Haiti’s Usual Politics of the Absurd Now Enters Chaotic Realm of the Surreal : Coup: To the wealthy elite, the masses are not people. Speaking for the oppressed, deposed President Aristide had tried to show they were.

A dark past is revisiting Haiti, a past not long left behind. The Army is installing Duvalierists, and military men are talking about establishing “a democracy.” A general toppled a democratically elected president and then called for elections.

An absurdist strain runs through Haitian politics and lately Haitians have been given a heavy dose of it. For many, it is too much. A Haitian friend of mine who voted in December for deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest, said she had not been outdoors since the military coup began. It was too violent in the streets, she said. It was like the days of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. “Give me some reason to hope,” she said. It wasn’t easy to respond.

Amid all the accusations against Aristide in the foreign press, there are a few things--only a few--that can and should be stated clearly: Aristide was Haiti’s first freely and fairly elected president. He was elected in a landslide. He was elected by the average Haitian person--not the economic elite, not the military hierarchy, not the Haitian bishops, not the old bankrupt intellectual and political class. He did not order executions; he did not order massacres; he did not order house-to-house raids on enemies; he did not order beatings and tortures. He spoke to and for the great masses of the Haitian people. He was deposed by a retrograde movement sparked by Haiti’s small and very conservative elite, some 3% of the population. The record should show this.

Another thing that is clear: The new Haitian government is not only unconstitutional, it is also an illegitimate front for the military. It is the expression of the opposite of the popular will in Haiti today. The 29 members of the 110-member legislature who were not in hiding have dismissed Aristide’s prime minister, who has a legal mandate in the absence of the president, and have appointed a provisional president of their own choosing--unconstitutional. The legislators did not appoint the head of the Supreme Court, which would have at least been quasi-constitutional. Instead, they chose Judge Joseph Nerette, a Duvalierist. The legislature also reported that Jean-Jacques Honorat, a Duvalierist and a human-rights activist (truly a Haitian melange), would be prime minister. Even the United States, which has not had much trouble stomaching Haiti’s post-Duvalier military dictators, refused to recognize Nerette.

The actions of the legislature, egregious violations of Haitian law, would be almost comic in their silliness if, in the background, a few minutes’ drive from the Legislative Palace, Aristide supporters and their families were not being massacred by the Army. “Aristide supporter” is a broad category these days: It seems to include anyone who lives in a slum or a village--some 80% to 90% of the Haitian population. They are now vulnerable to attacks by the military and the ever-excitable remnants of the Tontons Macoutes, the Duvaliers’ notorious paramilitary police, many of whose worst torturers were released from prison by the coup leaders. At least 250 people have died since the coup began. “We cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs,” a wealthy Haitian woman told the Washington Post, philosophically.

With events in Haiti so bloody and democracy under attack, the 34-member Organization of American States imposed severe economic sanctions and is considering some kind of multinational intervention. Many of Haiti’s imports come in through illegal contraband, so it’s unclear what effect the embargo will have.

It is hard to imagine a military intervention carrying Aristide back to power. Once a year, on the anniversary of the end of the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1934, Aristide used to give a sermon on the evils of intervention and foreign, especially U.S., interference in Haitian affairs. Isolated in Venezuela, awaiting the OAS decisions about his country’s future and facing a possible life in exile, perhaps Aristide now regrets those sermons.

Still, they were among his best-received homilies, because Haitians in almost every walk of life hated the occupation and are fiercely, almost historically, proud of their independence. Aristide’s legitimacy would be undermined if it took an intervention to reinstate him.

A loss of legitimacy, however, may be what the international community desires. The U.S. State Department, for example, likes the concept of Aristide the freely elected president, but is not crazy about the reality of Aristide the socialist spokesman for Haiti’s poor. An Aristide reinstated with help from the United States would be an Aristide with a heavy personal and political debt to pay, which might include softening his rhetoric, moderating further his reform efforts and quietly assuring Haiti’s economic and military elite that business-as-usual is acceptable. On Thursday, one worried Haitian business group urged the OAS to continue negotiating just such a return.

But the likelihood is that Aristide will not be reinstated. Not only has a campaign of disinformation about his human-rights record helped turn international sentiment away from him, but the Haitian elite are now openly and entirely dead-set against his return.

“ Tout moun pa moun, “ is a common Creole saying. It means: “Not everyone is someone,” or, more literally, “Not all people are people.” (“All animals are equal, but . . . .”) Each time they saw their small, black, Creole-speaking president on television, the light-skinned, French-speaking elite was reminded that everyone is someone, and that their maids and houseboys--and gardeners and cooks and scullery maids and the servants attached to houses rather than families and the young girls and boys who work as virtual slaves in the cool and elegant homes of the rich--are people too, with political and economic rights. One of Aristide’s favorite phrases was “ Tout moun, se moun. “ Everyone is someone.

When Aristide declared his surprise candidacy almost a year ago, many among his closest advisers were worried and angry. They feared he would lose a fraudulent election and become a joke among the people, or worse, be killed by a nervous military, and that Haitians would lose his important voice of opposition. In fact, in spite of his stunning presidential victory, this has happened. Aside from forfeiting international stature because of his pronouncements condoning the odious practice of necklacing, he has sacrificed his formerly fixed position on the Haitian map. Although his constituency still supports him, he is no longer in Haiti to respond to their political needs. The Aristide era is probably over.

Nonetheless, things have changed in Haiti, and it took a man of Aristide’s courage to force the transformation. The political class will never again be able to ignore the poor masses of their countrymen. Housemaids and carpenters and tinkers and cobblers and seamstresses and thousands of young, jobless men and women found a voice in Aristide--and a vote. They will not soon forget.