18751: Esser: From: An exchange on Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

World Socialist Web Site
http://www.wsws.org

An exchange on Haiti: Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the dead end of
"left" nationalist politics

18 February 2004


Below we post a letter on Haiti from a reader and a reply by WSWS
correspondent Richard Dufour.

To the Editor:

Referring to the current conflict in Haiti as a "right-wing"
rebellion indicates a lack of understanding of the opposition
movement calling for Aristide's resignation. There are several
distinct groups in the opposition. In addition to the business
associations and "wealthy elites" the United States left has focused
on, the main opposition movement, the Groupe 184, consists of a wide
variety of civil society organizations, including numerous peasant
organizations, syndicates [unions], women's groups, student
associations, and writers and artists, some of whom worked in earlier
Lavalas administrations. These groups have traditionally been
associated with the Haitian left, and the United States right-wing
would most likely find their missions abhorrent.

The Groupe 184 has clearly and repeatedly distanced itself from the
armed insurgents in Gonaïves, who were aligned with Aristide until
their leader, Amiot Metayer, was assassinated. The Groupe 184
organizes peaceful demonstrations, which have grown ever-larger,
particularly since thugs (chimères) affiliated with Aristide's
government entered the university, beat students, trashed classrooms
and broke the legs of the university rector on December 5, 2003.
Several of the opposition demonstrations have ended in violence, not
because of the behavior of the unarmed marchers, but because
chimères, and occasionally the police, have attacked them with
bottles, rocks, tear gas and guns. The Groupe 184 is unarmed and
unaffiliated with the armed opposition in Gonaives, and has not
called for insurrection. Winter Etienne, the spokesperson of the
Gonaives insurgents, has also clearly stated that his group is
unaffiliated with the Groupe 184. He has also explicitly stated that
his group acquired their weapons when they worked for Aristide
against the unarmed, civil opposition.

As a Haitian whose family was persecuted, arrested, exiled and/or
killed by the Duvalier government for being "radical leftists" and
"communists," I am dismayed by the knee-jerk support the United
States left is expressing for Aristide. To me, it is part of the same
colonialist mentality that the United States has always had towards
Haiti-that foreign whites know what is best for Haiti. Rather than
blindly accepting the Aristide government's propaganda, the United
States left should consider why so many of Aristide's Haitian
partisans, including many who fought hard for his return to power
after the 1991 coup d'état, have turned against him. The degradation
and deterioration of everything in Haiti since cannot be blamed on
the lack of foreign aid alone. In 1994, Aristide once again had the
opportunity to set Haiti on a new path to change and development, and
many Haitians, both in Haiti and abroad, were eager to work with him.
He (and Préval) squandered that chance; instead, Haiti under Aristide
and Lavalas has become increasingly dangerous and unliveable, due to
crime and violence perpetrated by the government-affiliated chimères
who use their government-issued weapons to terrorize both the local
Haitian population and visitors of Haitian ancestry. That is the
reason some Haitians are calling for his resignation today.

(I am not affiliated with any organization involved in Haitian politics.)

M-H L.D.

13 February, 2004

* * *

Thank you for your letter. It raises pivotal questions regarding the
current political turmoil in Haiti and what way forward for those
seeking to tackle the root causes of that country's never-ending
social-political crisis-deepening mass poverty amid great wealth for
a few, the outcome of decades of imperialist oppression of the
Haitian people.

While the main opposition groups, the Groupe 184 and Convergence
Démocratique, have sought to capitalize on the mass popular
alienation generated by the Aristide government's corruption,
autocratic methods and neo-liberal policies, they do not represent
any progressive alternative. Their strident denunciations of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide's human rights record notwithstanding, the
opposition forces have used similar methods of intimidation and
violence. After various electoral failures, they boycotted the last
presidential elections in 2000 and did everything to prevent, and
still oppose, new parliamentary elections-unless Aristide first
resigns and they are handed state power.

