Notes from the Hell That Is Haiti
CLEAVER, CAROLE
ON THE VERGE OF COLLAPSE Notes from the Hell That Is Haiti BY CAROLE CLEAVER "WHO IS SUFFERING most under the international embargo," Haitians keep asking each other, "the rich or the poor?"...
...One American was killed...
...The poor, of course, do not share the woes of the rich...
...It beats me," Morse responded...
...When that ship attempted to land 200 American and Canadian peacekeeping troops in preparation for Aristide's return last October, it was frightened off by a mob of gun-toting former tontons macoutes whooping it up on the dock...
...A soldier who was a passenger on the bus promptly took out his pistol and killed him...
...Brought before General Cedras after the coup, in fear of death, he is said to have wept, vomited and lost control of his bowels...
...On January 21 Le Nouvelliste, the nation's oldest daily newspaper, announced that it was cutting publication to three issues a week...
...In a few weeks their fuel supply will be completely gone and they will have to carry their supplies several miles...
...For instance, General Philippe Biamby, the Army Chief of Staff, has amassed an impressive Haitian art collection in a very short time...
...On December 3 his body was found in a ditch beside Route 1, about a mile north of Port-au-Prince...
...Libete, the only Creole language newspaper, ended publication last October...
...Mansions are being built, too...
...What plagues them, however, is their inability to buy tubes of paint to continue working, not a shortage of customers...
...We can't go on living in chaos...
...On Friday and Saturday nights its members' big new cars fill the parking lots of the casinos...
...The United States sees this as a unique opportunity to break the power of me military for good...
...This device was used as an effective transition following the departure of strongman Prosper Avril in 1990...
...Although the car slides down the hill easily enough," she explained, "it takes a lot of gasoline to get back home again...
...It has polarized the situation...
...The rich blame the poor for electing Aristide, for his intransigence about returning, and for thus causing the embargo that has wrecked their lives...
...There was rhetoric...
...The Dominican Republic's Army is said to be closely patrolling the border with its island neighbor, fearing a mass exit by Haitians if air travel is stopped and the chaotic situation becomes explosive...
...They do not have automobiles, refrigerators or telephones...
...Then we'll have real change...
...You don't realize it, but you Americans live under a military dictatorship just as we do...
...The Pentagon...
...Unemployment continues to grow as businesses leave or simply give up, many of them bankrupt...
...Aristide actually was about to be put on a plane and flown into exile...
...It's an academic question...
...His championship of the embargo has caused the poor, his constituency, to believe he puts personal power ahead of their lives...
...Pharmacies are running out of drugs, and many are already shuttered...
...Perhaps most damaging in this macho land is the account of his arrest...
...Those who live in the mountain areas can pay as much as $10 round trip to reach Port-au-Prince...
...Stories are rampant that Aristide is living it up in Washington on the $30 million of Haitian funds frozen by the U.S...
...Now everybody knows who the enemy is...
...We laughed...
...ships that ring the harbors...
...Today people get killed for nothing...
...Their difficulties are complicated by the fact that they live in a mountain retreat...
...According to Morse's scenario, the Pentagon brass reasoned that when Clinton turned to them for advice, they would say landing the troops on the Harlan County was too dangerous...
...Some store owners were cowed into agreeing to open a few hours a week...
...They stock up on staples but can buy meat for only one day, since they have no electricity and hence no refrigeration...
...It will not be lifted...
...If, as has been estimated, each worker supported an extended family of five to 10 people, a million people may have lost their means of survival by now...
...For if the business community has been going bankrupt, a new moneyed class has sprung up...
...The embargo is our weapon," he said...
...policy to my husband and me, plus a group of Haitians, at a lavish Embassy dinner on January 21...
...As far back as August Tele-Haiti, the country's only television service, ceased broadcasting most local programs and each month subsequently has decreased the number of hours it airs network shows from abroad...
...There was revenge...
...Everyone is suffering and everyone is angry...
...they ask...
...Practically every wealthy Haitian now hires a security guard," an art dealer told me, "and at the slightest sound they shoot in the air to scare away trouble...
...A candle may do just as well as the single cloudy bulb that normally lights their cailles, yet they have their own life-threatening problems...
...Because the agreement was not implemented, the embargo was reimposed, and this time is being enforced by U.S...
