Myrtha Desulme, ContributorYESTERDAY, PRIME Minister P.J. Patterson, along with a contingent of his CARICOM colleagues, Kenny Anthony, Patrick Manning and Perry Christie, played host to embattled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide for an emergency meeting on the Haitian crisis.
Saint Domingue is aflame once again. The Caribbean nation, which should have been celebrating a glorious and epic 18th century victory, in which it soundly defeated all of the major European superpowers of its time, is on the brink of a civil war.
Haiti is not a new, emerging and developing nation. It is a veteran state, which has withstood and emerged victorious from every imaginable assault on its sacred liberty, only to fall prey to a relentless vortex of internal conflicts, caused in great part by external pressures.
A nation bathed in glory at birth, which 200 years later, is stumbling into the 21st century, exhausted from the twists and turns of a persistently turbulent history. Storms are brewing once more in Haiti, and this time, the man in the eye of the hurricane is President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
There is a deafening clamour rising in the country, and it bears his name. In an unprecedented show of unity, thousands of representatives of every major sector in Haitian society are demanding his resignation. But the man who has dominated the Haitian political landscape for the past 13 years, remains a mystery to most. He has been cast as a folk-hero, and as a villain. He has been revered as the people's champion, and reviled as a tyrant, in this latest of Haitian dramas.
PROPHET
How could a man, who was once hailed as a prophet and a messiah on whom rested so much hope, have come to such an ignominious end? Will the real Aristide please stand up?
Jean-Bertrand Aristide was born in poverty in 1953, in the southern town of Port-Salut. His father was a small farmer, who died when Aristide was three months old. As a small boy he was brought to Port-au-Prince by his mother, who became a higgler. He was raised in great part by the Salesian Fathers. He attended school in St. John Bosco, which would become his parish in 1982, when he, in turn, was ordained a member of the Salesian Fathers. At 16, he entered the Salesian seminary in Port-au-Prince. A model student, he was a favourite of the Haitian bishops, due to his brightness. He pursued studies in theology, sociology and psychology in the Dominican Republic, Great Britain, Canada, Italy, and Israel, also absorbing Spanish, English, Italian, and Hebrew, and earning a master's degree.
As a radical priest, advocating liberation theology, Aristide worked among Haiti's poor, and was part of a group of progressive priests. Aristide is a wisp of a man, yet a firebrand preacher. Even as a priest, his masses were more like three-hour pep rallies. He preached human dignity, demanding equal distribution of wealth and land, and insisted the church divest itself of power and privilege. He criticised the church as backward, elitist, and cowardly. He attacked capitalism, and denounced its crimes against the poor of the Third World. His eloquence was explosive, he told his congregation who its real enemies were. His supporters were riveted with excitement, and expressed a cult-like devotion. It seemed that no one could move the Haitian masses like Aristide could. Just after ordination, Aristide delivered a sermon in which he denounced the Duvalier regime. Soon after this sermon, he was sent into exile in Montreal by the Salesian Fathers. He returned to Haiti in 1985. It was not long before he was back on the warpath. At a startlingly defiant mass, Aristide called for change in the country, and bluntly criticised the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier, when most of the churches were still cowed in the face of Duvalier's repressive regime. This mass is often cited as one of the sparks that set off the popular uprising of strikes and demonstrations, which led to the ouster of Jean-Claude Duvalier, a year later. It also earned Aristide the lasting enmity of the army, the police, and the para-military thugs known as the Tontons Macoutes.
It was not only secular groups, however, which opposed Aristide. The church hierarchy, as well as his own Salesian order, also resented his brazenness. Rather than work within the bounds of programmes already established for the poor by the Salesian Fathers, Aristide chose to establish his own projects, most notably, Lafanmi Selavi (The Family is Life). The organisation worked to find funding in order to provide housing, food, vocational and literacy training for street boys. Aristide pointed out in interview after interview, that the condition of these children was the result of a society in which the rich were unutterably rich, and the poor impossibly poor. He blamed the condition of the children on the state itself, and portrayed Lafanmi Selavi as one of the very few projects in Haiti which sought to raise the consciousness of people, rather than just feed them. On September 11, 1988, Aristide's church, was destroyed by fire in a vicious attack by para-military thugs. His enemies ruefully philosophised, that "He who sows the wind, reaps the storm".
