‘People Power’ in Haiti Stirs Civil War Fears

They appeared before dawn Saturday with pickaxes and machetes in hand. And with pebbles and sticks, they staked their claims.

There were dozens of them, impoverished slum dwellers from an urban hell called Cite Soleil--City of the Sun--and they worked all day carving new subdivisions into a rich man’s land: a prime, verdant hillside adjacent to Port-au-Prince’s international airport.

It was a land seizure, plain and simple. People power, Haitian-style. The worst nightmare of Haiti’s rich.

“This is my land now, the people’s land,” declared one of the occupiers, a barefoot, toothless man in an undershirt, pausing to explain. “I have no house. I have no money. And now this is mine. Now, we simply will wait for our President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to come, and he will give us the papers to make it legally ours. Then he will give cement for our houses; sewers; lights, and roads.”

But as they illegally toiled away just a few hundred feet from the airport terminal, where U.S. Defense Secretary William J. Perry was declaring Haiti a new zone of peace, the capital’s poor also were sowing the seeds for what the rich fear will be civil war.

Port-au-Prince was, in fact, a city at peace Saturday. In the three weeks since the first U.S. troops arrived, an evolving, ad-hoc U.S. military strategy finally appeared to have checkmated the brutal Haitian regime and its paramilitary thugs, at least in the capital.

There were reports of continuing attacks in the countryside. A bus filled with paramilitary agents reportedly rammed a pro-democracy demonstration, with the agents firing into the crowd and killing at least seven Friday night in the town of Peris, 50 miles north of Port-au-Prince, where similar demonstrations passed peacefully.

But in the capital, the poor continued a massive, voluntary cleanup campaign in advance of Aristide’s expected arrival next Saturday. Working barefoot and in ragged clothes, makeshift street crews shoveled mountains of human waste and rotting garbage from main boulevards and side streets and carted it all away.

Traffic snarled. The price of gasoline has plummeted in anticipation of an end to the international trade embargo, and many in the capital could afford to drive their battered old cars and jeeps for the first time in months.

But it was on the several hilly acres near the airport, off a street named Delmas 33, that the imagery shocked Haiti’s small but powerful rich elite.

“This is the real meaning of Aristide,” said a manager at one of the Caribbean nation’s faded five-star hotels, as he watched the peasants carving up land. “You Americans don’t realize what you’re doing bringing back Aristide. He wants everyone to eat corn. There will be no ice cream. If you liked Fidel Castro, you’re gonna love this little priest.”

At the heart of those fears are Aristide’s long-stated policies to divvy up Haiti’s riches. In a land where the overwhelming majority of the population lives in crushing poverty while a tiny minority controls the economy and luxuriates in sprawling villas far from the slums, a formal, gradual redistribution of wealth is the only way to avert civil war, according to Aristide’s aides.

Those policies, twinned with murmured threats of retribution, are fuel for the fears of the rich, whose future is as uncertain as that of the impoverished and unemployed toiling away off Delmas 33.

“We don’t know if we’ll be able to keep these plots,” the barefoot land-seizer said with a smile. “First, we make the occupation, and then we wait and see. If the land is owned by a private person, maybe the new government will tell us to move. If it is owned by the government, then they will have to give us cement for the houses.

“In any case, if they move us, they will have to give us a place somewhere else.”

The man, missing a little finger he said was chopped off by paramilitary thugs last February, asked not to be identified by name. He was still afraid, he said, because Aristide has yet to return. But his mere presence, along with that of dozens of others usurping land in broad daylight Saturday, showed how emboldened the city’s poor have become with the presence of 20,000 American troops who they believe are on their side.

“Before, I could get killed for this,” the man said, referring to Haiti’s police and army, which brutally enforced the law against the nation’s poor. “But I just woke up this morning and saw everyone else taking the land. I have no job, no shelter. I live on the floor in the house of a friend. So I decided to join in.

“This is the way it will be done now. Everybody is going to take land like this.”

But the atmosphere was not without hope that peaceful change still can come.

“We will stay here only until President Aristide comes home,” the man concluded. “And if the president tells us to move, I assure you everyone is going to leave.”