[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
5439: Aristide in Waiting--Sunday NYTIMES Magazine-Wilentz (fwd)
From: Tequila Minsky <tminsky@ix.netcom.com>
November 5, 2000 Sunday New York Times Magazine
Aristide in Waiting
Haiti's reclusive former president is poised to
return to power after a five-year absence. The
country has changed. So has he. By AMY WILENTZ
Jean-Bertrand
Aristide is giving a
tour. he's talking
animatedly about the
weather and old friends
and landscaping as he
makes his way quickly
around to the front of
his imposing white
house in the Tabarre
suburb of
Port-au-Prince. We've
just left the
air-conditioning of his
office, and it's hot
outside, as usual. We're
walking through the
broad gardens, where
palms and banana trees
grow and where guards lounge on the periphery. And
then we come to the pool. It's a particularly nice pool,
with brick trim.
"So this is it?" I ask. We are standing at pool's edge.
The pump is on, and the water is gurgling cheerfully.
"Yes," he says, smiling. He opens up his palms in a
resigned gesture.
As if to say: See? It's really just a pool. Which, of
course, it isn't. The pool, like everything else about
Aristide these days, is the subject of fevered
speculation. It's easy to understand why. Since he left
office five years ago, the 47-year-old former president
of Haiti has hidden himself away in his big house in
Tabarre. The man who once led his people from the
altar of a poor man's church now lives in splendor in
the suburbs; the man who once never walked without
being carried along by the crowd now hardly ever
ventures out; the man who would never shut his mouth
in public now never opens it. Around this silence, a
thicket of rumor, gossip and conjecture has grown.
To his supporters (many of
whom must trudge miles for
drinking water), the pool is the
rightful reward for Aristide's
willingness to confront the
Duvalier regime, for his bravery
in facing down one military junta
after another and for his courage in leading the Haitian
people to their first free and fair elections. To his foes
(some of whom have their own swimming pools), it's a
symbol of his corruption, his abandonment of
democracy, his hunger for power. To just about
everyone, Tabarre, with its pool and gardens, is the
place Aristide has retreated to while Haiti has fallen
apart.
A decade after Aristide won his historic election, life
in Haiti has hardly improved. Poverty is unrelenting,
the environment remains degraded, infrastructure,
where it exists at all, is crumbling. Armed robberies,
kidnappings and gangland-style killings have all
increased. Bands of paid thugs pour into the streets of
Port-au-Prince during tense political moments and slash
and burn whatever their patrons don't like. Drug
trafficking, a relatively new entry in the list of Haitian
woes, has taken on a menacing intensity. And political
assassinations have become as much a feature of the
terrain as they were under the military regimes. The
most flagrant killing was the April murder of Jean
Dominique, Haiti's best-known journalist and a man of
unimpeachable integrity, in the parking lot of his radio
station.
These days, the questions surrounding Aristide have
taken on a fresh urgency, for in the next elections, now
scheduled to be held on Nov. 26, it is expected that
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected
president of Haiti, will become president once again.
n the old days, back in the mid-1980's, aristide
received visitors in a dark, sweltering little office
next to his church, which backed on La Saline, one of
Port-au-Prince's biggest and most insalubrious
shantytowns. The man they called Titid wore the
liberation theologian uniform of the day: either a
guayabera and jeans or a polyester leisure suit, and a
digital Casio wristwatch. Mosquitoes would plane
through the hot air as Aristide -- bug-eyed behind his
enormous glasses -- made fiery points about economic
oppression and the future enfranchisement of Haiti's
illiterate majority while a crowd of orphans and
widows and youth leaders and foreign journalists stood
talking just outside the door, waiting their turn. The
Casio went off every half-hour.
Now a receptionist in business clothes welcomes you
to Chez Aristide. She offers you coffee and escorts you
to a couch in the waiting room. Politicians, former army
officers, members of the elite, businessmen, exporters,
engineers, the national director of prisons -- they all
flock expectantly to the waiting room at Tabarre.
