excerpts from the book
Damning the Flood:
Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment
by Peter Hallward
Verso, 2007, paperback
pxxiii
True political freedom is as limited in Haiti as it is anywhere
on the planet. It is limited by the fragility of an economy that
remains profoundly vulnerable to international pressure. It is
limited by a rigid and highly polarized social structure that
isolates a small and very concentrated elite from the rest of
the population. It is also limited by a whole range of strategic
and institutional factors: the persistence of neo-imperial intervention,
of elite and foreign control over the military or paramilitary
security forces, of elite and foreign manipulation of the media,
of the judiciary, of non-governmental organizations, of the educational
and religious establishments, of the electoral and political systems,
and so on. Taken together these things make it extremely difficult
to sustain any far-reaching challenge to the status quo.
The prospects for such a challenge declined
still further when the dictatorial Francois Duvalier became president
of Haiti in the late 1950s. With the help of a fearsome new paramilitary
force known as the Tontons Macoutes, Duvalier established the
most violently repressive regime in the island's history. Thanks
in part to the support of Haiti's most powerful neighbor, the
United States, the essential features of this regime survived
Francois Duvalier's death and replacement by his son Jean-Claude
in 1971.
In spite of many obstacles, however, in
the mid-1980s a remarkable political movement emerged in opposition
to the Duvalierist dictatorship. Pressure from this movement forced
the hopelessly decadent jean-Claude into exile in early 1986;
in an attempt to limit any more far-reaching changes the army
then returned Haiti to direct military rule. The next few years
were witness to a dramatic struggle for power. Against the army
and the elite, a broad coalition of progressive forces waged a
courageous and inventive campaign for democratic reform. Like
Duvalier before them, a succession of military rulers could only
suppress growing demands for change by resorting to unacceptably
public levels of violence. In the late 1980s unrelenting repression
brought Haiti to the brink of revolution.
In 1990 this protracted struggle culminated
in a watershed election victory for the popular anti-Duvalierist
movement that became known as Lavalas - a Kreyol word meaning
"avalanche" or "flood", as well as "the
mass of the people" or "everyone together" - and
its presidential candidate, the liberation theologian and grassroots
activist Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide's election signaled
an end to decades of authoritarian rule. Inaugurated in February
1991 in an atmosphere of exuberant collective enthusiasm, his
government began to implement a number of desperately needed reforms
and started to dismantle the structures of military and paramilitary
oppression that had dominated life on the island all through the
twentieth century. The campaign for the democratic liberation
of Haiti was now well and truly underway.
But so was the elite's drive to contain
and reverse this liberation. In September 1991, just seven months
after Aristide took power, the army overthrew his government and
killed many hundreds of its supporters. Nine long years later,
in the autumn of 2000, Aristide was again elected president with
another landslide majority. Although it cost the elite and its
allies more time and effort to get rid of him a second time, a
further coup duly followed in February 2004. But whereas the first
coup was widely condemned as a major political crime, the second
was largely ignored. Whereas the coup of 1991 triggered an international
campaign for the restoration of Haitian democracy, the disastrous
consequences of 2004 met and continue to meet with widespread
resignation or indifference, if not approval.
pxxiv
When the Haitian army deposed [Haitian President Jean-Bertrand]
Aristide in 1991, much of the world was appalled; when members
of this same army helped the US and France to oust him in 2004,
no-one seemed to care. What had changed? Although twice elected
with massive majorities, by 2004 most mainstream international
analysts had begun to denounce Aristide as an enemy of democracy.
