20279: Durban: WashPost Arias on Abolishing Armies (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Lance Durban <lpdurban@yahoo.com>

>From Washington Post of 3/12/04:

                Only the Marching Band
                            By Oscar Arias

   "I am the chief, the military chief. The country is in my
hands."

   Nothing could more clearly prove why Haiti does not need an
army than the boasting of rebel leader Guy  Philippe last week
in Port-au-Prince. The Haitian army was abolished nine years ago
during a period of democratic transition, precisely to prevent
the country from falling back into the hands of military men.
Now that the U.S. Marines have made the commendable decision to
disarm rebel and pro-Aristide militants alike, the Haitian
people desperately need the international community to ensure
that they finish the job.

   Like so many countries in the Third World, Haiti has suffered
not only from a lack of national security in the sense of
borders and territorial integrity but also from an ongoing
crisis of human security, the right of each person to live in
peace and with the guarantee of basic rights such as food,
health care, education and citizenship. The army, long an
instrument of suppressive authoritarian regimes, has
historically deprived Haitians of these fundamental rights.

   Isolated and destitute, Haitians have been terrorized by
military violence and its accompanying legacy of poverty. In the
late 1980s, the army consumed  about 40 percent of the national
budget, even as hunger and AIDS wracked the population. Haiti
had one soldier for every 1,000 citizens, and 1.5 doctors for
every 10,000.

   The 1991 coup against Haiti's first democratically elected
president was definitive proof of the army's predatory role.
Even though the 1994 agreement returning
Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office called for a reduction of the
army from 7,500 to 1,500 troops, a force that size was still a
clear threat to democratic governance. In 1995 I visited Haiti
to discuss with President Aristide the benefits of doing away
with the army entirely. He readily agreed that the army was a
problem, but he doubted he would have the political mandate to
tackle it.

   Since Aristide said that he could not abolish the army
without the support of the Haitian people, the Arias Foundation
for Peace and Human Progress commissioned an independent polling
firm to gauge popular support for the idea. The results
were stunning: 62 percent of Haitians were strongly in favor of
abolition and only 12 percent were against.

   These figures were key in convincing Aristide that
demilitarization was an idea whose time had come. He cut the
army's funding and set in motion a legislative process to have
the abolition of the army enshrined in Haiti's constitution. In
1996, when I visited Haiti for the inauguration of presidential
successor  Rene Preval, Aristide happily noted that the only
members of the army still on the government payroll were 20
marching band musicians.

   After the troops were disbanded, the next steps to
consolidate the rule of law were clear: The population needed to
be disarmed. Death-squad leaders and army generals had to be
brought to justice, and the police force required restructuring
and professional training to take on the duties of civil
defense. The abolition of the army was thus designed to
complement larger nation-building initiatives developed in
conjunction with the United Nations, the Organization of
American States and the U.S. government.

   But after a brief period of support following the American
occupation in 1994, the international community essentially left
Haiti to work out its problems alone.  It is no secret that
conservative Republicans were more concerned with facilitating
Aristide's exit from power than  with reinforcing the fragile
institutions of Haitian democracy. As a result, funding was
revoked just as Haiti was making the pivotal transition to
self-rule. The aid squeeze following the contested 2000
elections caused an implosion of the Haitian economy and a
consequent crisis of governance.

   Armed opposition groups of former soldiers reconstituted
themselves both in Haiti and in the neighboring Dominican
Republic. Aristide's response to his predicament was
disappointing, if not predictable. With his power threatened, he

encouraged the formation of pro-government gangs, or chiméres.
The chiméres also attacked students and peaceful demonstrators,
a chilling echo of the army's former role.

   But it would be wrong to interpret Haiti's current crisis as
proof that the original decision to demilitarize was a mistake.
The abolition of the army makes as much sense today as it did in
1995. The Haitian people still need their government
to spend its precious few resources on fighting poverty, not
buying arms. They need a professional, depoliticized police
force to maintain order, not an army that attacks its own people
with impunity. They need a say in their country's destiny, not
subjugation to the rule of men with guns.

   Haiti still has the potential to overcome the tragic legacy
of militarism, as has been proven in many cases elsewhere in the
Americas. In most of the region, the past 20 years have  brought
increased civilian control over what were once autonomous
militaries. The entire trade area of Mercosur is comprised of
former dictatorships -- Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and
Paraguay -- that today share a common agenda of development and
democratization. And for those who would argue that total
demilitarization is unrealistic, for the past 56 years, Costa
Rica has proven that a country without an army is eminently
possible in the modern world.

   What all these relatively peaceful and politically stable
countries share are open relationships of trade and
communication with their neighbors, which reinforce democratic
governance and discourage military meddling. No one president
can reduce military autonomy and disarm warring factions on his
own. In the case of Haiti, not only was the struggling democracy
cut off from outside aid but an armed insurrection of former
military and death-squad leaders was in the end endorsed by the
U.S. and French governments.

   Were the international community now to stand by as the
rebels reinstated the army, it would surely destroy the seeds of
peace and self-rule that have been planted with great sacrifice
by the Haitian people.
                      ***************

 The writer, a former president of Costa Rica, is the 1987 Nobel
Peace laureate.