Option Zero in Haiti
Franco-American overthrow of
constitutional government and crushing of popular hope in Haiti
by Peter Hallward
New Left Review, May-June 2004
As his advisors ponder the ever more troubling
consequences of regime change in Iraq, Bush is entitled to take
some comfort from the far more successful operation just completed
in Haiti. [1] No brusque pre-emptive strikes, domestic carping
or splintering coalitions have marred the scene; objections from
caricom and the African Union have carried no threats of reprisal.
In overthrowing the constitutionally elected government of Jean
Bertrand Aristide, Washington could hardly have provided a more
exemplary show of multilateral courtesy. Allies were consulted,
the un Security Council's blessing sought and immediately received.
The signal sent to Chávez, Castro and other hemispheric
opponents was unambiguous-yet it was not a bullying Uncle Sam
but France that made the first call for international intervention
in Haiti's domestic affairs.
In Paris, too, there was much satisfaction
at the sophisticated fit between the humanitarian duty of a civilized
nation and the need (without losing face) to placate Washington
for last year's disobedience over Iraq. The us might well fear
this 'Liberia at their gates', as Villepin's Independent Commission
report put it-but, wary of domestic reaction among their own black
population in an election year, hesitate to act. [2] The Quai
d'Orsay's offer of diplomatic protection would guarantee not only
safe entry but painless withdrawal, as the proposed un Stabilization
Force, took up the burden three months later. [3] London would
be suavely usurped of its chief attack-dog role. Chirac and Villepin
had the virtually unanimous backing of the French media, from
Le Figaro to Le Monde and L'Humanité, for military
intervention in Haiti. Among the most feverish voices has been
that of Libération, which held President Aristide-a 'defrocked
priest turned tyrant millionaire', 'the Père Ubu of the
Caribbean'-personally responsible for the 'risk of humanitarian
catastrophe' that was claimed to justify the invasion. [4]
On 25 February Villepin issued a formal
call for Aristide's resignation. Two days later, France, the us
and Canada announced the dispatch of troops to Port-au-Prince.
In the early hours of Sunday, February 29 the Haitian president
was flown out of his country at gunpoint. Later that same day
the un Security Council suspended its normal 24-hour pre-vote
consultation period to push through an emergency resolution mandating
the us Marines, French Foreign Legion and Canadian forces already
converging on the Haitian capital as the advance guard of a multinational
un force. In the face of such international backing, the Congressional
Black Caucus confined itself to mild rebuke. Libération
gloated at the dissolution of 'the pathetic carnival over which
Aristide had proclaimed himself king'. For the New York Times
the invasion was a fine example of how allies can 'find common
ground and play to their strengths'. All that remained was for
Bush to call and thank Chirac, expressing his delight at 'the
excellent French-American cooperation'. [5]
The Western media had prepared the way
for another 'humanitarian intervention' according to the now familiar
formula. Confronted by repeated allegations of corruption, patronage,
drugs, human rights abuses, autocracy, etc., the casual consumer
of mainstream commentary was encouraged to believe that what was
at stake had nothing to do with a protracted battle between the
poor majority and a tiny elite but was instead just a convoluted
free-for-all in which each side was equally at fault. The French
press in particular tended to paint a lurid portrait of 'African'
levels of squalor and superstition, to serve both as a warning
to France's remaining dependencies in the Caribbean and as a
challenge that might test, once again, the 'civilizing mission'
of the international community. As a former colonizer and slave
power, France would be wrong to 'turn its back', argued the chief
reporter of Villepin's investigative commission on Franco-Haitian
relations. The 2004 bicentenary of Haitian independence offered
the chance for a mature coming to terms with the past, through
which France might 'shed the weight which servitude imposes on
the masters', and negotiate a new relationship. [6]
Rather than a political struggle,
rather than a battle of principles and priorities, the fight for
Haiti became just another instance of the petty corruption and
mass victimization that is supposed to characterize public life
beyond the heavily guarded gates of Western democracy. Rather
than conditioned by radical class polarization or the mechanics
of systematic exploitation, the overthrow of Aristide has most
often figured as yet another demonstration of perhaps the most
consistent theme of Western commentary on the island: that poor
black people remain incapable of governing themselves.
Breaking the chain
The structural basis of Haiti's crippling
poverty is a direct legacy of slavery and its aftermath. The 1697
Treaty of Ryswick had formalized French occupation of the western
third of the Spanish possession, the island of Hispaniola, under
the name of Saint-Domingue. Over the following century, the colony
grew to be the most profitable in the world; by the 1780s, it
was a bigger source of income for its masters than the whole
of Britain's thirteen North American colonies combined. No single
source of revenue made so large a contribution to the growing
prosperity of the French commercial bourgeoisie, and to the wealth
of cities like Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille. The slaves who
produced these profits rose up in revolt in 1791. Combined British,
Spanish and French efforts to crush the rebellion fuelled a war
that lasted thirteen years and ended in unequivocal imperial
defeat. Both Pitt and Napoleon lost some 50,000 troops in the
effort to restore slavery and the status quo.
By late 1803, to the universal astonishment
of contemporary observers, the armies led by Toussaint L'Ouverture
and Dessalines had broken the chain of colonial slavery at 'what
had been, in 1789, its strongest link'. [7] Renamed Haiti, the
new country celebrated its independence in January 1804. I have
argued elsewhere that there have been few other events in modern
history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant
order: the mere existence of an independent Haiti was a reproach
to the slave-trading nations of Europe, a dangerous example to
the slave-owning us, and an inspiration for successive African
and Latin American liberation movements. [8] Much of Haiti's
subsequent history has been shaped by efforts, both internal and
external, to stifle the consequences of this event and to preserve
the essential legacy of slavery and colonialism-that spectacularly
unjust distribution of labour, wealth and power which has characterized
the whole of the island's post-Columbian history.
