18781: Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the dead end of left nationalist politics (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

An exchange on Haiti: Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the dead end of "left"
nationalist politics

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/feb2004/hait-f18.shtml

18 February 2004

Below we post a letter on Haiti from a reader and a reply by WSWS
correspondent Richard Dufour.

To the Editor:

Referring to the current conflict in Haiti as a "right-wing" rebellion
indicates a lack of understanding of the opposition movement calling for
Aristide's resignation. There are several distinct groups in the
opposition. In addition to the business associations and "wealthy elites"
the United States left has focused on, the main opposition movement, the
Groupe 184, consists of a wide variety of civil society organizations,
including numerous peasant organizations, syndicates [unions], women's
groups, student associations, and writers and artists, some of whom worked
in earlier Lavalas administrations. These groups have traditionally been
associated with the Haitian left, and the United States right-wing would
most likely find their missions abhorrent.

The Groupe 184 has clearly and repeatedly distanced itself from the armed
insurgents in Gonaïves, who were aligned with Aristide until their leader,
Amiot Metayer, was assassinated. The Groupe 184 organizes peaceful
demonstrations, which have grown ever-larger, particularly since thugs
(chimères) affiliated with Aristide's government entered the university,
beat students, trashed classrooms and broke the legs of the university
rector on December 5, 2003. Several of the opposition demonstrations have
ended in violence, not because of the behavior of the unarmed marchers, but
because chimères, and occasionally the police, have attacked them with
bottles, rocks, tear gas and guns. The Groupe 184 is unarmed and
unaffiliated with the armed opposition in Gonaives, and has not called for
insurrection. Winter Etienne, the spokesperson of the Gonaives insurgents,
has also clearly stated that his group is unaffiliated with the Groupe 184.
He has also explicitly stated that his group acquired their weapons when
they worked for Aristide against the unarmed, civil opposition.

As a Haitian whose family was persecuted, arrested, exiled and/or killed by
the Duvalier government for being "radical leftists" and "communists," I am
dismayed by the knee-jerk support the United States left is expressing for
Aristide. To me, it is part of the same colonialist mentality that the
United States has always had towards Haiti—that foreign whites know what is
best for Haiti. Rather than blindly accepting the Aristide government's
propaganda, the United States left should consider why so many of
Aristide's Haitian partisans, including many who fought hard for his return
to power after the 1991 coup d'état, have turned against him. The
degradation and deterioration of everything in Haiti since cannot be blamed
on the lack of foreign aid alone. In 1994, Aristide once again had the
opportunity to set Haiti on a new path to change and development, and many
Haitians, both in Haiti and abroad, were eager to work with him. He (and
Préval) squandered that chance; instead, Haiti under Aristide and Lavalas
has become increasingly dangerous and unliveable, due to crime and violence
perpetrated by the government-affiliated chimères who use their
government-issued weapons to terrorize both the local Haitian population
and visitors of Haitian ancestry. That is the reason some Haitians are
calling for his resignation today.

(I am not affiliated with any organization involved in Haitian politics.)

M-H L.D.

13 February, 2004

* * *

Thank you for your letter. It raises pivotal questions regarding the
current political turmoil in Haiti and what way forward for those seeking
to tackle the root causes of that country's never-ending social-political
crisis—deepening mass poverty amid great wealth for a few, the outcome of
decades of imperialist oppression of the Haitian people.

While the main opposition groups, the Groupe 184 and Convergence
Démocratique, have sought to capitalize on the mass popular alienation
generated by the Aristide government's corruption, autocratic methods and
neo-liberal policies, they do not represent any progressive alternative.
Their strident denunciations of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's human rights
record notwithstanding, the opposition forces have used similar methods of
intimidation and violence. After various electoral failures, they boycotted
the last presidential elections in 2000 and did everything to prevent, and
still oppose, new parliamentary elections—unless Aristide first resigns and
they are handed state power.

