Haiti: In Bondage to History?

The acrid smell hanging over the once-grand hillside neighborhood of Bel-Aire, near Haiti’s bleached white National Palace, was by then all too familiar: burning human flesh.

That day—November 18, 2004, anniversary of the slave army’s decisive victory over Napoleon’s soldiers 201 years ago—another semi-decapitated body laid in the streets, its charred flesh smoldering and crackling under the noonday sun. This time the killers brazenly ignited their prey, a man named Wéber Adrien, just a few blocks from the UN peacekeepers’ command post in Bel-Aire.

Beheadings, a new form of violence in this perpetually violent country, were almost as common as nighttime automatic weapons fire as Haiti’s bicentennial year ended. The trend started after a September 30 clash between Haitian police and protestors turned deadly. The demonstrators—some of them armed—were marching to demand the return of ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Shots were fired and in the end three policemen and perhaps six demonstrators were dead. The confrontation unleashed a wave of violence by pro-Aristide militants nicknamed “Operation Baghdad,” replete with ambushes, decapitations, snipers, and police counter-actions with harsh house-to-house searches and arrests without warrants. There appear to have been brutal summary executions on both sides.

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest and a leader of Haiti’s Lavalas social movement, was first overthrown by CIA assets inside the Haitian Armed Forces on September 30, 1991. Three years later, he was restored by a U.S. invasion of some 22,000 soldiers. After finishing his term and sitting one out, in 2000 he was re-elected in a poorly attended race in which he ran virtually unopposed. On February 29, 2004, he was chased from power again, this time by a broad civic movement and an armed paramilitary uprising.

After the 1991 coup, tens of thousands risked their lives resisting the army and calling for Aristide’s return. Not this time. Resistance has dwindled to several hundred mostly young men in the capital’s Bel-Aire neighborhood, some of them very visibly armed. In addition to swearing that they will not put down their guns until Aristide returns, they have also staged several demonstrations sometimes attended by hundreds of their neighbors. The majority of Haitians, however, are tired of the violence and have recoiled from the marches.

Aristide, now in South Africa, claims his second ouster was a “modern coup d’état” supported behind the scenes by Washington. But the interim government—which was backed by the opposition, the private sector, as well as the United States, France and Canada—says he was a tyrant overthrown by his own people.

To be certain, aristide’s ouster was not a simple resignation. There was ample U.S. and European funding to opposition groups like the Group of 184 coalition, which claimed to have over 184 member groups, including student groups, unions, business groups, peasant and popular organizations, women’s and human rights associations, and professional associations of lawyers, teachers and media owners. And when armed “rebels”—disgruntled former Haitian police and former Haitian soldiers—regularly attacked Haitian targets from the neighboring Dominican Republic over the course of a year, no Dominican eyebrows were raised. Since Aristide’s departure, however, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has refused to recognize the interim government and has denied Haiti a seat at CARICOM meetings.

But neither was it a coup d’état. By the time of his departure, tens of thousands from all walks of life regularly took to the streets to call for his resignation. Human rights abuses by police had become intolerably atrocious, negotiations between the government and the opposition had broken off, armed pro-Aristide gangs nicknamed “chimères” (“monsters”) frequently terrorized anyone not deemed sufficiently loyal to the National Palace, and economic and social indicators had spiraled down to what the UN called a “silent disaster.”

When the camouflage-clad “rebels” came across the border in February, taking over police stations and killing an unknown number of alleged Aristide supporters, they were mostly cheered, not resisted. Two months into his country’s bicentennial year, Aristide boarded a U.S.-chartered airplane and left the country.

But ten months, one U.S.-led invasion and one UN peacekeeping mission later, the headlines still groaned of “unrest” and “turmoil,” warning of “chaos” and “impending humanitarian disaster.”

Two months of “Operation Baghdad” shootouts between police and Aristide supporters had left parts of the capital resembling Fallujah. The government had locked up politicians and supporters of Aristide’s Lavalas Family party, sometimes without warrants, and police were suspected of multiple summary executions of Lavalas sympathizers. The country was reeling from two floods that left over 5,000 dead. And although international experts scurried around the country with plans, projects and budgets for the $1.3 billion in promised aid, little more than street sweepers had been hired.

“What is going on is literally insane,” human rights activist Jean-Claude Bajeux summarized recently. “It is what we call in philosophy a ‘death march.’ If we can’t stop this, we are looking at the destruction of the Haitian nation.” According to more than one analyst, Haiti now fully qualifies as a “failed state.” But in many ways, there is no state. Nobody really controls Haiti even though four armed groups—6,000 UN peacekeepers, 3,000 discredited Haitian National Police officers, up to 2,000 former soldiers and several hundred mostly pro-Aristide gang members—parade, patrol or slink around this country of eight million.