The main priority of the slaves who won
their independence in 1804 was to block a return to the plantation
economy by retaining some direct control over their own livelihood
and land. Unlike most other Latin American and Caribbean countries,
the development of export-oriented latifundia was limited by
the widespread survival of small peasant proprietorship, and today
93 per cent of Haitian peasants still have at least some access
to their own land. [9] The reduction in size of an average farm
to just two acres, however, combined with falling agricultural
prices, drastic soil erosion and a chronic lack of investment,
ensures that most of these peasants retain their independence
at the cost of an effectively permanent destitution.
Extension of this destitution to the
country as a whole was guaranteed by the isolation of its ruined
economy in the decades following independence. Restoration France
only re-established the trade and diplomatic relations essential
to the new country's survival after Haiti agreed, in 1825, to
pay its old colonial master a 'compensation' of some 150 million
francs for the loss of its slaves-an amount roughly equal to
the French annual budget at the time, or around ten years' worth
of total revenue in Haiti-and to grant punishing commercial discounts.
With its economy still shattered by the colonial wars, Haiti could
only begin paying this debt by borrowing, at extortionate rates
of interest, 24 million francs from private French banks. Though
the French demand was eventually cut from 150 to 90 million francs,
by the end of the nineteenth century Haiti's payments to France
consumed around 80 per cent of the national budget; France received
the last instalment in 1947. Haitians have thus had to pay their
original oppressors three times over-through the slaves' initial
labour, through compensation for the French loss of this labour,
and then in interest on the payment of this compensation. No other
single factor played so important a role in establishing Haiti
as a systematically indebted country, the condition which in turn
'justified' a long and debilitating series of appropriations-by-gunboat.
The most consequential of these foreign
interventions was launched by Woodrow Wilson in 1915, a counterpart
to his punitive assaults on the Mexican Revolution. The us occupation
lasted for nearly twenty years, and extended between 1916 and
1924 into a parallel incursion into the Dominican Republic next
door. The American military regime proceeded to institute an early
version of a structural adjustment programme: they abolished
the clause in the constitution that had barred foreigners from
owning property in Haiti, took over the National Bank, reorganized
the economy to ensure more 'reliable' payments of foreign debt,
expropriated land to create their own plantations, and trained
a brutal military force whose only victories would be against
the Haitian people. Rebellions-that of Charlemagne Peralte in
the north during the early years of the occupation, or the strike
wave of 1929-were savagely repressed. By the time they pulled
out in 1934, us troops had broken the back of the initial peasant
resistance to this socio-economic engineering, killing between
5,000 and 15,000 people in the process.
The army the us had constructed became
the dominant power after the Marines departed, keeping both the
population and politicians in check-the generals often taking
turns as president themselves. It was as a counter to this force
that the bespectacled ex-doctor François Duvalier organized
his own murderous militia, the Tonton Macoutes, after winning
the 1957 presidential election that followed the overthrow of
the previous military regime. For the next fourteen years, as
'Papa Doc' declared himself the divine incarnation of the Haitian
nation, the 10,000-strong Macoutes were used to terrorize any
opponents to his rule. Initially wary of his vaudouiste
nationalism, the us soon embraced Duvalier's staunchly anti-communist
regime. When François Duvalier died in 1971, his son Jean-François,
'Baby Doc', was proclaimed President for Life and enjoyed still
more enthusiastic us support. Foreign aid and elite corruption
soared, but for the mass of Haitians pauperization and political
oppression continued undiminished.
The gathering flood
By the mid-80s, a new generation was
coming of age in the sprawling slums of Port-au-Prince, open to
the appeal of liberation theology in the coded kreyòl
sermons of radical priests-chief among them, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Born in 1953, Aristide grew up outside the confines of Haiti's
traditional political class. A talented linguist, Aristide flourished
at the Salesian seminary, and read psychology and philosophy
at the State University in the 70s, along with the works of Leonardo
Boff and other liberation theologians. He began broadcasting
on the local Catholic radio stations that sprang up in the late
70s, before being dispatched by his order to study archaeology
in the Middle East in 1979, and then to Montreal for some (unsuccessful)
'theological reprogramming'. [10]
By 1985 he was back preaching in Haiti,
as the popular upswell against Baby Doc's bloated regime grew
into a mass wave of protests. Aristide's Easter sermon that year-'The
path of those Haitians who reject the regime is the path of righteousness
and love'-was recorded on dozens of cassette players, and heard
all over the country. His cry, 'Va-t'en, Satan!' was taken
up by the mass movement which, in February 1986, chased Baby Doc
off to exile in France, just weeks before Marcos, under similar
pressure, was sent packing from the Philippines. The murderous
tactics of the junta that followed, under General Namphy, could
not demobilize the flood-lavalas, in kreyòl-of
political groups, trade unions, mass organizations, peasant associations
and 'little church' community groups, the ti legliz. Aristide
was now preaching full-time at the church of St Jean Bosco, on
the edge of the Port-au-Prince slumtown of La Saline. The elections
scheduled for November 1987 were cancelled by the army on polling
day, but not before it had engineered the murder of dozens of
voters as they waited to cast their ballots. In September 1988
Macoutes stormed Aristide's crowded church, killed members of
the congregation and destroyed the building; Aristide was snatched
to safety by his supporters. In the protests that followed, rank-and-file
troops rose against their officers, driving Namphy out, before
a counter-coup under General Avril threw the leading ti soldats
into jail. The autumn of 1989 brought more mass strikes and mobilizations
against Avril's regime, a further bloody crackdown and renewed
protests. In March 1990, he too was driven from power.
