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Council On Hemispheric Affairs
Monitoring Political, Economic and Diplomatic Issues Affecting the Western Hemisphere
Memorandum to the Press 04.12	Wednesday, February 25, 2004

COHA Opinion: Haiti

The following op-ed, authored by COHA Research Fellow Jessica Leight, appeared on February 25, 2004 in the South African daily newspaper “This Day,” as well as in three other dailies in that country.

Haiti: Thrown to the Wolves

            Over the past two hundred years, Haiti has been no stranger to political violence, coups and the perversion of democracy. This was a sad betrayal of its proud heritage as the world’s first black republic and the Western Hemisphere’s second oldest independent nation, having won its freedom in 1804 after a nine-year uprising by the island’s slaves against their French colonial masters. However, this initial revolutionary triumph gave way almost immediately to the harsh realities of grinding poverty and a dreary succession of repressive governments that came to office by coups rather than honest elections. This dreary legacy culminated in the brutal father-and-son dictatorships of Francois and Jean-Claude Duvalier, who enjoyed Washington’s enthusiastic blessings throughout most of their brutal tenure.

Haiti experienced its first lingering taste of authentic democracy only fourteen years ago, when the populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected president in 1990 by two-thirds of all votes cast. Ousted by a military coup only nine months after his inauguration, he was restored via a U.S.-led military intervention in 1994, to serve the final year of his original five-year term. In November 2000, Aristide was reelected president, though the balloting was boycotted by the main Haitian opposition coalition, the Democratic Convergence, which contended that there was no possibility for a fair election because of the supposed fraud in the senate elections held earlier that year.

In fact, those elections were widely acknowledged at the time to be generally free and fair; the only dispute focused on the status of seven senators, some of whom should have been required to go to a runoff round, even though almost all of them had achieved strong pluralities. This relatively minor imperfection has been blown out of proportion and repeatedly brandished by the ironically-labeled “democratic opposition” in Haiti—both the Democratic Convergence and the subsequently formed Group of 184—as evidence of the illegitimacy of the Aristide government. In fact, the opposition was elected by no one and the offending senators all have long since resigned, at the president’s urging. Aristide repeatedly has offered new elections, which the opposition persistently has refused, preferring instead to stage provocative protests in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Even after the terms of one third of the lower house of Haiti’s parliament expired in January of this year, rendering the legislative body without a quorum and stalling all legitimate political processes – forcing Aristide to rule by decree – the opposition continues to refuse to nominate representatives to the provisional electoral council, an essential prerequisite for the holding of new elections, according to Resolution 822 of the Organization of American States, passed in 2000.

The reasons for the opposition’s persistent political obstructionism have long been well-known to the vast majority of Haitians, and in recent months opposition leaders have openly acknowledged their strategy: they have no agenda whatsoever other than the ousting of President Aristide, who they regard as a suspect because of his demobilization of the Haitian army, long the tool of repression sanctioned by the Haitian elite that is the backbone of his Port-au-Prince based opposition, as well as due to his clear identification with the cause of the Haitian poor. Democratic Convergence and Group of 184 are not political parties with a platform of demands over which they are willing to negotiate and compromise; rather, they are vehicles for achieving the ambitions of a small group of leaders, mainly drawn from Haiti’s tiny economic elite, who hope to gain through a violent power grab what they will never have or are likely to win through elections. Accordingly, prominent opposition leaders including Evans Paul, Gerard Pierre-Charles and Victor Benoit have openly stated their preference for a violent revolt or uprooting (dechoukaj) of the current government rather than elections.

The opposition’s hopes seem dangerously close to coming to fruition in light of the recent rebellions in Gonaive, Sant Marc, Henche, and now the takeover of the country’s second largest city, Cap Haitien. It now controls huge swaths of the northern and central regions of the country. The “non-violent” opposition has been joined by a number of notorious officials from the country’s former heavily discredited military and scores of ex-paramilitaries who together are responsible for the murder of upwards of 5,000 innocent civilians during the period of military rule, 1991-94. In fact, the recent sacking of Gonaive was led by a group formerly known as the Cannibal Army and renamed the Artibonite Resistance Front, some of whose leaders are now prominent members of FRAPH, the murderous aforementioned paramilitary organization, as well as pro-Aristide renegades.

Even more importantly, the attacks have highlighted the drastic inadequacy of the Haitian police force, which has been undermanned, undertrained, and undersupplied ever since the United States and Canada prematurely abandoned its police training program in 1996 and Washington, together with other international donors, cut off direct aid entirely in 2000 to the Aristide government, citing vague accusations of corruption and mismanagement. The insurmountable obstacles facing the police force as it attempts to maintain basic civil order highlights the utter irrelevance of the repeated accusations made by both the opposition and Washington in recent years that the Aristide government has failed to make sufficient efforts to establish a “climate of security.” Clearly, there is a limit to how much security can be purchased on a government budget of less than US$300 million a year.

The end game is now approaching with prospects being bleak for Aristide and even bleaker for Haiti. The explanation for this disastrous outcome is not different to divine. Rather than see Aristide as a societal asset whose cause needed to be counseled as well as aided, Washington looked at the Haitian leader as a dangerous radical whose rule required it to be contained and hobbled.

The denial of aid to Haiti, which has been based on a calculated exaggeration of the flawed elections in 2000, totally prevented Aristide from honoring his pledge to improve the population’s living standard. This set the stage for the rapid plummet of Aristide’s standing with the public and the increasing debasement of his presidency. This fatal disaffection together with the collapse of his police force and the disbanding of many street gangs loyal to him, allowed the return of the thugs from the era of military rule. As for U.S. policy, all along it has been characterized by malign neglect and, at best, exhibits only bare tolerance for the Haitian leader. As a result of a strategy of too little and too late, the White House has left Haiti to the wolves, with little prospect that the benighted country has a prayer of a chance to achieve stability or democracy, ostensibly Washington’s goals for the island.

This analysis, prepared by Research Fellow Jessica Leight, appeared in This Day

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