The official opposition has pinned its hopes on creating so much
disturbance and political instability as to render the country
ungovernable and thereby provoke the US government to intervene in
its favor. In numerous interviews in recent days with world media
outlets, opposition spokesmen have directed their appeals not to the
Haitian people but to the governments of France, Canada and above all
the United States.

Nothing could more clearly expose the opposition's profoundly
anti-democratic nature than this grovelling before Haiti's
imperialist masters. After all, what are the democratic credentials
of a Bush administration which came to power by stealing the 2000 US
election and which has since unleashed the deadly power of the US
military machine on the innocent peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq in
the quest for oil and geo-strategic advantage? And what is the US
record in Haiti? Throughout the last century, Washington, under
Democratic and Republican administrations alike, backed a long line
of Haitian dictators, including the infamous Duvalier family, all the
way up to the last decade when President George Bush Sr. gave his
seal of approval to the bloody 1991 military coup which overthrew the
first Aristide government.

Inside Haiti, the opposition has turned to the most reactionary
elements. Its response to the armed uprisings in the north, led by
criminal gang leaders, drug traffickers and other dubious figures,
was quite revealing. According to a Miami Herald report, "Although
Aristide's political opposition has tried to distance itself from the
gunmen, Evans Paul, a leader of the Democratic Convergence ... told
[a] news conference that their revolt is a legitimate reaction to
what they see as the president's misrule."

Reports have since emerged that leaders of the FRAPH-the right-wing
death squad which hunted down opponents of the 1991-1994 military
junta-have crossed the border from the Dominican Republic, where they
had taken refuge, to join the Gonaïves rebellion.

The political physiognomy of the "opposition"

Whether the official opposition groups had a direct hand in the armed
uprisings at Gonaïves and elsewhere may be debatable. Their
right-wing political affiliations are not.

André Apaid, the sweatshop owner who has emerged as the opposition's
leading spokesman, opposed the ouster of the military junta and
Aristide's restoration to power in 1994. He calls for the
reestablishment of the Haitian army, dissolved by Aristide in 1995-no
matter that this pillar of reaction, created by the United States
during its 1915-34 military occupation of the country, was
responsible for repeated bloody coups.

The official opposition is a loose coalition containing disparate
elements-from remnants of the old Duvalier political machine such as
ex-Duvalier minister Hubert De Ronceray to one-time supporters of
Aristide. It draws extensive support from the middle classes
("peasant organizations, syndicates, women's groups, student
associations, and writers and artists," as you put it). But its real
leadership rests in the hands of what you describe as "business
associations and 'wealthy elites'." Your quotation marks around the
latter are meant, one assumes, to convey a sense of exaggeration in
the use of the term. But the fact remains that the driving force
behind the dump-Aristide movement is Haiti's traditional ruling
elite-a strata notorious both for its deep-rooted fear of the popular
masses and readiness to support violence and authoritarian rule to
protect its privileges.

To the extent that Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as a young,
liberation-theology priest in a Port-au-Prince slum, emerged in the
final years of the Duvalier regime as a charismatic mass leader who
laced his sermons with anti-imperialist and socialist rhetoric, he
earned the hatred of the ruling elite. Indeed, on several occasions
he only narrowly escaped assassination by right-wing death squads.

Subsequently, I shall discuss how Aristide came to power and his
political responsibility for the abortion of the mass
anti-imperialist movement that convulsed Haiti between 1986 and 1991.
But one thing should be made clear now: for the dominant sections of
the Haitian ruling class, personified by the millionaire businessman
Apaid, Aristide's populist appeals to the "dirty masses"-whether in
their left-wing guise in the days of the struggle against Duvalier or
in their current form of right-wing, racial appeals against the
"mulatto elite"-are a dangerous promotion of "class hatred" that
cannot be tolerated.

Of course, the issue is presented otherwise by the opposition
leaders. Their talk of Aristide's "tyranny" is meant to downplay
their own past history and present associations. In this regard,
Apaid made a remarkable confession in an interview with the Montreal
daily La Presse: "Asked about the suspected drug traffickers who run
a radio station in the north and invoke freedom of expression, about
the gunmen convicted for a massacre under the putschist regime [of
1991-94] at Raboteau in Gonaïves, and about two senators ex-members
of Lavalas [Aristide's political party] suspected of grave crimes,
who are all his allies in the struggle against Aristide, Apaid
replied, 'I haven't negotiated anything with them,' but added: 'I
work in conviviality. I am not the justice minister'."

