21937: Esser: OPTION ZERO IN HAITI - Part II (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


[Continued from Part I - see Part III for Footnotes]


The Lavalas government never yielded, however, to us pressure to
privatize Haiti’s public utilities. At the same time, and with
drastically limited resources, it oversaw the creation of more
schools than in all the previous 190 years. It printed millions of
literacy booklets and established hundreds of literacy centres,
offering classes to more than 300,000 people; between 1990 and 2002
illiteracy fell from 61 to 48 per cent. With Cuban assistance, a new
medical school was built and the rate of hiv infection—a legacy from
the sex tourism industry of the 1970s and 80s—was frozen, with
clinics and training programmes opened as part of a growing public
campaign against aids. Significant steps were taken to limit the
widespread exploitation of children. Aristide’s government increased
tax contributions from the elite, and in 2003 it announced the
doubling of a desperately inadequate minimum wage. [22]

Opposition to Aristide

The government’s course created enemies both to the right and to the
left. Unsurprisingly, Aristide came under fire from those who
advocated more enthusiastic compliance with the us and imf, among
them the (highly unpopular) Prime Ministers, Smarck Michel (1994–95)
and Rosny Smarth (1996–97), along with other members of the opl. From
the beginning, the simple presence of Lavalas in government had
terrified a large portion of the dominant class. ‘Among the Haitian
elite’, as Robert Fatton has explained, ‘hatred for Aristide was
absolutely incredible, an obsession’. [23] With Lavalas in power,
many observers noted a ‘new confidence among the poor people of
Haiti’. [24] For the first time in living memory the distribution of
private property seemed vulnerable, as occasional instances of land
invasion and squatting went unopposed. Though in practice he tended
to cooperate with business leaders and international lenders,
Aristide appeared willing to strengthen his hand in government with
veiled threats of popular violence against ‘bourgeois thieves’. [25]
‘Panic seized the dominant class’, Fatton notes. ‘It dreaded living
in close proximity to la populace and barricaded itself against
Lavalas’. [26] Gated communities multiplied and the provision of
private security became one of Haiti’s fastest growing industries.
Class sympathy among Western elites who felt themselves under similar
threat, both at home and abroad, goes a long way to explaining the
recent international perception of the Lavalas regime.

A growing distrust of Aristide’s ‘demagogic populism’, meanwhile,
slowly alienated many of the foreign or exiled intellectuals—René
Depestre, James Morrell, Christophe Wargny—who had once supported
him. [27] More importantly, several of Haiti’s most significant
peasant organizations, including the Movman Peyizan Papay (mpp), Tèt
Kole Ti Peyizan and kozepep, as well as the small militant group
Batay Ouvriye, condemned the Fanmi Lavalas for its cooperation with
structural adjustment and accused it of becoming ‘anti-populaire’.
Clément François of Tèt Kole spoke for many critics of Lavalas when
he argued that Aristide should not have agreed to the us conditions
that allowed him to return from exile: ‘he should have stayed outside
and let us continue the struggle for democracy; instead, he agreed to
deliver the country on a platter so that he could get back into
office’. [28] mpp leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste made the same point
in 1994, shortly before he became involved in a bitter personal feud
with Aristide.

The true extent of popular disaffection with Lavalas is difficult to
measure. As a rule, foreign commentators find it ‘hard to credit the
strength of emotion that Aristide elicited and continues to provoke
in Haiti’. [29] Tèt Kole and the mpp were certainly weakened by their
opposition to Aristide, and neither group remains a significant
political force. In the late 90s Jean-Baptiste became an ally of
Pierre-Charles’s pro-American opl, before joining, in 2000, the
openly reactionary Convergence Démocratique; the militancy of his
followers has been dulled, as Stan Goff notes, ‘by the steady trickle
of project dollars flowing through the almost interminable list of
non-governmental organizations that infest every corner of Haiti’.
[30] The opl itself is probably the party which most closely
resembles that ‘civic’ alternative to Lavalas so dear to liberal
commentators, but after years of futile parliamentary manoeuvring it
was virtually wiped out in the 2000 elections. [31]

