Haiti (1994–96)
The perils of a rush for the exits
By James Morrell
a chapter in:
Regime Change: It's Been Done Before
Edited by
Roger Gough
Foreword by
Douglas Hurd
First published in May 2003 by Policy Exchange
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James Morrell is director of the Haiti Democracy Project, before
which he was research director of the Center for International Policy,
a liberal think tank in Washington. He was an adviser to President
Aristide at the Governors Island negotiations in 1993. In 2000 he
observed Haiti's legislative elections for the OAS. James received his
Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1977.
From the Foreword by Douglas Hurd, British foreign secretary, 1989'95
Regime change is a new and ugly name for an ancient process—the
toppling of a ruler because he has become repellent or dangerous
either to his own people or to their neighbours or to both. The lucky
rulers end in exile, the unlucky as mangled corpses like Mussolini; in
either case busts are smashed and statues overthrown.
But in a world of almost two hundred nation-states with a wide
variety of ruling systems all kinds of questions quickly gather round
the concept of regime change. It is particularly good to have this
book from Policy Exchange as we tackle the consequences of the
regime change which we have ourselves contrived in Iraq . . .
From the Introduction by Roger Gough
This book grew out of a Policy Exchange round-table held in early
March 2003. We were lucky enough to assemble a group of experts
at our London office to begin discussing the historical experience of
regime change. Misha Glenny (on the Balkans), Steve Heder (on
Cambodia), and Michael Griffin (on Afghanistan) gave brief
accounts of how regime change worked (or failed to work) in their
region. A major theme of the subsequent discussion was that insufficient
weight is given to past experiences of regime change ' and the
policies that follow it. This collection is the result of that sentiment,
and represents the collective efforts of an international group of
contributors in April and May 2003 . . .
The 1994 US intervention in Haiti—which, James Morrell
reminds us, was a second US occupation, with the first (1915-34)
providing many points of comparison—might have seemed a
promising blueprint for externally induced regime change. US forces
invaded to restore a democratically elected president to power, and
to remove an oppressive military regime. Instead, Haiti after 1994
serves as a particularly dramatic example of the damage caused by
lack of follow through following an intervention. Given the deep
problems of Haiti's political culture and its economic backwardness,
such sustained commitment was doubly necessary. Yet there were
also resources available, such as a pool of qualified emigres, that
could have improved the situation. This makes the ultimate failure
of the 1994 intervention all the more depressing.
In this case, the most significant forces working against a
sustained commitment to Haiti were to be found within the US
political process. The Clinton administration had examined a
serious process of nation-building and political change in 1993, but
buckled under a series of pressures, including the unnerving effect of
casualties in Somalia. The ultimate intervention, a year later, was
driven by a growing Haitian refugee crisis, and its effectiveness
undercut by partisan pressures. These came both from the
Republicans—hostile both to Clinton and to nation-building interventions—
and from Democrats—notably groups within the Black
Caucus who favoured a simple restoration of President Aristide over
more comprehensive reform.
Because of these pressures, policy focused on short-term, symbolic
objectives—the restoration of the president, and a reduced Haitian
refugee count—rather than long-term institution-building. Given the
weakness of institutions and of civil society in Haiti, there was a
vacuum that could have been filled by the occupiers. In the absence of
this, power returned to its traditional sources, highly personal politics
and an over-mighty presidency. Furthermore, the failure to develop
successful governance resulted in the squandering of some $3 billion
in aid, a sobering reminder of the likely fate of such programmes in
the absence of sustained and successful institution-building.
5. Haiti (1994–96)
The perils of a rush for the exits
James Morrell
Clickable table of contents
I. The regime change: how complete, how successful?
C. Attempts to exorcise the past
D. Reemergence of traditional elite politics
E. Failure to disperse economic power
G. Free elections, rule of law, and effective governance
II. Factors behind the failure of regime change in Haiti
A. Was there an alternative elite or constituency on which the inter vention could rely?
B. To what extent did existing elites remain important?
C. How consistent was external control? What alternative might
have been pursued?
Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
T he United States has tried forcible regime change in Haiti twice
over the past century, in both cases failing to change the essential,
underlying conditions. The first regime change brought considerable
modernization (1915-34), which it would take Haiti two
decades to spend down before plunging into the extended darkness
of Duvalierism (1957-86). The second regime change (1994) was
followed by a rush to the exits and unprotected nation-building,
quickly abandoned; accordingly, the relapse into prior conditions
has come much faster.
