20195: Esser: Democracy appears the loser in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

National Catholic Reporter
http://NCRONLINE.ORG

Issue Date:  March 12, 2004

Democracy appears the loser in Haiti
By JEFF GUNTZEL

Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide -- swamped in controversy
and political paralysis since his re-election in 2000 -- was forced
into exile last week in what some are calling Haiti’s liberation and
others, a tragedy.

In 200 years of independence, the people of Haiti have voted into
their presidential palace exactly two men, on three occasions. Twice
they chose the former priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and once his
prime minister. The rest came to power by force. In Haiti, coup
d’états -- often bloody -- seem as much a political certainty as
presidential elections in the United States.

Haitians have just seen their country’s 33rd coup. At least that’s
the word Aristide is using from exile in Africa. He blames the armed
rebels who spent most of February fighting their way to
Port-Au-Prince, demanding his resignation. He blames his political
opposition that has forced a political freeze since his inauguration.

And he blames the United States.

His friends, colleagues and supporters concur. Others who have known
him for a long time, however, say he became enamored of power and
began acting like the dictators he once worked to overthrow.

Reconciling the many takes on Aristide may be a puzzle forever
unsolved. And it is a distraction from the big question to emerge
from events in Haiti: Why did the United States support -- covertly
or overtly, implicitly or explicitly -- the forced resignation of a
democratically elected leader?

There is, of course, speculation. The United States was sending a
message to other populist leaders in the region, goes one theory. And
another: The United States saw an opportunity to rid itself of a man
no American president ever really liked with hopes of exchanging him
for somebody more like the man U.S. officials wanted him to be for
more than a decade.

“The United States could have stopped this at any time,” said human
rights lawyer Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center
for Constitutional Rights.

The armed rebels’ first success in their push towards Port-Au-Prince
was the taking of the seaside city of Goinaves. “All the Bush
administration had to do,” Ratner said, “was say to the opposition,
‘We’re going to land 100 Marines in Goinaves’ -- and that’s the ball
game. We all know that.”

Instead, administration officials offered statement after statement
that to some seem hollow in the face of recent events.

Decision not to defend Aristide

Just days into the rebel push, Secretary of State Colin Powell told
reporters, “President Aristide was elected by the Haitian people and
his departure from the scene as president can only be by democratic,
constitutional means. And it would not be appropriate … to force him
from office against his will.”

Aristide’s will is a contentious subject. Haitians woke up Feb. 29 to
news that their president had resigned and fled the country under
cover of darkness. The next day, Aristide claimed the event had been
a U.S.-led “kidnapping.”

Colin Powell called Aristide’s assertions “absurd.”

Still, the United States made a clear decision not to defend Aristide
-- militarily or otherwise. And that is what frustrates many
observers.

“The entire world should be condemning U.S. behavior in allowing this
removal of somebody who was a democratically elected leader,” said
Melinda Miles of the Quixote Center, a U.S.-based Catholic justice
and peace organization that has been working in Haiti for more than a
decade.

Just back from Haiti, where she experienced the undoing of Aristide’s
presidency from a rural area in the south, Miles is not nostalgic
about the fallen leader.

She acknowledges “inadequacies of Aristide’s rule,” placing at the
top of the list Aristide’s reliance on patronage -- a tradition
tracing back to the days of dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier.
But she believes Aristide tried in his final embattled months to
compromise, agreeing to a power-sharing plan that his opposition
rejected outright.

Still, she is cautious. “I think we have yet to see the true story on
what steps Aristide and the government had taken in the last few
months to try to retain power. I’m afraid some of those stories will
be damning.”

It is talk of a corrupted Aristide that dominates popular discourse.
But some are still protective of the man who was once considered by
many a savior.

Ratner has known Aristide and his wife, Mildred -- a Haitian-American
lawyer -- for years.

“It would be so unlike his character to be involved in what I read in
the papers,” Ratner said. “Drug dealing? No way in the world. And it
would be hard for me to believe that he would actually send people
out to kill people.