For all its undeniable faults, in other words, the fl remained the
only significant force for popular mobilization in the country. No
other political figure of the past fifty years has had anything like
Aristide’s stature among the urban and rural poor. Reporting from
Port-au-Prince in March 2004, the bbc’s correspondent was obliged to
concede that, whereas Aristide was ‘universally reviled’ by the
wealthy elite, he was still almost as universally affirmed by the
great majority of the urban poor. [32] The doctor and activist Paul
Farmer, who has worked in Haiti’s central plateau since the mid-80s,
makes a still stronger case for the enduring depth of Aristide’s
popularity in the countryside. [33] The one demonstration of any size
against the fl during the most recent elections was an mpp gathering
organized in September 2000. It drew several thousand people.
Otherwise, political opposition to Aristide was confined almost
entirely to the ranks of the dominant class. [34] The Haitian elite
found it hard to rally support in the streets. An Economist
Intelligence Unit report decribes the anti-Aristide protest held in
November 2003 by the ‘Group of 184’, which claims to represent a wide
range of civil-society organizations:

On the morning of the rally, a few hundred Group of 184 supporters
had assembled at the designated site but found themselves heavily
outnumbered by as many as 8,000 Aristide loyalists. When some
government supporters threw stones and shouted threats at their
opponents, the police struggled to keep order. As the situation
rapidly deteriorated, the police dispersed the crowd using tear gas
and firing live ammunition in the air. Meanwhile, the Group of 184’s
flat-bed truck with a sound system was stopped by police en route to
the rally and thirty people travelling in the convoy with it were
arrested when police discovered unlicensed firearms. Clearly unable
to proceed as planned, the Group of 184 organizers called off the
rally before it had begun . . . André Apaid [the Group’s coordinator]
said the episode showed that the authorities would not allow
opponents to assemble and thus were not contemplating fair elections.

The report failed to mention that Apaid is an international
businessman who owns several factories in Haiti, the founder of
Haiti’s most prominent commercial tv station, and leading figure in a
2003 campaign to block Aristide’s decision to double the minimum
wage. Itdoes note, however, that:

The turnout for the rally was lower than might have been suggested by
the Group’s claim to have more than 300 member organizations. It was
scarcely able to assemble more than this number of demonstrators. The
presence at the rally of many members of the more affluent sector of
society reinforced a perception that the Group of 184, despite its
claims to represent civil society, is an organization with little
popular appeal. This interpretation was confirmed by the failure of a
‘general strike’ called by the Group on November 17. Although many
private businesses in Port-au-Prince, including private schools and
banks, did not open, the state-owned banks, government offices and
public transport, as well as street markets, functioned as normal. In
the rest of the country the shutdown was largely ignored. [35]

May 2000 watershed

Despite the massive preponderance of their popular support, however,
neither Préval nor Aristide, in his 1991 or 1994–95 spells in office,
had ever been able to govern with the full support of the
legislature. But in the decisive legislative and local elections of
May 2000, a united Fanmi Lavalas won majorities at all levels of
government, taking 89 of 115 mayoral positions, 72 of 83 seats in the
Chamber of Deputies and 18 of the 19 Senate seats contested. [36] The
1995 elections had already ‘completely discredited the so-called
traditional political parties—especially those that collaborated with
the military regime between 1991 and 1994’, effectively eliminating
them from any further role in electoral politics. [37] In May 2000,
members of the original Lavalas coalition who had turned against
Aristide suffered the same fate. For the anti-Aristide opposition,
the elections proved that there was no chance of defeating the fl at
the polls for the foreseeable future.

