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U.S. Policy Options Toward Haiti

James R. Morrell, 0000-00-00

Haiti Democracy Project web page item #158 (http://www.haitipolicy.org)

U.S. Interests in Haiti

These focus on the creation of a stable, legitimate government that would provide a predictable environment in which economic development could take place and so relieve the pressure of illegal emigration to the United States. This U.S. interest also broadly coincides with that of Haiti’s poor majority for whom even minimally-paying jobs would be an advance over their current desperate situation. Georges Fauriol has stated this U.S. interest as, “Foster modern governance through a democratically competitive political environment.”

A second U.S. interest is blocking Haiti’s role as a narcotics transhipment country, a interest that is again crucially concerned with governance and official incapacity, if not collusion, with the drug trade.

There is also an economic interest but it is so small, compared with U.S. trade and investment in neighboring countries, that it is overshadowed by the refugee and drug interests.

Policy Options in Perspective

While U.S. interests have remained relatively constant for several decades, the policy instruments have oscillated in reaction to the rapidly-shifting situation in Haiti and also to its ramifications in U.S. domestic politics. The general policy preference is to work with the existing government despite its warts, but the glaring abuses of successive regimes have sometimes made this impossible. This was the case during some periods of the Duvalier dynastic rule, the succession of military regimes following 1986, the coup d’etat regime of 1991–94, and until now the second Aristide presidency because of the too-flagrant manipulation of the May 2000 elections. Temporary cutoff of aid to the government was the most frequent tool, but the first Bush administration resorted to an embargo against the 1991 military-coup regime and the Clinton administration escalated this sanction to a U.N.-approved military intervention.

The majority of Haiti experts and aid agency heads, meeting for example this January at a UNDP-International Peace Academy conference in New York, have expressed the opinion that the U.S. departure from Haiti after 1994 was too precipitous, that it was driven by an exit strategy rather than a vision of reconstruction, and that the United States went in “with a one-year strategy for a ten-year problem,” to quote a typical response. The promising beginnings of institutional reform were overtaken by the recrudescence of traditional Haitian factional politics focused on the presidency and the subordination of all institutions to it.

Policy Options for the Bush Administration

The primordial interest for the Bush administration is to attain minimally stable and legitimate government in Haiti and so to deal with the real threat of further destabilization and refugee generation. Conceptually there are three ways to go:

1. Continuance of current course of aid denial

The Bush administration accepted the aid cutoff and the eight points of agreement extracted from Aristide by the outgoing Clinton administration as an appropriate starting point for its policy. The administration stressed that it would break off the privileged personal connection to Aristide that the Clinton administration had clung to. It also correctly perceived that Aristide was making no real good-faith effort to implement the correction of the legislative elections. Such correction was always within the power of the regime by unilateral action, but instead progress was made hostage to negotiations with the opposition. Two notable spasms of violence undertaken by regime supporters against the opposition, in July and December 2001, undid what tentative progress had been achieved in these negotiations.

The upshot is that the Bush administration has been left with a negative policy of sanctions against the poorest country in the hemisphere. Even though reasons for the sanctions were valid and remain so today, the sanctions themselves were not effective in changing the regime’s behavior. From the Duvaliers through the coup regime, Haitian powerholders have shown that they can weather an aid cutoff. Aristide, through an astute, lavish public-relations campaign in the United States, and by exploiting natural sympathy for the hemisphere’s poorest nation and world’s first black republic, calculated that he could outlast the administration on the aid issue and he may be shortly proven correct. The Congressional Black Caucus, prominent Democrats, and virtually the entire membership of the OAS are tending to isolate the administration on this issue, when the administration is already open to charges of anti-Haitian and racist policy because of its detention of Haitian refugees reaching Florida.

The policy of aid denial, while it did push in the right direction toward the core U.S. interest of fostering stable, lawful governance in Haiti, was too passive and pursued too long under changing circumstances, to the point where it has become a political liability. The administration can take pride in that it pursued a principled approach to Haiti this long. But circumstances now call for a more proactive policy.

2. Return to the Clinton policy of basing U.S. policy on Aristide: resumption of aid to the regime and acceptance of the pro-Aristide OAS initial accord

While this would appear to be a “new” approach for the administration, given the vociferous Republican criticism of Aristide during the 1990s, in the longer historical perspective this would merely be another oscillation of U.S. policy back toward toleration of the regime such as the Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan administrations found expedient in earlier decades. It would relieve the political pressure noted above, especially since the Democrats, some of whom have been lured into the Aristide column by the paid public-relations campaign mentioned above, would find it difficult to suddenly criticize the administration for aiding a human-rights violator although this stance would be truer to the traditions of the Democratic party and U.S. liberal opinion. However, should Aristide unleash another spasm of repression such as the two in 2001, the administration by its aid would be newly open to criticism from the major human-rights organizations, most Haiti experts, and the media.

