23394: Blanchet: A Great Loss for Haiti

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Max Blanchet <MaxBlanchet@worldnet.att.net>


Grard Pierre-Charles dies

By MICHAEL NORTON
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, Oct. 11 (AP) -- Prominent Haitian intellectual and
politician Gerard Pierre-Charles has died of heart failure in Cuba, where
he
was receiving emergency treatment for a lung infection, friends and
colleagues
said Monday. He was 68.
   Pierre-Charles died Sunday, said retired physician Guy Noel, a close
friend.
He said Pierre-Charles was flown to Cuba on Friday after coming down with
the
flu.
   Involved in politics for half a century, Pierre-Charles was an
economist who
wrote at least 16 books and a longtime communist whose ideology shifted
toward
the center after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

He was a leading opponent of his former ally President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide up until his ouster in February, accusing him of betraying the
poor
and drifting toward dictatorship.
   "In the current crisis, the voice of Gerard was always the voice of
objectivity -- in a country where people are so emotional -- and I
personally
will miss him," interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue told The
Associated Press in a phone interview Monday.
   Though he never held elected office, Pierre-Charles became a top leader
of
the Democratic Convergence, an alliance that held a series of protests
until
Aristide left amid a rebellion this year.
   Pierre-Charles was born Dec. 18, 1935, in the southern city of Jacmel
and
was orphaned at 10 when his mother died.

   In 1959, he helped found the Party of Popular Understanding, which
later was
absorbed into the Haitian Communist Party.
   Communists faced persecution under dictator Francois "Papa Doc"
Duvalier,
and in 1960 Pierre-Charles began 26 years in exile, studying economics at
Mexico's National Autonomous University.
   For years he was allied with Aristide. The two had a falling out in
1997,
when Pierre-Charles accused the former priest of trying to monopolize
power.
   Pierre-Charles' supporters gathered signatures to nominate his for the
Nobel
Peace Prize last year.
   He is survived by his wife, three sons and a daughter.