Haiti After the Earthquake (23 page)

How to hold elections in such a fevered environment wasn't clear, but Father Aristide's candidacy led to a stampede of last-minute voter registration. The ballot was set for December 16, 1990. Having weathered the 1987 election-day killings in Haiti, I knew I ought to stay out of Port-au-Prince that day. But with so many international observers and such infectious enthusiasm amongst my friends, I wanted to see it with my own eyes.
²⁸

Although there were a dozen candidates, Aristide won 67 percent of the vote; he had cast his lot with the poor majority and they had cast theirs with him. But the army and many of Haiti's wealthy families remained, by and large, staunchly opposed to the young priest and his dangerous ideas (the ones he'd been preaching in his parish). Sure enough, another military coup—one of the bloodiest—toppled Aristide only seven months after his inauguration. If the previous four years had been difficult, it was hard to find words to describe the months after September 1991. Tens of thousands fled, by land and by sea. Aristide was sheltered in Caracas. Thousands more found no shelter at all.

More than five years after the fall of Duvalierism, Haiti had another military government. But most Haitians refused to be governed by unelected military officials or their civilian backers. The slums and poor neighborhoods from which Aristide drew his support fought back, the economy continued its downward spiral, and the army wasn't able to govern effectively, even with liberal use of force. Such repression fueled further waves of migration, and the “refugee crisis” was much discussed during the U.S. presidential elections in 1992. (Restoration of Haitian democracy made its way into the Clinton-Gore platform.) But there was foot-dragging on all sides, especially from the Haitian high command. Aristide himself had decamped from Caracas to Georgetown, D.C., to participate in these discussions. It was not until 1994, when President Clinton intervened to restore constitutional democracy, that Aristide returned to his homeland.

Not a shot was fired during this “immaculate invasion,” to quote one account of the period.
²⁹
But guns and bullets were on people's minds because these—not the ballot box—had always been the instruments of régime change in Haiti. How best to end this sorry cycle was much discussed in Haiti. Aristide proposed demobilizing the Haitian army, which since its creation by the U.S. Marines had never known a non-Haitian enemy. President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica endorsed this suggestion. (His country was one of the few in Central America without a standing army and also one of the few free from recurrent coups d'état.) Arias was in Haiti in 1995 when Aristide became the first Haitian president to hand over the reins of power to another elected civilian, agronomist René Préval, who had served as Aristide's Prime Minister in 1991. The hand-off was surely an achievement of note, and Arias, by then a Nobel laureate, wrote an op-ed saying as much: “Aristide happily noted that the only members of the army still on the government payroll were twenty marching band musicians.”
³⁰

Behind the scenes, though, power struggles continued, involving the usual players in the Haitian political class, the diaspora, the business élite, foreign embassies, and international institutions. Everyone seemed to have a prescription for Haiti, which limped along—deforestation continued apace, and erosion further threatened crop yields—until Préval also won a record: he became the first Haitian president to serve his complete term and pass the reins to the next elected president. He was replaced by none other than Aristide, who this time had won more than 90 percent of the vote. Would the former priest become the second Haitian president to serve out his term and move Haiti towards a constitutional democracy in which orderly transfer of power was the rule rather than the exception?

Bitter disputes about what happened next characterize almost all commentaries on the period.
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But some things are clear: although Aristide could easily win the popular vote, he had not endeared himself to the wealthy, nor to some members of the second Bush administration. (That the newly elected U.S. President's father had held the same office during the previous military coup against Aristide
was a topic of much commentary in Haiti.) It is also clear that the agenda of the popular movement—a just partition of wealth and improved access to basic social services—had deep-seated opposition. Some of its detractors could be found among the local beneficiaries of the old order; some were still influenced by Cold War mentalities. A handful of doughty conservatives counseled the new U.S. administration to obstruct capital outlays, including credit and development assistance, to populist, left-leaning régimes. This might not have mattered much in Cuba or Venezuela, but Washington's policies had, as usual, loud echoes in Haiti. As noted, the United States and others sought to slow direct assistance to the Haitian government because they disapproved of recent election cycles. How much influence these policies had on other countries is unclear, but they seem to have guided the hand of certain countries (such as France and Canada) and development agencies; U.S. assistance, certainly, went to NGOs instead of the public sector.

How cash poor was Haiti's government? In 2002, governing a population of almost ten million, its budget wasn't much bigger than that of the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts (with a population of one hundred thousand); neither amounted to a quarter of the budget of the Harvard hospital in which I trained. Without resources, it was impossible for public providers to provide much of anything; many professionals went to work for NGOs, which did not have a mandate to serve all citizens; others left the country altogether. Public health and public education faltered, as did other services of special importance to the poor—such as access to safe drinking water. Choking off assistance for development and basic service delivery ended up choking off oxygen to the government. But that had been the intention all along: to discipline or dislodge the Aristide administration.

