Haiti
Packer, George
It's hard to imagine how Port-au-Prince could be a worse place than the city I visited last March, but eight months later reports say that the bodies are turning up in greater numbers than at...
...It's impossible not to indulge the urge to spin hopeful scenarios for relief from watchWINTER • 1994 • 41 Politics Abroad ing Haiti disintegrate...
...He keeps his own morale alive by traveling to conferences, writing articles, proposing projects for a reconstituted democracy that have generated much enthusiasm among other exiles...
...However this ends," he told me, "the country will come out of it profoundly handicapped, not just economically but psychologically...
...According to a Harvard study, a thousand children nationwide are dying every month as a result of the embargo and the profiteering in food and medicine...
...He feels, as he didn't last year, a temporary loss of will among his colleagues back home to engage, analyze, discuss...
...For Haitians there and in exile, the spectacle of Duvalierists reappearing like ghouls on All Souls' Day and the paid thugs called attaches celebrating the retreat of the American warship Harlan County is the stuff of nightmare...
...And it would only take two days...
...One exile had to cancel his planned return home twice...
...But after the conference, after the publication, I come back to reality, and see what's happening in Haiti today, and have to wonder if it isn't all useless...
...Perhaps the army will factionalize (it wouldn't be the first time) and one element will seek a rapprochement with the democrats...
...After two hundred years you have to disarticulate the Haitian army before it will give up power...
...In the countryside things are far graver...
...November 1993) 42 • DISSENT...
...And this is Aristide's endgame: with maximum pressure there might be an uprising...
...Perhaps the residents of a provincial town, with nothing left to lose, will overrun an arms depot and uproot the local section chief, exploiting the decentralized command of the army's franchise terrorism, precipitating flight among neighboring chiefs in a domino effect that finally spreads general insurrection to Port-auPrince...
...They would take their money and retire to the Dominican Republic...
...I've always said armed force would be necessary to dislodge the putschists...
...But I can remember nothing...
...because of fear and the gasoline blockade the streets are empty of nearly everything except garbage...
...In Haiti halfway measures don't work," says a human rights expert...
...It's hard to see what else poor Haitians have to lose—yet that doesn't make revolt inevitable...
...Every night, around four o'clock, I wake up out of a nightmare, anguished...
...Perhaps an attaché will shoot a foreign diplomat and provide the pretext for some sort of intervention...
...Yet it's possible to know and still hope...
...experts talk of sub-Saharan-like famine in the northwest...
...It's hard to imagine how Port-au-Prince could be a worse place than the city I visited last March, but eight months later reports say that the bodies are turning up in greater numbers than at any time since the September 1991 coup...
...The offices of the trade unions that last spring held their first tentative meetings since the coup have closed again...
...Trade unionists and democratic political figures have gone back into full hiding, and one of them, Evans Paul, the mayor of Port-au-Prince, recently escaped at least two assassination attempts...
...He played the negotiation as well as he could, but he knew it wouldn't succeed...
...some of Haiti's elites, apparently having swallowed more than even they can stomach, are beginning to do that...
...From outside the country one can imagine a range of more and less bloody solutions, but what worries one exiled democrat is the sense of dispirit that the violence and isolation have produced inside Haiti...
...Perhaps the boats will start to leave again, blockade or no blockade, forcing the administration's hand...
...These generals are millionaires— have you ever seen a millionaire on the battlefield...
...after the second time he made no further reservations...
...It's always been the politics of all or nothing...
...Perhaps Haitians from abroad will try in Cap-HaItien what failed in the Bay of Pigs, without the dubious help of the CIA...
...All the same, he told me that the only surprise for him has been the disarray within the Clinton administration among the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA, with the latter two sabotaging whatever the president might seek in the way of intervention...
...No one who knows the Haitian military's history of blind brutality and greed should have been surprised by the descent into horror since its betrayal of the Governor's Island accord that was to have brought about the return of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide...
...In Brooklyn and Boston this is the talk, even among the politically sophisticated: give us the guns and we'll do it ourselves...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
