Next Step : Haiti: A Society Burning With Sorrow : For Haitians, fatalism is a faith. Whatever path is taken now, it seems unlikely to relieve their misery.

“Beyond mountains are more mountains.” -- old Haitian proverb.

“In Haiti more than anywhere, to know the future you must look to the past.” -- new Haitian proverb.

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A favorite image in Haitian life is kafu , the crossroad. Haiti is standing at one of the most important crossroads in its history today, but if the past indeed predicts the future here, there is little hopeful in whatever path is taken.

At the current kafu , one road sign points the way to the future of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a radical--even renegade--Roman Catholic priest with a past of erratic visions and conflicting actions.

The other road would take Haiti to a future of “New Duvalierism,” an echo of a movement whose past is littered with violence, corruption and terror.

Both sides say the future will be different. But as the Haitian intellectual who coined the new Haitian proverb puts it: “There is little reason to believe that the Haiti of the 21st Century will be different from the Haiti of the 19th or 20th centuries.”

Haiti, then, may climb today’s mountain but will find only another massif to ascend.

Aristide, who became the country’s first freely elected president before being stampeded into exile by a military revolt two years ago, clamors to return, claiming to be a changed man--”no longer a prophet,” in the words of one follower, “but a statesman” newly prepared to lead Haiti into the modern world.

Challenging him are the “New Duvalierists,” a confusing assortment of disparate groups including army officers, former government functionaries, extreme nationalists, conservative businessmen, the social elite and violence-worshiping thugs.

They too claim to be changed--no longer chained to the dark and bloody practices of the legendary Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier or the obscene and decayed corruption of his son, Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier.

“We are the future,” said Emanuel Constant, a leader of a New Duvalierist party called FRAPH (the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti) and the son of one of Papa Doc’s most fervent military supporters.

“We have 100 tendencies; we are businessmen, generals, intellectuals. We understand the world, and we are the alternative to the class war and catastrophe of Aristide.”

In between the two are the masses--the 90%-plus of Haiti’s more than 6 million people whose future is measured day to day if not hour to hour; a short life of brutish misery, of garbage-paved streets, superstition, illness and a hopelessness expressed by another Haitian proverb: “The donkey works so that the horse can strut.”

As a dockworker put it: “When I was young, it was Duvalier who said he spoke for me. I got nothing but a beating. Then it was Aristide, and now he brought us an embargo. We are here to die.”

Whether Aristide, a New Duvalierist or something different, Haiti needs change.

After two years of post-coup turmoil, including three different international embargoes, what was already the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere has been reduced to worse than penury.

Per capita income is estimated at less than $1 a day, but that is a guess since there is almost no work. The land is barren, the victim of predatory misuse of land and water.

The roads are almost impassable in most places. The electrical system will take hundreds of millions of dollars to repair. Telephone calls even inside the capital are a dream. There isn’t enough rice for internal needs, and what few goods and products are available lack markets or shipping facilities.

More than 10,000 people are said to have starved to death since the first international embargo went into effect in October, 1991. And if the current boycott continues, the death rate will be worse, since many people, particularly children, are still weak and vulnerable from earlier shortages.

“How do I see Haiti in the future?” asked one international relief worker rhetorically. “In body bags.”

On the surface, Aristide, whose 1991 electoral support of 67% probably still holds, does appear to present the best chance for change. He is supported, albeit reluctantly, by the United States and the rest of the international community.

They have promised more than $1 billion in economic and development aid once Aristide is restored to power. They have pledged to help build a real democracy, to reorganize Haiti’s military, police and judiciary and its political institutions.

But these are not new promises, and the past is not reassuring. Haiti is strewn with broken roads, crumbling factories and grotesque political structures built with foreign aid. The current military is the direct descendant of the Garde d’Haiti, organized, trained and even once led by U.S. Marines.

The weapons and ammunition used by the military today are the remnants of the latest American military aid program, suspended after the Sept. 30, 1991, anti-Aristide coup.

More backing, equally reluctant, comes from most of the country’s intellectuals and economists, and even from businessmen and the veneer of the wealthy elite.

“Aristide is no longer the enemy of capitalism and the United States,” says Antoine Adrien, a fellow priest and leading supporter of the exiled president. “He has spent too much time in the United States and has too many American friends to be anti-American.

“Aristide has changed in exile,” Adrien added during a long interview in his sparse, white-washed office. “He has gained a broader knowledge of the world. . . . He understands he cannot return to pre-coup attitudes and is conscious that you cannot use political power like you’re the only one here.”

