Originally: Aristide a flash point of explosive division
James Morrell, executive director of the Haiti Democracy Project, said he stood by Aristide after the coup because Aristide was the democratically elected president, the first in Haiti’s 200-year history.
Now he wishes he had looked closer.
“I turned gradually against him as the evidence piled up from 1996 onwards that he was a traditional-style, personalistic ruler type opposing himself to the democratic movement that had nominated him in the first place,” Morrell said.
“I had lazily not done my homework to review his nine months in office, and we glibly disregarded the disturbing evidence of intolerance and personalism during that period as lack of democratic experience. In any event, in exile he was on his best behavior and we saw none of that. Where, why and how did he go wrong? Indeed, power corrupts.”
In the years since Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted and restored to office, he has reigned over growing desperation and chaos.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Standing near the guardhouse of the stark-white National Palace, Elysée Mondestin vowed to fight and even die to keep President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in office.
Across town, outside the wrought-iron gates of the University of Haiti’s Human Sciences College, an equally defiant Josue Vaval pledged to lay his own life on the line to do the opposite — force Aristide out.
Vaval and Mondestin, both 27, reflect the passions of thousands of Haitians on opposite sides of a political and socioeconomic divide over the president — elected, toppled in a coup and then reinstated after a U.S. military intervention — that threatens to hurl Haiti toward disaster.
If the two young men and their compatriots are to be believed, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation is inching from simmering civil unrest to all-out civil war.
Mondestin: “The palace needs people like me to protect the president. The opposition will not succeed. Let them try.”
Vaval: “We feel he’s a bad president. We’re going to force him to leave the country.”
From the streets of the capital, north to Gonaves and Cap-Hatien, south to Jacmel and places in between, Haitians are locked in deadly struggle. While some call for Aristide to step down, others are adamant about having him serve out the five-year term that ends in 2006.
In some places every week — and in other places every day — political violence leads to bloodshed as anti-Aristide protesters clash with his supporters and armed thugs roam streets in this nation of eight million people.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
How did it come to this? Why do so many who once revered this former Roman Catholic priest and proverbial ”man of the people” now revile him?
Former supporters who have swelled the ranks of the opposition say Aristide has become corrupt, a dictator, and has mismanaged the country. They say that because of Aristide, Haiti has plunged to new depths of social and economic despair. They won’t end their fight until he resigns, they say.
The president’s staunchest supporters say he’s been constitutionally elected, and they accuse his opponents of behaving like sore losers, trying to achieve through a coup d’état what they could not at the ballot box.
A 2000 legislative election that the opposition and international observers alleged was fraught with fraud drove one more wedge between Aristide and the opposition when the president declared the election fair and valid.
Since then, civil unrest has gripped Haiti, escalating into deadly street clashes, assassinations and attacks against journalists. Some journalists have even been murdered. The conflict has forced several prominent Haitians into exile, while governments, including that of the United States, warn their citizens to avoid travel to Haiti.
And when chaos strikes this nation, South Florida feels it. Each year, thousands of Haitians flee the Caribbean island nation, about 750 miles from Miami, for some imagined piece of the American Dream.
Recently, for instance, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted 361 would-be migrants stuffed into a 53-foot vessel. That sort of desperate act in the past has been an indicator of real trouble at home, a foreteller of things to come without improvements in the nation.
Such is the state of affairs in Haiti as it prepares to mark 200 years of independence on Jan. 1, 2004.
Vaval, a psychology major who once supported Aristide, now calls Haiti’s first democratically elected president “a liar and a thief.”
Mondestin, still in high school, likens Aristide to ”a God” — a champion of the poor who ”should be made king,” not chased out of office.
”We feel he should be allowed to complete his term,” Mondestin said, as thousands of the president’s supporters ringed the palace — ‘Haiti’s White House’ — during a pro-Aristide rally. ‘We say `No to coup d’état!’ ”
As Vaval prepared to lead hundreds of fellow students on their own march through the capital, he added that Aristide was no longer a friend of democracy. Armed with a can of black spray paint, he scribbled on the concrete façade of a building near the university: “Down with Aristide, the drug dealer!”
”Aristide lost support from key people because he excessively mismanaged everything and does not believe in durable political friendship,” said Haitian economist Claude Beauboeuf. “Because of that, growing factions of the national police are leaving him. They do not trust his leadership.”
Beauboeuf said that under Aristide the economy has also suffered.
”For the last three years, since in fact Aristide returned to power, the Haitian economy has faced depression,” he said. “There has been a dramatic impoverishment of all social classes in Haiti. Purchasing power of Haitians has collapsed since especially October 2002, when the currency value considerably depreciated.”
Four years ago, 16 gourdes, the Haitian currency, bought one U.S. dollar. Now, Haitians need about 44.25 gourdes to buy the same dollar.
”Haiti is the country which captures the least direct foreign investment in the region,” Beauboeuf said.
Adding to the misery, by most estimates, more than 80 percent of Haitians are unemployed or underemployed.
”Since 1804, there has never been a national economic strategy to develop Haiti’s natural competitive advantages,” Beauboeuf added. ‘Aristide has practically never pronounced the term `employment’ and ‘unemployment’ in his speeches. This is why unemployment and underemployment are so high.”
DRUG CHANNEL
Then there’s the drug trafficking. The U.S. State Department maintains that 15 percent of all the Colombian, Peruvian and Bolivian cocaine that enters the United States now comes through Haiti.
Aristide, elected president in 1990, was toppled in a 1991 military coup and fled to the United States, where he worked feverishly to gain the international community’s backing for his return. In 1994, with the blessing of the United Nations, U.S. troops landed in Haiti to root out the military dictatorship and reinstall Aristide as president. He was reelected in 2000.
Haitians in Haiti and across the world praised the U.S. intervention and celebrated Aristide’s return. But as the years passed and social and economic conditions only worsened, his supporters became disillusioned.
James Morrell, executive director of the Haiti Democracy Project, said he stood by Aristide after the coup because Aristide was the democratically elected president, the first in Haiti’s 200-year history.
Now he wishes he had looked closer.
”I turned gradually against him as the evidence piled up from 1996 onwards that he was a traditional-style, personalistic ruler type opposing himself to the democratic movement that had nominated him in the first place,” Morrell said.
“I had lazily not done my homework to review his nine months in office, and we glibly disregarded the disturbing evidence of intolerance and personalism during that period as lack of democratic experience. In any event, in exile he was on his best behavior and we saw none of that. Where, why and how did he go wrong? Indeed, power corrupts.”
CITING OTHER CAUSES
Sen. Lans Clonés, 35, a member of Aristide’s governing Lavalas Family party and a staunch Aristide backer, said Haiti’s troubles are deeply tied to class and race.
”You have the minority who have everything and want everything and the majority that has nothing,” he said. “The majority has elected the president for five years and we will see to it that he serves five years. The minority wants to take power with their guns. And the minority who have money have bought the press.”
Amid the chaos, there’s some hope, a segment of the population on the sidelines calling for calm on both sides.
”I want Haiti to change for all my people,” said Dieudonné Jackson, 40, a construction worker. “Whether rich or poor.”