Haiti Takes a New Turn

...The Aristide government is certain to want to improve these conditions...

...Indeed, Aristide's chief bodyguard, Clódio Lémoine, reportedly is primarily skilled in karate and judo...

...He came to power in 1957 as a greatly loved country doctor who had alleviated much misery...

...Now he is hopeful that skilled Haitians will return from abroad, and that many living in the Haitian diaspora will send money to their homeland...

...A npil men chanjpa lou" (Many hands lighten the load), Aristide has replied...

...It was Aristide's outspoken hatred of the Tontons Macoute that brought him to prominence during the last stages of the Duvalier dynasty...

...No one has ever had the courage to suggest that income or luxury taxes be imposed to finance public projects...

...Despite a growing AIDS epidemic, medical care is minimal and offered to the poor mainly by foreign charities...

...Mouvement de Papaye, the peasants' union directed by his friend, Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, has been doing the same in the Central Plateau...

...Small in stature, he is affectionately called Ti Tide by the masses...

...In the countryside 77 Legliz (the Little Church), of which Aristide is a prominent member, has been setting up peasant cooperatives...

...Born to a poor family in a remote fishing village on the southern peninsula, Aristide is a distant relative of Bishop Willy Rumulous of Jérémie...

...Perhaps the responsibilities of governing will make the idealistic priest morepragmatic, and help him recognize the folly of burdening Haiti with an economic system that has failed in one country after another...

...Communist Party candidate Renò Théodore has repeatedly attacked Aristide himself for being too radical...

...Bazin, bousin...

...Jean-Bosco, in the heart of a Port-au-Prince slum, and on Radio Soleil, the Catholic station, he fearlessly attacked the Duvaliers and was instrumental in their fall...

...With 11 contenders competing in the December election, it was widely believed that none would capture the required 51 per cent of the vote and that a run-off election would be necessary...

...A Lebanese businessman told me Bazdn had also taken money from known smugglers, and if elected would owe them favors...

...The President-elect insists he will bring the Macoutes to justice in the courts...

...Since the fall of General Prosper Avril's government last March, the Army's performance has been almost impeccable...

...Apre bal, tambou lou" (After the ball, the drum is heavy), American Ambassador Alvin Adams has warned...

...Many in the upper echelons worry about his interfering with the smuggling and drug dealing that have made them rich, and the lower ranks have been infiltrated by former Macoutes...

...In 198 8 when his church was torched during Sunday service, members of the congregation died, but again he escaped...

...An Aristide government is unlikely to reverse the trend...

...Thus he championed the dechoucaj, in which untold numbers of them were butchered and Duvalierist property was burned and looted...

...I am a priest, yes," Aristide has been quoted as saying, "but I am a Haitian first...

...Some have speculated that a sense of invincibility engendered by his many narrow escapes, together with the international attention he has received from the flattering portrait of him painted by American journalist Amy Wilentz in her book The Rainy Season, emboldened the "little priest" to seek the Presidency as the standard bearer of the National Front for Change and Democracy...

...endorsed the election process in 1987, it miscalculated the power of the Macoutes, who drowned the voting in a bloodbath...

...Papa Doc was once a man of the people, too...

...A street war between the well-armed Duvalier secret police and Aristide loyalists therefore seems almost inevitable—even though the Macoutes are said to have a cache of automatic weapons hidden in the rural town of Verrette, while the priest's ardent followers have nothing but the force of numbers, machetes and rocks to protect him with...

...Haiti Progrès, a weekly published in Miami that ardently thumped for Aristide, accused the Brooklyn-based weekly, Haiti Observateur, of printing CIA "disinformation" to justify its backing Bazin...

...The peasants, quick to accept his money and his well-made T-shirts, laughed behind his back...

...Should concern about expropriation prove to be well-founded, that would surely frighten away entrepreneurs who might create jobs, and American aid would probably be limited to humanitarian projects...

...Once the results of the election were clear, a sober-faced American delegation led by Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Bernard W. Aronson and Ambassador Adams met with Aristide to congratulate him...

...Still, the Army as a whole has no love for the rebel priest...

...Aristide may shortly discover that he also must have a personal guard if he is to survive and carry out his plans...

...Eight days of looting would be allowed, and Provisional President Trouillot would be placed under arrest, according to this scenario...

...Consequently, the business community has good reason to be nervous...

