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23155: Slavin: Le Monde diplomatique - 2 Articles (fwd)
From: JPS390@aol.com
Le Monde diplomatique
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September 2004
FROM PROPHET OF THE SLUMS TO CONTROLLING RULER
Haiti: Titide's downfall
by Maurice Lemoine
IN THE beginning there was Titide, preacher of the slums and
shantytowns and voice of the disenfranchised. Titide -
Jean-Bertrand Aristide - was ordained in 1983 and served as
parish priest at the Don Bosco church in Port-au-Prince.
Haitians had suffered under the Duvaliers since 1957, when
François "Papa Doc" took power. When the brutal dictatorship
of his son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" ended in 1986, Titide was
the great hope of a desperate people.
When Haitians finally voted in free elections in 1990, it was
no surprise that Aristide was elected president. He waited
until the last day of registration to announce his candidacy,
ensuring an electrifying campaign called Lavalas, Creole for
flood. With hindsight it is easy to see this rush of
enthusiasm as excessive and misplaced. "We didn't have time
to think about his personality as an individual," admits one
of his many former supporters. "We didn't have time to think
about how he would move from the status of a prophet,
speaking out against evil, to a position of power."
But what power? Even as a president newly elected by a
massive majority, Aristide was not in full control of his
destiny. The world saw how the United States invaded Grenada
in 1984 and crushed the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In Haiti,
US intervention took the form of CIA aid to General Raoul
Cédras, who ousted Aristide in a coup barely seven months
after the election, to the delight of President George Bush
Sr.
On 29 September 1991 Haiti entered three years of
orchestrated chaos that left many Lavalassiens dead. But the
US did not intervene again until 19 September 1994, when Bill
Clinton's ad ministration, with United Nations backing, sent
20,000 soldiers to reinstate the legitimate government and
(more importantly from the US viewpoint) stop an armada of
boat people who sought refuge in the US.
Yet Aristide's comeback was not a return to the good old
days: by 29 February 2004 when his third term as president
ended (René Préval served from 1995 to 2000), the consensus
was that he no longer cared about anything but power and
money. This assertion was accompanied by a list of the little
curé's misdemeanours: he was thought to be an accomplice to
(if not directly responsible for) every crime - drugs
trafficking, political assassinations and the dead dogs in
the street. Could this be the man who received the 1996
Unesco prize for human rights education? Or is he being
unfairly demonised, as popular leaders, notably Venezuela's
Hugo Chávez, are when they have the nerve to upset the
established disorder in the US's backyard?
Aristide's experiences during his three-year exile in the US
loom over this. He presumably arrived in a state of
frustration and despair. But he returned transformed,
Americanised: "He left as Aristide and came back as Harry
Steed," says Anna Jean Charles of the Batay Ouvriyé union
(see box below). In Washington the pitit soyèt (child of the
people) aligned with the Democratic party and the
Congressional Black Caucus (a grouping of black members of
the House of Representatives) and discovered the US
establishment, big business and capitalism. Treated as a
serving president in charge of Haiti's frozen assets, he grew
greedy. With the help of his new Democrat friends, he had an
embargo imposed on Haiti, with devastating effects for his
poorest compatriots. The new friends brought Aristide back to
power and were richly rewarded in the ensuing round of
privatisations, particularly in telecommunications.
No longer priest of the poor
For, on his return to power, the former priest of the poor
followed the instructions of the international financial
institutions and liberalised the Haitian economy. He had his
own peculiar way of doing this. Jean-Claude Bajeux was
minister for culture when the first round of privatisations
was debated by the cabinet. "When the prime minister, Michel
Smarck, said we should draw up some invitations to tender,
the president interrupted him: 'Why don't we just arrange it
so we can share these things out between us?' "
Yet this is the Aristide to whom Haiti owes its only ever
peaceful transition of power between two democratically
elected leaders. In December 1995, constitutionally excluded
from standing for election immediately, he gave way to
Préval, a friend and former prime minister. The seeds of the
crisis in 2004 were sown during this period: Aristide moved
into a grandiose villa on the edge of Port-au-Prince, no
longer Titide but the "Duke of Tabarre" after the suburb in
which it was built.
