Haiti’s Parliament building stands empty, except for a few deputies off in a side room who recline in their armchairs, feet upon their desks, smoking. Across the street in the Senate offices, a secretary types up what I’m told are minutes from one of last year’s sessions. There is no National Assembly, since the terms of all members have expired, and there is no quorum in the Senate. Today, there are only nine elected officials in the entire nation, including the President. In the year 2000 every office in the country from local council member to president will be up for grabs. As of this writing, parliamentary elections are scheduled for March, and presidential elections for December of next year.
Five years ago, in September 1994, 20,000 U.S. troops landed in Haiti to oust a repressive military regime, stem a seemingly endless flood of refugees, and restore Haiti’s civilian government led by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The move, which pundits regarded as President Clinton’s greatest foreign-policy success, has steadily eroded into a chaos that the UN euphemistically refers to as Haiti’s “transition to democracy.”
The government has not functioned properly for over two years. The most heinous crimes of the coup years remain unpunished, and the perpetrators are still at large. As the last U.S. troops leave Haiti this year, violence has risen dramatically. In January, President René Préval’s sister was shot and wounded, and her bodyguard was killed in a street attack. On March 1, Senator Jean-Yvon Toussaint was gunned down after being lured from his house to investigate a flat tire. A week later, a well-known human rights activist was wounded in a drive-by shooting. In poorer neighborhoods, attacks on citizens have spurred riotous confrontations with the fledgling police force and inspired grafittied calls across the walls of the capital for the resignation of police leadership.
On May 28 a police attack on the Port-au-Prince shantytown of Carrefour Feuilles left 11 dead, including a 12-year-old boy. The UN civilian mission reported that ten of the victims were handcuffed and executed with a bullet to the back of the head; the eleventh, with a bullet to the heart. Chief of Police Jean-Colls Rameau, who witnesses say led the attack, fled—en route to the United States—to the Dominican Republic, where he was later captured by Dominican authorities. The executions were followed by the grisly discovery in June of the skulls and bones of at least six people—possibly as many as 14—killed in recent months and left to rot at Titanyen, the former government’s old dumping ground.
While inflation dropped last year, economic misery is greater today than during the coup years. Over the last decade, the economy has shrunk at a rate of 5% annually. Real wages fell 17% in 1996 and another 14% in 1997. Well over half the population is unemployed, and many basic services are nonexistent. Public disillusionment boiled over on May 28 at a rally for “peace and democracy” organized by the Haitian Chamber of Commerce, which is headed by wealthy coup-supporter Olivier Nadel, when protesters hurled plastic juice bottles filled with urine at the podium. Five years after the U.S. invasion, democracy has failed for most Haitians.
Most mainstream news analysis has blamed Haiti’s democratic collapse on an internecine parliamentary war that began in April 1997, when the majority party in Congress, the Organization of People in Struggle (OPL), contested the results of Haiti’s last legislative elections and prevented the winners from taking office. Formerly part of Aristide’s Lavalas movement, the OPL charged that the elections, in which they had faired poorly, were rigged to favor Aristide’s new party, the Lavalas Family. The controversy revolved around whether to count blank ballots—and hence whether Aristide’s candidates received an absolute or a relative majority of votes. The latter would have required a run-off.
The crisis escalated when Prime Minister Rosny Smarth resigned two months later and the OPL refused to ratify a replacement for the post—even rejecting one nominee, a senior official at the Inter-American Development Bank, on the grounds that he could not produce his grandmother’s birth certificate. As lawmakers’ terms expired at the end of last year with no replacements in sight, the crisis came to a head when President Préval, frustrated by what he perceived to be congressional intransigence, refused to extend their mandates. In a dramatic late-night session on January 11, he announced the end of the forty-sixth legislature, effectively shutting down Congress.
As a result of the breakup of Lavalas, Haiti has had no new budget in three years. Without a quorum of lawmakers, no laws can be passed. Social programs have been put on the back-burner. In a nation haunted by the standard tag-line, “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere,” hundreds of millions of desperately needed foreign aid dollars are being held up because loan terms cannot be negotiated by a nonexistent Congress. As of December 1998 a combined total of over $570 million worth of multilateral programs and projects were pending parliamentary ratification, and between 1995 and 1998, total bilateral and multilateral assistance to Haiti dropped by about 35%.
At first glance all this seems proof that Aristide’s Lavalas movement, which the United States and the UN spent billions of dollars to restore, was not truly up to the task of democratic governance. But a longer look reveals that Haiti’s democratic meltdown began well before the collapse of the Lavalas government. It is, in fact, part of a decade-long process of military, economic and diplomatic coercion that the U.S.-led intervention rubber-stamped rather than reversed.
Haiti’s first real democracy took off ten years ago, when Aristide rose to power on the shoulders of hundreds of thousands of Haitian peasants—the foundation of a massive grassroots liberation movement that blossomed in the wake of the Duvalier dictatorship. A priest and liberation theologian, he won what was widely hailed as Haiti’s first free and fair election, in 1990, by a landslide, declaring, “Alone we are weak; together we are strong; all together we are Lavalas!”—a great flood.
