21705: Esser: What now can Haiti count on? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

Indianapolis Star
http://www.indystar.com/

May 5, 2004

Opinion

What now can Haiti count on?
by Dan Carpenter

Still trying to understand Haiti, the island where democracy got lost
while we were trying to dig it out of the rubble of Iraq? Go by the
numbers.

Specifically, 22 and 21.

The former is remembered -- bitterly by the average Haitian, fondly
by a potent few -- as Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier's favorite lucky
number, displayed prominently by him and his Tontons Macoutes, the
terror squads that kept the peasants in line and the correct pockets
lined under the old family dictatorship.

The Duvaliers and Macoutes were history by the 1991 election of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but other exploiters and thugs remained. They
have returned twice to bring down the man raised to power by Haiti's
impoverished majority, and now it looks as if they may be in charge
for a good while.

How did the freedom-loving West allow this to happen? Number 21 gives
part of the answer.

As Paul Farmer, the noted American missionary to Haiti, points out in
a recent article in the London Review of Books, Aristide wasn't
interested in sucking up to the United States and France in return
for personal luxury, as the Duvaliers had been. Instead, he took the
old colonial powers to task for Haiti's systemic poverty.

A delicious example: Noting that the French had crippled the
fledgling rebel nation nearly two centuries ago by extorting, at
gunpoint, an indemnity of 150 million francs for loss of its slave
property, Aristide did some math and informed contemporary France it
now owes Haiti $21 billion and change -- and counting.

Laughable? France thought so, and joined with the U.S., which funded
Aristide's anti-democratic opposition, in sabotaging his rule and
frustrating Caribbean nations that want the circumstances of the coup
investigated.

Like 22 before it, $21 billion is a phantom symbol to supercilious
outsiders but a real and powerful totem to Haiti's poor. The monetary
sum is ludicrously large alongside Haiti's governmental budget --
$300 million a year for 8 million people, compared to $11 billion
plus for Indiana's 6 million -- yet it is ludicrously small against
the Iraq boondoggle. It is an exact measure of one thing: the
brashness and nationalistic fervor of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He also
demanded substantial taxes and decent wages from foreign factories,
accustomed to the cheapest outsourcing environment in the hemisphere.
He also welcomed Cuban doctors, who didn't speak well of capitalism
but who vaccinated children. He was obviously a dangerous man, and
the U.S., ever on the alert for terrorist threats, moved to block
millions in international loans that would have sailed into the
bloody hands of Papa Doc in the good old days.

Amy Wilentz, perhaps the best informed of American journalists
regarding Haiti, has found plenty to criticize about Aristide. But
like Farmer, she finds his sordid fate to be a lost opportunity for
the moneyed democracies to make good on a two-century-old debt and
finally help Haiti make it on its own.

"In 1991, when Aristide was inaugurated, it seemed that Haiti had
come through its darkest days and that a new phase was beginning,"
she writes in the Nation. "That was incorrect. Today, the army is to
be reinstated, the elite holds the reins of power and a
Franco-American occupation patrols the streets. The Haitian newsreel
is being played in reverse."

And the song's playing on. Such a catchy old number, and so well
traveled, you'd think it would stick in our heads.

Carpenter is Star op-ed columnist. Contact him at (317) 444-6172 or
via e-mail at dan.carpenter@indystar.com .
.