Haiti’s Hope

Today will be as much of a banner day as war-riven Haiti can hope for. Not only does it mark the 20th anniversary of the end of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s dictatorship, but Haitians have the opportunity to go to the polls for the best shot they’ve had in years at a fair election. It won’t be the most elegant election; dozens of candidates from dozens of parties are vying for the presidency and a run-off seems certain, while in order to cast ballots voters will have to brave violent streets. But hundreds of thousands of identification cards have been issued, voter rolls have been prepared, ballots have been printed and distributed to polling places, and 10,000 police officers and United Nations troops will seek to keep the peace.For Haiti, which has not experienced a period of stable, democratic government for 200 years, this marks progress. Yet one would never know the news today was good if you were reading the New York Times, which issued on January 29, under the headline “Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos,” a dispatch suggesting the Bush administration spent its early years allowing an independent prodemocracy group run by Republicans to subvert its official policy. The report, on the travails of a former American ambassador to Haiti, Brian Dean Curran, suggests that the International Republican Institute, and especially one of its one-time operatives, Stanley Lucas, discouraged opposition groups from negotiating with the then-president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, precipitating Mr. Aristide’s violent overthrow and flight into exile. This supposedly had the effect of plunging Haiti into new depths of chaos.The thing to mark about this kind of Aristide apologism is that it’s hard to find anyone to credit the theory other than Mr. Curran or friends of the deposed despot. The former assistant secretary of state who supervised Mr. Curran’s work in Haiti, Otto Reich, disputes the Times suggestion that the Bush administration was split in respect of Haiti, with Secretary Powell on one side and Mr. Reich – and later Mr. Reich’s successor, Roger Noriega – on the other. He’d told the Times, “There was a change in policy that was perhaps not well perceived by some people in the embassy. We wanted to change, to give the Haitians an opportunity to choose a democratic leader.” The Times article quotes Secretary Powell, as saying “that the American policy in Haiti was what Mr. Curran believed it to be,” implying that the I.R.I. was acting contrary to that official policy. However, in an as-yet unpublished letter to the editor of the Times, the president of the I.R.I., Lorne Craner, reports that Mr. Powell told one of the Times reporters, Walt Bogdanich, that he “didn’t accept [the] view that he differed with his Assistant Secretaries over Haiti policy.”The broader issue is important. In the two years since Mr. Aristide was forced out of office, he has inspired an odd sort of reverence from some Americans, such as Senators Boxer and Dodd and Mr. Curran. Under this theory, Mr. Aristide had been democratically elected and it was destabilizing for an American administration, with or without the help of the I.R.I., to either allow or encourage a chain of events that led to his ouster. But the truth is quite the contrary. Mr. Aristide’s rule was marked by corruption and terrible violence. His own ouster was eventually orchestrated in large part by a violent gang known as the Cannibal Army that Mr. Aristide himself had encouraged and that came to be run by the brother of a drug runner whose murder Mr. Aristide was said to have ordered.The interim Haitian government’s ambassador to America, Raymond Joseph, who is on leave from the editorship of the Haiti Observateur in New York and a column in The New York Sun, told us in response to the Times article, “Mr. Aristide himself put Haiti in chaos,” not the efforts of any American aid worker or administration official. It was understood, albeit to different degrees, by both the Clinton and Bush administrations that Mr. Aristide was not a positive force in Haiti. The Bush administration was decidedly less willing to humor him with endless rounds of negotiations with opponents who just didn’t trust him to deal fairly. And as opposition mounted, Mr. Bush was not willing to put American troops in danger to defend a dishonest, undemocratic dictator.The alternative – allowing an armed rebellion to force Mr. Aristide into exile – wasn’t perfect but, as Mr. Reich noted to us, “the decision was between several bad options.” The investigations editor of the Times, Matt Purdy, defended his reporters’ work in an e-mail yesterday, saying it “is an accurate and balanced portrait of what they learned from American government documents and interviews with dozens of participants in Haiti and the United States, including the former Secretary of State, Colin Powell.” Maybe I.R.I.’s letter will be in the Times this morning – or not. The big news today is not the disgruntlement of a former ambassador. It is that the departure of Mr. Aristide has given Haiti the opportunity to start the long process of picking itself up. If it works it will be a victory not only for Haiti but for the Bush administration’s faith in democracy.

Haiti’s Hope

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