The Lavalas Political Organisation (OPL), which had supported
Aristide since 1991, more out of self-interest than political
conviction, and was the largest party in parliament, defected
from the Lavalas movement. The OPL prime minister, Rosny
Smarth, resigned in June 1997, beginning a long period of
political stagnation. There were already many cracks in
Haiti's democratic system before the May 2000 elections,
which were to fill 7,500 seats at local and national levels.
Although international monitors judged that the vote had, on
the whole, been properly handled, the results were fiercely
contested. Seven seats in the senate were handed directly to
candidates who should have had to win a second round to
ensure election. It was a peculiar situation because Fanmi
Lavalas (Lavalas Family), Aristide's new party, had been
assured of a massive majority without having to cheat. "But
he just had to control every single thing," recalls Micha
Gaillard, who was a spokesman for Aristide while in exile:
"He wanted 100% of the seats in parliament. As he said during
the coup, 'I am the hub of a bicycle wheel and all the spokes
point to me'."
Some maintain that Aristide did not cheat and that the
cheating was the work of a few overzealous members of his
party who filled the urns to overflowing. His only error was
that "he did not speak out and left the system to rot". Maybe
so. But a revealing passage in the Fanmi Lavalas party
constitution undermines such confidence: "President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide has been elected National
Representative" [party leader], reads clause 29, while clause
32 states: "The position of National Representative becomes
vacant if the Representative dies or resigns" (1). Nowhere is
there any reference to internal elections. Aristide had
declared himself president for life of his party. This
revelation leaves little to distinguish his political
philosophy from that of the Duvaliers.
Aristide's artificially enhanced victory in the May 2000
elections flew right back in his face. The opposition,
electorally weak, was able to capitalise on this opportunity
to cause a scandal by boycotting the presidential election
that November. Although Aristide won that easily and
genuinely, his fervent popular support undiminished, the
international community froze most of its aid and loan
payments to Haiti. The country plunged into destitution and
chaos.
Doubts as to whether Aristide was good or bad persisted,
confusing Haiti. Father Frantz Gandoit, a priest of the
Dominican order, was appointed and remains head of Haiti's
literacy campaign. "On certain issues," he says, "Aristide
maintained a true social vision. He was determined to succeed
in certain areas. He genuinely wanted to see far-reaching
improvements in education. But on other issues he engaged in
realpolitik of the most Machiavellian kind." Some continued
to see Aristide as a progressive leader struggling against
the Yankee monster. But he no longer preached
anti-Americanism: though he still cited Haiti's liberation
hero, Toussaint L'Ouverture, in speeches, he dropped all
mention of Charlemagne Péralte, martyr of the resistance
against the 1915-1934 American occupation, who was executed
in November 1919.
Hub of the bicycle wheel'
As a lucky few amassed fortunes and all other Haitians
scraped by from day to day, the ministry of social affairs
systematically sided with bosses against the workers. The
regime even used the assassination, on 27 May 2002 at a rally
in Guacimale, of two unionists linked to Batay Ouvriyé as a
pretext for arresting union members. Confidence in the regime
evaporated further with the cooperatives scandal of
2001-2002. In a speech at the national stadium, Aristide
invited Haitians to save money by investing in new
institutions called, for reasons unexplained, cooperatives.
It was never clear who was in charge of these, hastily set up
amid total disorganisation. While encouraging investors to
act out of a spirit of social solidarity, they promised
ludicrous rates of interest - 12% a month or 140% annually. A
fever swept the middle-classes and some sold cars and homes
in the hope of doubling their investment in a year. Even the
poorest dug deep into their pockets. Then, suddenly and
simultaneously, the cooperatives went bust. Around $170m had
been invested. The government's only action was to imprison
the chairman of the victims' association, Rosemond Jean. The
anti-Aristide movement strengthened.
Aristide bears much of the responsibility for this scandal
but the opposition was not blameless. The OPL (it kept the
acronym after dropping its association with Lavalas, calling
itself Organisation du Peuple en Lutte, organisation of
struggling peoples) attacked Aristide for complying with
International Monetary Fund directives, forgetting that its
own leader, Rosny Smarth, signed a structural adjustment plan
when he was prime minister. The OPL claims that out of a
spirit of compromise it did not enact its own programme when
it was the largest party in parliament (1995-2000).
After his re-election in November 2000, Aristide tried to
correct the irregularities of the May vote by asking the
seven improperly elected Fanmi Lavalas senators to resign.