Although political violence declined dramatically during his years
in office, by 2004 he was regularly condemned as an enemy of human
rights. Although still immensely popular among the poor, he was
attacked as aloof and corrupt. Although he was prepared to make
far-reaching compromises with his opponents, he was derided as
intractable and intolerant of dissent.
pxxv
The effort to weaken, demoralize and then overthrow Lavalas [the
social/political movement that allowed Aristide to achieve the
Presidency of Haiti] in the first years of the twenty-first century
was perhaps the most successful exercise of neo-imperial sabotage
since the toppling of Nicaragua's Sandinistas in 1990. In many
ways it was much more successful, at least in the short-term,
than previous international triumphs in Iraq (2003), Panama (1989),
Grenada (1983), Chile (1973), the Congo (1960), Guatemala (1954)
or Iran (1953). Not only did the coup of 2004 topple one of the
most popular governments in Latin America but it managed to topple
it in a manner that wasn't widely criticized or even recognized
as a coup at all.
pxxvi
Back in 1991, Aristide and Lavalas were among the most potent
symbols for progressive political change in the entire world.
As anyone who lived through them will recall, the late 1980s and
early 1990s were an especially discouraging and reactionary time.
Reagan and Thatcher had secured the foundations of their "new
world order". Nicaragua's Sandinistas had been crushed, Cuba's
Castro was marginalized, Jamaica's Manley was subdued, the national-liberation
movements had been deflected. Just about everywhere, leftwing
parties were rapidly becoming indistinguishable from their traditional
opponents. Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales were nowhere in sight.
Apart from popular mobilizations in South Africa and the Philippines,
in the late 1980s the Haitian struggle against military rule began
in a context of almost total isolation.
pxxvi
U.S. Department of Justice describing conditions in Haiti in the
1990s
On one side are the vast majority of citizens,
mostly poor and poorly educated, who have traditionally been denied
participation in the political, economic, and social decisions
which affect their lives; they have been the primary targets of
government-ordered or government-supported violence. On the other
side are the groups that participated in the Duvalier political
system and benefited from its repression of the disenfranchised
majority. These include landholders who have used the political
system to gain control of Haiti's limited supply of fertile land;
business owners who have benefited from a submissive workforce
and enjoyed monopoly control over various segments of the country's
economy; and armed soldiers, section chiefs, militia, and Tontons
Macoutes who wish to retain the trappings of their power and fear
the accountability for past abuses that a new political order
might impose on them. Since Jean-Claude Duvalier's flight from
Haiti in 1986, the struggle has been played out openly and with
brutal repression of the Haitian masses.
pxxvii
The evolution of editorial policy at the Washington Post is typical
of the more general trend. Back in 1996, the Washington Post provided
a glowing assessment of Aristide's first term in office: "Elected
overwhelmingly, ousted by a coup and reseated by American troops,
the populist ex-priest abolished the repressive army, virtually
ended human rights violations, mostly kept his promise to promote
reconciliation, ran ragged but fair elections and, though he had
the popular support to ignore it, honored his pledge to step down
at the end of his term. A formidable record. Eight years later,
however, the day after his second term had been brought to its
premature end, another editorial in this same newspaper concluded
that "history will likely judge that Mr. Aristide was mostly
responsible for his own downfall. He presided over a corrupt government
that regularly used violence against its opponents and eventually
provoked a violent uprising ... He bitterly disappointed Haitians
who hoped he would bring democracy and development to the hemisphere's
poorest country...
pxxix
A tiny and paranoid minority of Haiti's population, the rich dominate
the poor through a combination of direct military coercion and
transnational economic power, in close collaboration with parallel
interests in the US. The privileges of the rich, and the exploitation
of the poor, can persist only so long as the rich maintain an
unchallenged grip on the available instruments of violent coercion.
Aristide challenged that grip.
pxxx
"Whether they like it or not," he warned in his inaugural
speech of 7 February 1991, "the [comfortable] stones in the
water will come to know the pain of the [impoverished] stones
in the sun.
Aristide was overthrown in 1991 because
the movement that he led posed an intolerable threat to Haiti's
comfortable ruling class... in 2004 he was overthrown again for
the same reason.
Aristide wasn't a threat to the status
quo because he sought to abolish it in a single stroke... Aristide
was a threat because he proposed modest but practical steps towards
popular political empowerment, because he presented widely shared
popular demands in terms that made immediate and compelling sense
to most of the Haitian population, because he formulated these
demands within the constraints of the existing constitutional
structure, because he helped to organize a relatively united and
effective political party that quickly came to dominate that structure
- and in particular, because he did all this after eliminating
the main mechanism that the elite had relied upon to squash all
previous attempts at political change: the army. Aristide was
a threat because by the year 2000, for the first time in modem
Haitian history, he raised the prospect of genuine political change
in a context in which there was no obvious extra-political mechanism
- no army - to prevent it.