Each regime change involved the invasion of a sovereign nation
and so came at grievous cost to the international rule of law. In each
case, however, the rule of a modern capitalist nation, even though
foreign-imposed, was more democratic than that of the venal native
powerholder it replaced. This was because in both cases the invader
tried to set up a state that worked for larger purposes than power
aggrandisement of the incumbent individual or armed group.
The fact that neither invasion accomplished any permanent
improvement would seem to seal the case against these interventions:
not only were bad external precedents set, but no internal
good came out of them. Yet, as we argue in the 'audit' of the
second occupation below (with the first occupation always in the
back of the mind as a comparison), the real question is whether
the nation-building efforts of these external occupations could, if
sustained, help the Haitians more effectively create the institutions
of internal popular sovereignty than they have been able to
on their own.
I. The regime change: how complete, how successful?
I n September 1991, in a country whose history is full of coups,
violent overthrows, and attentats, the army overthrew the first
democratically elected president in the country's history. The 1994
US-led military intervention reversed this completely. It not only
restored the president and exiled the military leaders put in place by
this coup, it led directly to abolition of the army itself. Seemingly, the
regime change which restored elected president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide to office could not be more complete.
The completeness of this removal at the senior levels recalls the
first occupation as well, in 1915, when the regime practically self-destructed
before the Americans came in (an enraged elite mob tore
the president literally to pieces, after that president had shot more
than a hundred elite prisoners he had taken hostage).
Again superficially, the Aristide regime change was impressive. In
1994 the army was taken off the board. A clean sweep was made of
regime-installed ministers. A new, neutral, and professional police
was created. The judiciary, deeply corrupted over the decades,
proved more resistant to change. Similarly, in 1915 the successive
takeovers by armed bands were ended by the Marines and a neutral,
professional Haitian constabulary created, while the judiciary
resisted reform.
C. Attempts to exorcise the past
The symbolism of the 1994 regime restoration, even if accomplished
at the point of foreign bayonets, marked a clear break with the past.
The results of a democratic election were upheld; a coup d'etat was
repudiated. There was further symbolism: prosecutions of the
authors of an army massacre in Raboteau, a slum in the city of
Gonaïves; a Truth Commission modeled on those of Latin America.
The targets of these prosecutions, however, were not the ones threatening
the fragile new democratic structure.
D. Reemergence of traditional elite politics
The 1994 regime change laid the basis for transcending elite politics.
In 1995 broadly democratic, although imperfect, elections were held
for the parliament.
However, returned President Aristide's popularity
and his untrammeled personal ambitions led him to dispense
with the congeries of small social democratic parties that had
promoted his original presidency. The split within the democratic
camp led to a recrudescence of the old style of politics based on presidential
ambition. The split was widened in late 1995 by the
president's attempt to stay in office past his constitutional term,
which was opposed by both the social democratic parties and the
United States. Since there was still a residual presence of US troops,
the president was forced to peacefully hand over to a successor.
Things took on further hallmarks of a traditional elite struggle for
power when the now ex-president launched a personalistic party to
further his candidacy.
By these moves Haiti was dragged back into
the usual politics of presidential succession that had dogged its
history for nearly two hundred years.
Similarly, from 1915 to 1934 the US occupation provided the
security behind which the elite senate chose presidents, albeit those
favored by the United States, and those presidents peacefully handed
over to successors, although each sought to overstay. Once the
United States departed in 1934, presidents routinely attempted to
overstay but were thwarted by the US-created army, and not until
Francois Duvalier (1957–71) did a president dominate the army and
impose life presidency.
E. Failure to disperse economic power
The initial nation-building in the wake of the 1994 occupation
prompted a hesitant revival of the economy, opening up opportunities
for both the elite and middle class. However, recovery was soon
choked off by endemic political violence, coupled with an appalling
infrastructure and a judicial system that failed to command confidence
among either domestic or foreign investors. The result was to
check middle-class entrepreneurship and, while creating difficulties
for a number of traditional elite investors as well, to confine opportunities
largely to those controlling the state structure, namely the
president and his party.
Post-Duvalier politics (1986 and thereafter) saw a widening role for
civil society and democratic politics, which revived with greater
force after the second US occupation and defeat of the army. The
elected president's gradual devolution into traditional powerholder,
profiled above, led to an independent, opposition role for civil
society, political parties, and the media.
G. Free elections, rule of law, and effective governance
After the 1994 occupation, the quality of governance varied in
inverse proportion to the number of foreign troops on the ground.
Although the foreign presence was not all-determining, it was a
crucial conditioning factor. As the troops were withdrawn, elections
got worse, the police became politicised, and governance as
measured by security and the effectiveness of institutions (parliament,
ministerial government, judiciary) deteriorated steadily.
