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30793: LA TIMES - Haiti tastes peace under Preval (fwd)






FROM: John Holmstead


Haiti tastes peace under Preval
The president, who shies from the spotlight, nudges
his traumatized nation slowly forward -- too slowly
for some.
By Carol J. Williams
Times Staff Writer

July 25, 2007

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI ? Shoeless boys with angry eyes
and empty stomachs no longer loiter outside the green
iron gates of the National Palace.

The odd jobs of oppression have disappeared. In the
unfamiliar atmosphere of peace, there are no more
orders to bash heads or crush dissent that once earned
the ragtag enforcers a plate of rice and beans or a
tube of glue to sniff.

A year into his second tenure as president, Rene
Preval has broken ranks with two centuries of despots
and demagogues.

Preval has eschewed the politics of brutality and
confrontation, quietly achieving what only a year ago
seemed unimaginable: fragile unity among this
country's fractious classes.

Allies and adversaries alike credit the reclusive
president with creating a breathing space for
addressing the poverty and environmental devastation
that have made Haiti the most wretched place in the
Western Hemisphere. Preval has taken small steps to
crack down on crime and corruption, and improve
Haiti's infrastructure and food supply. But he largely
holds fast to the strategy he used in defeating more
than 30 rivals in the presidential race last year:
Make no promises, raise no expectations.

Observers say Preval's low-key approach may be what
Haiti has needed, but they worry what will happen if
his shaky health takes a turn for the worse or if the
country's 8 million people start to lose patience with
his go-slow approach.

Preval loathes the limelight, evading ceremony and
exuding moody impatience with meetings, limiting them
to what aides insist are essential contacts to begin
moving mountains of corruption, injustice, squalor and
70% unemployment.

He seldom leaves the palace, where visitors find him
padding between his office and apartment in polo
shirts and sandals. When he must go out, he travels in
a modest motorcade without the customary sirens and
outsize entourage.

A loner chafing in the midst of liveried staff and a
protective contingent of U.N. soldiers, the president
has been known to sneak out for a nocturnal stroll,
incognito in the poorly lighted parks surrounding the
palace.

His private life, by contrast, is more of an open
book, at least in the gossipy circles of the business
and political elite. The bourgeoisie in the elegant
villas of Petionville were atwitter six months ago
when Preval installed a new paramour at the palace,
driving out his estranged-then-reconciled second wife,
Geri.

A once-legendary consumer of the island's famed
Barbancourt rum, Preval has lately cut down in favor
of an occasional whiskey and decidedly fewer
Marlboros. Some attribute the reining in of his
excesses to a cancer scare over the winter, when
doctors found signs suggesting a recurrence of the
disease. He makes regular visits to Cuba for
treatment, grouses about the side effects of his
medications, but looks to be weathering the demands of
office as well as can be expected of a 64-year-old
long advised to make lifestyle changes.

Colleagues panic at the thought that the prostate
cancer that was diagnosed and treated six years ago
could recur and force him from office.

"It would be a catastrophe, the end of everything. We
can't even permit ourselves to consider this
possibility," one advisor said.

Those closest to Preval praise his modesty but
sometimes despair of his reticence.

"Some people think he's too laid-back," conceded
Lionel Delatour, a business consultant and friend.
Preval hasn't made a single diplomatic appointment
since taking office, Delatour said, shying from the
kinds of decisions that could alienate factions in his
broad coalition.

"He isn't going to make waves," Delatour said. "He
told his ministers that he didn't want to see massive
firings" of civil servants, as occurred after his
mentor, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, fled following his
ouster in February 2004 and a caretaker government
swept his supporters from office.

Aristide basked in ceremony, donning his presidential
sash with relish. In contrast, after 14 months in
office, Preval has yet to tour the countryside, make a
public address, give a news conference or grant an
interview.

"He's a very low-key president, but it would be a
mistake to think he's not a hands-on president," U.S.
Ambassador Janet Sanderson said. Still, she wishes he
would get out more and promote the hard-won stability
he has secured to give confidence to potential
tourists and investors.

Some point to Preval's 1996-2001 presidency, when he
was perceived as doing Aristide's bidding, as the
cause of his reluctance to trumpet recent successes.

"He's very cautious and low-key, perhaps because he
was part of the mess," veteran human rights activist
Jean-Claude Bajeux says of Preval, whom he considered
too willing an accomplice of Aristide when the former
priest was arming street gangs and repressing
opponents.

