20024: (Chamberlain) Wilentz on Aristide (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(Los Angeles Times, March 7, 2004)


Fall From Grace

Haiti needed more from Jean-Bertrand Aristide than he was able to deliver

By Amy Wilentz



I've known Jean-Bertrand Aristide since 1986, though we're not on speaking
terms right now. In Haiti in the old days, his enemies pointed trembling
fingers at me, accusing me of being responsible for his rise to power. Now
his supporters are also pointing, accusing me of being responsible for his
downfall. But they're wrong on both counts.

I met Aristide by accident. I had wanted to meet a Catholic bishop for an
article I was writing in the heady, crazed days immediately following
Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's overthrow in 1986, but the bishops in
Haiti weren't talking to the press back then. When I explained to my
Haitian fixer that the church was stonewalling me, he had an idea.

"I know who you can see," he said, and he drove me careening in my rented
car to St. Jean Bosco, a little white and blue church in the La Saline
shantytown, a pit of misery on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince.

"You can meet this guy," my guide told me as he walked me into the
courtyard.

"But who is he?" I asked — I was on deadline.

"Oh, he's good," my guide said. "Just wait."

So began the first of my many long waits for Aristide. When the parish
priest finally emerged into the courtyard, I was unimpressed. He appeared
to be almost a child — tiny, google-eyed and bespectacled. He looked like a
cross between E.T. and Poindexter, and yet he was appealing. When he sat on
the cloister balustrade, his feet didn't touch the ground as he swung his
legs, speaking in perfect French about the future of Haiti. I asked him
about his role in the fall of Duvalier, against whom he had been preaching
for some time.

"What we are doing is trying to get a better life," he said, gesturing to a
group of young men who stood eagerly around us, smiling and nodding. "To
you, what we have in Haiti may look like a new government, a new face, new
symbols. But to us, we see Duvalier's face when we look at [the leader of
the interim junta]. What we have now is Duvalierism without Duvalier…. This
is not the end of the affair, not by a long shot." He was focused and
intense.

Aristide led an unusual life: He slept only four hours a night; conducted
perpetual meetings with friends, parishioners, supporters, journalists; ate
on the fly; never drank. The digital wristwatch he had then went off every
half hour, and he was still never on time. He loved music and wrote poetry.
In public, he was vituperative and fiery and bitter, but he had a wicked
sense of humor.

Aristide was the only religious figure I ever encountered who regularly
made his listeners laugh. These were hungry people from the slums, sitting
on hard benches in the oppressive Haitian heat, squished shoulder to
shoulder and thigh to thigh — and still they were laughing. He could turn
anything into a metaphor and use it for his own ends: A big black moth
flying blindly around the apse was the old regime. In a country renowned
for its speakers and its storytellers, its jokes and parables and proverbs,
he was a brilliant Creole orator, perhaps the greatest of them all.

A few months after my article was finished, I began work on a book about
Haiti and returned to live there. There was no question in my mind that
Aristide was central to the country's future and would be central to my
book as well. You could sense destiny all around him; ambition and
righteousness were his guides. He was a beacon in troubled, complicated
times.

Haiti was in terrible turmoil in the years following Duvalier's ouster, and
Aristide seemed to be at the center of every event; he was the climax, the
catharsis, the denouement. He was the national lightning rod.

Several times there were assassination attempts that forced him into
hiding. Each time, he was at first incommunicado. And then, when he
reappeared, he was frail, skeletal, weak, a sight that caused grandmothers
to weep and faint. Even if his injury was as small as a scratch on the
knee, he worked it — limping and supported on either side by congregants.

He was a victim, he played the role brilliantly and Haitians empathized,
because in their poverty and hunger, their joblessness and political
disenfranchisement, they identified with a victim.

Aristide also saw something positive in the assassination attempts: His
surviving them had convinced people that he was somehow protected. "They
believe that I can't be hurt," he told me. "It makes a hired killer a
little reluctant to take me on…. The odds are, he thinks, that I will
survive, and he will be punished. He thinks there is a powerful force
keeping me safe."

