The streets in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, are dirty, narrow and congested. The stench of human excrement wafts from open sewers. Most traffic lights don’t work because the country cannot always afford electricity.
The seemingly endless traffic jams allow drivers plenty of time to look at billboards, many of them covered with the face of Jean Dominique, a popular, outspoken radio broadcaster and owner.
“The assassins are still in the city,” the billboards read.
Dominique was gunned down April 3, 2000, in the parking lot of Radio Haiti, the station he owned. Three suspects were arrested, but efforts to prosecute them have been stalled.
“This wasn’t a random or spur of the moment killing,” says Patrick Elie, a founder of the Jean Dominique Foundation. “Whoever did it was powerful enough to hamper the progress of the inquiry.”
Sixteen thousand people attended Dominique’s funeral in the capital’s soccer stadium.
His killing is just one example of how little life has changed in the six years since American troops left this tiny Caribbean island, concluding a mission that cost taxpayers an estimated $2 billion.
The goal at the time: Save Haiti from itself by crushing a military coup and restoring a democratically elected president back to power.
The Haiti of 2002, though, is not much different than the Haiti of 1996. Political upheaval continues, hungry mobs loot grocery stores and thousands of Haitians sail for Florida’s shores to escape their country’s misery. Accusations of election fraud, political repression and treason have President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s Lavalas Family Party and his opposition at a stalemate.
The result: The U.S. has suspended $500 million in aid.
Although repression has eased since the end of the reign of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986, Haiti’s transition to democracy has been neither smooth nor complete.
Gang and mob violence, often funded by close associates of Aristide, is rampant; two outspoken journalists have been assassinated in the past two years; and treatable diseases such as tuberculosis and diarrhea continue to take a deadly toll.
Many people say Aristide is to blame–that he’s a micromanager, condoning the violence and encouraging the chaos. Many Haitians, however, say the situation is out of Aristide’s control.
Despite their enduring poverty, an overwhelming majority of Haitians still support the populist Aristide, the only political figure who has been able to garner widespread support since the arrival of the now-notorious Francois Duvalier and his personal militia, the “ton-ton macoutes,” in 1957.
In some eyes, Haiti’s poverty is the fault of everyone but Aristide.
`It’s his relatives’
“It’s not the president who doesn’t want to do something,” says Fritz Gerard, 28, as he paints an old, damaged car on a street in Port-au-Prince. “It’s his relatives in the government who don’t want to do things. They want to get everything for themselves.”
Others say “racist” American foreign policy is to blame.
“Whether economic and social conditions can improve has yet to be seen, but he has encountered extreme hostility from the United States,” says Elie, a grass-roots free-speech activist. “It’s too easy to brush aside the damage that has been done by the aid embargo.”
And many more blame his opposition.
“Aristide can’t do anything about suffering and feeding the people yet because he’s always negotiating with the opposition,” says Janvier Waldeck, 25, who first met Aristide when the future president ran the orphanage where Waldeck grew up.
Outsiders could easily label these excuses naive or ignorant–the product of a country in which only 56 percent of children are enrolled in the equivalent of an American elementary school.
But Haiti and its culture are more complex–too complex for one person to control.
“The expectations for him were too high for what one person could do,” says Bryant Freeman, director of the Institute of Haitian Studies at the University of Kansas. “He’s not Jesus Christ. He inherited a bad situation.”
A once-impoverished priest, Aristide is recognized as someone who tries his best to fight beside the poor, who tries to bridge the wide canyon between the wealthy and the desolate, who fights against the ex-members of the oppressive and corrupt Duvalier regimes, and who dissolved the long-hated army, a bastion of authoritarian rule.
But he also spent $1.5 million in government money to buy a residence for his prime minister and another $1.5 million to buy a residence for the country’s former president, Rene Preval.
Regardless, many Haitians say the good outweighs the bad.
“There is no longer overt state repression,” says Elie, arguing that Aristide has no knowledge of or control over politically charged organizations that are believed to be the cause of much of the mob violence. “I’m not kept up all night by shooting on the streets. You can go on the radio and criticize the government.”