First Lavalas victory
In December 1990, Aristide stood as the
presidential candidate of the Front National pour le Changement
et la Démocratie, the loose coalition of popular organizations
formed to contest Haiti's first free elections. Aristide swept
to an unexpected victory in the first round, with 67 per cent
of the vote (the us favourite, World Bank economist and former
Duvalier minister Marc Bazin, won only 14 per cent). The Haitian
elite lost no time in trying to destabilize him. The first coup
attempt came within a month of his election, and was blocked by
a massive counter-mobilization. In office, Aristide's room for
manoeuvre was limited by the fncd's minority in the legislature,
the ramshackle state and judicial apparatus and the continuing
depredations of the Macoutes, checked only by the threat of popular
resistance from the slums. Nor did Aristide's gifts as a mass
leader translate easily into parliamentary coalition-building
or manipulation of the levers of state. Once in power, Aristide
moved cautiously, while continuing to speak of a radical redistribution
of wealth. He won the support of international lenders by balancing
the budget and trimming the corruption-ridden bureaucracy. Otherwise
he restricted himself to mild agrarian and educational reforms
and the appointment of a presidential commission to investigate
the extra-judicial killings of the previous five years.
Even these moderate steps were too much
for the elite to tolerate. In September 1991, just seven months
after his inauguration, the army seized power again, installing
a new junta under General Cédras. Over the next three years
the military instituted a reign of terror in an attempt to dismantle
the Lavalas networks in the slums; around 5,000 Lavalas supporters
were killed. Churches and community organizations were invaded,
preachers and leaders were murdered. In September 1993 thugs led
by cia-trained Louis Jodel Chamblain assassinated democracy activist
and key Aristide ally, Antoine Izméry. In April 1994, paramilitaries
under the leadership of Jean Tatoune, another cia product, slaughtered
scores of civilians in what became known as the Raboteau massacre
in the town of Gonaïves.
At the same time, the (exemption-ridden)
economic embargo imposed against the Cédras regime led
to widespread malnutrition. Waves of emigrants tried to flee
to the us. Aristide, exiled in Washington, tried to marshal diplomatic
support. Hostile to Aristide's agenda and smarting from the recent
Iran-Contra affair, the first President Bush chose to turn a blind
eye. Clinton, confident that 'the mission is achievable, and
limited', was more amenable. Military success in Haiti would help
repair the damage done in Somalia, and Aristide's return would
stem the flood of refugees. us conditions, however, were exorbitant.
Aristide had to agree to an amnesty for the coup-makers, in effect
pardoning the murder of thousands of his supporters. He had to
accept that his term as Haitian president would end in 1995, as
if he had served it in full. He had to share power with the opponents
that he had defeated so convincingly in 1990, and to adopt most
of their highly conservative policies; in particular, he was
required to implement a drastic imf structural adjustment programme.
Aristide was perfectly aware, of course,
of the political cost of structural adjustment; his most recent
book on the oppressive consequences of globalization is broadly
consistent with his speeches of the late 1980s. [11] The question
that began to divide the Lavalas movement in the mid-1990s was
simply, what kind of resistance to us and imf objectives was feasible?
Even someone as critical of Aristide's 'dictatorial turn' as Christophe
Wargny believed that 'no Haitian government can survive without
American support'. [12] As un envoy Lakhdar Brahimi-currently
hard at work in Baghdad-candidly explained on Haitian radio in
1996, there was never any question that either the us or the
un would tolerate even limited attempts to dilute the elite's
monopoly of economic power. [13] Under the circumstances, Aristide's
new government felt it had little room for manoeuvre. And though
he won 87 per cent of the vote in the 1995 presidential elections,
albeit on a lowered turnout, Aristide's successor René
Préval found himself in a still more difficult position.
The attempts of Préval's prime
minister, Rosny Smarth, to legislate the unpopular imf programme
would permanently fracture the Lavalas coalition, both inside
parliament and in the country as a whole. The politicians most
in line with Washington's priorities, and most critical of what
they condemned as Aristide's top-down style, banded together
under his rival Gérard Pierre-Charles to form a more 'moderate'
faction, which eventually called itself the Organisation du Peuple
en Lutte. From late 1996, Aristide began organizing a more cohesive
party of his own supporters, the Fanmi [family] Lavalas, drawing
on his personal authority among the Haitian poor. The split between
the opl and the fl soon became irreversible, paralysing the legislature
and blocking the appointment of a new prime minister or a full
cabinet after Smarth's resignation in 1997. [14] Préval
finally broke the parliamentary deadlock by dissolving the National
Assembly in 1999, and after some delay new elections were held
in May 2000.
Globalization comes to Haiti
Predictably, the imf cure for Haiti's
desperate poverty involved further reductions in wages that had
already sunk to starvation levels, privatization of the state
sector, reorientation of domestic production in favour of cash
crops popular in North American supermarkets and the elimination
of import tariffs. It was the last of these, easiest to implement,
that had the most immediate impact. With the tariff on rice cut
from 50 per cent to the imf-decreed 3 per cent, Haiti-previously
self-sufficient in the crop-was flooded with subsidized American
grain, and rice imports rose from just 7,000 tonnes in 1985 to
220,000 tonnes in 2002. Domestic rice production has all but disappeared.