A similar deterioration set in after the 1934 withdrawal, but
because the first occupation had had nineteen years in which to
work, its achievements stood longer. After 1994, Clinton was beset
on the Haiti issue by the Republicans, who took both houses of
Congress only two months after he went into Haiti. He had to exit
precipitously, having seemingly accomplished his main objective of
stanching the refugee flow. During 1994–96 primarily, behind the
security provided by foreign soldiery, United Nations missions and
twenty bilateral and multilateral donors achieved reasonably free
elections, neutral and professional police, a functioning parliament,
the beginnings of judicial reform, and the rudiments of ministerial
government.
In the ensuing years, as the troops left, each of these
achievements fell away and Haiti returned to its historical pattern of
presidential power-grabbing. By 2002 the World Bank reported that
all its projects in Haiti had failed due to poor governance.
Some
$3
billion in aid had been invested since the ouster of Duvalier.
II. Factors behind the failure of regime change in Haiti
A. Was there an alternative elite or constituency on which the inter
vention could rely?
T he restoration of the democratically elected president could be
accomplished by a quick invasion, but the nurturing of democratic
politics which would have broadened the constituency for the intervention
would have required a concerted, long-term occupation and
programme of nation-building which parochial US politics would
not support.
The traditional elite, symbolised by the army coup of 1991, had
already proved grossly incapable of constituting legitimate governance,
and both the first Bush administration and the Clinton
administration treated this regime as a pariah state that increasingly
threatened palpable US interests as it generated refugees. The first
Bush administration, transfixed by President Aristide's leftist
oratory, balked at restoring him to power, but the more pragmatic
Clinton rightly disregarded the oratory and sought, quite unsuccessfully,
to groom Aristide as a democratic leader and reconciler.
Indeed, Clinton's original manager of Haiti policy,Amb. Lawrence
Pezzullo (special envoy for Haiti, 1993–94), sought to broaden
beyond Aristide, whom he mistrusted, by nurturing a balance of
reformed army, reconstituted parliament, restored prime minister,
and presidential restoration. The checks and balances of these institutions
under the 1987 constitution would provide an arena for
democratic politics and a broadened constituency for the US
presence. However, the army and the other actors failed to cooperate
with Pezzullo and Clinton failed to back him up (symbolized most
unforgettably by the October 1993 withdrawal of the Harlan County,
a troopship bearing the original contingent of US and Canadian
military advisers that were to launch the reforms). When in spring
1994 Clinton realised that the refugee onslaught and the discriminatory
treatment of them were threatening real political interests,
particularly in the African-American community, he did an abrupt
policy reversal, jettisoning Pezzullo and treating Aristide as if he
would somehow become a guided missile for US interests.
As Pezzullo recalled in 2002:
To its shame, the Clinton administration caved. It abandoned its negotiating
leadership forged with the OAS/UN team and made a quiet deal
with Aristide which, in effect, ceded policy control to Aristide in return
for an end to the anti-administration lobbying effort.
The fatal flaw in ceding control to Aristide was that he wanted to
return unfettered by the constraints imposed on the presidency by
the Haitian constitution of 1987, which established a parliamentary
democracy with executive authority divided between a president and
prime minister.
The invasion of Haiti by US troops did further lay the foundations
of democratic politics by removing the army, which had
proved impossible to reform. But after removing virtually the only
functioning institution in the country besides the Catholic Church,
it was incumbent on the invaders to stay long enough to build
countervailing institutions, or the monopolisation of power by the
Haitian presidency, so long the pattern of history, would be sure to
recur.
B. To what extent did existing elites remain important?
The 'elite' in Haiti are traditionally considered the mercantile bourgeoisie,
but this was an elite that, especially under Duvalier, was
increasingly stripped of political power. The power elite of Haiti was
whatever grouping, whether army or presidential faction, seized
control of the presidential palace. The 'bourgeoisie' was typically
only one of several kingmakers in this seizure.
While many of the economic elite aligned themselves first with the
army, then with Aristide after he reestablished traditional personalistic
rule, so as to share in the spoils, a more modern-minded
portion cast their lot with civil society, creating progressive business
associations such as the Center for Free Enterprise and Democracy
(CLED) and supplying moderate, democratic-minded prime
ministers such as Robert Malval and Smarck Michel.
By comparison with many countries, Haiti is racially and linguistically
homogeneous, with a shared history of nationhood. The
racial distinction between noir and mulâtre has at times in Haitian
history seemed almost to take on the virulence of the ethnic divide
found in tribal cultures such as Bosnia or Kosovo. On closer examination,
however, this was a distinction always manipulated by the
fierce politics of presidential monopolisation and succession.