...Only when the Macoutes and the masses get the message that neither Aristide nor the Army will tolerate disorder can Haiti have any hope for peace and progress...

...Clearly Père Aristide, aman of good will who genuinely cares about the welfare of his flock, is in a precarious position...

...The impoverished in slums like Cité Soloil and La Saline will still be hungry—and will be looking to him to fulfill the hopes he has stirred...

...Furthermore, Aristide cannot expect any help from beleaguered Moscow...

...So little money has been available for public services that in November the United States and several international agencies had to provide funds to cart away garbage left uncollected in Portau-Prince for over four months...

...It is expected that he will be defrocked upon his inauguration...

...Claiming to have infiltrated the Aristide camp, the Observateur had run a front-page article asserting that whether or not he won, Aristide's people intended to storm the National Palace on election night and put him in the President's chair...

...Haitians were able to hold their first free and fair election in 33 years...

...No progress would be made, he declared, until every Macoute was required to pay for his crimes...

...When the United States helped JeanClaude Duvalier leave Haiti in 1988, it miscalculated the tenacity of the military junta that assumed power, supplying it with funds and arms...

...Whatever the truth, because of his "live and let live" philosophy, his election would have provoked no conflict with the Tontons Macoute...

...One of his chief advisers, however, is Gérard Pierre-Charles, the MarxistLeninist historian who quit the Haitian Communist Party because it was not sufficiently militant...

...Now the specter of expropriation looms as a stronger possibility...

...Months later he emerged to run a shelter for homeless boys...

...Carole Cleaver, who writes frequently for The New Leader from Haiti, is currently working on a book about voodoo...

...Given that former Haitian Presidents often considered the assets of the National Bank their personal property, it is not surprising that smart people preferred to keep their money overseas...

...But that may prove virtually impossible, for most judges owe their jobs and their allegiance to the Duvalier regime...

...It enabled Provisional President Ertha Pascal-Trouillot to withstand two coup attempts and insured the integrity of the December election...

...Not only was the rat-infested refuse a health hazard, but cars could not get through some streets...

...After the Catholic hierarchy refused to assign him a parish, he went into hiding...

...From the destabilization of the government of Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier in 1985, through five unelected and unpopular regimes, the Haitian people have lived in a climate of constant chaos and economic stagnation...

...The "American candidate," Marc L. Bazin, an economist who worked for 20 years at the World Bank in Washington, managed to gain only about 12 per cent of the vote...

...But a countrywide landslide netted the little priest more than 70 per cent and an immediate win...

...When I interviewed Aristide several years ago, he told me that Haitians did not need American aid or investment by foreign capitalists...

...In a nation where bureaucrats have been using their offices solely to line their pockets, where 90 per cent of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of 10 per cent of the population, where many drive BMWs while the majority is close to starvation, economic change is vital...

...The Tontons Macoute, of course, will not simply lay down their arms and submit to a firing squad...

...No public health clinics offer help to the rapidly growing population, whose children die regularly of malnutrition...

...Lacking both a sense of social responsibility and the sensible goal of creating a consumer market, Haitians who live in comparative comfort have preferred to keep things as they are...

...Peasants cut down the trees for use as charcoal, until today the land can barely feed the people...

...The General Hospital is always short of basic necessities—antibiotics, anesthesia, sometimes even running water...

...Foreign currency to pay for necessary imports such as gasoline is often nonexistent, causing high prices and long lines...

...Following the election of Père JeanBertrand Aristide as President last December 16, Haitians held their breaths, waiting for the Macoutes to strike: Former Interior Minister Lafontant had vowed publicly that the 37-year-old Leftist priest would not live to be inaugurated on February 7. The Army's quick decision to oust the Macoute plotters from the National Palace and restore constitutional rule was a most hopeful development...

...The educated minority supporting Bazin believed he was best qualified to deal with Haiti's economic problems and with foreign diplomats...

...More than 75 people have already died in post-election violence...

...Aristide was dismissed from the Salesian order in 1988 for preaching revolution...

...In fact, anticipating the priest's victory, the élite has in recent months sent vast sums out of the country...

...The need for American money alone could moderate his actions, even as the need for votes moderated his rhetoric...

...In private conversation he appears to be a quiet man...

