18635: Higbie: Wilentz on Aristide (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Janet Higbie <jhigbie@nytimes.com>

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/weekinreview/15wile.html


New York Times Week in Review, February 15, 2004
Haiti's Man of the People Lost His Way
By AMY WILENTZ


As armed revolt swept through town after town in Haiti last week, it was hard
not to conjure up visions from the country's violent past. Bloody overthrows
are the norm in Haiti: There have been 30 coups in its 200-year history.

The country has virtually no institutions. Even when they are there in name,
people cannot turn to them to help solve problems. Having no system has become
the system.

Haitians have accommodated themselves to an extemporaneous existence. To get a
telephone line, you have to know someone. Self-styled electricians climb poles
and steal for their neighborhood whatever current there happens to be, charging
for the service. Garbage pickup is whimsical at best. The Ministry of Justice
is lethargic and mysterious. Courts function sporadically, sometimes at a
judge's caprice.

In general, work gets done on an ad-hoc basis, depending on connections.
Scribes at typewriters still sit under trees near customs at the airport; they
write letters for the illiterate and fill out documents, but those documents
can rarely be recovered later. It's a pretend bureaucracy ripe for corruption.

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest, rose through the ranks of an
institution, the Roman Catholic Church, which survived in Haiti because it is
financed from abroad, from lot bo dlo, or the other side of the water.
Nonetheless, he has also been a master of Haiti's nonlinear, back-channel
culture.

>From childhood, Mr. Aristide learned little respect for the hierarchies of
institutions. He grew up in the southwest countryside, where a handful of men
who owned the land were in charge and where what is known in Haiti as "the
Republic of Port-au-Prince" was a distant dream.

Though the country's elected leader, he was often the first to point out that
the few institutions that had survived were complicit in the evils of the
society and in the oppression he sought to curb.

Haiti has few institutions for good reason. It was born out of the rejection of
institutions, and has perceived them as vehicles of subjugation. In 1791,
Haitian slaves rebelled against France, the grandest power of the day, and
began the world's only successful slave revolution. By 1804, the slaves had
defeated the armies of Napoleon and created their own country.

This history plays into the present. The slogan of the most bloody-minded slave
leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was "Koupe tet, boule kay'' - "Cut off the
head, burn down the house" - words that echo today among the armed gangs
opposed to Mr. Aristide.

"Haitian history is full of attempts to build institutions,'' said Jocelyn
McCalla, director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, "but then they
are destroyed or completely ignored. Since the revolution, which was a
fantastic thing, Haiti has been insulated and isolated from other parts of the
world. It lacks communication, education, sophistication - the kind of training
that leads to real institution building."

In part because of its lack of institutions, Haitian society works on a "big
man,'' or gwo neg, principle. A big man can fix things, whether on the village
or the national level.

Today, such a man could be a mayor or a legislator, but is just as likely, in
the Haitian countryside, to be a voodoo priest or a big agricultural
cultivator. This man decides the community's direction, distributes needed
funds and punishes wrongdoers. He is subject to the whim of his people only if
he is no longer effective; then they usually desert him.

Mr. Aristide has always been an able leader in that old-fashioned manner. Yet,
in 1990, in a twist of history, he became Haiti's first legitimately elected
president, who was supposed to lead his country into an era in which the rule
of law and institutions would prevail.

But Mr. Aristide was soon ousted by a military coup, and was only reinstated
with American support, in 1994. "Because of the coup," Mr. McCalla said, "he
saw in institutions like the army or the police the very instrument that could
affect another coup against him." Upon his return, he disbanded the army and
kept the police to a minimum.

But without a force of order to fall back on, it has been impossible for Mr.
Aristide to carry out any social agenda, and for a long time now he has not
seemed to have the inclination or the budget to try.

The most flagrant example of his disregard for institutions came in 2000, when
he allowed irregularities in an election that gave him a clear legislative
majority. The United States responded by stopping all funds, says Robert
Maguire, director of the international affairs program at Trinity College in
Washington and a longtime Haiti observer. "This became a resource-starved
government very quickly,'' Mr. Maguire said, "Aristide could not deliver on any
of his big promises about education and health care and so forth, and he
couldn't even really do street patronage."

In other words, Mr. Aristide in some way stopped being a big man, even though
he was the president, because he could not deliver the goods.

What is happening now is not simply the result of Mr. Aristide's leadership
style. "This is happening because of irrefutable Haitian truths," Mr. Maguire
said. "The country is deeply polarized between the included and the excluded,
the elite rich and the poor masses, between the urban dweller and the rural
villager. Aristide represented something unique and important. He rose to power
as someone who was not part of the political class and not put in by the army.
His support came solely from the Haitian people."

It turns out, however, that the Haitian people have a limited supply of
patience.

Amy Wilentz is the author of "The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier."