Haiti Regime Accused of Corruption and Terrorism

This nation’s painful attempt to crawl from despotism to democracy has again been retarded by an inept and corrupt military government whose undisciplined troops have terrorized the population and stolen such vast sums that the economy is verging on collapse, according to civic and political leaders.

The leaders say they fear another reign of Duvalier-style tyranny.

The arrests of three major political figures late last month and their repeated display on national television--faces bruised and bandaged and shirts bloodied from apparent mistreatment--triggered general strikes throughout the country Nov. 7 demanding their release from jail.

After the arrests, Louis Dejoie, a leading presidential candidate in elections scheduled for next year, was among nearly a dozen politicians who went into hiding in fear of their lives.

Dejoie and the three arrested politicians had called for civil disobedience and a mass protest march against the military president, Lt. Gen. Prosper Avril, on Nov. 29, the anniversary of Haiti’s last bloodily aborted attempt at elections in 1987.

“This is the beginning of Duvalier III,” Dejoie said before slipping out of sight. He referred to the dynasty of Francois (Papa Doc) and Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, who ruled for nearly 30 years until February, 1986. “If Avril doesn’t change his ways, this country is going down the drain.”

Haiti has undergone two years of increasing instability that saw a puppet civilian president, Leslie F. Manigat, deposed by the dictatorial Lt. Gen. Henri Namphy, who was in turn ousted in the “sergeants’ coup” that brought Avril to power. The country is almost down the drain socially and economically, according to Haitian economists, human rights activists and civic leaders.

They describe days and nights of uncertainty, violence and crime as undisciplined soldiers and armed ex-soldiers ousted in five recent unsuccessful coup attempts pull off holdups, run extortion rackets and bully ordinary people with terrorist threats. Joining the soldiers are roving bands of armed thugs from the old Duvalier regime.

Jean-Claude Bajeaux, a leading human rights activist, told of innocent people, in one case a respected French Roman Catholic monk, chased down and shot by soldiers who may have been acting on orders or merely free-lancing as after-hours gangsters.

Bajeaux said one young man, while being arraigned on a petty charge, was shot dead in the courtroom by an officer in civilian clothes. The officer apparently had been offended when the youth refused to accompany him to the army’s notorious Researche Criminal, once the headquarters and torture center of the Duvalier political police.

“That was in September, yet nothing has been done about it,” said Bajeaux. “There are daily rights violations and nothing is done.”

Several businessmen who asked to remain unidentified told of extortion threats, at least three of them successful, in which callers demanded $40,000 to $50,000 payoffs. Jean-Claude Roy, a young businessman who heads a fledgling political party called the Haiti Constitutional Union, said armed men appeared twice at his house after a death threat and were driven away both times by his own armed security men.

It is not merely violent crime but economic crime on a massive scale that is bringing Haiti’s economy to its knees, according to a number of reliable informants, including businessmen, economists and former government officials. They say Avril’s urgent need to buy the loyalty of soldiers and officers is to blame for a wholesale raid on the country’s treasury.

Avril’s biggest single reward to the armed forces, which one businessman characterized as “9,000 armed gangsters,” was a one-third boost in this year’s military budget, which at $42 million overshadows all other government expenses.

However, selected officers, sergeants and enlisted men whose support is crucial to keeping Avril in power have received extra personal rewards: special profiteering privileges at state-owned enterprises that would earn long jail terms in any other country.

The soldiers, and others whose favor Avril depends upon, have been given virtually unlimited rights to buy flour, cement and other products from public-sector companies at low, state-controlled prices. They then sell the products on the black market at double or more the purchase cost. Meanwhile, legitimate buyers have been turned away, made to endure long delays or forced to buy from the black marketeers.

When all of the country’s major cement-using firms shut down in protest for three weeks last month, the Avril government relented, but not by much. It raised the controlled price of cement by $1 a bag, which still left the black marketeers a hefty profit margin.

The result, according to two leading economists, is that the once-profitable state flour company, the cement company and the telephone company all show severe deficits for the first time in years.

One businessman estimated that the 1,000-member Presidential Guard, which put Avril into power and is now the only elite unit in the army, takes more than $1 million per month from the cement plant alone. “All told, during the past year the state enterprises hemorrhaged losses of more than $100 million,” one of the economists said.

The military government also has forced state enterprises to hire favored but unneeded relatives and friends. One result is that the Port Authority of Port-au-Prince, which once made money, is now deep in debt because of a payroll that has grown from $300,000 to $950,000 per month just since last April, said another top Haitian economist. “They even force schools to take in their relatives without entrance exams,” he said, “just riding roughshod over everyone with their special status.”

“In most countries, the rich subsidize the poor, but here it’s the other way around,” commented a foreign diplomat.

Recalling that Avril was a senior financial adviser to the Duvaliers, a foreign economist who has spent years puzzling over the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere said: “The way you stay in power in Haiti is you buy support. Avril is just going back to what he has been doing for the last 23 years: manipulating state corporations to turn them into cash cows to be milked by his supporters.”

Mismanagement and economic ignorance on the part of senior officials of the Avril government also are to blame for the country’s plight, according to presidential candidate Marc Bazin, a former World Bank economist. Bazin is currently the favorite if next year’s scheduled elections are held.

Bazin cited a recent government decision to end Haiti’s longstanding parallel market in hard currency in which businessmen and others could freely buy U.S. dollars at only a modest premium of about 20% above the officially fixed rate, which is five Haitian gourdes to the dollar. The free trade in dollars was essential to keep what had been a growing export sector as well as the country’s importers in business, the economist said.

But when the free market ended last month, the premium on dollars, if they could be found, more than doubled.

“It was terribly counterproductive,” said a foreign economist. “The banks have lost a third to a half of their deposits, and some businessmen have just closed up and left the country.”

“The government handled the foreign exchange situation so badly that it got worse than if they’d done nothing,” said Bazin.

Although most political leaders still harbor doubts about Avril’s sincerity in agreeing to hold free and open elections next year, major figures such as Bazin are busily building political structures and trying to whip up grass-roots support as if the voting will take place as planned.

Bazin’s moderate centrist Movement to Install Democracy in Haiti (MIDH) recently drew 1,200 delegates and 2,800 supporters to its first convention, just outside Port-au-Prince. The one-time finance minister, who was favored by the United States in the aborted 1987 election, has forged what most believe is a binding alliance with two other parties, one slightly right and the other slightly left of center, giving him a commanding early lead.

The country’s constitutionally independent nine-member Electoral Council, led by respected 60-year-old economist Louis-Antoine Auguste, also is working as if its ambitious, three-phase electoral timetable will be met. But the work has proceeded slowly, according to Auguste, partly because the Avril government did not give the council an office until last month.

Even then, the council’s government-assigned office turned out to be the same one in downtown Port-au-Prince that was abandoned by an earlier electoral council when it was demolished in a bomb attack. The bombing has since been ascribed to the old military government’s thugs.

“Some people thought that might be a bad omen,” Auguste said with a wry smile.