22107: Esser: The Haiti Crisis: Aristide Is Not the Issue (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com


Dollars & Sense magazine
http://www.dollarsandsense.org

Issue #253, May/June 2004


The Haiti Crisis: Aristide Is Not the Issue
BY BILL FLETCHER, JR.


One of the biggest mistakes people have made looking at the recent
Haitian crisis has been to focus on the person of President Bertrande
Aristide. This may sound odd since, after all, he is the one who was
overthrown. What took place this February was not simply the ouster
of an individual, however, but the termination of constitutional
rule. Thus, whether someone happens to oppose or support President
Aristide is secondary. The primary question is whether it is
permissible to overthrow a genuinely elected leader other than via
legal and constitutional procedures.

Following the coup, many progressives reacted, understandably, by
defending President Aristide-the-person. But this misses the point
about the coup’s upending of constitutional rule. It also fails to
address the complications that President Aristide found himself
facing as a result of the conditions that he accepted when he was
returned to power in 1994.

At that time, the U.S. government imposed on President Aristide a set
of conditions that were the equivalent of handcuffing him. He was
expected to adopt, almost wholesale, the economic approach that has
come to be known as the Washington Consensus. This included the
elimination of thousands of civil service positions and the
advancement of a privatization agenda. The United States and
multilateral lending institutions demanded this approach of the
poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, one emerging from a
history of political despotism and neo-colonialism. For better or for
worse, President Aristide accepted these parameters.

The difficulty for President Aristide, however, is that sections of
his base were unwilling to accept such conditions. They were
thirsting after the Aristide who, upon his initial election in 1990,
had promised a redistribution of wealth and the articulation of a
politics defined not by the Haitian wealthy elite, but by the Haitian
majority—its poor.

In some respects, then, it is appropriate to see the post-1994
Aristide as a political character buffeted by contending political
waves. On the one hand, his bases among the historically dispossessed
protested against privatization and demanded that Aristide carry
forward his promised reforms—and were in some cases able to halt
neoliberal efforts. Sections of this base became disenchanted,
feeling that Aristide had either gone back on his word or was not
moving forward quickly enough. In some cases there were more serious
criticisms about alleged human rights abuses by the government and
its failure to investigate them. Nevertheless, it appears that the
bulk of his base remained loyal to him and to his party, Famni
Lavalas.

The other wave was from the political right. It was a wave generated
from both Washington and from the Haitian elite. This wave saw in
Aristide, even the new-and-improved Aristide after 1994, a person too
far to the left and an unstable political element. Aristide’s efforts
to change the conditions of the Haitian poor through improvements in
health care, education, and roads were viewed as a threat to the
dominance of the rich and powerful.

Thus, President Aristide went too far to the right to satisfy
important sections of his base (and in some cases demoralizing them),
but not far enough to the right to satisfy the Bush administration
and the Haitian elite.

The coup against Aristide, then, must be understood not in isolation,
but as the culmination of activities that really began the minute he
was re-elected in 2000. Destabilization efforts by the U.S.
government, active U.S. support for the creation of a so-called
civil-society opposition, and eventually the invasion of Haiti by an
armed band of criminals and murderers were all part of a process
designed to ensure that Haiti would return fully to the fold of the
U.S. empire and its minions in Haiti.

There are many lessons that we in the United States must learn from
this entire debacle, but perhaps the most important one is that the
actions of our citizenry, or our inactions, help determine whether
the space in which countries of the global South operate is one in
which dreams can be realized, or one in which nightmares must be
suffered.



• Bill Fletcher, Jr., is the president of TransAfrica Forum, a
Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit educational and organizing center
formed to raise awareness in the United States regarding issues
facing the nations and peoples of Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin
America. He can be reached at bfletcher@transafricaforum.org.


Copyright © 2003 Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc.
.