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COMMENTARY
February 28, 2004
Haiti
Haiti is celebrating the bicentennial of its independence this year with its latest complete social disintegration and another swelling tide of boat people seeking entry to the United States if possible. Perhaps the richest country (per capita) in the Western hemisphere in 1804 it is now the poorest; its legacy of slavery transformed into a legacy of political obscenity. The president Jean Bertrand Aristide a radical priest defrocked by the Vatican and a demagogue in both Creole and French has proved the latest of a long line of Haitian wonder-workers whose only accomplishment has been to sharpen the edge of the ideological knife that now divides "left" from "right". It is easy to say that Aristide should go. He was a disaster from the moment he first came near power and now he has lost all but the hardest core of his own mass movement -- reduced to gangs of thugs burning tires and the cars attached to them to create useless roadblocks through a capital city in its almost-customary state of terror. New elections could theoretically be held but elections have never got Haiti anywhere. The persistent breakdown of "civil society" is the cause of persistent foreign intervention not the consequence of it. And the alternative rulers starting with Guy Philippe the leader of the northern rebellion a shadowy former police chief with U.S. special forces training who may or may not be working with drug cartels do not necessarily represent an improvement. Now that Philippe's thugs have a taste of power it does not follow that Mr. Aristide's resignation will placate them. Yet Haiti is still a victim of "abroad". Lionized as the seat of the world's first independent black state after one of history's most memorable slave rebellions Haiti has been celebrated patronized and excused for two full centuries. It has a history of false dawns and great expectations and unbelievable tyranny. Through which it would appear no real progress has ever been made in creating a people who are susceptible to self-government. The spontaneous wild looting that has followed the progress of the rebellion from Cap-Ha?tien to Gona?ves to Saint-Marc to the docks of Port-au-Prince provide the hard facts. The country is the victim of that reverse racism which refuses to demand that an "oppressed people" behave reasonably even under duress and instead blames outsiders for all their problems. Many Haitians now being interviewed believe that since the U.S. re-installed Mr. Aristide in 1996 (despite many warnings to the Clinton administration that he was bad news) it should now remove him. But the Bush doctrine which could find good reasons to change governments in Afghanistan and Iraq provides little motive to take responsibility for Haiti. It offers less of a security threat today than it did when President Woodrow Wilson sent in the Marines in 1916. France which the crazed Aristide government was incidentally trying to sue for $22 billion in settlement of "the legacy of colonialism" is now leading the diplomatic effort for Mr. Aristide's ouster. The U.N. Security Council is meeting but would require forces other than those under U.N. command to do anything. Canada the U.S. the Dominican Republic and Brazil are among countries which have sent troops to rescue their own and other foreign nationals from what many of them believe will be the worst combustion in living memory. But unless the Bush administration commits itself to another Clinton-style incursion under the weight of the bad election-year advice it is currently receiving it is hard to visualize a coherent foreign occupation force. The motive for such an incursion is almost purely humanitarian. In the Fort Dimanche quarter of Port-au-Prince a former prison stronghold now occupied by squatters residents eat a kind of cookie made from earth salt water and margarine -- using clay as the binder. The desperation in much of Haitian society is heart-breaking. Charity is a defensible motive but only when unmixed. It is Haiti that is the problem; and it is finally a problem for Haiti. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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