Haiti to the Haitians?
CANHAM-CLYNE, JOHN
HAITI TO THE HAITIANS? BY JOHN CANHAM-CLYNE AND WORTH COOLEY-PROST Rich Gosser, a math professor from Pennsylvania, observed the ballot count in Haiti's June 25 parliamentary elections at...
...A White House official told us several months ago, "Look, we don't care what size military Haiti has or whether they have one at all...
...No to anyone under the table or on top of the table...
...This constitutes a direct subsidy from the poor of Haiti to the private sector," notes economist Lisa McGowan, Haiti project director for the Development Group for Alternative Policies based in Washington...
...That's for the Haitians to decide...
...If the reports are to be believed, at the specific request of Ambassador Swing, the Haitian electoral council has delayed announcing results," Representative Goss said on July 12...
...The massive, multi-year "democracy-enhancement" project drafted two months later amounted to an overt, white-collar invasion of Haiti...
...It was very hot," he says, "and it was not a very big space, maybe the size of your living room, and there were a lot of people, four of us, all the election workers, and several party observers...
...The morning after, the IRI gang proclaimed the accuracy of their predictions at yet another press conference in yet another expensive hotel...
...The man on the street knows the five gourds he has today buy less than they did yesterday, but much more than they will next week...
...The Haitian majority understands that the U.S...
...Haiti is no different from anywhere else: responding to Republican attacks on foreign aid last winter, AID chief Brian At-wood bragged that 60 percent of AID dollars go to American businesses...
...officials gave the junta leaders...
...AID has authorized millions of dollars for its "administration-of-justice" programs...
...These World Bank and IMF plans do not sound so good for us...
...However, the Commission labors under very serious constraints: it must complete its work within 180 days, with virtually no money...
...Some White House officials, however, are less determined to preserve the military in its current form...
...documented how the agency worked to undermine Aristide's promises to lead the country "out of misery and into honest poverty...
...policy, the hope for serious social change in Haiti will be severely diminished...
...Word went out that Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina had called for Senate hearings on "Haiti's fraudulent elections," and IRI upped the voltage of its rhetoric to declare the entire election "forty-eight hours of mayhem...
...Aristide sat down last year at a table in Washington sadly different from the one he always evoked in speeches and sermons...
...The Haitian government is scheduled to borrow $40 million to repair and upgrade the [national] electric company's equipment before the company is sold...
...The U.S...
...Former President Jimmy Carter and U.S...
...But as Goss surely knows, the U.S...
...To permanently change the army's status—or do away with the army entirely—the new parliament will have to amend the constitution...
...Enhancing Haiti's democracy failed to prevent the coup and its three years of slaughter and plunder...
...intervention has been a mixed blessing...
...Nine months after Aristide's restoration, no one has been indicted, much less convicted, for crimes against humanity during the Cedras coup...
...Because the existing parliament's mandate expired last year, Aristide has been ruling by executive order...
...When the Aristide government returned to office, it found state institutions completely stripped...
...officials pressured Aristide to "remain neutral" during the recent parliamentary elections, an absurd request to make of a sitting president...
...Worth Cooley-Prost is a board member of the Washington Office on Haiti, and led an international delegation to the recent elections in Haiti...
...I wonder if he wants us to object...
...The president of the polling place would hold up the ballots, one by one, and announce the name of the party the vote was cast for...
...forces are scheduled to withdraw fully following the inauguration of Aristide's successor in early 1996, the United States will not be relinquishing control...
...military presence and a flood of aid have not reduced prices for basic commodities...
...For the moment, Aristide appears to have won a significant victory...
...The Haitian majority still clings to the hope of creating a new society and saw the recent elections as a step toward that goal...
...Four years later, the table, with people seated around it, was the ballot symbol for OPL, the new Lavalas political party...
...U.S...
...For example, AID gave $7 million to the Haitian business elite to lobby against Aristide's "anti-business" proposals, like doubling the minimum wage from what was then the equivalent of $2 a day to $4 a day...
...Is the State Department crossing the line on interference in the internal affairs in Haiti...
...And there wasn't a spoon in sight.* John Canham-Clyne is research director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch...
...Thus the significance of the parliamentary elections...
...T! Ihese traditional powers in Haiti are searching for mechanisms to ensure that popular and democratic forces are not able to exercise meaningful political power—to deny Haiti to the Haitians at all costs...
...Undaunted, AID recently unveiled phase two of the democracy project...
...Most of that money will go for technical assistance, training, and increased salaries to the very judges who presided during the coup...
...The authors' views are not necessarily those of their organizations...
...BY JOHN CANHAM-CLYNE AND WORTH COOLEY-PROST Rich Gosser, a math professor from Pennsylvania, observed the ballot count in Haiti's June 25 parliamentary elections at a rural polling site outside the town of Petit Goave...
...The United States insisted that at least half of the training for the new force take place at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, contrary to the wishes of the Aristide government...
...military presence in Haiti has been drastically reduced since the September 1994 invasion, but even though U.S...
...Haiti is a country still on the brink...
...After several preliminary steps, on January 19 Aristide ordered the virtual disbanding of the military...
...officials put enormous pressure on the Haitian president to maintain the core of the existing army, which was created under the last U.S...
...Agency for International Development] and the private sector...
...If i've fallen down a well, and my enemy pulls me up, i still know he's my enemy.' But its ultimate goal is to deter rather than enhance genuinely democratic development, and to ensure a reasonably stable formal democratic process as window dressing for a punitive economic policy...
...The size of the U.S...
...For instance, in the race for mayor of Port-au-Prince, Manno Charlemagne, a radical folksinger, soundly defeated Evans Paul, whom U.S...
...On the economic front, the structural-adjustment program for Haiti remains on track, with no internal disagreement in Washington...
