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Out of context: Reply #10214
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May 2000 watershed
Despite the massive preponderance of their popular support, however, neither Préval nor Aristide, in his 1991 or 1994–95 spells in office, had ever been able to govern with the full support of the legislature. But in the decisive legislative and local elections of May 2000, a united Fanmi Lavalas won majorities at all levels of government, taking 89 of 115 mayoral positions, 72 of 83 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 18 of the 19 Senate seats contested. [36] The 1995 elections had already ‘completely discredited the so-called traditional political parties—especially those that collaborated with the military regime between 1991 and 1994’, effectively eliminating them from any further role in electoral politics. [37] In May 2000, members of the original Lavalas coalition who had turned against Aristide suffered the same fate. For the anti-Aristide opposition, the elections proved that there was no chance of defeating the fl at the polls for the foreseeable future.
It was at this point that the campaign to discredit the Lavalas government entered a new and more intensive phase. During the summer of 2000, most of Aristide’s opponents—dissidents like Pierre-Charles’s opl and Jean-Baptiste’s mpp, along with right-wing evangelicals, business leaders and ex-Duvalierists—banded together to form the ‘Convergence Démocratique’. From the start, the cd’s main objective was Option Zéro: the total annulment of the 2000 elections and a refusal to allow Aristide to participate in any subsequent vote. [38] In order to make this strategy seem compatible with democratic conventions, the cd had first to redouble its efforts to portray the fl as irredeemably undemocratic, authoritarian, violent and corrupt—accusations already long familiar from the propaganda that accompanied the Cédras coup in 1991. [39]
The first priority was to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the fl’s electoral victory. The pretext here was a minor technical complaint made by observers from the Organization of American States. The oas had actually described the May 2000 elections as ‘a great success for the Haitian population, which turned out in large and orderly numbers to choose both their local and national governments. An estimated 60 per cent of registered voters went to the polls’, and ‘very few’ incidents of either violence or fraud were reported. Even the staunchly anti-fl Centre for International Policy agreed that the May 2000 elections were Haiti’s ‘best so far’. [40] The oas subsequently characterized the elections as ‘flawed’ not because they disputed the fairness of the vote or the overwhelming clarity of its result but because, once the Lavalas victories were recorded, they objected to the methodology which Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (cep) used to count the votes for eight of the seats in the Senate. Rather than include all of the many less popular candidates in its calculation of voting percentages, the cep—which Haiti’s constitution identifies as the sole and final arbiter in all electoral matters—decided to count only the votes cast for the top four candidates in each race. By this method, Lavalas candidates won 16 Senate seats in the first round, taking an average 74 per cent of the vote. [41]
The oas had itself been closely involved in the development of this form of calculation, and there is no good reason to believe that the balance of power in the Senate would have been any different whatever method was used. The results are consistent both with the undisputed returns registered in the Chamber of Deputies ballot held at the same time and with a us-commissioned Gallup poll taken in October 2000. In November 2000, Aristide went on to win the presidential election with 92 per cent of the votes cast, on a turnout estimated, by those few international observers left in the country, at around 50 per cent (although much lower by the opposition).
Throttling aidThe immediate response from the Clinton Administration was to seize upon the oas objection to the calculations for the senatorial seats in order to justify a crippling embargo on foreign aid—democratic scruples hard to square with Washington’s support for the Duvalier dictatorships and the juntas that succeeded them. In April 2001, after cutting off its own aid to Haiti’s government, the us blocked the release of $145 million in previously agreed loans from the Inter-American Development Bank, and of another $470 million scheduled for the following years. In 1995 the Haitian government had received close to $600 million in aid. By 2003 the total government budget had been reduced to just $300 million—under $40 a head per year for each of its 8 million citizens—minus the annual $60 million payment on the national debt (45 per cent of which was incurred by the Duvalier dictatorships). [42] The response of the imf and other international lenders was to force Haiti to make still deeper cuts in its budget and pay yet higher sums in arrears.
Few governments could survive such sustained financial assault. The combined effect of these measures was to overwhelm an already shattered economy. Haitian gdp fell from $4 billion in 1999 to $2.9 billion in 2003. While American exports to Haiti have risen substantially in recent years, a majority of Haitians now live on the edge of starvation, without access to water or medicine; average incomes amount to little more than a dollar a day and unemployment hovers around 70 per cent. In 2001, a bankrupt Aristide agreed to virtually all of the concessions demanded by his opponents: he obliged the winners of the disputed Senate seats to resign, accepted the participation of several ex-Duvalier supporters in his new government, agreed to convene a new and more opposition-friendly cep and to hold another round of legislative elections several years ahead of schedule. But the us still refused to lift its aid embargo.