Aristide still brings confidence when Haitians had none. He is a symbol of hope, a word that is rarely associated with Haiti, but one that nevertheless describes the country’s beginnings.
In 1791, slaves on St. Domingue began a 13-year revolution against their oppressive French landowners, establishing the first black republic in modern times. It remains the only successful slave revolt in world history.
Since then, a succession of homegrown dictators and tyrants has ruled the country, including one king, two emperors and nine presidents-for-life. They gained the palace by insurrection, revolution, coup d’etat, and left it the same way: Two were assassinated, one executed, one committed suicide and 20-odd were violently overthrown.
All the while, independent Haiti, which under France had been the wealthiest colony in the world, underwent a slow economic decline, sinking into the swamp of incessant political turmoil to become the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest on Earth.
Legacy of violence
Although the overthrow of the Duvalier regime demonstrated a rejection of despotism, it also reinforced the idea that violence was and still is the only effective route for change in this chronically underdeveloped country.
It’s a legacy that Aristide has been unable, and perhaps unwilling, to change.
Aristide ascended to politics by taking on the Duvalier regime through powerful sermons that helped fuel a national revolt. After President Duvalier left in 1986, Aristide spent four years rallying against U.S.-supported politicians and elections before declaring himself a candidate in one of them. He won with 67 percent of the vote.
The honeymoon didn’t last long. He was deposed less than a year after he was inaugurated, and the coup dealt a severe blow to his faith in his own judgments. It was masterminded by Raoul Cedras, a man Aristide had promoted to head of the Haitian army on the advice of the U.S. Embassy.
The coup changed Aristide’s image.
Once described as a European-style social democrat, he increasingly came to be seen as a finely tuned, neo-liberal politician while he lived in exile in Washington and negotiated with the Clinton administration for his return. In exchange for U.S. support, he was forced to make many concessions, such as granting amnesty to coup leaders and forming a broader-based government that included his opponents.
Clinton’s decision to send troops was motivated both by principle and necessity.
“If Clinton had permitted one country to let its military take over, why couldn’t Uruguay do it too?” Freeman says. “It is unthinkable for Americans to allow the bayonet to be stronger than paper.”
The U.S. had another vital interest in keeping Haiti peaceful and calm: the boat people. The coup sent more than 67,000 Haitian rafters to Florida’s shores between 1992 and 1994.
`Haiti’s atomic bomb’
“The boat people are Haiti’s atomic bomb,” Freeman says. “That is Haiti’s only threat to the U.S.”
But the U.S. commitment to Haiti ended there–keeping it calm and far from prosperous. The relief from the boat phenomenon was only temporary.
The number of Haitians intercepted off the coast of Florida by the U.S. Coast Guard has been on the rise since 1997. Patrols have caught more people in the first six months this year–1,438–than during all of 2001.
“I have a friend who tried to take a boat to the U.S. five years ago,” says Gerard. “The boat sank, and he died. He tried to convince me to go with him, and I thank God every day that I didn’t end up like him.”
But the risk of death doesn’t stop Haitians. They risk just as much at home: armed robberies and gang-style killings, not to mention tuberculosis or AIDS. Travel guides advise the rare and adventurous tourist to avoid discussions of politics.
Political squabbling is not isolated to the grass-roots level.
President Aristide met with his opposition, Convergence, for the first time in two years on June 15 to resolve an electoral crisis, which American officials say has stalled the $500 million in aid.
Convergence charged that legislative elections in May 2000 were tabulated unfairly to favor Aristide’s Lavalas Party. The opposition also charged that Lavalas did not hold seven legally required runoff elections for Senate seats because the Lavalas candidate did not receive a majority. The seven Lavalas senators have resigned, but the opposition and the United States say that is not enough.
The overall effect of the violence and squabbling has been devastating. As elite Haitians flee the poverty and chaos, the masses are left with even fewer resources and leadership.
“There is hope for individual Haitians,” Freeman says. “But as a country, I just don’t see hope.”