...The third one was looking over his shoulder, checking to make sure it was done right...
...However, rather than supporting the development of an economic system that addresses the long-term development needs and priorities of Haiti's poor majority, what it appears to be creating is a juggernaut of development assistance that preferentially serves international and elite Haitian interests...
...The standard of living for many Haitians is even worse now than it was during the coup...
...As a fallback, the Aristide government has demanded that civilian observers be permitted to scrutinize the U.S...
...But despite this victory for Aristide and the popular movement, the United States and the Haitian elite are still maneuvering to undermine real political and economic democracy in Haiti...
...As many as a dozen of Haiti's state enterprises may be scheduled for privatization...
...They had two candles going, and we were helping them out with our flashlights...
...officials openly express the need for management of the transition to formal democracy...
...The only functioning unit at present is the palace band...
...But it remains to be seen whether the new parliament and President Aristide will have the resources to construct the table and find enough chairs for Haiti's impoverished majority...
...The military has been the CIA's most important asset in Haiti for years...
...The new civilian police force will have 7,000 members, far more than the Haitian government wanted, and perhaps not coincidentally, the same size as the old Haitian military...
...Aristide had hoped to construct a national police academy in Haiti to ensure that all training would be carried out under the auspices of Haiti's constitutional government...
...Aside from the overwhelming administrative challenge, the government faced two immediate political challenges: establishing some sort of mechanism to account * These World Bank and imf plans do not sound so good for us...
...A Haitian proverb tells us that if you eat with the devil, you must use a long spoon...
...Aristide's Lavalas party, now called the OPL, appears to have been the big winner in the elections...
...military intervention to restore Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, rushed to praise the elections as a scruffy but ultimately legitimate exercise in democratic political expression...
...bhhbh All over the country, poll workers knelt on dirt floors, carefully sorting and counting ballots by candlelight in an atmosphere that was extraordinarily hopeful and reverential...
...AID's enforcer role is not new in Haiti or elsewhere, but it did assume new dimensions after Aristide's inauguration in February 1992...
...One fellow would sort the ballots by party as they were announced, another fellow was sitting on a little bench with a pencil next to a candle, writing down each tally...
...If I've fallen down a well," one peasant leader observed, "and my enemy drops me a rope and pulls me up, I'll take it, but I still know he's my enemy...
...I don't know," she mused...
...In his speech to the United Nations just three days before the coup, he used one of his favorite images to describe that promise: "Yes to everyone around the table...
...The only money the Truth Commission has received to date is from the Haitian government's own grievously limited resources...
...The political space in Haiti is much narrower now than when Aristide assumed office five years ago...
...A delegation from the International Republican Institute (IRI), led by former CIA operations officer and Republican Congressman Porter Goss of Florida, saw things very differently...
...But the military intervention and Aristide's return did succeed in stopping the wholesale slaughter...
...Nonetheless, Aristide complied as he has with most such demands, honoring the invoice for his return while finding space at the margins to communicate his general political sentiments...
...training to prevent a replay of the kind of training U.S...
...in some buildings, including the palace, even the plumbing fixtures were gone...
...Aristide ran for president in 1990, promising a basic measure of economic justice...
...To IRI observers, who spent the day zooming around in air-conditioned four-by-fours and looking like grim summer campers all dressed up in spiffy white T-shirts, hats, and shorts, Haitian workers counting ballots in the dirt and dark appeared "anarchical...
...Chairman, even after our exit in February 1996, we will remain in charge by means of AID [the U.S...
...The international community has moved mountains to support democracy and provide development assistance to Haiti...
...But the Republicans continued to denounce it...
...Shortly after Aristide's return last October, a peasant woman in the Central Plateau talked about the new economic policies...
...Yet this struggle is far from over...
...AID is arguably the most powerful political institution in Haiti...
...In the short run, the agency designated $34.5 million for the elections, "democratic institutional development," administration of justice, and local municipal development for 1995...
...The day before the elections, IRI released a pricey 300-page report predicting chaos and disaster at the polls...
...The National Labor Committee in its 1993 report—"Haiti After the Coup: Sweatshop or Real Development...
...Not surprisingly, the primary beneficiaries of international largess appear to be development consultants, multinational corporations, and Haiti's traditional elite...
...Political democracy in a country as economically polarized as Haiti will go nowhere fast if it is not accompanied by economic democracy, where citizens are fully involved in shaping the economic policies that determine who gets what and how much of it they get," says McGowan...
...Titid [Aristide] says they are good, but he says it surrounded by many tall Americans...
...Government crossed that line a long time ago...
...officials had been quietly touting as presidential material...
...It plays a crucial role in enforcing the conditions imposed on Aristide's return...
...While Washington consulting firms scramble for the "justice" money, the Truth Commission is pleading for five donated laptops and a fax machine...
...International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans are conditioned on privatization...
...However, the United States continues to exert substantial influence over Haiti's security forces...
...Speaking at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on March 9,1995, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who had just returned from Haiti, said, "I assure you, Mr...
...Titid says they are good, but he says it surrounded by many tall Americans.' for human-rights abuses during the coup, and beginning the process of improving the standard of living...
...The Aristide government has waged a bruising behind-the-scenes battle with the CIA and elements of the Pentagon over the future of the Haitian army...
...If the United States is able to surround Aristide with conservative politicians or even Lavalas members willing to go along with the central features of U.S...
...Clinton Administration officials, eager to attach the beloved "democracy" label to the U.S...
...the Macoute knows where his gun is hidden and bides his time...
...military occupation...
...A Truth Commission, headed by sociologist Francoise Bou-card, was named on March 28 to begin the process of investigating human-rights cases...
Vol. 59 • September 1995 • No. 9
