Getting to know the general - Haitian military leader General Raoul Cedras

National Review, Nov 29, 1993 by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

GENERAL Raoul Cedras sat serenely at the colonial headquarters of the Haitian army. From the rickety balcony of his office he could see the American gunbeats, deployed for the umpteenth time this century in hostile action against his country. Below him, in the sink of Port-au-Prince, he could also see the empty streets, the closed factories, the total breakdown of economic activity in what is already the poorest country in the hemisphere. None of it persuaded him that the time had come to give up power.

Indeed, as the UN deadline for the restoration of President Jean Bertrand

Aristide came-and went--le general expressed a certain pity for the Clinton Administration. "They don't know what they're doing. They've got themselves into an absolute muddle, and now they're prisoners of their own actions," he said, speaking in a tone of light irony and nonchalance, as if he were a French cavalry officer.

For Haitians the episode is reminiscent of attempts by President Kennedy to dislodge Papa Doc in 1963. An American flotilla surrounded the island. The OAS made itself busy. The UN took positions. Deadlines were set. Only to end in the humiliating flight of the American ambassador.

Not that Cedras resembles Papa Doc, the voodoo dictator and champion of noirisme. Le general, aged 46, is a light-skinned mulatto with a passion for water sports and an aristocratic contempt for politics. Though he is usually described as the architect of the September 1991 coup, the revolt in fact began with a mutiny of sergeants and corporals that rapidly got out of control. "There was a great mass of them here in my office, rankers, the lot. I couldn't tell who they all were. They were enraged, ready to tear him '[the president] limb from limb, because his mobs were burning them alive in outposts across town."

"Aristide was here in this chair," he said, getting up to re-enact the scene.

"So I jumped in front of him to shield his body, and I told them not to touch a hair of his head. That's not the way we do things here any more."

Given the intense caste hatred between the black ti soldats ("little soldiers") and the mulatto officer corps, Cedras could have been lynched himself. He was viewed as Aristide's man, hand-picked as a reward for his role as chief of security in the squeaky-clean elections of 1990. As for the U.S. embassy, it pinned its hopes on Cedras as the man to reform the military.

All this has been forgotten now that it is policy to denounce le general. Also forgotten is the terror systematically employed by Father Aristide during his seven months in office in 1991. It is an episode journalists have tended to brush under the carpet, usually on the extraordinary grounds that Aristide won 67 per cent of the vote and therefore had a mandate.

The Catholic Church was one of the first to suffer the wrath of the Little Priest. Over a two-day period in January 1991, his lavalas mobs (which critics call his answer to the Tonton Macoutes, though he would furiously deny it) destroyed the old cathedral and gutted the house of the archbishop. According to the Puebla Institute, a Catholic human-rights organization, they then burned the Vatican embassy, broke both legs of the priest serving as First Secretary, and threw him into a ravine. The Nuncio himself narrowly escaped lynching.

"I got a call from him at night," said General Cedras. "He was wounded and needed medical treatment, but didn't dare come out of hiding. So I rushed out with my wife, and we went from pharmacy to pharmacy trying to find all the things he needed."

Aristide's preferred instrument for terror was Pere Lebrun--necklacing with a burning tire. It was mostly used for dispatching Tonton Macoutes. "If you catch one, do not fall to give him what he deserves," Aristide said on Radio Nationale, during a bout of mob justice. "What a beautiful tool! It's lovely, it's cute, it's pretty, it has a good smell; wherever you go you want to inhale it."

But he also used terror to deter political dissent. In August 1991 the Parliament, which had turned against him, tried to move a vote of no confidence. He had the Palais Legislatif surrounded by lavalas screaming "Pere Lebrun? Deputies were beaten as they tried to leave the building. Opposition party headquarters were burned down. Two months later the leader of the Christian Democrats, the Reverend Sylvio Claude, was lynched and chopped to pieces by layalas after he criticized Aristide for inciting violence.

It goes without saying, of course, that the current regime also practices systematic terror. Since the assassination of the Justice Minister three weeks ago, the cabinet-in-waiting has gone underground. From time to time they emerge for an irrelevant meeting at the stone mansion of interim Prime Minister Robert Malval, only to disappear again. Several claim half in pride, half in terror--that they have a price on their heads.

In urban areas, the paramilitary attaches are making a final push to decapitate Aristide's neighborhood vigilance networks. "They used to kill people secretly at night; now they're doing it in broad daylight," said a lavalas block captain as we lurked in a baking, broken-down bus, hidden from the ubiquitous spies, in the vast slum of Cite Soleil.