?Mr. Aristide is a repeat offender. He doesn?t keep his word,? said Arielle Jean-Baptiste, a research associate at the Haiti Democracy Project. The Washington, D.C.?based think tank is part of the Brookings Institute, a policy and research center.
She said the fact that the Congressional Black Caucus has offered support for Aristide’s presidency equates to little more than betrayal because it is picking a rejected leader over the people.
By backing a man whose popularity has waned, the message sent is that the will of the people is to be ignored by wealthier forces, Jean-Baptiste said.
?Why has the population welcomed these rebels, these same rebels that probably tortured them in the past?? she asked. ?That’s what needs to be asked. Some have said that it could be the devil to come down, they?ll take anyone to deliver them from Aristide. This man has broken the law and he needs to go, like Nixon.?
Arielle Jean-Baptiste, Haiti Democracy Project associate
As dispatches from Haiti reflect more discord with greater potential of mass bloodshed and exodus, policy-makers and advocates in the United States remain split as to which direction is best for the island nation.
For months, opposition forces have called for the ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the once-deposed-then-restored president. but their campaign took a violent turn two weeks ago, and armed rebels continue to carve up control of the country.
Aristide has pledged to finish his term.
The Bush administration initially signaled that it would assist Aristide in his bid to finish
his term, set to end in 2006, but shifted gears last week when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that Aristide ?examine? whether he should relinquish power.
The topsy-turvy directives from the White House fit into a historic pattern where Haiti is concerned, observers said.
Most agree that since becoming the second fully declared independent nation in the Western Hemisphere in 1804, Haiti and its leaders have waded through mixed messages and hostile relations with the United States.
They also concur that democracy needs to remain for Haiti to escape the poverty and despair that has plagued it since its inception.
What role Aristide should play in that continuum draws no consensus. It questions whether that ideal should come in a one-size-fits-all American model.
?The problem is that we’re doing just enough to confuse everybody and kind of perpetuate the situation,? said John D. Garrigus. a history professor at Jacksonville University in Florida and Fulbright scholar who has studied in Haiti.
The country’s current crisis has roots running from its 2000 election to its revolutionary founding when enslaved Africans there overthrew Napoleon’s armies.
In 2000, voting irregularities for certain parliamentary seats inflamed tensions surrounding Aristide’s leadership. Charges of fraud and corruption flew and stewed.
His first election in 1990 had been short-circuited by a coup that left him exiled for much of the term. When President Clinton helped reinstall him in 1994, Aristide had to wait until his reelection to govern.
His leadership continues to earn mixed reviews.
Aristide is criticized for seeming to enrich himself while much of the nation wallows in poverty ? about three in four Haitians live in destitution, according to the United Nations. Half the country is illiterate, while drug lords reportedly set up shop there after U.S. policy tightened on familiar South American outlets. And he is said to have strengthened his reign by aligning with known provincial warlords.
?Mr. Aristide is a repeat offender. He doesn?t keep his word,? said Arielle Jean-Baptiste, a research associate at the Haiti Democracy Project. The Washington, D.C.?based think tank is part of the Brookings Institute, a policy and research center.
She said the fact that the Congressional Black Caucus has offered support for Aristide’s presidency equates to little more than betrayal because it is picking a rejected leader over the people.
By backing a man whose popularity has waned, the message sent is that the will of the people is to be ignored by wealthier forces, Jean-Baptiste said.
?Why has the population welcomed these rebels, these same rebels that probably tortured them in the past?? she asked. ?That’s what needs to be asked. Some have said that it could be the devil to come down, they?ll take anyone to deliver them from Aristide. This man has broken the law and he needs to go, like Nixon.?
Comparisons to Watergate break-ins ? or even hanging chads in Florida ? are not quite intellectually honest, though, said Bill Fletcher, Jr., president of the TransAfrica Forum, a pan-Africa policy center based in Washington, D.C.
For one, among those leading the rebel forces are convicted murderers whose atrocities date back to coups and massacres of years past, he said. Second, Haiti?s vitality revolves around its ability to depose its leaders legally and bloodlessly, Fletcher said.
?There are people in the United States that want Bush to leave,? he said. ?The fact that that there are some people who want Aristide to step down is interesting, and noteworthy, but he was a democratically elected president.
?When you have political change by coup, there is no democracy. The bottom line is that the crisis in Haiti needs to be handled through constitutional means.?
Haiti’s constitution does offer a provision for presidential crisis? Article 149 outlines a succession that defers power to the president of the Supreme Court ? but few are confident that it could he executed, especially with troops armed even heavier than the local police force.
Which is why the Congressional Black Caucus expressed support for the idea of deploying Marines to Haiti recently floated by the White House.
Despite the disaster that Haiti appears, Fletcher and others point staunchly to U.S. complicity in its creation.
Blockades that withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in crucial funds that could have Blockades that withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in crucial funds that could have helped promote infrastructure and training for everything from road building to hospitals has helped cripple not just Aristide’s reputation, but the populace, they say.
It?s akin to when the United States refused to recognize Haiti after its founding, said Michael G. Levy, a former board member of Amnesty International who has studied human rights abuses in Haiti through the years.
Aristide?s boldness in working with Cuban doctors and sluggishness in accepting globalization are examples of moves that discomfited some in Washington, observers said.
?It has been U.S. policy for probably ever since President Aristide was elected to have that regime be a failure,? Levy said. ?Part of it is because the U.S. likes to promote its kind of democracy and is troubled by true representative democracy if it doesn?t produce a result that?s of the U.S.?s liking.?
Contemplating Haiti?s outcome is more than an abstract study in Third World politics.
Besides its proximity to the United States, the Haitian-born population living here has grown 87 percent from 1990 to 2000, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
In particular hot spots ? Florida and Massachusetts, for example?that constituency has nearly doubled, and may grow further.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has asked Haiti?s neighbors to accept those fleeing the nation, but how likely that is to happen remains open to question.
The Dominican Republic next door, for example, has had a long and bitter history with Haiti, interspersed with war and turf battles; some of today?s rebel leaders took refuge there prior to returning with weapons.
President Bush has stated unequivocally that any Haitians that reach U.S. waters would be returned, a policy that follows in his father’s footsteps.
During the first Bush administration, Haitian boat people often were rounded up and planted in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. U.S. officials are preparing spaces for a repeat performance, which should morally offend everyone, said Joan Dayan, a University of Pennsylvania professor and author of ?Haiti, History and the Gods.?
She described squalid conditions there, and considering that such refugees would now be housed close to those being held on charges of terrorism, such detention should be considered an outrage. Dayan said.
?They are fleeing from death and persecution, and we’ll put them in pens,? she said. ?The relationship between the United States and Haiti has never been a fair or just one. It?s a very long and complex history.?
Figuring out Haiti?s next chapter means first ending the violence and then returning to the negotiating table, but whether Aristide will be among that company remains to be seen.
?It seems that it is too late for President Aristide to seek a compromise with his opponents,? said A.B. Assensoh, the Richard A. Bernstein Research Professor at the University of Maryland?Eastern Shore.
?Therefore, the most noble thing is for him to step aside and allow the U.N. to negotiate a peaceful solution, especially since his presence escalates matters.?
Webmaster’s note: The Haiti Democracy Project is not affiliated with the Brookings Institution.