Aristide may not leave his house, but that doesn't mean
he doesn't hold power. (Haiti's elected president, Rene
Preval, was Aristide's chosen successor.) The
broad-chested men who plant themselves in the room's
comfortable chairs are carefully scheduled so that they
don't see one another, or carefully scheduled,
depending on Aristide's intentions, so that they do. (One
wonders: Are they welcomed into the house itself? Do
they know about the special column in the living room,
near the hallway to the kitchen, behind which a person
can stand and hear everything that is said without being
seen? Aristide showed this to me years ago, just after
the house was finished.)
No journalists are on the ex-presidential horaire,
however, because Aristide does not speak to the press
these days. The only reason I am invited is that I wrote
a book years ago, before he became a politician, that
included chapters about him, and because we have
known each other for more than a decade. But I haven't
been to Haiti in six years, and we haven't spoken in
four. Before he was killed, even Jean Dominique, once
a close friend of Aristide's, hadn't spoken to Aristide in
person in more than four years, except for one brief
encounter at a party.
hen I first see Aristide, he emerges from behind
a door to take me into his office. It's bright and
white and very presidential. A huge desk presides over
the room, and the Haitian flag appears in various
corners -- even, in miniature form, sprouting from the
desktop. A closed door separates the office and waiting
room from the rest of the sprawling house, and
air-conditioning keeps the hungry bugs at bay.
Everything is light and breezy and cool. Down near the
gate to the long driveway, a few nameless
sweat-soaked sycophants sit in the sun on rickety
chairs.
"I welcome everyone
here," Aristide says,
extending an arm to take
in the broad expanse of
his office. He's wearing
pleated pants, a tie and
a crisp white shirt with
French cuffs and gold
cuff links. His jacket
goes on and off. "Not
only street kids, but
also politicians and
businessmen of all
stripes. I know this one
or that one may leave
my office and give an order to have me killed, may
already have put out a contract, but I receive him with
respect and courtesy -- even those who participated in
the coup against me. I cannot nourish a sentiment of
hatred in my heart. It would be bad for me and bad for
the country."
A close personal adviser interprets: "What Titid is
telling you is that he's inviting everyone and talking to
everyone. This means that no one knows with whom he
is making alliances. This makes all of them nervous.
They are all competing against each other for his
favor."
Aristide acknowledges this.
"Things are better for the country if there is
competition," he says, smiling broadly. Formerly an
open socialist, it amuses him to use the language of
capitalism. "But these people are not used to
competition. They are used to a situation in which each
has a monopoly in his own area. I'm trying to change
that, little by little."
His adviser interprets: "What he means is that he's
keeping them on their toes. They're not sure whom he
prefers. This way, he ends up on top of the heap, with
everyone else fighting each other below, instead of
undermining him."
Or so he hopes. There is a feeling
of secrecy about Aristide these
days that was not so pronounced
back when he was making his name
in Haitian politics. Back then, he
didn't have much need for
Machiavellian ploys. He ascended
to power by taking on the regime of
Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier
in a series of powerful and
vituperative sermons that helped
fuel a popular revolt. After
Duvalier fled the country in 1986,
Aristide spent the next four years
railing against political candidates
and U.S.-inspired elections before
finally declaring himself a
candidate and winning the
U.S.-inspired election of 1990 with
67 percent of the vote, to the
consternation of pre-Clinton
Washington.
It was only after the coup against him -- which came
less than a year after he was inaugurated -- that Aristide
really learned to play politics. It is an understatement to
say that the coup was a devastating blow to his sense of
his own power and ability to judge character. Members
of his own presidential guard were involved. The
attack was masterminded by Raoul Cedras, a man
Aristide had promoted to head the Haitian Army on the
advice of the American Embassy. While the coup
unfolded, Aristide was in the hands of the military, and
there were moments when it was unclear whether he
would escape with his life. He talks about the coup as
if it happened yesterday, and he is still planning and
plotting to ensure that such a thing never happens again.