The next priority of the cd campaign was to portray the fl as fundamentally authoritarian and corrupt. That there were some grounds for this is plain. Drug-running—Haiti has long been a relay station for Colombian cocaine heading north—has increased since 1990. As in other destitute countries patronage remains widespread, even if it falls far short of the ‘officially sanctioned piracy’ characteristic of the pre-Lavalas period. [43] More urgently, the legacy of violence in Haiti, from the colonial era through to the dictatorships fronted by Duvalier, Namphy and Cédras, has left deep scars; Aristide himself is the survivor of repeated assassination attempts. The murderous assault on Lavalas during his first exile pushed some pro-fl groups, like Jeunesse Pouvoir Populaire and the Petite Communauté de L’Église de Saint Jean Bosco, to adopt quasi-military forms of self-defence against former soldiers who were disbanded but not disarmed in 1995. Vigilante gangs associated with Lavalas are certainly responsible for some of the violence that has occurred over the past few years. Critics of the fl have been quick to equate these gangs with Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes. [44]
In a comparative perspective, however, political violence during the Lavalas administrations was far less than under previous Haitian regimes. Amnesty International’s reports covering the years 2000–03 attribute a total of around 20 to 30 killings to the police and supporters of the fl—a far cry from the 5,000 committed by the junta and its supporters in 1991–94, let alone the 50,000 usually attributed to the Duvalier dictatorships. [45] Examination of Lavalas violence would also suggest that it was, indeed, largely a matter of gang violence. There are armed gangs in Port-au-Prince, as there are in São Paulo, Lagos or Los Angeles; their numbers have swelled in recent years with the deportation to the island of over a thousand Haitian and Haitian-American convicts from the American prison system. Above all, it should be stressed that the lion’s share of recent violence in Haiti has been perpetrated by the us-trained paramilitary forces deployed by opponents of the Lavalas regime since the summer of 2001.
Final assaultEconomic constraints paralysed the Lavalas administration and political pressure backed it into a corner; but in the end, only old-fashioned military coercion on the Contra model could dislodge it from power. Leading figures in the Convergence Démocratique made no secret of their intentions at the time of Aristide’s reinauguration as president in February 2001; they openly called for another us invasion, ‘this time to get rid of Aristide and rebuild the disbanded Haitian army’. Failing that, they told the Washington Post, ‘the cia should train and equip Haitian officers exiled in the neighbouring Dominican Republic so they could stage a comeback themselves’. [46] The us, it seems, obeyed these instructions to the letter.
The insurgency that eventually triggered the second coup began just when it seemed as if Aristide’s new administration might finally be making some political progress. Shortly after talks held in mid-July 2001 at the Hotel Montana, the opl’s Pierre-Charles and other leaders of the cd acknowledged that they were close to achieving a ‘total agreement’ with the fl. Less than a fortnight later, on 28 July, groups of army veterans launched attacks against police stations along the Dominican Republic border, killing at least five officers. What happened next is typical of the pattern that persisted right through to the completion of Option Zéro on 29 February 2004. The government arrested 35 suspects linked to the attacks, including some cd supporters. With the approval of the us ambassador, the cd responded by breaking off further negotiations with the fl, claiming that Aristide had staged the attacks himself in order to justify a crackdown on his opponents. A similar sequence would follow the next major incident, a full scale assault on the Presidential Palace in December 2001. [47]
What actually began to unfold in Haiti in 2001, in other words, was less ‘a crisis of human rights’ than a low-level war between elements of the former armed forces and the elected government that had disbanded them. Amnesty International reports indicate that at least 20 police officers or fl supporters were killed by army veterans in 2001, and another 25 in further paramilitary attacks in 2003, mostly in the lower Central Plateau near the us-monitored Dominican border. Militarization of some regional fl groups was an almost inevitable result. Most of the known leaders of this insurgency were trained by the us and, although evidence of Washington’s direct support for the ‘rebels’ will be hard to find, American allegiances have been made perfectly explicit in the wake of Aristide’s expulsion.
In the autumn of 2003 the guerrillas based over the border (led by Louis Jodel Chamblain and Guy Philippe) were strengthened by a new insurgency inside Haiti itself led by Jean Tatoune. Despite his close us connections and a conviction for his role in the Raboteau massacre of 1994, Tatoune managed to swing the Gonaïves-based gang known as the ‘Cannibal Army’ against Lavalas, after making the implausible but widely reported claim that Aristide was behind the murder, in September 2003, of the gang’s former leader, long-standing Lavalas activist Amiot Métayer—who also happened to be an equally long-standing enemy of Tatoune.
