WORLD POLICY JOURNAL

BOOKS: Volume XXI,  No 1, Spring 2004	Print
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Haiti: So Many Missteps
Michele Wucker*

This was to have been a year of celebration for Haiti. It is the bicentennial of the world’s first free black republic, created on January 1, 1804, when former Haitian slaves routed the mighty Napoleon Bona-parte’s troops. This coming October 15 also will mark the tenth anniversary of the defeat of the military regime that had toppled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and of his triumphant return to Haiti with international help. Instead, it is a time of anguish, of dashed hopes for a once-beloved leader, of carnage, recrimination and revenge, of the return to Haiti of troops from its former occupiers, the United States and France, and of the glaring recognition of how badly Washington and the international community have failed Haiti. All this cruelly coincides with America’s election year preoccupations, and with the Bush administration’s skittishness about a flood of Caribbean refugees heading toward Florida.

In February, a photograph in the New York Times showed Haitians on the docks of Port-au-Prince jeering at a man and a little girl who just had been repatriated by the U.S. Coast Guard. Those refugees, who hadfled violence and desperation only to be sucked back into it and then mocked for seeking a better life, seemed to be an emblem of Haiti itself.

When Aristide was overthrown in a military coup in September 1991, not even a year after he became Haiti’s first freely elected president, condemnation was universal—by the United Nations, the Organization of American States (OAS), and human rights groups everywhere. The United Nations and the OAS imposed oil and arms embargoes, trade sanctions followed, and envoys and mediators shuttled to and from Port-au-Prince, but the measures did less to intimidate the de facto regime than to further impoverish the country’s already destitute population. At one point of low comedy in the effort to return Aristide to power, the Clinton administration, fearful of domestic backlash, pulled out its putative peacekeepers when dockside rioters threatened a round of grapeshot.

When President Aristide was flown into exile for the second time this February 29, it was hard to say that he would be sorely missed. Once seen as a long-sought source of hope for Haiti, the embattled former priest had steadily alienated most of the people who once believed in him. Even those who protested the removal of a (more or less) democratically elected leader would be hard-pressed to argue that Aristide was a shining example of democracy—and some made a point of saying so.

However, many members of Haiti’s intransigent opposition, particularly the Democratic Convergence, can hardly be said to have made a genuine effort to reach a settlement that would have allowed a transfer of power via elections instead of guns. Nor could the rebel leaders, who plotted against Aristide from the neighboring Dominican Republic and then returned to bring him down, be described as Boy Scouts. Louis-Jodel Chamblain allegedly ran death squads in the 1980s, later was a key member of the FRAPH paramilitary group during the 1991–94 military regime, and has been implicated in the high-profile political murders of Justice Minister Guy Malary and businessman/activist Antoine Izmery and in the infamous April 1994 Raboteau massacre of as many as 50 opponents of the military government. His accomplice, Guy Philippe, a former Aristide ally, has been accused by international observers of ordering executions of suspected gang members in the late 1990s.¹

Despite the rebel leaders’ notoriety, Aristide could not muster enough support at home or abroad to prevent a ragtag band of not more than 200 rebels from overcoming the government in northern areas in a matter of weeks. As in other nations that have emerged from long dictatorships, many citizens appear to be choosing authoritarian order over democratic chaos. Indeed, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the “president for life” who was overthrown in 1986, recently announced from France that he would like to return to Haiti, an idea that many of Aristide’s opponents have entertained since a constitutional ban on Duvalierists holding office expired.

Yet to focus solely on Aristide’s lapses and Baby Doc’s possible aspirations would be not only a misplaced effort but ultimately damaging. Washington’s obsession with one leader’s personality, rather than Haiti’s need to build functioning institutions, was an essential part of what ultimately undid the country’s fragile democracy. This has created a dangerously polarized nation and set major obstacles in the way of a better future for the country.

Just as damaging to Haiti has been the baleful role of U.S. partisan politics. Aristide has been either demonized or lionized in the United States. Democrats and Republicans share blame for contributing to Haiti’s democratic breakdown to a point where it became easier for both to stand aside rather than fight to keep a questionable leader in power. “If Aristide was forced out, it was not at the end of an American gun,” J. Brian Atwood, a former U.S.

