Haiti Undone

...Clearly, the salient division in Haiti today is not between parliamentary factions, but between Haitian leaders and the Haitian people...

...Over the last decade, the economy has shrunk at a rate of 5% annually...

...Without a quorum of lawmakers, no laws can be passed...

...On May 28 a police attack on the Port-au-Prince shantytown of Carrefour Feuilles left 11 dead, including a 12-year-old boy...

...In 1990, an astounding 85% of the electorate turned out at the polls to elect Aristide...

...The controversy revolved around whether to count blank ballots-and hence whether Aristide's candidates received an absolute or a relative majority of votes...

...resident Pr6val has inherited a catch-22...

...Real wages fell 17% in 1996 and another 14% in 1997...

...It is, in fact, part of a decade-long process of military, economic and diplomatic coercion that the U.S.-led intervention rubber-stamped rather than reversed...

...a great flood...

...officials...

...The political bickering over "modernization" has crowded out popular demands and concerns, primarily poverty and impunity...

...invasion that restored Aristide to power, democracy has failed for most Haitians...

...Widely perceived as Aristide's hand-picked successor (he is referred to as Aristide's "twin" in Haitian media) he has nonetheless been forced to carry out the neoliberal economic reforms-or take the blame for not doing so-that Aristide agreed to but never enacted, and now publicly opposes...

...Reports of human rights abuses dropped...

...Haiti's immense poor population feels excluded from the seemingly arcane debates that have divided the government...

...By the time he was returned to Haiti in October 1994, with only one year remaining in his presidential term, it was not to victory but to devastation...

...the eleventh, with a bullet to the heart...

...The UN civilian mission reported that ten of the victims were handcuffed and executed with a bullet to the back of the head...

...As President, Aristide initiated a program of social democracy, raising the minimum wage, strengthening national industry, enforcing taxation-a burden Haiti's wealthy had traditionally escaped-and constructing a social safety net...

...Public disillusionment boiled over on May 28 at a rally for "peace and democracy" organized by the Haitian Chamber of Commerce, which is headed by wealthy coup-supporter Olivier Nadel, when protesters hurled plastic juice bottles filled with urine at the podium...

...Social programs have been put on the back-burner...

...And stockpiles of military documents which could have revealed the identities of the coup's hired assassins-and the extent of U.S...

...The latter would have required a run-off...

...Forming the Lavalas Political Organization, they won control of Congress in elections supported and funded by Washington...

...Haitians have taken to calling their government demokrasy pkp--second-hand democracy, from the Kreyol word for the barrels of used clothing sent to Haiti each year from the United States...

...Five years ago, in September 1994, 20,000 U.S...

...Pierre Charles is openly critical of his former ally...

...The government has not functioned properly for over two years...

...In the shadow of the economic debates, going without is exactly what Haitians are doing...

...The executions were followed by the grisly discovery in June of the skulls and bones of at least six people-possibly as many as 14-killed in recent months and left to rot at Titanyen, the former government's old dumping ground...

...all together we are Lavalas...

...and millions of dollars in foreign aid were promised to the new democracy...

...As the state of affairs in Haiti today makes clear, this is no formula for democracy...

...Faced with a rising body count in Haiti and intense pressure to resolve the crisis from abroad, Aristide agreed to broad political and economic concessions...

...troops leave Haiti this year, violence has risen dramatically...

...As the last U.S...

...But a longer look reveals that Haiti's democratic meltdown began well before the collapse of the Lavalas government...

...The crisis escalated when Prime Minister Rosny Smarth resigned two months later and the OPL refused to ratify a replacement for the post-even rejecting one nominee, a senior official at the InterAmerican Development Bank, on the grounds that he could not produce his grandmother's birth certificate...

...To move forward, Lavalas found, it had to accommodate the Haitian business class as well as international lenders...

...When Aristide was returned to power in Haiti three years later, it was with a dramatically different program...

...the national coffers registered a positive balance again...

...Aristide, meanwhile, increasingly sought to distance himself from his own concessions...

...In January, President Ren6 Pr6val's sister was shot and wounded, and her bodyguard was killed in a street attack...

...But by 1996, the first presidential election after the invasion, only about 15% of the population turned out to elect Ren6 Pr6val...

...By 1997 the rift became formal...

...Aristide does not understand his historic role," he drawls...

...Today, there are only nine elected officials in the entire nation, including the President...

...While inflation dropped last year, economic misery is greater today than during the coup years...

...A priest and liberation theologian, he won what was widely hailed as Haiti's first free and fair election, in 1990, by a landslide, declaring, "Alone we are weak...

...A bourgeois reformist sector urged compromise and reconciliation as a means of returning to office...

...soldiers...

...The streets, awash with Haitians waving their ink-stained thumbs in pride, seemed to harbor new winds of change for the small country...

...troops landed in Haiti to oust a repressive military regime, stem a seemingly endless flood of refugees, and restore Haiti's civilian government led by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide...

...Most mainstream news analysis has blamed Haiti's democratic collapse on an internecine parliamentary war that began in April 1997, when the majority party in Congress, the Organization of People in Struggle (OPL), contested the results of Haiti's last legislative elections and prevented the winners from taking office...

...In poorer neighborhoods, attacks on citizens have spurred riotous confrontations with the fledgling police force and inspired grafittied calls across the walls of the capital for the resignation of police leadership...

...But while Aristide's policies were popular among the poor, they, along with his bold rhetoric, earned him the enmity of Haiti's traditional elite and the distrust of U.S...

