21936: Esser: OPTION ZERO IN HAITI - Part I (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

New Left Review 27, May-June 2004
http://www.newleftreview.net

for the article including links: www.newleftreview.net/NLR26102.shtml
Download as pdf: www.newleftreview.net/PDFarticles/NLR26102.pdf

[See Part III for Footnotes ]


A very multilateral coup. Franco-American harmony and unanimous
blessings from the Security Council for the overthrow of a
constitutional government and crushing of popular hope, in the
Western hemisphere’s poorest nation-state.

PETER HALLWARD

OPTION ZERO IN HAITI

As his advisors ponder the ever more troubling consequences of regime
change in Iraq, Bush is entitled to take some comfort from the far
more successful operation just completed in Haiti. [1] No brusque
pre-emptive strikes, domestic carping or splintering coalitions have
marred the scene; objections from caricom and the African Union have
carried no threats of reprisal. In overthrowing the constitutionally
elected government of Jean Bertrand Aristide, Washington could hardly
have provided a more exemplary show of multilateral courtesy. Allies
were consulted, the un Security Council’s blessing sought and
immediately received. The signal sent to Chávez, Castro and other
hemispheric opponents was unambiguous—yet it was not a bullying Uncle
Sam but France that made the first call for international
intervention in Haiti’s domestic affairs.

In Paris, too, there was much satisfaction at the sophisticated fit
between the humanitarian duty of a civilized nation and the need
(without losing face) to placate Washington for last year’s
disobedience over Iraq. The us might well fear this ‘Liberia at their
gates’, as Villepin’s Independent Commission report put it—but, wary
of domestic reaction among their own black population in an election
year, hesitate to act. [2] The Quai d’Orsay’s offer of diplomatic
protection would guarantee not only safe entry but painless
withdrawal, as the proposed un Stabilization Force, took up the
burden three months later. [3] London would be suavely usurped of its
chief attack-dog role. Chirac and Villepin had the virtually
unanimous backing of the French media, from Le Figaro to Le Monde and
L’Humanité, for military intervention in Haiti. Among the most
feverish voices has been that of Libération, which held President
Aristide—a ‘defrocked priest turned tyrant millionaire’, ‘the Père
Ubu of the Caribbean’—personally responsible for the ‘risk of
humanitarian catastrophe’ that was claimed to justify the invasion.
[4]

On 25 February Villepin issued a formal call for Aristide’s
resignation. Two days later, France, the us and Canada announced the
dispatch of troops to Port-au-Prince. In the early hours of Sunday,
February 29 the Haitian president was flown out of his country at
gunpoint. Later that same day the un Security Council suspended its
normal 24-hour pre-vote consultation period to push through an
emergency resolution mandating the us Marines, French Foreign Legion
and Canadian forces already converging on the Haitian capital as the
advance guard of a multinational un force. In the face of such
international backing, the Congressional Black Caucus confined itself
to mild rebuke. Libération gloated at the dissolution of ‘the
pathetic carnival over which Aristide had proclaimed himself king’.
For the New York Times the invasion was a fine example of how allies
can ‘find common ground and play to their strengths’. All that
remained was for Bush to call and thank Chirac, expressing his
delight at ‘the excellent French–American cooperation’. [5]

The Western media had prepared the way for another ‘humanitarian
intervention’ according to the now familiar formula. Confronted by
repeated allegations of corruption, patronage, drugs, human rights
abuses, autocracy, etc., the casual consumer of mainstream commentary
was encouraged to believe that what was at stake had nothing to do
with a protracted battle between the poor majority and a tiny elite
but was instead just a convoluted free-for-all in which each side was
equally at fault. The French press in particular tended to paint a
lurid portrait of ‘African’ levels of squalor and superstition, to
serve both as a warning to France’s remaining dependencies in the
Caribbean and as a challenge that might test, once again, the
‘civilizing mission’ of the international community. As a former
colonizer and slave power, France would be wrong to ‘turn its back’,
argued the chief reporter of Villepin’s investigative commission on
Franco-Haitian relations. The 2004 bicentenary of Haitian
independence offered the chance for a mature coming to terms with the
past, through which France might ‘shed the weight which servitude
imposes on the masters’, and negotiate a new relationship. [6]

Rather than a political struggle, rather than a battle of principles
and priorities, the fight for Haiti became just another instance of
the petty corruption and mass victimization that is supposed to
characterize public life beyond the heavily guarded gates of Western
democracy. Rather than conditioned by radical class polarization or
the mechanics of systematic exploitation, the overthrow of Aristide
has most often figured as yet another demonstration of perhaps the
most consistent theme of Western commentary on the island: that poor
black people remain incapable of governing themselves.