Rather like the ANC in South Africa, by
2000 Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas organization could present itself
as Haiti's natural party of government. Ordinary Haitian people
were beginning to get a sense of their collective political strength;
as Aristide's ally Father Gerard Jean-Juste put it in November
of that year, "The Haitian people have finally realized that
the voting card is power." 18 Lavalas activists were finally
in a position to oversee sustained and durable political change.
In May 2000 they won overwhelming and unprecedented majorities
in both houses of parliament and at all levels of government,
gaining on average more than 75 percent of the vote.
Since none of several foreign-sponsored
vehicles for a "democratic opposition" ever stood the
slightest chance of defeating Lavalas in an election, to get rid
of their nemesis after the elections of 2000 the elite was obliged
to follow a somewhat involved and laborious path. Although in
1990 some sectors of the elite that resented the repression that
accompanied direct military rule were prepared to align themselves
with the popular mobilization against dictatorship, a year later
many of these sectors had already begun to desert this mobilization
when they started to perceive it as a threat to their privileged
position. As far as these sectors were concerned, Lavalas was
"broad-based" when it opposed neoDuvalierism, but it
became "sectarian" when it began to pose modest challenges
to the supremacy of the elite itself, it became "criminal"
when it threatened both to dilute elite influence and to dismantle
the military's grip on the country. By the time of Fanmi Lavalas'
May 2000 electoral victories, virtually all of the elite politicians
who had allied themselves with Aristide's anti-macoutism in 1990
had switched sides. They had all joined a US-funded pro-army opposition
group known as the Convergence Démocratique. Together with
its allies in Haitian civil society and in the governments led
by Bush and Chirac, this little posse of unelectable politicians
(who collectively never enjoyed the support of more than perhaps
15% of the people) was then able to mount a remarkably effective
campaign to deprive Aristide's government of funds and to demonize
it as violent and corrupt. In one of the most impressive propaganda
exercises in modern times, they were able to make the equation
of Aristide and Duvalier look like a self-evident cliché.
This effort required considerable amounts of money and ingenuity.
pxxxi
In the late 1980s, the army could still rule the country with
around 7,000 poorly equipped domestic troops, backed up by several
thousand local police and paramilitary auxiliaries or attachés.
Twenty years on, the violent pacification of post-Aristide Haiti
would require some 9,000 or so international soldiers armed with
state-of-the-art equipment, reinforced by some 6,000 internationally
trained police and an eclectic (and rapidly expanding) array of
around 10,000 private security guards.
pxxxii
The coup of 2004 did not simply disrupt the Lavalas organization
and kill thousands of its supporters. It was also intended to
complete a task that began back in 1991: the task of reversing
Lavalas' achievements and of inverting their significance. It
didn't serve merely to put an end to the "threat of a good
example" but also to discredit it beyond repair. Haiti's
[democratic] mobilization [for Aristide] had proved that [according
to Lavalas activist Patrick Elie] "the poorest people in
the hemisphere can know more about democracy than the people who
are pretending to be beacons of civilization. The movement that
you see now in Latin America, the new large social movements that
are sweeping away the traditional political parties, that also
started in a way in Haiti. For the US, Haiti is an example that
must be crushed, that must be made to fail."
pxxxii
Haiti's poverty, together with its alleged lack of natural resources
and strategic significance, is often cited by analysts who prefer
to understand US intervention in Haiti along more altruistic lines.
