entirely alone.

Two years ago, the international human rights group Reporters Without
Borders placed Aristide on its list of the world's 35 worst abusers
of free expression, landing him in the company of such champions of
democracy as Fidel Castro of Cuba and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

"There is no doubt that the Haitian state must not only respect
rights but also guarantee those rights," Eduardo Bertoni, the OAS
Special Rapporteur for Press Freedom, said in an interview late last
year.

"But there are still cases pending of assassination of journalists."

Shamsie agrees that Aristide's mottled record on freedom of
expression is a cause for concern.

"We needed to hear far more protesting on his part. He should have
come out far, far more strongly about finding who was responsible for
killing these journalists."

So far he has not and, in Haiti, the flames of rebellion continue to
mount, with few signs of a peaceful solution, all of which likely
spells more unrest, more violence, and more poverty for what is
already among the world's most impoverished lands.

"I just see the opposition absolutely unwilling to negotiate," said
Shamsie, "and I don't see Aristide stepping down."

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