HAITI The Next Round
Chamberlain, Greg
"We've failed this time round. We've made too many mistakes. Democracy is very difficult," said former Haitian Education Minister Rosny Desroches. "It isn't easy. We won't have the answer...
...The new electoral law abolished voting secrecy and voter registration...
...The men, of different social classes who are both recognized as future political leaders, were surveying the desolate political scene in Haiti after the Army and its Duvalierist allies destroyed the country's first free elections in 30 years in an orgy of violence and killings last November...
...But what there is of the Left, including the tiny Communist Party, is hardly discussing armed struggle, much less using it...
...Now it is balewouze, which means "sweep them out and wash the place down...
...government provided the bulk of the council's $7 million budget and the rest came from Venezuela, Canada and France...
...It was the commander of the country's main military unit, the Dessalines Battalion, Col...
...Like anywhere else in Latin America, elections are in the hands of the oligarchy who use them to undermine popular demands...
...Blaming the Media As for the lawyer named to head an official probe into the November vioJANUARY/FEBRUARY 1988 5 Greg Chamberlain is The Guardian of London's Caribbean specialist...
...A maximum two-year jail term for adPra.alaetion tactie: Macautes burn dawn market nlane in canitnal vocating abstention, a clause held over from the earlier law, took on special significance because of the broad announcement of the boycott...
...A two-day general strike called by the opposition in December was barely followed, through a mixture of fear, Haiti's extreme poverty, the proximity of Christmas and the spoiling tactics by a small far Left around the New York-based Ben Dupuy...
...The fight began with dechoukaj (uprooting) as soon as the Duvaliers fell...
...The old electoral council, through understandable over-enthusiasm and veiled anti-Duvalierist statements ("we must banish forever the sound of gunfire and the groan of torture, the distress of the hungry and the stink of the slums"), had made itself an easy prey for Namphy, who never forgave the humiliation of his failed attempt to crush the council during last July's unrest...
...The front, which grew out of the broad Committee of 57 Coalition that led the unsuccessful anti-regime protests last summer, has been hampered by its mainly middle class leadership in the context of the country's enormous wealth, color and class differences...
...aid cut, and the two men commiserated about the "foreign disinformation campaigns" and "domestic destabilization" that they had to put up with...
...Opposition figures, many in semi-clandestinity, are under heavy pressure...
...But then the people want to vote for a messiah...
...The garden of the villa of their unofficial leader, former Army chief Gen...
...Carl Michel Nicolas said the Army had stopped the violence "in time" and that there was danger of a communist takeover...
...diplomats in Port-au-Prince said the United States had gambled on Namphy's honesty about elections and had lost), France and the European Economic Community cut back theirs and some U.S...
...The Left will have to re-think its policy of non-violence, he says...
...Namphy Condemns Church Namphy told the Paris daily Liberation that "foreigners" had financed and supported the independent council running the November 29 poll in its "plot" to ensure a leftist victory by stuffing ballot boxes...
...The tone has been set by a ferocious propaganda campaign to convince Haitians that a spotless, patriotic Army has saved them in the nick of time from both the "communists" and the "Catholic Church...
...Opposition Under Pressure The vigilance brigades which sprang up all over the country to ensure the November 29 poll took place were outlawed a few days before election day...
...There is also some hostility within the front toward Gourgue, seen by some as an old-fashioned right-winger who kept himself apart from last summer's protests, but who was chosen, according to some front leaders, to appease Washington...
...Commander Gen...
...Military values at the service of the nation," proclaims the state television in a long-shot public relations effort...
...It's incapable of marshalling the potential for resistance," says economist Jean-Jacques Honorat...
...It's depressing...
...JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1988 5lence, he has already decided it was all the fault of the media who, he said, "worked the masses up into a white heat...
...We won't solve the country's problems by voting," he says...
...The U.S...
...The Cast of Candidates The Left's constituency has been undermined by the rise of the two populist presidential candidates, Dejoie and Claude, from opposite ends of the social scale...
...and other international charges that his soldiers were directly involved in the bloodshed, is now set to install a president elected in a token vote who will watch over the interests of the Army and the Duvalierists, including former members of the Duvaliers' dreaded Tontons Macoutes militia...
...Some Haitians were convinced however that Washington had wanted cancellation (without the bloodshed) in November to avoid a victory by Gourgue or Claude...
...Namphy got his only comfort when he telephoned Panamanian ruler Manuel Antonio Noriega, an earlier target of a U.S...
...His movement recalls eastern Caribbean populism of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly Grenada's Eric Gairy...
...Some have had their passports confiscated...
...But the heirarchy has denounced the Church's liberationist minority, whose unofficial leader, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, scorns the elections...
...The candidates can't bring change...
...He named his own council and gave it a long list of orders, despite a constitutional ban on doing so...