Why would the US or France want to intervene in such an apparently
barren and unprofitable place? It's quite true that economic issues
played less of a motivating role in Haiti 1991 or 2004 than they
did in Chile 1973 or Iraq 2003. A manufacturing sector in which
sweatshop wages hover around $2 a day has obvious transnational
uses, but the preservation of such a place is not by itself enough
to warrant such assiduous imperial attention. The prospect of
a social revolution that might look west to Cuba for inspiration
and then spread east into the rather more profitable cane fields
and hotels of the Dominican Republic is perhaps another matter,
especially for a government that is beholden to the South Florida
lobby. Combine the prospect of such a revolution with the peculiar
legacy of militant anti-slavery and the radical promise of liberation
theology arguably the greatest single challenge to US strategic
interests in Latin America in the entire post-war period - and
as far as the American empire is concerned you are talking about
a specter that warrants exorcism by any and all available means.
Throw in Aristide's unsettling request that France should help
Haiti celebrate its bicentennial in 2004 by repaying the enormous
amount of money that it extorted from its old slave colony during
the nineteenth century, and you are dealing with little less than
a menace to postcolonial civilization itself.
There is nothing unfamiliar about me basic
issues at stake in this sequence. As Noam Chomsky and others have
argued for many years, "it is only when the threat of popular
participation is overcome that democratic forms can be safely
contemplated. Back in the 1970s and 80s, in Haiti as elsewhere
the prospect of popular political participation typically provoked
an overtly coercive response: the general goal of the "bureaucratic-authoritarian"
regimes that emerged with US support in much of Latin America
during those years [1970s-1980s] was to destroy permanently a
perceived threat to the existing structure of socioeconomic privilege
by eliminating the political participation of the numerical majority.
Today we live in slightly more sophisticated times. Our rulers,
notes Aristide's prime minister Yvon Neptune, still "want
a democracy without the people," but rather than simply exclude
them from politics today's goal is instead "to reduce the
people to puppets or clowns."
pxxxiii
Since their development by the CIA and the State Department in
the 1970s, never have the well-worn tactics of "democracy
promotion" been applied with more devastating effect than
in Haiti between 2000 and 2004.
pxxxiv
True political action is animated by collective principles that
concern everyone by definition - principles of freedom, equality,
solidarity, justice.
pxxxiv
Jean-Bertrand Aristide's 1990 presidential campaign slogan for
the presidency of Haiti
Alone we are weak, together we are strong;
all together we are Lavalas, the flood.
pxxxiv
Haitian social activist Bobby Duval
Aristide's got nothing to do with the
establishment, personally, ideologically, institutionally. He
remains hugely popular. When he speaks, he touches a chord in
the people like no-one else, it's unbelievable. He wasn't perfect,
but he was the only politician who was from the people, and the
only one who worked with the people.
pxxxvi
political scientist Robert Fatton, November 2006
Aristide still remains the most popular
politician in Haiti today. If he could stand for reelection tomorrow
he would easily win.
pxxxvi
Carol Joseph is a minister in the current Haitian government
It is undeniable that Jean-Bertrand Aristide
is still the most popular man in Haiti, and if he could run for
office again he would be re-elected tomorrow.
pxxxvi
Haitian social activist Bobby Duval
If there was a massive campaign against
Aristide it is not because his government was worse than any other,
but because his power came from the people.
pxxxvii
Aristide was the first politician to stand alongside the people
from the 'quartiers populaires', to share the dangers they faced,
to affirm their language, their religion and their values, to
affirm them as genuinely political actors. He was the only prominent
politician of his time to address the realities of class struggle
and injustice in terms that made compelling sense to those who
suffer their effects.
p1
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, 3 March 2004
We don't go around sticking our nose into
democracies and trying to tell people what to do.
p1
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, 1988
Haiti is poor because of the rich.
p1
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, 2003
Poverty today [in Haiti] is the result
of a 200-year plot. In 1803 and in 2003, this is the same plot.
