19874: (Chamberlain) Class and Colour Divides Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(LA Times, 5 March 04)


In Aristide's Wake, a Land Long Divided by Class, Color Explodes

Looting and attacks on businesses and the rich could lead to deepening of
the nation's poverty.

By Carol J. Williams



PETIONVILLE, Haiti — From the palm-shaded swimming pools and marble
terraces of this wealthy suburb's hillside villas, the distant squalor of
Port-au-Prince looks like a tranquil, opalescent coastal setting.

The lavish comforts enjoyed here by Haiti's small class of industrial
kingpins inspired former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to label them
"rocks washed by cooling waters," while his people, the impoverished masses
in the slums below, were "the rocks in the sun, taking the heat."

In a populist drive to show the rich how poverty feels, Aristide once urged
his followers to drag the rocks from the river into the inferno — a
metaphorical appeal that lives on after his departure as armed supporters
continue to loot and burn the businesses of the upper class in a frenzy of
revenge.

"Aristide sold people that image, that we were the rocks in the water,"
said Michael Madsen, an industrialist of Danish descent who is the
embodiment of the light-skinned elite whom Aristide demonized as Haiti's
economic vampires.

"He told his people to take us out, to show us what it was like on the
outside. Why didn't he encourage them to come themselves into the water?
Because he was incapable of building anything. He only knew how to
destroy."

Two days before Aristide stepped down, gunmen armed by his Lavalas Party
broke into Madsen's Haiti Terminal port freight yard, he said, ransacking
the offices to punish him for supporting the political opposition. It
wasn't long before desperate slum dwellers began looting the shipping
containers in the yard, which were filled with food, clothing and
electronics.

In the torrent of reprisals unleashed against his perceived enemies in
ideology, class and color as his power vanished, Aristide succeeded in
sharing the pain of the poor with some of the elite that had never felt it.


But the strategy of sacking enterprises owned by Aristide's political
opponents promises to only widen the social gap between the industrial
dynasties that have controlled the economy for generations and the
impoverished masses that will have even fewer jobs. As U.S. Marines
patrolling the capital refuse to intervene to halt the looting, the damage
could spread.

Aristide, who departed early Sunday, had long promised a "cleansing flood"
— his party's translation of the Creole word lavalas, whose close French
derivation more accurately means "deluge." The inundation of the last few
days has wiped out the workplaces of thousands and perhaps the gains of the
relatively few blacks who succeeded, under Aristide, in penetrating the
so-called bourgeoisie.

How much longer the attacks on the rich will continue is uncertain, but the
damage has dealt a staggering blow to an economy that was already the
poorest in the Western Hemisphere and spiraling downward. At least $160
million in property has been destroyed, estimated Maurice Lafortune, head
of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce.

The loss could represent half this devastated nation's private investment,
said importer Sandro Masucchi, whose Honda auto dealership was looted and
burned on the morning of Aristide's departure.

The roots of the mob rampage run deep in Haitian history.

The minuscule population of whites and mulattos — as those of mixed
black-and-white ancestry are called in Haiti — thought to be no more than
1% of the populace of 8.5 million, has long occupied a disproportionate
position in the equally tiny echelon of the wealthy.

That is a consequence of landownership dating to Haiti's 1804 independence,
when some offspring of French colonial masters and African slaves acquired
property amid the panicked exodus of the Europeans after the slave revolt
triumphed. With no redistribution of land, the haves and have-nots formed
along racial lines. Color was so obsessively tied to status then that
Haitians put names to 64 racial mixtures and assigned each a place on the
social hierarchy.

In 1884, British Ambassador Spencer St. John wrote prophetically of the
young state's racial fixation. "There is a marked line drawn between the
black and the mulatto, which is probably the most disastrous circumstance
for the future prosperity of the country."

Those now heading family empires insist that the color issue faded at the
start of the last century, when the same waves of immigration that brought
Irish, Italians and Germans to work in U.S. factories also infused fresh
blood into Haiti. Business deals and marriage crossed racial lines sooner
than in the United States, say the racially mixed third- and
fourth-generation descendants of the immigrants.

