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27520: Hyppolite Pierre (Editorial in today's New York Times by Amy Wilentz) (fwd)




From: Hyppolite Pierre <hpierre@irsp.org>

The link is: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/opinion/07wilentz.html ************** Here's the full text. By AMY WILENTZ
Published: February 7, 2006

TWENTY years ago today, in the elegant but down-at-the-heels central square of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian people celebrated the departure of a dictator and the end of nearly three decades of a nightmare dynasty. In the smallest hours of Feb. 7, 1986, Jean-Claude Duvalier, his chain-smoking wife at his side, drove his Mercedes sedan right up to the open door of a United States Air Force jet and fled the country for the South of France. Along with about 50 members of the foreign press corps, I was there at FranÃois Duvalier International Airport, named for the fleeing man's father, who had visited disaster after disaster on his native land. Now it was morning, and it seemed all of Haiti had descended into the square, each person waving fanlike branches cut from street-side trees. It was as if a forest had come to town to cover up the traces of the hated regime. A brighter day was dawning, so most people thought, and so I thought, although it was clear that there would be difficult moments ahead. Mobs surged through the city and countryside, hunting down supporters of the ancien rÃgime. Yet Haitians in general were ecstatic. Surely democracy, with that joyous popular will behind it, would triumph. Soon after that brilliant day, I became acquainted with a bunch of boys. They were young and homeless, and every day dozens of them would gather at the school where Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest known for his broadside sermons against the Duvalier regime, lived and worked. The boys spent a lot of time kicking a dead ball around the dusty courtyard in noisy games of soccer. Waldeck was one, another was nicknamed Ayiti (which means Haiti in Creole), another was Ti Johnny. One I did not know so well was Wilmer. There were so many; they all wanted money, and sneakers. Democracy, it turned out, was not within easy grasp. Having suffered through almost 30 years of the Duvaliers' kleptocracy, Haiti had no economy to speak of, hardly any infrastructure, no workable education system and no viable democratic institutions. The little boys were typical. Under Father Aristide's auspices, they eked out a living at the edge of this dysfunctional non-system, sleeping at night in a shantytown warehouse, with a single light bulb, and straw mats for beds. In the wake of Mr. Duvalier's ouster, democratic steps were taken: an electoral council established, a Constitution written, candidates announced. In 1990, Haiti held a free and fair election under international supervision, and â to my amazement â my boys' Father Aristide, the priest who spoke for Haiti's disenfranchised millions, became the country's first honestly elected president. But beneath the veneer of progress, Haiti hadn't really changed. The same ruinous division continued between the tiny upper class, which had long run the country, and the poor. The rich went on living in mansions amid boutiques and restaurants at the literal top of the hill in Port-au-Prince, and the impoverished, unemployed, illiterate and starving majority of the people endured in the mud, sewage, garbage and pig slop in shantytowns at the bottom, or in the remote countryside, unelectrified and dark. Worse yet, the country was essentially bankrupt, relying almost entirely on funds from donor nations and on money sent back to relatives by Haitians abroad. President Aristide had little effect on all this, for all his orphan boys and his dedication to popular empowerment. Many of his immediate projects revolved around himself, though he always bore the people's future in mind. As far as he was concerned, he was the people, and the people were President Aristide. Thus a new house for him, with an echoing living room, was a new sanctuary where the people could come to hear his message. A new swimming pool in his yard was a place where the little boys could come to swim without fear or embarrassment â and they did. Meanwhile, conditions in the shantytowns worsened. None of this was surprising in a Haitian president. But Jean-Bertrand Aristide was supposed to be different. And he really was different. No matter how big his house, how nice his swimming pool, he never lost the respect of a wide swath of the population for whom he remained a commanding symbol of liberation. A powerful sector of Haiti's elite could not stomach that â nor did they like this outsider's control over the country's purse strings. Once in power, President Aristide was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. If he didn't make slum dwellers and heads of popular movements his closest advisers, for example, he would be shunning the Haitian people, the very ones who gave him his legitimacy. But if he did accept the common people into his circle or reject his handful of upper-class advisers, he would be seen as encouraging naÃve, unlettered toughs who were likely to be sycophantic and turn to violence when thwarted. Haitian society was so polarized between haves and have-nots that every decision was potentially destructive and only moderation might have saved the day. Yet President Aristide was not a natural moderate, and neither were his most implacable enemies â members of a powerful elite that wielded remarkable influence in Washington. And so President Aristide was overthrown before he had served a year of his term. Reinstated by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Mr. Aristide rightly feared that the same forces â a cabal of elite families, members of the military and American powerbrokers â would conspire to take him down again. He disbanded the army. In 2000, he was again elected president. This time he made stabs at moderation, but his enemies would not budge, and in the end, he believed he needed the militant support of his power base in the shantytowns to stave off another attempt to oust him. Those boys whom I'd met in 1986 were big now â those who had survived. Waldeck had a baby and was helping with security at the presidential palace. Ti Johnny had been shot and killed in a drug-related incident. Ayiti had died, too â of AIDS, it was said. I didn't hear anything about Wilmer for a long time. As he had feared, President Aristide was overthrown again in February 2004, with the support of the right-wing elite and a nod from Washington. Soon after, Wilmer surfaced as an armed street organizer in the giant slum of Cità Soleil, on the outskirts of the capital. A skinny boy not so long ago, he had become a legendary outlaw Aristide supporter known as Dread Wilmer â to some a bandit hero, a Haitian Robin Hood, to others a drug trafficker, gangster and killer. With President Aristide gone, he was vulnerable. Last July, Wilmer and four others, including a woman and her two small children, were killed in a gun battle with the United Nations forces that had been sent to keep the peace in Haiti. Since Mr. Aristide's most recent ouster, things have fallen apart in Haiti in a dramatic way, with kidnappings and street shootouts commonplace. This is not a propitious atmosphere for today's planned presidential vote, in which RÃnà PrÃval, a former elected president and a former close Aristide associate, is the front-runner, according to polls. If Mr. PrÃval wins by a wide margin (less likely since electoral authorities decided not to allow voting inside the restive Cità Soleil), he might be able to take some small steps forward for the country. President Aristide's example, however flawed, makes it hard for any future Haitian leader to rule without a popular mandate. The trouble lies in getting both Haitian elites and American policy makers to accept fair elections and whatever leadership, unpredictable as it might be, that emerges from them. This may not happen today, or even tomorrow. But the new generation of Haiti's elite needs to recognize that regime change in Haiti must come from the electorate. And in the same spirit, Washington â for so long insincere on the question of Haitian democracy â has to put its backing once and for all truly behind the Haitian people. Amy Wilentz, who is writing a book about California, is the author of "The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier."