National Agenda : Haiti’s Capital of Chaos : Port-au-Prince’s new mayor stakes his future on the formidable task of remaking the city.

It’s a typical morning snarl on Boulevard La Saline, the key artery that connects the Haitian capital’s seaport to its desperate daily commerce. Average driving time: two blocks an hour.

Thousands of pavement merchants sit cross-legged in the street, hawking stacks of mangoes, oranges, papayas, baseball caps, used clothes and polluted water by the glass, as battered trucks piled high with bags of sugar, flour and rice attempt to navigate around and through them, delivering goods to scores of illegally constructed warehouses--legacies of the strong-arm corruption that pushed the hawkers into the street during the past three years under Haiti’s crooked, indifferent military rule.

Cars belch black smoke. Horns blare. Vehicles break down every few minutes. A wheel-less van inches through the mess, mounted on a wooden cart pulled by a single man.

The scene is a metaphor for the municipal madness of Port-au-Prince and its 2 million people, and for the staggering challenge confronting Mayor Evans Paul, who has staked his future, perhaps his life, on the task of transforming the urban nightmare into a daily life of, he says, “something more than anarchy.”

Paul emerged from three years of hiding and occasional assassination attempts as the man considered most likely to succeed Jean-Bertrand Aristide as Haiti’s next president. But to do so in elections scheduled for late next year, when Aristide, under law, has to step down, Paul must first resurrect the capital from the ashes of dictatorship.

In short, the soft-spoken man who prefers open shirts to dark suits and impassioned rhetoric to urban master plans must deliver, and fast, in a nation of limitless expectations.

Paul must deliver jobs to a capital with 80% unemployment. He must create security in a traumatized city of slums where many of the dictatorship’s murderous thugs remain at large. He must remove impoverished hawkers from the streets without the use of excessive force, bulldoze garbage dumps that have become homes to thousands of scavengers and reclaim parks where fountains have become bathtubs for the homeless.

And he must do so in a city that is flat broke.

Paul’s task is a microcosm of what lies ahead for Haiti as a whole, after 20,000 U.S. troops eased its dictators into exile and brought Aristide and Paul back to power in the poorest nation in the hemisphere. With the bulk of the U.S. troops scheduled to pull out of Haiti before Dec. 1, to be replaced by a softer multilateral force, Paul and Aristide know they are fighting against time, working with virtually no resources and a limited reservoir of popular goodwill.

“In the short term, our deadline is Christmas,” Paul said in a recent interview in his office at City Hall, a building ringed by U.S. Army concertina wire, rooftop sharpshooters and machine-gun nests. “We are used to doing the impossible, but now we’re going to try to do the impossible before it’s too late.”

The fight will begin in earnest Monday at a two-day political showdown--he calls it a symposium--that Paul has spent weeks arranging. The goal is to enlist Haiti’s rich yet wary private business people as the mayor’s new partners in the future Port-au-Prince.

“The idea is to create a center for the promotion of Port-au-Prince,” he said. “And we can’t do that without the private sector. The city itself has nothing.” City Hall, in fact, was looted down to the wiring and plumbing in the final days of the military regime--to the tune of nearly $2 million, according to the mayor’s preliminary reckoning.

“There was absolutely nothing here when I got here,” Paul recalled. “There was a typewriter ribbon without a typewriter. There wasn’t a stick of furniture. The phones were gone. There wasn’t even a sheet of paper. It was an utter disaster. And there wasn’t a single penny in the city’s accounts.”

So out of sheer necessity, Paul turned to his least likely potential allies--the business people who tacitly or overtly supported the military regime that ousted Aristide’s and Paul’s populist governments three years ago and shot down their pro-democracy colleagues on the street, terrorizing the city’s impoverished masses night after night until American troops descended on the Caribbean nation Sept. 19 under United Nations authorization.

The fallen military regime and some of its supporting business people are, in part, directly responsible for the problems Paul is now asking the elite to help solve. To illustrate, the mayor cited Boulevard La Saline, where the generals permitted helter-skelter construction of the waterfront warehouses in exchange for hefty kickbacks. The construction, in turn, forced hawkers into the street. The combination of sidewalk sales and warehouse construction was instant chaos.

“This is all the result of an anarchic situation, the consequence of retrograde governments running this city and this country into the ground,” Paul said. “For example, when anyone can put up a building wherever and however he likes, a poor merchant (also) feels he can set up where he likes. So now, the example must again come from the elite. And that’s why, above all else, I’m trying to bring the elite into this.

“My goal is not to punish or antagonize the elite, but to (make them sensitive), educate them. . . . There will, of course, always be people who refuse to give in, but we have to give everyone some room to maneuver.”

Paul is the first to point out that the problem goes far beyond his city. It is part of a national crisis that must be solved simultaneously with his assault on the nightmares of Port-au-Prince.

About 300,000 of the city’s slum dwellers are relative newcomers, refugees from rural Haiti who fled a nationwide crackdown during the 1991 coup. The influx swelled the city’s already overpopulated slums. On the national level, Aristide, with the aid of U.S. Special Forces units, must now pacify the countryside, neutralizing and disarming the ousted regime’s rural sheriffs, known as section chiefs in the military’s cold jargon, and stage elections for about 2,000 local offices.

The national government also must establish economic policies that will encourage the private sector to invest, particularly in the urban development and worker-relocation projects that Paul plans to present in his meeting next week. Aristide clearly is aware of the needs. Among his new Cabinet ministers are internationally acclaimed professionals like World Bank economist Leslie Delatour, who has agreed to serve as Haiti’s Central Bank chief.

Such appointments are critical gestures not only for the handful of families that control Haiti’s private-sector economy but also for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which controls the largest single chunk of a worldwide aid effort for Haiti, now pledged at $500 million during the next five years. The AID budget of $200 million for the coming year alone equals about a quarter of the country’s entire annual budget. And so powerful is the job of AID’s country director, Larry Crandall, that diplomats have nicknamed him “commanding general” of the U.S. intervention.

Crandall agreed in a recent interview that developing Port-au-Prince is a critical cornerstone to changing the face of the Haitian nation, pointing out that “one-third of all Haitians live there.” But most of the U.S. aid effort, he said, will be directed at nationwide humanitarian projects--2,500 feeding centers, family planning programs in a country that will double its population in just 20 years and an emergency short-term jobs program to employ up to 50,000 people as garbage collectors and road crews.

The rest, Crandall concedes, will be up to the creativity and ingenuity of key leaders such as Evans Paul, a child of repression in Haiti. His father disappeared under the regime of Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier in 1958; his mother, a textile worker, scratched out the funds to send the boy to high school and, later, to study drama and accounting.

His political bent began with a job as a disc jockey on Creole radio. Later he hosted a talk show called “Pen in Hand” and operated in the anti-government underground as Comrade Pen.

Paul is nothing if not inventive. He conceded he shuns pie-in-the-sky master plans and makes up his budgets after he solicits the money on a project.

He illustrated his stubborn approach by relating the events of a recent meeting: “The businessmen kept saying: ‘Mr. Mayor, where are your studies? You must have plans and blueprints.’ But I just kept repeating the same question 25 times: ‘What can you do for me and for this city?’ Finally, they agreed to create a committee to finance these studies and plans for the symposium.”

At the heart of any of those plans will be what Paul sees as crucial in resolving the needs of his city: creating an alternative. It goes together with what he described as his governing style: “You must be subtle and firm at the same time.”

Again, Paul selected an urban site to illustrate. Dubbed “U.N. Plaza” for the dozen or so flags of the Americas that fly beside a fountain in the center, the downtown park has become a blight that the homeless have converted into a huge outdoor toilet and laundry.

“To come with a stick and say ‘You have to leave’ is not the solution,” he said. “Because these people are victims of our society. I don’t think they’ve chosen to live in these conditions. What I’m trying to do is build a sanitary facility near this area, with showers, indoor toilets and laundry facilities.

“Once there is an alternative, then I will ban the people from doing this in the square. Then if I have to use force, I will do it.”

If he is successful in raising enough private capital at next week’s symposium to build a new market complex for the city’s tens of thousands of street hawkers, Paul said he will use the same approach to clear the streets and continue the process of urban development.

In the short term, he added, he also will need the continuing presence of the 9,000 or so U.S. combat troops President Clinton has said will remain in Haiti after the Dec. 1 withdrawal.

“I’ve just lost three years to insecurity,” Paul said. “We must be realistic. If the Americans weren’t here, I wouldn’t be able to be here or work at all.” And, of the U.N. military force that is to inherit responsibility for maintaining security when the U.S. military pulls out the remainder of its troops next spring, Paul said, “It may well be that the U.N. force will not be able to create this atmosphere of security that we need.

“The important thing right now is that we must seize on the presence of the Americans to create our own political and economic stability through these new institutions. We must create a state of mind of security. Force cannot create stability forever, for violence is the father only of more violence.”

Back of the Pack

Haiti is desperately poor compared to other economies in the region, which poses a major challenge to Mayor Evans Paul’s attempt to rehabilitate Port-au-Prince.

Haiti Facts

Population: 6,491,450

Population Growth Rate: 1.63%

Infant Mortality Rate: 108.5 deaths per 1,000 live births

Literacy: 53%

Inflation Rate: 20% (1992 estimate)

Unemployment Rate: 25 to 50% (1991 estimate)

Source: The CIA World Factbook 1994