Opposition leaders are deliberately cultivating ambiguity as to the
policies they want to see implemented by a post-Aristide government.
When asked in the same La Presse interview about the opposition's
attempt to develop a common program, Apaid said, "The contentious
points have been pushed aside, as for example: should the economy be
based on the national space or on globalization and openness? Should
workers or investors be protected?... This left-right battle will
keep tensions up for six, eight, ten more years."

Apaid may refrain from openly stating his own position in the
"left-right battle," but his actions as owner of the industrial glove
maker, Alpha Sewing, speak for themselves. According to an August
1998 report on Alpha Sewing by Action Alert, a labor rights group:
"Workers report skin and respiratory problems because of work done
unprotected with heavy chemicals. Workers work approximately 78 hours
a week. 75 percent of the women do not earn the minimum wage."

Based on the above observations, it is entirely accurate to
characterize the official opposition movement and the armed rebellion
in the north-whatever the exact nature of the ties between them-as a
right-wing challenge to the elected government of Jean-Bertrand
Aristide. To recognize this political fact and to bring out the real
agenda of opposition forces in Haiti does not mean political
"knee-jerk" support for Aristide as you imply in your letter.

It is true that elements in the US commonly identified as "left,"
such as Workers World and the weekly Haiti-Progrès, are raising the
threat of reaction as a cynical means to drum up support for an
Aristide government whose popularity has plummeted because of its
policies of privatizations, mass layoffs and price-subsidy cuts. The
irony is that your own position, glorifying the Haitian opposition
movement, is but the other side of the same coin. You share with the
pro-Aristide "lefts" the view that the most one can do is support one
or the other of the bankrupt bourgeois factions now at each other's
throats in a deadly feud for the crumbs of power.

The World Socialist Web Site insists rather that working people in
Haiti, the United States, and internationally should take an
independent class standpoint. Principled political opposition to
Aristide must be based on the recognition that he has played a
crucial role in derailing a mass popular movement, which contained
within it the potential for revolutionary change.

The political record of Jean-Bertrand Aristide

Jean-Bertrand Aristide has now been in power for 10 years, both
directly and through his so-called "twin" René Préval who was Haiti's
nominal president from 1996 to 2001. His failure to improve the
country's social conditions-they have in fact grown far worse-and the
subsequent political resurrection of the forces of reaction represent
the most damning indictment of Aristide's "left" nationalist politics.

Let us now briefly review Aristide's political career since his
fateful decision in late 1990 to seek the presidency. In December of
that year he stood against Marc Bazin, a former World Bank economist
who was then widely seen as Washington's favored candidate. This
represented a 180-degree shift for a man who had until then denounced
the coming elections as "US made" and advocated their boycott.

What caused this turnaround? As the day of the ballot drew closer,
agitation among the popular masses increased dramatically in response
to the electoral campaign mounted by the Duvalierist forces under the
leadership of Roger Lafontant, the strongman of the regime in its
dying days. Nearly five years after the colossal upheavals that had
toppled "Baby Doc" Duvalier, the Haitian ruling class became
increasingly alarmed at the prospect of another eruption of the
oppressed masses into the country's political life.

It was at this point that significant sections of the Haitian
bourgeoisie turned to the former radical priest Aristide as a means
to contain such a movement. A necessary precondition was to divert it
from the streets into electoral channels. And Aristide obliged them.
He quickly set aside his past "anti-capitalist" and
"anti-imperialist" rhetoric, agreed to head a coalition of bourgeois
and petty-bourgeois political formations, and campaigned on a
platform of "national reconciliation," in particular for a "marriage
between the people and the military." Aristide won a landslide
victory in an election for which working people and the oppressed had
come out en masse.

