Georgie Anne Geyer’s February 13th article about the political situation in Haiti had the virtue of pointing to the complexity of the issues involved. The groups that have taken control of several northern cities are not a revolutionary movement. They are, as she points out, gangs. Nor is Haiti on the verge of a revolutionary transformation, it is, instead, slipping into ungoverned chaos.
Geyer’s picture of President Aristide, however, is too simple, too forgetful of recent history, to illuminate the situation. He is, it is true, governing ineffectively and, according to many rumors, corruptly. Many in Haiti – including some of the thugs that are rising against him –claim that he himself is responsible for their having arms. It is said that his supporters initially armed criminal gangs as an informal security force. If that’s true, then he and his people bear an enormous degree of responsibility for the violence that they and the country generally are now facing.
At the same time, he has been popularly elected by the Haitian people not once, but twice. Ms. Geyer refers snidely to this fact, but it is a terrible mistake to underestimate its importance. Though his support is dwindling, he is the only person in Haitian politics with any shred of a claim to legitimate popular support. In two relatively clean elections, a large majority of voters chose him. This matters.
Any comparison between Aristide and François Duvalier, the notorious “Papa Doc,” is absurd. Duvalier’s murderous regime was marked by a systematic, nationwide, violent repression of all opposition. His Tonton Macoutes were everywhere. The existence today of scattered gangs of armed thugs, some of which support Aristide is a bad thing, but it is nothing like Haiti under Duvalier.
Though we may not like the way Aristide governs, and though we may not like him, as a democratically elected ruler he deserves our support. This is not to say that we should be preparing an expeditionary force to quash what looks sometimes like a rebellion. It merely means that we should be looking for chances to convince those segments of the opposition that are genuinely interested in better, more popular governance that the best way to do so is to prepare for the next presidential elections.
Ms. Geyer implies that we are fools to exaggerate the importance of democracy when an elected president is unraveling progress that his predecessors had made – whatever their claim to power might have been. But apart from the question of principle, whether effective authoritarian rule deserves our support, Ms. Geyer’s description of the improving situation that Aristide’s Lavalas movement inherited is deceiving.
She quotes former Ambassador Preeg’s sad recollection of the manufacturing jobs that were being created under Jean-Claude Duvalier’s cleptocratic dictatorship, but it wasn’t until Aristide was first elected that those sweatshops began to pay even a minimum wage of 37 Haitian gourds per day. That is still the minimum wage, and it’s now worth less than a dollar. Rural Haitians was forced to take such rotten jobs because the rural agricultural economy was been decimated by U.S.-supported policies ranging from the eradication of the Creole pig to the importation of subsidized food stuffs that undercut Haitian domestic production. She and Ambassador Preeg also fail to point out that Haitians are still repaying the debt that the economic policies of the ‘80’s created, and that those debt payments are one big reason why, even at his best moments, Aristide’s government has never had the resources to invest in development.
I am very far from knowing what the right answers for Haiti are. I spend several months in Haiti every year, and I agree with at least one part of what Geyer quotes Ambassador Pezzullo as saying. Simple solutions are not possible. Geyer rightly points to our own culpability in the present crisis, but to say that our mistake began with our support for Jean-Bertrand Aristide is forgetfulness of the worst kind. In the final analysis, Haitians are going to need to sort out their own problems. We can be supportive bystanders if we choose to, but we should not expect that new intervention on our part will do anything but continue our history of undermining the strength and the independence the second oldest republic in the Americas.
Steven Werlin Dean of the College Shimer College Waukegan, IL
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