But the opposition had lost interest in compromise. It
boycotted Congress and would not participate in government
initiatives. Instead it denounced the state of the economy,
due mostly to the US trade embargo, which was justified by
the political crisis that its own attitude perpetuated. Even
more hypocritically, it attacked the government for refusing
to negotiate.
Yet the opposition parties, united as the Demo cratic
Convergence coalition (2), had little real electoral
importance. Their survival depended on the support of the
Group of 184, which brought together organisations within
Haitian civil society. The leader of the Group was André
Apaid, Haiti's largest industrial employer. His businesses
had some 4,000 workers, each paid 68 US cents a day. Not
content with ignoring Haiti's official minimum wage of $1.50,
Apaid had opposed Aristide's proposals that it be increased.
He was not the likeliest associate for a movement of broadly
centre-left political parties.
Consensus on a range of issues'
But that did not seem to worry the coalition. "There is
consensus on a whole range of issues," said Gérard
Pierre-Charles, general coordinator of the OPL, "democracy,
civic freedoms, the need to change the way we live in Haiti."
Divisions, potential divisions, old wounds and the lack of
any common agenda were smoothed over in service of a single,
unifying purpose: to get rid of Aristide. Pierre-Charles is
one of many intellectuals, leaders and campaigners -
including Micha Gaillard and Claude Bajeux of the National
Congress of Democratic Movements (Konakom) - whose courage
and probity are not in doubt. But all were part of a
coalition whose ambiguous nature and intransigent tactics
brought catastrophe to Haiti.
Its refusal to negotiate with Aristide left him isolated,
abandoned by the international community and deprived of aid.
His only option was to fall back on the support of the
impoverished masses, many of whom were unaware how their hero
had changed. Most saw attacks on Titide as an attempt to take
power away from the people. It is not hard to understand why.
The Democratic Platform (a coalition of Democratic
Convergence and the Group of 184) had not, as a political
entity, proposed a single social policy reform. The violence
always beneath the surface of Haitian society boiled over as
the Chimères, armed gangs of Aristide supporters who recalled
the Duvaliers' Tontons Macoutes (bogeymen), attacked the
opposition.
Aristide has been given more than his fair share of blame for
the violence. "If you put people, no matter who, under this
sort of pressure, if you plunge them deep into despair and
crush them to death," says an angry Jacques Barros, former
head of the French Institute in Haiti (3), "then this is what
you get. You go from Weimar Republic to Hitler, from the
League of the Just to Stalin, from the Salesians of Don Bosco
to the Chimères." The people were used to being attacked:
General Cédras's dictatorship had wiped out the leadership of
the popular struggle and killed 4,000 followers. Attacks on
Fanmi Lavalas supporters were still frequent as late as 2003
- there were murderous raids at Petit-Goâve and in the
central plain (4). Insecurity swept the country and any
family that could afford to do so armed itself.
This helps to explain, if not to justify, how Haitians came
to be enthralled by a romantic image of themselves as a
people in arms. Yet the emergence of the Chimères did change
the nature of Haitian violence. Since Aristide had disbanded
the army on return from exile, the state had armed its
citizens as a defence against a repetition of the military
coup that brought Cédras to power in 1991. Weapons were
handed out to government officials, local councils and
citizens with leadership qualities and a concern for social
justice, or passed around the shantytown-dwellers. Some of
these, once armed, began to make demands and threats.
Greedily amassing power, they organised themselves into gangs
and mafia networks. The police collaborated with these groups
in operations from kidnapping to drugs-trafficking. Ruling
their neighbourhoods with an iron hand, these gangs also
engaged in political violence, supporting the president by
attacking opposition demonstrations and burning down party
headquarters.
Encouraging the violence
There is no proof that Aristide had any hand in running these
groups. But he never spoke out against them and made no
attempt to quell their activities. "He did just the
opposite," says a former ally, bitterly. "He explained that
they were the products of destitution, which is true, but his
whole tone was implicitly egging them on." What mattered for
Aristide was to have a clientele within the popular movement,
so that he could control the violence if he needed to do so.
The strategy backfired. The rebellion in the port of Gonaïves
in February 2004 was led by Butteur Métayer, a member of the
Cannibal Army, a gang that supported Aristide in exchange for
control over the port's customs. Métayer had fallen out of
favour with the president and accused the regime of killing
his brother. He changed sides. His uprising was soon joined
by former soldiers, criminals, drug-traffickers and
underworld figures from the Dominican Republic. The rebellion
spread across Haiti until it controlled five of nine
administrative areas and brought down the president.
