19014: Esser: Haiti's obscene nightmare (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

The Jamaica Observer
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com
Editorial

Haiti's obscene nightmare

Monday, February 23, 2004

Perhaps by now the rebels, led by former death squad leader
Louis-Jodel Chamblain and coup plotter Jean-Baptiste Joseph,
operating under the umbrella of the so-called opposition, will have
taken Port au Prince and President Aristide will have left Haiti.

In retrospect, it was bound to happen.
Mr Aristide must have been exceedingly naive, at the resumption of
his presidency after his first overthrow, if he harboured a view that
he would have been allowed to maintain his leadership with any degree
of certainty. And the rest of us were gullible to expect that the
opposition would have entertained a political and constitutional
solution to Haiti's current crisis.

It is hardly coincidental that yesterday's capture, by the gunmen of
Cap Haitien, and the new push for Port au Prince, comes hard on the
heels of Mr Aristide's second public embrace of a set of initiatives
of which the United States has appropriated authorship, but which in
fact was developed by Caribbean Community (Caricom) leaders at a
meeting in Kingston last month.

In fact, it was the Jamaican prime minister, Mr Patterson, who
outlined the broad range of the Kingston Accord on January 31 and to
whom Mr Aristide publicly responded in announcing his acceptance at
Jamaica House.

Not unexpectedly, in the immediate aftermath of Mr Aristide's
acceptance of that Caricom-brokered initiative, which was to lead to
the selection of a new prime minister and government and other
confidence-building undertakings, the violence in Haiti escalated. As
did the crescendo of the opposition demands that Mr Aristide had to
step down, notwithstanding the widely accepted view that he was the
legitimately-elected president of Haiti.

We do not believe that Mr Aristide has been embracing or as proactive
as he might have been in building Haiti's institutions and advancing
the country's democracy. But neither do we hold that this is either
the fundamental reason, or a legitimate cause, for this coup d'etat
against him.

Yet we understand now that the process was inevitable. Mr Aristide
and his Lavalas represented a potential for a paradigm shift in Haiti
for the removal of power and influence from those who have
traditionally benefited from the rightist dictatorships of the recent
past.

Indeed, many of those who helped to overthrow Mr Aristide in the
early 1990s continued to lurk in the shadows during his second
coming, biding their time, waiting for the appropriate occasion. The
fig leaf of their talk of democracy has been pealed away, and the
vulgarity of their position laid bare, with their easy embrace of the
sordid bunch who in the past murdered hundreds.

That it has come to this is in part the fault of the international
community, who focused only the shortcomings, real and otherwise, of
Mr Aristide rather the broad reality of Haiti. Sanctions were bound
to break the country and lay the basis for today's instability which
has been so cynically exploited by those who claim democracy as their
agenda.

But it need not have come to this had there been clear and definitive
declarations by those who have the muscle to make their voices really
count - the United States, Canada, the European Union - that there
will be no rewards for violence and undemocratic actions to achieve
political ends.

They at times, mostly late in the day, admonished against violence as
a political tool. But there was always a sense that these statements
were delivered in a language full of double-speak that left the
impression that the remarks also contained something of a nod and a
wink. It was a policy based on personality rather than what is right
and what is moral.
It might not have been so bad if we were assured that Mr Aristide's
departure was the route to stability in Haiti. It is more likely,
though, to be just the start of a new turn through a new cycle of
violence and instability. Unless we assume that Mr Aristide has no
support in Haiti.
.