"Is there?" I asked him.

He smiled. "You be the judge."

I believe now that the powerful force protecting him at the time was the
passionate backing of the Haitian people.

Not much more than a year after that conversation, St. Jean Bosco was
attacked by thugs with guns and machetes while Aristide was leading a Mass.
At least 13 parishioners were killed, and Aristide was whisked away by
representatives of the church. It was almost impossible to ascertain his
whereabouts. When I finally did, it was impossible to communicate with him.


As is the case today, it was hard to tell whether it was he himself who had
fled from the violence into hiding or whether it was the powers above him
who had buried him away to shut him up. At these moments of crisis in
Aristide's life, thousands poured into the streets of Port-au-Prince to
support him, in unmistakable demonstrations of his political potential. On
the street he was known as a prophet, a martyr, a saint — a leader.

Like many others, I thought back then that I had found the Martin Luther
King Jr. of Haiti, someone who would be a thorn in the side of the regime
forever, who would hold power to account. His voice was the only one loud
enough, brave enough and pointed enough to be heard over the political
confusion and violence engulfing the country.

Then, in 1990, Aristide changed the equation. In a sudden move that caught
almost everyone by surprise, he declared that he would be a candidate in
the upcoming presidential elections. Up until the moment of his
announcement, he had been absolutely against what he called "imposed"
elections. "The Haitian people," he said after one earlier aborted
election, "should never have been led into this electoral trap from which
there was finally no exit but a bloody death." His candidacy shook my faith
in him. It seemed his ambition had led him to a decision that his better
self had always warned against.

Aristide insisted that everything he did was in service of the Haitian
people. Thus, anyone who criticized him — personally or politically — was
shunned as an enemy of the people. (For the last four years, because of
things I've written questioning his actions, I have fallen into this
depressing category.) He was quick to justify his ambition and his methods,
and the dramatic, tragic story of the Haitian people from 1990 on became
inextricably intertwined with the dramatic, tragic narrative of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

It proved impossible for Aristide to switch comfortably from opposition
leader to president. As president, it was much harder for him to have the
give and take with average Haitians that had been his daily political
bread. Giving up his ministry, marrying and having children brought him
down from an exalted position in the average Haitian's eyes to the level of
a mortal politician. It was also impossible for him to hold power to public
account, because he was now power. In addition, the art of compromise and
consensus did not really excite Aristide: He was suspicious of other
people's motives. He undoubtedly felt justified in his suspicions after the
1991 coup d'état that forced him into exile.

In another world, Aristide's story might have had a happy ending after his
triumphant return to Haiti and political power in 1994. So why didn't it?
His character flaws, while a factor, cannot begin to account fully for the
depths of the debacle that we have just witnessed in Haiti. Although he was
a major player in his downfall, he certainly does not bear full
responsibility.

Aristide's long-standing identification with the people, and his sway over
them, turned him into an irresistible target for the powerful groups that
ultimately conspired to bring him down: the Haitian elite, the political
class, the business community, the exploiters of Haitian labor,
conservatives in the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince. One
of Aristide's favorite jokes was: "Why is Washington such a safe place?"
Answer: "No American Embassy." The punch line made him laugh and take off
his glasses and shake his head. In the end, these were the groups that
worked tirelessly to remove Aristide from the national scene.

The gold wristwatch that replaced his faithful Casio, and the big white
suburban house that is now in ruins, are indicators of how — in many small,
incremental ways — Aristide moved away from his power base. But it was a
still-polarized Haiti — self-destructive and dependent on the whim of the
hardhearted outside world, a country Aristide did not know how to cure —
that, after lifting him up so high, took him down.

_________

Amy Wilentz is the author of "The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier" and
the novel "Martyr's Crossing." She translated a book of Aristide's speeches
and writing, "In the Parish of the Poor: Writings"