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30816: (news) Ives: Haiti Liberte's This Week in Haiti 1:1 07/25/2007 (fwd)




From: K M Ives <kives@toast.net>

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI LIBERTE newsweekly. For the complete edition with other news in French and Creole, please contact the paper at (tel) 718-421-0162, (fax) 718-421-3471 or e-mail at editor@haitiliberte.com. Also visit our website at <www.haitiliberte.com>.

                   HAITI LIBERTE

         "Justice. Verite. Independance."

           * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

               July 25 - 31, 2007
                    Vol. 1, No. 1

HAITI LIBERTE:
FOR INDEPENDENCE, JUSTICE AND TRUTH

Today, one cannot be silent. Haiti is nothing more than a neo-colony of international capitalism. Since this system penetrated Haitian society, the country has been dysfunctional and its people plunged into the most abject poverty which benefits only the comprador bourgeoisie and the multinational corporations represented by the governments of the United States, France and Canada.

It is significant that this newsweekly, Haiti Liberte, is being launched on July 25, 2007, three days before the 82nd anniversary of our nation's first occupation by the Yankees in 1915.

Haiti Liberte is not just another newspaper. Rather it is a new forum for the airing of new ideas on how to advance the struggle for Haiti's liberation. We will do our best, under the difficult conditions of this fight, to defend not only the fundamental rights of the Haitian people, but above all to defend our national soil. This is why we have devoted most of this first issue to analyzing Haiti's foreign occupations - past and present - and to demanding the departure of UN forces now holding the country hostage.

In this same vein, Haiti Liberte will fight for the triumph of justice, because since the days of the Duvalier dictatorship until now, the Haitian people have been denied justice. We have not forgotten the two most recent coups d'etat, that of September 1991 and the kidnapping of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on February 29, 2004, after which more than 5,000 Haitians were killed.

The current political situation is very grave because the democratic forces are losing ground. After so much sacrifice, in 2006 the popular masses elected President Rene Preval to meet their demands: free the political prisoners, end the occupation and return President Aristide. To their great disappointment, the masses have seen their enemies, those that carried out the massacres, and their former torturers take control of the Preval government and monopolize power with the support of the pocket-patriot bourgeoisie and US imperialism.

Haiti Liberte can under no circumstances support such a regime. On the contrary, we demand the release of the many remaining political prisoners and the return of all political exiles, particularly former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's attempt to arrest the mercenary and former "rebel" leader Guy Philippe is palpable proof of the close links between the Preval-Alexis government and the United States. The U.S. just wanted to panic this former instrument of the CIA so that he would shut his mouth and stop denouncing members of Haiti's bourgeoisie who led the "unarmed" opposition to Aristide. If Philippe continues to denounce his former collaborators - the sponsors of the destabilization campaign leading up to Aristide's 2004 kidnapping - he will pay very dearly because his employer is ready to put him aside if not physically eliminate him altogether, just as in 2005 it rubbed out Ravix Ramissainthe, another "rebel" leader who got too big for his britches. Indeed, by accusing him of being a drug-dealer, the U.S. only thinly veils what it could have in store for Philippe if he doesn't behave.

Let truth's light accompany us in our fight to defend our country and the Haitian people! Since 1804, our ruling class has never stopped exploiting, ridiculing and misleading the Haitian people with disinformation.

For us at Haiti Liberte, the Haitian masses are and forever will be our compass. Naturally, we will work in close solidarity with other nations and peoples in the hemisphere fighting for their freedom and their independence.

For conscious and responsible progressives, the doors of this newspaper are wide open because sectarianism only stifles the revolutionary fight. On the contrary, we must create a broad forum filled with lively debate which can help awaken the social and national consciousness of the majority of the population. This is the challenge facing all the progressives of our nation, who, with the support of the foreign internationalists, must continue the struggle so that one day the wind of freedom blows again in Haiti and the Haitian people become masters of their destiny.

Berthony Dupont

-----

ARISTIDE AND THE VIOLENCE OF DEMOCRACY


A review of Alex Dupuy's The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community and Haiti (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, ISBN 0-7425-3831-1, 238 + xi pages)

(The first of three articles)

by Peter Hallward


The basic argument of Alex Dupuy's new book is that between 1990 and 2006, Haiti's "tumultuous transition to democracy" was "temporarily derailed by both Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his enemies" (203). In particular, Dupuy sets out to show that "when he left [Haiti] in February 2004, Aristide had become a discredited, corrupted and increasingly authoritarian president who had betrayed the trust and aspirations of the poor majority" (2).

Alex Dupuy is an experienced and highly regarded scholar who has already written two other substantial books on modern Haitian politics. He has a sophisticated grasp of the workings of the "new world order", of transnational capitalism and of contemporary forms of political and economic domination. Readers familiar with the recent work of analysts like David Harvey, Immanuel Wallerstein or William Robinson will find themselves right at home. His latest book is sure to appeal to people who are instinctively critical both of US imperialism and of the apparent degeneration of Aristide and the Lavalas movement that he led. It is reasonable to assume that The Prophet and Power will soon become a standard point of reference for anyone who wants to understand what happened to Haiti in the two confusing decades that followed the expulsion of the US-backed dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986. It is already beginning to enjoy a warm reception as a "challenging and enlightening book", one that presents a "fair and persuasive" argument that is "rooted carefully in factual data, analyzing the global situation with insight and logical rigor."1 Such an argument clearly deserves to be considered in detail and at length.

Dupuy provides a fairly full account of Aristide's two terms in office (February 1991 - September 1991; February 2001 - February 2004). Both terms were interrupted by violent military coups. Dupuy argues that in each case, responsibility for the coup lay both with Aristide himself and with his opponents among the Haitian economic elite, backed by the Haitian army (or its paramilitary replacement) and its international patrons. Long before his political career was brought to an end in February 2004, Dupuy insists that it had become "clear that Aristide, as well as his Fanmi Lavalas party in power, relied on intimidation, violence, and corruption to maintain themselves in power, had become discredited, no longer represented the interests of the majority of Haitians who brought them to power, and were a major obstacle to the democratization of Haiti. But if Aristide and Fanmi Lavalas subverted democracy, so too did the organized opposition, the Haitian bourgeoisie, and their foreign allies" (168).

Most readers familiar with recent Haitian history are likely to agree with at least the second aspect of Dupuy's analysis. Dupuy provides a useful introductory overview of the ways in which neo-liberal globalization has led to increasingly desperate levels of exploitation and impoverishment. He demonstrates how this global economic order is tightly interconnected with US imperial power. He understands the difference between core and peripheral states within the contemporary world-system. He shows how the US and its allies in the Haitian elite were determined at all costs to prevent Aristide from pursuing meaningful social and economic reforms. He shows how the "democratic opposition" that the US and pro-US members of Haiti's little elite rigged up to oppose Aristide's second administration amounted to nothing more than a front for the most reactionary forces in Haitian society. He shows how Aristide's early efforts to rid Haiti of the murderous legacy of the Duvalier dictators (1957-1986) and their brutal "Tonton Macoute" militia were thwarted by a mixture of military and paramilitary reaction. He explains how Aristide's early ambition to lead Haiti towards a "maximalist" (redistributive, socially transformative) version of democracy was constrained by pressure from the international community and its financial institutions to legislate for what became a merely "minimalist" or formal (market-driven, politically conservative) version of democracy (18-21). In all these respects Dupuy provides a valuable and clear-sighted analysis of this most turbulent period in Haitian history.

What may be more controversial is Dupuy's insistence that the primary responsibility for the end of democratic rule in 2004 nevertheless lies with President Aristide and members of his Fanmi Lavalas party. Like a good many other analysts who considered themselves sympathetic to the embryonic phase of the Lavalas project, Dupuy claims that whereas Aristide's first administration was marked by a mix of authoritarian and democratic tendencies, his second administration was simply authoritarian through and through. "Aristide's second term of office", he writes, was "disastrous on all fronts political, economic, and social" (168). By 2001, "Aristide's objective was to consolidate his and his party's power and preserve the prebendary and clientelistic characteristics of the state he had vowed to dismantle in 1991. To maintain power, Aristide relied on armed gangs, the police, and authoritarian practices to suppress his opponents, all the while cultivating a self-serving image as defender of the poor. That strategy did not work, though, as his government became increasingly discredited and his popularity waned [...]. Consequently, unlike in 1991, the majority of the population did not rally to save Aristide from being forced out in 2004 or clamor for his return afterward" (xv). By 2004, "betrayed by a false prophet", one of world's most remarkable and inspiring political mobilizations had been definitively crushed.