[15] A similar sequence eliminated Haiti's poultry sector, at
the cost of around 10,000 jobs. Haitian farmers tend to associate
these developments with the most bitterly resented of all the
international community's many aggressive interventions in their
domestic economy-the 1982 extermination, to allay the fears of
American importers concerned by an outbreak of swine fever, of
Haiti's entire native pig population, and their subsequent replacement
with animals from Iowa that required living conditions rather
better than those enjoyed by most of the island's human population.
As a result of these and related economic
'reforms', agricultural production fell from around 50 per cent
of gdp in the late 1970s to just 25 per cent in the late 1990s.
Structural adjustment was supposed to compensate for agrarian
collapse with an expansion of the light manufacturing and assembly
sector. The lowest wages in the hemisphere, backed by a virtual
ban on trade unions, had encouraged mainly American companies
or contractors to employ around 60,000 people in this sector
in the late 1970s, and through to the mid-90s companies like Kmart
and Walt Disney continued to pay Haitians around 11 cents an
hour to make pyjamas and T-shirts. [16] The companies benefit
from tax exemptions lasting for up to 15 years, are free to repatriate
all profits and obliged to make only minimal investments in equipment
and infrastructure. [17] By 1999, Haitians fortunate enough to
work in the country's small manufacturing and assembly sector
were earning wages estimated at less than 20 per cent of 1981
levels. Nevertheless, still more dramatic rates of exploitation
encouraged many of these companies to relocate to places like
China and Bangladesh, and only around 20,000 people were still
employed in the Port-au-Prince sweatshops by the end of the millennium.
Real gdp per capita in 1999-2000 was estimated to be 'substantially
below' the 1990 level. [18]
It would be wrong to think that these
reforms were implemented with anything approaching Third Way zeal.
On the contrary, the Lavalas government was continually criticized
for its 'lack of vigour' by international financial institutions:
'Policies imposed as conditions by international lenders have
been at best half-heartedly supported by the domestic authorities,
and at worst violently rejected by the public'. [19] With its
back to the wall, Lavalas resorted to what James Scott has famously
dubbed the 'weapons of the weak': a mixture of prevarication and
evasive non-cooperation. This proved partially successful as a
way of deflecting at least one of the main blows of structural
adjustment, the privatization of Haiti's few remaining public
assets. Lavalas had good reason to drag its feet. When the state-run
sugar mill was privatized in 1987, for example, it was bought
by a single family who promptly closed it, laid off its staff
and began importing cheaper sugar from the us so as to sell it
on at prices that undercut the domestic market. Once the world's
most profitable sugar exporter, by 1995 Haiti was importing 25,000
tons of American sugar and most peasants could no longer afford
to buy it. [20] By contrast, in September 1995 Aristide dismissed
his prime minister for preparing to sell the state-owned flour
and cement mills without insisting on any of the progressive
terms the imf had promised to honour-opening the sale to middle-class
and diaspora participation, and ensuring that some of the money
it earned was to go towards literacy, education and compensation
for victims of the 1991 coup. Aristide could only delay the process
for two years, however. In 1997 the flour mill was duly sold for
just $9 million, at a time when its yearly profits were estimated
at around $25 million per year. [21]
The Lavalas government never yielded,
however, to us pressure to privatize Haiti's public utilities.
At the same time, and with drastically limited resources, it oversaw
the creation of more schools than in all the previous 190 years.
It printed millions of literacy booklets and established hundreds
of literacy centres, offering classes to more than 300,000 people;
between 1990 and 2002 illiteracy fell from 61 to 48 per cent.
With Cuban assistance, a new medical school was built and the
rate of hiv infection-a legacy from the sex tourism industry of
the 1970s and 80s-was frozen, with clinics and training programmes
opened as part of a growing public campaign against aids. Significant
steps were taken to limit the widespread exploitation of children.
Aristide's government increased tax contributions from the elite,
and in 2003 it announced the doubling of a desperately inadequate
minimum wage. [22]
Opposition to Aristide
The government's course created enemies
both to the right and to the left. Unsurprisingly, Aristide came
under fire from those who advocated more enthusiastic compliance
with the us and imf, among them the (highly unpopular) Prime Ministers,
Smarck Michel (1994-95) and Rosny Smarth (1996-97), along with
other members of the opl. From the beginning, the simple presence
of Lavalas in government had terrified a large portion of the
dominant class. 'Among the Haitian elite', as Robert Fatton has
explained, 'hatred for Aristide was absolutely incredible, an
obsession'. [23] With Lavalas in power, many observers noted
a 'new confidence among the poor people of Haiti'. [24] For the
first time in living memory the distribution of private property
seemed vulnerable, as occasional instances of land invasion and
squatting went unopposed. Though in practice he tended to cooperate
with business leaders and international lenders, Aristide appeared
willing to strengthen his hand in government with veiled threats
of popular violence against 'bourgeois thieves'. [25] 'Panic
seized the dominant class', Fatton notes. 'It dreaded living in
close proximity to la populace and barricaded itself against
Lavalas'. [26] Gated communities multiplied and the provision
of private security became one of Haiti's fastest growing industries.
Class sympathy among Western elites who felt themselves under
similar threat, both at home and abroad, goes a long way to explaining
the recent international perception of the Lavalas regime.
A growing distrust of Aristide's 'demagogic
populism', meanwhile, slowly alienated many of the foreign or
exiled intellectuals-René Depestre, James Morrell, Christophe
Wargny-who had once supported him. [27] More importantly, several
of Haiti's most significant peasant organizations, including the
Movman Peyizan Papay (mpp), Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan and kozepep,
as well as the small militant group Batay Ouvriye, condemned the
Fanmi Lavalas for its cooperation with structural adjustment
and accused it of becoming 'anti-populaire'. Clément
François of Tèt Kole spoke for many critics of Lavalas
when he argued that Aristide should not have agreed to the us
conditions that allowed him to return from exile: 'he should have
stayed outside and let us continue the struggle for democracy;
instead, he agreed to deliver the country on a platter so that
he could get back into office'. [28] mpp leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste
made the same point in 1994, shortly before he became involved
in a bitter personal feud with Aristide.