Exactly, echoed Robert Malval, a wealthy businessman appointed prime minister by Aristide to lead his new government.

“The problem with President Aristide was that he wanted to remain both a prophet and a statesman. What the president has learned is that he cannot be both. . . . Gandhi knew he could not be a politician and a prophet; Martin Luther King made his choice. Now, Aristide has made his choice; he will be a statesman and not a prophet.”

But talks with businessmen and economists reveal a far more wary view of a man whose past economic theory called for socialism, “a turn to the left,” and for the poor to eat from the plates of the rich.

“I’m glad to hear that Aristide is a changed man,” said one business leader who agreed to support the president after a meeting earlier this year. “But I still hear the demagoguery, the class hatred, and I remember Pere Lebrun”--a reference to the cartoon figure that symbolized the occasional practice by Aristide followers of placing burning tires around the necks of enemies, a practice that Aristide himself once spoke of as grace.

Other skeptics recalled the forced payments pried from businessmen by Aristide agents while at the same time he allowed smuggling to continue at the country’s ports.

“He told me,” one businessman said, “that he couldn’t close it (contraband) because too many people depended on it.”

The wariness is not limited to people who remember the inconsistent--if not nonexistent--economic planning that went on during the president’s seven months in office. There are also those who dislike the idea that he has changed.

“There are conservatives and radicals alike who worry that he has accepted modern economic ideas,” one diplomat said. He was talking about reports that Aristide wants to turn the economy over to a group of young, highly educated technocrats who favor market economics and modern accounting practices.

“If there ever was an economic program here, it was one of non-competition, of statism in which the ruler’s friends got a take in exchange for payments and favors,” the diplomat said. If (the new economists) come in, some of the richest families will fail because they can’t compete in a modern world. On the other hand, the Duvalierist way of padding public payrolls with relatives and friends will be gone. Nearly everyone hates that.”

Then there is the political side of a man who through his career spit on politics and who disdained ordinary political parties.

Malval says that Haiti lacks “structure.”

“We have no institutions, no political parties,” Malval said. What Aristide offered before, and offers now, is more a slogan than even a mass movement. Called Lavalas, it means torrent and is a metaphor for cleaning everything away.

The closest thing to an Aristide party is a loose alliance of small organizations that calls itself the National Front for Change and Democracy, a grouping that can’t even coordinate well enough to organize a parliamentary quorum to support Aristide initiatives.

But if an Aristide future as measured by his past is scary, a road ahead with the New Duvalierists is bone-chilling in the minds of all but the New Duvalierists.

Papa Doc Duvalier moved to power in 1957 by crying for power to the blacks and an end to the domination and privileges of the mixed-race elite--a vague ideology that quickly turned into a 30-year orgy of unbridled corruption, incredible inefficiency and nearly unbelievable brutality. The climax came when Papa Doc named himself president for life, rewrote the Lord’s Prayer into an obscene hymn of self-praise and anointed his simple-minded son as successor.

Now comes the New Duvalierists, promising modernism and democracy. But there is the shock of recognition. The New Duvalierists are either old Duvalierists or their children.

To Malval, this is not as bad as it appears. “We need to get away from the Manichean vision of everything as either black or white, good or evil,” he said.

And the children are not the same as the fathers. “The fathers,” Malval said, “never left Haiti, never looked outward. Their children are modern, they study in the States, Europe. Their fathers were men of the past; the children are of the future.”

But it is not just the children, the New Duvalierists, who are in Haiti’s future.

Franck Romain was a Palace Guard officer under Papa Doc, Port-au-Prince mayor under Baby Doc and sometime leader of the Tontons Macoutes, the Duvalierist terrorist security organization. He remains an idol to Duvalierists.

Romain recently had breakfast with Malval as part of the prime minister’s wide-eyed effort to bring the followers of what he also called “a system of hate, despair and blood” into “the new order.”

“I would even permit Jean-Claude back (from exile in France) if he agreed to” take part in a legitimate political party, Malval said recently.

Perhaps so, but it doesn’t work the other way. The new Macoutes, the ones organized by New Duvalierist Emanuel Constant, have made it clear that they will fight Aristide’s return no matter what.

It was their mob that stopped an American military cargo ship from landing road building equipment Oct. 11, and it was their mob that assaulted the car of U.S. Charge d’Affaires Vicki Huddleston and drove her from the streets.

Most diplomats also think it is the new Macoutes who are carrying out the daily and often multiple killings of Aristide supporters, even as the world is demanding an end to such violence if Haiti is to rid itself of the economic and political quarantine it now suffers.