...The Organization of American States (OAS) embargo, originally imposed in September 1991 after a military coup forced into exile Haiti's first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was initially so porous it was a joke...
...But a new station, Radio 16, originating in Aristide's Embassy in Washington, is being received without difficulty...
...Unable to visit, people can't stay in contact by telephone either...
...Gasoline, no longer available commercially, is offered on the black market at $8 to $10 a gallon to those who know where to find it...
...Haitians are disenchanted with democracy...
...While a drastic shortage of electricity has resulted in a blackout of 90 per cent of the nation, the homes of Army officers are lit up like Christmas trees in the ever-darkening Haitian night...
...The embargo is good...
...In addition to the cost of food tripling, bus fares have reached the point where it is impossible for many to reach their jobs...
...Perhaps in Michel Francois, Haiti's police chief, who is said to be tough and street smart and already wields tremendous power...
...Sanctions are no longer a joke...
...It is primarily across this border that black market fuel seeps in...
...Everyone, that is, except the military the sanctions were designed to depose and the drug dealers...
...Factories that could not export their goods closed and moved their operations to other countries...
...They are happy to buy art, including the treasured paintings and antiques of those whose fortunes have declined...
...But he's dead...
...Papa Doc [Francois Duvalier] knew how...
...On January 26 the Chamber of Commerce voted to close all stores for a two-week period starting the 28th...
...Where will Haitians find him...
...A few still have emergency rooms open for anyone able to get to them, but ambulance service is out of the question...
...The Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (frap), a neo-Duvalierist group made up largely of former ton-ton macoute thugs, promptly criticized the Chamber for contributing to the effectiveness of the embargo by stopping the distribution of what little was left to buy...
...That was Aristide's last hope...
...Another Papa Doc...
...Two of the nation's most influential radio stations, Radio Metro-pole and Radio Soleil, have cut their air time 50 per cent...
...Pretty soon they will start killing each other...
...This is especially important in a nation where few own TV sets and the majority cannot read, so radio is the main source of news...
...the country is on the verge of collapse...
...The poor blame the rich for supporting the military coup and keeping Aristide out...
...The American people don't make your policy toward Haiti," he continued, "and neither does your President...
...Meanwhile, Haiti's four "friends"?Canada, the United States, France, and Venezuela—are pressuring the United Nations Security Council for still tighter sanctions...
...They alone have plenty of gasoline to run their cars and private generators...
...He was so humiliated, the story goes, that he cannot bear to face the man who witnessed his most embarrassing moment...
...Treasury Department...
...A trip that previously cost 35 cents now costs $1, because the gasoline is being purchased on the black market...
...The Haitians present received this news with sadness...
...Nobody can keep order in this country," a taxi driver insisted...
...Allowing only the importation of food and medicine, it has hit Haitians hardest by depriving them of fuel...
...Clean him up," Cedras is supposed to have told a fellow officer, "he can't travel like that...
...He killed for a reason...
...Small contraband-laden boats cross lakes Enriquillo and Etang Saumatre, and more gasoline is brought in through the southern town of Pedernales...
...Now he will never come back...
...Care, which had been feeding up to a million people each day, has had to shut down several of its stations because it does not have fuel to transport the food from its warehouses...
...Aristide is never coming back," asserts Richard Morse, the Princeton-educated manager of the Hotel Oloffson...
...He killed his enemies...
...A sticking point has been the matter of passenger air travel: France wants it curtailed, and the U.S...
...It would take $5 billion to repair the damage that's been done to this country in the past two years," an aid official said, "if indeed it can ever be repaired...
...The World Health Organization has estimated that 30,000 jobs were lost here in the first four months alone of the original embargo...
...Perhaps in one of the co-founders of the three-month-old frap, "Jojo" Chamberlain or "Toto" Constant...
...Le Nouvelliste reported that Frank Glen, also known as Robert Hall Dean, had been killed by "foreigners" when a drug deal went sour...
...If necessary the embargo will be tightened...
...With friends like these," Le Nouvelliste keeps repeating, "who needs enemies...
...With their fortunes founded on drug trade, these people have more cash than they know what to do with...
...Sure, he killedpeople...
...Duvalier was a tyrant who killed people," I protested...
...It quickly clogs fuel lines and wrecks engines...
...it has brought them too much misery...
...Given that many of these people earn $3 to $6 a day, they cannot afford to go to work...
...Estimates of those killed by the military since the 1991 coup range from 3,000 to 25,000, and the violence continues...
...There's only one man knew how to do it...
...Then," I asked, "what is the point of the embargo...
...Where are we going to find another Francois Duvalier...
...Anything that would return life to relative normalcy, even an American occupation, would be preferable to the conditions under which they now live...
...Restaurants, facing the same difficulties, joined the shutdown...
...If American lives were being lost there might be a call for direct intervention, and Washington has no intention of going that route...
...Apparently the Clinton Administration did not want the incident blown up...
...A tanker with gasoline earmarked solely for humanitarian organizations was allowed to unload during the last week of January, but distribution was held up by bureaucratic red tape as the military plotted to get a share of the bounty...
...Soon they will be marooned there...
...When he was running the country, what did he do for us...
...That's why he won't negotiate with Cedras," people say...
...Even Haiti's world-famous artists are feeling the pinch...
...But not like now...
...When they left, documents recounting all the horror stories they had collected were shredded "to protect the sources...
...It's no longer about Aristide...
...Hospitals, lacking the electricity needed to power equipment, shut down their operating rooms a month ago...
...There was the infamous speech he made on September 27, 1991, inciting the poor to put flaming tires around the necks of the rich...
...Carole Cleaver, a frequent contributor to these pages, is co-author of Spirits of the Night: The Vaudou Gods of Haiti...
...One woman told me she and her widowed mother use their car only once a week to secure food...
...If they killed a couple of whites, preferably Americans, there'd be action...
...Cedras and Francois, he points out, both received their military training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and are chummy with the American military...
...The Marines would land...
...It could neither find sufficient paper nor afford to generate power to run its presses...
...On street corners hawkers are selling small containers of a liquid they claim is gasoline that has proved to be a strange mixture of kerosene and mashed avocado pits...
...Just look at the Harlan County incident...
...wants it left in place...
...Without fuel many people could not shop, and supermarkets had no refrigeration to prevent food from spoiling...
...Everyone is suffering...
...That's what we need...
...They are also becoming disenchanted with Aristide...
...But an OAS official assured me that the material was "stored in a computer somewhere...
...Morse contends that the Pentagon and the CIA, who never liked Aristide, conspired with the Haitian military to stage the demonstration so that there would be an excuse to turn back...
...Nobody gives a shit if a million niggers die," a Marxist friend sneered...
...The next ruler of Haiti is now being chosen by the Pentagon...
...Since the resignation of Aristide's Prime Minister, Robert Malval, on December 15, Haiti has had no government, only a Legislature that debates endlessly without power, and an Army that keeps the lid on...
...The Haitian military is well aware of that...
...The wife of Francois Benoit, a former Ambassador to the United States, confided that she and her husband have had to become vegetarians...
...You can wait an hour for a dial tone, then find that the number you are trying to get is out of order...
...The new American Ambassador, William L. Swing, explained U.S...
...But sometimes in the morning bodies are found...
...Increased prices have made bare subsistence much harder...
...But there were no positive programs, no lessening of poverty...
...If he thought American lives might be lost, he would back down—as, indeed, he did...
...Every night one hears the sound of gunfire—gunfire mixed with the joyful tinkle of carnival bands...
...The Embassy hushed up the matter, and to my knowledge it was never reported in the American press...
...It was lifted entirely last July when General Raoul Cedras, the country's ruler, signed an agreement at Governor's Island in New York providing for the return of Father Aristide by October 30...
...that he is mentally unbalanced, as a CIA report alleged...
...In an ironic touch, 30 of the UN-OAS observers who were evacuated last October have just been ordered back...
...my young Marxist friend cried...
...One woman, unaware of the latest fare hike, was short 20 cents...
...An irate man, discovering that his car had been ruined, stalked the deceiving vendor and killed him...
...The driver was so incensed that he shot and killed her...
...that he pays his lawyer, Michael Barnes, $55,000 a month...
...Many of the main lines are down, making service extremely erratic...
...One Haitian suggested using a provision of the Constitution that allows the head of the Supreme Court to assume the presidency...
...The observers' mission was to investigate human rights abuses and, by their presence, prevent more from occurring...
Vol. 77 • January 1994 • No. 1
