Haiti: The Crisis Persists

FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER THE FORCED DEPARTURE OF THE DICTATOR, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Haiti has not yet found the way to political stability, which might allow economic development and an improvement in the social conditions of the population. The arrival in power of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 aroused great hopes among the disadvantaged masses of the shantytowns and rural areas. But the experience did not last, for seven months after Aristide took the oath of office the army intervened to reclaim power in a bloodbath.

After three years of dictatorship, and economic and commercial boycott, on October 15, 1994, Aristide returned to power under the protection of more than 20,000 American soldiers. The mission of these troops, according to the Clinton administration, was "to create a secure and stable environment for the consolidation of democracy in Haiti." The landing of American troops, which was regarded by some as a second occupation of the country after that of 1915, has not produced the anticipated results. In reality, for more than four years, Haiti has been plunged into one of the gravest crises of its history.

The crisis began with the implementation of the Paris accord by the Aristide government. The accord, it seems, was one of the conditions imposed on the Lavalas leader by the so-called friends of Haiti, notably the United States, Canada and France, for restoring him to power. In fact, since the return to power of the Lavalas government, it has applied in an orthodox manner a program of "structural adjustment" under the eyes of such international financial institutions as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The plan includes lowering tariffs to a level between zero and three percent, lower than many other Caribbean countries. This represents a severe blow for agricultural production, especially for the rice planters of the Artibonite Valley. The government has likewise launched a policy of reducing state employment through what it calls "voluntary leavings and anticipated retirements." As a result of this program, 25 percent of the country's 45,000 civil servants -- a number already insufficient to serve the people -- have been dismissed. The Haitian currency loses more and more of its value in relation to the U.S. dollar: today there are about 25 gourdes to the dollar. This has enormous consequences for the cost of living. Necessities are very expensive, especially for the disadvantaged sectors of the population whose purchasing power is so weak. In Haiti the educational system is in private hands (80 percent of schools). Since 1994, the Lavalas governments of Aristide and Préval have carried out the construction of several dozen schools. But these are far from sufficient to change a system that requires large state investments. Several profitable state enterprises, such as cement and flour making, are privatized. The government is now preparing to sell its telecommunications company, the port of Port-au-Prince, the airport, etc. The invitation of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the summit of the heads of state of the governments of the Americas is proof of the loyalty of the authorities in Port-au-Prince to anti-popular, neo- liberal politics.

In 1997 the divorce was consummated on the occasion of partial legislative elections. On one side was the Fanmi party, founded by Aristide, who put up his own candidates, and on the other the OPL. These elections have still not been concluded. The second round did not take place because of challenges by the OPL, which accused the Fanmi of electoral fraud -- hence the crisis that has brought the country to its present condition.

A climate of insecurity produces dead and wounded almost every day, only two to three hours of electricity every second or third day, scenes of violence in the streets, the freezing of international aid. This is the situation in which Haiti finds itself just a few months after Aristide's return to power on February 7. "Haiti is at the edge of an abyss; all the conditions are present for a social explosion, if not for a civil war," declared Pierre Emile Rouzier, a member of an employers' organization, the Centre pour la Libre Entreprise et la Démocratie (CLED).

Indeed, since parliamentary and local elections on May 21, 2000, the political situation in Haiti has become increasingly grave. The opposition parties that took part have rejected the official results, published by the Conseil Electorale Provisoire (CEP), which give almost total victory to Aristide's party, Fanmi Lavalas, in power since 1994. According to these results, Fanmi controls both houses of parliament with 26 senators out of 27, 72 deputies out of 83, more than 100 of the 133 municipalities. As a protest against what they consider electoral fraud, the opposition parties did not participate in the second round of voting. They denounced the implantation of a one- party dictatorship in the country, and since then they have demanded the pure and simple nullification of the vote.

The results of the 2000 elections have also been placed in doubt by the international community. A mission sent by the Organization of American States (OAS) to supervise the elections in May 2000 expressed reservations concerning the methods used by the CEP to determine the percentages of the vote won by the senatorial candidates, and requested the correction of these methods. The Haitian authorities rejected this request, which was also supported by the rest of the international community. For that reason, the OAS did not supervise the second round of elections on July 9, 2000.

