22885: Holmstead: Philadelphia Enquirer: Dashed dreams on a borrowed lot in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: John Holmstead <cyberkismet5@yahoo.com>

Philadelphia Enquirer
August 5, 2004

Dashed dreams on a borrowed lot in Haiti

A former prisoner and activist developed a youth
athletic complex. Now the owners want the land back.

By Andrew Maykuth

Inquirer Staff Writer

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Bobby Duval, a former
political prisoner and human-rights activist, wanted
to put his beliefs into practice. So eight years ago
he opened a youth sports complex on a trash-strewn lot
near Cité Soleil, a vast slum on the edge of the
capital.

Duval is a rarity in Haiti - a scion of the nation's
light-skinned bourgeois reaching out to the poor,
black masses. His project received a lot of attention
- journalists trekked to the grassy oasis, and HBO
broadcast an uplifting special about Athletics of
Haiti.

"You know, I'm not supposed to be here, in this
place," said Duval, 50, surveying the soccer fields
where players practiced on a recent muggy afternoon.
"I'm out of my sphere. But it's my country and I want
to do it, you know."

But Duval's project was conceived in more idealistic
times, when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the
"people's priest," promised to elevate the
downtrodden. Aristide's popularity waned, and he was
forced to flee Haiti in February after a rebellion
threatened to unravel the poorest nation in the
Americas. U.N. troops now maintain a fragile peace.

With the departure of the left-leaning Aristide, Duval
and other Haitians are coming to terms with dashed
dreams. Duval's project has been living on borrowed
time - and, it turns out, borrowed real estate.

The wealthy owners who grudgingly lent 15 acres upon
which Duval built Athletics of Haiti - he essentially
had taken the land without asking - are reclaiming
their turf. Now that Aristide is out of the picture,
they want Duval gone.

He is not going quietly.

"I'm not happy about it, and I really think it's
unfair," he said.

The dispute has gone public. A local journalist took
Duval's side, calling the landowners the "morally
repugnant elite."

But Duval is discovering that the fiery rhetoric that
once scored points with Haiti's rulers now carries
little weight. The landowners have dug in their heels,
suggesting Duval is a thief for squatting on their
land.

Even his supporters believe the winner-take-all
passion Duval brings to sports is alienating the rich
people whose gifts sustain his program.

"He is cutting his nose to save his face," said
Philippe R. Armand, president of the American Chamber
of Commerce in Haiti. "Those guys asked for their land
back, and he's making an issue of it. Why is he trying
to antagonize them? He's behaving in a way that is
scaring anybody who wants to donate to his
organization."

That Duval's project has reached this precipice is
partly due to his naiveté - he always knew the land
did not belong to him. But it is also symptomatic of a
larger problem in Haiti, where society has long been
cleaved along class lines and riven by suspicions
about political motives.

"There is no culture of compromise in Haiti," said
Edouard Baussan, a banker who has advised Duval to be
less confrontational. "Everybody views compromise as a
defeat. They get in this mind-set - 'I will not back
down' - and before long, nothing is accomplished."

Baussan has offered to help, donating six acres of his
own land for new facilities. Though the parcel is
smaller and in a worse location, Duval can carry on
his mission. But Duval says rebuilding is costly, and
he wants his landlords to pay for developing the new
site.

"It's not often you find somebody like Bobby," said
Baussan, whose family owns a shipping firm. "We don't
have enough people of our social background, our
education, who can arrange projects like this."

Duval says the current feud is rooted in the
animosities among the privileged class that lives in
Petionville, the hillside suburb overlooking
Port-au-Prince. From their mansions, the
lighter-complexioned Haitians who trace their roots
more to Europe than to Africa have long lorded over
Haiti.

Duval was born into such a family. His father made his
fortune manufacturing auto parts, and sent him to
North America for an education. He graduated from the
Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne in 1971 before
attending college in Massachusetts and Canada, where
he was a soccer star.

His life veered off course when he returned to Haiti
in 1976. Awakened to the plight of the poor, he
denounced President Jean-Claude Duvalier and was
jailed for 17 months. He saw dozens of other political
prisoners die before the government released him under
pressure from the Carter administration. When he was
freed, Duval weighed 90 pounds, less than half his
normal weight.

"I suppose spending a year and a half in prison in
Haiti at the time - he almost died - changes a
person," Baussan said.

Duval indeed had changed - radically. He was enraged
by the silence of his Petionville peers, and vowed to
change Haitian society. He wrote a book about his
imprisonment and, while working for the next two
decades in the family business, he also became active
as a human-rights advocate.

In 1996, he created Athletics of Haiti to provide
daily training in soccer, basketball and track, as
well as healthy meals, academic tutoring, and payment
of school fees, to promising athletes who could not
afford the programs available to privileged Haitian
youths.

"I wanted to test my convictions, to come and work and
sweat with people here, in the smell and the dirt," he
said. "I wanted to do something real."

A group of Catholic priests invited Duval to set up on
vacant industrial land next to their residence, near
Port-au-Prince International Airport.

The property was a mess. It had been used as a dump
for bottles; it also contained the ruins of several
houses, wrecked by rampaging slum youths. Duval
cleaned up the rubbish and planted grass.

A year after he started, Duval said, the landowners
informed him the athletic fields were on private
property - but they let him use it until further
notice.

So Duval built a concrete wall around the lot and
rehabbed the houses to serve as offices and
dormitories for players and coaches. He bought four
buses to shuttle players from the slums. The program
thrived. He has to hold tryouts to limit enrollment to
650, mostly boys.

Now, the landlords want the land back. Duval says it's
their revenge on him for betraying his class. They say
they simply want to develop the property.

"We are a country of rules, and you must play by the
rules," said Francois Dresse, one of the owners, who
declined to comment further on the record. Dresse, a
Belgian manufacturer, serves as Belgium's consul to
Haiti.

Duval admits he understood that the arrangement was
temporary. But the expectation of permanence had taken
root.

"All I wanted was to just use the land," he said. "I
hoped that once the program got going... that they
would, like, carry me on."

In recent months, as the exchanges grew more
emotional, one of the landowners painted the 10
Commandments on a wall facing the complex,
highlighting "Thou Shall Not Steal."

"They don't want to confront me directly," said Duval.

His friends and family - his ex-wife and two children
live in the United States - advised him to move on.

But he can't seem to let go - not only of the real
estate, but of the hope that Haiti's vast imbalance of
resources will become more equitable.

"The sentiment of the elites is that business is going
back to normal now," Duval said. "But when are they
going to realize that Aristide wasn't the problem
himself?

"Aristide was a thermometer of social discontent and
social despair, man."

Contact staff writer Andrew Maykuth at 215-854-2405 or
amaykuth@phillynews.com.





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