Breaking the chain

The structural basis of Haiti’s crippling poverty is a direct legacy
of slavery and its aftermath. The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick had
formalized French occupation of the western third of the Spanish
possession, the island of Hispaniola, under the name of
Saint-Domingue. Over the following century, the colony grew to be the
most profitable in the world; by the 1780s, it was a bigger source of
income for its masters than the whole of Britain’s thirteen North
American colonies combined. No single source of revenue made so large
a contribution to the growing prosperity of the French commercial
bourgeoisie, and to the wealth of cities like Bordeaux, Nantes and
Marseille. The slaves who produced these profits rose up in revolt in
1791. Combined British, Spanish and French efforts to crush the
rebellion fuelled a war that lasted thirteen years and ended in
unequivocal imperial defeat. Both Pitt and Napoleon lost some 50,000
troops in the effort to restore slavery and the status quo.

By late 1803, to the universal astonishment of contemporary
observers, the armies led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines had
broken the chain of colonial slavery at ‘what had been, in 1789, its
strongest link’. [7] Renamed Haiti, the new country celebrated its
independence in January 1804. I have argued elsewhere that there have
been few other events in modern history whose implications were more
threatening to the dominant order: the mere existence of an
independent Haiti was a reproach to the slave-trading nations of
Europe, a dangerous example to the slave-owning us, and an
inspiration for successive African and Latin American liberation
movements. [8] Much of Haiti’s subsequent history has been shaped by
efforts, both internal and external, to stifle the consequences of
this event and to preserve the essential legacy of slavery and
colonialism—that spectacularly unjust distribution of labour, wealth
and power which has characterized the whole of the island’s
post-Columbian history.

The main priority of the slaves who won their independence in 1804
was to block a return to the plantation economy by retaining some
direct control over their own livelihood and land. Unlike most other
Latin American and Caribbean countries, the development of
export-oriented latifundia was limited by the widespread survival of
small peasant proprietorship, and today 93 per cent of Haitian
peasants still have at least some access to their own land. [9] The
reduction in size of an average farm to just two acres, however,
combined with falling agricultural prices, drastic soil erosion and a
chronic lack of investment, ensures that most of these peasants
retain their independence at the cost of an effectively permanent
destitution.

Extension of this destitution to the country as a whole was
guaranteed by the isolation of its ruined economy in the decades
following independence. Restoration France only re-established the
trade and diplomatic relations essential to the new country’s
survival after Haiti agreed, in 1825, to pay its old colonial master
a ‘compensation’ of some 150 million francs for the loss of its
slaves—an amount roughly equal to the French annual budget at the
time, or around ten years’ worth of total revenue in Haiti—and to
grant punishing commercial discounts. With its economy still
shattered by the colonial wars, Haiti could only begin paying this
debt by borrowing, at extortionate rates of interest, 24 million
francs from private French banks. Though the French demand was
eventually cut from 150 to 90 million francs, by the end of the
nineteenth century Haiti’s payments to France consumed around 80 per
cent of the national budget; France received the last instalment in
1947. Haitians have thus had to pay their original oppressors three
times over—through the slaves’ initial labour, through compensation
for the French loss of this labour, and then in interest on the
payment of this compensation. No other single factor played so
important a role in establishing Haiti as a systematically indebted
country, the condition which in turn ‘justified’ a long and
debilitating series of appropriations-by-gunboat.

