20048: Slavin: Economist on Haiti (4 articles) 030604 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JPS390@aol.com

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=2478583The Caribbean Whose coup in Haiti?Mar 4th 2004 From The Economist print editionJean-Bertrand Aristide played a big part in his own downfall. But Washington made mistakes tooNO, IT is not Iraq. But once again, American television screens have been full of pictures of their country's troops being helicoptered into a foreign land, to stake out bridgeheads and secure perimeters. Once again, the marines are being dispatched in the name of peace, order and democracy. In Haiti, their mission is on a much smaller scale (up to 2,000 American troops will be involved), and is less dangerous than in the battlefields of the “war” on terror. It is cast in an older mould, a police action in Uncle Sam's backyard. But as so often in the past, the marines have flown in through a cloud of controversy and much debate as to how deep and lasting should be their commitment. And as in Iraq, the Americans are already being accused of being slow to take charge, allowing a power vacuum to develop.
The Americans, along with French, Canadian and Chilean troops, form the spearhead of a “multinational interim force” approved by the United Nations' Security Council to “secure and stabilise” the country, facilitate humanitarian aid and establish law and order. Its arrival followed the ousting of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's elected president, by a combination of armed rebellion, popular protest and French and American pressure. A thuggish rebellion
No sooner had Mr Aristide landed in African exile than he claimed to be the victim of kidnapping and an American coup against democracy. “Nonsense,” George Bush's spokesman retorted; Mr Aristide had agreed to resign to avoid further bloodshed. But the controversy does not end there. The Bush administration faces two other, somewhat contradictory, criticisms (see article). The first is that by refusing to send troops until Mr Aristide, a leftist former priest, stepped down, it in effect endorsed the thuggish armed rebellion against him. The second charge is that it was far too slow to appreciate the seriousness of the Haitian crisis.
These criticisms owe something to electioneering in the United States. But there are serious questions to answer. Mr Aristide became the sixth leader in Latin America since 1999 to be ousted before the end of his term. That is worrying confirmation that the region's democratisation, one of the great achievements of the past two decades, remains far from consolidated. The United States did much to promote the spread of democracy, and Mr Aristide was part of the process. In 1990, he became Haiti's first freely elected leader. Within months he was overthrown by a military coup. In 1994, Bill Clinton sent 20,000 troops to restore him to power. The Bush administration has seemed more ambivalent, withholding support from elected leaders it dislikes. In 2002 it failed to condemn a coup (quickly reversed) against Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, one of America's main oil suppliers.
Establishing democracy in Haiti, the poorest and most misgoverned country in the Americas, was never going to be easy. The Americans and the United Nations quickly gave up. But Mr Aristide, too, carries much of the blame. The same dogmatic inflexibility that made him a brave opponent of dictatorship made him a poor democratic ruler.
Having installed an ally as president in 1995, Mr Aristide was complicit in delaying legislative elections for three years, with a consequent breakdown of government and the loss of several hundred million dollars of aid. When those elections were at last held in 2000, they were flawed. Several opposition candidates were murdered; the electoral court was browbeaten into awarding ten disputed Senate seats (and thus a majority) to Mr Aristide's party. Mr Aristide was then re-elected president in a poll boycotted by the opposition.
Ironically, Mr Aristide would almost certainly have won a free vote. But he was turning into another Haitian despot, wanting absolute control of his destitute country. He relied on gangs to enforce his rule. So reviled had this become that he was toppled by a rag-tag army of as few as 200 rebels.
But the opposition's democratic halo is equally tarnished. It refused all compromise with Mr Aristide, seeking his overthrow. Its claims not to support the armed rebels rang hollow. The Bush administration insists it gave no support to the rebellion. But it blocked aid to the government for years. And the Republican Party gave active help to the opposition.
The most plausible charge against the Bush administration is that it looked away as Haiti's discontents came to the boil late last year. Only last week, when the Americans became alarmed at a potential exodus of refugees, did their diplomats put their weight behind a compromise that would have kept Mr Aristide in power in a coalition government with the opposition, pending fresh elections. That was the best option; Mr Bush acquiesced in its rejection by the opposition.
But the United States was hardly alone in refusing to prop up Mr Aristide. France and Canada took the same view. And countries that are prepared to risk their troops to keep the peace are surely entitled to set the conditions on which they will do so. Most important of all, though perhaps 80 Haitians were killed in the rebellion, Mr Bush can claim—so far—to have forestalled the bloodbath forecast by many.
Dealing with elected despots
Will the occupiers be successful this time in laying the basis for a more democratic and less poor Haiti? Already, there are worrying signs. They are supposed to be implementing a plan drawn up by Caribbean mediators. The chief justice was named as the interim president. Mr Aristide's prime minister remains in office. A council of “wise men”, to be drawn from both sides, is supposed to govern until elections can be held. After order is restored, the UN plans a “follow-on” force devoted to supporting constitutional rule.
Yet the suspicion remains that the United States is blessing a coup. Guy Philippe, the quick-witted rebel leader, was allowed to march into the capital, where he proclaimed himself head of a reconstituted army. The abolition of that repressive institution was one of Mr Aristide's achievements. What Haiti needs is a stronger and better police force. Mr Philippe, a former police chief, may deserve a place in that—provided there is no truth to allegations, which he denies, of drug trafficking. Some of his followers with death-squad pasts belong in jail.
Outsiders will be needed for several years if Haiti is to become a better place, though not necessarily in large numbers. Haitians themselves need to learn to work together. And just as much as aid, mobilising the resources of the Haitian diaspora is vital in fighting poverty.
The lasting question raised by the past month's events is how to deal with elected presidents who start to rule despotically. The world has fumbled this in Zimbabwe. The United States may well be faced with it again in Venezuela, if Mr Chávez quashes a recall referendum on his rule. There are no easy answers. But one lesson is not to allow such questions to become tainted by partisanship at home. The same rules should apply to elected despots of the right (such as Peru's Alberto Fujimori, accepted for too long by the United States as an ally) as to those of the left. Haiti has been ill-served by becoming the plaything of partisan politics in Washington. There should be no place for coups in the democratic Americas.

Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=2478647Haiti after Aristide Will America finish the job, this time?Mar 4th 2004 | PORT-AU-PRINCE From The Economist print editionWith Aristide gone, the Americans now have to face Haiti's triumphant rebels“NOW we're partying. Then we'll go back to work,” declared a democratic opposition leader as Jean-Bertrand Aristide flew off to the Central African Republic on February 29th at the start of his uncertain exile. The party did not last long: rebel action forced Haitians to face up to a future rosy with promises but little else.
When the Americans last intervened in Haiti, to put Mr Aristide back into the presidency in 1994, they had had the three years since his overthrow in which to construct a blueprint. In the event, the blueprint was more or less consigned, by events on the ground and by America's early withdrawal, to the dustbin. This time, policy is having to be invented, on the run.
The intent, at least, is good. James Foley, America's ambassador, promised Haitians that the international community would “fill the void” and that, this time, outsiders would not “walk away from Haiti before the job was completed.” He added, even more unconvincingly, that “the whole world is united to help Haiti.”
It seems sadly unlikely, with the extra twist that the world is led by a government bogged down in Iraq, with a beady eye on November's election, and divided over Haiti. As with Iraq, America's Defence Department and State Department do not always agree. On March 2nd Defence officials said that the 1,500-2,000 marines in their 90-day stay in Haiti would of course try to restore order, but would not, they stressed, act as the new cop on the beat.
For a few hours after Mr Aristide's departure, the transfer of power appeared to go smoothly under American and French tutelage. A new president, Boniface Alexandre, the respected head of the Supreme Court, was named. Mr Aristide's fiercely loyal prime minister, Yvon Neptune, agreed to stay on to help the process along. A policy for national reconciliation, based on the “action plan” brokered by the Caribbean Community (Caricom) and agreed to last month by Mr Aristide, involved the setting up of a commission which would select a council of notables—seven “wise men”—which, in its turn, would select a new prime minister.