For the presidential election on November 26, 2000, the main opposition parties, reassembled as the Convergence Démocratique, called for a boycott. Aristide was thus the only well-known candidate to face six other politically insignificant persons. For good reason, then, these presidential elections took place amid almost total indifference in the population, with a participation rate of between 10 and 15 percent according to the observers of CARICOM, and five percent according to the opposition. (However, the CEP and observers from the American organization Global Exchange spoke of 60 percent participation.) The Haitian press and foreign journalists verified the high rate of abstention among the population. People questioned in various neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince spoke of their disappointment that most popular demands had not been satisfied by the politicians of Lavalas, who had nevertheless promised much.

In October 2000, several weeks before the presidential elections scheduled for November 26, the OAS sent a mission to Haiti, headed by its adjunct secretary general Luigi Enaudi, to encourage the protagonists to sit down and work out a solution to the crisis. After three days of coming and going between the two sides, Enaudi left without having succeeded in bringing them together around the same table. After the failure of several more attempts at negotiations under the aegis of the OAS, a group of organizations from Haitian civil society, assembled as the Initiative de la Société Civile, formed a facilitating commission to help in resolving the crisis.

One week before the inauguration of Aristide on February 7, the two sides having finally been brought face to face, some proposals were formulated to help Haiti emerge from the crisis. Fanmi put forward a program that it had previously submitted to the Clinton administration. It proposed, among other things, a second round of elections for about ten senators who had benefited from the "special calculations" of the CEP in May 2000. The opposition parties, for their part, suggested annulling purely and simply the May election and forming a presidential council headed by the leader of the Fanmi. This council would have a mandate of two years to organize general elections in the country.

The talks stumbled once again over the intransigent positions of both sides and failed to find a compromise capable of resolving the political crisis. It was thus with a disputed legitimacy, at the national as well as the international level, that Aristide took the oath of office as President of the Republic on February 7, 2001. The same day, the opposition, grouped together as the Convergence Démocratique, installed its own president, the lawyer Gérard Gourgue, a former human rights activist under the Duvalier dictatorship. Accordingly, the country has today two presidents, one real and the other virtual.

In his quest for legitimacy from the international community, President Aristide has brought into his government some former functionaries under Duvalier and some supporters of the very military putschists who threw him out in September 1991. Aristide and his partisans present this decision as an expression of their willingness to open up the government to oppositionists. The presence of these macoutes in the Aristide government is vigorously denounced by several civil society organizations, but those who are close to the authorities reject the protests. "The macoutes appointed to the government and to the new CEP have no record of criminality or corruption," said Lovensky Pierre-Antoine, leader of an organization of victims of the 1991 coup d'etat and friend of the government. Nevertheless, another supporter of Lavalas, Benjamin Dupuy, head of the Parti Populaire National, printed in his newspaper Haiti Progrès, edited and published in New York, a dossier proving that one of the Duvalierist ministers chosen by Aristide, Stanley Théard, was implicated in the embezzlement of several million dollars under the government of Jean-Claude Duvalier. While continuing to support President Aristide, Dupuy was very critical of the decision to include crooks and former executioners of the people in a government that claims to represent the aspirations of the majority.

As for the opposition, its greatest weakness is its lack of a popular base. Convergence Démocratique is a multiform alliance composed of former militants of the Left, such as Gérard-Pierre-Charles and Evans Paul (once close to Lavalas), and politicians of the Right formerly associated with the civilian and military dictatorships, like Hubert de Ronceray and Lesly Manigat. Most of those politicians who once participated in corrupt and repressive governments have no significant audience among the population. That is why they rely above all on the international community, especially the U.S. Republicans, to recapture power.

For its part, the European Union announced officially last January the freezing of funds destined for Haiti within the framework of African-Caribbean-Pacific-EU (ACP/EU) cooperation. This decision was denounced by the ACP countries as premature. In an effort to loosen the vice, the Aristide government has made a new proposal. During a special OAS session on Haiti on March 14, the Haitian foreign minister, Joseph Phillipe Antonio, presented a plan that provides for a series of partial legislative elections from November 2002 to replace those whose elections were disputed and whose terms expire in 2004 and 2006.