Cedras ran the country for three years while Aristide
lived in a paralyzed exile in Washington and negotiated
with the Clinton administration for his return to Haiti.
After he went back home on a United States government
plane in 1994, he ruled for only one more year, until the
constitutional end of his five-year term. "Aristide had
one year in office, three years in Washington and one
more year in office," says an official from the ruling
Lavalas Party, who refused to be named. (Lavalas,
founded by Aristide, means "flood" or "avalanche" in
Creole.) "He feels he was denied his full term." This
accounts for his interference in the day-to-day workings
of Haitian politics.
"His behavior is only natural if you think about it," says
a foreign diplomat who knows him well and who
likewise spoke only on condition of anonymity. "When
he failed to control the army, he had a coup on his
hands. When his party failed to control the legislature,
he found his government paralyzed, unable to pass the
simplest legislation. I think he's determined never to be
nave again."
What the coup has meant for Aristide, psychologically,
is that he has developed the finely tuned, constant,
high-level paranoia that is not uncommon among
Haitian politicians. The definition of a paranoid in
Haiti? Someone who understands the situation.
"I feel it is my responsibility to the Haitian people not
to expose myself to danger except for good reason,"
Aristide says, explaining why -- even though he loves
to socialize -- he doesn't dine at friends' houses, doesn't
go out into crowds and doesn't make campaign
speeches.
There is also the matter of his family. In the old days,
he was a priest with no wife and kids. Now, his
Haitian-American wife, Mildred, whom he met during
his American exile, pops in and out of the office,
sometimes remaining to participate in our conversation,
as she does with other visitors, including officials from
the United States. Halfway through our talk, his
daughters, Michale and Christine, ages 2 and 4, wander
in. They are like little candy girls, with bows in their
hair and charming smiles that look just like their
father's when he was a tiny boy. They kiss visitors
hello and goodbye. Aristide talks to them in an adoring
voice and bends over to hear their whispered replies.
Their mother stands surveying the scene, her arms
folded, amused. When the girls leave the house for
school or for camp, they travel with security.
Watching his two little girls traipse up the stairway
behind his office, I remember that Aristide once told
me that he thought people with children could never be
good revolutionaries.
n the old days, Aristide had different children.
Waldeck was one of them, and there is a picture of
him on the wall of Aristide's waiting room. It's taken
from a helicopter, and it shows Waldeck smiling
broadly up from within a huge crowd of people. It was
taken from one of the U.S. helicopters that flew
Aristide and the entire government in exile from the
Port-au-Prince airport to a reception at the palace
downtown on their first day back.
When I was living in Haiti, I used to call Waldeck and
his friends -- Ayiti, Ti Sonny, Ti Johnny -- my boys.
Really, though, they were Aristide's boys, four of the
tiny ringleaders of the pack of orphaned or abandoned
boys Aristide took under his wing back in the early
1980's. When I first knew them, they were little, all
around 10 years old; they played soccer in the
churchyard with punctured balls that lay flat as
pancakes until you kicked them; they played marbles
hunched over in the dust of the dry season, and at night,
under a single bare bulb, they slapped down poker
games using incomplete or mismatched decks. Aristide
said back then that he hoped to build a new Haiti with
kids like this. They were spirited, intelligent and,
above all, resourceful.
It is hard, though, to imagine building a new Haiti with
them today. At 18, Ayiti died of tuberculosis. One
evening two years ago, Ti Johnny was dragged from
one end of town to another by a gang of drug dealers. In
the end, they forced him to lie down on the street at the
Leogane gate, where traffic from one shantytown meets
traffic from another, and then they shot him through the
head. By then, Aristide -- now a former president of
Haiti -- was living in Tabarre, where the boys who
were left visited him and sometimes swam in his pool.