It was at this point that the campaign to discredit the Lavalas
government entered a new and more intensive phase. During the summer
of 2000, most of Aristide’s opponents—dissidents like
Pierre-Charles’s opl and Jean-Baptiste’s mpp, along with right-wing
evangelicals, business leaders and ex-Duvalierists—banded together to
form the ‘Convergence Démocratique’. From the start, the cd’s main
objective was Option Zéro: the total annulment of the 2000 elections
and a refusal to allow Aristide to participate in any subsequent
vote. [38] In order to make this strategy seem compatible with
democratic conventions, the cd had first to redouble its efforts to
portray the fl as irredeemably undemocratic, authoritarian, violent
and corrupt—accusations already long familiar from the propaganda
that accompanied the Cédras coup in 1991. [39]

The first priority was to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the fl’s
electoral victory. The pretext here was a minor technical complaint
made by observers from the Organization of American States. The oas
had actually described the May 2000 elections as ‘a great success for
the Haitian population, which turned out in large and orderly numbers
to choose both their local and national governments. An estimated 60
per cent of registered voters went to the polls’, and ‘very few’
incidents of either violence or fraud were reported. Even the
staunchly anti-fl Centre for International Policy agreed that the May
2000 elections were Haiti’s ‘best so far’. [40] The oas subsequently
characterized the elections as ‘flawed’ not because they disputed the
fairness of the vote or the overwhelming clarity of its result but
because, once the Lavalas victories were recorded, they objected to
the methodology which Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (cep)
used to count the votes for eight of the seats in the Senate. Rather
than include all of the many less popular candidates in its
calculation of voting percentages, the cep—which Haiti’s constitution
identifies as the sole and final arbiter in all electoral
matters—decided to count only the votes cast for the top four
candidates in each race. By this method, Lavalas candidates won 16
Senate seats in the first round, taking an average 74 per cent of the
vote. [41]

The oas had itself been closely involved in the development of this
form of calculation, and there is no good reason to believe that the
balance of power in the Senate would have been any different whatever
method was used. The results are consistent both with the undisputed
returns registered in the Chamber of Deputies ballot held at the same
time and with a us-commissioned Gallup poll taken in October 2000. In
November 2000, Aristide went on to win the presidential election with
92 per cent of the votes cast, on a turnout estimated, by those few
international observers left in the country, at around 50 per cent
(although much lower by the opposition).

Throttling aid

The immediate response from the Clinton Administration was to seize
upon the oas objection to the calculations for the senatorial seats
in order to justify a crippling embargo on foreign aid—democratic
scruples hard to square with Washington’s support for the Duvalier
dictatorships and the juntas that succeeded them. In April 2001,
after cutting off its own aid to Haiti’s government, the us blocked
the release of $145 million in previously agreed loans from the
Inter-American Development Bank, and of another $470 million
scheduled for the following years. In 1995 the Haitian government had
received close to $600 million in aid. By 2003 the total government
budget had been reduced to just $300 million—under $40 a head per
year for each of its 8 million citizens—minus the annual $60 million
payment on the national debt (45 per cent of which was incurred by
the Duvalier dictatorships). [42] The response of the imf and other
international lenders was to force Haiti to make still deeper cuts in
its budget and pay yet higher sums in arrears.

Few governments could survive such sustained financial assault. The
combined effect of these measures was to overwhelm an already
shattered economy. Haitian gdp fell from $4 billion in 1999 to $2.9
billion in 2003. While American exports to Haiti have risen
substantially in recent years, a majority of Haitians now live on the
edge of starvation, without access to water or medicine; average
incomes amount to little more than a dollar a day and unemployment
hovers around 70 per cent. In 2001, a bankrupt Aristide agreed to
virtually all of the concessions demanded by his opponents: he
obliged the winners of the disputed Senate seats to resign, accepted
the participation of several ex-Duvalier supporters in his new
government, agreed to convene a new and more opposition-friendly cep
and to hold another round of legislative elections several years
ahead of schedule. But the us still refused to lift its aid embargo.

The next priority of the cd campaign was to portray the fl as
fundamentally authoritarian and corrupt. That there were some grounds
for this is plain. Drug-running—Haiti has long been a relay station
for Colombian cocaine heading north—has increased since 1990. As in
other destitute countries patronage remains widespread, even if it
falls far short of the ‘officially sanctioned piracy’ characteristic
of the pre-Lavalas period. [43] More urgently, the legacy of violence
in Haiti, from the colonial era through to the dictatorships fronted
by Duvalier, Namphy and Cédras, has left deep scars; Aristide himself
is the survivor of repeated assassination attempts. The murderous
assault on Lavalas during his first exile pushed some pro-fl groups,
like Jeunesse Pouvoir Populaire and the Petite Communauté de L’Église
de Saint Jean Bosco, to adopt quasi-military forms of self-defence
against former soldiers who were disbanded but not disarmed in 1995.
Vigilante gangs associated with Lavalas are certainly responsible for
some of the violence that has occurred over the past few years.
Critics of the fl have been quick to equate these gangs with
Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes. [44]