EXPELLED
The bishops of Haiti had unsuccessfully tried many times to silence Aristide. When that didn't work, they tried to transfer him, but his avid supporters were always able to impede the transfers through their demonstrations. The bishops bided their time, and finally were able to apply enough pressure on the Salesians to cause Aristide to be expelled from the order on December 15, 1988.
The reasons given were:
A political commitment involving incitement to hatred and violence, and the glorification of class struggle, in direct opposition to the teachings of the church.
The desecration of the liturgy, in which Aristide seemed to place the Eucharist and the sacraments at the service of politics.
A constant and public disruption of church unity, which had made the priest a figure of destabilisation in Haiti.
Aristide, now a priest without a pulpit, was in effect banned. When presidential elections were held in 1990, Aristide became the candidate of a coalition of leftist parties, and was elected with an overwhelming majority. The honeymoon was short-lived. Aristide was overthrown in a bloody military coup seven months after taking office, and fled into exile in Venezuela and later the United States.
After three years in exile, Aristide was returned to power in October 1994 by a 20,000 strong US-led multinational force. But the Aristide who returned, was not the same man as the Aristide who had fled into exile. During his three years in the cold, Aristide had to sit by, and allow the State Department to manipulate the treacherous political negotiations between himself and the junta. As a condition of its return to power, the Aristide Government in exile, was compelled by powerful foreign interests to adopt the same capitalist, neo-liberal IMF and World Bank economic policies, which he used to denounce from the pulpit.
In the year following his return to power, he was forced to demit office once more, as his term had ended, and the new Constitution of 1987 barred him from running in a second consecutive election. In 1995, Aristide's protégé and former Prime Minister, Rene Preval was elected to succeed him.
But Aristide was biding his time, to return to the polls in the 2000 elections. Again, he was elected president in 2000, but this time, the Opposition claimed that the elections were flawed, which unleashed a wave of dissent and protests across the country.
Determined to hold on to power this time around, in the face of overwhelming protests, Aristide has firmly declared that he has no intention of stepping down.
HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES
Claims of repression and human rights abuses proliferate against the Aristide administration. Former Aristide followers have been defecting in droves, disillusioned by the alleged corruption, brutality, and the lack of improvement in their social condition.
During Aristide's exile, the Haitian people had had to endure a severe and devastating trade embargo, aimed at dislodging the junta.
Today, Haitians are again suffering from another war of attrition, this time directed at the Aristide administration. Foreign multilateral and bilateral aid organisations, which have no accountability to the Haitian electorate, but control the aid monies needed by Aristide, are tying the release of the funds to the implementation of imposed institutional reforms, as well as the civil and democratic reforms, demanded by the Opposition and the human rights organisations.
Aristide is the first president in Haitian history to offer to his compatriots, the startling spectacle of a Black Haitian populist president, risen to power on a rabidly revolutionary, anti-imperialist platform, now surrounded by white, U.S. Secret Service bodyguards, and foreign security personnel, protecting him against his own people. He has become the man he used to warn his followers about. The popular demands for a restructuring of Haitian society remains at centre stage.
The strengthening of institutions of civil society in relation to the state, are Haiti's only hope for an elusive transition into democracy.
The once-upon-a-time fiery, revolutionary priest used to preach to his followers that only with a conversion of the heart could a change in the social structure be effected. Let us hope that Aristide, as well as the Opposition, can now fathom these profound words.
Myrtha Desulme is a Haitian businesswoman whose family has been living in Jamaica since 1962. At present she serves as the chairperson of the UNESCO Haiti/Jamaica Exchange sub-committee organising activities to mark the bicentenary of Haiti's independence from France.
