Review of a Review: Answering recent distortions
March 12, 2003
Kim IvesIt is hard to know where to begin in dissecting Peter Dailey's pair of articles, "The Fall of the House of Aristide" and "Haiti's Betrayal" in the March 13 and March 27, 2003, issues of the New York Review of Books. Where do you start with an analyst who purports to be progressive but then portrays Washington's pressure on Haiti as that of the "international community," who sympathizes with "international lenders" who think that "Haiti today seems increasingly indistinguishable from any other third-world sinkhole," and who refers to anti-imperialist remarks as "anti-Americanism"?
Although he would have us believe he is an expert in Haitian affairs, Dailey mostly churns out, and perhaps relied upon, the same stereotypes, half-truths and misinformation seen in the mainstream media. His account is marked by historical distortions, glaring omissions, plagiarism, and outright falsehoods which belie his claim that "for most of the Lavalas years, I was a fairly regular visitor to Port-au-Prince."
Like a physicist's faulty mathematical theorem which omits an elementary factor such as, say, gravity, Dailey eliminates from his gloomy analysis of Haiti's recent history under the administrations of Presidents Jean Bertrand Aristide and René Préval the central role played by Washington in sabotaging Haiti's democratic movement and elected governments since the fall of dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986. This subversion is the flip side of U.S. support for Haitian dictators over decades before.
The article purports to be a review of Robert Fatton, Jr.'s book, Haiti's Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy, which I have not read and which Dailey only occasionally cites in his review. Therefore I don't know how much of Dailey's argument was drawn from or inspired by Fatton, a Haitian-born professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia. But given the paucity of Dailey's referrals to the object of his review, I will treat the analysis as his.
Or perhaps I should say it is the analysis of the OPL (Organisation du Peuple en Lutte), Organization of Struggling People, the central component of the U.S.-backed Democratic Convergence opposition front. Headed by Gérard Pierre-Charles, a former leader of the Unified Haitian Communist Party (PUCH), the OPL is hailed by Dailey as "the social democratic constitutionalist wing of the Lavalas movement, the left-wing populist coalition that first brought Aristide to power, which was mobilized into opposition by the Aristide government's increasingly corrupt and authoritarian character." The less charitable characterization of the OPL's leaders would be boot-lickers of U.S. imperialism, who encouraged Aristide to break with Haiti's leftist popular organizations and return from exile in 1994 on the shoulders of 23,000 U.S. troops and who preach compliance and subservience to every U.S. dictate. Their Convergence front today receives millions of dollars funneled from Washington's National Endowment for Democracy to wreak political havoc in Haiti.
But for Dailey, this is "the social democratic constitutionalist left" which has sought "to consolidate and institutionalize Haiti's fragile democracy and to establish the concepts of pluralism and power-sharing integral to a modern political system" against Aristide's "authoritarian" power grabs. The OPL's role as Washington's collaborator in blocking three prime ministers proposed by Préval, in helping to privatize Haitian state industries, and in providing the excuse for the Bush Administration's blockage of $500 million in international aid and loans to Haiti reveals little that could be interpreted as "left" or "power-sharing."
Dailey makes ample use of tired clichés from the mainstream press. He refers to Préval as Aristide's "hand-picked successor," a common refrain in AP and Reuters dispatches. In reality, Préval was "hand-picked" by the OPL in 1995 in opposition to the call by most Haitians for Aristide to serve out the three years that he spent in exile from his five-year term during the 1991-1994 coup d'état, a perfectly legitimate interpretation of Haiti's 1987 Constitution. But that wasn't Washington's interpretation, since Aristide was proving to be mercurial and uncooperative about privatizations and other neoliberal reforms.
The tension burst forth on Nov. 11, 1995, when Aristide verbally pilloried U.S. Ambassador William Swing and U.N. Haiti chief Lakhdar Brahimi at the National Cathedral during a funeral for one of the president's slain partisans (see Haïti Progrès, 11/15/1995). "The game of hypocrisy is over" Aristide exclaimed with a fire reminiscent of his sermons when a priest at St. Jean Bosco in the early 1980s. "We don't have two, or three heads of state, we have one."
Peeved and alarmed, Washington, whose troops still occupied the country, turned to the OPL to push Aristide out. Having no viable presidential candidates of their own, the OPL selected Préval, who had been Aristide's prime minister in 1991. The move galled Aristide, who didn't announce his support for Préval until the day before his Dec. 17, 1995, election.
Préval turned out to be his own man and gradually struck a course of growing independence from his OPL sponsors, starting with his refusal to name Gérard Pierre-Charles as prime minister, thus forcing a compromise on a lower level OPL cadre, Rosny Smarth.
Nor was Préval Aristide's "surrogate," as Dailey blithely asserts Although he did take account of Aristide's positions, their relationship was often prickly. Préval walked a line between the OPL, which controlled the Parliament, and Aristide, who formed his own party, the Fanmi Lavalas (FL), in November 1996.