...The fragile centerleft National Front for Concerted Action, which named human rights veteran Gerard Gourgue as its presidential candidate, joined the three other major parties, all center-right, led by Louis Dejoie, Marc Bazin and Sylvio Claude, in announcing a boycott of the new general elections, hastily rescheduled for January 17...
...Haitians have meanwhile come up with a name for a third stage of their battle to stamp out Duvalierism...
...President Henri Namphy, brushing aside U.S...
...When the people are ready to fight," riposts Evens Paul, "everyone will find a weapon...
...A group of Caribbean leaders lead by Jamaican Edward Seaga, a major U.S...
...The United States suspended two-thirds of its aid (U.S...
...The political class here is so backward...
...Candidates also had to print and distribute their own ballot papers...
...And none of the candidates in November seriously discussed any of the issues...
...Dejoie, a cheery millionaire mulatto, arouses little enthusiasm among his own class but has successfully struck a chord with the poor...
...Claude, a fiery Baptist preacher with the card of having never yielded to the Duvaliers, may well have won the most votes in the three hours of balloting November 29...
...Namphy contributed not a penny, nor did he give the slightest consideration to the council's desperate pleas for protection against the Duvalierist thugs who threatened its members with death, burned down its offices and stopped ballots from getting to the provinces...
...The subsequent savage murder of several Duvalierist gunmen was avenged by mass arrests of brigade militants in Port-au-Prince and perhaps as many as 70 deaths...
...But the boycotting opposition firmly rejected a U.S...
...congressional figures and others talked of an invasion to restore order and ensure fair elections...
...The opposition still has a mighty weapon in the vigorously free radio and press, despite armed attacks and some temporary shutdowns after the November vote...
...I'm a Catholic, but I don't have any respect left for priests...
...But they remain otherwise untouched, and can hope for a comfortable existence under Namphy's wing...
...But it is this mystique and his charisma of "The Martyr," as his election posters called him, which draws Haiti's poor and superstitious voodoo-worshipping masses to him...
...Namphy also lashed out at the clergy...
...His incoherent "Caritatism," based on his own notion of Christian charity, erratic positions and religious fervor means he is dismissed, yet feared, by the intelligentsia and foreigners...
...However, according to Paul's equally hard-line colleague, Capt...
...The Duvalierists, 12 of whose presidential candidates were banned under the constitution by the old council, thus unleashing the wave of killings, were also barred from running in the January poll in a conciliatory gesture to Washington...
...Claude Raymond, in Port-auPrince's chic hillside suburb of Debussy, is filled round the clock with armed men, easily hired amid the country's poverty...
...His colorful speeches contrast with the drier, less comprehensible talk of a Gourgue or of Bazin, still the U.S: favorite...
...Bazin: One of the four candidates to boycott elections...
...We can't leave the ground to the Macoutes...
...The Catholic Church has controlled education here for the past 100 years but it's left Haitians illiterate," he snapped...
...Paul is also the Army's top suspected drug smuggler...
...A few weeks before the cancelled November election, Namphy violated the spirit of the new national constitution by naming himself armed forces chief for the next three years...
...Namphy seemed to be threatening more of the same when he told Liberation that "believe me, the day the Army really intervenes, then there'll be complete silence...
...Searching for the Center Namphy has faced strong international condemnation over the election cancellation...
...ally, subsequently reflected Washington's attitude by trying to steer Namphy toward the center...
...proposal that they agree on a single candidate and drop their abstention...
...Yet the opposition as a whole is still divided and inexperienced, and has failed to mobilize effective resistance to Namphy...
...We won't have the answer tomorrow," says Evens Paul, a leader of the radical Democratic Unity Confederation (KID...
...Jean-Claude Paul, who the United States says organized much of the November election day killing...
...Last 6 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS I REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 6summer, the cry was "rache manyok, bay nou te blan" (pull up your manioc and clear off...
...It was from here that many of the commandoes were seen to emerge on November 29...
...Abstention Decreed Illegal For January 17, Namphy took no chances...
...The Church, which largely led the fight against the Duvaliers, condemned the bloody end to the November elections that included the schoolyard massacre of 16 queuing voters...
...Isidore Pognon, governor of the dreaded Fort Dimanche political prison, it was the Left which caused all the violence, dressing up as soldiers and Duvalierists and even, mysteriously, "using the constitution to get arms...
...Military Muscle But poor civilian political leadership has yielded extra power to the Army during its two-year reign, which has seen top officers acquire lucrative interests in smuggling and drug trafficking to the United States...
...They seem to think their misery will end at once...
...Like most others, he dreams of a split in Army unity...
...But Evens Paul of KID, which stands somewhere between the National Front and Dupuy, says the election failure has at least weeded out false democrats...
Vol. 22 • January 1988 • No. 1