Ti Sonny, a minuscule scamp with a sweet voice and
big eyes, loyal as a lap dog back in the old days,
decided last year -- with the help of some of Aristide's
political rivals -- that he wanted to run for mayor
against the candidate from Aristide's party. "Can you
imagine?" Aristide asks, shaking his head, both irritated
and astonished. "Ti Sonny as mayor?" Ti Sonny lost.
Waldeck is the only success story in a country where
success is a very relative term. Waldeck went to work
in the Presidential Palace as a messenger. Recently, he
saw someone there taking money, and he reported it to
his superiors, he says. Instead of a promotion for his
honesty, however, he was asked to leave because of
concerns for his safety. He's out of a job, now, but
survives with the help of his friends in the palace. He
says he feels ashamed about receiving help and not
working, but he has a baby coming and a wife who is
also unemployed. His life still centers on Aristide, and
he still hopes that one day, when Titid is back in the
palace, there will be something for him there too.
ene Preval, another aristide protege, has fared
better than the boys: he's president of the country.
Aristide's handpicked successor, a former baker, greets
me on the steps of the enormous tridomed Presidential
Palace, which squats like a family of whitewashed
toadstools in the center of Port-au-Prince. Preval leads
me through the palace's towering formal doors up the
grand, red-carpeted stairway from the reception room,
through security, past the official meeting rooms, down
a marble hallway to an interior staircase and then down
into the residential wing. He is wearing a guayabera
and pressed pants. His face has the look of a Pierrot
clown, perpetually sad, mouth and eyes turned down.
You can easily imagine a teardrop painted on his cheek.
"I was just talking to President Aristide on the phone,"
President Preval says.
The two men are close friends. When I was in
Aristide's office, Preval called. When I was at Preval's,
Aristide called. But from the market ladies in the
streets to the American diplomats who make a point of
visiting Aristide as well as Preval whenever they come
to Haiti, everyone agrees that Aristide is the man in
charge and that Preval is just keeping the presidential
seat warm until his predecessor becomes his successor.
Down in the living quarters of the palace, the president
plunks himself onto the couch opposite a big-screen
television, then hops up to find a tape. "Look at this," he
says. He squishes himself back into the couch and
fiddles with the remote. "Look."
And there is President Preval himself in a green field
on the video. The mute is on. He's visiting a
sugar-cane-processing project, he says. At his side is a
light-skinned man who looks like an aging French
movie star. This is Jean Dominique.
"There he is," the president says, pointing with the
remote. There are tears in his eyes. Dominique was
killed not long after the videotape was made.
Preval has not recovered from Dominique's death.
"This is a lonely job," he says of the presidency, which
he will leave on Feb. 7, when his term is up. "I counted
on Jean. He was my closest adviser." He pauses the
video on a close-up of Dominique's catlike face. "When
I didn't understand, he was always there to explain."
"Who killed him?" I ask.
"Who can say?" the president responds. He shakes his
head. "We are investigating. We don't know." He
pushes the stop button.
"I'll show you what I really like," Preval says, standing
and heading out of the den. We ride down in an
elevator with a bodyguard. The president pushes open a
door, and we are outside on a pathway to the green
lawn. He leads me out into the gardens. It is dusk.
Security men accompany us, but at an almost discreet
distance, like shadows. When the president walks, he
glides -- it's slow and even. He guides me to a side
garden at the edge of the palace grounds and points
down. Below our feet is a rectangular fish pond.
There's not much light, but as my eyes become
accustomed to the dark I can see the fish swirling. The
pond is overpopulated. "Like Haiti," Preval says. A
smile glimmers across his face. There are more ponds,
also packed with fish swimming gill to gill. Preval says
he may build more ponds if he has time before his
presidency runs out.
This is his pisciculture project. "More than a thousand
fish," he says. He believes the fish ponds will one day
help feed the Haitian people. Above the ponds are
chicken coops, with open-wire flooring. This is what
the fish feed on.
ois (Papa Doc) Duvalier had his enemy's decapitated
head brought to him for a consultation while he was in
the bath; his son, Baby Doc, killed a baby as a sacrifice
before he and his money sneaked out of Haiti and into
exile. Now Aristide is at the center of things, and the
certainty of his return to the presidency combined with
his continuing silence have fanned the flames of talk.
