19323: (Chamberlain) Haiti Bleeds on an Altar of Savior Politics (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(Los Angeles Times, 27 Feb 04)


COMMENTARY

Haiti Bleeds on an Altar of Savior Politics

By Greg Chamberlain



The deepening crisis in Haiti — Latin America's own "failed state" — is
rich in the symbolism, drama and passions of its violent birth as the
world's first independent black republic.

A tiny, studious-looking Catholic priest, the color of the slave
underclass, who speaks in riddles and rhymes about peace and justice,
confronts a light-skinned aristocracy that presides over an economy
exporting mostly drug money and other ill-gotten gains to foreign bank
accounts and over a society whose members it has kept in dire poverty.

Not so very different from the heroic situation that sparked the rebellion
against the French colonial masters 200 years ago. Except that this former
beacon of liberation in the Caribbean and beyond, once the world's richest
colony, is today destitute and a painful embarrassment to its neighbors in
a region that otherwise scores at the top in most developing-world human
and economic indicators.

Exhausted by decades of political disaster (some of it caused by outsiders,
but mostly not), Haitians elected Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide as
president in 1990, only a few months after he had denounced elections as a
trick of "the bourgeoisie" (the code name for the aristocracy). They hoped
he would break the system of rich versus poor and Haiti's shocking version
of apartheid. Fourteen years later, he has clearly joined that system,
grown suspiciously wealthy, bought himself a thuggish militia of desperate
slum youths and given a free hand to the shameless pillage of the state,
all tragically in the "best" Haitian tradition.

Did he jump into this, as his enemies say, or was he pushed, unable to
stand up to the Haitian juggernaut of kleptocracy and compulsive violence?
He seems to have been unable to resist either personal temptation or the
orders of powerful drug barons.

The trouble didn't start, as is often claimed, with slightly fiddled
elections in 2000 that Aristide would have won anyway. It started before
that, with unpunished killings of opponents, the takeover of the police by
his henchmen, the looting of public funds — turning thousands of idealistic
supporters against him and giving a green light to the lawless youths now
manning the barricades in the capital, Port-au-Prince, as the U.S.
government struggles for a solution tailored to its own election year
rather than the needs of Haiti. Yet Aristide's opponents promise little
better. The mulatto elite, whose visceral hatred of him is rooted in their
centuries-old terror of the unwashed masses storming the plantation great
houses (read today's luxury mansions), are glad to have the disillusioned
underclass in the streets on their behalf, so as to soften their
upper-class image.

But they stand for nothing but their own privilege. Haiti's intolerant
political culture means that neither they nor their darker-skinned allies
have a program beyond seizing control of the state in time-honored fashion,
a slight variation on Aristide's brand of political thuggery. They are
hopelessly divided, and their "political parties" with grandiloquent names
exist mostly on paper.

The professed democrats among them stand little chance and are likely to be
devoured by the system, as Aristide was. The armed rebels in the north,
co-led by a former death-squad chieftain, are the face of what will have to
be accommodated if Aristide leaves. The army he abolished is likely to be
revived to once more block real change on the whispered instructions of the
elite.

Haitians, meanwhile, worship at the Church of the Perpetual Conspiracy.
Anyone's fault but Haiti's … the imagined nonstop plotting by the United
States to seize the country's negligible economic resources and crush a
supposed revolutionary example to other countries. The admittedly overkill
suspension of foreign aid as punishment for election fraud is held up by
Aristide as a handy mask for his own incompetence.

The way forward, and the priority for any international assistance, must be
to build institutions to wean Haiti away from "savior politics": strictly
supervised, properly coordinated economic aid, an effective parliament,
independent courts whose judges are not forced to flee abroad, an education
system wherein the 75% of people who cannot read can be turned into the 75%
who can in nearby Jamaica.

Haitians are as intelligent, creative and energetic as any other group of
human beings. They need major help to escape the bad political and cultural
habits that have held Haiti back — habits and phases that all countries
pass through in their history. But their political class needs to take
responsibility for their ruinous behavior and to close the yawning gap
between what is known as "the Republic of Port-au-Prince" and the medieval
conditions in the countryside where most people are condemned to live.

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Greg Chamberlain has reported on Haiti and the Caribbean since 1970 and is
the former Caribbean specialist for the British daily the Guardian.