30001: Simidor (reply and continueation of discussion) Re: 29968: Corbett (book review) comments on Alex Dupuy's book: THE PROPHET AND POWER (about Aristide) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Daniel Simidor <danielsimidor@yahoo.com>

The Dupuy book provides much grist for an honest,
regenerative debate around what happened in Haiti in
the last two decades.   For now, I?m limiting my
remarks to a few points in Bob?s very engaging and
down-to-earth account of reading it.

With all due respect, I think that Bob has succumbed
to a much greater degree than Dupuy to the idealist
notion that Aristide gave rise to the popular movement
he lent his voice to, instead of the other way around.
Aristide, he writes, ?was clearly a central reason why
the serious chance [of doing the old regime in] was
even there. Had he not been who he was ? as Dupuy well
describes ? the prophet and outsider to government,
the champion of the poor, then even the chance of such
a revolutionary change seems almost impossible to
imagine.?  The failure of savior politics -- there
lays the reason for Bob?s pessimism in the end, I
would think.

For all his charisma, Aristide was less a catalyst
than a product of his times.  His dramatic ?preaching
of democracy? only reflected the mood of the moment.
I?m talking about the 1985-1991 popular movement, with
its widespread, mostly nonviolent and decentralized
mobilization for radical change and a democratic
society.

The September 1991 military coup was meant primarily
to crush that movement and those aspirations.  And it
did, aided to a considerable extent by Aristide?s own
reliance on the US superpower to reverse the coup.
During his exile in Washington, Aristide obviously
shed some of his enthusiasm for ?pouvwa popilè?
(people?s power) for the time-tested
?if-you-can?t-beat-them, join-them? real politick
personified by his ?good friend? Slick Willie (Bill
Clinton).

By the time of the Dec. 2000 elections, the popular
movement was effectively crushed, politically and
organizationally.  Faced with a new hostile Bush
administration, Aristide opted for a modus operandi
that abandoned all economic and foreign policy
decisions to Washington, for a free hand in domestic
affairs.  That arrangement worked up to a point with
the Colin Powell State Department, until Aristide dug
his own grave by going after all his opponents at once
with the power of just a few hundred chimères behind
him.

Both Corbett and Dupuy tend to underestimate the
Dominican government?s role in undermining and
destabilizing Aristide?s 1991 and 2001-2004
governments, and in providing the logistics and base
of operations for the military and paramilitary coups
against him.  The two narratives also ignore, for
different reasons I would think, the negative role
played by the mainstream pro-Soviet Haitian left in
comforting Aristide in his politics of capitulation to
US hegemony, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

Daniel Simidor




____________________________________________________________________________________
Finding fabulous fares is fun.
Let Yahoo! FareChase search your favorite travel sites to find flight and hotel bargains.
http://farechase.yahoo.com/promo-generic-14795097