“We’re not talking about a blood-thirsty dictator here,” Ratner said.
“We’re talking about a guy who tried to rule in a very difficult
situation. Amazing contending forces. And the U.S. like a millstone
around his neck.”

On the millstone, Miles agrees. “The U.S. had a policy of withholding
all international assistance from the government of Haiti,” Miles
said, explaining that some funds were funneled through
nongovernmental organizations and nonprofits working inside Haiti.

International aid was frozen after Aristide’s Lavalas party won
overwhelmingly in what are considered flawed elections, though even
detractors acknowledge the party would have seen sweeping victories
even without the election irregularities.

“We’ve condemned that embargo because only the government has the
national reach to improve health infrastructure or to deliver potable
water to people.” Miles said. “And the loans that have been withheld
include loans for health and potable water.”

Meanwhile, the United States, through the International Republican
Institute, a federally funded Washing-ton D.C.-based nonprofit
organization, was empowering Aristide’s political opposition with
economic and political support. It is a project the institute calls
“party building.”

Weighing the criticisms against the obstacles he faced, some say it
is impossible to know what kind of leader Aristide might have been.
“It’s like climbing a mountain where you’re being pushed down all the
time,” said Ratner.

Miles agrees. “The government did build some schools, some public
housing, they finished some roads. But we’ll never really know if
they would have fulfilled the social platform that they said they
would fulfill.”

James Morrell, executive director of the Haiti Democracy Project and
one-time adviser to Aristide, does not worry about the leader he
might have been.

“He just degraded into your type A tyrant,” Morrell said.

To the man who once helped Aristide navigate his way through the
political channels that would ultimately return him to power in 1994,
Aristide is more a small-time Mugabe than he is a closeted Mandela.

“He had to have all the power,” Morrell said. “He was so insecure and
egotistical that he had to have it all.”

What comes next?

The immediately pressing issue for Haitians is what comes next.

Rebel leader Guy Philippe, who declared himself Haiti’s new “military
chief” after a victory parade through the capital, is to many a ghost
from Haiti’s dark past. He wants an army again, and he wants power
over it.

Often appearing at his side, urging Haitians to forget the past and
look toward the future, is former army death squad leader Louis Jodel
Chamblain. Also a leader of the recent armed revolt, Chamblain was
sentenced in absentia in 1993 to life in prison for mass murder.

Demobilized by Aristide in 1995, the army was a symbol of repression
for many in the country. “Everybody in Haiti knows what the military
means,” said Miles. “It wasn’t so long ago -- the early ’90s -- that
people were being killed every day by the army.

“The political opposition is a loosely united group and the only
thing that united them was their hatred for Aristide,” she continued.
“So now that he’s gone, what will they do? Will they splinter because
they all want power?”

Morrell, meanwhile, praises the men with guns who accomplished in
three weeks what the political opposition tried to accomplish for
three years, and he sees the two unsteady forces working together.

“What you want to do,” he said, “is support the democratic actors so
that they can subsume the armed fellows in a larger consensus.”

And back it up with an international force: On this Miles and Morrell
agree. “What Haiti needs most,” Miles said, “is the troops that are
there to make sure that Haiti can hold free and fair elections.”

Still, the questions linger: What are the lessons learned here? Does
a country trying to establish legitimate democracy benefit from the
forced resignation of a president the people voted in?

No, says Brian Concannon, an American human rights lawyer who has
worked for the Haitian government’s International Lawyers Office for
nearly a decade.

“I think it’s fair that there are criticisms [of Aristide], just like
there are criticisms of George W. Bush,” Concannon said. “I think it
is unfair to use those criticisms as justification for violent regime
change.

“If you don’t like the current government, you vote it out. If George
Bush were to resign today, I would be happy. But I certainly would do
what I could to oppose anybody kicking him out unconstitutionally,”
he added.

“The right thing is to support democracy.”

Jeff Guntzel is a contributing writer who lives in Indianapolis.
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