The most consequential of these foreign interventions was launched by
Woodrow Wilson in 1915, a counterpart to his punitive assaults on the
Mexican Revolution. The us occupation lasted for nearly twenty years,
and extended between 1916 and 1924 into a parallel incursion into the
Dominican Republic next door. The American military regime proceeded
to institute an early version of a structural adjustment programme:
they abolished the clause in the constitution that had barred
foreigners from owning property in Haiti, took over the National
Bank, reorganized the economy to ensure more ‘reliable’ payments of
foreign debt, expropriated land to create their own plantations, and
trained a brutal military force whose only victories would be against
the Haitian people. Rebellions—that of Charlemagne Peralte in the
north during the early years of the occupation, or the strike wave of
1929—were savagely repressed. By the time they pulled out in 1934, us
troops had broken the back of the initial peasant resistance to this
socio-economic engineering, killing between 5,000 and 15,000 people
in the process.

The army the us had constructed became the dominant power after the
Marines departed, keeping both the population and politicians in
check—the generals often taking turns as president themselves. It was
as a counter to this force that the bespectacled ex-doctor François
Duvalier organized his own murderous militia, the Tonton Macoutes,
after winning the 1957 presidential election that followed the
overthrow of the previous military regime. For the next fourteen
years, as ‘Papa Doc’ declared himself the divine incarnation of the
Haitian nation, the 10,000-strong Macoutes were used to terrorize any
opponents to his rule. Initially wary of his vaudouiste nationalism,
the us soon embraced Duvalier’s staunchly anti-communist regime. When
François Duvalier died in 1971, his son Jean-François, ‘Baby Doc’,
was proclaimed President for Life and enjoyed still more enthusiastic
us support. Foreign aid and elite corruption soared, but for the mass
of Haitians pauperization and political oppression continued
undiminished.

The gathering flood

By the mid-80s, a new generation was coming of age in the sprawling
slums of Port-au-Prince, open to the appeal of liberation theology in
the coded kreyòl sermons of radical priests—chief among them,
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Born in 1953, Aristide grew up outside the
confines of Haiti’s traditional political class. A talented linguist,
Aristide flourished at the Salesian seminary, and read psychology and
philosophy at the State University in the 70s, along with the works
of Leonardo Boff and other liberation theologians. He began
broadcasting on the local Catholic radio stations that sprang up in
the late 70s, before being dispatched by his order to study
archaeology in the Middle East in 1979, and then to Montreal for some
(unsuccessful) ‘theological reprogramming’. [10]

By 1985 he was back preaching in Haiti, as the popular upswell
against Baby Doc’s bloated regime grew into a mass wave of protests.
Aristide’s Easter sermon that year—‘The path of those Haitians who
reject the regime is the path of righteousness and love’—was recorded
on dozens of cassette players, and heard all over the country. His
cry, ‘Va-t’en, Satan!’ was taken up by the mass movement which, in
February 1986, chased Baby Doc off to exile in France, just weeks
before Marcos, under similar pressure, was sent packing from the
Philippines. The murderous tactics of the junta that followed, under
General Namphy, could not demobilize the flood—lavalas, in kreyòl—of
political groups, trade unions, mass organizations, peasant
associations and ‘little church’ community groups, the ti legliz.
Aristide was now preaching full-time at the church of St Jean Bosco,
on the edge of the Port-au-Prince slumtown of La Saline. The
elections scheduled for November 1987 were cancelled by the army on
polling day, but not before it had engineered the murder of dozens of
voters as they waited to cast their ballots. In September 1988
Macoutes stormed Aristide’s crowded church, killed members of the
congregation and destroyed the building; Aristide was snatched to
safety by his supporters. In the protests that followed,
rank-and-file troops rose against their officers, driving Namphy out,
before a counter-coup under General Avril threw the leading ti
soldats into jail. The autumn of 1989 brought more mass strikes and
mobilizations against Avril’s regime, a further bloody crackdown and
renewed protests. In March 1990, he too was driven from power.