Most worrisome are the ex-soldiers. Hundreds of former members of Haiti’s Armed Forces—disbanded by Aristide after the coup in 1995—came out of the woodwork and down from the mountains after the President’s departure. They patrol, man checkpoints and even make arrests, despite the fact that they and their guns, which range from pistols to AK-47s, are illegal. These men—some of whom are recent young “recruits” to the cause—are demanding the government reinstate the army, originally established by U.S. Marines during the first occupation (1915-1934) and blamed for thousands of deaths during the 1991-1994 coup.

The heavily armed gangs, like the ones who say they will continue “Operation Baghdad” until Aristide is returned to office, are the other problem. They essentially shut down two neighborhoods for most of last fall.
Interim Prime Minister Gérard Latortue, who so far refuses to disarm the ex-soldiers and has even promised to integrate them into the police and other security forces, says Aristide is organizing the gang violence. From South Africa, Aristide has called for peace and “dialogue,” but he has also said he is part of the solution. “I’m part of the solution because I was elected by the Haitian people and the Haitian people today are open for dialogue, as I’m open for dialogue,” he told reporters there.

Before being gunned down, beheaded, torched and taken to Bel-Aire, Wéber Adrien was a vocal leader of the 2002-2003 anti-Aristide movement and a well-known sympathizer of the left-wing National Revolutionary Movement (MRN). And like many who joined the opposition, he was also once a Lavalas supporter. In the mid-1990s he even worked for the Lavalas mayor of Port-au-Prince—folksinger Mayor Manno Charlemagne. When a new interim mayor took over City Hall last spring, Adrien was appointed coordinator of the city’s notoriously corrupt open-air marketplaces.

“He had integrity,” recalls Josue Mérilien, head of the Haitian National Teachers Union (UNNOH). “It doesn’t surprise me that he fell like he did, because he did not tolerate corruption.” And so, like generations of Haitian leaders before him, he was cut down. His friends suspect either pro-Aristide militants or marketplace strongmen who felt their livelihoods were in danger, or both.

Lavalas Senator Gérald Gilles did not know if pro-Aristide “chimères” or someone else killed Adrien. But last fall, as the government carried out what he, Amnesty International and others say are illegal, politically motivated arrests of Lavalas Family party members, and as the bodies piled up in Bel-Aire, he knew the future of his country was in jeopardy.

“There is a spirit of revenge driving this government,” Gilles said from his home where he was in semi-hiding. Gilles himself was arrested on October 2 with two other party members. He was later released, but as of late November the others were still in prison, accused of fomenting and financing the Bel-Aire violence. So were former Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and former Minister of the Interior Jocelerme Privert. Masked members of the police force also arrested former Miami immigrant organizer Father Gérard Jean-Juste without a warrant on October 13 but released him six weeks later. Some Lavalas lawyers say more than 700 political prisoners are in Haitian jails. State officials, however, say none of them are “political prisoners,” that all those incarcerated committed crimes and add that the accused will have their day in court. Still, they will have to face Haiti’s notoriously slow judicial system. Of 1,300 men in Haiti’s National Penitentiary, only 20 are serving prison terms—all the rest are awaiting trials.

“I think the current government is making us pay for certain illegal and arbitrary arrests Lavalas made while in power,” Gilles admitted. “When we were in power, we lost our way, we spread terror, and now they are making Lavalas pay for that…. This is very bad for the nation.” Still, Gilles said Lavalas had some responsibility. He admitted that the armed men in Bel-Aire were what he called “Lavalas extremists.”

“If you want to talk about our errors, the biggest one was the perversion of the popular sector,” he said. “We are responsible.… We exploited the poverty of these people … and turned them into pressure groups.”

The “chimères” or “extremists” were “rent-a-mobs” who mobilized for rallies, to harass and attack anti-Aristide marches. To his dismay, Gilles said chimères also blocked the investigation into the murder of journalist and radio station owner Jean Dominique by bursting into Parliament and preventing them from voting to remove a Lavalas Senator’s immunity. “Even we were aggressed by these people,” Gilles said, shaking his head.

Gilles said that because of the errors his party committed, some members are talking about organizing a new party. If the Lavalas Family splinters further, that will bring the number of Lavalas movement offshoot parties to over a dozen. To date, 91 parties have registered for the elections slated for some time in 2005. The number is not surprising: it attests to the country’s turbulent political history. Founded 200 years ago after the hemisphere’s first and only successful slave revolt, Haiti has seen more political strife than anywhere else in the hemisphere, and perhaps the world.

