HAITI: Plus Ça Change ...
AS WE GO TO PRESS, IT SEEMS HAITI HAS declared open season on the clergy. On Sunday August 23, five of Haiti's best known Roman Catholic priests were brutally attacked outside the coastal city...
...Marc...
...Despite a powerful grassroots upheaval, little has been done to dismantle the dictatorship...
...Pope John Paul II had pronounced during his 10hour visit in March 1983: "Things must change here...
...And within John Paul's own Church, the emergence of Ti Legliz, little or popular Church, and activism by progressive Catholics was pivotal in shifting the tide against the dictatorship...
...The brutal attack on the priests was only the most recent in a summer of heavy-handed rule which graphically illustrates the continuum...
...We're pleased to bring you this fresh look at Haiti in summer 1987, as well as background on the currents that hastened the dictatorship's demise...
...popular movements banded together in the country's first nationwide confederation...
...Almost immediately, there were signs of greater freedom of expression: new publications appeared...
...Agency for International Development leaves little room for grassroots initiative...
...These actions touched off "the most impressive general strike since the Duvaliers fled," writes Greg Chamberlain, forcing the government to back down...
...SA AITI: PLUS CA CHANGE...
...Michael S. Hooper, executive director of the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, has conducted regular fact-finding missions to Haiti since 1979 and published 13 reports on human rights, some in cooperation with Americas Watch and the Lawyers Committee for International Human Rights...
...political parties sprouted like mushrooms...
...LIKE "11 most Reports, has been in the works for well over a year...
...And in the issue's final article, Hooper examines the Haitian economy...
...The CNG also outlawed the country's largest union federation, CATH...
...But the export-led development model tutored by the World Bank and the U.S...
...Our authors, two leading Haiti experts, obligingly added new material and updated their analysis...
...Two priests were seriously injured...
...The dictator's homes and businesses were thoroughly ransacked, visual symbols of the outrage of a people he had impoverished...
...An immigration lawyer, he brings his special expertise to bear in analyzing the "sorry state of human rights in postDuvalier Haiti...
...Haiti now seems "ready to mobilize human resources-its biggest capital-to rebuild the economic infrastructure so badly neglected during the dictatorship," writes Hooper...
...Rather than revolution, the transition represents a continuum, suggesting the French adage, plus ga change, plus c'est la meme chose--the more things change, the more they stay the same...
...Greg Chamberlain, a Paris-based writer who covers the Caribbean for the British daily, The Guardian, says Duvalier was routed by a mass-based provincial movement, whose growth was fed by Catholic activism and the rise of Creole radio stations broadcasting "from the countryside the complaints of ordinary Haitians about the Duvaliers' misrule...
...As we were about to go to press, the CNG made its move...
...trade union organizing took off...
...Jean-Claude Duvalier, second in the family dynasty which ruled for 29 years, was forced to flee in February 1986...
...According to witnesses, some 40 men in civilian dress-armed with automatic weaponry, machetes, clubs and stones-fell upon the group after they had been waved through an Army checkpoint...
...Some things have changed...
...The men, who included crusading Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, had said mass commemorating a July massacre of 300 peasants...
...On Sunday August 23, five of Haiti's best known Roman Catholic priests were brutally attacked outside the coastal city of St...
...Yet Haiti today remains in an eerie and uneasy interregnum...
...The National Government Council (CNG), to whom Duvalier willed power as he was wisked away by friends in Washington, made a play to wrest control of the electoral process from an independent council, mandated by the new and popular constitution...
...The movement has repeatedly proved its mettle, but whether it can effect meaningful social change remains to be seen...
...a seminary student was saved from death when troops told the mob their victim was not Father Aristide...
Vol. 21 • May 1987 • No. 3
