19007: (Chamberlain) Make Haiti a banana democracy (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(Jamaica Gleaner, 22 Feb 04)


Why can't Haiti be a 'banana democracy'?

By J. Michael Dash



On a CARICOM fact-finding mission to Haiti in June 1989, I remember the St.
Lucian delegate from the group asking why Haitians were not being
encouraged to grow bananas in order to solve the then political crisis. At
the time, this question seemed both absurd and inappropriate in a country
which was as poor in topsoil as in political options. However, on further
reflection, I suppose that what he had in mind was that banana farmers were
a pillar of democratic political culture in St. Lucia and that no political
solution for Haiti could be found unless there was something similar on
which to ground Haitian democracy.

This is an idea well worth keeping in mind as Haiti undergoes a seemingly
endless transition to something other than authoritarian political rule.
Democracy clearly needs to be rooted in basic institutions and practices
that preserve democratic values. Not only do Haitians, at all levels, lack
these institutions but the only system of government the vast majority of
the population has known is Duvalierism, a particularly violent
manifestation of state power. Having brought down this absolutist state in
the name of democratic freedoms, Haiti is left with little or no central
control and without the means of creating an alternative to the absolutist
state. Never has Haiti needed banana farmers as much as at the present
time.

Haiti's present problems are as much related to the current president,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as to the demands of an unrelenting opposition that
has rallied around the one slogan that Aristide must leave the country.
Aristide and his opponents have one thing in common. Neither has any real
experience of democratic institutions. Aristide is himself a product of a
centralised, authoritarian system ­ the Catholic Church -­ has essentially
retained power by populist rhetoric, paranoid political practices and a
politicising of the legal institutions as well as security forces.

He is at least guilty of gross incompetence and a callous disregard for the
well-being of the Haitian people as a whole. Always unflappably vague,
always ready with the fuzzy sound bite, Aristide has frustrated for the
last four years, any attempt by the opposition political parties or the OAS
negotiators to correct the irregularities of the elections of 2000. This
combination of an arrogant refusal to compromise and naive demagogic
rhetoric has shown that Aristide is no Mandela but simply an incompetent
populist who has failed to rise to an historic occasion. For this he may
deserve impeachment, which the constitution does not seem to allow, but not
expulsion from Haiti.

Haiti, however, is a country in which politics is a fight to the death and
to the winner go all the spoils. The opposition, therefore, is not
interested in building its own political base by capitalising on the
widespread disenchantment with Aristide. They are not interested in having
a referendum on the self-destructive incompetence of the president. They
themselves have resorted to the hysterical sound bite 'Aristide must go'.
They show no signs of embarrassment at the parallel Government that they
installed in 2001 under the decrepit shadow presidency of Gerard Gourgue.
Indeed, the opposition's uncompromising extremism can be traced back to
their obstruction of the appointment of a Prime Minister by President Rene
Preval after the resignation of Rosny Smarth. They, who now sound so
righteously indignant, were once quite happy to stall the functioning of
the government by cavalierly wielding their limited political power.

Intransigence on both sides has, therefore, paralysed Haiti for the last
four years. Aristide, who had no respect for the date when Parliament was
dissolved in January 2004, insists that the date for the end of his term in
office in February 2006 be respected. The opposition has been emboldened by
its ability to promote massive demonstrations in Port-au-Prince and have
openly flirted with anarchy by promoting confrontations between their mobs
and the mobs of Aristide supporters. Increasingly, the opposition seems to
have been taken over by business interests as certainly one businessman,
whom no one elected, has become the spokesman of the chaotic anti-Aristide
movement. This suggests that the whole point of removing Aristide now, as
it may have been in 2001, is to allow for business as usual for the Haitian
so-called elite who have always run the country as their private franchise.

Anti-Aristide opposition has now entered a new and even more disturbing
phase. Armed gangs which now constitute themselves as a National Liberation
Front have taken over the town of Gonaives and attacked the Haitian police
in the nearby towns of St. Marc and Hinche. In the face of an ill-equipped
and demoralised police force of 5,000 men, such victories have come without
much difficulty. The so-called rebels have also been joined by various
members of past para-military organisations who had fled over the Dominican
Republic's border. The spokesman for the armed opposition, Butteur Matayer,
brother of the thug who once led 'The Cannibal Army' in Gonaives, now
produces his own incoherent sound-bites for the international media. This
insurrection mercifully does not seem important enough or sufficiently
well-organised to overthrow the Government. What it is likely to do is
produce a no-win civil war as Aristide's chimeras or armed loyalists
respond to the threat to the presidency.

In all of this Aristide sits in his empty palace mouthing abstractions like
'dignity' and 'freedom'. The non-violent opposition makes no attempt to
denounce the opportunist thugs who have seized control of Gonaives and a
humanitarian crisis of massive proportion threatens to unleash a flood of
refugees in the northern Caribbean. The very phenomena of Macoutism and
militarism that the anti-Duvalier movement had fought against now threaten
to engulf post-Duvalier Haiti. To make the irony more acute, the 200th
anniversary of the surrender of Napoleon's troops to Dessalines' army may
yet witness the landing of French troops in Haiti in a bid to provide some
semblance of the rule of law.

Haiti cannot be saved by those on the outside if only for the simple reason
that a modern democratic society can neither be imposed by the well-armed
nor inserted by the well-meaning. Haitians will have to find the capacity
for patience and compromise in order to extricate themselves from their
predicament. The radical restructuring of Haitian society can be helped,
however, by external forces who are committed to long-term nation-building
and not to sending contradictory signals, wittingly or unwittingly, to
political elements in Haiti. The international community restored Aristide
to power in 1994 and left before any real institutional change was
established in Haiti. Since the change of administration in Washington,
Aristide has been out in the cold and the opposition has not been
discouraged from their extremist activism.

The single most important signal sent by the United States was the recent
statement by Secretary of State Colin Powell, that they would not recognise
a Government installed by violence and that Aristide should be allowed to
finish his term in office. Such a constructive American approach could lead
to some kind of international intervention in the face of which armed
opposition will fizzle and the non-violent opposition will have to
participate in elections and try to convince the Haitian people that they
are really interested in their welfare. With the millions of dollars in
frozen aid restored, the project of rooting democratic values in Haitian
society could become a real possibility.

A more united U.S. and U.N. approach can have an impact on Haiti, a country
which is vastly smaller than Iraq and nowhere near the violent collapse of
countries such as Liberia and Somalia. In such a context, Haiti's Caribbean
neighbours seem once more either too cynical about Haiti's fate or too
ill-advised in their attempts to intervene. The recent series of meetings
in the Bahamas and Jamaica with the opposition and Aristide while
commendable produced a series of contradictory signals. On one hand the
opposition was not told firmly that the removal of Aristide would not be
tolerated by CARICOM and on the other CARICOM seemed to be threatening
sanctions against Aristide.

It is now commonplace to speak of the lack of strong regional leadership in
the Caribbean. To this extent, no major problem in Haiti or elsewhere is
likely to be solved by CARICOM or any Caribbean body. It is not even
embarrassing for owners of local newspapers to wonder out loud whether
Haiti should not be expelled from CARICOM, like an amputated limb. No more
helpful are those who, blinkered by Afrocentric solidarity, reduce Haiti to
the victory of 1804 and try to see Boukman or Toussaint in the face of
every Haitian. Of course, Haiti will survive in one way or another. Today
the only voice that seems to make sense is that of a St. Lucian politician
who many years ago felt that unless Haiti became a banana democracy it was
forever fated to be a banana republic.

-------------------
J. Michael Dash is Professor of French at the New York University. You can
send your comments to mjdio@nyu.edu.