PERSPECTIVE ON HAITI : Aristide’s Challenge: to Stay Alive : The unarmed want him back. Everyone with a gun wants to kill him. Foreign military presence is unavoidable.

Monday’s spectacle of defiant gangs blocking the arrival in Port-au-Prince of American peacekeepers demonstrates without subtlety the gang sponsor’s notion of who is in charge. It’s not the United Nations, the United States or the Haitian people. It’s the thug branch of the Haitian army.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the legally elected president of Haiti, is due to go back on Oct. 30, more than two years after the coup that expelled him in order to continue the thug-and-drug rule that is the legacy of “Papa Doc” Duvalier.

Everyone who doesn’t have a gun wants Aristide back. Everyone who has a gun wants to kill him.

A Haitian friend of mine described his country as “the land of infinite impossibility.” Just because Aristide won 67% of the vote in Haiti’s first honest election, say the corrupted elite who oppose him, is no reason that he should be president. One of them described the coup as “correction of democracy.”

The Bush Administration’s languid blockade, embargo and hand-wringing had no effect. The rich kept their goodies and sold the smuggled essentials for profit. When I visited Haiti last February, there was cheese and wine from France, soap from Italy, Valentine’s Day candy from New York and cocaine for your sweetie from Colombia. It took an embargo with teeth in it--no oil, even for the elite--to force a promise to bring back legal government.

Now the embargo is lifted and the concession is being nibbled away. The notorious former death squads, the Tontons Macoutes, are home, and no longer former. So-called attaches have kept killing, even dragging one of Aristide’s most prominent supporters out of church to shoot him down in the street.

They performed this deed while the police watched and in the presence of U.N.-OAS observers sent to offer their bodies as a form of moral pressure on the coupsters. When we watched the observers arrive, a Haitian friend called them “the voyeurs.” They may see the evil, but what do they do about it?

A few days, ago a friend in the village of Jacmel sent me a note: “The fishing is good, the waters are alive.” She was referring to the packets of drugs being dropped from low-flying planes. The folks who receive and transship this harvest from the sea are not eager for Aristide to form a government. It will interrupt their commerce.

Self-promoted Gen. Raoul Cedras, ardent scuba diver, signed the agreement to bring Aristide home. He was the officer who fronted the coup. He also said he would resign his commission in due course. Does that mean he will put on his shiny wet suit and his snorkel and swim off into the sunset? If he intends to live up to the agreement, why does he permit the daily murders, the bodies of Aristide supporters left in the streets?

As one police official explained when asked why so many journalists get beaten up, tortured or disappeared: “You and I have words. We can express ourselves with words. But these poor soldiers, they have no language. But they have guns. So they express themselves with what they have.” The colonel is in touch with his Inner Thug.

Some say the “MREs” (the name some U.N./OAS observers have given to the Morally Repugnant Elite) are reconciled to the return of Aristide. All they ask is that he include a few Duvalierists, a few coupsters, some of the traditional kleptocrats in a “government of national reconciliation.” If Aristide agrees to this, he violates his compact with his supporters and cannot lead his government. If he doesn’t agree to this, argue the MREs, then it’s his fault if there is “turbulence.” The MREs play a win-win game.

Aristide is not a perfect leader. He has a tendency to shoot from the lip. I’ve heard him declare that he will return to Haiti “on waves of love.” But what the waters of the harbors of Haiti are alive with are not waves of love. Aristide has made mistakes of arrogance, self-righteousness, demagoguery. But he was elected, he is the choice of the people and he may have learned from his wanderings in the wilderness of the United Nations. He needs protection. He identifies himself as the savior of the nation; he comes from a tradition that accepts martyrdom.

It’s not easy for Haitians to accept foreign protection for their leader. They have pride and they have a history of brutal interventions from abroad to parallel the brutal interventions from their MREs. But if Aristide counts on saintly forbearance to protect him, he should look around and notice how little his people have gained from martyrdom. Some kind of armed foreign presence--probably not Americans, perhaps French-speaking Canadians, Creole and French speakers from Martinique or Mauritius, sponsored by the United Nations or the Organization of American States--seems essential.

The great Trinidadean poet Derek Walcott wrote: “The gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles.” More brutally, Cedras said, “Haiti is a country where life is more terrible than death.” He ought to know, since he helped to make it that way.

The Haitians who want Aristide back are those without power, the sufferers, the abused, the fed-up, the overwhelming majority. The United States now wants him back because otherwise, boatloads of refugees will come washing up on Florida’s beaches. Probably this practical emergency is more important politically than mere morality.

The well-meaning and practical folks in Washington had better think of how to keep Aristide alive after Oct. 30.