More important than the political fallout, however, is the strong probability that aid resumption and imposition of an OAS accord would NOT serve the primordial U.S. goal of  stabilization and legitimation and might indeed further set back these goals by tying the United States to an inherently unstable regime. The essence of the Aristide presidency is to resurrect and project into the twenty-first century the traditional Haitian model of the winner-take-all presidency which has been a formula for instability for nearly two centuries. It requires a monopoly of control of government institutions such as the parliament, police, judiciary, and electoral machinery totally at variance with the 1987 constitution and is focused on the perpetuation of personal presidential power, traditionally through repeated terms or life presidencies, although circumstances may now require use of a family member or other stand-in. This model of power has throughout Haiti’s history provoked numerous uprisings and coups, relieved only by periods of severe repression such as the Duvaliers’. But in a Haiti that has tasted of democracy and sees the progress registered by relatively democratic regimes all around it, this model, always inappropriate, is today a gross anachronism and a recipe for endemic instability. As Jacky Dahomay writes, “The nature of the current crisis is there: a government that strives to be above the law at the same time that current historical conditions demand the democratic exercise of power.”

The turmoil in Gonaïves is only the latest example: it stemmed from the violence against the opposition employed by Aristide last December 17, then the counter-pressure generated by the OAS Commission of Inquiry, forcing Aristide to arrest the Gonaïves agent of violence, who then refused to play the role of sacrificial pawn and soon had thousands of poor people on the streets shouting for the regime’s downfall. Thus the imperatives of the presidential model pursued by Aristide led directly to a situation of near-anarchy, and will again.

 Further new factors against the Aristide presidential model are democratic progress in the hemisphere and the size of the diaspora and its growing economic importance, and the prospect that in return for these remittances it will eventually demand a voice in governance.

Thus the “easy” way, while it may offer short-term relief, will likely only drive the problem deeper and confront the administration with the same problem in new guises, thus forcing the administration into an endless series of policy reviews and gyrations. Nothing will have been done to address the underlying problems which have made it impossible for the World Bank and all aid donors to achieve any lasting progress in institutional reform. These institutional reforms are the sine qua non for economic development and mitigation of the refugee pressure.

In the end, going the “easy” way will cause wiser heads in the administration to grudgingly acknowledge President Clinton’s courage in attempting to attack the problem at its roots.

3. Middle, proactive course: promoting and protecting unimpeachably free and fair elections

This option foresees providing real resources to current policy and so transforming it from a reactive policy of aid denial into a purposeful policy to surmount the crisis. This option foresees making the “silent majority” of Haitian opinion, now increasingly skeptical of Aristide and more than ever intensely desirous of democratic modernization, an asset of administration policy instead of an obstacle, which it would be in Option 2. This option avoids the flipflop of policy required by Option 2, in which a Republican administration would bail out Aristide.

While the Haitian electorate remains ill-polled and poorly understood, a truly free and fair election would probably produce a pluralist parliament able to insist on its constitutional prerogatives to oversee the government administration, which would be in the hands of a legislatively-approved prime minister more likely to appoint professionally-qualified administrators. This is a process that began to take root in the mid–1990s, under the impact of the intervention and the heavy presence of foreign advisers, only to be aborted by the recrudescence of traditional politics. A truly free and fair election, then, would perforce mean the end of the traditional presidential-monopoly system which Aristide has resurrected. However, because such an election would fatally challenge that monopoly of power, it cannot be achieved without the Bush administration devoting major resources to protect the elections against the incumbent power.

The current OAS negotiating process has matured in conditions in which the Bush administration, in Option 1, has starved it of resources. As a result, although it aims at the same objective—free and fair elections—it has had to make the best of the relative power balance between the regime and its weak opposition. The result is a proposed accord that favors the stronger party in an attempt to get an agreement. Going forward with this accord without resources would create the illusion of progress, but not the reality.

Minimal resources needed would include the U.N. and a multinational police training presence, preferably as part of an accord that would build on the current OAS draft. Existing versions of this accord foresee detaching a significant portion of the police to serve under the control of a pluralistic electoral commission, to guarantee the conditions for a free and fair election. Under Option 3 the trainers would deploy with these electoral police and have both the capability and authority to mobilize the Haitian police in defense of law and order, in contrast to recent episodes where they have stood by, if not participated, in repression by the “popular organizations,” i.e., traditional subsidized gangs.  This training presence would be backed by energetic diplomacy holding the regime to its promises.

Although innovative diplomacy could extract both Aristide’s and the opposition’s agreement to such a scheme, compliance would be another matter and this would be the test of the administration’s resolve. Almost certainly, Aristide would attempt to play the traditional cards of false nationalism and might stage a confrontation between his subsidized gangs and the foreign armed trainers or the Haitian police they would lead. There would always be the risk of a confrontation. Application of the Powell doctrine in 1994, and the full illegitimacy of the military regime, avoided this danger for the U.S. intervention in 1994 although there was a firefight in which Marines killed fifteen Haitian soldiers.

Going the route of Option 3 thus requires an honest acknowledgment of the dangers, and counsels in favor of making the dissuasive presence sufficiently robust as to deter these dangers. That would argue for the presence of U.S. personnel because although foreign personnel would have the physical capability to resist the untrained gangs mobilized by Aristide,  they would be politically vulnerable in case of a confrontation. The absence of U.S. personnel would be perceived, particularly by Aristide, as absence of commitment and an open invitation to challenge the election security arrangements.

Conclusion

Option 1 is a failed policy. Option 2 would merely compound the problem and would probably not even succeed in deferring it beyond the current administration.

Option 3 requires real resources and incurs appreciable risks, but, with the hindsight of experience, offers the only way forward to achievement of core U.S. interests, which happen to coincide with those of the vast majority in Haiti itself.