In a comparative perspective, however, political violence during the
Lavalas administrations was far less than under previous Haitian
regimes. Amnesty International’s reports covering the years 2000–03
attribute a total of around 20 to 30 killings to the police and
supporters of the fl—a far cry from the 5,000 committed by the junta
and its supporters in 1991–94, let alone the 50,000 usually
attributed to the Duvalier dictatorships. [45] Examination of Lavalas
violence would also suggest that it was, indeed, largely a matter of
gang violence. There are armed gangs in Port-au-Prince, as there are
in São Paulo, Lagos or Los Angeles; their numbers have swelled in
recent years with the deportation to the island of over a thousand
Haitian and Haitian-American convicts from the American prison
system. Above all, it should be stressed that the lion’s share of
recent violence in Haiti has been perpetrated by the us-trained
paramilitary forces deployed by opponents of the Lavalas regime since
the summer of 2001.

Final assault

Economic constraints paralysed the Lavalas administration and
political pressure backed it into a corner; but in the end, only
old-fashioned military coercion on the Contra model could dislodge it
from power. Leading figures in the Convergence Démocratique made no
secret of their intentions at the time of Aristide’s reinauguration
as president in February 2001; they openly called for another us
invasion, ‘this time to get rid of Aristide and rebuild the disbanded
Haitian army’. Failing that, they told the Washington Post, ‘the cia
should train and equip Haitian officers exiled in the neighbouring
Dominican Republic so they could stage a comeback themselves’. [46]
The us, it seems, obeyed these instructions to the letter.

The insurgency that eventually triggered the second coup began just
when it seemed as if Aristide’s new administration might finally be
making some political progress. Shortly after talks held in mid-July
2001 at the Hotel Montana, the opl’s Pierre-Charles and other leaders
of the cd acknowledged that they were close to achieving a ‘total
agreement’ with the fl. Less than a fortnight later, on 28 July,
groups of army veterans launched attacks against police stations
along the Dominican Republic border, killing at least five officers.
What happened next is typical of the pattern that persisted right
through to the completion of Option Zéro on 29 February 2004. The
government arrested 35 suspects linked to the attacks, including some
cd supporters. With the approval of the us ambassador, the cd
responded by breaking off further negotiations with the fl, claiming
that Aristide had staged the attacks himself in order to justify a
crackdown on his opponents. A similar sequence would follow the next
major incident, a full scale assault on the Presidential Palace in
December 2001. [47]

What actually began to unfold in Haiti in 2001, in other words, was
less ‘a crisis of human rights’ than a low-level war between elements
of the former armed forces and the elected government that had
disbanded them. Amnesty International reports indicate that at least
20 police officers or fl supporters were killed by army veterans in
2001, and another 25 in further paramilitary attacks in 2003, mostly
in the lower Central Plateau near the us-monitored Dominican border.
Militarization of some regional fl groups was an almost inevitable
result. Most of the known leaders of this insurgency were trained by
the us and, although evidence of Washington’s direct support for the
‘rebels’ will be hard to find, American allegiances have been made
perfectly explicit in the wake of Aristide’s expulsion.

In the autumn of 2003 the guerrillas based over the border (led by
Louis Jodel Chamblain and Guy Philippe) were strengthened by a new
insurgency inside Haiti itself led by Jean Tatoune. Despite his close
us connections and a conviction for his role in the Raboteau massacre
of 1994, Tatoune managed to swing the Gonaïves-based gang known as
the ‘Cannibal Army’ against Lavalas, after making the implausible but
widely reported claim that Aristide was behind the murder, in
September 2003, of the gang’s former leader, long-standing Lavalas
activist Amiot Métayer—who also happened to be an equally
long-standing enemy of Tatoune.


[See Part III for continuation]
.