Préval had to make a choice, however, in January 1999 when the terms of most OPL parliamentarians ran out due to the political gridlock they themselves had imposed. Préval refused to decree an unconstitutional extension of their terms, as they demanded, and the Parliament expired. Dailey is therefore wrong in parroting the mainstream press and OPL assertion that Préval was "shutting down the opposition-controlled Parliament," a step the OPL charged was "a coup against our democratic institutions." And also wrong for claiming "for the remainder of his term, together with a de facto government formed with his FL colleagues, [Préval] ruled by decree." The term "de facto government," used during the coup to characterize the military's puppets, was resuscitated by the OPL in an effort to demonize the Préval regime.
The comparison was ludicrous and generally Haitians applaud the way Préval ran the government and held elections after the obstructionist parliament self-destructed. (Préval held elections not because of "rising international protest," as Dailey asserts, but because the OPL could no longer block them). Furthermore, Préval was never a member of the FL, nor was his Prime Minister Jacques Alexis, nor were most of the ministers.
In the same vein, it is incorrect when Dailey says that "Aristide and his associates quit OPL to form the FL." Aristide was never an OPL member, nor were most of the FL founders.
In addition to the OPL, Dailey's references come from the regime's harshest foes. He regularly cites the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR), which he incorrectly says was "once [one of] Aristide's strongest supporters." NCHR, which like its cousin organization Americas Watch is supported by financier and currency-speculator George Soros, has had a thorny relationship with Aristide since his first administration in 1991.
Shortly after the Sept. 30, 1991, coup d'état, the NCHR abetted the first Bush administration by issuing a report, based in part on information and interpretations from the de facto prime minister Jean-Jacques Honorat, which portrayed the Aristide government as a human-rights abuser. The U.S. was thus able to posture that the coup was in some measure "justified." As a second Bush administration wars with Aristide, the NCHR continues to willingly provide the U.S. State Department with ammunition in the form of supposed Lavalas "human-rights violations" against the Convergence while ignoring repeated opposition attacks and abuses against Lavalas militants and the deadly campaign being carried out by neo-Duvalierist guerrillas who claim affinity with the opposition (see Haïti Progrès, 2/12/2003). The NCHR has thus perfected its knack of being in the wrong place at the right time.
Dailey also relies heavily on the Haiti Democracy Project, a Washington-based Convergence ally with a board full of U.S. State Department veterans and clients.
"Gross electoral fraud by the ruling party has deprived the entire political apparatus of legitimacy," Dailey writes, a silly charge that Convergence politicians regularly bark. "For most of this time attacks by government-sponsored and armed militants on opposition rallies made free assembly all but impossible." In reality, the Convergence regularly holds meetings, marches, and rallies, while its politicians dominate the Haitian airwaves and are often even interviewed on the government-run Haitian National Television. It even briefly and illegally set up a "parallel government" in Port-au-Prince until it collapsed under the weight of its own ridiculousness. Imagine state reaction if that happened in Washington or Paris.
"By 1999, it seemed to many Haitians that Aristide, who once personified Haitian aspirations for democracy, now represented Haitian democracy's biggest obstacle," Dailey continues. This phrase speaks volumes about Dailey's unground ax, because in 1999 Aristide had been out of office for four years and was making anti-neoliberal noises. The electoral wrangling of 2000 was still a year off. So who were the "many Haitians"? How was Aristide already "democracy's biggest obstacle"?
In fact, Aristide was an "obstacle" for the U.S. which feared his popularity and agenda and set out to engineer an "electoral coup d'état" in 2000. But that electoral coup was defeated by a massive popular mobilization and turn-out for the FL. Dailey completely omits any mention of U.S. meddling in Haiti's election and the people's response, pretending instead that the FL somehow engineered "gross electoral fraud," which even the Organization of American States (OAS) never charged. The FL was not in power for the 2000 elections and had no members on the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) that presided over them. Half of the CEP members, however, were from the opposition.
Contrary to Dailey's mixed-up account, the OAS's dubious objection to the May 2000 parliamentary elections was that eight (not 14, as Dailey says) of the nineteen Senate races should have gone to a second round. (Seven of those eight senators voluntarily stepped down, one of the FL's early concessions.) The opposition, the U.S., and now Dailey have inflated this quibble over how run-offs were calculated to the point where the reviewer writes the "legitimacy of [Aristide's] government [is] very much in dispute." Deciding on which races required run-offs was solely in the CEP's jurisdiction and outside of OAS election observers' mandate. This charge is simply absurd, as is Dailey's charge that Préval was responsible for "forcing the resignation of Smarth" in June 1997, which "marks the end of the last legally constituted government Haiti has had to date." Smarth stepped down due to popular outcry over his OPL policies, and both of Aristide's governments since 2001 (Prime Ministers Jean-Marie Chérestal and Yvon Neptune) have been "legally constituted" and recognized by every government on the planet.