Although U.S. assistance didn't flow to the public sector, it did flow, some of it to civil society groups that opposed the Aristide administration. A handful of wealthy families also helped finance these groups. At the other end of the spectrum, urban slums were becoming ever more factionalized into gangs, some of them heavily armed. Young gang members, called
Chimè,
were blamed for much of the
urban disorder. Madison Smartt Bell, the novelist, wrote an affecting essay in
Harper's
about these troubled times. Here's what he said about the
Chimè
:

Tout moun se moun
really means “every person is a person,” and it was the favored motto of the poor, who continued to support their champion even as others, including many civil society groups, defected. The toll taken by the unacknowledged aid embargo was steep—a fact was much commented upon in Haiti, even as it was denied by those who'd slowed their aid. As mysterious “rebels” (many of them demobilized soldiers from the Haitian army) massed on the Dominican border, Aristide was roundly condemned by officialdom for having the cheek to bring up the distasteful subject of the French debt. The Haitian president asked the French government to repay the money France had extorted from Haiti in the nineteenth century, and was only too happy to let them know how much 150 million germinal francs were worth in 2003 terms: with interest, $21 billion.

It was another violent interregnum. In central Haiti, our medical teams did their best to care for victims of border raids. These included, in the space of a few months: a judge, a vice mayor, several police officers, and security guards at the hydroelectric dam. Most were shot dead. The “rebels” also kidnapped Dr. Wesler Lambert, a protégé and colleague, and four nurses interviewing for a job with
Zanmi Lasante. Dr. Lambert was driving an ambulance—clearly marked as such—and when released asked only that it be returned, along with the medicines he'd been transporting. We never got them back.

Entire books (containing many discrepant claims) have been written about this violent period, and more will surely follow.
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But some facts were incontestable: there would be no repeat of the 2000 transfer of power from one elected president to the next. In February, 2004, Aristide and his Haitian-American wife, the lawyer who had chaired the national AIDS commission, were spirited away to the Central African Republic, itself governed by a military man who had installed himself in a recent coup. U.S. and French diplomats insisted the Aristides had been taken to a country of their choosing; but the destination, a lawless place neither he nor his wife had ever visited before, seemed to support the president's claim that they'd been kidnapped.
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American officials, including Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, dismissed this claim as absurd, and denied any U.S. involvement. As Amy Wilentz noted in the
Nation
:

Regardless of the disputes over Aristide's departure, the régime that replaced him didn't really take. The U.S.-selected caretaker
government was unpopular, unrest continued to grow, and Port-au-Prince became the kidnapping capital of the world in spite of a large UN peacekeeper presence. Local police forces were weak or corrupt—a pale reflection of what they should have been—as were the public health, public education, and judicial systems. Haiti again proved difficult to govern without elections.

The next two years weren't much better. The leader of the UN peacekeeping forces, a Brazilian general, took his own life in the Montana Hotel. Another UN diplomat, Jean-Marie Guehenno, compared the plight of Haiti to that of Darfur. “Haitians in Cap Haïtien,” he noted, “are in a worse situation than some of the [internally displaced persons] I saw in Darfur.”
³⁶
In terms of security in its broadest sense—freedom from want and freedom from attack—Haiti was in bad shape. No member of its interim government had been elected; the elected president was in exile (first in the Central African Republic, then in Jamaica, and finally in South Africa); armed “rebels” moved freely throughout the country; the Prime Minister and other government officials had been jailed without due process; and there were persistent shortages of food and fuel and other basic necessities. It was hard to imagine that those who had supported the latest coup would be satisfied with such an outcome. It certainly made delivering basic health services difficult.

As the months dragged on, as people accustomed themselves to the UN peacekeeper presence, myths and mystifications about Aristide's departure were in no short supply. But as in the preceding decade, the appetite for constitutional rule and an end to de facto governance was great. In 2006, Haitian voters again elected René Préval, whose second term would be fraught with problems not entirely under his control. In 2008, an international flare in food and fuel prices caused riots and a vote of no confidence in his prime minister. His next choice, Michèle Pierre-Louis, was not approved by the parliament for months, which meant, essentially, that any bold development policies would be difficult to implement. And any hope of reversing Haiti's ecological disaster, accelerated by deforestation, needed bold policies. Every rainy season brought landslides, floods, and deaths. The 2008 hurricane season was, as noted, the worst on record.

This, then, is the short version of what physicians call the history of the present illness. During the twentieth century, Haiti had survived a foreign occupation (followed by various régimes of short duration, none properly elected), a twenty-nine-year-long family dictatorship with scant interest in long-term development, a series of military-civilian juntas, brief democratic rule, more coups, and the slow sundering of a once united popular movement. In the decade or so preceding January 12, 2010, Haiti was deforested and fragile but was not peopled by the same zombified populace (to use the local term) who suffered in seeming silence under the Duvaliers. A large portion of the current population was born after 1986, the year the dictatorship crumbled. Its people were strong and proud, but its government and institutions were weak and largely unable to deliver the basic services for which the population clamored.