The true extent of popular disaffection
with Lavalas is difficult to measure. As a rule, foreign commentators
find it 'hard to credit the strength of emotion that Aristide
elicited and continues to provoke in Haiti'. [29] Tèt
Kole and the mpp were certainly weakened by their opposition to
Aristide, and neither group remains a significant political force.
In the late 90s Jean-Baptiste became an ally of Pierre-Charles's
pro-American opl, before joining, in 2000, the openly reactionary
Convergence Démocratique; the militancy of his followers
has been dulled, as Stan Goff notes, 'by the steady trickle of
project dollars flowing through the almost interminable list of
non-governmental organizations that infest every corner of Haiti'.
[30] The opl itself is probably the party which most closely
resembles that 'civic' alternative to Lavalas so dear to liberal
commentators, but after years of futile parliamentary manoeuvring
it was virtually wiped out in the 2000 elections. [31]
For all its undeniable faults, in other
words, the fl remained the only significant force for popular
mobilization in the country. No other political figure of the
past fifty years has had anything like Aristide's stature among
the urban and rural poor. Reporting from Port-au-Prince in March
2004, the bbc's correspondent was obliged to concede that, whereas
Aristide was 'universally reviled' by the wealthy elite, he was
still almost as universally affirmed by the great majority of
the urban poor. [32] The doctor and activist Paul Farmer, who
has worked in Haiti's central plateau since the mid-80s, makes
a still stronger case for the enduring depth of Aristide's popularity
in the countryside. [33] The one demonstration of any size against
the fl during the most recent elections was an mpp gathering organized
in September 2000. It drew several thousand people. Otherwise,
political opposition to Aristide was confined almost entirely
to the ranks of the dominant class. [34] The Haitian elite found
it hard to rally support in the streets. An Economist Intelligence
Unit report decribes the anti-Aristide protest held in November
2003 by the 'Group of 184', which claims to represent a wide range
of civil-society organizations:
On the morning of the rally, a few hundred
Group of 184 supporters had assembled at the designated site but
found themselves heavily outnumbered by as many as 8,000 Aristide
loyalists. When some government supporters threw stones and shouted
threats at their opponents, the police struggled to keep order.
As the situation rapidly deteriorated, the police dispersed the
crowd using tear gas and firing live ammunition in the air. Meanwhile,
the Group of 184's flat-bed truck with a sound system was stopped
by police en route to the rally and thirty people travelling in
the convoy with it were arrested when police discovered unlicensed
firearms. Clearly unable to proceed as planned, the Group of 184
organizers called off the rally before it had begun . . . André
Apaid [the Group's coordinator] said the episode showed that the
authorities would not allow opponents to assemble and thus were
not contemplating fair elections.
The report failed to mention that Apaid
is an international businessman who owns several factories in
Haiti, the founder of Haiti's most prominent commercial tv station,
and leading figure in a 2003 campaign to block Aristide's decision
to double the minimum wage. Itdoes note, however, that:
The turnout for the rally was lower than
might have been suggested by the Group's claim to have more than
300 member organizations. It was scarcely able to assemble more
than this number of demonstrators. The presence at the rally of
many members of the more affluent sector of society reinforced
a perception that the Group of 184, despite its claims to represent
civil society, is an organization with little popular appeal.
This interpretation was confirmed by the failure of a 'general
strike' called by the Group on November 17. Although many private
businesses in Port-au-Prince, including private schools and banks,
did not open, the state-owned banks, government offices and public
transport, as well as street markets, functioned as normal. In
the rest of the country the shutdown was largely ignored. [35]
May 2000 watershed
Despite the massive preponderance of
their popular support, however, neither Préval nor Aristide,
in his 1991 or 1994-95 spells in office, had ever been able to
govern with the full support of the legislature. But in the decisive
legislative and local elections of May 2000, a united Fanmi Lavalas
won majorities at all levels of government, taking 89 of 115 mayoral
positions, 72 of 83 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 18 of
the 19 Senate seats contested. [36] The 1995 elections had already
'completely discredited the so-called traditional political parties-especially
those that collaborated with the military regime between 1991
and 1994', effectively eliminating them from any further role
in electoral politics. [37] In May 2000, members of the original
Lavalas coalition who had turned against Aristide suffered the
same fate. For the anti-Aristide opposition, the elections proved
that there was no chance of defeating the fl at the polls for
the foreseeable future.
It was at this point that the campaign
to discredit the Lavalas government entered a new and more intensive
phase. During the summer of 2000, most of Aristide's opponents-dissidents
like Pierre-Charles's opl and Jean-Baptiste's mpp, along with
right-wing evangelicals, business leaders and ex-Duvalierists-banded
together to form the 'Convergence Démocratique'. From
the start, the cd's main objective was Option Zéro:
the total annulment of the 2000 elections and a refusal to allow
Aristide to participate in any subsequent vote. [38] In order
to make this strategy seem compatible with democratic conventions,
the cd had first to redouble its efforts to portray the fl as
irredeemably undemocratic, authoritarian, violent and corrupt-accusations
already long familiar from the propaganda that accompanied the
Cédras coup in 1991. [39]
The first priority was to cast doubt
on the legitimacy of the fl's electoral victory. The pretext here
was a minor technical complaint made by observers from the Organization
of American States. The oas had actually described the May 2000
elections as 'a great success for the Haitian population, which
turned out in large and orderly numbers to choose both their
local and national governments. An estimated 60 per cent of registered
voters went to the polls', and 'very few' incidents of either
violence or fraud were reported. Even the staunchly anti-fl Centre
for International Policy agreed that the May 2000 elections were
Haiti's 'best so far'. [40] The oas subsequently characterized
the elections as 'flawed' not because they disputed the fairness
of the vote or the overwhelming clarity of its result but because,
once the Lavalas victories were recorded, they objected to the
methodology which Haiti's Provisional Electoral Council (cep)
used to count the votes for eight of the seats in the Senate.