During the 30-year dictatorship of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his
son, Jean-Claude, the mulatto industrialists prospered and paid little heed
to either the poverty that afflicted the masses or the repression of the
Duvaliers' political opponents. The elite's protectors and political
delegates were the generals of the Haitian National Army.

When Aristide rose to national prominence from his Catholic pulpit in the
late 1980s, he embraced a socialist ideology equating ownership with
exploitation and encouraged the homeless to build shantytowns on
industrialists' land. He cast factory owners as modern-day enslavers for
the paltry wages they paid, sowing discord in the workplace. Business
owners were so angered that some backed the 1991 military coup that deposed
Aristide.

That purported collusion with the army by a few of the most powerful
families — the Brandts, the Mevs, the Accras — allowed Aristide to taint
the entire industrial class as dictatorship's paymasters. He also dissolved
the army and used jobs in the police force to reward political patronage,
essentially destroying the security institutions and replacing them with
armed bands of hungry street kids.

"The bourgeoisie are the reason Aristide couldn't do anything," said Katho
Laguerre, a 21-year-old Cite Soleil slum dweller, gesturing toward the
hills of Petionville above the capital. "The bourgeoisie have everything,
and we have nothing. That's why Aristide said we could build houses here,
that this was the living room of the people."

Charles Baker, whose apparel empire has been closed and sister's factory
torched, said the former president, unlike his predecessors, used color to
polarize the nation.

"When someone says 'bourgeoisie' in Haiti, they don't mean a rich man who
is black but a rich man who is white or mulatto and belongs to the
opposition," said Baker, a descendant of Europeans and American blacks who
came here in the 1930s. "The opposition is 99% black and of lesser means
than we are, but the image he tried to create was of a light-skinned
elite."

Aristide's use of racial politics forced the business elite to descend from
its splendid isolation and join a broad array of movements, from
independent media to peasant groups to labor unions.

"It's the one good thing he did," author and opposition activist Yannick
Lahens said of Aristide. "Everybody felt so threatened that it brought us
together."

Wealthy businessmen such as Madsen and Andre Apaid, the son of a Lebanese
father and mulatto mother, say the elite has learned a humbling lesson from
the Aristide era, when they were blamed for every social failure.

"We have to be a society of inclusion, and we have to stay united," said
Apaid, whose telecommunications businesses have proved less vulnerable to
the crowbar-wielding vandals than the holdings of other industrial leaders.
"We have a precious thing in this unity for the first time in our history.
Where else do you see union leaders and business owners marching together?"

Some opposition leaders, however, remain skeptical of the motivation of the
rich to work for better lives for all Haitians.

"The mentality of the elite hasn't changed yet," said Franckel Jeanrisca,
head of the Peasant Movement of Papaye. "We can't have two classes — one
mulatto and one black."

Haiti's subsistence farmers have long occupied the bottom rung of the
social ladder. Devastating environmental problems have drastically cut crop
yields, leaving them poorer than ever, Jeanrisca said.

His 200,000-strong organization, which once avidly supported Aristide,
entered a "tactical union" with the elite and other factions to drive the
president out, he said. It remains to be seen whether the industrialists
are genuinely committed to national reconciliation, he added.

Honda dealer Masucchi, whose Italian ancestors arrived after World War I,
is one of many businessmen who contend that they became Aristide targets
not because of their money or light skin but because of their challenge to
Lavalas.

The wrecking crews targeted even small businesses owned by Aristide
opponents, such as Hans Remy's Caribbean Stitches sportswear factory. The
sole enterprise of the young black entrepreneur, its loss will deprive 250
workers from nearby Cite Soleil of their wages.

Some fear that the security vacuum and the legions of armed thugs left
behind by Aristide will fan the flames of social conflict and feed a cycle
of destruction of capital and jobs, deepening poverty and driving more
Haitians to theft and looting for survival.

Others, such as Madsen, say the current pillaging is the death spasm of
Haiti's history of divide and conquer and that citizens will renew their
respect for law and order once a modicum of stability returns. "I don't
think the people of Cite Soleil have any problem with us. These people are
poor and doing what they can," Madsen said of the looters who had laid
waste to his shipping containers.

"I want to believe this will stop. Please, let me hold on to my optimism."