Agency for International Development administrator, wrote recently. “He was instead the victim of longstanding American neglect.”²

Aristide was not the sole author of his transformation from good guy to bad. What ultimately doomed his government was a combination of mistakes that boiled down to too much attention on the wrong issues and too little attention on the right ones, and burdening nascent political institutions with impossible goals that ordained their failure. The government failed to re-channel ex-army members—and future armed gang members—into useful tasks instead of troublemaking; it addressed problems only when it was too late to fix them instead of when they surfaced. Yet it is essential to add that the international failure to support Haiti after Aristide returned to power created pressures that any leader would have had a hard time surviving. If the international system is to succeed in helping Haiti move toward democracy, it must not repeat these mistakes.

Perhaps the saddest part of Haiti’s recent history is the sheer number of wrong decisions taken inside and outside Haiti. Each failure made it less likely that the Aristide era would end successfully. One cannot forget the hope and joy that surrounded Aristide’s election as president on December 16, 1990, in Haiti’s first-ever democratic elections. In Port-au-Prince, people felt free to walk the streets at night; in New York, Haitian émigrés finally believed their dream of returning home might come true. Today, Aristide’s supporters are that much angrier for having lost that brief hope than they might have been had they never experienced it.

When Aristide took office on February 7, 1991—the anniversary of Haiti’s 1986 liberation from three decades of rule by the Duvalier dynasty—the end of the Cold War was all too recent. Washington viewed his election more in terms of ideology than in light of the fact that this country, so bereft of any reason for hope, finally had one. Though his economic policies were more conservative than most analysts acknowledged, he alarmed Haiti’s wealthy, powerful elites by failing to ease their fears that he would turn throngs of his poor supporters against them. And it soon became apparent that his temperament was far more suited to being in the opposition than to governing.

Aristide also alienated a third crucial actor: the government of the Dominican Republic, the Spanish-speaking nation with which Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola. One of his first acts once he took office was to roundly criticize his octogenarian, ironfisted Dominican counterpart, President Joaquín Balaguer, for the way Haitian migrants were treated. In return, Balaguer deported thousands of Haitians, on the correct and cynical assumption that this would destabilize Haiti by inundating it with people clamoring for houses and jobs. Then he looked the other way as Haitian militants plotted the September 30 coup that sent Aristide into exile for the first time in 1991. After the coup, Balaguer overtly flouted the international embargo that was intended to drive out Haiti’s military government—underscoring just how important Santo Domingo can be to any policy with respect to Haiti.

By the time the United States returned Aristide to power three years later, the embargo had left most of Haiti’s 8 million people significantly poorer. At first, international donors offered money to help the country get back on its feet. Yet it quickly became apparent that the money was not enough to undo the damage the embargo had done or to keep Haiti from slipping further into poverty.

Allow Democracy to Work

As if the political challenges besetting Aristide upon his return were not already sufficiently daunting, his international backers pressured him to carry out difficult economic reforms. They then left him without enough financial resources to make good on his pledges to reduce poverty and thus rebuild the political capital he had lost in the attempt.

The measures that international lenders, including the International Monetary Fund, demanded of Haiti in 1995—privatization of important state enterprises, ending fuel subsidies, boosting tax collection, and reducing the government payroll by as much as 52,000 employees—were similar to those applied in other Latin American countries in the 1990s. However useful they were in reducing inflation and redirecting government resources from political patronage to social services, such measures proved to be politically disabling even in much stronger democracies.

For Haiti, the combination was lethal. In 1991, Aristide—despite his “leftist” label—had lifted foreign exchange controls, opened the economy to foreign investment, and fired workers in state enterprises. This naturally alienated the discharged workers, many of whom had gotten their jobs under the Duvalier regime. In 1994, the issue of firing state workers proved even more contentious because three years of economic embargo had further added to jobless rolls. Nevertheless, Aristide and his prime minister, Smarck Michel, mounted a concerted campaign to secure parliamentary approval of the reforms. In the process, they squandered precious political goodwill, especially on the extremely contentious issue of privatization. Michel eventually resigned in September 1995, after widespread protests over his announcement of plans to sell the state-owned flour and cement companies, and Haiti went the next 18 months without a prime minister. Not surprisingly, Haiti’s entire privatization program was delayed, but international funders nevertheless insisted on its resumption before promising further financial aid.

