22128: erzilidanto: The Haiti Crisis: Aristide Is Not the Issue (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Erzilidanto@aol.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.



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Forwarded by the Haitian Lawyers Leadership
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"Men anpil chaj pa lou"  is Kreyol for - "Many hands make light a heavy load."

See, The Haitian Leadership Networks'  7 "men anpil chaj pa

lou" campaigns to help restore Haiti's independence, the will of the mass
electorate and the rule of law. See,
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/haitianlawyers.html ; http://www.margueritelaurent.com/campaigns/campaigns.html

and Haitiaction.net

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