C. How consistent was external control? What alternative might
have been pursued?
As has been suggested above, the second occupation wound down
precipitously from the twenty-one thousand troops originally sent
in in September 1994 under the Powell doctrine of overwhelming
force to the full withdrawal of American troops in April 1996, at
which there was a handover to a UN force that lasted another year.
After that it was a dwindling number of police advisers.
This contrasts with the first occupation, which was executed by a
few hundred US Marines and sailors taking over a collapsed state,
and a garrison of nine hundred Marines over the nineteen years of
occupation.
The second occupation was thus characterized by gross inconsistency
of policy, whereas the first was remarkably consistent through
nineteen years. Differences of perceived US interests, and secular
change in the Zeitgeist, account for this contrast.
The first occupation could cite strategic goals. It filled a vacuum
opened during a world war by political instability; Germany had,
indeed, played an increasingly active role in Haiti before the war.
Haiti was scooped up along with other struggling small states
around the Caribbean. While racism, empire-building, and dollar
diplomacy were all in the mix, the explicit goal of occupation was to
prevent in Haiti the constant rebellions (there had been seven
violent overthrows in as many years before the US takeover) that had
reduced the country to near-chaos.
The only serious US interest for the second occupation was
preventing a rush of Haitians to the Florida shores. The Clinton
administration, just like other administrations since Nixon's, had
mainly relied on cordoning off Haiti as the best way to protect US
interests, for the alternative, active involvement in its internal affairs,
was and still is deemed too risky in the absence of viable Haitian
political structures.
But the flagrant racism of denying Haitian refugees while
admitting Cuban, and the hypocrisy of doing this after having criticised
President Bush for the same thing, were a little too much for
the American body politic to swallow. There was growing dissent
within Clinton's Democratic Party power base, threatening the
Democrats' prospects in the mid-term election. Retaining Florida'
or not losing any more seats to the Republicans'was a key concern.
The African-Americans had the vote and eloquent spokespeople
such as Randall Robinson, Charles Rangel, and John Conyers.
In the narrow sense of temporarily stanching the refugee flow,
Clinton's quick intervention may be said to have been successful. But
the dramatic, fateful decision for invasion'with its trampling on
the principle of sovereignty even with the full imprimatur of the
United Nations'was a decision to solve this problem at the source,
a decision that both President Woodrow Wilson and President
Clinton made, but that only President Wilson seriously followed
through. To redeem this decision with all of its fateful consequences
Clinton needed, once committed, to have applied a long-term
strategy by which American troops would not merely support a
president, but would similarly support the range of actors and institutions
that could have eventually constituted a minimally
accountable, democratic government.
For truly, as the human-rights lawyer Gérard Gourgue has noted,
'In Haiti presidential power is a disease.'And the failure to make any
progress on this issue means that today Haiti is once again bleeding
refugees. Turned aside by the US Coast Guard, they mainly reach the
Dominican Republic or the Bahamas, but the pressure increases.
As noted above, the political constraints on Clinton, symbolized
by 'attack hearings' accusing one of his ambassadors of perjury,
hastened the exit. Back in 1915, the original American occupier of
Haiti, Admiral William B. Caperton, had written to the Navy
Department, 'For the love of anything good or bad, do not send
any politicians down here yet awhile. I would like to say, never
send them.'
Clinton, however, faced them from the very
beginning.
There was also a larger secular change in Zeitgeist, as the
American public, never keen on empires and foreign adventures,
actively rejected the concept after Vietnam. The American left, which
was the natural constituency for the rights of the abused Haitian
masses, was precisely the sector most sceptical of the American
intervention which was the only effective way to help them.
Thus this healthy and commendable political maturation among
the American public created a situation in which Clinton's intervention
in Haiti was bereft of support on either the right or the left.
There was no constituency for the difficult, long-term nation-building
program the situation demanded; hence it is no wonder
that it was abandoned so precipitously.
The skewing of American politics has proceeded to the point
today that several of the most prominent and liberal Democratic ex-congressmen
have allowed themselves to be suborned by the Aristide
regime, while it is rigidly conservative Republicans in the Bush
administration, still resenting Aristide's early populism, who are his
most outspoken critics.
As the former US ambassador to Haiti, Timothy Carney, has
noted:
Now, what is the problem by which the United States can't figure out
what to do in Haiti? Part of the answer is that the issue has been turned
over almost entirely to special interest groups. And unfortunately, the
most active special interest is the Black Caucus which has produced the
most astonishing nonsense relating to what's going on in Haiti today.