Demanding reimbursementIn April 2003, the desperately cash-starved Aristide attempted to rally his countrymen with the demand that, in the bicentennial year of Haitian independence, France should reimburse the 90 million francs that Haiti had been forced to pay between 1825 and 1947 as compensation for the loss of colonial property. Assuming a low return of 5 per cent in annual interest, he calculated that the sum was now equivalent to 21 billion American dollars. As Michael Dash has noted, ‘Aristide got a lot of support for this demand both inside and outside of Haiti’, particularly in Africa and Latin America. [48] Unlike most slavery-related reparation demands currently in the air, the Haitian claim refers to a precise and documented sum of money extracted in hard currency by the colonial power. Though quick to pour scorn on the claim, the French government was clearly rattled, with Chirac soon resorting to threat: ‘Before bringing up claims of this nature’, he warned in the summer of 2003, ‘I cannot stress enough to the authorities of Haiti the need to be very vigilant about—how should I put it—the nature of their actions and their regime’. [49]
The commission dispatched by the Foreign Ministry to devise a more ‘philosophical’ defence of the French position duly concluded that, while Haiti had indeed been ‘impeccable’ in its own payments to France, there was no ‘legal case’ for the reimbursement claim. To general applause from the French media, the Commission’s Report described the fl’s demand as ‘aggressive propaganda’ based on ‘hallucinatory accounting’. It noted with some satisfaction that ‘no member of the democratic opposition to Aristide takes the reimbursement claims seriously’. It recognized, however, that the opposition and paramilitaries lacked sufficient ‘mobilizing force’ to see the job through; and that the Americans, though hamstrung by domestic considerations (‘boat-people, Black Caucus’), were looking for ‘an honourable way out of the crisis’. It stressed that a ‘more affirmative’ French engagement in Haiti would not be carried out against the interests of the us, but in a spirit of ‘harmony and farsightedness’. At stake was an opportunity for ‘audacious and resolute coordination’. [50]
Without such intervention, as the Report acknowledged, the Lavalas government could not have been dislodged. The stumbling block was Aristide’s continuing popularity. The battering of the last fifteen years had taken its toll on his support, but as the most detailed—and by no means uncritical—study of the recent period concludes, there was no doubt that Aristide still enjoyed ‘undisputed and overwhelming popularity’ among the mass of Haitians. [51] The Gallup poll conducted in October 2000 rated the fl as thirteen times more popular than its closest competitor, and over half of those polled identified Aristide as their most trusted leader. [52] According to the latest reliable measure, a further Gallup poll conducted in March 2002, the fl remained four times more popular than all its significant competitors combined. [53]
Return of the old guardThe real goals of the occupation that began on 29 February 2004 are perfectly apparent: to silence or obliterate all that remains of this support. During the first week of their deployment, the Franco-American invasion force operated almost exclusively in pro-Aristide neighbourhoods and killed only fl supporters. Their new puppet Prime Minister Gérard Latortue (a 69-year-old ex-un factotum and Miami talk-show host) publicly embraced the convicted mass-murderer Tatoune and his ex-army rebels in Gonaïves as ‘freedom fighters’—a move interpreted by the New York Times as ‘sending a clear message of stability’. [54] Latortue’s ‘national unity government’ is composed exclusively of members of the traditional elite. On March 14, the Haitian police began arresting Lavalas militants on suspicion of unidentified crimes, but decided not to pursue the rebel death squad leaders, even those already convicted of atrocities. The new National Police chief, Léon Charles, explained that while ‘there’s a lot of Aristide supporters’ to be arrested, the government ‘still has to make a decision about the rebels—that’s over my head’. [55] On March 22 Latortue’s new Interior Minister, the ex-General Hérard Abraham, announced plans to integrate the paramilitaries into the police force and confirmed his intention to re-establish the army which Aristide abolished in 1995. [56] In late March, anti-Aristide death squads continued to control the country’s second largest city, Cap Haïtien, where ‘dozens of bullet-riddled bodies have been brought to the morgue over the last month’. [57] While scores of other Aristide supporters were being killed up and down the country, the us Coast Guard applied Bush’s order, in keeping with usual us practice (but in flagrant violation of international law), to refuse all Haitian applications for asylum in advance.