The official opposition has pinned its hopes on creating so much
disturbance and political instability as to render the country ungovernable
and thereby provoke the US government to intervene in its favor. In
numerous interviews in recent days with world media outlets, opposition
spokesmen have directed their appeals not to the Haitian people but to the
governments of France, Canada and above all the United States.

Nothing could more clearly expose the opposition's profoundly
anti-democratic nature than this grovelling before Haiti's imperialist
masters. After all, what are the democratic credentials of a Bush
administration which came to power by stealing the 2000 US election and
which has since unleashed the deadly power of the US military machine on
the innocent peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq in the quest for oil and
geo-strategic advantage? And what is the US record in Haiti? Throughout the
last century, Washington, under Democratic and Republican administrations
alike, backed a long line of Haitian dictators, including the infamous
Duvalier family, all the way up to the last decade when President George
Bush Sr. gave his seal of approval to the bloody 1991 military coup which
overthrew the first Aristide government.

Inside Haiti, the opposition has turned to the most reactionary elements.
Its response to the armed uprisings in the north, led by criminal gang
leaders, drug traffickers and other dubious figures, was quite revealing.
According to a Miami Herald report, "Although Aristide's political
opposition has tried to distance itself from the gunmen, Evans Paul, a
leader of the Democratic Convergence ... told [a] news conference that
their revolt is a legitimate reaction to what they see as the president's
misrule."

Reports have since emerged that leaders of the FRAPH—the right-wing death
squad which hunted down opponents of the 1991-1994 military junta—have
crossed the border from the Dominican Republic, where they had taken
refuge, to join the Gonaïves rebellion.

The political physiognomy of the "opposition"

Whether the official opposition groups had a direct hand in the armed
uprisings at Gonaïves and elsewhere may be debatable. Their right-wing
political affiliations are not.

André Apaid, the sweatshop owner who has emerged as the opposition's
leading spokesman, opposed the ouster of the military junta and Aristide's
restoration to power in 1994. He calls for the reestablishment of the
Haitian army, dissolved by Aristide in 1995—no matter that this pillar of
reaction, created by the United States during its 1915-34 military
occupation of the country, was responsible for repeated bloody coups.

The official opposition is a loose coalition containing disparate
elements—from remnants of the old Duvalier political machine such as
ex-Duvalier minister Hubert De Ronceray to one-time supporters of Aristide.
It draws extensive support from the middle classes ("peasant organizations,
syndicates, women's groups, student associations, and writers and artists,"
as you put it). But its real leadership rests in the hands of what you
describe as "business associations and 'wealthy elites'." Your quotation
marks around the latter are meant, one assumes, to convey a sense of
exaggeration in the use of the term. But the fact remains that the driving
force behind the dump-Aristide movement is Haiti's traditional ruling
elite—a strata notorious both for its deep-rooted fear of the popular
masses and readiness to support violence and authoritarian rule to protect
its privileges.

To the extent that Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as a young, liberation-theology
priest in a Port-au-Prince slum, emerged in the final years of the Duvalier
regime as a charismatic mass leader who laced his sermons with
anti-imperialist and socialist rhetoric, he earned the hatred of the ruling
elite. Indeed, on several occasions he only narrowly escaped assassination
by right-wing death squads.

Subsequently, I shall discuss how Aristide came to power and his political
responsibility for the abortion of the mass anti-imperialist movement that
convulsed Haiti between 1986 and 1991. But one thing should be made clear
now: for the dominant sections of the Haitian ruling class, personified by
the millionaire businessman Apaid, Aristide's populist appeals to the
"dirty masses"—whether in their left-wing guise in the days of the struggle
against Duvalier or in their current form of right-wing, racial appeals
against the "mulatto elite"—are a dangerous promotion of "class hatred"
that cannot be tolerated.

Of course, the issue is presented otherwise by the opposition leaders.
Their talk of Aristide's "tyranny" is meant to downplay their own past
history and present associations. In this regard, Apaid made a remarkable
confession in an interview with the Montreal daily La Presse: "Asked about
the suspected drug traffickers who run a radio station in the north and
invoke freedom of expression, about the gunmen convicted for a massacre
under the putschist regime [of 1991-94] at Raboteau in Gonaïves, and about
two senators ex-members of Lavalas [Aristide's political party] suspected
of grave crimes, who are all his allies in the struggle against Aristide,
Apaid replied, 'I haven't negotiated anything with them,' but added: 'I
work in conviviality. I am not the justice minister'."