Now readers familiar with anti-Aristide propaganda will know that as far as the prevailing norms of the genre are concerned, this is very mild stuff. Alex Dupuy's incisive and sharply written book is certainly more balanced and more accurate than say Michael Debert's recent account of these same years, in his Notes from the Last Testament (2005). Dupuy's argument draws on a very wide consensus, a consensus endorsed for some time now by a whole slew of other experienced observers, including Jane Regan, Charles Arthur, Jean-Michel Caroit, and Laënnec Hurbon, among many others. Dupuy's restatement of the prevailing case against Aristide deserves to be considered very seriously.

So let's consider it.

Dupuy mounts three main accusations against the twice-deposed president. First, he claims that Aristide contributed to the first coup, in 1991, by failing to do enough to placate his enemies within the Haitian economic and political elite. Second, he claims that by the time Aristide was re-elected in 2000 (if not by the time he returned to Haiti in 1994) he had abandoned his original principles and had become just another "all-too-ordinary and traditional president, who like all the others who came before him, was using state power for his and his allies' personal gains" (170). Third, as his corrupt administration began to encounter understandably agitated forms of political opposition, Dupuy claims that Aristide decided to arm gangs of his most impoverished and desperate supporters (the infamous "chimes") to intimidate his opponents. This strategy, Dupuy concludes, "would prove to be the Achilles' heel of Aristide's second term. In effect, I will argue, by relying on armed gangs rather than mobilizing his popular base as a counterforce to the opposition, as he tended to do in his first term, Aristide would marginalize the latter. Henceforth, Lavalas would become equated with the chimes, and the entire popular movement associated with Lavalas [...] would become discredited, demobilized, and demoralized" (143-144).

I'll go through these three accusations in turn, paying particular attention to the first and the third.

I

The first accusation is the most familiar, since it is an echo of longstanding elite anxieties about Aristide that date back to the explosive entry, in the late 1980s, of this "cross between Ayatollah and Fidel" onto the political stage.2 The "greatest mistake" of Aristide's first administration, Dupuy says, was his belief that "with the masses behind him, he was invincible and that he could rule without respecting the law and without winning over the bourgeoisie, the parliament, or the army" (130). Although Dupuy can see that this most fearless scourge of macoutisme stood little chance of gaining the support of the Duvalierists and their Macoutes, still "he could have done much more to reassure the bourgeoisie and win it over to his side" (132). Instead, by failing to reward his bourgeois allies within the political class, and by making a couple of apparently inflammatory speeches, he drove Haiti's economic masters back into a lethal alliance with the army and the Macoutes.

There are two separate issues to assess here, one political, one strategic. The political question concerns the relation between Aristide's actual electoral base and the little clutch of professional politicians who briefly allied themselves to that base during the election campaign of 1990. As far as Dupuy is concerned, "the most important virtue of the broad and decentralized democratic movement" that started up in the late 1980s was precisely its lack of centralized organization, a virtue which "meant that no single political organization or individual would emerge as its identifiable leaders" (59). Free from the oppressive influence of a united and identifiable leadership, these golden years of Haitian civil society were instead populated by small (and surely unidentifiable) "social-democratic" groupings like Victor Benoît's KONAKOM and Evans Paul's KID, groupings that aimed to "created a popular, progressive, and democratic government as an alternative to the discredited dictatorial system" (59). So when in the autumn of 1990 a more dominant and more identifiable individual backed up by a more effective popular organisation did indeed begin to engage more directly with this dictatorial system, it's not surprising that for Dupuy this development already represented a serious setback for Haitian democracy.

