Haiti Held Hostage: International Reponses to the Quest for Nationhood 1986-1996

By Robert Maguire, Edwige Balutansky, Jacques Fomerand, Larry Minear, William O’Neill, Thomas G. Weiss, and Sarah Zaidi

Review by Farhan Haq in Haiti en Marche, November 12, 1996.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 24 (IPS) — U. S. Political divisions over Haiti continue to hold that nation hostage to an uncertain fate, in which international assistance to rebuild Haiti is anything but certain, a multi-disciplinary team of scholars and activists asserts.

The seven-member team, sponsored by Brown University’s Humanitarianism and War Project at the Watson Institute, contends in a new report, "Haiti Held Hostage," that U.S. domestic politics have played a role in the often tentative international response to Haiti’s democratic crisis.

"There is some truth in the observation of a senior Haitian government official that ‘Nobody really cares about Haiti except as it impacts on Southern Florida,’" the report notes.

Unfortunately, the report’s contributors warn, the ongoing U.S. political tussle over the credibility of populist former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Lavalas political continues to endanger support for the country’s fragile democracy.

"Haiti has to a great extent been held hostage to partisan politics in the United States, especially in this election year," said Robert Maguire, representative for Haiti at the Inter-American Foundation and the team’s leader.

Maguire told a U.N. University public forum yesterday that the Republican Party continues to insist that Washington should not support Haiti’s present government. He notes that Republican presidential contender Bob Dole previously authored an amendment restricting humanitarian aid and police training funds for Haiti following the 1995 murder of Mireille Durocher Bertin, a rightist Haitian lawyer.

Republicans have portrayed Aristide as an unstable radical and have criticized President Bill Clinton for deploying U.S. troops to restore Aristide to office in September 1994 after three years of military rule.

They have also portrayed President Rene Preval’s current government as weak and unable to investigate what right-wing Haitians and some U.S. media claim is a spate of killings of coup supporters.

The upshot, argued team member William O’Neill, a consultant for the National Coalition for Haitian Rights, is that "Haiti does not have the luxury of time."

A U.N. support mission is scheduled to leave Haiti in six weeks, and a U.N.-Organization of American States human rights mission, MICIVIH, is crucially short of funds, he said.

Because international support for rebuilding Haiti is set to terminate soon, such crucial tasks as the training of a new, 5,200 member police force to replace the discredited and now disbanded Haitian Armed Forces have been rushed, O’Neill said.

Haitian police received only four weeks of training because Washington was concerned with meeting its deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops last February, he noted. "The training was inadequate because it was too short," O’Neill argued.

"The time-table… was dictated by political considerations outside of Haiti," agreed Larry Minear, co-director of Brown University’s Humanitarianism and War Project.

The project studies complex emergencies and international response in such areas as Liberia, Afghanistan, and Somalia, producing reports for relief practitioners in the field, human rights people, development people and, policy -makers.

In addition to U.S. domestic politics, he argued, another factor is that, having invested several years pulling Haiti out of military rule, "the world is moving on to other crises."

The key question for governments who have assisted Haiti, Minear added, is, "Will you have enough staying power to see these investments through when they seem a bit fragile and shaky at the moment?"

With Haiti’s new police tested by a growing crime problem and the threat of destabilization by supporters of the military junta, the answer may well be "no," the report warns.

"Currently billed as a ‘success story’ among international interventions, Haiti may not long remain so," the report says.

"Viewed in the context of two centuries of Haitian experience, a decade of international engagement at varying of intensity and with varying objectives and strategies is anything but a guarantee that Haiti’s quest for nationhood will achieve fruition," it adds.

Still, Haiti has made some dramatic gains in the past two years, despite the tentative quality of international help, Maguire said.

The new police force, while still "wet behind the ears," is a dramatic improvement over the force originally envisioned by the U.S. government in 1994, which would have included old army officers if they passed some human rights requirements, he noted.

"These are new players–they’re not old players being recycled," Maguire said.

O’Neill said he hopes that the U.N. peacekeepers and MICIVIH both can be extended for another six months to give Haiti’s democracy time to stabilize. Some U.N. and Haitian officials say that such an extension is possible when the fate of the peacekeepers comes up again for review at the end of November, several weeks after U.S. elections.

Regardless of who wins the U.S. elections, however, Maguire contended that the aura of Aristide’s restoration as a U.S. foreign policy success may compel Washington to continue to support Haiti.

"The overwhelming opinion is that the United States has invested too much in Haiti right now not to stay the course," Maguire said, citing media reports in even traditionally anti-Aristide U.S. publications like The Washington Times.