Opposition leaders are deliberately cultivating ambiguity as to the
policies they want to see implemented by a post-Aristide government. When
asked in the same La Presse interview about the opposition's attempt to
develop a common program, Apaid said, "The contentious points have been
pushed aside, as for example: should the economy be based on the national
space or on globalization and openness? Should workers or investors be
protected?... This left-right battle will keep tensions up for six, eight,
ten more years."

Apaid may refrain from openly stating his own position in the "left-right
battle," but his actions as owner of the industrial glove maker, Alpha
Sewing, speak for themselves. According to an August 1998 report on Alpha
Sewing by Action Alert, a labor rights group: "Workers report skin and
respiratory problems because of work done unprotected with heavy chemicals.
Workers work approximately 78 hours a week. 75 percent of the women do not
earn the minimum wage."

Based on the above observations, it is entirely accurate to characterize
the official opposition movement and the armed rebellion in the
north—whatever the exact nature of the ties between them—as a right-wing
challenge to the elected government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. To recognize
this political fact and to bring out the real agenda of opposition forces
in Haiti does not mean political "knee-jerk" support for Aristide as you
imply in your letter.

It is true that elements in the US commonly identified as "left," such as
Workers World and the weekly Haiti-Progrès, are raising the threat of
reaction as a cynical means to drum up support for an Aristide government
whose popularity has plummeted because of its policies of privatizations,
mass layoffs and price-subsidy cuts. The irony is that your own position,
glorifying the Haitian opposition movement, is but the other side of the
same coin. You share with the pro-Aristide "lefts" the view that the most
one can do is support one or the other of the bankrupt bourgeois factions
now at each other's throats in a deadly feud for the crumbs of power.

The World Socialist Web Site insists rather that working people in Haiti,
the United States, and internationally should take an independent class
standpoint. Principled political opposition to Aristide must be based on
the recognition that he has played a crucial role in derailing a mass
popular movement, which contained within it the potential for revolutionary
change.

The political record of Jean-Bertrand Aristide

Jean-Bertrand Aristide has now been in power for 10 years, both directly
and through his so-called "twin" René Préval who was Haiti's nominal
president from 1996 to 2001. His failure to improve the country's social
conditions—they have in fact grown far worse—and the subsequent political
resurrection of the forces of reaction represent the most damning
indictment of Aristide's "left" nationalist politics.

Let us now briefly review Aristide's political career since his fateful
decision in late 1990 to seek the presidency. In December of that year he
stood against Marc Bazin, a former World Bank economist who was then widely
seen as Washington's favored candidate. This represented a 180-degree shift
for a man who had until then denounced the coming elections as "US made"
and advocated their boycott.

What caused this turnaround? As the day of the ballot drew closer,
agitation among the popular masses increased dramatically in response to
the electoral campaign mounted by the Duvalierist forces under the
leadership of Roger Lafontant, the strongman of the regime in its dying
days. Nearly five years after the colossal upheavals that had toppled "Baby
Doc" Duvalier, the Haitian ruling class became increasingly alarmed at the
prospect of another eruption of the oppressed masses into the country's
political life.

It was at this point that significant sections of the Haitian bourgeoisie
turned to the former radical priest Aristide as a means to contain such a
movement. A necessary precondition was to divert it from the streets into
electoral channels. And Aristide obliged them. He quickly set aside his
past "anti-capitalist" and "anti-imperialist" rhetoric, agreed to head a
coalition of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political formations, and
campaigned on a platform of "national reconciliation," in particular for a
"marriage between the people and the military." Aristide won a landslide
victory in an election for which working people and the oppressed had come
out en masse.