Do you understand my message?
p311
Jean-Bertrand Aristide
It is better to err with the people than
to be right without them.
p311
In many ways, the people (first-world diplomats, IFI economists,
USAID consultants, IRI mediators, CIA analysts, media specialists,
ex-military personnel, security advisors, police trainers, aid-workers,
NGO staff) ... managed to back one of the most popular political
leaders in Latin America into a corner from which he couldn't
escape. They managed not only to overthrow but also to discredit
the most progressive government in Haitian history, and they managed
to attack this government in ways that were rarely perceived (by
mainstream commentators) as aggressive at all. They managed to
disguise a deliberate and elaborate political intervention as
a routine contribution to the natural order of things. Ten years
after his triumphant return from exile in 1994, Aristide's enemies
not only drove him out of office but into an apparently definitive
disgrace.
p313
Confronted by a threatening attempt at popular democracy, the
Haitian elite and its friends in France and US adopted a predictable
but highly effective strategy. They starved the Lavalas government
of funds and international credit, obliging it to adopt unpopular
economic policies and to cut public sector services and jobs.
They developed powerful if not irresistible forms of economic
pressure to further impoverish and alienate its supporters. They
cast doubt on its democratic legitimacy, equating Haiti's most
popular president with the Duvalier and Cédras dictatorships.
They secured and supported sympathetic assets within the security
forces, and bought off opportunistic elements within the popular
movement. They obliged the government's supporters to take defensive
measures in the face of paramilitary attack, and then characterized
these measures as intolerant of dissent. They presented opposition
to the government as diverse and inclusive, and valorized these
opponents as the embattled victims of government repression. Taking
special care to ensure that the government was attacked from both
right (business groups, professional associations, civil society
organizations) and left (humanitarian NGOs, human rights groups),
they sustained a relentless media campaign to present the government
as intractable and authoritarian. After a few years of such coercion,
even a tiny military insurgency led by notorious criminals and
organized by the most reactionary interests in the country was
welcomed by most mainstream observers as a "popular insurrection"
against a despotic regime. If in the end even such insurrection
wasn't enough to get rid of the despot, who then could blame the
great powers when they eventually went in to finish the job on
their own?
p315
The capacity of the US or its allies France and Canada to pose
as friends of the Haitian people is for the foreseeable future
damaged beyond repair [because of their role in the overthrow
of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004].
p321
Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in exile in South Africa,
interviewed by Peter Hallward, July 20, 2006
What happened in September 1991 happened
again in February 2004, and could easily happen again soon, in
the future, so long as the oligarchy who control the means of
repression use them to preserve a hollow version of democracy.
This is their obsession: to maintain a situation that might be
called "democratic," but which consists in fact of a
superficial, imported democracy that is imposed and controlled
from above.
*
p321
We now live in a country in which just 1% of its people control
more than half of its wealth. For the elite, it's a matter of
us against them, of finding a way of preserving the massive inequalities
that affect every facet of Haitian society. We are subject to
a sort of apartheid. Ever since 1804, the elite has done everything
in its power to keep the masses at bay, on the other side of the
walls that protect their privilege. This is what we are up against.
This is what any genuinely democratic project is up against. The
elite will do everything in its power to ensure that it controls
a puppet president and a puppet parliament. It will do everything
necessary to protect the system of exploitation upon which its
power depends.
*
p322
It's not an accident that when it came to choosing a leader, these
people [Haitians] who remain so poor and so marginalized by the
powers that be, should have sought out not a politician but a
priest. The politicians had let them down. They were looking for
someone with principles, someone who would speak the truth.
*
p323
[In 1994, US President Bill] Clinton needed a foreign policy victory,
and a return to democracy in Haiti offered him that opportunity;
we needed an instrument to overcome the resistance of the murderous
Haitian army, and Clinton offered us that instrument. We never
had any illusions that the Americans shared our deeper objectives,
we knew they didn't want to travel in the same direction. But
without the Americans we couldn't have restored democracy.
p328
Even in spite of the aid embargo we managed to accomplish certain
things. We were able to invest in education, for instance ...
in 1990 there were only 34 secondary schools in Haiti; by 2001
there were 138... We built a new university at Tabarre, a new
medical school. Although it had to run on a shoestring, the literacy
program we launched in 2001 was also working well... Previous
governments never seriously tried to invest in education, and
it's clear that our program was always going to be a threat to
the status quo. The elite want nothing to do with popular education,
for obvious reasons.
p329
[The American] goal all along was to ensure that come January
2004, there would be no meaningful celebration of the bicentenary
of independence. It too the US fifty-eight years to recognize
Haiti's independence, since of course the US was a slave-owning
country at the time, and in fact US policy has never really changed.