Tout sa ou we, se pa sa.
It's a simple Creole phrase, but telling. Roughly
translated, it means: Everything you see? That's not it. It
means that nothing and no one can be taken at face
value, including Aristide, and including the person who
says to you Tout sa ou we, se pa sa. This neoproverb
has a touch of humor about it, but under the
circumstances, it's not funny.
There have been rumors about drug trafficking and
money laundering and bribery and fraud, all of which
Aristide refuses to dignify with a response. The
unsolved murder of Dominique has added to the
confusion. Though the Preval government has asked Ira
Kurzban, a Miami lawyer, to head its probe into the
slaying, the rumor mill has made much of the
investigation's slowness.
When Aristide discusses the killing of his old friend,
his face is inexpressive, but often when he is angry his
face goes intensely blank. "Look to the usual suspects,"
he says, sitting at one end of the couch in his office. By
this he means the people he used to call the
bourgeoisie, the economic elite, the power brokers of
Haiti and their foreign friends, the people who used to
be suspected when peasant leaders and union types and
liberation theologians and journalists were killed or
kidnapped. Of course, today Aristide numbers many of
those bourgeois and their foreign friends among his
frequent visitors. He shrugs. "You know how
treacherous the scene is here," he says.
he problem is, Aristide has a unique talent for
giving his enemies ammunition against him. The
municipal and legislative elections of May 21 are one
good example. Aristide's Lavalas Party won the
balloting in what looked like an overwhelming victory.
Although foreign officials had predicted a low turnout,
huge numbers of eligible voters went to the polls. The
results of the elections: Aristide's party won 72 of the
83 seats in the chamber of deputies and 18 out of 19
seats that were up for grabs in the 27-member senate. It
was a stunning victory that would grant Aristide, should
he win the presidential election, the first cooperative
legislature since his party came to power in 1990.
But tout sa ou we, se pa sa.
The Haitian electoral council, whose personnel were
overwhelmingly Lavalas, miscalculated the balloting.
Nine candidates had questionable victories. It would
have been easy to admit the mistake and make some
kind of immediate rectification, perhaps demanding that
all such candidates participate in a runoff.
But herein lies the mystery of Aristide. Citing concerns
about constitutionality and Haiti's sovereignty, he
seemed to scoff at the idea of putting those candidates
up for the runoff, or of redoing the vote, even though the
victory would have no doubt gone to Lavalas, though
probably not on so grand a scale.
Aristide missed the point, and with his refusal to
rethink the results, he handed his political rivals a great
strategic advantage. Those elections have since been
deemed fraudulent. As a result, the Organization of
American States and the United States have -- for now
-- abandoned their plans to help organize and monitor
the coming presidential vote, which will effectively
delegitimize any president elected in that balloting. The
Clinton administration has said it will impose
economic sanctions on Haiti if the government fails to
toughen its democratic procedures before the election.
And the Haitian opposition has leapt at the chance to
boycott a vote that it always knew it would lose.
I ask Aristide about
this, and he closes his
eyes for a second as if
to will himself into
patience. "We'll deal
with all this," he says.
"I'm an optimist, and I
like to believe that
everyone is of good
will, even if that's hard
sometimes, even when
they are plainly not."
Meanwhile, the
Americans are worried about what will happen to a
future Aristide government if it does not have
international legitimacy and wads of foreign aid. So is
Aristide: it's easy to envision another coup should he
arrive in power with no money to do anything for any of
his thousands of starving and expectant constituents.
As chances for a Middle East resolution fade, it has
become a priority for the Clinton administration to fix
Haiti, one of its few remaining supposed foreign policy
triumphs. American emissaries, and O.A.S. officials,
have been shuttling between Aristide and the
fragmented mini-parties of the opposition to try to
cobble together some kind of agreement that will adjust
the incorrect legislative vote. The painstaking
to-and-fro may result in a delayed presidential election.