This external pressure undermined Haiti’s democracy by forcing a fractious Parliament and a lame-duck government— the Haitian constitution bars consecutive presidential terms—to wrestle with extremely difficult issues. (In hindsight, it is particularly clear that extending Aristide’s term to make up for his three years in exile, which his international backers opposed, would have given his government a better chance at a viable relationship with Parliament.) The pressure was tantamount to extortion. A far better option would have been to work with Haitian legislators to come up with alternative plans to fight corruption and make the state enterprises profitable, while also delaying the social costs of downsizing until the government could withstand them.

It also sent a negative message about the American idea of democracy: that Haitian lawmakers (and by extension, all voters) would not be allowed to come to decisions on their own. After this experience, Haitians can hardly be blamed for their cynicism about high-minded lectures from Washington. Haiti would have been far better off if its institutions had been allowed to work, even though they did not follow the dictates of the United States.

Too Little, Too Late

In February 1996, Aristide handed over the presidency to his newly elected ally, René Préval, a weak leader who was seen as a stand-in but who nevertheless had to continue to battle for Washington-backed economic reforms. Not to have done so would have been to risk the precious foreign aid that was absolutely vital to the recovery of a country that had lost many of its export partners during the 1991–94 embargo and urgently needed investment to rebuild roads and long-neglected infrastructure crucial to economic recovery.

As Haiti’s government continued to spend its precious political capital to meet international priorities, the country slipped from the news and out of international aid budgets, especially after the remaining contingent of U.S. peacekeepers, who had arrived when Aristide returned in 1994, left in 1996. In 1995, the first full year after Aristide’s return, Haiti received $730 million from all international donors combined, a sum that represented more than 10 percent of the country’s GDP, yet barely began to address Haiti’s staggering needs. Within two years, however, total international aid had slumped, averaging just under $182 million annually from 1997 through 2002.

Some of that money went to pay interest on government debt and to support the balance of payments; other funds went to train a new police force, support elections, and provide food and short-term jobs. But little was directed toward long-term investments in health care, education, and infrastructure. (Indeed, the road between the capital, Port-au-Prince, and Cap-Haitian in the north, has deteriorated so much that a trip that took under five hours by public transport in 1988 now takes seven hours by car.)

U.S. aid to the war-torn Balkan countries across the Atlantic was remarkably higher than that earmarked for a near neighbor in which we had a direct interest—not least in preventing a flood of refugees from reaching our shores and not to speak of the presence of a million Haitian Americans concentrated in Miami, New York, and Boston. A recent RAND study illustrates just how far early post-coup aid to Haiti fell below levels needed in postconflict situations. “Per capita, Bosnia received five times more postconflict reconstruction assistance from the United States than did Haiti. Kosovo received ten times more U.S. aid,” the study notes. Total post-coup assistance to Haiti from governments and private sources, like remittances from family members abroad, averaged $74 per person annually. This amount is high compared to Haiti’s per capita income of roughly $360, but low in terms of the country’s needs. The RAND report added that in Bosnia, large-scale external aid kept flowing even when lawmakers in Sarajevo, like their colleagues in Port-au-Prince, resisted economic reforms.³

How much aid would have been “enough” to head off the current crisis is hard to say. If, however, aid to Haiti had been raised to the same per capita level as aid to Bosnia, total international assistance in the crucial postconflict years would have been roughly $3 billion annually, including $500 million in remittances and $2.5 billion from governments, either directly or through multilateral lending institutions. (Remittances have since risen to nearly $1 billion annually.) Clearly, what was provided to Haiti fell far short of what the Balkans received. Yet, to be fair, the Aristide government played a role in making international funders leery. From the earliest days after his return to power, Haitians began to protest that money meant to combat poverty was being used for corrupt purposes.