Rather than include all of the many less popular candidates in
its calculation of voting percentages, the cep-which Haiti's constitution
identifies as the sole and final arbiter in all electoral matters-decided
to count only the votes cast for the top four candidates in each
race. By this method, Lavalas candidates won 16 Senate seats in
the first round, taking an average 74 per cent of the vote. [41]
The oas had itself been closely involved
in the development of this form of calculation, and there is no
good reason to believe that the balance of power in the Senate
would have been any different whatever method was used. The results
are consistent both with the undisputed returns registered in
the Chamber of Deputies ballot held at the same time and with
a us-commissioned Gallup poll taken in October 2000. In November
2000, Aristide went on to win the presidential election with
92 per cent of the votes cast, on a turnout estimated, by those
few international observers left in the country, at around 50
per cent (although much lower by the opposition).
Throttling aid
The immediate response from the Clinton
Administration was to seize upon the oas objection to the calculations
for the senatorial seats in order to justify a crippling embargo
on foreign aid-democratic scruples hard to square with Washington's
support for the Duvalier dictatorships and the juntas that succeeded
them. In April 2001, after cutting off its own aid to Haiti's
government, the us blocked the release of $145 million in previously
agreed loans from the Inter-American Development Bank, and of
another $470 million scheduled for the following years. In 1995
the Haitian government had received close to $600 million in aid.
By 2003 the total government budget had been reduced to just
$300 million-under $40 a head per year for each of its 8 million
citizens-minus the annual $60 million payment on the national
debt (45 per cent of which was incurred by the Duvalier dictatorships).
[42] The response of the imf and other international lenders
was to force Haiti to make still deeper cuts in its budget and
pay yet higher sums in arrears.
Few governments could survive such sustained
financial assault. The combined effect of these measures was to
overwhelm an already shattered economy. Haitian gdp fell from
$4 billion in 1999 to $2.9 billion in 2003. While American exports
to Haiti have risen substantially in recent years, a majority
of Haitians now live on the edge of starvation, without access
to water or medicine; average incomes amount to little more than
a dollar a day and unemployment hovers around 70 per cent. In
2001, a bankrupt Aristide agreed to virtually all of the concessions
demanded by his opponents: he obliged the winners of the disputed
Senate seats to resign, accepted the participation of several
ex-Duvalier supporters in his new government, agreed to convene
a new and more opposition-friendly cep and to hold another round
of legislative elections several years ahead of schedule. But
the us still refused to lift its aid embargo.
The next priority of the cd campaign
was to portray the fl as fundamentally authoritarian and corrupt.
That there were some grounds for this is plain. Drug-running-Haiti
has long been a relay station for Colombian cocaine heading north-has
increased since 1990. As in other destitute countries patronage
remains widespread, even if it falls far short of the 'officially
sanctioned piracy' characteristic of the pre-Lavalas period. [43]
More urgently, the legacy of violence in Haiti, from the colonial
era through to the dictatorships fronted by Duvalier, Namphy
and Cédras, has left deep scars; Aristide himself is the
survivor of repeated assassination attempts. The murderous assault
on Lavalas during his first exile pushed some pro-fl groups,
like Jeunesse Pouvoir Populaire and the Petite Communauté
de L'Église de Saint Jean Bosco, to adopt quasi-military
forms of self-defence against former soldiers who were disbanded
but not disarmed in 1995. Vigilante gangs associated with Lavalas
are certainly responsible for some of the violence that has occurred
over the past few years. Critics of the fl have been quick to
equate these gangs with Duvalier's Tonton Macoutes. [44]
In a comparative perspective, however,
political violence during the Lavalas administrations was far
less than under previous Haitian regimes. Amnesty International's
reports covering the years 2000-03 attribute a total of around
20 to 30 killings to the police and supporters of the fl-a far
cry from the 5,000 committed by the junta and its supporters in
1991-94, let alone the 50,000 usually attributed to the Duvalier
dictatorships. [45] Examination of Lavalas violence would also
suggest that it was, indeed, largely a matter of gang violence.
There are armed gangs in Port-au-Prince, as there are in São
Paulo, Lagos or Los Angeles; their numbers have swelled in recent
years with the deportation to the island of over a thousand Haitian
and Haitian-American convicts from the American prison system.
Above all, it should be stressed that the lion's share of recent
violence in Haiti has been perpetrated by the us-trained paramilitary
forces deployed by opponents of the Lavalas regime since the summer
of 2001.
Final assault
Economic constraints paralysed the Lavalas
administration and political pressure backed it into a corner;
but in the end, only old-fashioned military coercion on the Contra
model could dislodge it from power. Leading figures in the Convergence
Démocratique made no secret of their intentions at the
time of Aristide's reinauguration as president in February 2001;
they openly called for another us invasion, 'this time to get
rid of Aristide and rebuild the disbanded Haitian army'. Failing
that, they told the Washington Post, 'the cia should train
and equip Haitian officers exiled in the neighbouring Dominican
Republic so they could stage a comeback themselves'. [46] The
us, it seems, obeyed these instructions to the letter.