But early on March 1st, before people could really take in what was happening, the National Resistance Front for the Liberation of Haiti, the rebel army occupying the north of the country and led by Guy Philippe (seen receiving tribute in the picture above), came rolling into the capital, Port-au-Prince. At the airport, a rebel caravan of pick-ups and SUVs swept past Colonel Dave Berger, the marine commander.
The colonel had been on the ground only a few hours, with his first contingent of 150 marines. As soon as they had secured the perimeter of the airport, he said, they would begin moving into the city “to secure key government installations”. But, following the Defence Department line, he stressed that he had no instructions for dealing with the rebels. “That's a Haitian problem,” he said. “We are not a police force.” Looting continued under the Americans' eyes, as did the rebels' progress.
Squeezing him out
For days before Mr Aristide's departure, American officials had been saying privately that there was no way the capital would be allowed to fall into rebel hands. Indeed, for a crucial 48 hours, the rebels had heeded America's appeal to stay put in Cap-Haïtien, allowing America and France time to put the squeeze on Mr Aristide. But, from the first rebel uprising on February 5th in Gonaïves, America had misread the determination and firepower of the rag-tag rebel army, headed by Mr Philippe, a one-time police chief.
Mr Aristide's exit was cleverly, if cynically, finessed. Although some critics are alleging that he was kidnapped by the Americans, and thrown on a plane, his removal was more like slow death by strangulation. Despite the pressure from American hawks to dispatch him post haste, Colin Powell, the secretary of state was concerned to avoid direct American complicity in a coup. He also had to take into account the Caribbean leaders who were calling for swift international military intervention to protect Mr Aristide and Haiti's democratic order.
American officials were reasonably confident that Mr Aristide could be outmanoevred. And, indeed, he was, in the end, the author of his own downfall. Last week, his dreaded enforcers, the street gangs of angry young men and boys known as chimères, began a campaign of terror in the streets of the capital. By the middle of the week, bodies of opposition activists were lying about, some killed by “execution”. Opposition businesses and radio stations were targeted for attacks.
But Mr Aristide's doom was sealed on February 27th when the chimères began intimidating repatriated boat people. If there was anything the Bush administration was not going to stand it was an interruption, especially in the months before the election, of its policy of sending home intercepted Haitian boat people.
That afternoon the American embassy demanded that the chimères be got off the streets. Mr Aristide appeared on television, telling his supporters to go home. Next morning all was still, seemingly providing damning proof that the chimères took their orders from Mr Aristide, and that he, in effect, was their commander.
At the weekend, Luis Moreno, the number two at the American embassy and a veteran Haiti hand, visited the president to tell him that the rebels were massing to attack the capital, and that America would not intervene to save him. If he valued his life, and those of his fellow citizens, it was time to go. In the early hours of February 29th Mr Aristide left his palace with Mr Moreno, handing him a short resignation letter, that declared his wish to avoid a bloodbath.
There has not been a bloodbath: fewer than 100 people have been killed since the start of the violence. But Mr Aristide's summary departure fuelled rumours of foul play, with many Haitians remaining sceptical of the official version of events.
Bad public relations. But perhaps America's bigger mistake was to allow Mr Aristide's untrammelled rule to last as long as it did. This has left a country that is wretchedly poor, riddled with corruption and awash in drugs. A sign of how out of touch Mr Aristide, a former priest, had become with the poor is the $350,000 in rotting, unusable $100 bills that looters found in a secret chamber under his house.
Haiti has long been a drugs transhipment point for Colombian cocaine traffickers. By the mid-1990s, the drugs trade was out of control, capitalising on Haiti's internal squabbles and the greed of the country's police chiefs, especially those who, like Mr Philippe, served in the port city of Cap-Haïtien. But drugs also infected the ruling Lavalas Family party, corrupting it to the core. The suspension of international financial aid starved Mr Aristide's government of cash, driving it ever further into the arms of the drug dealers.