Officially, in the 1990 election campaign, Aristide replaced Victor Benoît as the candidate of another loose coalition of KONAKOM- and KID-affiliated social-democrats who briefly duplicated themselves to create a parallel grouplet called the Front National pour le Changement et la Democratie (FNCD). Dupuy suggests that the "worst" and most "dangerous" consequence of 1990 was that "once Aristide's Operation Lavalas emerged as the dominant political force and the other popular organisations and left-of-center coalitions, especially the FNCD, accepted Aristide as their leader, they in effect surrendered their autonomy and their ability to criticize Aristide, to serve as checks and balances to his powers, and to articulate independent agendas" (95). Aristide himself, by contrast, appears to have wasted little time in implementing his own all-too-independent agenda. After winning the election with a landslide 67% of the vote, rather than choose leading members of this FNCD coalition as ministers in his cabinet, a president that Dupuy presents as worryingly "theocratic" and "messianic" preferred to work with a mixture of competent administrators and veterans of the powerful popular movement he had helped to inspire over the preceding couple of years. Rather than appoint a worthy democrat like Victor Benoît, Aristide named as his prime minister a mere agronomist and social activist, Rene Preval. "Ironically", says Dupuy, the result of such choices was the enmity of the "FNCD, the very coalition that made Aristide's candidacy and his election possible" (125).

Some readers, mindful of the electrifying impact of Aristide's last-minute decision to stand as a candidate in that election, might question whether it really was the hapless and unpopular FNCD politicians that made his victory possible. Granted, they provided the banner under which Aristide could legally run. But no one can deny that just four months after Aristide had appointed him, the FNCD opposition had managed to grind Preval's energetic, practical and wide-ranging legislative programme to a halt. Had the army not intervened in its own fashion in September 1991, notes Dupuy, "there is little doubt that the four major political blocs in the Chamber of Deputies, including the FNCD, would have voted in favor of a censure motion" (127). Readers will have to judge for themselves the degree to which such behavior corroborates Dupuy's own diagnosis of the most "dangerous" development of 1990 the fact that the FNCD and their fellow social-democrats had apparently "surrendered their autonomy and their ability to criticize Aristide." Readers familiar with the subsequent political evolution of people like Evans Paul and Victor Benoît a shift that saw these erstwhile social-democrats ally themselves with unreconstructed Duvalierists like ex-general Prosper Avril and ex-colonel Himmler Rebu, backed up by plenty of financial and logistical support from the most reactionary and most powerful figures of the second Bush administration (Roger Noriega, Otto Reich, Stanley Lucas...) may also hesitate a little before opting to characterize it in terms of a servile deference to Aristide.

Be that as it may, Dupuy's main point at this stage of his book is that "Aristide's option for the masses, his distrust of the bourgeoisie and of the US, and theirs of him made it impossible for him to substitute the prince's clothing for the prophet's. It reinforced his inclination to 'go it alone' and shun any attempt to form a broad consensus government" (107). Since Dupuy is sharply critical of this failure to change clothes and to embrace consensus, the thrust of this line of reasoning seems clear enough. Aristide shouldn't have opted for the isolation of the masses. He should have trusted the bourgeoisie, and he should have trusted the US. Then maybe everything would have worked out fine. Aristide could have morphed into a proper democrat like KONAKOM's Victor Benoît, and the whole disastrous experiment in "anarcho populism" could have been avoided. Instead, Aristide stubbornly refused to "woo the bourgeoisie" and declined to form "a broad coalition government that included representatives" from among his "opponents in the National Assembly" (119). Instead of embracing proper parliamentary democracy, Aristide "disdained all established political parties, sought to bypass the National Assembly and the judiciary, and even encouraged his popular supporters to harass and intimidate parliamentarians and the justices who opposed him" (133).