Aid to Haiti dropped markedly in 2000 because of irregularities in its long-delayed parliamentary elections. Washington cut off aid to the Aristide government but continued to fund Haitian nongovernmental organizations through the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID disbursed $80 million in fiscal 2000, $67 million in 2001, $54 million in 2002, and $71 million in 2003. The European Union and multilateral lending institutions likewise froze funds in 2000, all told holding up approximately $500 million in promised aid.

When Aristide was elected to a second presidential term in November 2000, he stepped back into a nearly impossible situation: a cash-strapped government and rising political opposition not only from his earlier opponents but also from disgruntled former supporters. The result of the aid squeeze was twofold. First, it undermined Aristide’s ability to make good on promises to improve life for the poor by providing health care, education, and jobs. Second, no economic alternatives existed for the former police and army members who were permitted to keep their guns when Aristide disbanded the armed forces to remove the threat of a military takeover. As the economy worsened and jobs failed to materialize, the threat from this quarter reasserted itself, prompting Aristide to arm street gangs to protect himself and intimidate opponents. Many gang members—known as chimères, after the Greek monster, and evoking the feared Ton-tons Macoutes of the Duvalier era—told reporters after Aristide’s second ouster that they would have preferred real jobs.

These factors combined to create a systemic and pervasive level of violence. By the time the Inter-American Development Bank began releasing some frozen funds in mid-2003, it was too late to save Haiti’s democracy. Robert Maguire, the doggedly level-headed director of the Haiti Project at Trinity College in Washington, D.C., describes the dynamic bluntly: “With fewer and fewer resources to manage, the government was left to manage scarcity and became increasingly desperate and corrupt. In Haiti’s political reality, managing scarcity means managing power, with equally predictable results.”⁴

Elections Need Nurturing

A combination of problems undermined the May 2000 parliamentary elections, which had been postponed for so long that members’ terms had expired in January 1999 and which, by many accounts, hastened Aristide’s second untimely exit. The long delay in the midterm balloting led President Préval to dissolve the legislative body and rule by decree. After repeated delays, Haitians took to the streets to demand elections.

By early 2000, Washington was impatient for elections to take place, not least because the Haitian presidential election was scheduled for later in the year but also because of the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Unfortunately, the Clinton administration failed to mobilize the necessary international effort to ensure that the Haitian elections would be free and fair. Leaders of the Haitian-American community argued that more time was needed so voter rolls could be checked and arrangements for security at the polling places and a supervised vote count could be put in place. But nervous U.S. officials pushed for immediate elections. In this case, bad elections turned out to be possibly worse than no elections. In the absence of international support, the flawed elections became a litmus test that Haiti was bound to fail.

In the weeks before the vote, support for “democracy building” (and for education and agricultural programs) evaporated when Sen. Jesse Helms cut off more than $30 million in U.S. aid to Haiti over a commercial dispute involving an American-owned rice company. Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, harbored an almost visceral contempt for Aristide based on both ideology and personality. Unfortunately for Haiti, the Clinton administration, leery of drawing too much attention to its failed nation-building attempt in Haiti in a U.S. election year, showed little heart in opposing Helms, and so the ban stood.

The May 21 vote proved a disaster. Ballots and boxes disappeared from polling stations. The Provisional Electoral Council threw out the votes for the least-popular Senate candidates and declared first-round winners from Aristide’s Lavalas Family Party, although they had not technically won the majority required. Léon Manus, head of the electoral commission, was forced into exile when he objected. And 35 opposition activists and candidates were arrested when postelection protests turned violent. Ironically, observers from the Organization of American States reported that the irregularities would not have affected the final outcome significantly—suggesting that the strong-arming had been unnecessary.

By August, OAS secretary general César Gaviria and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights were expressing worry about Haiti’s political climate. The commission, glumly summing up the deteriorating situation, said: “There seems to be no political consensus on how to consolidate the country’s nascent democracy.” Elections alone do not make a democracy—a key lesson that still eludes nation builders—but unless a country holds credible elections there is no chance at all for democracy to succeed.