This mercenary army did not come out of nowhere. US
Republicans may have hated Aristide, but he had maintained a
state of relative calm and agreed to neoliberal reforms.
Officially they supported him to the end. The Secretary of
State, Colin Powell, made strenuous efforts to reach a deal
with the opposition. Neither the CIA nor the
ultra-conservative Roger Noriega, assistant secretary of
state for Western hemisphere affairs, wanted to see Haiti
taken over by men they had not chosen.
In March 2004 in the Dominican capital Santo Domingo, the
Haiti Commission of Inquiry, headed by former US
attorney-general Ramsey Clark, published its preliminary
findings. Aristide was languishing in Jamaica. Noting that
200 US special forces had travelled to the Dominican Republic
for "military exercises" in February 2003, the commission
accused the US of arming and training Haitian rebels there.
With permission from the Dominican president, Hipólito Mejía,
US forces trained near the border, in an area used by former
soldiers of the disbanded Haitian army to launch attacks on
Haitian state property. (The Dominican Republic's collusion
is not new. In the 1980s Honduras played a similar role in
the US campaign against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua.)
With US-trained fighters at their core, the rebel gangs
spread to Haiti, creating the situation that enabled US
ambassador James Foley to force Aristide out on 29 February
2004. Washington's principal western ally was Paris. France
was keen to repair relations with the US after the Iraq
crisis and anxious to prevent the US from taking Haiti out of
the French sphere of influence within which it had always
been. France had little time for Aristide, who demanded $21bn
as repayment for the 90m gold francs Haiti had paid for
independence from France in 1804.
Regardless of Aristide's personal faults, his departure has
worried many observers, particularly leaders of other
Caribbean and South American states: what right do powers
such as the US and France have to remove a head of state this
way? "I never received a single document saying that the
president had resigned," says Ivon Feuillé of Famni Lavalas,
chairman of the National Assembly at the time of Aristide's
departure. Not without reason many see the Franco-American
intervention in Haiti as a dangerous precedent that could
encourage the US to do something similar in Cuba or Venezuela
or even Colombia or Bolivia.
But the former Haitian opposition has other things on its
mind. It was partially robbed of its victory by the US. On 21
February Aristide's opponents rejected a generous plan by
which he had agreed to cooperate with them in forming a new,
multi-party government, with an independent and neutral prime
minister. For the rebels, though, Aristide had to go. And so
he went. The rest of the script was written in Washington.
The government was handed to an imported prime minister,
Gérard Latortue (5), and many foreign troops moved on to
Haitian soil (6). On 20 March Latortue referred to the
self-declared rebels (many of them former torturers from the
disbanded army) as freedom fighters, and there is talk of
recruiting some to a police force desperately in need of new
blood. In the countryside, they have taken charge, either by
force or natural leadership, and are helping the big
landowners and other Duvalier supporters to bring back the
good old days, using terror to impose their will and steal
land from small farmers.
There is talk of elections. But for as long as the North (Cap
Haïtien), Artibonite province (Gonaïves) and the central
plateau remain in the hands of these armed gangs, it is hard
to see how a campaign could be organised. Meanwhile the
witch-hunt against Aristide's supporters goes on. Many have
been forbidden to leave the country and their movements
within Haiti restricted; there have been arrests and illegal
extraditions. Many are in hiding; others have been murdered.
Yet Fanmi Lavalas seems likely to remain, for the foreseeable
future, the most popular political movement.
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(1) "Charte, statuts et règlements de Fanmi Lavalas", First
Congress, 14-16 December 1999, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
(2) Democratic Convergence was made up of social-democratic
parties: the OPL, Konakom, the Haitian Nationalist
Revolutionary party, the Democratic Unity Convention;
centrist parties including the Christian Democratic party;
and four or five others.
(3) Barros is also the author of Haiti de 1804 à nos jours,
L'Harmattan, Paris, 1984.
(4) "Haiti: Abuse of human rights: political violence as the
200th anniversary of independence approaches",Amnesty
International, London, October 2003.
(5) Latortue is an international diplomat who has lived
outside Haiti for 30 years.
(6) The United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, led by
Brazil, has replaced the original interim peace-keeping force
of troops from the US, France, Canada and Chile.