As the international force builds its presence in Haiti to the proposed total of around 5,000, Mr Philippe's days could be numbered. On March 3rd, the marines began to patrol in the capital, and Mr Neptune declared a state of emergency. Mr Philippe said he would disarm his men. American officials make no secret of their distaste for his past record; they say he has no role to play in a future government. Their preferred candidate for prime minister is retired-General Herard Abraham, one of Haiti's few genuine military heroes, who has been living quietly in Miami. As commander of the armed forces, General Abraham helped end military rule in 1990, and played a major role in organising the country's 1990 democratic elections, which Mr Aristide won by a landslide.
Mr Philippe denies harbouring political ambitions. But he is calling for the army, disbanded in 1994, to be reinstated and has proclaimed himself to be Haiti's military chief. He claims that 90% of the (crumbling and corrupt) police force is behind him. The struggle for power in post-Aristide Haiti is just beginning.Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=2478624Franco-American relations Happiness is doing things togetherMar 4th 2004 | PARIS From The Economist print editionFrance feels it has pulled off a triumph “PERFECT Franco-American co-ordination,” chirped Dominique de Villepin, France's foreign minister, as his country's soldiers dropped into Haiti this week alongside American marines. It was a phrase that the French have not come close to uttering for over a year, since their differences with America over how to disarm Iraq burst open. Now, there is a sense of relief in Paris, not so much at the idea that the Americans have welcomed them back from the cold as at the thought that their way of doing things has prevailed—and in America's own backyard.
Ever since Jacques Chirac threatened to veto a second UN resolution on Iraq, and George Bush was urged by his national security adviser to “punish France” for its truculence, relations between the two countries have modulated between cool and glacial. In public, the French have been snubbed.
France's president has yet to hear whether Mr Bush will accept an invitation this summer to the 60th anniversary celebrations of the D-day landings in Normandy. In more concrete terms, the French have often found their voice ignored. When Mr de Villepin recently outlined a grand Middle East peace plan, for example, nobody noticed.
How pleasing for the French, therefore, that the Americans not only listened to but acted on Mr de Villepin's peace plan for Haiti. The French foreign minister had pressed for intervention, in the face of initial American scepticism. And how unprickly of the French to accept an American commander for their troops, albeit alongside many more American ones, on the island (but reporters noted that the first French units, unlike the American ones, had to hire a battered school bus to take them from the airport to the city). Moreover, the rush to secure UN approval for the military intervention handed the French exactly the sort of multilateral operation that they claim is their preferred model. Could this be the beginning of a more lasting rapprochement? It is not the only sign of change. A recent delegation of American congressmen, on a trip to mend relations, was received royally in Paris. And Mr Chirac has tried to stop going on about “multi-polarity”, an attempt to counter American power that irks the Bush camp.
Yet mutual suspicion remains. Last week, to French anger, the Americans slapped a trade ban on French foie gras. When mistrust lingers, it is hard for the French not to detect political retaliation. Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=2478631America's debate on Haiti Did he go or was he pushed?Mar 4th 2004 | WASHINGTON, DC From The Economist print editionHaiti is now a punch-ball in America's election campaign.“I WAS forced to leave. They came at night. There were too many...white American, white military.” With those words, spoken over a crackly telephone from the Central African Republic, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's ex-president, poured fuel on the dispute inside the United States about the Bush administration's role in the collapse of the Haitian regime.
More, almost, than any other country, Haiti depends on America. Among other acts of intervention (see article), the United States installed Mr Aristide as president in 1994, by sending troops to defeat a coup against him. The poorest country in the western hemisphere, Haiti has long relied on American aid. The administration could hardly avoid getting entangled in the president's ouster. But the bitterness caused by this entanglement was striking.
Maxine Waters, a Democratic congresswoman from California said the exiled president had told her he had been kidnapped. Another member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Charles Rangel, accused the administration of siding with “the coup people”. Both demanded a congressional investigation.
“Absolutely baseless, absurd,” replied Colin Powell, the secretary of state. The administration said Mr Aristide had volunteered to fly to safety. America's protection, one official claimed, not only saved his and his wife's lives, but prevented the capital, Port-au-Prince, from descending into an uncontrollable cycle of violence.