His first government, which took office in February 1991, was marked
by feeble attempts at social reforms, including a token rise in the
minimum wage, coupled with preparations for the imposition of
IMF-inspired austerity measures. This was under conditions where the
oppressed masses who had propelled Aristide into the National Palace,
in particular his supporters among the youth, were pressing hard for
a meaningful redistribution of wealth to alleviate poverty. After
little over eight months in office, the dominant sections of the
Haitian ruling class lost confidence in Aristide's ability to contain
the revolutionary strivings of the masses and backed a military coup
by the man Aristide had appointed head of the Haitian armed forced,
General Raoul Cédras.

The response of Aristide, whose life was spared thanks only to an
intervention by the French ambassador on the night of the coup, was
to have catastrophic political consequences for the Haitian people's
struggle for their social emancipation. While his supporters in the
popular neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince were being machine-gunned,
Aristide appealed for the coup's opponents to remain "peaceful" so as
to avoid civil war. This didn't prevent a civil war, but only made it
one-sided. It is estimated that over 3,000 people were killed during
General Cédras' three-year rule.

But most politically damaging was Aristide's decision, after finding
refuge in the United States, to base the struggle against the
military junta not on appeals to the American and international
working class to assist their Haitian class brothers and sisters in
throwing off the yoke of military terror and capitalist exploitation,
but on the very force that had played the central role throughout the
twentieth century in maintaining Haiti into the most abject poverty
and oppression-that is, US imperialism.

That Aristide and his inner circle basically threw themselves at
Washington's knee, begging for support, flowed organically from their
social nature as representatives of a petty-bourgeoisie whose class
outlook is shaped by the gruesome day-to-day reality of imperialist
oppression, but which lacks any genuine independence from the
national bourgeoisie and from imperialism itself. In a previous
historical period, when the Cold War conflict between US imperialism
and the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union provided the
national bourgeoisie with some room to maneuver, and existing
constraints on the international mobility of capital allowed for a
limited possibility of national economic development, petty-bourgeois
nationalists such as Cuba's Fidel Castro or Nicaragua's Sandinistas
could pose as radical anti-imperialists and even socialists. But by
the time Aristide was forced into exile the Soviet Union was on the
brink of formal dissolution and in response to the economic shocks of
the 1970s, the advanced capitalist powers had become increasing
aggressive in their dealings with the so-called Third World,
demanding the dismantling of tariff barriers and state-owned
industries as a condition for credit, investments and access to
advanced technology.

That Aristide's career as an "anti-imperialist" proved so short, and
his transformation into a lackey of Washington such an unpleasant
spectacle, was thus not fundamentally a result of personal failings.
Rather it was rooted in the fact that he had come onto the scene at
the very point when any objective basis for implementing his
petty-bourgeois nationalist program of using the nation-state to
foster indigenous industry and implement limited social reforms in an
attempt to overcome the legacy of imperialist oppression had
collapsed.

In any event, Aristide's pleas to US imperialism fell initially on
deaf ears, as the Republican administration of George Bush Sr. all
but openly welcomed the eviction of the former radical priest at the
hands of its main prop in Haiti, the US-built Haitian armed forces.
However, the military junta's brutal rule soon led tens of thousand
of Haitians to try to cross the sea to Florida, and the influx of
Haitian refugees became an issue in the 1992 US presidential election
with Democratic hopeful Bill Clinton denouncing Bush's policy of
systematically denying Haitian refugees the right of asylum.

Following Clinton's election to the White House, pressure built on
him to solve the refugee problem. His administration finally decided
in 1994 upon a military intervention to restore Aristide to power, so
as to justify completely closing the US's doors to poor Haitians and
dispel the growing impression that the Clinton administration was
impotent before Cédras and the Haitian junta. Aristide's return,
however, was made conditional on his providing a host of right-wing
guarantees, most importantly a pledge to carry out IMF-style
neo-liberal policies.