"It's essential that we reach a resolution on the May 21
elections and proceed as rapidly as possible to
presidential elections so that we can have a smooth
transition on inauguration day," says Donald Steinberg,
the State Department's special Haiti coordinator. "We
would view it as dangerous and destabilizing to have a
vacuum of presidential power when Preval leaves
office."
But the opposition is digging in its heels. "We can no
longer speak of a 'democratic transition' under
Lavalas," says Jean-Claude Bajeux, a human rights
advocate. Bajeux's voice is full of bitterness when he
speaks of Aristide. "The mystery of mysteries is why
Aristide did this," he says, referring to the disputed
election. "I suppose there are psychological reasons for
wanting a 100 percent vote. There is a desire for total
power. Mwen se sel met peyi-a, sel kok ki kapab
chante." He translates: I am the sole master of the
country, the only cock who can crow.
Interestingly, among Aristide's biggest foes are
intellectuals like Bajeux -- academics, journalists,
human rights people, clergymen -- many of whom
originally backed him. And Aristide's party in turn
seems to be responding to the rebellion of the
intellectuals, many of whom are members of the
country's light-skinned elite. On state television, which
is run by Lavalas, there are now long segments that
show crowds of black Haitians demonstrating in the
streets. In other programming, ceremonies of voodoo --
sometimes considered by the elite to be the religion of
the poor black masses -- go on for hours. Although
there are certainly light-skinned people who still
support Aristide and certainly dark-skinned ones who
have rejected him, I began to notice -- as I went from
one estranged supporter of Aristide's to the next -- that
the great majority of them were lighter-skinned
Haitians.
The opposition is increasingly
frightened by Aristide's
populism: they call his base of
support (in French) le lumpen,
while he calls his constituency
pep-la (in Creole) -- the people.
Embryonic dictatorship, these
members of the opposition now
call the Preval-Aristide
government. They point out that
Preval dismissed the fractious
elected legislature in early 1999
and that until recently, when the
new legislature was seated after
the disputed May election, he
governed -- if you can call it that
-- by decree. They claim, too, that Aristide, like both
Duvaliers before him, will soon be a president with a
rubber-stamp senate and a chamber of deputies to serve
him.
"In the first meeting of the new legislature under
Aristide," Bajeux predicts, "a law abolishing the
one-term limit on the presidency" will be passed. Then,
Bajeux implies, Aristide, like the Duvaliers, would be
able to be president-for-life, if he chooses. If he
remains popular.
Those around Aristide deny that he has plans to make
successive presidential terms legal or to serve
successive terms. "And why should he bother?" says an
American diplomat who insisted on anonymity. "During
his off terms, he can simply rule, as he has done, from
the sidelines."
n the end, what will Aristide do with his power?
According to Americans involved in the recent
electoral negotiations, he has promised that once in
office, he will do "all the right things" -- but there are
many who might not find that reassuring. His actions
will be those of a clearly changed man. Unlike the
Aristide of a decade ago, Aristide now understands the
baroque complexity of Haitian politics, and that the
political game -- nationally and internationally -- is at
least as important as the people's will. Whether he can
play both sides is another question. Powerful as he is,
he was unable to rein in Ti Sonny. Is he then expected
to be able to control big men with guns? He has
controlled Preval, but then Preval wanted to be
controlled, and he and Preval have not done very well
directing the country.
Years ago as he was preparing to leave power,
Aristide told me that during the next regime, he would
"sit, and play guitar, and watch while someone else
took the blame." As it turns out, he and Preval seem to
have fiddled while Haiti has disintegrated. He could
afford this unforgivable lapse because, although pep-la
were starving and struggling, he remained fairly certain
that no other leader could emerge to guide them, and
that while he was waiting to be reunited with them,
they, too, would wait for him. Their long wait is almost
at an end. Aristide should hope that their patience is
not.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001105mag-aristide.html