“Of the twenty-two heads of state between 1843 and 1915, only one served out his prescribed term of office, three died while serving, one was blown up with his palace, one presumably poisoned, one hacked to pieces by a mob, one resigned. The other fourteen were deposed by revolution after incumbencies ranging in length from three months to twelve years,” writes James G. Leyburn in The Haitian People.

The use of mobs is not new, either. In 1844 in the south, former slave soldier Louis Jean-Jacques Acaau led the “armée souffrante” (“suffering army”) of 2,000 machete- and pike-wielding peasants in a bid for power. Some 20 years later, Major Sylvain Salnave led an “army” of 4,000 whose cries “Long live Salnave! Down with parliament!” are reminiscent of the pro-Aristide mobs that used to rally in front of the National Palace with hundreds of freshly printed T-shirts, posters, flyers and banners, all bearing the President’s face. Populist leader and school teacher Daniel Fignolé’s “steam roller” mobs rolled out of Bel-Aire as needed in 1957—before, during and after his 19 days in power. He was thrown out by a military coup that led to the 29-year-long Duvalier dictatorship.

Haitian historian and political scientist Alix René puts the Lavalas movement, Aristide and the “chimères” squarely into Haiti’s historical traditions. “Society produces ‘chimères’ and it will continue to produce them until society addresses the underlying causes,” René said. “Our country was founded on a very fragile unity … among the fragile and divided elite that carried off independence, and then between them and the excluded masses. It was a country founded on exclusion.”

In the 200 years Haiti’s elite has squabbled for power, René noted, its members never built a state that redistributed wealth or provided things like education, health care, roads or electricity. “Really, 200 years of history has been 200 years of violence.… Whenever a government comes or goes it is always by insurrection, conspiracy and plotting,” he said.

The latest regime change was not much different. The opposition Group of 184’s clarion call was for a “Social Contract,” but René and others note with irony that it took Haiti’s bourgeoisie a full 240 years to catch up with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And while full of flowery promises, the Contract document does not address the pitiful daily minimum wage of about $2 (less than during the Duvalier dictatorship) or land tenure.

“Until we deal with the problem of restructuring society, we will have the same problems, we will have hopeless people open to exploitation, open to anything, and we will be caught in this circle of violence,” he said. Like other progressives, René is troubled by the fact that his country is once again occupied by foreign soldiers, and also by the fact that foreign powers played a role in Aristide’s ouster. He is also troubled by the international left’s misconceptions about the Lavalas movement and the former president.

Like hundreds of other intellectuals, René once supported the Lavalas movement and Aristide’s first candidacy, but when the government pushed for more and more neoliberal economic policies and turned to gangs for support, he turned away. He also did some hard thinking.

“I now realize that the Lavalas project is a project of excluded middle classes, and that Aristide was a poor guy from the petit-bourgeoisie who took over the leadership of this movement,” he explained. The movement, which also included elements of the bourgeoisie, made overtures to peasants and workers, but it did not include them nor represent their needs. Aristide and others rode a multi-class wave of energy, goodwill and discontent into office in 1990 and again in 1995, but the movement never had a clear ideology or structure.

“I think we progressives who thought Lavalas could be part of a progressive solution made a serious mistake,” René admitted. “During its ten years in power, Lavalas did absolutely nothing for the popular masses, even when it had a chance. It didn’t even touch the simplest problems like education, sanitary conditions, jobs. In fact, you can’t say Lavalas was a popular movement or that Aristide was a popular leader. He was a leader with popularity but he was not a people’s leader.”

As 2004 ended, the future was not clear for thinkers like René, politicians like Gilles or union leaders like Mérilien. All three were dissatisfied with the interim government and its human rights abuses, its failure to implement even basic social policies and its foot-dragging on disarmament. They also did not like the gang warfare, the presence of former Haitian soldiers or the fact that foreign soldiers were on Haitian soil once again.

Mérilien’s solution had a tragically familiar ring to it. “I think that the people should rise up to demand that the interim government pay back all the taxes they are using and then step down,” he said during a meeting held to prepare Adrien’s funeral. “We are going to mobilize to show the government and the international community we don’t agree with what is going on here! We want the government out.”

Once again, Haitians are clamoring for regime change.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Regan, a journalist and filmmaker, has lived in Haiti for most of the last 13 years, writing and filming for mainstream and alternative media. Together with Haitian photographer Daniel Morel, who contributed photos and some reporting for this article, she runs Wozo Productions www.wozoproductions.org.