20027: Esser: Aristide Development (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

Aristide Development

By Erin Aubry Kaplan, LA Weekly
March 8, 2004

When President Bush declared last week that the U.S. would turn back
any Haitians who tried to seek refuge here because their problems of
insurrection, street violence and complete instability weren't really
all that bad, I felt a shiver of recognition. I knew the callousness
was not intended for me or for any other American of color, but it
certainly felt aimed in our direction. Here, after all, is a black
nation not far away whose long-standing problems parallel those of
its American counterparts, albeit to greater degrees: high poverty,
crime, disease, insufficient education, underemployment. Here is an
American government looking assiduously the other way, being
sublimely hypocritical in advocating freedom and justice for all but
never devoting the time, energy or political resources to ensuring
that happens. Waiting until bad circumstances melt down into a bona
fide crisis to act or, more accurately, react – and then less in
Haiti's interest than in its own.

When Jean-Bertrand Aristide was finally spirited away last Sunday,
leaving Port-au-Prince to the looters, self-proclaimed rebels, and
mostly plain citizens who couldn't quite decide if they were better
off with law enforcement or without, the scene in the papers
resembled nothing so much as the maelstrom of South-Central L.A. in
April '92. Then, the first President Bush expressed great
consternation publicly, made a few visits out West to confirm for
himself that Central L.A. was indeed the disaster area it had been
for years, then went home to focus on getting re-elected. The current
Bush will doubtless do something like that in Haiti, if that much,
and we will all go back to what we were doing until the next
eruption. In the end, in the eyes of the most powerful country on
Earth, black folks just don't matter, and poor black folks matter
least.

Even when America pays attention, it does so conditionally. The U.S.
tends to confer any good will it might harbor toward black
populations through its leaders, but only hand-picked leaders who
reinforce a racial or economic status quo that works in America's
favor. So we crowned Booker T. Washington but not W.E.B. Du Bois,
lauded Martin Luther King Jr. (to a point) but not Patrice Lumumba.
Aristide was a flawed leader who was too easy to paint as a black
Saddam-like tyrant by a Bush government that simply wanted Aristide,
as it wanted Saddam, out of the way. Nor did the protestations of
black leaders here make a dent: The failed appeals of 19 members of
the congressional Black Caucus to its own government to negotiate a
pact with rebel leaders to keep Aristide and his legitimately elected
government in place speak volumes about the dubious state of black
influence in this country.

Caucus leader and longtime Haiti advocate Charles Rangel (D-New
York), clearly angry about what he saw as a betrayal of a good-faith
effort to help broker a compromise, was among the first to accuse the
U.S. of orchestrating a coup; as Aristide lent credence to that
accusation on CNN, Maxine Waters went further in declaring that
America was once again effecting a "regime change." Rangel said that
Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice led them to believe that a
compromise was possible even as they pushed for Aristide's departure,
which was the unofficial U.S. position. Not surprisingly, the U.S.
got its way, and the black American delegation was left with egg on
its face (that the African-American Powell and Rice carried American
interests and not those of the black delegation – and couldn't have
done otherwise, really – underscores the discomfiting reality of
black leadership being chosen and sanctioned by the existing power
structure, not by itself). But so it has always been with efforts to
build up black communities stateside. Reconstruction was woefully
inadequate and more beneficial in the end to white Southerners, not
their former slaves; legislation and court rulings through the years
that "gave" blacks the right to vote or access to equal education
were not speedily or systematically enforced. In the bid to retain
Aristide and keep Haiti solvent, Rangel and company played the only
card black leaders throughout history have had: holding America to
its own founding principles of democracy and self-determination.

The caucus encouraged Washington to respect the rule of law – this
time in another country – but the plea fell on especially deaf ears
within the Bush administration, which has already proved its
willingness to act unilaterally and sabotage governments it deems
uncooperative. The best it does is ignore them altogether, which, as
we've seen in Liberia and other troubled nations that happen to be
black, is often the most immoral choice of all. But money trumps
morality every time. The fact that Haiti has zero natural resources
to pique American interest – save sweatshop labor that the American
banks seemed eager to cultivate in a "border zone" deal with the
Dominican Republic proposed a couple of years ago – doesn't help its
cause of global involvement, which would have to begin here.

It also doesn't help matters that Aristide seems for all the world
like a good guy gone bad, a onetime pastor too corrupted by politics
and power to be much good to the people who once elevated him as a
savior. It's another uncomfortable parallel to the black American
experience, which has more than its share of preacher-hustlers and
people whose proclaimed ambitions to improve community are often
undermined by deeper ambitions of financial profit or 15 minutes in
the spotlight. The equation is rarely either/or, but it's often
depicted that way, and so writing off a Jesse Jackson or an Al
Sharpton or an Aristide is that much more justifiable to those in
power, and writing off the communities these fallen figures represent
is even easier. But with leaders or without, the places and their
problems of concerted neglect and political isolation remain. With a
population bigger than L.A.'s but smaller than New York City's, Haiti
is an inner-city island with freedom dreams still frustrated 200
years after gaining independence. Some things don't change.
.