...Blessed with a huge slush fund of unknown origin, Bazin had toured the country, speaking in a patois closer to Parisian French than Haitian Creole...

...But the President-elect has to think of what will happen if and when they become merely a bad memory...

...From the pulpit of his church, St...

...Many feared, though, that blood rather than water would be flowing...

...Recent efforts to arrest Lafontant, for example, were stymied because the first warrant issued was torn up by a friendly judge, and the second mysteriously disappeared before it was served...

...A clash in 1987 between a Ti Legliz cooperative and independent farmers resulted in the death of 200 people in the small northern town of Jean-Rabel...

...This time around, in thinking that money and propaganda alone could install the moderate Bazin, the U.S...

...A canon issued by Pope John Paul II forbids priests and nuns from holding political of fice...

...Talking to the press afterward, the Americans commended the Haitians on a fair election and pledged support for their chosen leader...

...Aristide's appeal to his fanatical supporters to desist in their retaliation was a positive sign as well...

...They also killed Macoutes with machetes, rocks and necklaces of flaming tires, and torched the 18th-century Catholic cathedral whose bishop, Monsignor François Ligondé, had spouted anti-Aristide rhetoric...

...Thus far the Macoutes have been used as scapegoats for the misery of the masses...

...Repeated assassination attempts forced him to establish his own militia, soon nicknamed the Tontons Macoute, to counteract Army intrigues...

...Abraham will have a difficult time controlling each individual soldier...

...I must do what I believe best to serve my people...

...Hewas educated and ordained by the Salesian order, and besides French and Creole speaks English and Spanish fluently...

...The fertile soil that made 18th-century Haiti, then a French colony, rich with coffee and sugar crops has eroded away...

...This fall Aristide's campaign slogan was Lavalac, a Creole word meaning "flood" intended to signify his determination to flush out the corrupt bureaucracy...

...Some, though, would not vote for him because of their reluctance to install an American puppet...

...During the campaign Aristide replaced his anti-Macoute harangues with odes of love and brotherhood, but he said little about practical economic matters...

...And unlike the majority of Haitians, who thought they had won their freedom when Baby Doc and his wife finally fled the country on February 7,1986, the radical cleric unswervingly maintained that the succeeding military junta was simply "Duvalierism without Duvalier...

...Several attempts have been made on Aristide's life...

...once at the podium his eloquence can move a mob to do anything...

...When the U.S...

...The problem is that Haiti's plentiful hands possess neither the weapons to defend democratic decisions nor the tools to alleviate the nation's desperate poverty...

...Moreover, masses who have suffered torture and murder for so many years are likely to demand a quicker, surer form of "justice...

...In each case it has been the Haitians who have paid for Washington's mistakes...

...Duvalier's latterday paranoia ultimately excused his guard of all crimes, no matter how heinous...

...Haiti has no natural resources and little to export to effect a balance of trade...

...Crucial to the outcome will be the stance of the Army, whose chief, General Hérard Abraham, has promised it will fulfill its constitutional responsibilities to defend the President-elect...

...He plans to impose high tariffs to protect locally made products, and to repatriate the capital businessmen have banked elsewhere...

...Thanks to the presence of more than 1,000 foreign observers, provided by the Organization of American States, the UN, former President Jimmy Carter's task force, and delegations from the United States and other countries, no violence occurred during the December balloting...

...LEANING TO THE LEFT Haiti Takes a New Turn BY CAROLE CLEAVER Port-au-Prince A critical question remains to be answered here: Was Roger Lafontant's failed January 7 coup the last hurrah for the infamous Tontons Macoute created by François ("Papa Doc") Duvalier, or will other Duvalierists like General Claude Raymond or Colonel Williams Régala continue to impede Haiti's five-year struggle to achieve democracy...

...All had reason to feel relieved because there was no repetition of the Election Day Massacre that aborted the voting on November 29,1987...

...miscalculated again...

...After Lafontant and his 15 cohorts were arrested, mobs overturned trailer trucks and set fires on the airport road to prevent his escape into exile...

...they jeered—an alliteration employing the Creole word for whore...

...Every candidate was given adequate security, and the campaign was marred by only one bloody incident when a grenade was thrown into an Aristide rally in Pétionville...

...Previously, the military had more often than not supported Macoute atrocities...

...In 1987 when his car was ambushed on Route 1, he managed to get away although other passengers were killed...