27520: Hyppolite Pierre (Editorial in today's New York Times by Amy Wilentz) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Hyppolite Pierre <hpierre@irsp.org>

The link is: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/opinion/07wilentz.html 
**************
Here's the full text. 
By AMY WILENTZ
Published: February 7, 2006

TWENTY years ago today, in the elegant but down-at-the-heels central square of 
Port-au-Prince, the Haitian people celebrated the departure of a dictator and 
the end of nearly three decades of a nightmare dynasty. In the smallest hours 
of Feb. 7, 1986, Jean-Claude Duvalier, his chain-smoking wife at his side, 
drove his Mercedes sedan right up to the open door of a United States Air Force 
jet and fled the country for the South of France. Along with about 50 members 
of the foreign press corps, I was there at FranÃois Duvalier International 
Airport, named for the fleeing man's father, who had visited disaster after 
disaster on his native land. 
Now it was morning, and it seemed all of Haiti had descended into the square, 
each person waving fanlike branches cut from street-side trees. It was as if a 
forest had come to town to cover up the traces of the hated regime. 
A brighter day was dawning, so most people thought, and so I thought, although 
it was clear that there would be difficult moments ahead. Mobs surged through 
the city and countryside, hunting down supporters of the ancien rÃgime. Yet 
Haitians in general were ecstatic. Surely democracy, with that joyous popular 
will behind it, would triumph. 
Soon after that brilliant day, I became acquainted with a bunch of boys. They 
were young and homeless, and every day dozens of them would gather at the 
school where Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest known for his broadside 
sermons against the Duvalier regime, lived and worked. The boys spent a lot of 
time kicking a dead ball around the dusty courtyard in noisy games of soccer. 
Waldeck was one, another was nicknamed Ayiti (which means Haiti in Creole), 
another was Ti Johnny. One I did not know so well was Wilmer. There were so 
many; they all wanted money, and sneakers. 
Democracy, it turned out, was not within easy grasp. Having suffered through 
almost 30 years of the Duvaliers' kleptocracy, Haiti had no economy to speak 
of, hardly any infrastructure, no workable education system and no viable 
democratic institutions. The little boys were typical. Under Father Aristide's 
auspices, they eked out a living at the edge of this dysfunctional non-system, 
sleeping at night in a shantytown warehouse, with a single light bulb, and 
straw mats for beds. 
In the wake of Mr. Duvalier's ouster, democratic steps were taken: an electoral 
council established, a Constitution written, candidates announced. In 1990, 
Haiti held a free and fair election under international supervision, and â to 
my amazement â my boys' Father Aristide, the priest who spoke for Haiti's 
disenfranchised millions, became the country's first honestly elected 
president. 
But beneath the veneer of progress, Haiti hadn't really changed. The same 
ruinous division continued between the tiny upper class, which had long run the 
country, and the poor. The rich went on living in mansions amid boutiques and 
restaurants at the literal top of the hill in Port-au-Prince, and the 
impoverished, unemployed, illiterate and starving majority of the people 
endured in the mud, sewage, garbage and pig slop in shantytowns at the bottom, 
or in the remote countryside, unelectrified and dark. Worse yet, the country 
was essentially bankrupt, relying almost entirely on funds from donor nations 
and on money sent back to relatives by Haitians abroad. 
President Aristide had little effect on all this, for all his orphan boys and 
his dedication to popular empowerment. Many of his immediate projects revolved 
around himself, though he always bore the people's future in mind. As far as he 
was concerned, he was the people, and the people were President Aristide. Thus 
a new house for him, with an echoing living room, was a new sanctuary where the 
people could come to hear his message. A new swimming pool in his yard was a 
place where the little boys could come to swim without fear or embarrassment 
â and they did. Meanwhile, conditions in the shantytowns worsened. 
None of this was surprising in a Haitian president. But Jean-Bertrand Aristide 
was supposed to be different. And he really was different. No matter how big 
his house, how nice his swimming pool, he never lost the respect of a wide 
swath of the population for whom he remained a commanding symbol of liberation. 
A powerful sector of Haiti's elite could not stomach that â nor did they like 
this outsider's control over the country's purse strings. 
Once in power, President Aristide was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. 
If he didn't make slum dwellers and heads of popular movements his closest 
advisers, for example, he would be shunning the Haitian people, the very ones 
who gave him his legitimacy. But if he did accept the common people into his 
circle or reject his handful of upper-class advisers, he would be seen as 
encouraging naÃve, unlettered toughs who were likely to be sycophantic and 
turn to violence when thwarted. 
Haitian society was so polarized between haves and have-nots that every 
decision was potentially destructive and only moderation might have saved the 
day. Yet President Aristide was not a natural moderate, and neither were his 
most implacable enemies â members of a powerful elite that wielded remarkable 
influence in Washington. 
And so President Aristide was overthrown before he had served a year of his 
term. Reinstated by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Mr. Aristide rightly feared 
that the same forces â a cabal of elite families, members of the military and 
American powerbrokers â would conspire to take him down again. He disbanded 
the army. In 2000, he was again elected president. This time he made stabs at 
moderation, but his enemies would not budge, and in the end, he believed he 
needed the militant support of his power base in the shantytowns to stave off 
another attempt to oust him. 
Those boys whom I'd met in 1986 were big now â those who had survived. 
Waldeck had a baby and was helping with security at the presidential palace. Ti 
Johnny had been shot and killed in a drug-related incident. Ayiti had died, too 
â of AIDS, it was said. I didn't hear anything about Wilmer for a long time. 
As he had feared, President Aristide was overthrown again in February 2004, 
with the support of the right-wing elite and a nod from Washington. Soon after, 
Wilmer surfaced as an armed street organizer in the giant slum of Cità Soleil, 
on the outskirts of the capital. A skinny boy not so long ago, he had become a 
legendary outlaw Aristide supporter known as Dread Wilmer â to some a bandit 
hero, a Haitian Robin Hood, to others a drug trafficker, gangster and killer. 
With President Aristide gone, he was vulnerable. Last July, Wilmer and four 
others, including a woman and her two small children, were killed in a gun 
battle with the United Nations forces that had been sent to keep the peace in 
Haiti. 
Since Mr. Aristide's most recent ouster, things have fallen apart in Haiti in a 
dramatic way, with kidnappings and street shootouts commonplace. This is not a 
propitious atmosphere for today's planned presidential vote, in which RÃnà 
PrÃval, a former elected president and a former close Aristide associate, is 
the front-runner, according to polls. If Mr. PrÃval wins by a wide margin 
(less likely since electoral authorities decided not to allow voting inside the 
restive Cità Soleil), he might be able to take some small steps forward for 
the country. 
President Aristide's example, however flawed, makes it hard for any future 
Haitian leader to rule without a popular mandate. The trouble lies in getting 
both Haitian elites and American policy makers to accept fair elections and 
whatever leadership, unpredictable as it might be, that emerges from them. This 
may not happen today, or even tomorrow. But the new generation of Haiti's elite 
needs to recognize that regime change in Haiti must come from the electorate. 
And in the same spirit, Washington â for so long insincere on the question of 
Haitian democracy â has to put its backing once and for all truly behind the 
Haitian people. 
Amy Wilentz, who is writing a book about California, is the author of "The 
Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier."