20234: Slavin: Chamberlain Writes in LATimes 022704 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: JPS390@aol.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chamberlain27feb27,1,4264786.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

COMMENTARY

Haiti Bleeds on an Altar of Savior Politics

By Greg Chamberlain

 Greg Chamberlain has reported on Haiti and the Caribbean since 1970 and
is the former Caribbean specialist for the British daily the Guardian.

February 27, 2004

 The deepening crisis in Haiti — Latin America's own "failed state" — is
 rich in the symbolism, drama and passions of its violent birth as the
 world's first independent black republic.
 A tiny, studious-looking Catholic priest, the color of the slave
 underclass, who speaks in riddles and rhymes about peace and justice,
 confronts a light-skinned aristocracy that presides over an economy
 exporting mostly drug money and other ill-gotten gains to foreign bank
 accounts and over a society whose members it has kept in dire poverty.

 Not so very different from the heroic situation that sparked the
 rebellion against the French colonial masters 200 years ago. Except that
 this former beacon of liberation in the Caribbean and beyond, once the
 world's richest colony, is today destitute and a painful embarrassment to
 its neighbors in a region that otherwise scores at the top in most
 developing-world human and economic indicators.

 Exhausted by decades of political disaster (some of it caused by
 outsiders, but mostly not), Haitians elected Father Jean-Bertrand
 Aristide as president in 1990, only a few months after he had denounced
 elections as a trick of "the bourgeoisie" (the code name for the
 aristocracy). They hoped he would break the system of rich versus poor
 and Haiti's shocking version of apartheid. Fourteen years later, he has
 clearly joined that system, grown suspiciously wealthy, bought himself a
 thuggish militia of desperate slum youths and given a free hand to the
 shameless pillage of the state, all tragically in the "best" Haitian
 tradition.

Did he jump into this, as his enemies say, or was he pushed, unable to
 stand up to the Haitian juggernaut of kleptocracy and compulsive
 violence? He seems to have been unable to resist either personal
 temptation or the orders of powerful drug barons.

 The trouble didn't start, as is often claimed, with slightly fiddled
 elections in 2000 that Aristide would have won anyway. It started before
 that, with unpunished killings of opponents, the takeover of the police
 by his henchmen, the looting of public funds — turning thousands of
 idealistic supporters against him and giving a green light to the lawless
 youths now manning the barricades in the capital, Port-au-Prince, as the
 U.S. government struggles for a solution tailored to its own election
 year rather than the needs of Haiti. Yet Aristide's opponents promise
 little better. The mulatto elite, whose visceral hatred of him is rooted
 in their centuries-old terror of the unwashed masses storming the
 plantation great houses (read today's luxury mansions), are glad to have
 the disillusioned underclass in the streets on their behalf, so as to
 soften their upper-class image.

 But they stand for nothing but their own privilege. Haiti's intolerant
 political culture means that neither they nor their darker-skinned allies
 have a program beyond seizing control of the state in time-honored
 fashion, a slight variation on Aristide's brand of political thuggery.
 They are hopelessly divided, and their "political parties" with
 grandiloquent names exist mostly on paper.

 The professed democrats among them stand little chance and are likely to
 be devoured by the system, as Aristide was. The armed rebels in the
 north, co-led by a former death-squad chieftain, are the face of what
 will have to be accommodated if Aristide leaves. The army he abolished is
 likely to be revived to once more block real change on the whispered
 instructions of the elite.

 Haitians, meanwhile, worship at the Church of the Perpetual Conspiracy.
 Anyone's fault but Haiti's … the imagined nonstop plotting by the United
 States to seize the country's negligible economic resources and crush a
 supposed revolutionary example to other countries. The admittedly
 overkill suspension of foreign aid as punishment for election fraud is
 held up by Aristide as a handy mask for his own incompetence.

 The way forward, and the priority for any international assistance, must
 be to build institutions to wean Haiti away from "savior politics":
 strictly supervised, properly coordinated economic aid, an effective
 parliament, independent courts whose judges are not forced to flee
 abroad, an education system wherein the 75% of people who cannot read can
 be turned into the 75% who can in nearby Jamaica.

 Haitians are as intelligent, creative and energetic as any other group of
 human beings. They need major help to escape the bad political and
 cultural habits that have held Haiti back — habits and phases that all
 countries pass through in their history. But their political class needs
 to take responsibility for their ruinous behavior and to close the
 yawning gap between what is known as "the Republic of Port-au-Prince" and
 the medieval conditions in the countryside where most people are
 condemned to live.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

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J.P. Slavin
New York
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