The United States spent $50 million to finance the OAS, National Democratic Institute, International Republican Institute, and Carter Center missions that observed, advised, and mediated the 1987, 1990, and 1995 presidential and 1997 parliamentary elections.⁵ The 1987 election, held only a year after Baby Doc’s departure and the country had barely had time to recover from decades of dictatorship, was aborted when gunmen massacred voters. The 1990 presidential election, by contrast, was a credible exercise, by Haitian standards remarkably free of violence. Aristide won in a landslide. Similarly, the 1995 presidential election in which Préval was elected, succeeding Aristide, went comparatively smoothly.

This relative success served as confirmation that international involvement in Haiti was “working.” Yet it also may have contributed to the lackadaisical attitude toward the need for overall economic aid, and to the lack of foresight that could have helped avert the problems that plagued the 2000 parliamentary elections and led to the cutoff of international aid that would be the beginning of the end for Aristide. The botched 2000 parliamentary elections took place only six months before the presidential election on November 26. Voter turnout in the presidential race—between 5 and 15 percent of the population—was anemic, but Aristide easily won a second term. The opposition boycotted that election, which similarly was marked by intimidation tactics on the part of Lavalas. And despite the cutoff of foreign aid, neither Préval nor Aristide ordered new parliamentary elections.

Two years later, Aristide was still resisting living up to his commitments to international organizations to name a credible electoral commission, end the violent attacks against political opponents, and prosecute those guilty of such attacks. Nearly the entire roster of international human rights groups roundly condemned Aristide for the political violence.⁶ The case that most dramatically exemplified the ongoing abuses was the April 2000 killing of the beloved Haïti Inter Radio journalist, Jean Dominique, a former Aristide supporter turned critic.⁷ Aristide persistently refused to bring the killers to justice or even identify them, and he spurned a gesture by the OAS in September 2002 to drop its previous insistence that he come to an electoral agreement with the opposition Democratic Convergence coalition as a condition for unfreezing international aid. In December 2002, armed gunmen attacked Michèle Montas, Dominique’s widow, and killed her bodyguard. After her husband’s murder, she had bravely resumed broadcasts with the same “Bonjour, Jean,” greeting that she had used when he was alive and they broadcast together. But with other staff members’ lives now at risk, she closed Haïti Inter and left the country.

A Multilateral Approach

If Aristide had been a right-wing leader, his human rights record would have elicited howls of indignation from many of the organizations and individuals on the political left who are now protesting his most recent overthrow yet conveniently sidestepping the issue of his egregious abuses of power. Had Washington funded such a government elsewhere, these groups would have protested. The circumstances thus muddied the question, Was it a bad thing to have allowed the removal of a democratic leader? “Put abstractly, obviously yes. Put in the concrete of Haiti, in this case, perhaps less so,” Luigi Einaudi, the second-in-command at the Organization of American States and the body’s Haiti point man, told the Associated Press.⁸

Whatever action the United States takes in Haiti is emotionally charged, and its role in the latest crisis means less attention is given to the more fundamental question: what can be done to help Haiti? Few cases offer a better argument for a multilateral approach, allowing other countries to deflect some of the political heat that change creates. In this case, France and Canada both have important roles to play.

France has obvious longstanding interests in Haiti and thus should be a key partner. The French ruled Haiti as a colony until Haitians expelled them in 1804 after a 12-year revolution so costly that it forced France to sell Louisiana to the United States. France has since hosted many Haitians, from the revolutionary hero, Toussaint L’Ouverture, who died in a French prison, to the former dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Wealthy Haitians have long sent their children to France for their studies. Before the latest crisis, there were about 2,000 French citizens living in Haiti.

In April 2003, Haiti asked France to pay $21.7 billion to compensate it for the 90 million francs (with interest) that Haiti had paid France in the nineteenth century. This was the price for French recognition of Haiti’s independence, an unusual case of the victor in a conflict paying reparations. Replying to the 2003 demand, French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin replied that France had already paid Haiti 200 million euros as its share of a 2 billion euro EU aid package. Haitian observers have suggested that France should consider a significant contribution to Haiti’s stability as a continuing repayment of its colonial debt. In the wake of Aristide’s departure, France was among the first nations to commit peacekeepers, sending an initial contingent of 600 soldiers.