Thus, when you write that "in 1994, Aristide once again had the
opportunity to set Haiti on a new path to change and development,"
you overlook the concrete conditions of his return. As a result of
his own petty-bourgeois political orientation-his preference to turn
to imperialism rather than the Haitian and international working
class-Aristide had his hands and feet tied from the start. He was
completely beholden to the very force that has so long blocked
Haiti's' "path to change and development,' i.e., American
imperialism. In one of history's bitter ironies, Aristide, who was
elected president on the basis of a campaign against a former World
Bank official whom he decried as "the US candidate," was put back in
power by US marines after pledging to impose a socially incendiary
economic program dictated by Washington and Wall Street.

Aristide remained in office only until the beginning of 1996, since
Clinton administration officials had insisted that no extension of
his five-year mandate would be allowed despite the three years of
Cédras's rule and Haiti's constitution barred him seeking a second
consecutive term. Aristide's chosen successor and right-hand man,
René Préval, therefore ran as the candidate of Aristide's party,
Lavalas, and was elected president in 1996.

It was Préval's government that actually carried out the key elements
of the IMF structural adjustment program, leading to mass
redundancies in the public sector, the shutdown of publicly run
companies such as the country's flour and cement manufacturers, and
huge cuts in subsidies on food and transportation under conditions of
runaway inflation. The result was deepening social misery in the
poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Aristide still pulled the
strings of power behind the scenes, but since he formally held no
office he was somewhat shielded from the political fallout of such
deeply unpopular policies.

Aristide was reelected president in December 2000, following
elections boycotted by opposition forces but deemed fair by
international observers. Compared to a decade before, however, the
turnout was way down, well under 50 percent according to most
estimates.

During the past three years, the devastating IMF-dictated policies
Aristide signed onto and his "twin" carried out have torn ever deeper
into the country's social fabric. And the social crisis has been
further exacerbated by the withholding of hundreds of millions of
dollars of promised foreign financial aid as the US, Canada and other
big powers try to force Aristide to incorporate opposition
representatives into his government. Unable to offer any progressive
solution to the ever-widening social misery, Aristide has come to
rely more and more on the dirty tricks of generations of Haitian
politicians-patronage repression, racial appeals, and his own private
network of armed gangs recruited from lumpen elements.

The international working class and the struggle against imperialism

In the end, both Aristide and his foes in the opposition are
defenders of bourgeois rule who lack any genuine popular basis of
support. They both rely on the political backing of Washington and
other imperialist forces, and on patronage and intimidation tactics
at home. Neither has the slightest concern for bourgeois-democratic
norms, let alone the democratic rights of the masses: they know class
divisions are so deep and conditions of life so hellish for the vast
majority of Haitians, that they can only be enforced through the use
of naked force.

Whether Aristide or the opposition forces ultimately prevail may
determine which section of the political and business elite gets to
plunder the state-the most important source of wealth in a country
with such a low level of economic activity and output as Haiti. For
the masses, it will make no fundamental difference.

Those looking for a genuinely progressive solution, one which
addresses the burning needs of the masses for peace, democratic
rights, security, adequate food, housing, health care and education
will find it in the struggle to mobilize Haiti's oppressed masses
against the domination of the island's economy and state by a native
business oligarchy, serving as the junior partner of Wall Street and
Washington.

The only social force able to lead the fight for such an alternative
is the Haitian, Caribbean and international working class. But it
must draw the lessons of the tragic last two decades of struggles in
Haiti. It must recognize the bankruptcy of petty-bourgeois
nationalist politics of the type espoused by Aristide and his
supporters. Imperialist oppression cannot be overcome on a national
basis, but only as part of a struggle against international capital.

Under today's conditions of globalization, whose great potential of
progress for the whole of humanity remains blocked by the monopoly
control of a few giant transnational corporations driven by private
profit, the strivings of the broad masses can only be fulfilled by a
fundamental, revolutionary shift at the very basis of society. The
world economy must be run to address social needs and not the profits
of a few. For this, working people in Haiti must consciously unite
their struggles with those of their class brothers and sisters in the
Caribbean, South and North America, and join in the building of an
independent mass political movement of the international working
class against imperialism.

Sincerely,

Richard Dufour, for the WSWS

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