General’s Gone, Not the Garbage : Haiti: The new civilian government offers some hope, but Duvalierist thugs still block the way to true democracy.

Turn any corner in Port-au-Prince these days and you come upon a mountainous pile of garbage, a thing reaching toward heaven and stinking to heaven, too. At its crest, invariably, a skeletal dog is sniffing--burrowing, foraging. Just as you edge around the heap, you find yourself facing what you could not see from behind the last garbage pile: another pile of garbage, with another mongrel astride it, jealously fending off more dogs.

Haiti has a civilian president for the moment, a civilian state council, a new set of moderate ministers and a united, moderate opposition. Yet the streets are still lost under the accumulated foulness of the last regime. Officials stole or cannibalized the garbage trucks; there is no money in the coffers to pay for new ones. And there are many snarling dogs of another kind in Haiti today, Duvalierists jealously guarding the portion of corruption they have managed to maintain throughout the four turbulent years since Jean-Claude Duvalier fell from power.

The Duvalierists, who have plundered Haiti for two generations, are the ones who have the most to lose should the new government successfully lead Haiti to free and fair elections. No one who is not paid to do so will come out to vote if the Duvalierists have not been disarmed and eliminated from the scene; no one has forgotten the bloody election day of 1987 that was disrupted by Duvalierist thugs with machetes and automatic weapons. In other words, the new government cannot conduct successful elections--its most important assignment--as long as the thugs remain at large. In the past two weeks, more than 40 civilians have died in street violence, many of them members of neighborhood committees set up to protect residential areas from Duvalierist terror.

“Today is a great day for democracy,” said Alvin Adams, the U. S. ambassador, after President Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, a former Supreme Court justice, was inaugurated. But since Duvalier’s fall, the United States has supported two military regimes, both of which talked about elections while openly sabotaging the electoral process and ruthlessly repressing dissent. Gen. Prosper Avril’s undoing this month was noticeably similar to Jean-Claude Duvalier’s: unrest in the provincial towns, demonstrations and roadblocks in Port-au-Prince, the meetings between the U.S. and French ambassadors and the dictator, the negotiated exile, and the night flight out on an American plane.

So it is questionable just how interested the United States is in the creation of democratic structures in Haiti. Sources in the Unity Assembly (the coalition of political and social leaders that organized the new government) say that the U.S. Embassy consistently opposed creation of the State Council, the quasi-legislative branch of the new government. It includes representatives of various parts of Haitian society--professionals, educators, journalists, human-rights groups, businesses, unions, women, peasants, popular organizations--and is the branch of the provisional government that has given it legitimacy abroad and at home. Without the council, as one popular leader said, “this would be just another marriage between a weak president and the army, with the American ambassador as best man.”

The new president is something of a mystery. Pascal-Trouillot’s family is solidly if not zealously Duvalierist. In 1977, at the age of 31, soon after she became an attorney, she published a sycophantic article titled “Women in the Context of the Duvalierist Revolution.” She was appointed to the Supreme Court by Prosper Avril; a position on that court has never been a indication of integrity. Yet all of Pascal-Trouillot’s pronouncements since taking power have been uniformly progressive. She has called for an end to human-rights abuses, a cut in “the princely salaries of high government functionaries” (including her own) and an end to government participation in the “perpetuation of luxury among a small number of persons who are insensible to the distress of the people.” She calls the Presidential Palace “la Maison du Peuple,” or the People’s House. Still, her speech was made in French, which 95% of Haiti’s Creole-speaking people cannot understand.

During the installation of the new cabinet this month, the military band was cheerfully out of tune, the generals walked briskly down the center aisle, and the upright civilian leaders took their seats with solemn acknowledgement of the historic moment. Yet even as the international press corps watched all the pomp, outside the palace walls, the Duvalierists were operating: two men killed in a rampage at a market place, eight nuns slashed in another attack, tear gas fired into a full school. All over town, in slums and in wealthy neighborhoods, the Duvalierists were meeting. The question remains for this government: Can it survive if it cannot get rid of these anachronistic criminals? The dogs are still growling at the gates of the People’s House.