With its French-speaking population, Canada is also an obvious partner, one with the advantage of proximity. Home to more than 150,000 Haitians as well as other Caribbean immigrants, Canada has strong ties to CARICOM (comprising 15 Caribbean nations), which tried to broker a compromise that would have allowed Aristide to remain in office. It helped train Haitian police from 1994 to 2001, and sent $200 million in aid during this same period. It has 800 military personnel in Haiti helping with the current peacekeeping effort.

Finally, any policy toward Haiti must consider its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, which historically has used its geographic proximity to undermine Haitian governments. The several hundred thousand Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic are a longstanding sore point in bilateral relations, and they have often been used as pawns in power struggles. In the past, tensions between the two countries have risen whenever either nation has faced an economic or political crisis, especially when their leaders’ personalities clashed, as happened under the Aristide government. In the past decade, however, a new generation of Dominican leaders has taken the lead in seeking funds for joint development projects. The Dominican Republic is the first place refugees flee when violence breaks out in Haiti. Although wealthier by comparison, it still is a developing country that does not have the resources to support a huge influx of political or economic refugees. Should Dominicans feel they are being inundated, the recent thaw in the relationship between the two countries could lead Santo Domingo to scapegoat Haitian immigrants and meddle in Port-au-Prince for political gain, to the detriment of both nations.

How to Move Forward

Looking back over the sorry record of the United States and other international actors across the full range of ideologies in Haiti, it is clear that Washington’s approach to this persistent problem needs to be revised.

First, Haiti ought to become a bipartisan priority. To this end, policymaking toward Haiti should be depoliticized as much as possible. This will be difficult in a presidential election year. One way to overcome the political obstacles would for Congress to establish a standing nonpartisan committee to design and monitor a multiyear aid commitment to Haiti.

Second, the United States must provide enough aid to give Haiti’s new government a fighting chance and reduce the need for Haitians to turn to alternate sources of income, like the narcotrafficking that characterized the last decade. It should give Haitians a say in how such aid is spent and make the recipients accountable for where the money goes. Aid should be earmarked for development and poverty reduction, jobs, health care, and education. Put Haitians, including former combatants, to work rebuilding roads, ports, hospitals, and schools. Individual governments and multilateral lending institutions should forgive Haiti’s $1.2 billion in international debt and provide future monies in the form of grants, not loans. At the same time, donors must ensure accountability by regular monitoring of spending, training Haitians in auditing and accounting, and involving them in making public any mismanagement. In addition, the Dominican Republic should be involved in some economic development projects to cement a constructive relationship between the two neighbors.

Third, rebuilding Haiti’s government must focus not on individual leaders but on the creation of functioning legislative and judicial institutions. Robert Maguire has recommended instituting a proportional representation system that would ensure that minority parties get seats in Parliament and thus increase political participation and stimulate the development of civil society. Haiti must also bring to light past human rights abuses by convening a truth and reconciliation commission with the power to grant amnesty in exchange for information and contrition. Along these lines, a never-released report of abuses following the 1991–94 coup should be made public.

Fourth, justice demands changing U.S. policy toward Haitian refugees, which since December 2001 has mandated that Haitian asylum applicants be detained, unlike applicants from other countries, who typically are paroled. Detainees have limited access to lawyers and their requests for asylum are often summarily denied. Haitian “boat people,” including the more than 1,000 intercepted in February, are being automatically repatriated. The dozens of Haitians still in U.S. detention centers should be paroledand given a chance to tell their stories, and future asylum applicants also should receive fair hearings.

Above all, the United States needs to encourage Haiti’s democracy to develop by allowing it to work. It should help the Haitian government set realistic goals and provide the support that will enable it to achieve them, but it should not try to micromanage Haiti’s efforts. And U.S. policy-makers, whether on the right or on the left, should base their assessments of Haiti’s leaders on their governing and human rights records, not on whether they are willing to represent political dogma from one end or the other of the political spectrum._•