Translated by Gulliver Cragg
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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2004 Le Monde diplomatique
<http://MondeDiplo.com/2004/09/09haiti>
Le Monde diplomatique
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September 2004
Slave labour along the Massacre river
by Maurice Lemoine
THE Massacre river in northern Hispaniola divides the
Dominican Republic and Haiti. It is crossed by a crumbling
bridge, with Ouanaminthe, Haiti, on one side and Dajabón,
Dominican Republic, on the other. In 2002 Jean-Bertrand
Aristide's government announced the creation of a free trade
zone in Ouanaminthe. The proposal was fiercely resisted by
local landowners, tenant farmers and agricultural labourers,
who were promised compensation but have received none. But
resistance was impossible: the tractors that tore up the
crops were accompanied by armed guards, leaving the farmers
helpless, homeless victims.
The Dominican investor was clothing subcontractor Grupo M,
the largest employer in the Dominican Republic, with 12,000
workers in its factories and a reputation for treating them
brutally and ignoring union rights and regulations. The World
Bank's International Finance Corporation, possibly unaware of
the malpractice, provided a loan of $20m for Grupo M to set
up in Ouanaminthe. We may presume that Aristide was better
informed about Grupo M's nature: on 8 April 2003, when he
came to lay the foundation stone with the Dominican
president, Hippólito Mejía, he did so in secret. Haitians
only heard about it the day after, in the Dominican press.
In August 2003 Grupo M opened two facilities in the new free
trade zone, employing around 1,000 workers. The Codevi
factory produces Levis 505s and 555s jeans while the MD
factory makes T-shirts, all exported via the Dominican
Republic.
Grupo M's Haitian employees were made to work at high speed
for long hours in terrible conditions and paid a pittance.
They soon protested: on 13 October 2003 the Codevi Workers
Union (Sokowa in Creole) was created in Ouanaminthe and
affiliated to Batay Ouvriyé, Haiti's worker support
organisation. On 2 March 2004, with the country in a power
vacuum following Aristide's departure, Grupo M fired 34 union
members, with militiamen from northern Haiti's "rebel army"
on hand to crush resistance.
On 13 April, after tough negotiations attended by
representatives from the World Bank, Levi-Strauss & Co, and a
tripartite commission from the new Haitian government, Grupo
M agreed to reinstate the 34 workers. But, as Yannick Etienne
of Batay Ouvriyé explains: "They forgot that there was also
an agreement to let the union negotiate a new factory-wide
contract."
A new contract was urgently needed. Codevi employees were
being made to work from Monday to Saturday, often doing 55
hours instead of the official 48, with no overtime money.
"You can't ask questions,"says Etienne. "If you do, they put
your name down so they can fire you." Recalcitrants were
called into the back room: "You're locked in there for hours,
guarded by armed thugs. They put the air conditioning on full
blast to make it uncomfortable." Female workers are given a
mysterious injected "vaccination" every two months and many
have complained of irregular and unnaturally long periods;
there has been an abnormally high rate of unexplained
miscarriages among Codevi workers.
Sokowa continued to campaign for a new contract and on 7 June
staged a half-hour work stoppage. On 8 June 40 heavily armed
soldiers from the Dominican Republic arrived (on Haitian
territory) to beat the workers. A 24-hour strike followed and
Grupo M bosses closed the factory, illegally locking out its
employees; 370 were laid off 48 hours later when the plant
reopened.
Since then the workload has increased further. Workers were
expected to produce 1,000 pairs of jeans a day. They are now
required to turn out 1,300 for 1,300 gourdes ($37) a week.
"No one can meet these targets," says Etienne, "and you only
get 432 gourdes ($12) if you don't manage it."
While Dominican soldiers, now in plain clothes, continue to
enforce order, Grupo M's chief executive officer, Fernando
Capellán, has threatened to relocate. "We don't believe the
factories will close," says Etienne, "but the threat is a
clear signal that this is war." Batay Ouvriyé has fought
tough battles before - it rose up in 1995 against the Walt
Disney Corporation's Haitian subcontractors and the
Association of Haitian Industrialists (ADHI). Capellán, a
Dominican, is a member of the ADHI. Etienne is suspicious: "I
think the Dominican and Haitian bosses want to work together
to get rid of our young union and remove all workers' rights
to ensure maximum exploitation."
________________________________________________________
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2004 Le Monde diplomatique
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J.P. Slavin
New York
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