First Lavalas victory

In December 1990, Aristide stood as the presidential candidate of the
Front National pour le Changement et la Démocratie, the loose
coalition of popular organizations formed to contest Haiti’s first
free elections. Aristide swept to an unexpected victory in the first
round, with 67 per cent of the vote (the us favourite, World Bank
economist and former Duvalier minister Marc Bazin, won only 14 per
cent). The Haitian elite lost no time in trying to destabilize him.
The first coup attempt came within a month of his election, and was
blocked by a massive counter-mobilization. In office, Aristide’s room
for manoeuvre was limited by the fncd’s minority in the legislature,
the ramshackle state and judicial apparatus and the continuing
depredations of the Macoutes, checked only by the threat of popular
resistance from the slums. Nor did Aristide’s gifts as a mass leader
translate easily into parliamentary coalition-building or
manipulation of the levers of state. Once in power, Aristide moved
cautiously, while continuing to speak of a radical redistribution of
wealth. He won the support of international lenders by balancing the
budget and trimming the corruption-ridden bureaucracy. Otherwise he
restricted himself to mild agrarian and educational reforms and the
appointment of a presidential commission to investigate the
extra-judicial killings of the previous five years.

Even these moderate steps were too much for the elite to tolerate. In
September 1991, just seven months after his inauguration, the army
seized power again, installing a new junta under General Cédras. Over
the next three years the military instituted a reign of terror in an
attempt to dismantle the Lavalas networks in the slums; around 5,000
Lavalas supporters were killed. Churches and community organizations
were invaded, preachers and leaders were murdered. In September 1993
thugs led by cia-trained Louis Jodel Chamblain assassinated democracy
activist and key Aristide ally, Antoine Izméry. In April 1994,
paramilitaries under the leadership of Jean Tatoune, another cia
product, slaughtered scores of civilians in what became known as the
Raboteau massacre in the town of Gonaïves.

At the same time, the (exemption-ridden) economic embargo imposed
against the Cédras regime led to widespread malnutrition. Waves of
emigrants tried to flee to the us. Aristide, exiled in Washington,
tried to marshal diplomatic support. Hostile to Aristide’s agenda and
smarting from the recent Iran–Contra affair, the first President Bush
chose to turn a blind eye. Clinton, confident that ‘the mission is
achievable, and limited’, was more amenable. Military success in
Haiti would help repair the damage done in Somalia, and Aristide’s
return would stem the flood of refugees. us conditions, however, were
exorbitant. Aristide had to agree to an amnesty for the coup-makers,
in effect pardoning the murder of thousands of his supporters. He had
to accept that his term as Haitian president would end in 1995, as if
he had served it in full. He had to share power with the opponents
that he had defeated so convincingly in 1990, and to adopt most of
their highly conservative policies; in particular, he was required to
implement a drastic imf structural adjustment programme.

Aristide was perfectly aware, of course, of the political cost of
structural adjustment; his most recent book on the oppressive
consequences of globalization is broadly consistent with his speeches
of the late 1980s. [11] The question that began to divide the Lavalas
movement in the mid-1990s was simply, what kind of resistance to us
and imf objectives was feasible? Even someone as critical of
Aristide’s ‘dictatorial turn’ as Christophe Wargny believed that ‘no
Haitian government can survive without American support’. [12] As un
envoy Lakhdar Brahimi—currently hard at work in Baghdad—candidly
explained on Haitian radio in 1996, there was never any question that
either the us or the un would tolerate even limited attempts to
dilute the elite’s monopoly of economic power. [13] Under the
circumstances, Aristide’s new government felt it had little room for
manoeuvre. And though he won 87 per cent of the vote in the 1995
presidential elections, albeit on a lowered turnout, Aristide’s
successor René Préval found himself in a still more difficult
position.

The attempts of Préval’s prime minister, Rosny Smarth, to legislate
the unpopular imf programme would permanently fracture the Lavalas
coalition, both inside parliament and in the country as a whole. The
politicians most in line with Washington’s priorities, and most
critical of what they condemned as Aristide’s top-down style, banded
together under his rival Gérard Pierre-Charles to form a more
‘moderate’ faction, which eventually called itself the Organisation
du Peuple en Lutte. From late 1996, Aristide began organizing a more
cohesive party of his own supporters, the Fanmi [family] Lavalas,
drawing on his personal authority among the Haitian poor. The split
between the opl and the fl soon became irreversible, paralysing the
legislature and blocking the appointment of a new prime minister or a
full cabinet after Smarth’s resignation in 1997. [14] Préval finally
broke the parliamentary deadlock by dissolving the National Assembly
in 1999, and after some delay new elections were held in May 2000.