Conclusion
I t is not therefore, the decision for regime change itself that the
American presidents of 1915 and 1994 should be taxed for. Although
the violation of sovereignty was a high price to pay, it was somewhat
mitigated in both cases. In 1915 there was a world war and sea lanes
to protect, creating the veneer of self-defence. In 1994 that same
implausible rationale was applied to the refugees; however, the
military's violation of their agreement with the United Nations, and
the virtually unanimous support of the General Assembly and
Security Council, bolstered the Clinton administration's moral case.
However, the reliance in 1994 on a returned president, in a
country suffering from presidential 'disease,' was a short cut that has
saddled both Haitian and US politics with virtually insuperable
obstacles. In Haiti it lent the strength of a superpower to already
fierce presidential ambitions. It skewed the balance against political
parties and civil society that had yet to find their moorings among
the population. It alienated and demoralised a population that is
now paying a huge price for its proclivity to place its faith in an individual,
rather than institutions. The resulting regime has a
chokehold on the economy such that there is no feasible way,
whether by aiding the corrupt government directly or by providing
alms through non-governmental organizations, to address the
causes of Haiti's scandalous mass poverty.
The shortsightedness of the right in American politics, evidenced
in this case by ideological rejection of Aristide's early pretend-leftism
and a visceral attack on Clinton's intervention, may be taken as a
given. The right, with control of the White House for more than two
years, has shown much less decisiveness and courage than Clinton in
addressing the Haiti problem; indeed it has done no more than
blindly continue the policy inherited from Clinton.
It is the left and liberal sectors in American politics that have
discretion, yet have in effect closed their hearts and intellects to the
cause of the impoverished Haitian masses. They have allowed themselves,
by inattention in many cases and greed in some, to be beguiled
by the historical memory of Aristide, the powerholder who once
exhibited the leftist rhetoric that in a poor country like Haiti comes
as naturally as breathing. Whereas this sector ought to be united in an
urgent quest for a model and praxis of international humanitarian
intervention in a country as stricken as Haiti, instead it is confused
and compromised: for every voice that is clear and factually-based on
human rights, there is another that is seemingly or actually suborned
by a regime ruling by political violence. The result of this cacophony
is merely to eliminate the left as a coherent voice of guidance for an
American population, significant elements of which have a strong
natural empathy for the plight of the Haitian people.
Thus the failure to persist in regime change has led to a reversion
to the status quo ante with remarkable rapidity. And it has created a
deeply confused political situation, in both the colonised nation and
the coloniser, that it will take many years, and many innocent lives,
to unravel.
The tragedy was all the greater because the means to avoid it lay so
readily to hand. Truly, Pezzullo had been right in seeking alterna-
tives. The alternatives were there in the congeries of social democratic
reformists who no less than Aristide had agitated against
Duvalier and subsequent military regimes.
They were there in a
portion of the formerly retrograde bourgeoisie, which as noted now
awoke to the opportunity they were losing. They were there in the
Haitian diaspora, whose talents placed hundreds of thousands at
professional levels in US society running systems far more complex
than any to be found in Haiti.
These were genuinely new assets, created by the processes of
political development and migration in the latter half of the
twentieth century, which were not available to Colonel John Russell,
the American high commissioner in 1920'30. What prevented the
United States from using them?
First, it would have required an extended stay by US troops to
shelter and nurture these alternative sources of nation-building
personnel, a stay which for reasons already given the US political
system would not sustain. In the US absence, no other nation was
likely to come forward, nor could a weakened United Nations
provide an independent presence.
Second, were the United States to throw support to the social
democratic parties, it would be supporting not a pretend-leftist such
as Aristide but the real thing. Several of the parties and leaders have
a sincere dedication to socialist and constitutionalist ideals, which
come naturally in a country as poor as Haiti.
In short, to have succeeded in the occupation would have required
the United States to have used its power consciously on behalf of the
impoverished masses of Haiti, in the enlightened interest of the
United States to be sure, but in violation of too many ideological
verities thrown up by a deeply conservative US power structure.
Given the gross asymmetry between US and Haitian power, and
the deep involvement of the United States in Haitian affairs, the
degradation in Haiti can only to a certain degree be blamed on
Haitians. The reversion to personal rule was both predictable and
containable. The ultimate blame for the failure to contain,
neutralise, and transcend it lies not with Haiti, but the United States.
It was perhaps this asymmetry that a poor woman residing in the
sprawling Raboteau slum in Gonaïves had in mind when she
screamed at a recent demonstration, 'America, come and take your
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