Preval, the son of a gentleman farmer and former
agriculture minister, was educated in engineering and
agronomy in Belgium in the 1960s, when leftist student
movements set the political tone across Europe. His
rural, but privileged, origins in Haiti and his
foreign experience forged a politician who was
initially "not just a populist but an anarchist,"
Bajeux said.

He believes Preval is now skillfully moving the
country away from the disorder of populist revolution
but without any recognizable governing model. That
experiment could fail if the millions without work or
much hope of it in the near future get restless, he
said.

"Recovery is very slow, and time is against us," said
Bajeux, 76. "There is misery now like never before.
People are hungry, children's health is declining.
People are not endlessly patient."

One reason Preval was drafted into running for
president was his success in transforming the small
town of his birth, Marmelade, into an island of
agrarian prosperity. The town, in the lush northern
Artibonite region, is planted with bamboo that locals
harvest, fashion into furniture and market throughout
the Caribbean. Profits from the cooperatives formed by
Preval have been plowed into a community Internet
center, public works and schools.

In office, Preval has confronted only the most
egregious troublemakers. Kidnappings for ransom surged
late last year, prompting him to authorize U.N.
peacekeepers to target slum gang leaders. Two major
criminal bosses were killed, a dozen jailed and any
remaining kingpins have gone into hiding. Kidnappings
fell from 42 in January to eight in June.

With the security situation improved, Preval turned to
crimes of the elite: corruption and tax evasion. One
of Haiti's wealthiest men, banker and mobile phone
magnate Franck Cine, has been in the fetid
penitentiary since mid-May pending trial on charges of
expropriating deposits.

There are glimmers of improvement: Electrical
generation plants are being repaired with foreign aid.
A new road to the north is under construction. Food
aid for orphanages and health centers is flowing.
Flights from Miami, Fort Lauderdale and New York have
tripled in the past year, bringing thousands who
patronize hotels, restaurants and open-air markets
selling paintings, voodoo flags and punched-metal
sculptures.

A handful of new investments in the mobile phone and
textile industries have created a few hundred new jobs
but in a country needing millions.

The business elite and other former opponents praise
Preval for those small steps to improve the economy,
but that has gained him little capital on the squalid
streets of Port-au-Prince, where two in five Haitians
live. Most of them are jammed into one-room hovels,
often next to open sewers and charred reminders of
gang war.

The few complaints Haitians voice about their leader
center on the achingly slow pace of change in their
daily lives.

"We're living in a very delicate moment now," said
Micha Gaillard, a professor who was a political
opponent of Preval but now serves on his committee to
reform the judiciary. "If there are no clear signs of
improvement at the social level, everything he's done
to combat insecurity and corruption could come to an
explosive end."

Some of the poor say they are not impressed.

"If there's anything to be thankful for, God is
responsible," sniffed Nadine Domaius, a 42-year-old
mother of four who was selling soft drinks in the
crush of rickety pushcarts, honking jalopies,
smoke-belching trucks and women carrying heavy bundles
on their heads.

Denis Sonel, another slum-dweller selling prepaid
phone cards across from the National Palace, concedes
it is now safe to walk the streets. But he, too, is
reluctant to credit Preval.

Motioning with his head toward the palace, the
53-year-old father of five said: "Preval was already
there once and he didn't do much."

Much of Preval's support among the poor stemmed from
his association with Aristide, who vowed to seize the
wealth of the nation from the few dozen families who
control 90% of the economy.

Many of those who voted for him last year thought that
if he were elected, he would bring Aristide back from
exile.

"We voted for him, but he hasn't said anything about
the return of Aristide, and the population is getting
very angry about that," said Annette August, a
militant supporter of Aristide's Lavalas movement.

For conservatives such as Daniel Fouchard at the other
end of the spectrum, Preval is a strange political
bedfellow but an effective leader.

Fouchard has been brought in to the Tourism Ministry
to craft a plan to help eradicate poverty one
household at a time by drawing local craftsmen,
drivers, cooks and cleaners into restored community
markets, eco-touring and rural hostels.

"Preval has opened the government to all," said the
businessman, who backed a wealthy colleague in last
year's election. "For the first time since the 19th
century, we have no troublemakers at work. It's not a
window of opportunity, it's a great big gate."



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