The insurgency that eventually triggered
the second coup began just when it seemed as if Aristide's new
administration might finally be making some political progress.
Shortly after talks held in mid-July 2001 at the Hotel Montana,
the opl's Pierre-Charles and other leaders of the cd acknowledged
that they were close to achieving a 'total agreement' with the
fl. Less than a fortnight later, on 28 July, groups of army veterans
launched attacks against police stations along the Dominican
Republic border, killing at least five officers. What happened
next is typical of the pattern that persisted right through to
the completion of Option Zéro on 29 February 2004.
The government arrested 35 suspects linked to the attacks, including
some cd supporters. With the approval of the us ambassador, the
cd responded by breaking off further negotiations with the fl,
claiming that Aristide had staged the attacks himself in order
to justify a crackdown on his opponents. A similar sequence would
follow the next major incident, a full scale assault on the Presidential
Palace in December 2001. [47]
What actually began to unfold in Haiti
in 2001, in other words, was less 'a crisis of human rights' than
a low-level war between elements of the former armed forces and
the elected government that had disbanded them. Amnesty International
reports indicate that at least 20 police officers or fl supporters
were killed by army veterans in 2001, and another 25 in further
paramilitary attacks in 2003, mostly in the lower Central Plateau
near the us-monitored Dominican border. Militarization of some
regional fl groups was an almost inevitable result. Most of the
known leaders of this insurgency were trained by the us and, although
evidence of Washington's direct support for the 'rebels' will
be hard to find, American allegiances have been made perfectly
explicit in the wake of Aristide's expulsion.
In the autumn of 2003 the guerrillas
based over the border (led by Louis Jodel Chamblain and Guy Philippe)
were strengthened by a new insurgency inside Haiti itself led
by Jean Tatoune. Despite his close us connections and a conviction
for his role in the Raboteau massacre of 1994, Tatoune managed
to swing the Gonaïves-based gang known as the 'Cannibal
Army' against Lavalas, after making the implausible but widely
reported claim that Aristide was behind the murder, in September
2003, of the gang's former leader, long-standing Lavalas activist
Amiot Métayer-who also happened to be an equally long-standing
enemy of Tatoune.
Demanding reimbursement
In April 2003, the desperately cash-starved
Aristide attempted to rally his countrymen with the demand that,
in the bicentennial year of Haitian independence, France should
reimburse the 90 million francs that Haiti had been forced to
pay between 1825 and 1947 as compensation for the loss of colonial
property. Assuming a low return of 5 per cent in annual interest,
he calculated that the sum was now equivalent to 21 billion American
dollars. As Michael Dash has noted, 'Aristide got a lot of support
for this demand both inside and outside of Haiti', particularly
in Africa and Latin America. [48] Unlike most slavery-related
reparation demands currently in the air, the Haitian claim refers
to a precise and documented sum of money extracted in hard currency
by the colonial power. Though quick to pour scorn on the claim,
the French government was clearly rattled, with Chirac soon resorting
to threat: 'Before bringing up claims of this nature', he warned
in the summer of 2003, 'I cannot stress enough to the authorities
of Haiti the need to be very vigilant about-how should I put it-the
nature of their actions and their regime'. [49]
The commission dispatched by the Foreign
Ministry to devise a more 'philosophical' defence of the French
position duly concluded that, while Haiti had indeed been 'impeccable'
in its own payments to France, there was no 'legal case' for the
reimbursement claim. To general applause from the French media,
the Commission's Report described the fl's demand as 'aggressive
propaganda' based on 'hallucinatory accounting'. It noted with
some satisfaction that 'no member of the democratic opposition
to Aristide takes the reimbursement claims seriously'. It recognized,
however, that the opposition and paramilitaries lacked sufficient
'mobilizing force' to see the job through; and that the Americans,
though hamstrung by domestic considerations ('boat-people,
Black Caucus'), were looking for 'an honourable way out of the
crisis'. It stressed that a 'more affirmative' French engagement
in Haiti would not be carried out against the interests of the
us, but in a spirit of 'harmony and farsightedness'. At stake
was an opportunity for 'audacious and resolute coordination'.
[50]
Without such intervention, as the Report
acknowledged, the Lavalas government could not have been dislodged.
The stumbling block was Aristide's continuing popularity. The
battering of the last fifteen years had taken its toll on his
support, but as the most detailed-and by no means uncritical-study
of the recent period concludes, there was no doubt that Aristide
still enjoyed 'undisputed and overwhelming popularity' among
the mass of Haitians. [51] The Gallup poll conducted in October
2000 rated the fl as thirteen times more popular than its closest
competitor, and over half of those polled identified Aristide
as their most trusted leader. [52] According to the latest reliable
measure, a further Gallup poll conducted in March 2002, the fl
remained four times more popular than all its significant competitors
combined. [53]
Return of the old guard
The real goals of the occupation that
began on 29 February 2004 are perfectly apparent: to silence or
obliterate all that remains of this support. During the first
week of their deployment, the Franco-American invasion force operated
almost exclusively in pro-Aristide neighbourhoods and killed
only fl supporters. Their new puppet Prime Minister Gérard
Latortue (a 69-year-old ex-un factotum and Miami talk-show host)
publicly embraced the convicted mass-murderer Tatoune and his
ex-army rebels in Gonaïves as 'freedom fighters'-a move
interpreted by the New York Times as 'sending a clear message
of stability'. [54] Latortue's 'national unity government' is
composed exclusively of members of the traditional elite. On March
14, the Haitian police began arresting Lavalas militants on suspicion
of unidentified crimes, but decided not to pursue the rebel death
squad leaders, even those already convicted of atrocities. The
new National Police chief, Léon Charles, explained that
while 'there's a lot of Aristide supporters' to be arrested,
the government 'still has to make a decision about the rebels-that's
over my head'. [55] On March 22 Latortue's new Interior Minister,
the ex-General Hérard Abraham, announced plans to integrate
the paramilitaries into the police force and confirmed his intention
to re-establish the army which Aristide abolished in 1995. [56]
In late March, anti-Aristide death squads continued to control
the country's second largest city, Cap Haïtien, where 'dozens
of bullet-riddled bodies have been brought to the morgue over
the last month'. [57] While scores of other Aristide supporters
were being killed up and down the country, the us Coast Guard
applied Bush's order, in keeping with usual us practice (but in
flagrant violation of international law), to refuse all Haitian
applications for asylum in advance.