Their priorities haven't changed, and today's American policy
is more or less consistent with the way it's always been.
p329
The coup of September 1991 was undertaken by people in Haiti with
the support of the US administration, and in February 2004 it
happened again, thanks to many of these same people.
p330
The overall objective was to undermine the celebration of our
bicentenary, the celebration of our independence and of all its
implications [2004]. When the time came [the U.S.] sent emissaries
to Africa, especially to francophone Africa, telling their leaders
not to attend the celebrations. Chirac applied enormous pressure
on his African colleagues; the Americans did the same. Thabo Mbeki
was almost alone in his willingness to resist this pressure, and
through him the African Union was represented. I'm very glad of
it. The same pressure was applied in the Caribbean: the prime
minister of the Bahamas, Peny Christie, decided to come, but that's
it, he was the only one. It was very disappointing.
p331
A lot of the $200 million or so in aid and development money for
Haiti that was suspended when we won the elections in 2000 was
simply diverted to a propaganda and destabilization campaign waged
against our government and against Fanmi Lavalas. The disinformation
campaign was truly massive. Huge sums of money were spent to get
the message out, through the radio, through newspapers, through
various little political parties that were supposed to serve as
vehicles for the opposition ... It was extraordinary. When I look
back at this very discouraging period in our history I compare
it with what has recently happened in some other places. They
went to the same sort of trouble when they tried to say there
were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I can still see Colin
Powell sitting there in front of the United Nations, with his
little bag of tricks, demonstrating for all the world to see that
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Look at this irrefutable
proof! It was pathetic. In any case the logic was the same: they
rig up a useful lie, and then they sell it. It's the logic of
people who take themselves to be all-powerful. If they decide
1 + 1 = 4, then 4 it will have to be.
p331
The leaders of the Group of 184... are beholden to a patron, a
boss. The boss is American, a white American. And you are black.
Don't underestimate the inferiority complex that still so often
conditions these relationships. You are black. But sometimes you
get to feel almost as white as the whites themselves, you get
to feel whiter than white, if you're willing to get down on your
knees in front of the whites. If you're willing to get down on
your knees, rather than stay on your feet, then you can feel almost
as white as they look. This is a psychological legacy of slavery.
... In this case and others like it, what's
really going on is clear enough. It's the people with power who
pull the strings, and they use this or that 'petit negre de service',
this or that black messenger to convey the lies that they call
truth. The people they recruited into the Group of 184 did much
the same thing. They were paid off to say what their employers
wanted them to say. They helped destroy the country, in order
to please their patrons.
... Why were the Group of 184 and our
opponents in "civil society" so hostile? Again it's
partly a matter of social pathology. When a group of citizens
is prepared to act in so irrational and servile a fashion, when
they are so willing to relay the message concocted by their foreign
masters, without even realizing that in doing so they inflict
harm upon themselves - well if you ask me, this is -a symptom
of a real pathology. It has / something to do with a visceral
hatred, which became a real obsession: a hatred for the people.
It was never really about me, it's got nothing to do with me as
an individual. They detest and despise the people. They refuse
absolutely to acknowledge that we are all equal, that everyone
is equal. So when they behave in this way, part of the reason
is to reassure themselves that they are different, that they are
not like the people, not like them. It's essential that they see
themselves as better than others.
... I'm convinced it's bound up with the
legacy of slavery, with an inherited contempt for the people,
for the common people, for the niggers [petits nègres]
... It's the psychology of apartheid: it's better to get down
on your knees with whites than it is to stand shoulder to shoulder
with blacks. Don't underestimate the depth of this contempt.
p344
There is no legal justification for blocking my return... I was
elected president but am accused of dictatorship by nameless people
who are accountable to no-one yet have the power to expel me from
the country and then to delay or block my return.
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