While the two sides proclaim themselves ready to sit down for dialogue and negotiations to resolve the crisis, no concrete steps have been made in this direction since the collapse of negotiations in February. Recently the country has experienced a series of violent demonstrations organized by supporters of both sides. Pro- government elements demand the arrest of the "virtual president" and the other leaders of the opposition, while pro-opposition elements demand the resignation of Aristide and the organization of general elections. On March 20 some members of the Lavalas party attacked the office of the Convergence with rocks, bottles and firearms. This attack was repulsed by oppositionists who also used firearms. The confrontation resulted in one death and several wounded. There were similar situations at Petit- Goave (60 kilometers south of the capital), Cap-Haitien in the north, Hinche and several other provincial towns.

In all sectors of civil society signs of impatience are evident. Employers' organizations, such as the Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie, Association des Industriels, and Centre pour la Libre Entreprise et la Démocratie, complain of the degeneration of the socio-economic climate, which has a very negative impact on their business. The business community is pressuring both sides to end the stalemate in order to avoid a complete collapse of the economy. Because of the political climate, in particular because of the violence and the problems with the supply of electricity, several businessmen have left the country and established themselves in the Dominican Republic. "The political authorities must give the country a chance," writes Maurice Lafortune, vice-president of the Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie.

Women's organizations, including Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen (Solidarité des Femmes Haitiennes -- SOFA) and Konbit Fanm SAJ (Rassemblement des Femmes de SAJ), have criticized the politicians in power and in the opposition who defend only their interests and the interests of imperialism, to the detriment of the interests of the majority of the people. "Women have had enough of this crisis; it is we and our children who pay the cost of this querelle de chapelle," writes Konbit Fanm SAJ in a press release.

The Commission Nationale Episcopale Justice et Paix, a Catholic human rights organization, has drawn attention to the consequences of the crisis for civil liberties. According to the commission, almost everywhere in the country "officials of Fanmi Lavalas, especially the mayors, have established a climate of repression, forbidding all meetings and public demonstrations. Several persons, members of grass-roots organizations close to the opposition, have been shot at or imprisoned for trying to organize demonstrations against the government," writes Justice et Paix in a recently published report. This situation was also denounced by the Plate-Forme des Organisations Haititiennes des Droits Humains and Amnesty International.

The Mouvement Paysan National du Congrès de Papaye (MPNKP), the oldest peasant organization in the country, was not able to have a peaceful march on March 21. The mayor of the city of Hinche, arms in hand, prohibited the march because the peasants were going to demonstrate against the government. In a resolution adopted at the end of its general assembly, the MPNKP drew up a negative balance sheet of the last ten years of Lavalas rule. According to this resolution the high cost of living, unemployment, insecurity, drug trafficking, rural exodus, have all worsened. The MPNKP, one of whose leaders is Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, a founder of the Lavalas movement, is now closer to the Convergence Démocratique.

Some popular organizations, linked together in the Regroupement des Organisations Populaires Autonomes, call on the masses to mobilize themselves in order to change the situation created by the traditional politicians. The view of these groups, among them the peasant organization Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan and some organizations in the poor neighborhoods, such as Chandel, Solidarite Ant Jèn, MUPAC, is that the solution to the problems of the masses will come neither from Aristide nor from the opposition because they are all in the service of the great powers.

"The traditional politicians have failed. We need a new way to rescue the country from underdevelopment." Such is the judgment of Jean William Jeanty on the occasion of the launching of a new political organization, the Collectif Socialiste pour l'Identité et la Liberté. It includes the economist Camille Chalmers, executive secretary of the Plate-Forme Haitienne de Plaidoyer pour un Dévelopement Alternatif. For the Collectif, both Lavalas and the Convergence are lackeys who work to perpetuate the domination of imperialism over the Haitian people. "We need a different project that responds to the aspirations of the Haitian people, a project that envisages first of all changing the situation of the majority," declared Jean-Claude Cherubin, a member of this new organization of the Left.

"Lavalas and the Convergence are two sides of the same coin"; this is the opinion of the Comité d'Initiative pour une Alternative Populaire et Révolutionnaire. In a recently published bulletin, this committee called for an awakening of progressive forces to reconstruct the popular camp, the only viable means of combating Lavalas populism and the revival of the Right.

Translated from the French by Thomas Harrison

Contents of No. 31

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