The Haiti of any future under the New Duvalierists, as described by another leader, Evans Francois, brother of and spokesman for the infamous Port-au-Prince Police Chief Michel-Joseph Francois, will be one dominated by “the big Macoute.”

Macoutes, he said in a recent interview, should dominate even an Aristide Cabinet, holding the key ministries of defense, interior, social welfare and information.

“That, my friend,” one Haitian political expert said, “is not new Duvalierism. That’s the same old stuff.”

“It is,” added a business leader, “a system of government built on crime and corruption. It was built up over 30 years of dictatorship, it never really was dismantled, not even under Aristide, and if it isn’t stopped now, the new Haiti will be just like the old, perhaps worse.”

“You want to know what will Haiti be like in my children’s time?” asked a Haitian liberal intellectual. “It will be a future of Haitians killing Haitians.”

DECADES OF TURMOIL

This year’s crisis in Haiti is just the latest chapter in its unstable history of dictatorships alternating with brief forays into democracy.

* 1957

Oct. 22: Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier becomes president in a disputed election after a year of turmoil in which six provisional governments held power. His administration quickly deteriorates into dictatorship.

* 1971

April: Duvalier dies and his son, Jean Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, 19, is declared president for life.

* 1979

Elections take place in the National Assembly with 57 of the 58 seats won by the official government party. Protesters allege electoral irregularities. Press censorship is introduced.

* 1986

Feb. 7: After several weeks of unrest, Duvalier, his wife and relatives flee Haiti, ending the 28-year dictatorship by the Duvalier family. They fly to France aboard a U.S. military jet. A five-member National Council of Government, led by Duvalier’s army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Henri Namphy, takes power.

Feb. 10: Provisional government, led by Namphy, names Cabinet. It dissolves Assembly and Tontons Macoutes, the Duvalier family’s private militia. Schools are reopened and political prisoners freed.

* 1987

March 29: Voters approve a new constitution putting elections for president and National Assembly in the hands of a civilian Electoral Council.

Nov. 29: Election Day. Assassins, protected by the army, kill at least 34 voters, and the voting is called off. Namphy and junta dissolve Electoral Council. The United States suspends about $75 million in aid in protest.

* 1988

Jan. 17: Leslie Manigat, a university professor, is elected president in army-controlled elections. Few Haitians vote and most opposition leaders refuse to participate.

June 19: Manigat is overthrown by Namphy after Manigat tries to force him out as army chief.

September: Namphy is ousted by coup led by noncommissioned officers. Lt. Gen. Prosper Avril, chief of the Presidential Guard and former Duvalier adviser, is named president.

* 1990

March: Avril steps down after anti-government protests. He leaves for exile in United States. Supreme Court Justice Ertha Pascal-Trouillot becomes head of a provisional government pending elections in December, 1990.

HAITI: A DREAM DEFERRED

* 1990

Dec. 16: Jean-Bertrand Aristide wins Haiti’s first democratic elections.

* 1991

Sept. 30: Aristide is forced into exile by coup. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Nerette is later named provisional president, but real power remains with the army. Organization of American States calls for trade embargo against Haiti.

* 1992

May 24: President Bush orders direct repatriation of Haitian boat people headed for the United States.

June 2: Conservative Marc Bazin is named prime minister, replacing Nerette as head of government.

* 1993

June 8-16: Bazin steps down after dispute with army. Worldwide oil embargo and assets freeze are imposed on Haiti by U.N. Security Council.

July 3: Agreement signed at Governors Island, N.Y., to return Aristide to power Oct. 30. Amnesty is granted to coup participants.

Aug. 25-27: Businessman Robert Malval wins parliamentary nod for transition rule, and United Nations suspends oil embargo.

Sept 11: Antoine Izmery, a prominent supporter of Aristide, is assassinated.

Oct 11: About 200 U.S. and Canadian troops arrive off Port-au-Prince as part of U.N. plan to restore democracy. But a mob prevents their ship from docking.

Oct 14: Justice Minister Guy Malary, a key Aristide supporter, is assassinated.

Oct 15: Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, Haiti’s military ruler, refuses to honor agreement to step down to allow Aristide-appointed government to take power. President Clinton orders six warships to enforce U.N. trade embargo.

Oct. 30: Aristide returns to power in Haiti?

SOURCES: Associated Press, Reuters, Los Angeles Times

Compiled by Times researcher JANET LUNDBLAD