19244: (Craig) NYT Op-Ed: Why Aristide Should Stay (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <hoosier@att.net>

Op-Ed Contributor: Why Aristide Should Stay
February 26, 2004
By TRACY KIDDER

NORTHAMPTON, Mass.

In Haiti, a paramilitary group has been making coordinated
attacks on towns and cities, overwhelming understaffed,
underequipped and ill-trained members of the national
police force. The group has been burning police stations
and setting free prisoners, both ordinary criminals and
people convicted of involvement in massacres. It has been
looting and rounding up supporters of the elected
government and, apparently, killing anyone who tries to
oppose it.

This group seems to be operating with the tacit approval of
some of the politicians who oppose Haiti's government. But
many of these rebels, as news reports call them, have
unsavory records. Some are former soldiers from the
disbanded Haitian Army, which in 1991 deposed Haiti's first
democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
and ruled the country with cruelty and corruption for three
years. Another was a ranking member of an organization that
aided the army in terrorizing the country during that
period. This rebel group seems to enjoy sanctuary within
the Dominican Republic and free passage across the border
between that country and Haiti.

For several years, the rebels have been making raids into
Haiti, including a commando-style assault on the
presidential palace in 2001 and, in 2003, an attack on a
hydroelectric dam, during which they burned the control
station, murdered two security guards and stole an
ambulance. Clearly, they were just getting warmed up. Their
leaders now boast that they will soon be in control of the
entire country.

I first went to Haiti in 1994, for research on an article
about some of the American soldiers sent to restore the
country's elected government. I have spent parts of the
past several years there, working on a book about an
American doctor and a public health system that he helped
to create in an impoverished rural region. The Haiti that I
experienced was very different from the Haiti that I had
read about back in the United States, and this
disconnection is even stronger for me today.

Recent news reports, for example, perhaps in laudable
pursuit of evenhandedness, have taken pains to assert that
President Aristide and his Lavalas Party have been using
armed thugs of their own to enforce their will on the
country. The articles imply that the current crisis in
Haiti is an incipient war between two factions roughly
equal in illegitimacy. But I have interviewed leaders of
the opposition, and can say with certainty that theirs is
an extremely disparate group, which includes members of the
disbanded army and former officials of the repressive
regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier - and also people who were
persecuted by both these groups.

This is an opposition that has so far shown itself unable
to agree on much of anything except its determination to
get rid of Mr. Aristide. Most important, the various
leaders of this opposition have enjoyed little in the way
of electoral success, the true measure of legitimacy in any
country that calls itself a democracy. Mr. Aristide, by
contrast, has been elected president twice, by overwhelming
margins, and his party won the vast majority of seats in
Parliament in the last legislative elections, held in May
2000.

Press reports generally date the current crisis to those
elections, which they describe as flawed. In fact, they
were flawed, but less flawed than we have been led to
believe. Eight candidates, seven of them from Lavalas, were
awarded seats in the Senate, even though they had won only
pluralities. Consequently, many foreign diplomats expressed
concern, and some went so far as to call the election
"fraudulent."

But to a great extent, the proceedings were financed,
managed and overseen by foreigners, and in the immediate
aftermath many monitors declared a victory for Haiti's
nascent democracy. Sixty percent of the country's eligible
voters went to polling stations, many trudging for miles
along mountain paths, then waiting for hours in the hot sun
to vote. Moreover, those eight contested Senate seats
didn't affect the balance of power in Parliament. Even if
it had lost them all, Mr. Aristide's party would still have
had a clear majority.

Citing the flaws in those elections, the United States and
other foreign governments refused to monitor the
presidential election that followed, later in 2000, which
Mr. Aristide won handily. The opposition boycotted the
affair and still claims that the election was illegitimate,
but it does so against the weight of the evidence. This
includes a Gallup poll commissioned by the United States
government but never made public. (I obtained a copy last
year.) It shows that as of 2002 Mr. Aristide remained far
and away the most popular political figure in Haiti.

Again citing the flawed elections as its reason, the Bush
administration also led a near total embargo on foreign aid
to the Haitian government - even blocking loans from the
Inter-American Development Bank for improvements in
education, roads, health care and water supplies.
Meanwhile, the administration has supported the political
opposition. This is hardly a destructive act, unless, as
Mr. Aristide's supporters believe, the aim has been to make
room for an opposition by weakening the elected government.

They have a point. Over the past several years, the United
States and the Organization of American States have placed
increasingly onerous demands on Mr. Aristide. Foreign
diplomats insisted that the senators in the contested seats
resign; all did so several months after Mr. Aristide's
re-election. Though Mr. Aristide called for new elections,
the opposition demanded that he himself step down before it
would cooperate. Last year, a State Department official in
Haiti, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that the
United States wouldn't tolerate that kind of intransigence
but also said that no support for new elections would be
forthcoming until President Aristide improved "security."
And yet by the time the diplomat said this, the
administration had long since withdrawn support from
Haiti's fledgling police force, with predictable and now
obvious results.

Mr. Aristide has been accused of many things. A few days
ago, a news report described him as "uncompromising." For
more than a week now, American and other diplomats have
been trying to broker a deal whereby the president would
appoint a new prime minister acceptable to the opposition.
Mr. Aristide has agreed. So far the opposition has refused,
insisting again that the president resign.

It was the United States that restored Mr. Aristide to
power in 1994, but since his re-election our government has
made rather brazen attempts to undermine his presidency.
One could speculate endlessly on American motives, but the
plain fact is that American policy in Haiti has not served
American interests, not if those include the establishment
of democracy in Haiti, or the prevention of the kind of
chaos and bloodletting that has led in the past to
boatloads of refugees heading for Florida.

One could also argue about the failings and sins of all the
quarreling factions inside Haiti. But there are more
important considerations. Haitians have endured centuries
of horror: first slavery under the French, and then, since
their revolution, nearly two centuries of corrupt,
repressive misrule, aided and abetted by foreign powers,
including the United States. All this has helped to make
Haiti one of the world's poorest countries, and its people,
according to the World Bank, among the most malnourished on
earth.

The majority of Haitians have been struggling for nearly
two decades to establish a democratic political system. It
is important to this effort that Haiti's current elected
president leave office constitutionally, not through what
would be the country's 33rd coup d'?tat. Progress toward
this difficult goal may still be possible, if the warring
politicians within the country and the various foreign
nations that have involved themselves in Haiti's affairs
pull together now and put a stop to the growing incursions
of terrorists. If this does not happen, there is little
hope for Haiti. The result, I fear, will be a new civil
war, one that will likely lead back to dictatorship and
spill enough blood to cover all hands.

Tracy Kidder is the author, most recently, of "Mountains
Beyond Mountains."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/26/opinion/26KIDD.html?ex=1078803950&ei=1&en=6d106eb1300c5423
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company