Despair Reigns in Haiti Despite Hopes for Pact

The machines sit idle in the factory, encrusted with grime and enough rust to raise questions about whether they could ever be used again, a metaphor for the wrecked Haitian economy after four months of a crushing international economic embargo.

For the owner of the machinery, designed to extract essential oil from grass for use in making perfumes and other essences, there is no question, either about his products or Haiti’s economy.

“I’m through,” he said in an interview in his chaotic office, darkened by the lack of electricity that is a main result of the embargo. “I’ve lost my market, I’ve lost my money and I’ve lost my hope for the future.”

The country’s economy is the same, he said. “The end of the embargo won’t make any difference. There are no products we make that we can sell. Nobody will invest here and there is no confidence in whatever new government we have. . . . The embargo only caused misery, starvation.”

The views of this man, who pleaded that his name not be used, are nearly universal among Haitian businessmen, opposing political figures, diplomats and international financial and development experts.

“The economy has been set back years,” said Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official and one of the country’s most experienced economists, “and its direct effects are going to last at least another 10 years.”

The crisis began Sept. 30 when Haiti’s army, backed by many of the country’s business and social sectors, violently overthrew the populist and anti-elite government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest and the nation’s first democratically elected president.

Led by the Organization of American States and with the support of the Bush Administration, Western Hemisphere governments imposed a near-total economic boycott on what was already the poorest nation in the region.

Now, the crisis is supposedly near an end with the announcement a week ago of an agreement to restore Aristide as president, if in name only, and the appointment of a prime minister satisfactory to the international community and acceptable to much of the Haiti power structure, including the military command.

However, the agreement hasn’t ended the general despair, not even with the announcement that its ratification will end the embargo and restore about $450 million in international aid that was suspended after the coup.

“After the damage from the embargo, it is hard to see what good the money will do,” said Bazin who, ironically, supported the coup but now backs the agreement to restore as president, at least on paper, a man he once accused of waging class warfare.

Here are some statistics about the Haitian wreckage, according to diplomats and the United Nations:

* Out of a pre-coup employment level of 252,000 permanent jobs, 144,000 jobs have been lost permanently.

* Of 44 American-owned assembly plants eligible for reopening, none have even applied for a license to resume production. Experts say that at best only 4,000 of the 47,000 employees of the plants will be rehired.

* An entire season of growing mangoes, one of country’s few profitable export crops, was lost at a cost of 500,000 seasonal jobs. International development specialists doubt that Haiti can recapture its mango markets from other Caribbean nations that filled the vacuum.

* Haiti’s export markets for coffee, rice and sugar, already nearly gone before the embargo because of inefficiency and disappearing demand, have evaporated and, because most of the planting season for such crops has been missed, cannot be recovered.

* Remittances of between $200 million and $300 million usually sent home every year by Haitians living abroad have been severely curtailed because mail service was cut off.

* The government has lost $80 million in customs duties--one of its only sources of legitimate revenue--because of loss of imports.

* More than 300,000 people in Port-au-Prince alone are totally dependent on private foreign relief agencies for the single daily meal they receive.

But more than any figures can do, a walk through the slums of Port-au-Prince or a short drive into the countryside shows how abject people can be because of events they have no part in, let alone a chance to control.

In the grotesquely named slum of Bel Air, a pencil-thin woman gave up all sense of modesty and dignity to wrest a scrap of soiled paper from a scavenging dog. She ignored watching eyes as she licked whatever was on the paper.

On a street less than two blocks from the national Parliament, Gabriel Raymont was turned away when he tried to join a crew stripping a burned-out auto wreck.

“I used to repair cars in a shop,” he said, “but the owner closed down. I then worked at (one of the assembly plants), but that closed down. I don’t know where my family is. I think they left for the countryside. I have no money. I sleep in the street. Can you give me money? I haven’t eaten in two days.”

The doomsayers for Haiti’s future are not limited to those such as Bazin who supported the coup, but include Aristide backers who first thought the embargo was necessary to restore democracy.

Included in this group is Antoine Izmery, considered the major financial supporter of Aristide’s presidential campaign and, in the beginning at least, an embargo advocate.

“The economy is dead,” he said during an interview in the cramped office of the trading company he and his brother run in a teeming slum in downtown Port-au-Prince.

But, Izmery continued, “it wasn’t the embargo that killed the economy. It was the (final result) of Haiti’s typical political problems. The embargo is an excuse for a bad political system,” a system he said included even Aristide’s time in office.

He also pointed out what had become increasingly obvious: that with all its devastation and economic carnage, the embargo itself was so uneven that much of the upper class and the military survived, some even flourishing.

“Smuggling was already worth almost half a billion dollars a year,” he said, “and it’s value has gone up. Most goods (the elite wanted) got through from Miami and Europe.

“I saw cartons of American cornflakes and (vegetable) juice being unloaded. It was an operation run by a retired army colonel.”

And, Izmery said, “there is no question that the drug trade has increased.”

Carol Long, head of the U.N. Development Program for Haiti, speaks cautiously, as befits an international civil servant. “It’s hard to say how damaged the economy here is,” she said in an interview. But as the conversation continued, her bland assessment gave way to the reality of this place once called “an island of evil.”

“The structural problems will continue,” she said of a nation with no viable road system, no countrywide electricity network and no water distribution program.

“When you look for the base to build on,” she concluded, “you have to admit it’s very hard to find.”

Still, Long’s job is to hope. So she and her organization are meeting with representatives of the United States and other nations with aid programs for Haiti because no one wants to see the country drift into final economic death.

Their goal is to rebuild the country’s devastated physical infrastructure--roads, electricity and water systems, ports and communications networks.

But can new roads stop the slide? To a person, those interviewed said no, not unless something else drastic is done.

“You’ll have to stop everything, break everything that has to be broken and start all over,” said Izmery. “Otherwise, a few people who make money will continue to be rich and the rest will get poorer.”

Bazin, at the opposite pole politically, nevertheless agreed that trying to restore the status quo is hopeless. “The damage is so bad,” he said, “that we have to start from zero.”