...Chief of Police Jean-Colls Rameau, who witnesses say led the attack, fleden route to the United States-to the Dominican Republic, where he was later captured by Dominican authorities...

...and projects were pending parliamentary ratification, and between 1995 and 1998, total bilateral and multilateral assistance to Haiti dropped by about 35...

...invasion, democracy has failed for most Haitians...

...Across the street in the Senate offices, a secretary types up what I'm told are minutes from one of last year's sessions...

...Five years after the U.S...

...invasion, rising poverty and near-total impunity have sharpened the longstanding fault lines that divide Haitian society...

...In the first half of the 1990s, Haiti's popular movement learned a hard lesson after the derailing of grassroots efforts to bring about change...

...A week later, a well-known human rights activist was wounded in a drive-by shooting...

...As lawmakers' terms expired at the end of last year with no replacements in sight, the crisis came to a head when President Pr6val, frustrated by what he perceived to be congressional intransigence, refused to extend their mandates...

...As a result of the breakup of Lavalas, Haiti has had no new budget in three years...

...Haiti's economy is plummeting," said Gerard Pierre Charles, head of the OPL, in a recent interview...

...That would not be so important if the Haitian people would be willing to go without food for a while...

...We used to produce sugar, now we don't produce any at all...

...And the pressures of exile had exposed rifts in the Lavalas movement...

...As President, he holds a weak hand...

...A bloody military coup ended his reign after only seven months in office...

...There is no National Assembly, since the terms of all members have expired, and there is no quorum in the Senate...

...Since the U.S...

...The state-run cement factory has not functioned in ten years...

...A CIA-generated propaganda campaign, which cast Aristide as mentally unstable, had chipped away at his reputation as a statesman...

...As of December 1998 a combined total of over $570 million worth of multilateral programs Five years after the U.S...

...In a dramatic late-night session on January 11, he announced the end of the forty-sixth legislature, effectively shutting down Congress...

...After leaving office Aristide created his own more left-leaning party, while the OPL changed its name from Lavalas Political Organization to the Organization of People in Struggle and began advocating what in Haiti today is called "modernization"-privatization of state-run industries and adherance to the structural-adjustment programs demanded by international lenders...

...He rode a wave, but he was not the wave itself...

...So you tell me, what are we to do...

...Aristide's economic program had been derailed and his popular base was splintered...

...together we are strong...

...Haiti's Parliament building stands empty, except for a few deputies off in a side room who recline in their armchairs, feet upon their desks, smoking...

...In a nation haunted by the standard tag-line, "the poorest country in the Western hemisphere," millions of desperately needed foreign aid dollars are being held up because loans cannot be negotiated by a nonexistent Congress...

...Whatever leverage the party claims, or once claimed, is due to the fact that it represents the interests of Haiti's business community as well as those of the United States, which has conditioned its financial assistance to Haiti on the privatization of at least three state-run industries...

...t first glance all this seems proof that Aristide's Lavalas movement, which the United States and the UN spent billions of dollars to restore, was not truly up to the task of democratic governance...

...As the junta's generals were flown abroad to join their bank accounts, members of the reform sector spearheaded a return to the rituals of civilian rule...

...In the year 2000 every office in the country from local council member to president will be up for grabs...

...Now, the second half of the 1990s offers a different lesson...

...By that time, Haiti's death squads, led by CIA agent Emmanuel Constant, had raped, tortured and killed thousands of his followers...

...Yet the OPL's policies are plainly unpopular in Haiti...

...As of this writing, parliamentary elections are scheduled for March, and presidential elections for December of next year...

...He granted an amnesty to the junta leaders, promised to broaden his government and select a prime minister from the business sector, and, as a final condition for his return, in August 1994 he signed an agreement to implement an IMF structural-adjustment program...

...And in the disputed April 1997 parliamentary elections, the supposed cause of Haiti's democratic collapse, a mere 5% of the eligible population turned out to vote...

...As Fritz Longchamps, Haiti's Minister of Foreign Affairs notes dryly, "Fiftyfive percent of the Haitian budget is based on international aid...

...In a nation haunted by the standard tag-line, "the poorest country in the Western hemisphere," hundreds of millions of desperately needed foreign aid dollars are being held up because loan terms cannot be negotiated by a nonexistent Congress...

...Formerly part of Aristide's Lavalas movement, the OPL charged that the elections, in which they had faired poorly, were rigged to favor Aristide's new party, the Lavalas Family...

...On March 1, Senator Jean-Yvon Toussaint was gunned down after being lured from his house to investigate a flat tire...

...Well over half the population is unemployed, and many basic services are nonexistent...

...Some of Aristide's supporters had radicalized into a hard left, while others had adopted a pragmatic stance...

...collusion-were confiscated by U.S...

...The only export that is doing well is mangos...

...The most heinous crimes of the coup years remain unpunished, and the perpetrators are still at large...

...Haiti's grassroots movement had been beheaded-its leadership murdered, hiding out, or in exile...

...That lesson is not that Haiti's grassroots movement has failed, but on the contrary, that a government which ignores grassroots concerns cannot succeed...

...Haiti's first real democracy took off ten years ago, when Aristide rose to power on the shoulders of hundreds of thousands of Haitian peasants-the foundation of a massive grassroots liberation movement that blossomed in the wake of the Duvalier dictatorship...

...The move, which pundits regarded as President Clinton's greatest foreign-policy success, has steadily eroded into a chaos that the UN euphemistically refers to as Haiti's "transition to democracy...

...we barely export coffee...