The Security Council resolution that mandated the invading Franco-American troops as a un Multinational Interim Force on 29 February 2004 called for a follow-up un Stabilization Force to take over three months later. In March, Kofi Annan duly sent his Special Advisor, John Reginald Dumas, and Hocine Medili, to assess the situation on the ground. The ‘Report of the Secretary-General on Haiti’, published in April, took the obfuscatory euphemism of un discourse to new levels. ‘It is unfortunate that, in its bicentennial year, Haiti had to call again on the international community to help it overcome a serious political and security situation’, wrote Annan. The circumstances of the elected President’s overthrow were decorously skirted, the Secretary-General merely noting that: ‘Early on February 29, Mr Aristide left the country’. The toppling of the constitutional government was deemed to offer Haitians the opportunity of ‘a peaceful, democratic and locally-owned future’. [58]
Admittedly, the realization of that future was to be somewhat protracted. Annan noted that, while the local political parties, including the Fanmi Lavalas and Convergence Démocratique, all hoped for general elections before the end of 2004, ‘members of civil society and the international community were of the view that more time would be needed’. Moreover, democracy—when the time was right—should begin at parish-pump levels, since ‘Haiti’s political life has too often been dominated by highly personalized presidential elections, fostering inflammatory rhetoric and distracting the population’s attention from local challenges’. On April 29, the Security Council voted unanimously to send an 8,300-strong un Stabilization Force from 1 June, under the leadership of Lula’s Brazil, to ‘foster democratic governance’ and, of course, ‘empower the Haitian people’. Among the paragons of popular empowerment dispatching troops to Haiti are Nepal, Angola, Benin and Pakistan. [59] ‘We will stay until democracy is reinstated’, announced the Chilean un ambassador, whose country had joined the initial invasion force along with the us, France and Canada. The latter may soon be coming under renewed pressure to prove its loyalty, since—what with the Ivory Coast and Burundi—the un reports having difficulty in mustering enough Francophone forces for all the missions in hand. As un spokesman David Wimhurst confessed to the la Times: ‘There’s a surge in peacekeeping, and there’s a squeeze on troops. We’re concerned that it will be difficult for French-speaking countries to step up to the plate.’ [60]
Exemplary HaitiIn 1804, the outcome of Haiti’s war of independence dealt an unprecedented blow to the colonial order. The victory celebrated two hundred years ago was to inspire generations of revolutionary leaders all over Africa and the Americas. The triumph of neo-colonialism achieved in February 2004 was clearly meant to ensure that Haiti will never again furnish the ‘threat of a good example’. Reduced to poverty and debt-dependence by reparation payments to its former colonial master, the country was further brutalized by the dramatic polarization of wealth and power imposed by its tiny ruling elite. By the mid-80s, the brutal and corrupt Duvalier dictatorships ended by provoking a mass protest movement too powerful for them to control. When the Haitian elite lost confidence in Jean-Claude Duvalier’s power to preserve the status quo, it initially sought merely to replace his regime with another form of military rule. This solution lasted from 1986 to 1990, but the army could only suppress the growing movement by resorting to unacceptably public levels of violence. Unrelenting repression brought Haiti to the brink of revolution.
What began following the Lavalas election victory of 1990 was the deployment of a partially new strategy for disarming this revolution, at a moment when the Cold War no longer offered automatic justification for the repression of mass movements by the overwhelming use of force. Designed not simply to suppress the popular movement but to discredit and destroy it beyond repair, the key to this strategy was the implementation of economic measures intended to intensify already crippling levels of mass impoverishment, backed up by old-fashioned military repression and propaganda designed to portray resistance to elite interests as undemocratic and corrupt. The operation has been remarkably successful—so successful that in 2004, with the enthusiastic backing of the media, the un and the wider ‘international community’, it resulted in the removal of a constitutionally elected government whose leadership had always enjoyed the support of a large majority of the population.
There is every reason to suspect that by the end of this year, many hundreds of fl activists will have been killed. With them will die the chances of rebuilding any inclusive popular movement for at least another generation. The Lavalas leadership had many faults, and there is much to learn from its defeat. But Lavalas was the only organization of the last half-century to have successfully mobilized the Haitian masses in a social and political challenge to their intolerable situation, and it was removed from office through the combined efforts of those who, for obvious reasons, feared and opposed that challenge. If Lavalas also remains a bitterly divisive force, this is largely because it was the only large-scale popular movement ever to question the massive inequalities of power, influence and wealth which have always divided Haitian society. That Lavalas managed to do little to reduce them may say less about the weakness of the movement than it does about the extraordinary strength, today, of such inequalities.