Voodoo diplomacy - US intervention has left Haiti in total chaos

National Review, June 17, 1996 by Nina Shea

THE week of President Clinton's State of the Union address, in which he hailed Haiti as a major foreign-policy success, a pitched battle raged in Port-au-Prince's vast shantytowns. An armed gang called the Red Army fought the National Police with automatic weapons and flaming barricades of tires, leaving nine dead, many more wounded, fifty warehouses destroyed, and over a hundred homes burned. By the time I arrived in Haiti during the final week of the U.S. troop operation, violence by the Red Army, the gang called Saddam, and other mobs had become daily occurrences.

Weaving my way around the used-clothes vendors and basket-crowned market women who crowd the tropical capital, I saw firsthand how quickly an unruly mob can form. One disgruntled group had barricaded a main thoroughfare to oppose the closing of the Ministry of Information, a proposed austerity measure. Another group demanding flood relief blocked traffic by hijacking heavy equipment belonging to the Public Works Department. Once, my jeep turned a corner into a full-blown battle between police and khaki-uniformed students who had been demonstrating for the removal of the garbage that blocked their high school.

The locals gave countless other examples of how Haiti is increasingly coming under mob rule. An armed gang associated with a faction of Jean-Bertrand Aristide's leftist Lavalas movement attacked the union of the Haiti Flour Mill after the union had expressed an openness to privatization. A Red Army brigade operating a protection racket in the Cite Soleil slum of Port-au-Prince forced out Dr. Reginald Boulos's famous Centre de Sante, a clinic for indigents. In early March, gangs from Cite Soleil engaged police in a seven-hour shoot-out that left eight dead. A municipal survey identified ten different armed gangs in Cite Soleil alone. This month, the UN determined that the mobs have replaced the Right as the main security threat and requested an extension of its troops' mandate.

''Operation Uphold Democracy,'' in which 20,000 U.S. troops were deployed to Haiti in September 1994, ended on February 29. It would have been better called ''Operation Political Vacuum.'' Haiti is in a state of political anarchy. Economic anarchy too, with a staggering 80 per cent unemployment.

Every branch of Haiti's government is weak, and there are no significant mediating institutions. Rene Preval, a member of Lavalas who succeeded Aristide as president on February 7, was elected with only 28 per cent of the electorate voting. He has no constituency independent of Aristide.

Haiti also has no effective armed forces. The U.S. saw as the main purpose of its $2-billion intervention the dismantling of Haiti's abominable military and the formation of a civilian-controlled national police force. The main focus in forming this police force was to screen out human-rights abusers. Strongly supported by Republicans in the U.S. Congress, this objective was achieved. However, the rookie force is simply not prepared to deal with the plethora of armed gangs in Haiti.

In February, Preval told Le Monde: ''The members of the police force have received just four months of training. They are underequipped. . . . When they are pitted against a group of agitated people throwing rocks, then the situation quickly turns into hand-to-hand combat. A policeman who has just his gun will have a tendency to use it. The people are starting to feel that this police force, which was warmly welcomed, is now beginning to look like the Army that we dismantled.''

The police are certainly no match for the mobs, which are a mix of plain criminal elements and an evolved form of the leftist neighborhood vigilante brigades that started up in the late 1980s. Active in drug trafficking, illicit property confiscations, and organized crime, the mobs formed part of Aristide's base.

Serge Gilles, president of the opposition PANPRA party, has a modest home in Petionville, the flower-filled hill town above the capital. A variety of center-leftist opposition politicians gathered on Gilles's veranda one evening to talk about the mounting chaos. They were alarmed about the failure of the government to deal with the mobs, noting that a few weeks before Aristide had conferred standing on them by opening a dialogue. They were also concerned by the ''trigger-happy'' police. They told of the recent beatings and arrest of a PANPRA activist from Petit Goave on trumped-up charges of membership in the Red Army. (The activist was released a few days later under international pressure.) The greatest frustration, Gilles said, is that there simply is no legal recourse. ''Without the international community, Haiti would be ungovernable,'' he said.

Aristide has always been able to use anarchy to his advantage. Leaving the organizing of his political movement to others, the populist demagogue has preferred to exert power by manipulating and relying on mobs to silence opposition from the Catholic bishops, parliamentarians, and fellow Lavalas members, as well as the militant Right. A few days before the 1991 coup, Aristide openly condoned ''necklacing'' -- forcing a burning tire around a victim's neck. Under strong pressure from Bob Dole, the Clinton Administration recently acknowledged that it suspects Aristide's government was implicated in some of the 22 execution-style slayings of opposition leaders last year and in obstructing a related FBI investigation.