The administration insists that its decisions were right, not least because American troops might not have saved Mr Aristide anyway: it had tried to arrange a peace deal but the armed opposition had grown too strong for compromise. The French government also called upon Mr Aristide to step down for that reason.
Even more important, say American officials, it would have been wrong to have saved him. Mr Aristide, they argue, was deeply flawed. He had rigged elections in 2000. He condoned corruption and drug-running in Haiti (all of which the ex-president denies). He was turning to armed thugs to defend his regime. To have saved such a man, administration officials argue, would just have destabilised Haiti further. As it is, his resignation paves the way for a constitutional transfer of power and new elections.
Democrats do not quite contradict that. They concede Mr Aristide brought many of his troubles on himself. But they also blame George Bush. At a debate in New York on February 29th, John Kerry argued that the administration had in practice made a peaceful settlement impossible by giving the opposition a power of veto over its terms. The deal worked out by America, France, Canada and Caribbean countries had been accepted by Mr Aristide, but was rejected by the opposition. Without American pressure on the president's armed opponents, says Mr Kerry, the peace plan was bound to fail.
John Edwards, until this week Mr Kerry's chief rival in the Democrats' primary campaign, blamed the administration for a different reason. He argued it helped create conditions for chaos by ignoring or isolating Haiti. It continued a ban on direct aid begun by the Clinton administration. It held up $500m of loans by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank. It permitted peace negotiations under the auspices of the Organisation of American States, but put no diplomatic weight behind them. As Daniel Erikson of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington, puts it, the administration neither led, or followed, nor got out of the way.
The lessons of Mr Aristide's fall, and the debate about it in America, are depressing. Partisan differences—the debate, for instance, over whether Haiti's prime need was democracy or aid—have paralysed consistent policymaking. The result has been that Haiti got neither.
Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=2478638Haiti's history If at first...Mar 4th 2004 From The Economist print editionFirst time tragedy, second time tragedyWHEN, having rebuffed the British, French and Spanish armies, Haiti's freed slaves wrote their act of independence in 1804, their leader's secretary vowed to use “a white man's skull for an inkwell, his skin for parchment, blood for ink”. But the white men of Europe, and of America, have shaped Haiti's history from the arrival of Columbus to the exile of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
First there were reparations, embargoes and intrigues. Then in 1915, the white man—in the shape of American troops, who arrived as a butchered president was dragged through the streets—recolonised the country. Though ostensibly humanitarian, their mission's main motives were America's fear of German expansionism, and the protection of American property and interests.
The occupiers improved the infrastructure and tackled tropical disease. But their use of forced labour led to a revolt in which several thousand Haitians died. For all their talk about respecting Haitian sovereignty, the Americans imposed a constitution, installed pliant presidents and dissolved non-pliant legislatures. Their racism didn't help: the secretary of state of 1915 considered “the African race” to be “devoid of any capacity for political organisation”, with “an inherent tendency to revert to savagery”.
The Americans left in 1934; 12 years later there was another revolution—evidence of failure or of success, depending on your point of view. But the United States continued to meddle, propping up the lengthy dictatorship of the Duvalier family as a bulwark against Cuban communism; then enabling the exile of “Baby Doc” Duvalier in 1986.
With Haitian refugees washing up in Florida, American interest persisted after the threats of German imperialism and communism receded. In contrast to the welcome afforded Cubans, George Bush senior, like his son, ordered his coastguard to turn back the boat people who fled Haiti after the coup that dislodged Mr Aristide in 1991 (in which the CIA is thought to have been involved).
Then, in 1994, Bill Clinton sent in his forces to return Mr Aristide to power; they mostly left within two years. Perhaps their successors will heed the findings of a presidential commission of 1930. It criticised the Americans' “brusque attempt to plant democracy [in Haiti] by drill and harrow”, and their failure to train up Haitians for government or understand their problems.
Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
------------J.P. SlavinNew York------------