As President, Aristide initiated a program of social democracy, raising the minimum wage, strengthening national industry, enforcing taxation—a burden Haiti’s wealthy had traditionally escaped—and constructing a social safety net. Reports of human rights abuses dropped; the national coffers registered a positive balance again; and millions of dollars in foreign aid were promised to the new democracy. But while Aristide’s policies were popular among the poor, they, along with his bold rhetoric, earned him the enmity of Haiti’s traditional elite and the distrust of U.S. officials. A bloody military coup ended his reign after only seven months in office.
When Aristide was returned to power in Haiti three years later, it was with a dramatically different program. By that time, Haiti’s death squads, led by CIA agent Emmanuel Constant, had raped, tortured and killed thousands of his followers. A CIA-generated propaganda campaign, which cast Aristide as mentally unstable, had chipped away at his reputation as a statesman. And the pressures of exile had exposed rifts in the Lavalas movement. Some of Aristide’s supporters had radicalized into a hard left, while others had adopted a pragmatic stance. A bourgeois reformist sector urged compromise and reconciliation as a means of returning to office. Faced with a rising body count in Haiti and intense pressure to resolve the crisis from abroad, Aristide agreed to broad political and economic concessions.
He granted an amnesty to the junta leaders, promised to broaden his government and select a prime minister from the business sector, and, as a final condition for his return, in August 1994 he signed an agreement to implement an IMF structural-adjustment program. By the time he was returned to Haiti in October 1994, with only one year remaining in his presidential term, it was not to victory but to devastation. Haiti’s grassroots movement had been beheaded—its leadership murdered, hiding out, or in exile. Aristide’s economic program had been derailed and his popular base was splintered. And stockpiles of military documents which could have revealed the identities of the coup’s hired assassins—and the extent of U.S. collusion—were confiscated by U.S. soldiers.
As the junta’s generals were flown abroad to join their bank accounts, members of the reform sector spearheaded a return to the rituals of civilian rule. Forming the Lavalas Political Organization, they won control of Congress in elections supported and funded by Washington. Aristide, meanwhile, increasingly sought to distance himself from his own concessions. By 1997 the rift became formal. After leaving office Aristide created his own more left-leaning party, while the OPL changed its name from Lavalas Political Organization to the Organization of People in Struggle and began advocating what in Haiti today is called “modernization”—privatization of state-run industries and adherance to the structural-adjustment programs demanded by international lenders.
“Haiti’s economy is plummeting,” said Gerard Pierre Charles, head of the OPL, in a recent interview. “We used to produce sugar, now we don’t produce any at all; we barely export coffee. The only export that is doing well is mangos. The state-run cement factory has not functioned in ten years. So you tell me, what are we to do?” Pierre Charles is openly critical of his former ally. “Aristide does not understand his historic role,” he drawls. “He rode a wave, but he was not the wave itself.” Yet the OPL’s policies are plainly unpopular in Haiti. Whatever leverage the party claims, or once claimed, is due to the fact that it represents the interests of Haiti’s business community as well as those of the United States, which has conditioned its financial assistance to Haiti on the privatization of at least three state-run industries.
President Préval has inherited a catch-22. Widely perceived as Aristide’s hand-picked successor (he is referred to as Aristide’s “twin” in Haitian media) he has nonetheless been forced to carry out the neoliberal economic reforms—or take the blame for not doing so—that Aristide agreed to but never enacted, and now publicly opposes. As President, he holds a weak hand. As Fritz Longchamps, Haiti’s Minister of Foreign Affairs notes dryly, “Fifty-five percent of the Haitian budget is based on international aid. That would not be so important if the Haitian people would be willing to go without food for a while.” In the shadow of the economic debates, going without is exactly what Haitians are doing.
Haitians have taken to calling their government demokrasy pèpè—second-hand democracy, from the Kreyol word for the barrels of used clothing sent to Haiti each year from the United States. The political bickering over “modernization” has crowded out popular demands and concerns, primarily poverty and impunity. Haiti’s immense poor population feels excluded from the seemingly arcane debates that have divided the government. In 1990, an astounding 85% of the electorate turned out at the polls to elect Aristide. The streets, awash with Haitians waving their ink-stained thumbs in pride, seemed to harbor new winds of change for the small country. But by 1996, the first presidential election after the invasion, only about 15% of the population turned out to elect René Préval. And in the disputed April 1997 parliamentary elections, the supposed cause of Haiti’s democratic collapse, a mere 5% of the eligible population turned out to vote. Clearly, the salient division in Haiti today is not between parliamentary factions, but between Haitian leaders and the Haitian people.
Since the U.S. invasion, rising poverty and near-total impunity have sharpened the longstanding fault lines that divide Haitian society. As the state of affairs in Haiti today makes clear, this is no formula for democracy. In the first half of the 1990s, Haiti’s popular movement learned a hard lesson after the derailing of grassroots efforts to bring about change. To move forward, Lavalas found, it had to accommodate the Haitian business class as well as international lenders. Now, the second half of the 1990s offers a different lesson. That lesson is not that Haiti’s grassroots movement has failed, but on the contrary, that a government which ignores grassroots concerns cannot succeed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherine Orenstein has reported on and worked in Haiti since 1990, when she traveled there as a Peabody-Gardner fellow. In 1995 and 1996 she investigated human rights crimes for the United Nations and for a team of international lawyers contracted by the Haitian government to build cases against coup criminals.
