BuddanRobert Buddan
JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE did not govern long enough to merit being overthrown.
He simply did not have enough time to do badly. His rule was frequently interrupted. Aristide was first elected in 1990 but was overthrown in 1991.
He resumed his term in 1994 but under a new constitution he could not immediately succeed himself in 1996. He was elected by 92 per cent of Haitian voters in 2000 and four years later he has been overthrown again.
Why have the United States, France and Canada created the circumstances for his overthrow?
Reasons suggest that the coup was designed to abort an emerging radical democracy based on a model of grassroots development.
Camille Chalmers, a professor of economics at Haiti's State University since 1983 and former chief of staff to Aristide, gives reasons to hold this view.
Chalmers himself became disillusioned with Aristide's failure to maintain this radical democratic movement.
After the fall of Duvalier, a number of repressed grassroots organisations spontaneously emerged. They began to practise a model of democracy based on direct participation. Many communities created popular tribunals. They interviewed former Duvalierist terrorists to get to the bottom of the human rights abuses under the Duvalier dictatorship.
However, the neo-Duvalierists staged a coup in 1991, overthrowing Aristide and destroying many of these organisations. In their place, western international organisations sought to establish structures based on western rather than Haitian experience.
BUILDING MARKETS
Some 10 to 15 families controlled virtually all aspects of the Haitian economy. Western attempts to support the Haitian private sector amounted to supporting these wealthy families.
The private sector does not invest in Haiti and this is why Haiti has remained so poor. As Chalmers put it, it will buy, say, coffee, sell it somewhere, and put the money in a foreign bank.
The pro-private sector structural adjustment model of the World Bank and the International Monteray Fund (IMF) only threatened to destroy the already weak peasant sector and force Haitians to import food from the U.S. Haitians would become dependent for jobs in sweat shop assembly industries owned by the elite.
The USAID's economic model for Haiti rested on two comparative "advantages": proximity to the U.S. market and cheap labour.
But weeks before his overthrow in 1991, Aristide had announced plans to raise Haiti's minimum wage. You would have thought that this would be a good thing in the poorest country in this hemisphere. But there was great opposition from the elite and, shortly after, the military overthrew Aristide.
Aristide wanted a model that invested in human capital rather than in cheap labour. Haiti's private sector wanted the latter, one not designed for national development.
The cheap labour assembly sector had no backward or forward linkages with the rest of the economy. Whatever Haiti earned from exports it spent on imports. Virtually no benefit accrued to the domestic sector.
Aristide and the new developmentalists around him wanted to utilise the country's domestic capital to build a nationally oriented private sector out of its large informal sector.
As Chalmers said, "We think that development is only possible to the extent that it uses the historic development capacities of the country its four million peasants (800,000 farmer families), 300,000 artisans, 12,000 peasant organisations, 8,000 cooperatives, many tens of thousands of small and micro enterprises and a very dynamic informal sector."
The IMF model, as usual, is not pro-people but anti-state. It called for reducing the size of the state and for privatisation.
This dogma defies the fact that the Haitian state is already too small and weak. It needs greater developmental capacity in such a poor country.
The World Development Report of 1997 admitted that what was important for development was not the size but the effectiveness of the state, and that the state had important roles to play in education, law and order and building infrastructure so that markets could succeed.
Chalmers said that the Haitian state employed only some 48,000 persons for eight million people. The Dominican Republic, with a comparable population, employed 400,000 state employees.
Of Haiti's state employees, over 40 per cent worked in education, health and security precisely those areas that are important for building human capital.
PRIVATISATION
In Haiti's countryside, the state is virtually absent. There are few schools or hospitals. The ease with which a handful of rebels could control the country after a few weeks shows how weak the state is.
In a country with the highest rates of infant and maternal mortality in the hemisphere the state needs greater presence in development.
When Aristide came to power in 1990, Haiti had 55 state enterprises, a small number by Latin American standards where the state has typically controlled thousands of state enterprises.
The IMF wanted Haiti to privatise the telecommunications company, the electric company, two banks, the cement company, the flour mill and a company that produced food oils.
These are companies that would be necessary to build the foundations of a new economy. These were profitable state companies, too. Privatisation only benefits the rich who have the money to buy state enterprises.
The Aristide government wanted to keep these strategic enterprises to create a network to provide quality service to people, create new and responsible management and use the enterprises as part of a strategy of national development.
HAITIAN DEMOCRACY
Serving the people was central to Aristide's new democracy. During his 1990/91 administration, Aristide experimented with popular democracy.
Chalmers gives this example. In August 1991, Aristide and his team were going to Paris to negotiate with the international financial institutions. Before he went, he called all his ministers and advisers together and they had a day-long meeting at the national palace with 800 representatives of national organisations.
The meeting was televised live on national television. The representatives were able to ask questions and the ministers had to explain why they were going to Paris.
But after he was overthrown and restored, things changed. Aristide had been forced to accept conditions amounting to structural adjustment in exchange for U.S. support to restore him to power. It wasn't a democratic restoration as much as a restoration of structural adjustment.
Then Aristide was forced to stand down for re-election in 1996. His party's candidate, Rene Preval, won presidential elections in 1996 and his party swept legislative elections in 1997. But up to 2000, the Government was divided and the party split between the more pro-structural adjustment and more anti-structural adjustment factions.
This undermined a policy that both government and the international financial institutions (IFIs) could support. Aristide tried to steer a middle path between radical democracy and a path that compromised with the IFIs.
International organisations withheld funds for food aid and for balance of payments support when they felt Aristide was not complying with their preferred policies.
Aristide had no option. The state depended on international donors for 85 per cent of its investment budget and 45 per cent of its operating expenses. Without the international financial institutions there was really no state. Aristide tried to reform the state without privatising critical companies believing that a more effective state could make Haiti earn its way out of this dependence.
Haitian economists calculated that Haiti could earn revenues to cover its operating budget if the state companies were restructured. But the IMF insisted on privatisation and U.S. multinationals waited eagerly to buy up the state companies.
In 1996, 10 bids were placed for privatisation and nine were placed by U.S. companies. Remember that the U.S. has been willing to destroy the banana economies of the Caribbean to satisfy U.S. banana multinationals.
Caribbean democracies cannot go so cheaply. CARICOM should study the circumstances of Aristide's overthrow and prepare a study on the rebuilding of Haiti's democracy, economy and society.
At a symposium on CARICOM Governance last year I argued for a CARICOM institution to promote better governance in the region. The Haitian tragedy shows best of all why we need such an institution.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, Mona, UWI. E-mail: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm
