J. Michael Dash
, Contributor
ON A CARICOM fact-finding mission to Haiti in June 1989, I remember the St. Lucian delegate from the group asking why Haitians were not being encouraged to grow bananas in order to solve the then political crisis. At the time, this question seemed both absurd and inappropriate in a country which was as poor in topsoil as in political options. However, on further reflection, I suppose that what he had in mind was that banana farmers were a pillar of democratic political culture in St. Lucia and that no political solution for Haiti could be found unless there was something similar on which to ground Haitian democracy.
This is an idea well worth keeping in mind as Haiti undergoes a seemingly endless transition to something other than authoritarian political rule. Democracy clearly needs to be rooted in basic institutions and practices that preserve democratic values. Not only do Haitians, at all levels, lack these institutions but the only system of government the vast majority of the population has known is Duvalierism, a particularly violent manifestation of state power. Having brought down this absolutist state in the name of democratic freedoms, Haiti is left with little or no central control and without the means of creating an alternative to the absolutist state. Never has Haiti needed banana farmers as much as at the present time.
STRUGGLE TO DEATH
Haiti's present problems are as much related to the current president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as to the demands of an unrelenting opposition that has rallied around the one slogan that Aristide must leave the country. Aristide and his opponents have one thing in common. Neither has any real experience of democratic institutions. Aristide is himself a product of a centralised, authoritarian system the Catholic Church - has essentially retained power by populist rhetoric, paranoid political practices and a politicising of the legal institutions as well as security forces.
He is at least guilty of gross incompetence and a callous disregard for the well-being of the Haitian people as a whole. Always unflappably vague, always ready with the fuzzy sound bite, Aristide has frustrated for the last four years, any attempt by the opposition political parties or the OAS negotiators to correct the irregularities of the elections of 2000. This combination of an arrogant refusal to compromise and naive demagogic rhetoric has shown that Aristide is no Mandela but simply an incompetent populist who has failed to rise to an historic occasion. For this he may deserve impeachment, which the constitution does not seem to allow, but not expulsion from Haiti.
INCOMPETENT OPPOSITION
Haiti, however, is a country in which politics is a fight to the death and to the winner go all the spoils. The opposition, therefore, is not interested in building its own political base by capitalising on the widespread disenchantment with Aristide. They are not interested in having a referendum on the self-destructive incompetence of the president. They themselves have resorted to the hysterical sound bite 'Aristide must go'. They show no signs of embarrassment at the parallel Government that they installed in 2001 under the decrepit shadow presidency of Gerard Gourgue. Indeed, the opposition's uncompromising extremism can be traced back to their obstruction of the appointment of a Prime Minister by President Rene Preval after the resignation of Rosny Smarth. They, who now sound so righteously indignant, were once quite happy to stall the functioning of the government by cavalierly wielding their limited political power.
Intransigence on both sides has, therefore, paralysed Haiti for the last four years. Aristide, who had no respect for the date when Parliament was dissolved in January 2004, insists that the date for the end of his term in office in February 2006 be respected. The opposition has been emboldened by its ability to promote massive demonstrations in Port-au-Prince and have openly flirted with anarchy by promoting confrontations between their mobs and the mobs of Aristide supporters. Increasingly, the opposition seems to have been taken over by business interests as certainly one businessman, whom no one elected, has become the spokesman of the chaotic anti-Aristide movement. This suggests that the whole point of removing Aristide now, as it may have been in 2001, is to allow for business as usual for the Haitian so-called elite who have always run the country as their private franchise.
FACES OF THE PAST
Anti-Aristide opposition has now entered a new and even more disturbing phase. Armed gangs which now constitute themselves as a National Liberation Front have taken over the town of Gonaives and attacked the Haitian police in the nearby towns of St. Marc and Hinche. In the face of an ill-equipped and demoralised police force of 5,000 men, such victories have come without much difficulty. The so-called rebels have also been joined by various members of past para-military organisations who had fled over the Dominican Republic's border. The spokesman for the armed opposition, Butteur Matayer, brother of the thug who once led 'The Cannibal Army' in Gonaives, now produces his own incoherent sound-bites for the international media. This insurrection mercifully does not seem important enough or sufficiently well-organised to overthrow the Government. What it is likely to do is produce a no-win civil war as Aristide's chimeras or armed loyalists respond to the threat to the presidency. In all of this Aristide sits in his empty palace mouthing abstractions like 'dignity' and 'freedom'. The non-violent opposition makes no attempt to denounce the opportunist thugs who have seized control of Gonaives and a humanitarian crisis of massive proportion threatens to unleash a flood of refugees in the northern Caribbean. The very phenomena of Macoutism and militarism that the anti-Duvalier movement had fought against now threaten to engulf post-Duvalier Haiti. To make the irony more acute, the 200th anniversary of the surrender of Napoleon's troops to Dessalines' army may yet witness the landing of French troops in Haiti in a bid to provide some semblance of the rule of law.
RESCUING HAITI
Haiti cannot be saved by those on the outside if only for the simple reason that a modern democratic society can neither be imposed by the well-armed nor inserted by the well-meaning. Haitians will have to find the capacity for patience and compromise in order to extricate themselves from their predicament. The radical restructuring of Haitian society can be helped, however, by external forces who are committed to long-term nation-building and not to sending contradictory signals, wittingly or unwittingly, to political elements in Haiti. The international community restored Aristide to power in 1994 and left before any real institutional change was established in Haiti. Since the change of administration in Washington, Aristide has been out in the cold and the opposition has not been discouraged from their extremist activism.
The single most important signal sent by the United States was the recent statement by Secretary of State Colin Powell, that they would not recognise a Government installed by violence and that Aristide should be allowed to finish his term in office. Such a constructive American approach could lead to some kind of international intervention in the face of which armed opposition will fizzle and the non-violent opposition will have to participate in elections and try to convince the Haitian people that they are really interested in their welfare. With the millions of dollars in frozen aid restored, the project of rooting democratic values in Haitian society could become a real possibility.
INTERVENTION NECESSARY
A more united U.S. and U.N. approach can have an impact on Haiti, a country which is vastly smaller than Iraq and nowhere near the violent collapse of countries such as Liberia and Somalia. In such a context, Haiti's Caribbean neighbours seem once more either too cynical about Haiti's fate or too ill-advised in their attempts to intervene. The recent series of meetings in the Bahamas and Jamaica with the opposition and Aristide while commendable produced a series of contradictory signals. On one hand the opposition was not told firmly that the removal of Aristide would not be tolerated by CARICOM and on the other CARICOM seemed to be threatening sanctions against Aristide. It is now commonplace to speak of the lack of strong regional leadership in the Caribbean. To this extent, no major problem in Haiti or elsewhere is likely to be solved by CARICOM or any Caribbean body. It is not even embarrassing for owners of local newspapers to wonder out loud whether Haiti should not be expelled from CARICOM, like an amputated limb. No more helpful are those who, blinkered by Afrocentric solidarity, reduce Haiti to the victory of 1804 and try to see Boukman or Toussaint in the face of every Haitian. Of course, Haiti will survive in one way or another. Today the only voice that seems to make sense is that of a St. Lucian politician who many years ago felt that unless Haiti became a banana democracy it was forever fated to be a banana republic.
J. Michael Dash is Professor of French at the New York University. You can send your comments to mjdio@nyu.edu.
