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Twice elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide has been a controversial and enigmatic force in Haitian life for the better part of two decades. The power he drew from the poor was summed up in the Creole name he gave his political movement — Lavalas, a cleansing torrent. No one in modern times has rallied the masses as Aristide has — nor sent such fear through the ranks of the well-to-do.
“I can't think of anyone who has inspired so much love and so much hate at the same time,” Marleine Bastien, a Haitian-American activist in Miami, says.
But during his unfinished second presidency from 2001 to Feb. 29, 2004, many working- and middle-class Haitians — who had also once supported him — turned away from him. “The Lavalas government committed many crimes; there was corruption and summary executions,” says Pierre Esperance, director of the Haiti-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights.
Conclusive proof that the Aristide government had people killed has not been produced. However, before he took office, legendary radio journalist and democracy activist Jean Dominique and a radio station guard were assassinated in April 2000. Amnesty International, which said the killings marked “the beginning of a steep decline in the respect for human rights in Haiti,” criticized the Aristide government for not investigating the assassination. Several investigative judges were threatened into resigning from the case, and the bodyguard for Dominique's widow, Michële Montas, was killed during a 2002 attack on Montas.
In the years that followed, the rector of the State University of Haiti had both legs broken by a pro-government gang that broke up an anti-Aristide demonstration in December, 2003.
In 2001, another radio journalist, Brignol Lindor, who was considered sympathetic to Aristide's opposition, was killed, and, in January 2003, so were two university students involved in anti-government demonstrations. Human-rights organizations also reported acts of violence and intimidation by Lavalas supporters and government employees.
Aristide was a Roman Catholic priest when he rose to prominence as a leader of the Ti Legliz (Creole for “little church”) movement of the 1980s. Ti Legliz was Haiti's version of “Liberation Theology,” whose call to challenge authority (and, by extension, the United States) on behalf of the downtrodden swept through the Americas beginning in the 1960s. Ti Legliz was also part of the growing opposition to the dictatorship of Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier and his enforcers — the army and paramilitaries known as Tontons Macoutes. The fearsome tontons were named after the bogeymen of Haitian folklore who were said to carry straw bags — macoutes — into which they stuffed children. Aristide barely survived three assassination attempts during the end of the Duvalier dynasty and the short-lived military regimes that followed.
Short and slender, Aristide is known in Haiti as Titid — “little guy.” In interviews and small meetings, he speaks softly and in gentle tones, even when responding to harsh attacks with tough language of his own.
At first, Aristide tried appealing to the conscience of Haiti's privileged class. “Go to your parents tonight, as you sit at your nice dinner table, and ask them if they couldn't please share just a little bit of all that you have with the poor people of Haiti,” he said in French during a TV appearance on Feb. 8, 2001, the day after starting his second term. “And if they say 'yes,' then give them a kiss, and say that it is from Titid.”
Before crowds of poor Haitians, however, another side of Aristide emerges — revolutionary firebrand. “Burn tires, burn tires, we have no other arms, until we get a revolutionary popular government!” he exhorted on July 14, 1987, when a military regime was trying to block elections.
In a speech four years later, however, his talk of burning tires proved fateful. “What a beautiful tool! What a beautiful instrument! . . . It has a good smell, wherever you go you want to inhale it.” Haitians grasped right away that he was condoning “necklacing,” the practice initiated during anti-apartheid protests in South Africa in which flaming tires are put around the necks of political enemies like ex-macoutes and, by implication, the rich. When Aristide gave that speech on Sept. 27, 1991, he was seven months into his first term as president. Three days later the Haitian military deposed him.
Aristide spent the next three years in Washington, where he came to personify a deep split over U.S. policy. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., the conservative icon, called him a “psychopath.” The Clinton administration, with reservations, sent 20,000 troops to Haiti in 1994 to help restore Aristide to his position as the country's elected president. Although Helms retired in 2002, his foreign affairs aide Roger Noriega is now assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and the administration's top policymaker on Haiti.
Noriega has taken a more measured tone than Helms, but he has made it clear that the Bush administration had no use for the Haitian president. The 1994 restoration of Aristide to power was a “complete failure due to [his] inability and lack of willingness to move the country along a democratic path,” Noriega said in 2003.
By then, Aristide had started a second term as president, with the United States and other countries questioning the validity of the elections that put him back in power.
With both of his five-year presidential terms interrupted, Aristide served a total of only about five years. During that time, Haiti has seen some improvements. School enrollment doubled to 1.6 million during the five years following Aristide's 1994 return to Haiti, child mortality fell from 150 per 1,000 children under age 5 in 1990 to 123 per 1,000 in 2002, and infant immunizations against measles rose from 31 percent of the baby population in 1990 to 53 percent in 2002.
Nevertheless, Haiti made fewer strides than it could have, the World Bank and other development institutions concluded. Among other criticisms, they say Aristide did not build strong government agencies that could efficiently manage development funds. “The two administrations of President Aristide . . . were blighted by infighting, corruption, weak institutions and poor political and economic governance,” the World Bank concluded after his departure in 2004.
In 2002, a year into Aristide's second term, the U.S. Agency for International Development paid $1.2 million to the International Republican Institute (IRI) — a nonprofit organization formally unconnected to the Republican Party — to train Haitian political activists on “democratic political party training and development.” The project was widely perceived as designed to build opposition to Lavalas. In IRI's earlier work in Haiti, says Director James Morrell of the Washington-based anti-Aristide advocacy group the Haiti Democracy Project, the institute organized a conference of Haitian political parties that contributed a couple of years later to the emergence of the primary anti-Aristide political coalition.
Aristide supporters say his real opposition was, in the words of economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, “a coterie of rich Haitians linked to the preceding Duvalier regime and former (and perhaps current) CIA operatives.” However, after Aristide was forced to leave Haiti in February 2004, Noriega denied that uniformed ex-Haitian army troops who had instigated an armed insurgency against him had received U.S. help, as critics suspected.
Richard Morse, an American who runs the legendary Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince and has lived in the city for 20 years, rejects the U.S.-plot conspiracy theory. The ex-soldiers were “not the main impetus,” he says, although they accelerated the process. “By the time Aristide left, the demonstrations in Port-au-Prince were at 150,000 people-200,000 people, once or twice a week. That means that you've lost it.”
Aristide had enough political strength, Morse says, to have surrounded the National Palace with supporters — but he didn't. Though Aristide later called his departure a U.S. “kidnapping,” he hinted in one interview that Morse's perception might have been correct: “Thousands of people were going to be killed . . . so that night I did my best to avoid bloodshed.”
Alex Dupuy, a Haitian-born sociologist at Wesleyan University, condemns what he called the coup d'ètat against Aristide, while conceding that Aristide's alliance with slum gangs to maintain power during his second term meant “he no longer represented the interests of the majority of Haitians as he tried to do in his first administration.”
Aristide simply wasn't cut out to be president, concludes Miami-based activist Bastien. He dug his own political grave by scaring better-off Haitians, she says, instead of negotiating with them. “I think he could have done so much more for the masses as an activist.”
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