----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Mensah" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, March 07, 2004 1:18 PM
Subject: [unioNews] Fwd: Haiti endures storm


Mar. 7, 2004. 01:00 AM
<H3>Haiti endures storm</H3>
<B><i>With the streets calming and smoke clearing, it's clear the
Haitian bloodshed could have been worse</i></B>


As bad as it was, it could have been worse.

If there is any consolation to be plucked from the rubble by the long-
suffering people of Haiti - already the Western Hemisphere's most
impoverished land - this might well be it: The torment and death they
have lately endured could well have been even worse.

During the past few weeks, Haitians devoted themselves once again to
the unruly business of regime change, and they went about it in the
traditional Haitian way, with sound and fury and no little killing,
followed by one man's last frantic dash for an airplane.

This Caribbean passion play wasn't pretty to watch, and its ill
effects will be felt for a very long time, but Haiti at least managed
to avert a catastrophe even greater than the spiral of bloodshed and
destruction that spun out of control early last month, sweeping
southward across the country until it stopped at Port-au-Prince, the
crowded and throbbing capital.

"There was loss of life, and that's a shame," says Anne Sainte-Marie
of Amnesty International in Montreal, "but there wasn't a massacre.
Given the history of Haiti, that's an improvement."

When the country's democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, fled the country aboard a private, U.S.-supplied aircraft
in the early hours last Sunday, he didn't really have much choice -
it was either leave or die - but he probably wound up saving more
Haitian necks than his own.

Once the former priest and leftist firebrand was gone, the violence
finally began to dampen down, although there is no guarantee it won't
flare up again, as at least some Haitians engage in a rite of
political passage known locally as dechoukage, the extermination
or "uprooting" of all remnants of the ancien régime.

Already, much of Port-au-Prince is a gutted shambles, and the same
holds true for many other towns to the north.

More than 100 people are dead, and hundreds have been wounded.
Countless others have lost their homes or their livelihoods.

The country has no viable police force. Its legislative assembly is
unable to function. Its already feeble economy has suffered further
debilitating damage.

But it could have been worse. The entire country of 8 million people
could have gone up in flames, but it didn't.

That said, the prospects Haiti now faces are exceedingly grim.

"It's hard to be optimistic," says Joanne Mariner, Human Rights
Watch's deputy director for the Americas. "We have a number of
reasons to be concerned about Haiti's future."

Say what you will about Aristide - that he was uncompromising,
unreliable, given to harsh methods and probably corrupt.

It's likely all true, but just look at some of the gangsters who last
week forced him to abandon Haiti's gleaming white National Palace,
gangsters who now are jostling for a share of power in a country
that's pretty much up for grabs.

The leaders of the armed rebels who marched into Port-au-Prince last
week include men such as Louis Jodel Chamblain, formerly the second-
most powerful officer in FRAPH, acronym for the Front pour
l'Avancement et Progrès d'Haiti, an absurdly misnamed network of pro-
government thugs that terrorized much of Haiti until it was disbanded
by Aristide when he was restored to power in 1994, after being
overthrown by the military three years earlier.

Chamblain was later convicted in absentia for the 1993 assassination
of pro-democracy activist Antoine Izméry and for carrying out the
notorious Raboteau massacre of 1994, in which some 20 people were
murdered.

"His past is about as bad as you can get in human rights terms," says
Mariner. "He's really, from our perspective, the worst of the worst."

Now, Chamblain is back, along with many other stalwarts of the right-
wing security and military apparatus that misruled Haiti in bygone
times, using means both brutal and corrupt.

Not only are they back, but the old guard seem to be eerily popular,
greeted by cheering throngs from Gonaives, where the rebellion began
early last month, to Cap-Haitien in the north and Port-au-Prince in
the south.

"These are very unsavoury characters," says Robert Fatton, a
political science professor at the University of Virginia and author
of Haiti's Predatory Republic. "The most despicable people come back,
and they are welcomed."

Either Haitians have very short memories or they realize that, in a
lawless land, there's no real choice but to smile and wave at the
guys with the guns.

From a distance during these chaotic weeks, it may have seemed at
times that Haiti's entire population had turned into louts and
bullies and bloodthirsty savages. But that impression is completely
wrong.

The vast majority of Haitians reacted to their country's crisis the
same way sensible people would in any other land.

They locked their doors (those who have doors), remained in their
houses (those who have houses) and kept their heads down. When the
opportunity arose, they came to each other's aid.

"There are a lot of well-intentioned people in Haiti," says Sainte-
Marie.

Unfortunately, there are also a significant number of ill-intentioned
people in Haiti, and they tend to carry guns. They also tend to want
two main things - money and power.

In Haiti, it's almost impossible to have one without the other.
Almost completely bereft of natural resources, the country has no
real sources of wealth except those that come with political office.

"Power becomes a business," says Fatton, "and it becomes a very
lucrative business."

Those who have power, desperately want to keep it. Those who lose it,
want it back.

A champion of Haiti's abused and impoverished majority, Aristide was
swept into the presidency in 1990, becoming the country's first
democratically elected leader in nearly 200 years of independence.

At the time, he claimed a personal net worth of just $500.

Haiti's traditional ruling class - a joint venture between a few
senior army officers and a small, mainly light-skinned economic
elite - has never gotten over it.

They threw out the defrocked priest for the first time in 1991.

Three years later, thanks to a Democratic president named Bill
Clinton in the White House and to a military intervention by 21,000
American troops, Haiti's traditional rulers were obliged to accept
Aristide's return.

But they definitely didn't like, and they liked it even less when
Aristide promptly dissolved the Haitian army, replacing it with a
national police force.

The violent events of the past weeks are really just the most recent
episode in a conflict that has hounded the country ever since
Aristide first took power. Much has changed during those years - not
least, Aristide himself.