His first government, which took office in February 1991, was marked by
feeble attempts at social reforms, including a token rise in the minimum
wage, coupled with preparations for the imposition of IMF-inspired
austerity measures. This was under conditions where the oppressed masses
who had propelled Aristide into the National Palace, in particular his
supporters among the youth, were pressing hard for a meaningful
redistribution of wealth to alleviate poverty. After little over eight
months in office, the dominant sections of the Haitian ruling class lost
confidence in Aristide's ability to contain the revolutionary strivings of
the masses and backed a military coup by the man Aristide had appointed
head of the Haitian armed forced, General Raoul Cédras.

The response of Aristide, whose life was spared thanks only to an
intervention by the French ambassador on the night of the coup, was to have
catastrophic political consequences for the Haitian people's struggle for
their social emancipation. While his supporters in the popular
neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince were being machine-gunned, Aristide
appealed for the coup's opponents to remain "peaceful" so as to avoid civil
war. This didn't prevent a civil war, but only made it one-sided. It is
estimated that over 3,000 people were killed during General Cédras'
three-year rule.

But most politically damaging was Aristide's decision, after finding refuge
in the United States, to base the struggle against the military junta not
on appeals to the American and international working class to assist their
Haitian class brothers and sisters in throwing off the yoke of military
terror and capitalist exploitation, but on the very force that had played
the central role throughout the twentieth century in maintaining Haiti into
the most abject poverty and oppression—that is, US imperialism.

That Aristide and his inner circle basically threw themselves at
Washington's knee, begging for support, flowed organically from their
social nature as representatives of a petty-bourgeoisie whose class outlook
is shaped by the gruesome day-to-day reality of imperialist oppression, but
which lacks any genuine independence from the national bourgeoisie and from
imperialism itself. In a previous historical period, when the Cold War
conflict between US imperialism and the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet
Union provided the national bourgeoisie with some room to maneuver, and
existing constraints on the international mobility of capital allowed for a
limited possibility of national economic development, petty-bourgeois
nationalists such as Cuba's Fidel Castro or Nicaragua's Sandinistas could
pose as radical anti-imperialists and even socialists. But by the time
Aristide was forced into exile the Soviet Union was on the brink of formal
dissolution and in response to the economic shocks of the 1970s, the
advanced capitalist powers had become increasing aggressive in their
dealings with the so-called Third World, demanding the dismantling of
tariff barriers and state-owned industries as a condition for credit,
investments and access to advanced technology.

That Aristide's career as an "anti-imperialist" proved so short, and his
transformation into a lackey of Washington such an unpleasant spectacle,
was thus not fundamentally a result of personal failings. Rather it was
rooted in the fact that he had come onto the scene at the very point when
any objective basis for implementing his petty-bourgeois nationalist
program of using the nation-state to foster indigenous industry and
implement limited social reforms in an attempt to overcome the legacy of
imperialist oppression had collapsed.

In any event, Aristide's pleas to US imperialism fell initially on deaf
ears, as the Republican administration of George Bush Sr. all but openly
welcomed the eviction of the former radical priest at the hands of its main
prop in Haiti, the US-built Haitian armed forces. However, the military
junta's brutal rule soon led tens of thousand of Haitians to try to cross
the sea to Florida, and the influx of Haitian refugees became an issue in
the 1992 US presidential election with Democratic hopeful Bill Clinton
denouncing Bush's policy of systematically denying Haitian refugees the
right of asylum.

Following Clinton's election to the White House, pressure built on him to
solve the refugee problem. His administration finally decided in 1994 upon
a military intervention to restore Aristide to power, so as to justify
completely closing the US's doors to poor Haitians and dispel the growing
impression that the Clinton administration was impotent before Cédras and
the Haitian junta. Aristide's return, however, was made conditional on his
providing a host of right-wing guarantees, most importantly a pledge to
carry out IMF-style neo-liberal policies.

