22622: (Chamberlain) Ronaldo going to Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

(The Guardian, 5 July 04)



Haitians lay hopes at Ronaldo's feet

A friendly football match against Brazil could bring 90 minutes of
stability to a country still riven by violence

By Gary Younge in Port-au-Prince



In the four months since the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was
forced to flee Haiti, only one foreign force has shown the potential to
reunite the country - the Brazilian football team.

There is no exaggerating the appeal of Brazilian football here. Alongside
Jesus and Mary, one of the few mortals to appear on tap-taps, the brightly
painted local buses, is Ronaldo.

The best that is hoped of the United Nations, whose soldiers recently
arrived to replace the Americans, Canadians, French and Chileans, is that
they manage to keep the pro-and anti-Aristide factions apart. But when the
Brazilians play a friendly football match against Haiti in August,
divisions will dissolve for at least 90 minutes.

Brazilian troops, who make up a large part of the UN peacekeeping force,
arrived last month bearing gifts of 1,000 footballs for Haitian children.
The Brazilian president, Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva, plans to attend the
game. But to get a ticket for the big match, each fan must turn in at least
one gun.

It is an imaginative effort at disarmament in a political culture riddled
with violence and an economy racked by poverty.

In the final months of Mr Aristide's rule, former death-squad leaders
mounted an armed opposition to his presidency, while gangs from the slums
terrorised political opponents. When Mr Aristide left, the gangs faded into
the background and took their weapons with them.

A flash of Ronaldo's footwork will certainly lift morale. But it will take
a lot more than that to get the pistols out of Haitian politics.

"At a symbolic and moral level [the Brazilian game] could have a certain
impact," says Maurepas Jeudy, a spokesman for Intermon, the Spanish branch
of Oxfam. "But these gangs are made up of young people who have nothing
apart from guns. They won't disarm because, if they do, they will be left
with nothing."

Nothing is what most Haitians had before Mr Aristide's departure and, in
some ways, things have got worse.

In late May floods left 2,600 people dead or missing in Haiti and many more
displaced. They also exposed the country's environmental crisis.

"It was not an act of God," says Helen Spraos, Christian Aid's field
officer in Haiti. "It was the result of years of deforestation and could
happen again in another part of the country at any time."

Meanwhile, the cost of basic provisions has shot up.

"Rice has gone from four dollars to 10," says Marie-Annie Viyesse, 33, who
has three children and is expecting a fourth.

She survives with a shrug and a prayer. "There is no food and no work."

The main improvement since Mr Aris tide's departure is the break in the
spiral of vicious political violence that, in February, sent Ms Viyesse
running for the hills in fear for her life.

There are now 2,000 UN troops on the ground and a caretaker government.
Fresh elections are due in November 2006. That is just a few months after
Mr Aristide would have had to go to the polls had he been allowed to
remain.

Beyond the die-hard loyalists in his Lavallas party, there is no popular
clamour for his return. But there is no popular affection for or
identification with the interim government which replaced him either. It
has no money or authority and little legitimacy at home or abroad. Until
the weekend the Caribbean community was discussing whether to even
recognise it.

Aid organisations simply work around it, and few in civil society believe
it holds anything but the most basic potential.

"We have stopped the slide into chaos but the situation is very
precarious," says Jean-Claude Bajeux, the head of the ecumenical human
rights centre who campaigned for Mr Aristide to be ousted.

"We have to be conscious that there are a lot of people who are angry and a
lot of people who have weapons, and the government cannot even pay its
civil servants. There is not a single problem this government could solve
now without international aid."

One diplomatic source says: "The problem with Haiti is that there are no
institutions. This government exists only on paper."

The vacuum is most blatant at local level. At the Red Cross centre in the
town of St Marc, where the only ambulance is broken, the vice-chairman,
Tevenau Joseph, says there has been "a return to stability" and the police
are in control.

This is news to Pascal Robert, the chief inspector of the local police, who
has one car, no walkie-talkies and a pistol for each officer to protect a
population of between 400,000 and 500,000 people.

The French recently made a show of force in the town, 40 miles north of the
capital, which UN troops have not yet visited.

"It's a very delicate situation because there are a lot of people with
weapons and anything could happen at any moment," Mr Robert says. "If
something did happen, we would be unprepared."

At the town hall there are no phones, few tables, fewer chairs and a
handful of filing cabinets. The deputy mayor, Charlieuse Thompson, has not
been paid since April - but then he was not elected, either.

"We have the confidence of the people, who trust us to guide the town
towards democracy," says Mr Thompson, who was part of an anti-Aristide gang
called the Ramicos.

When the Guardian was last in St Marc, on February 11, a pro-Aristide gang
called the Bale Wouze had taken over and was murdering Ramicos supporters.
A few weeks later, when Mr Aristide left the country, some prominent Bale
Wouze members were burned alive and hacked to pieces. Others fled or were
arrested. But most are still in town and keeping their heads down.

In St Marc, as in the country as a whole, the relative stability is due
neither to consent nor consensus, but a mixture of battle-weariness, flood
fatigue and the presence of foreign troops who are better armed and trained
than the gangs.

There is little sense that the country's civil society is ready or willing
to heal its wounds, and poverty, polarisation and poor leadership remain.

Much hope was hanging on a conference of international donors in Washington
this month. But with no representative domestic government and negligible
consultation with local organisations, some here fear the conference will
address the interests of the international community rather than the needs
of Haiti's poor.

Politically, Haiti may be on the road to becoming a failed state, but
economically it has been a model of open borders and liberalism, with the
lowest customs tariffs and least-protected industries in the Caribbean. In
the 1980s it produced 80% of its rice. Now it imports nearly 80% of it from
the US, where rice production is subsidised.

"There will be plenty of papers prepared by foreign consultants like the
IMF and the World Bank," Mr Jeudy says. "But they don't take account of our
national priorities as we see them.

"Our most crucial problems are all linked to the need to eat. In rural
areas, that has led to environmental instability, in the urban areas it has
led to political instability."

There is still graffiti in the poorest areas and in the centre of town
calling for five more years for Aristide. But the large bicentennial
posters linking Mr Aristide to the slave rebel, Toussaint L'Ouverture,
declaring, "Two men, two centuries, one vision", have been removed. The
first, by the airport, has been replaced by an advert for local cola. The
second, in Canape Vert, by a poster of naked buttocks advertising local
beer.

"The difference between this huge foreign intervention and the last one 10
years ago is the lack of hope this time around," says one diplomat who was
in the country for Mr Aristide's return.

"The place is infected with cynicism at every level. There is no sense of
purpose. The idea that all this country needs is elections is a joke."

At the purely ceremonial handover of authority from the US-led forces to
the UN in June, the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, read a statement to
an international force in many ways as sceptical as the Haitian people.

"The stakes are high," he said. "This time let us get it right."