It would take a rare and special human being to govern Haiti without
resorting to some rough measures or without pocketing a bribe or two.

Aristide, it is clear, did both - and his net worth increased
substantially from that initial $500 grub stake.

"The guy was clearly corrupt to some extent," says Fatton. "Whether
he was as corrupt as they say, I'm not sure."

Some of those around him certainly were. In 1998, the most popular
song in that year's Carnival celebrations in Port-au-Prince was
entitled "Grands Mangeurs" - Big Eaters - a reference to the
politicians and senior bureaucrats in Fanmi Lavalas, or Avalanche
Family, Aristide's political party.

They roared around the capital in their $60,000 SUVs, dined at the
city's best restaurants and built mansions that cost vastly more than
someone on a legitimate government salary could possibly afford.

Meanwhile, it's widely agreed that Haiti was becoming a significant
transshipment point for Colombian cocaine bound for the U.S. market.

"There was no longer any transparency in the government," says
Fatton. "So, there were all kinds of opportunities for corruption.
Clearly, there was a level of corruption."

Already hated by his long-standing enemies, Aristide also managed to
alienate many of his erstwhile supporters over the long, rocky years
of his rule.

In a country long policed by brutes, he consorted with thugs. He set
up partisan outfits known officially as "popular organizations" but
really just armed gangs that roamed Haiti's cities by night,
intimidating Aristide's political opponents.

They came to be known as chimere, a Creole word that means a kind of
monster in Haitian folklore.

Journalists who challenged Aristide were routinely harassed. In
several cases, they were killed - and no one was ever charged.

Perhaps worst of all, Aristide failed to improve life for the legions
of his country's poor. The vast, despairing slums of Port-au-Prince -
where the searing squalor probably cannot be imagined without being
seen - did not diminish in size. Instead, they burgeoned.

Conditions did not get better. They got worse.

In 2000, after ruling from behind the scenes for several years,
Aristide was returned to the presidency in elections that were
boycotted by the opposition in protest against an earlier vote for
the country's national assembly, a vote that was seriously marred by
fraud.

In the years that followed, tensions between Aristide and his
opponents steadily worsened, violence increased, the economy went
nowhere and then - a month ago, in the central Haitian city of
Gonaives - the final armed rebellion began.

It needn't have ended with Aristide's overthrow. At almost any point
prior to his desperate departure by air last Sunday, Aristide's
presidency could have been saved.

All it would have taken is a few hundred well-armed soldiers -
possibly American, possibly French. But no such soldiers came, or not
until it was too late for the beleaguered leader.

"If they had wanted to save him, they could have," says Fatton,
referring to Paris and Washington.

"But they didn't want to."

<B>The French had been upset with Aristide for some time, annoyed at his
demands that Paris pay reparations to Haiti for the predations of
colonial rule, which ended exactly 200 years ago, in 1804.

Some speculate that French President Jacques Chirac seized upon the
Haitian conflict as a perfect opportunity to co-operate fully with
the United States and thereby warm a bilateral relationship that had
been practically frozen by French opposition to last year's U.S.
invasion of Iraq.

<i>Tant pis, M. Aristide.</i>

For their part, U.S. Republicans have never liked Aristide,
considering him a leftist, a demagogue and anything but a team
player.</B>

They shed no tears when he was ousted in 1991, would not have
restored him to power in 1994, and evidently did not beat their
chests in anguish when he climbed aboard an airplane at the Toussaint
L'Ouverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince and flew away to
the Central African Republic.

In fact, they supplied the plane.

Aristide didn't have any options. His own police force was incapable
of defending him and the private detail of bodyguards he rented from
a company based in California reportedly declined to do so.

The ousted president subsequently charged that he was kidnapped by
Americans, which the U.S. government stoutly denies.

Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe, either way, it comes to the same
thing.

"He had no other choice," says Fatton. "He could either exit and save
his life or he would be dead. He was given an offer he couldn't
refuse."

Now that he's gone, Haiti is confronted by a future that is no less
troubling - in fact, even more troubling - than it was before the
former president bid the country his last adieu.

What Haiti needs now, say Fatton and others, is a professional police
force that is well-equipped, well-trained and very, very well-paid,
with salaries generous enough that police will turn down bribes even
from drug-traffickers.

The country requires an independent and professional judiciary, and
it must end its long tradition of granting impunity to murderers,
including Louis Jodel Chamblain.

It must have new legislative and presidential elections. Some say
these should be run - not simply monitored, but run - by an
international agency such as the United Nations.

"Then," says Fatton, "after that, you have to deal with the real
problems."

In Haiti's case, the real problems are deeply rooted and all but
intractable.

The country survives on international aid and foreign remittances,
and it has few domestic resources to exploit, apart from an
inexpensive labour force and a potential - not now, but maybe
someday - for tourism.

Already, Haiti is an ecological disaster-in-the-making. In the past
dozen years or so, the country's already depleted forest cover has
been further reduced by two-thirds and continues to shrink, as
hapless peasants cut down trees in order to make charcoal, about the
only commodity they have to sell.

In both the countryside and the cities, the great majority of Haiti's
people remain desperately poor, and they don't have many prospects of
improving their lot.

Still, Canada and other countries are pitching in to help. Defence
Minister David Pratt announced on Friday that Canada will send 450
troops to Haiti in order to help preserve the peace for at least
three months. Ottawa may help out in other ways, as will many other
governments and international agencies.

<B>For Haiti, the future is bound to be a long, hard haul, but the
country's people have shown themselves to be extraordinarily
resilient, even in the face of withering hardships.

Meanwhile, if it's any consolation at all, the events of the past few
weeks - bad as they were - could have been worse.

It's a small thing, no doubt, but consolations usually are.</B>


Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved.



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