Global Policy Forum

By Bob Shacochis

In 1995, I spoke with a Haitian-American woman in Miami who had recently enjoyed a lucrative tenure as translator for the American high command in Port-au-Prince during the early months of its military intervention, which had restored Haiti's first democratically elected President to the national palace. "What will happen when the American troops finally go home?" I wondered out loud to the well-educated linguist, the daughter of one of Haiti's elite families. Her horrific vision of the future, which she seemed to energetically embrace, shocked me. "Everything will be fire, ashes and blood," she said, because the Haitian people would at long last be free to unleash the revolution that she believed the Americans had denied them throughout the 20th century. The woman's prophecy echoed in my ears last week when it was reported that the Clinton Administration plans to withdraw the last American troops from Haiti at the end of this year.

At a dinner at the United States Ambassador's residence in Port-au-Prince last winter, I listened to matter-of-fact table chatter about how the Administration had ceased calling Haiti a foreign policy success. True, as President Clinton has asserted, Haiti saw its first peaceful democratic transition of power from one chief of state to another in 1996, when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, unable to succeed himself, passed power to René Préval. And although sporadic political violence continues, the Haitian people are free of the state-sponsored terrorism that visited such misery on them for decades.

But by virtually every other measure, Haiti is far worse off than it was before the 1994 intervention. The country has stumbled backward into a vacuum, virtually without a functioning government. President Préval dissolved an intractable Parliament in January at the end of its constitutional term. Lavalas, the loose grass-roots coalition that brought Mr. Aristide to power in 1990, has broken up into several groups warring over every issue imaginable. Wealth was not redistributed during the chaotic early months of the invasion, but weapons were. Street crime is commonplace. Cocaine flows into the United States through the island's covert pipelines. The Haitian national police are better known for corruption, civil rights violations and trigger-happy tactics than preserving law and order. The justice system is as defunct now as it was in the days of the tyrants.

The destruction of Haiti's ecology has only gotten worse, its mountains eroded to bedrock, its coral reefs suffocated with topsoil, its aquifer on the verge of drying up. Its economy is moribund, an endless line of old women on the side of the road hawking identical pyramids of oranges to customers who never come. What went wrong? Setting aside for the moment the culpability of the Haitian leadership, Washington's policymakers might acknowledge that in vitro democratization is a risky procedure. Haitian democracy, born prematurely, will not survive without a genuine multiparty system, which won't exist without a secure middle class, which can't evolve without a viable economy, which won't exist without credible leadership strong and wise enough to wrench the country out of its tailspin.

The transition to mature democracy can't be effected overnight, and perhaps not even in a single generation. But Haiti's transition to democracy has been especially rocky. Mr. Aristide was on the job only seven months after his 1990 election. Overthrown in a coup, he spent the next three years in exile. The United States restored him to office, on the condition that he serve only the rest of his five-year term, a mere 14 months. Mr. Aristide returned to a debilitated administrative and physical infrastructure -- even the toilet in his office had been smashed by the previous regime. His Government was so unorganized that it could barely spend the emergency aid donated by the United States, France and other countries.

To make matters worse, in the months after the United States invasion of Haiti, the American military was ordered to tell its troops that Fraph, the country's most dreaded paramilitary group, was actually a legitimate political opposition party. Now, the United States Government is almost certainly going to have to accommodate itself to five more years of the mercurial Mr. Aristide, whom voters will almost certainly return to power in elections in 2000. Whether Mr. Aristide might be a great leader of his people is yet to be determined. But Haiti, which seems to have no bottom to its troubles, cannot be ruled by a weak leader. If the United States maneuvers, as it has in the past, to undermine the Haitian President's power in the wrongheaded belief that a multiparty system is indeed just around the corner, then Mr. Aristide is doomed -- again -- to failure.

The American Government and the Haitian people need to grant Mr. Aristide the ideological space to make hard decisions. Haiti is going nowhere without skilled, conscientious and trustworthy dealmakers. Mistakes will be made, but it's time to stop the petulant, hypocritical handwringing about what Mr. Aristide does or doesn't do. Perhaps Mr. Aristide will engineer a confluence of selfless patriotism among the country's bickering factions, and Haiti will inch forward into the light. Perhaps not.

But now that the Clinton Administration has decided to recall the troops before the country's elections, Haitians and Americans alike should brace themselves for the fire and ashes scenario -- three parts anarchy and one part civil war -- in which Haiti may well find its bottom. If that happens, I doubt Americans will have the will to stop it. Nor should we. Haiti, Graham Greene wrote, deserves a chance to be ruled by its heroes. That chance has come, and it is fast dwindling. Given the breach of faith, the heroes must step forward. Bob Shacochis is the author of the "Immaculate Invasion," an account of American military intervention in Haiti.