Dailey's assertion that the "Aristide government's increasingly authoritarian behavior has left it isolated and condemned by the international community, which has suspended crucial foreign aid to the point that today there is a total embargo apart from emergency humanitarian relief," is also laughable on several counts. The "international community," if defined as the majority of the world's nations, is sympathetic to the Haitian government and disapproving, at the very least, of the Bush administration's strong-arming. They have not "suspended crucial foreign aid." Only the U.S. and European powers have done that. (In fact, the U.S. has vetoed the disbursement of $140 million approved by the Inter-American Development Bank, a violation of the bank's internal rules against political meddling.) On the contrary, the majority of the OAS and CARICOM member states have pleaded for the release of the aid and loans to Haiti, held hostage only by Washington's hostility to Aristide.
Dailey's research is beyond sloppy. At one point he even lifts a quote of artist Edzer Pierre, uncredited, from another author's article and then changes Pierre's label from "former activist" to "former FL activist." When challenged about the plagiarism on an Internet Haiti discussion group, Dailey blamed the matter on an ill-informed New York editor.
The reviewer also champions Convergence spin-masters when he says that "the most plausible explanation" for the Dec. 17, 2001 commando attack on the National Palace (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 19, No. 40, 12/19/2001) is that it was "a dispute between factions of the National Police, aided by their Dominican allies, over control of the drug trade." Is this explanation "most plausible" when similar commando raids by anti-Lavalas guerrillas based in the Dominican Republic both preceded and followed the attack, when people identifying themselves as its organizers laid out their plans to a prominent Haitian journalist in Miami weeks before it, when the attackers came with a 50-caliber machine gun bolted in the back of a pick-up, and when one of the attackers killed was a former Haitian soldier? Dailey does not mention (and perhaps did not know) that the "group of disgruntled officers of the Haitian National Police" who the Haitian government charges led the attack had been in exile for over a year, having fled when Préval's government claims to have caught them planning a coup. Dailey also states that "as everyone in Haiti knows," Aristide lives in Tabarre not the Palace. In truth, Aristide used to stay at the Palace and often returned there on Sunday night, when the attack took place. An assassination attempt against Aristide by the same neo-Duvalierist guerrillas operating in Haiti today appears a much more plausible explanation.
Dailey's analysis has a scientific veneer which might hold some allure to progressives unfamiliar with Haiti. But his use of long-discredited racist simplifications, like the mainstream notion that Haiti's ruling class is a "mulatto elite," reveal the weak and shallow nature of his "class analysis."
One could go on for at least the length of Dailey's two installments, ticking off their inaccuracies and fallacies. But the biggest problem lies in the reviewer's pro-Convergence premises.
Dailey eloquently describes many obvious problems currently besetting Haitian society: the destruction of agriculture, the resulting rural flight to the cities, the deterioration of education and infrastructure, and the rise of the state as the principal employer, all of which have brought terrible social distortions and strains. This is where Fatton got the notion of a "predatory democracy" in which "the Haitian government remains the primary route to power and wealth." The problem is not in enumeration of the symptoms, but in diagnosis of the disease. Dailey faults Aristide's "ecclesiastical authoritarianism," while progressives point to Haiti's past marked by colonialist rape, semi-feudal obscurantism, comprador parasitism, and imperialist intervention and plunder.
It's sure that there are plenty of reasons to criticize Aristide. But the principal problem, for progressives, is not Aristide's "authoritarianism," as Dailey contends, but rather his half-measures, vagueness, and hesitation in defending the Haitian people's demands for radical change in Haiti, whether due to political cowardice, immaturity, miscalculation, or duplicity.
One might forgive someone's misconception or confusion about Haiti, but Dailey's white-washing of the U.S. role in undermining Haiti's democratic movement is inexcusable. He consistently misrepresents the dismay, alarm, or punitive actions of Washington or Paris as those of the "international community."
It is unfortunate that a publication like the New York Review of Books has become the vehicle for such unadulterated Convergence "dogma," as Dailey terms the defense of Aristide's government by "Lavalas parliamentarians and pro-Lavalas journalists as well as Aristide's more credulous foreign supporters."
Perhaps the biggest falsehood of all comes when Dailey asserts in his final paragraph that "increasingly" the Haitian people have "decided" to accept "acknowledgment of defeat," in Fatton's words, after the high hopes of 1990. But the majority of Haitians still appear to support Aristide, rightly or wrongly, as the agent of wealth redistribution in Haiti. They poured into the streets by the tens of thousands in December [2002] to denounce the Convergence's call for Aristide's overthrow. This seems to contradict Dailey's hopes that "political passions among the people appear to be spent."
Haïti-Progrès, March 12, 2003===============
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