Haiti’s Collapse

By Amy Wilentz

February 13, 2004, The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040301&s=wilentz

The Aristide administration, which has been overthrown once
already, has been egalitarian in the lives destroyed during its
time: Among its dead can be counted the president’s former friends
and his foes, democrats and supporters of dictatorship. Among the
victims have been policemen and prisoners and politicians; rich
men and poor, journalists and slum-dwellers, human-rights workers
and doctors and businessmen. Almost no sector has been untouched.

No one can argue that Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s presidency has been
in any way successful other than this: It exists. He was elected
in 1990 with enormous hope by an overwhelming majority in a
legitimate election — and quickly overthrown by the Haitian Army
and its friends. In 1994 he was returned to power through the good
will of the Clinton Administration, in the optimistic expectation
that he would be able to turn Haiti around. He was not able to do
so for a combination of reasons, some political, some personal and
most having to do with his inability to conduct a happy
relationship either with the Bush Administration or with his own
business and intellectual elite. Washington also cut off huge
portions of aid, which cannot have helped Aristide’s standing.
Still, a fatal combination of arrogance and naïveté on his part
made Aristide’s difficult position much more intractable.
Meanwhile, the Haitian opposition has been coddled and pushed
toward the depths of intransigence by Aristide’s detractors in the
US government, in both Haiti and in Washington. By now, with the
country well on its way to chaos, many argue that Aristide has
exhausted the electorate’s patience and must be replaced.

Yet now — as he finally begins to recognize how powerful the
opposition has become despite all his political jockeying and
playacting — should be the time for all friends of Haiti,
especially in the US government, to support Aristide’s
continuation at the helm: not because he is good but because he is
president. Aristide is a transitional figure and not the best of
these. He is no Mandela, and he does not have the political
maturity to control the violent forces that swirl through Haitian
politics — no easy job. Yet the future of Haiti hinges on support
for institutions and for a state based on law.

As part of the unrest, a gang element managed to take over
Gonaïves, one of Haiti’s largest cities — a ramshackle affair of
shantytowns and gingerbread houses atop salt flats and roads made
undrivable by potholes, with few enough institutions as it is.
This gang, which styles itself the Cannibal Army or, in its latest
incarnation, the Artibonite Resistance Front (perhaps more
palatable to the international community), has burned down the
courthouse and the prison in Gonaïves, released the prison
population and forced the mayor to flee. Though there may be
elaborate and in some cases good excuses for these actions, taken
as a trend they do not bode well for the rule of law. In the wake
of the Gonaïves takeover, ten lesser cities have fallen to such
forces, each in differing circumstances but all motivated by
encouragement from sectors of the opposition and by the sense that
Aristide is about to fall. That will not be helped by State
Department spokesman Richard Boucher’s hints on February 9 that a
solution to the situation might not necessarily include President
Aristide. Three of the towns have been retaken by the government.

The numbers of Aristide’s detractors, their unwillingness to stop
their protests even in the face of police brutality and killings
and their takeover of Gonaïves and other towns have brought a new
humility to Aristide, which sits rather uncomfortably on his proud
shoulders. Still, the situation has been volatile enough to force
him to make necessary concessions, under pressure from the
Organization of American States and Caribbean Community, to the
opposition. Because the opposition is swollen with self-importance
in the wake of so many bloody victories in the countryside, it may
not respond to Aristide’s eleventh-hour overtures. It was not
moved by a huge outpouring of support for him in the streets of
Port-au-Prince on the recent anniversary of the fall of Duvalier.

It may be too late for Aristide. Rarely has a leader failed so
grossly to rise to a historic occasion. When he returned to power,
he bravely disbanded the Haitian Army and then promptly permitted
a kind of mass civilian militarization without insuring his
continuing control over it. A remnant of the old army is
supporting and perhaps leading the current chaos. But in hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of instances, it is Aristide’s own toughs who
have turned against him. Someone has convinced them that he no
longer represents Haiti’s future; no doubt someone with money. In
a country as poor as Haiti, the man with more money to spend will
win in the end (as in the favelas of Brazil and the slums of
Colombia), because it is so very hard to maintain the high moral
ground when no one’s paying you to do it and the kids are starving
back in the village or your one-room shack.

And the miserable street — with its thugs and its slum-dwellers,
with its students and bricklayers and flat-tire fixers and car-
wash boys, with its orphans and preachers and market ladies and
tap-tap drivers, with its cart-pullers and trough-cleaners, its
seamstresses and tailors, its cock-fighters and garbage-pickers,
numbers-runners, whores and money-changers — is Haiti’s political
steamroller. The gods must help the Haitian politician the street
has finally turned against — nothing else will. It will be
interesting to see who will reward the "resistance" for its
courage, and how. If Aristide must fall, let us hope still for
real, meaningful elections in Haiti, soon. But let us not expect
them.

[Amy Wilentz, an associate professor of journalism at Columbia
University, is the author of ’The Rainy Season: Haiti Since
Duvalier’ (Simon & Schuster, 1989).]

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.