27257: Wharram (editorial) Gwynne Dyer article: Haiti No Easy Way Out

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From Bruce Wharram

Date: Jan 10, 2006 3:01 AM
Subject: Fw: Gwynne Dyer article: Haiti
To: gwynnedyer@gmail.com

Haiti: No Easy Way Out
                                                       By Gwynne Dyer

       "We are not going to participate (in the election) without
Aristide," said Father Gérard Jean-Juste, whom many Haitians see as the
natural successor to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the priest-president who was
overthrown by the United States in 2004. "It's going to be like the
election in Iraq. It will be futile."

       That was last February, and as part of the process of trying to
break Aristide's support among the Haitian poor, the "interim government"
installed by the US, France and Canada jailed Jean-Juste in July on the
implausible charge that he murdered a journalist.  But the elections that
might finally give the foreign intervention some legitimacy have just been
postponed for the FOURTH time.

       They said they were cancelling the vote on 8 January because of
problems with the new electronic voting system, but the real problem is
that they still don't control a lot of the country.  In particular, they
still don't control Cité Soleil, the seething shanty-town that dominates
Port-au-Prince, the ramshackle capital where a third of the 8.5 million
Haitians live.

       In Cité Soleil, Aristide is still the president. When United Nation
troops in Haiti conducted a pre-dawn raid there last July, it turned into a
five-hour firefight. The UN troops killed the five "gang members" they were
allegedly after, but local residents saw the dead men as martyrs for
Aristide and placed photos of the exiled president on their bodies. They
did the same for the twenty other residents of the slum who they claim were
killed by the "blue helmets" -- and since then, UN troops have rarely dared
to enter Cité Soleil.

       In fact, all foreigners associated with the military intervention
in Haiti are potential targets. In the last ten days of December, three
Chilean UN soldiers were wounded in the northern town of Plaisance, a
Jordanian soldier was killed in Cité Soleil, and a Canadian soldier was
shot dead near a checkpoint just outside the slum.  On 30 December, two
employees of the Organisation of American States, one Peruvian and the
other Guatemalan, were kidnapped while driving near Cité Soleil.

       Haiti is responding badly to foreign intervention because it is a
real country with a tragic history.  Haitians may have no money, little
education and few prospects, but they actually know who they are.

       They are a whole country descended from people who were kidnapped
from Africa, heirs of the greatest slave rebellion in history two centuries
ago. They are the survivors of an attempted genocide by Napoleon, whose
strategy for reconquering France's richest colony  involved exterminating
every black over 12 and restocking Haiti with more docile slaves imported
from Africa. They are also the victims of the long, sad aftermath of
Haiti's victory and independence.

       With all the whites dead or fled, the enslaved former peasants from
Africa inevitably ended up being dominated in independent Haiti by the
so-called "mulattos," locally born ex-slaves, many of them mixed-race, who
spoke good French and understood how business, government and diplomacy
worked. The new mulatto elite created an army, recruited mostly from the
black majority, whose main job was to keep other blacks under control, and
generation after generation they cooperated with foreigners to exploit
their own fellow-countrymen.

       Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest nurtured on liberation
theology, became the hero of the poor black masses because he promised to
end all that. He was elected president by a landslide in Haiti's first free
election in1990, after the reigning dictator, "Baby Doc" Duvalier, was
forced into exile, but the unreformed army overthrew him the next year with
the warm approval of the elder Bush administration, which saw him as a
dangerous Marxist.

       The Clinton administration used 24,000 American troops to put
Aristide back in power in 1994, but discovered too late that he was a real
revolutionary.  He disbanded the army on his return, and when the old elite
started using gangs of ex-soldiers to defend their privileges, he used
similar gangs recruited from amongst the poor to cow them. His policies
were incoherent, he was more a demagogue than a democrat, and Haiti
remained the poorest country in the Americas -- but the poor still loved
him.  Especially after the US overthrew him again.

       The Republican-controlled Congress cut off US aid to Aristide's
government in 2000, and the younger Bush administration revived US links
with the mulatto elite and their ex-military gangs afer 2001. In early
2004, gangs of ex-soldiers launched a revolt that advanced to the outskirts
of Port-au-Prince -- and a US official arrived at the presidential palace
with a group of heavily armed Marines to escort Aristide to the airport.

       Washington got diplomatic cover by persuading Canada and France to
go along with the operation (they both felt the need to give Bush something
after refusing to help him invade Iraq), and it got a 7,400-strong
"peacekeeping force" out of the United Nations (which also felt the need to
look helpful).  But Caricom, the association of Caribbean countries, still
refuses to accept the US-backed coup, and most poorer Haitians see the
"interim government" as a US puppet and the UN troops as an occupying army.

       Aristide, in exile in South Africa, still sees himself as the
legitimate president of Haiti, and so do a lot of Haitians. They will not
be allowed to vote for him even if the "interim government" does eventually
manage to stage an election, but that means that nothing will be settled
and the violence will not abate. Aristide may never return, but the old
order cannot be restored.
____________________________
To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and .  ("In fact...Soleil"; and
"Washington...army")
       Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles
are published in 45 countries.






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