Haiti Makes Best of a Tenuous Peace

Just a short walk from the gang-ruled slum he calls home, on a street he was afraid to tread less than six months ago, Eligene Mondesir has found the first paying job of his 55-year lifetime.

It’s smelly, exhausting work, shoveling garbage from the gutters in the withering tropical heat. But Mondesir, like the 1,750 others hired by a foreign relief group, is grateful for the $2 daily wage that allows him to feed more than a dozen family members.

In the tenuous peace that has prevailed since Haiti’s Feb. 7 presidential election, faint signs of economic life have emerged, offering the first breath of hope in years that Haitians might finally escape decades of desperation.

But this luckless country has been at this crossroads before, and those who have seen their modest dreams of a normal life dashed by violence, misrule and corruption have learned to damp their expectations.

“I’ll take it while it lasts,” Mondesir says of the street-cleaning job on the volatile airport road -- work that will disappear at the first sign of any resumption of gang warfare.

With the election of agronomist Rene Preval, a former ally and protege of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the kidnapping and killing that had made this capital a war zone ceased as if someone turned off a switch. Why, who and for how long remain questions no one can answer.

Preval has reached out to defeated rivals in putting together a new government and recovery plans. Some see the current calm as a breathing space accorded by skeptical rivals. Others say it is just a pause for assessment of how to manage the new leader.

Gang violence ceased with Preval’s election because the gunmen decided to give the new president “the gift of a truce” while they decide whether Preval will interfere with their criminal interests, speculates Mario Andresol, head of the Haitian National Police.

“I’m not too confident about security in this country,” he said, pointing to an incident last month in which a Haitian judge freed an accused killer from prison in exchange for $60,000.

The Brazilian-led U.N. peacekeeping force that has more than 9,000 troops and police in Haiti has responsibility for helping reform the judicial system, mission spokesman David Wimhurst said. But the more the world body’s civilian advisory team learns about crime and justice here, the more it despairs of the near future.

“Those who don’t want a return of law and order can stir things up so easily,” Wimhurst said.

He pointed to recent judicial manipulations that lifted a freeze on Aristide Foundation bank accounts long enough for millions to be withdrawn by the former leader’s exiled allies. The accounts had been frozen to allow investigation into allegations that the money was illegally transferred from state coffers. The head of the corruption investigation who sought to thwart the withdrawal was jailed for a week on another judge’s order.

“The judicial system is not just corrupt, it’s fallen to pieces,” Wimhurst said.

How much control over the police and courts Haiti’s new leaders are willing to cede to U.N. officials is unclear. A proposal by the mission to pair every Haitian judge with an overseeing foreign counterpart has been met with a hail of protests as a denigration of Haitian sovereignty.

John Currelly, who heads the Pan American Development Foundation’s Clean Streets project that Mondesir works for, says of the postelection peace, “It is absolutely only a lull.”

The only way to entrench stability, says the Haiti veteran who was kidnapped for ransom a year ago, is to improve the standard of living and demonstrate to Haitians that there is a dignified means of surviving without resorting to the gun.

The suspension of violent clashes in the slums of Port-au-Prince has allowed some progress in efforts to alleviate suffering among Haiti’s poorest.

“It certainly helps us a lot. There are a lot less restrictions on our movements” now that it’s safe for medical relief workers to get into areas previously off limits because of security hazards, said Karoline Fonck, the Pan American Health Organization country officer for HIV/AIDS programs.

But others warn that the postelection peace is as orchestrated as the violence was.

“The roots of the problems haven’t been tackled yet -- that being the extreme misery of poverty in this country and the armed groups who still have their weapons,” said Paul Denis, a leader of the Struggling People’s Organization, a rival political movement to Preval’s, but one that has joined the president’s governing coalition. “These gangs are armed and waiting. Just as the violence was turned off by someone’s order, so can it be turned on again at a moment’s notice.”

Analysts note that the key to economic improvement must come from the private sector. But most concede a longer period of calm will be needed to lure back investors chased away over the last 15 years of populism and political violence.

One exception that has brought swift change on the business landscape was the May launch of a new cellular phone network that broke a cozy duopoly enjoyed by companies now forced to compete.

Not only has the new company’s $130-million investment nearly doubled the number of Haitians with access to communications, it has created 350 jobs, expects 700 employees by mid-summer and has franchised 220 outlets across the country.

Preval’s recently installed prime minister, Jacques-Edouard Alexis, says he knows he’s running against a clock.

Noting that organizations such as the U.S. Agency for International Development are already fashioning projects to spend pledged foreign aid, Alexis said he wanted the donors to respond to what the government considers priority projects. The urban needs may be more apparent to foreign visitors, but Alexis wants the roads, schools and conditions for agriculture and small business first addressed in the countryside. That would stem the flow of people into the capital, where the vast majority live in miserable shantytowns without jobs or access to food, power or running water, he said.

“We have to develop the countryside so people will stay there,” Alexis said. “We can encourage the assembly sector to create factories in the provinces and jump-start agriculture so we can produce more of our own food and at lower prices.”

The Bush administration has assured Preval that aid and assistance will flow to this country to ensure that recovery can get underway and the tentative peace can be firmed up with a tangible improvement in living standards.

“We in the United States understand that our commitment here, our engagement, has to be long term,” said a senior U.S. diplomat who declined to be identified. “We have at times had a short attention span on Haiti.”

The mood on the streets is one of deep skepticism.

“It’s good for now. No one can say about tomorrow,” said Jean Leger Jean-Baptiste, a 42-year-old who lives in the squalid Cite Soleil neighborhood.

Claudette Pierre, a 32-year-old with four children and an ailing mother to support on the few pennies she makes a day selling candy, looked confused when asked what she expects can be accomplished if peace endures through the summer.

“The future is something we’ve never had time to think about,” she said.