Thus, when you write that "in 1994, Aristide once again had the opportunity
to set Haiti on a new path to change and development," you overlook the
concrete conditions of his return. As a result of his own petty-bourgeois
political orientation—his preference to turn to imperialism rather than the
Haitian and international working class—Aristide had his hands and feet
tied from the start. He was completely beholden to the very force that has
so long blocked Haiti's' "path to change and development,' i.e., American
imperialism. In one of history's bitter ironies, Aristide, who was elected
president on the basis of a campaign against a former World Bank official
whom he decried as "the US candidate," was put back in power by US marines
after pledging to impose a socially incendiary economic program dictated by
Washington and Wall Street.

Aristide remained in office only until the beginning of 1996, since Clinton
administration officials had insisted that no extension of his five-year
mandate would be allowed despite the three years of Cédras's rule and
Haiti's constitution barred him seeking a second consecutive term.
Aristide's chosen successor and right-hand man, René Préval, therefore ran
as the candidate of Aristide's party, Lavalas, and was elected president in
1996.

It was Préval's government that actually carried out the key elements of
the IMF structural adjustment program, leading to mass redundancies in the
public sector, the shutdown of publicly run companies such as the country's
flour and cement manufacturers, and huge cuts in subsidies on food and
transportation under conditions of runaway inflation. The result was
deepening social misery in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
Aristide still pulled the strings of power behind the scenes, but since he
formally held no office he was somewhat shielded from the political fallout
of such deeply unpopular policies.

Aristide was reelected president in December 2000, following elections
boycotted by opposition forces but deemed fair by international observers.
Compared to a decade before, however, the turnout was way down, well under
50 percent according to most estimates.

During the past three years, the devastating IMF-dictated policies Aristide
signed onto and his "twin" carried out have torn ever deeper into the
country's social fabric. And the social crisis has been further exacerbated
by the withholding of hundreds of millions of dollars of promised foreign
financial aid as the US, Canada and other big powers try to force Aristide
to incorporate opposition representatives into his government. Unable to
offer any progressive solution to the ever-widening social misery, Aristide
has come to rely more and more on the dirty tricks of generations of
Haitian politicians—patronage repression, racial appeals, and his own
private network of armed gangs recruited from lumpen elements.

The international working class and the struggle against imperialism

In the end, both Aristide and his foes in the opposition are defenders of
bourgeois rule who lack any genuine popular basis of support. They both
rely on the political backing of Washington and other imperialist forces,
and on patronage and intimidation tactics at home. Neither has the
slightest concern for bourgeois-democratic norms, let alone the democratic
rights of the masses: they know class divisions are so deep and conditions
of life so hellish for the vast majority of Haitians, that they can only be
enforced through the use of naked force.

Whether Aristide or the opposition forces ultimately prevail may determine
which section of the political and business elite gets to plunder the
state—the most important source of wealth in a country with such a low
level of economic activity and output as Haiti. For the masses, it will
make no fundamental difference.

Those looking for a genuinely progressive solution, one which addresses the
burning needs of the masses for peace, democratic rights, security,
adequate food, housing, health care and education will find it in the
struggle to mobilize Haiti's oppressed masses against the domination of the
island's economy and state by a native business oligarchy, serving as the
junior partner of Wall Street and Washington.

The only social force able to lead the fight for such an alternative is the
Haitian, Caribbean and international working class. But it must draw the
lessons of the tragic last two decades of struggles in Haiti. It must
recognize the bankruptcy of petty-bourgeois nationalist politics of the
type espoused by Aristide and his supporters. Imperialist oppression cannot
be overcome on a national basis, but only as part of a struggle against
international capital.

Under today's conditions of globalization, whose great potential of
progress for the whole of humanity remains blocked by the monopoly control
of a few giant transnational corporations driven by private profit, the
strivings of the broad masses can only be fulfilled by a fundamental,
revolutionary shift at the very basis of society. The world economy must be
run to address social needs and not the profits of a few. For this, working
people in Haiti must consciously unite their struggles with those of their
class brothers and sisters in the Caribbean, South and North America, and
join in the building of an independent mass political movement of the
international working class against imperialism.

Sincerely,

Richard Dufour, for the WSWS

.