24676: (news) Chamberlain: Haiti's Lavalas -- One Man's View

[sak-pase@bimini.ws]

Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

Haiti's Lavalas -- One Man's View 
By Jane Regan


PETION-VILLE, 5 April 05 (IPS) - Senator Gérald Gilles does not hide his
political allegiance. 

Gilles is proud of to be a member of the Lavalas Family party and he still
believes it can play a leading role in moving Haiti forward. 

Trained as a surgeon, the 38-year-old from Jérémie, a port town located on
Haiti's southern arm, has been involved with ex-President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide ever since his student activist days. 

In 1990, Gilles accompanied Aristide to the polling station as the
ex-priest cast his vote in the presidential elections he later won in a
landslide, and Gilles remained a Lavalassien throughout the nineties,
struggling for Aristide's return during the 1991-1994 coup that left 3,000
to 5,000 dead. 

When Aristide broke from his former allies in the Lavalas Political
Organisation (OPL) party in 1996 and formed the Lavalas Family, with
himself as president, Gilles joined up, ran for senator in 2000 and won. 

"Lavalas is still Haiti's strongest party," Gilles told IPS during an
interview at his home in the hills above Haiti's capital. "But it is split
between two tendencies right now. If we can come together, we can win." 

Gilles was talking about his group and its supporters, which include
Lavalas parliamentarians and others he calls the "moderates," and a second
group he calls "radical." 

The "radicals" include the groups that have recently led protests demanding
Aristide's return. They say elections are unconstitutional since Aristide
is still president. 

At least some of their members, those nicknamed "chimè," or "angry
monster," are heavily armed. A number of guns even have Aristide stickers
on them. They say they will do whatever it takes to bring their president
back. 

Other members include Father Gérard Jean-Juste, a priest well known in
Haiti and also Florida, where for years he defended the rights of Haitian
immigrants. Earlier this year, Jean-Juste was arrested and held for seven
weeks in connection with organising armed pro-Aristide resistance. He was
released without being charged. 

During a three-day meeting where political parties were invited to sign a
kind of "non-agression" pact laying down ground rules for the upcoming
elections, Jean-Juste read off a nine-point list of demands he said had to
be met for Lavalas to participate in the elections. At the top of the list
was Aristide's return. No Lavalas representative signed the pact. 

(To foreign reporters, however, Jean-Juste dangles the possibility that he
might run for president.) 

The pro-return/non-elections Lavalassiens also include a number of former
officials who are now in the U.S. and other countries, and also, of course,
Aristide himself, in exile in South Africa and who continues to campaign
for his return. 

"I will return. I don't know when, but I will return," the South African
Press Association quoted him as saying after a lecture he gave at a
university there last month. 

But Gilles thinks that is exactly what the Lavalas Family party does not
need. 

Instead, he wants members of the party to come together, assess the errors
of the past and move forward. Under Aristide's firm rule, Lavalas made
errors, Gilles said. 

Among them was Aristide's encouragement of a "cult of personality," he
said. 

"But the biggest error we made was in instrumentalising the poor, in
turning them into pressure groups," Gilles said, referring to the
grassroots groups that were coopted by the Lavalas power structure and
encouraged to harass opposition demonstrators or even Lavalas members
deemed not sufficiently loyal. 

Mostly young men -- many of whom were on the payrolls of state institutions
like TELECO, the telephone company -- they can be seen leading pro-Aristide
demonstrations today, even if they are joined by hundreds or thousands who
never got a paycheck. 

"We need to do a 'mea culpa' from our point of view, but the other parties
need to do the same thing," Gilles continued. He is working on a book
tentatively entitled "Lavalas: Les causes de notre echec, les raisons
d'éspérer" ("Lavalas: The causes for our failure, the reasons for hope"). 

Haiti's political culture has relied too much on violence and is too
"Manichean" Gilles continued, with intolerance and polarisation ruling the
day. Instead of dealing with Haiti's problems, political parties and their
seemingly eternal leaders take shots at one another. 

According to the Lavalas Family statutes, Aristide is head of the party
unless he "dies or resigns." The non-democratic nature of the parties and
their vicious power struggles hurt the nation, Gilles argues. 

A glance at history attests: In 200 years, Haiti has had some 45 heads of
state, most of them dictators. Only five have served out their terms. The
rest have been poisoned, blown up, hacked to death, overthrown and/or
driven into exile, sometimes with a little encouragement or assistance from
foreign powers like the U.S. or France. 

The playing field today does not look much better. There are 91 registered
political parties. A half-dozen of them were founded by defectors from
Lavalas. 

Gilles wants to prevent more splits. He would like to reconcile the two
"tendencies" and he wants Aristide to help. 

"I think Aristide has a historic role to play," he said. 

But with Aristide's lieutenants in Haiti, Miami and New York organising
marches and teach-ins, hosting radio programmes, running websites,
circulating petitions and writing articles, that does not appear too
likely. 

In an open letter on Mar. 29, the 18th anniversary of the constitution's
ratification, Aristide's spokesperson accused the interim government of
"genocide" and the deaths of "over 10,000 people," a number no rights group
or journalist has ever come close to matching. The letter also encouraged
continued "mobilisation" for Aristide's return. 

As the title of his book implies, Gilles has not yet given up hope. But he
recognises what is at stake if Lavalas does not come together and if Haiti
does not somehow move forward, with or without Aristide. 

"The failure of Lavalas would be my failure, too," he admitted.