The Security Council resolution that
mandated the invading Franco-American troops as a un Multinational
Interim Force on 29 February 2004 called for a follow-up un Stabilization
Force to take over three months later. In March, Kofi Annan duly
sent his Special Advisor, John Reginald Dumas, and Hocine Medili,
to assess the situation on the ground. The 'Report of the Secretary-General
on Haiti', published in April, took the obfuscatory euphemism
of un discourse to new levels. 'It is unfortunate that, in its
bicentennial year, Haiti had to call again on the international
community to help it overcome a serious political and security
situation', wrote Annan. The circumstances of the elected President's
overthrow were decorously skirted, the Secretary-General merely
noting that: 'Early on February 29, Mr Aristide left the country'.
The toppling of the constitutional government was deemed to offer
Haitians the opportunity of 'a peaceful, democratic and locally-owned
future'. [58]
Admittedly, the realization of that future
was to be somewhat protracted. Annan noted that, while the local
political parties, including the Fanmi Lavalas and Convergence
Démocratique, all hoped for general elections before the
end of 2004, 'members of civil society and the international
community were of the view that more time would be needed'. Moreover,
democracy-when the time was right-should begin at parish-pump
levels, since 'Haiti's political life has too often been dominated
by highly personalized presidential elections, fostering inflammatory
rhetoric and distracting the population's attention from local
challenges'. On April 29, the Security Council voted unanimously
to send an 8,300-strong un Stabilization Force from 1 June, under
the leadership of Lula's Brazil, to 'foster democratic governance'
and, of course, 'empower the Haitian people'. Among the paragons
of popular empowerment dispatching troops to Haiti are Nepal,
Angola, Benin and Pakistan. [59] 'We will stay until democracy
is reinstated', announced the Chilean un ambassador, whose country
had joined the initial invasion force along with the us, France
and Canada. The latter may soon be coming under renewed pressure
to prove its loyalty, since-what with the Ivory Coast and Burundi-the
un reports having difficulty in mustering enough Francophone forces
for all the missions in hand. As un spokesman David Wimhurst confessed
to the la Times: 'There's a surge in peacekeeping, and
there's a squeeze on troops. We're concerned that it will be difficult
for French-speaking countries to step up to the plate.' [60]
Exemplary Haiti
In 1804, the outcome of Haiti's war of
independence dealt an unprecedented blow to the colonial order.
The victory celebrated two hundred years ago was to inspire generations
of revolutionary leaders all over Africa and the Americas. The
triumph of neo-colonialism achieved in February 2004 was clearly
meant to ensure that Haiti will never again furnish the 'threat
of a good example'. Reduced to poverty and debt-dependence by
reparation payments to its former colonial master, the country
was further brutalized by the dramatic polarization of wealth
and power imposed by its tiny ruling elite. By the mid-80s, the
brutal and corrupt Duvalier dictatorships ended by provoking
a mass protest movement too powerful for them to control. When
the Haitian elite lost confidence in Jean-Claude Duvalier's power
to preserve the status quo, it initially sought merely to replace
his regime with another form of military rule. This solution lasted
from 1986 to 1990, but the army could only suppress the growing
movement by resorting to unacceptably public levels of violence.
Unrelenting repression brought Haiti to the brink of revolution.
What began following the Lavalas election
victory of 1990 was the deployment of a partially new strategy
for disarming this revolution, at a moment when the Cold War
no longer offered automatic justification for the repression of
mass movements by the overwhelming use of force. Designed not
simply to suppress the popular movement but to discredit and destroy
it beyond repair, the key to this strategy was the implementation
of economic measures intended to intensify already crippling levels
of mass impoverishment, backed up by old-fashioned military repression
and propaganda designed to portray resistance to elite interests
as undemocratic and corrupt. The operation has been remarkably
successful-so successful that in 2004, with the enthusiastic
backing of the media, the un and the wider 'international community',
it resulted in the removal of a constitutionally elected government
whose leadership had always enjoyed the support of a large majority
of the population.
There is every reason to suspect that
by the end of this year, many hundreds of fl activists will have
been killed. With them will die the chances of rebuilding any
inclusive popular movement for at least another generation. The
Lavalas leadership had many faults, and there is much to learn
from its defeat. But Lavalas was the only organization of the
last half-century to have successfully mobilized the Haitian masses
in a social and political challenge to their intolerable situation,
and it was removed from office through the combined efforts of
those who, for obvious reasons, feared and opposed that challenge.
If Lavalas also remains a bitterly divisive force, this is largely
because it was the only large-scale popular movement ever to
question the massive inequalities of power, influence and wealth
which have always divided Haitian society. That Lavalas managed
to do little to reduce them may say less about the weakness of
the movement than it does about the extraordinary strength, today,
of such inequalities.
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