Globalization comes to Haiti

Predictably, the imf cure for Haiti’s desperate poverty involved
further reductions in wages that had already sunk to starvation
levels, privatization of the state sector, reorientation of domestic
production in favour of cash crops popular in North American
supermarkets and the elimination of import tariffs. It was the last
of these, easiest to implement, that had the most immediate impact.
With the tariff on rice cut from 50 per cent to the imf-decreed 3 per
cent, Haiti—previously self-sufficient in the crop—was flooded with
subsidized American grain, and rice imports rose from just 7,000
tonnes in 1985 to 220,000 tonnes in 2002. Domestic rice production
has all but disappeared. [15] A similar sequence eliminated Haiti’s
poultry sector, at the cost of around 10,000 jobs. Haitian farmers
tend to associate these developments with the most bitterly resented
of all the international community’s many aggressive interventions in
their domestic economy—the 1982 extermination, to allay the fears of
American importers concerned by an outbreak of swine fever, of
Haiti’s entire native pig population, and their subsequent
replacement with animals from Iowa that required living conditions
rather better than those enjoyed by most of the island’s human
population.

As a result of these and related economic ‘reforms’, agricultural
production fell from around 50 per cent of gdp in the late 1970s to
just 25 per cent in the late 1990s. Structural adjustment was
supposed to compensate for agrarian collapse with an expansion of the
light manufacturing and assembly sector. The lowest wages in the
hemisphere, backed by a virtual ban on trade unions, had encouraged
mainly American companies or contractors to employ around 60,000
people in this sector in the late 1970s, and through to the mid-90s
companies like Kmart and Walt Disney continued to pay Haitians around
11 cents an hour to make pyjamas and T-shirts. [16] The companies
benefit from tax exemptions lasting for up to 15 years, are free to
repatriate all profits and obliged to make only minimal investments
in equipment and infrastructure. [17] By 1999, Haitians fortunate
enough to work in the country’s small manufacturing and assembly
sector were earning wages estimated at less than 20 per cent of 1981
levels. Nevertheless, still more dramatic rates of exploitation
encouraged many of these companies to relocate to places like China
and Bangladesh, and only around 20,000 people were still employed in
the Port-au-Prince sweatshops by the end of the millennium. Real gdp
per capita in 1999–2000 was estimated to be ‘substantially below’ the
1990 level. [18]

It would be wrong to think that these reforms were implemented with
anything approaching Third Way zeal. On the contrary, the Lavalas
government was continually criticized for its ‘lack of vigour’ by
international financial institutions: ‘Policies imposed as conditions
by international lenders have been at best half-heartedly supported
by the domestic authorities, and at worst violently rejected by the
public’. [19] With its back to the wall, Lavalas resorted to what
James Scott has famously dubbed the ‘weapons of the weak’: a mixture
of prevarication and evasive non-cooperation. This proved partially
successful as a way of deflecting at least one of the main blows of
structural adjustment, the privatization of Haiti’s few remaining
public assets. Lavalas had good reason to drag its feet. When the
state-run sugar mill was privatized in 1987, for example, it was
bought by a single family who promptly closed it, laid off its staff
and began importing cheaper sugar from the us so as to sell it on at
prices that undercut the domestic market. Once the world’s most
profitable sugar exporter, by 1995 Haiti was importing 25,000 tons of
American sugar and most peasants could no longer afford to buy it.
[20] By contrast, in September 1995 Aristide dismissed his prime
minister for preparing to sell the state-owned flour and cement mills
without insisting on any of the progressive terms the imf had
promised to honour—opening the sale to middle-class and diaspora
participation, and ensuring that some of the money it earned was to
go towards literacy, education and compensation for victims of the
1991 coup. Aristide could only delay the process for two years,
however. In 1997 the flour mill was duly sold for just $9 million, at
a time when its yearly profits were estimated at around $25 million
per year. [21]


[See Part III for continuation]
.