Posted on 02/27/2004 8:13:08 PM PST by RWR8189
Before Haiti can achieve its long-term objectives, the United States can have only one goal in the short term: liberating Haitians from their corrupt and demagogic dictator.
AS A GROWING BAND of ragtag rebels converged on Port-au-Prince last week, threatening to topple Haitian dictator Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Bush administration's policy at first appeared hesitant. The situation was admittedly confusing. But happily, by the end of the week, the administration seemed to have reached a correct judgment that before any good can be accomplished, Aristide must go.
The United States has several long-term objectives for Haiti: achieving stable democratic government, building an economy out of aid capital, repairing ecological damage unequaled on the planet, forcing the Colombian cocaine underworld to stop using the country as one of its most important transshipment centers, and preventing a refugee crisis on our shores. Before it can achieve its long-term objectives, the United States can have only one goal in the short term: liberating Haitians from their corrupt and demagogic dictator. This in turn requires a recognition that the United States cannot turn its back on this nation 600 miles from Florida.
Aristide, of course, did not create Haiti's problems, but he profits from all of them. His ten years of direct and indirect rule have been a disaster. His regime has been democratic only in the Haitian sense of one man, one vote, one time. The last free and fair election in Haiti was in 1990, the closely monitored contest that brought Aristide to power. Even then, Aristide was making use of street violence orchestrated by his "vigilance committees." Forced to flee after a September 1991 coup, he spent three years in Washington lobbying for his restoration. In 1994, the Clinton administration intervened to restore Aristide to power, but things quickly went downhill. Four years ago, Aristide received over 90 percent of the vote in a presidential election so transparently corrupt that several American and European agencies reluctantly froze hundreds of millions of dollars in aid money. (Last week, the irony-proof Iowa senator Tom Harkin noted that in that electoral charade, "Aristide got a higher percentage of the vote in Haiti than Bush got in this country.")
With a mystifying regularity reminiscent of Saddam Hussein, Aristide has refused the simplest procedural inducements to unlock millions that could have been used to feed and treat his poorer compatriots. From humble beginnings as a Salesian slum priest (he was expelled from his order in 1988), Aristide has become the richest man in Haiti. How? Last Wednesday in Miami, the Haitian mafioso Beaudoin Ketant, go-between for three Colombian cartels, was sentenced to 27 years in prison for transporting 30 tons of cocaine between Haiti and Florida. At his sentencing, Ketant said that Aristide "is a drug lord. He controlled the drug trade in Haiti. . . . It's a one-man show, your honor. You either pay him or you die."
In the past two years, Aristide created a system of cooperative banks that paid absurd levels of interest. Once the Haitian middle class had invested much of its savings in these banks, the whole system collapsed in a manner reminiscent of the Albanian Ponzi scheme of 1997--perhaps because of a mysterious $90 million loan taken out either by Aristide or by one of his associates. This wipeout of Haiti's already-infinitesimal middle class gave an impetus to street protests against the regime, and led to demonstrations of thousands in front of the presidential palace.
But Aristide has until now been well defended against such unrest, not so much by the police that U.S. consultants had set up for him in the mid-1990s as by two irregular groups. First is his private security detail, made up of former U.S. Special Forces, working under private contract. Second are the lumpen hooligans and released criminals known as "chimeras," who, in whatever numbers are needed, can be armed and paid by Aristide loyalists for deployment against political enemies.
In early December 2003, chimeras beat some uncooperative teachers at a local university, sparking student protests. On December 23, security forces fired into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in downtown Port-au-Prince, killing a dozen. But none of this would have threatened Aristide had not the chimeras themselves begun to turn on him. Over the holidays, two or three hundred of them protested in front of the Presidential Palace after not having been paid for breaking up a demonstration earlier in the month. In January, some of Aristide's northern gangs--the Cannibal Army in Gonaïves, the Red Army and Saddam's Army in Cap-Haïtien--grew discontented with Aristide's attempt to discipline their leaders.
Randall Robinson, founder of TransAfrica and a longtime Aristide apologist, accuses those who seek his removal of "undermining democracy." Democratic presidential near-nominee John Kerry said of Aristide last week, "This democracy is going to be sustained." Both of them misread what has gone on in Haiti since Aristide's return. It is not the "democratic authorities" that are being overthrown in Haiti, but Aristide's retinue of gunmen (who, as we go to press, are reportedly handing out weaponry to loyalists, who in turn are robbing passersby in Port-au-Prince). That--and not any "grudge" against a charismatic Marxist slum priest--is why not only the rebels but also the entirety of the democratic opposition have refused to take part in any negotiations that envision Aristide's continuation in power.
France's foreign minister Dominique de Villepin apparently understands this. A week ago, he declared that Aristide bears "grave responsibility" for the current state of low-intensity civil war. At that point, Colin Powell still seemed to be threatening to withhold recognition from any government that replaced Aristide by force, but by the end of the week, Powell had evolved toward the view that Aristide would have to be replaced.
Both France and the United States now appear to see that only those with guns were capable of rising against the Aristide thugocracy. It is true that the armed force that triumphs will likely have elements that we cannot permit to rule, unless we're willing to live through another rebellion 18 months from now. Such elements include not just the old anti-Aristide hard-line opposition of the early 1990s, but also the new anti-Aristide opposition, which was doing Aristide's bidding scant weeks ago. Villepin's call for a peacekeeping force in Haiti, even if it's the knee-jerk European response to Third World crises, should be given serious consideration in this case. It's a way to protect Haiti's democratic forces as they crawl out from under cover and seek to rejoin their country's political life.
As for the task of rebuilding an economy destroyed by kleptocracy, drug dealing, and the U.N. embargo set up to gain Aristide's return in the 1990s, this is work for the long haul that will cost billions, and the United States has no particular monopoly on the expertise and values needed to carry it out. A France that wants to play a role in that effort deserves our respect and gratitude. Nevertheless, America must lead the effort in its area of historic responsibility. With all due respect to M. de Villepin, it is time for Secretary Powell to lay out a plan for a transfer of power that begins to place Haiti on the road to reconstruction.
--Christopher Caldwell, for the Editors
Indeed. Now with the reopening of the OKC bombing investigation, I think we're going to see other unattractive aspects of his "legacy" emerging.
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