Of course Alex Dupuy is a sophisticated analyst and a trenchant critic of the oppressive machinery of our new world order. More simple-minded sceptics may wonder, nevertheless, whether his repeated preference for a "broad-based" as opposed to a "mass-based" government is altogether compatible with his apparent enthusiasm for democracy. They may not grasp how a decision to pursue policies emphatically endorsed by the great majority of the population and authorized by several repeated and overwhelming election victories is best interpreted as a rejection of "consensus." They may wonder whether Aristide was really mistaken in his distrust of the bourgeoisie and the US, when a fair amount of Dupuy's own book is devoted to a damning and perfectly accurate demonstration of their determination to frustrate, depose and then discredit him by all available means. They may find it strange to see that Aristide's reluctance to adopt disdainful enemies as ministers in his own government provides Dupuy with further proof of his authoritarian tendencies no doubt bona fide democrats like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair have been criticized, but perhaps rarely, for their failure to include parliamentary opponents in their own cabinets. Still more intransigent sceptics may even find it strange that whereas the whole thrust of Dupuy's book targets the deeply, institutionally entrenched corruption of the political class and the profoundly "predatory" or "prebendary" orientation of the status quo, he nevertheless condemns out of hand, and as a matter of dignified principle, Aristide's rather cautious attempt to submit this status quo to the one and only source of non-predatory pressure available: the force of direct popular mobilization.

As far as anyone interested with actually-existing Haitian democracy is concerned, such musings are somewhat beside the point. Over the last dozen years or so, Haitian voters can have left even the most sophisticated analysts in little doubt as to their own opinion of parties like KONAKOM, KID and the many KID-like clones that emerged (with generous US and EU support) to divide and rule the Haitian political scene in the 1990s. In 1995, for instance, Evans Paul ran as a candidate for mayor of Port-au-Prince against a close ally of Aristide, the activist and singer Manno Charlemagne: despite (or because of) years of US encouragement, Paul only managed to scrape 14% of the vote. Later in 1995, KONAKOM's own Victor Benoît finally got his chance to run in his own presidential election, against Aristide's old prime minister Rene Preval: the first of the FNCD posse to break free of Aristide's "authoritarian" grip back in the autumn of 1990, Benoît earned the support of an impressive 2% of the electorate, against Preval's 88%. Five years later, all of the myriad social-democratic parties that had embraced an unconditional revulsion for Aristide as their political raison d' tre were wiped off the electoral map in a crushing and definitive defeat. In the legislative elections of May 2000, the largest and most significant of these parties, Gerard Pierre-Charles' OPL, managed to win just one seat in the 83-member Chamber of Deputies. Like most other members of his profession and class, Dupuy is no doubt entitled to regret the fact that so unconventional a political organization as Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas happened to win 72 of these seats but perhaps he is not entitled to regret it in the name of "democracy" per se.

Whether Alex Dupuy likes it or not, Benoît's 2% is just about par for the course for Haiti's leading social democrats. Although they were wise enough not to challenge Aristide directly for the presidency in 2000, in the 2006 presidential elections Evans Paul polled 2.5% of the vote, and Serge Gilles, the long-time darling of French social democracy, 2.6%. As we shall see in a moment, however, mere numbers have never made much of an impression on Alex Dupuy.

What now about the strategic side of this first question? Here Dupuy knows that he is on slightly firmer ground, and we need to ponder his argument more carefully. He observes that in 1991 Aristide's government sought to pursue "an economic program that depended for its success on the cooperation with the bourgeoisie," but he notes that by occasionally raising the prospect of vigilante violence against the enemies of democracy, Aristide made such cooperation a virtual impossibility (129). Dupuy has in mind two notorious speeches given on 4 August and 27 September, speeches in which Aristide refused to rule out recourse to defensive violence as a last-ditch strategy whereby the people might protect the government they had elected against extra-legal pressure from the army, the Macoutes and the ruling class. Although hardly typical of Aristide's main priorities during these years his relentless emphasis on the non-violent struggle for social justice, conceived in the terms developed by liberation theology and its "preferential option for the poor" Dupuy is surely right to say that these pointed appeals to popular vigilance provided the enemies of Lavalas with an inexhaustible supply of damaging propaganda. In the 4 August speech in particular Aristide openly considered the pros and cons of recourse to "Pere Lebrun", a phrase that was guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of the Haitian elite and their proxies in the armed forces.

To be continued

- - - - -

Peter Hallward is a professor of philosophy at Middlesex University in London, England and the author of the upcoming book "Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment" to be published by Verso this fall. Although first published here, this review was written in February 2007.

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