Trying to Pin Down Elusive Death Lists : Haiti

Haitians are always talking about la conjoncture politique. La conjoncture is the latest what’s-happening, today’s fizzy cocktail shaker full of all the volatile, up-to-the-minute political ingredients. In Haiti, this swirling, mutable conjoncture is reconfigured every day by pundits, pols, intellectuals, foreign-aid personnel, even peasants. It includes who’s up or down with the president, what soldiers are being retired, who’s getting foreign funding, what politician was seen going into which embassy, who is fighting with whom within what party and who’s on whose death list.

Interpretation of events is a fine art in this mostly oral culture. It’s hard to say where truth resides, though everyone agrees it is lurking there in the shadows, just out of reach.

A few things, however, almost any Haitian will acknowledge to be true. One: Things are much better in Haiti since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return. Two: You can usually go out at night without getting killed. Three: Haiti needs foreign economic aid immediately. Four: Aristide is the most popular president Haiti has had in more than a century. Five: The Americans’ Operation Restore Democracy endangers Haiti’s future by failing to disarm former military and paramilitary forces. Six: These armed groups are behind the sporadic violence interrupting the country’s otherwise peaceful days and nights.

Yet, even these evident truths are hard to transmit to Washington. Since Aristide--then a militant leftist--was elected president, Haiti has become an ideological touchstone in Washington; and whenever a U.S. politician perceives an issue as a possible indicator of his ideological preference, that issue becomes clouded over by posturing.

Thus, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) loudly dismissed President Bill Clinton’s unprecedented (and brave) attempt to restore Haitian democracy, calling the ouster of the military junta and Aristide’s return the replacement of “one bunch of thugs with another.” Why, Gregg asks, is Clinton “making such a big bunch of hoopla about what is happening in Haiti?”

Please.

One problem for Washington is that the people in charge there tend to get their information on Haiti long distance from usually unreliable in-country sources--especially unreliable when it comes to Aristide. The GOP congressional leadership, the Central Intelligence Agency, elements in the State Department and the Pentagon tend to talk to military leaders whom Aristide has retired; to the conservative politicians his success has discredited; to the leftists who see Aristide as the biggest stumbling block to their taking of power, and to the economic elite implacably opposed even to the limited political and economic reforms Aristide has come to represent.

These groups tend to represent themselves as Haiti’s beleaguered opposition, weak in the face of the Aristide juggernaut, when, in fact, they still control Haiti’s economy and almost all its weapons. This “bunch of thugs” generally does see Aristide and his government as another bunch of thugs. And the Washingtonians who listen to them--most recently the Pentagon, with its pompous warnings about death lists of Aristide foes--have little clear idea about what is really happening.

Death lists are an odd fact of Haitian political life. Even when thugs are not in power, you can think that things on the streets of Port-au-Prince might get wild fast. Partly, this is because the conjoncture changes so often that it gives you the slippery feeling of walking on quicksilver. Partly, it is the fault of the never-ending parade of death lists. In the United States, death lists are not big on the political scene. Richard M. Nixon’s enemies list was the closest thing in recent memory. And that’s really what the Haitian death lists are: Documents that provide useful interpretational information to assess the current conjoncture.

Haitians agree that death lists have little bearing on who eventually is assassinated. They are enemies lists. The lists come out in samizdat: You never know their provenance absolutely, so you can never say that, say, this list was published by Aristide supporters and is a list of his enemies. That same list may just as well have been published by some of the people whose names appear on it in order to discredit Aristide, or to imply that whoever is not on this list is secretly an Aristide supporter. Or it could simply be just a list of those present at some meeting.

There was one minor politician, for example, whose name kept appearing on various death lists in the late 1980s, in spite of the fact that he was among the least talked-about people in the country. Being on hit lists was a part of his presidential campaign strategy, people said, a way to achieve name recognition.

Serious Haitian political figures always discount the lists. “The people who are really going to kill you do not put out lists,” Father Antoine Adrien, a longtime activist and supporter of Aristide, commented once when his name appeared yet again on such a document. Adrien is still alive. On the other side of the political spectrum, death-list regulars Williams Regala, the alleged author of a fabled massacre under Duvalier, and Franck Romain, the former mayor of Port-au-Prince who reportedly organized a massacre at Aristide’s church in 1988, are both still around.

So it is amusing to find that the Pentagon has entered the fearsome yet frivolous business of Haitian death lists. As always, when Americans get involved, things that are subtle and elusive are treated as if they were straightforward. Thus, a list that Haitians have known about for some time and dismissed is now being touted by the Defense Department as a real hit list of Aristide foes that puts people in “highly extreme danger.”

All this seems slightly more believable because of the recent killing of Mireille Durocher Bertin, a former counsel to and spokesperson for Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, who led the 1991 coup against Aristide. Like many more powerful political figures who have come to no harm, Bertin was setting up a political party to participate in the coming elections. The killing of this young mother seems senseless.

But the timing of her murder, like the timing of the release of the Pentagon’s hit list, is revealing. Durocher Bertin was killed just days before Clinton arrived in Haiti to preside over the change in command from a U.S.- to a U.N-led force, and the Pentagon hit list was released just after. In the wake of her killing, unnamed U.S. officials disclosed that they suspected an Aristide minister of masterminding the assassination. Clinton, in Haiti to congratulate himself and Aristide on the success of the U.S. mission, was embarrassed by his own government’s thinly veiled charges against Aristide’s government.

This affair reflects a disagreement on Haiti policy that has been simmering in Washington since Clinton began working to return Aristide to Haiti. The disagreement is between the executive, on the one hand, and the national-security apparatus--the Pentagon, the CIA and a sector of the State Department--on the other. Clinton supports Aristide and the reinstatement of Haitian democracy; the national-security apparatus--ever a bulwark of the old order in Haiti--does not.

With important Haitian legislative elections scheduled in June, conservative GOP forces in Washington, along with these agencies, appear to be mounting another campaign of disinformation against Aristide designed to discredit him in Washington and to create an atmosphere of violence that will frighten the Haitian electorate into staying away from the polls.

The lower the registration and turn-out, the better the chances that conservative anti-Aristide forces will be able to take over the legislature. If voters stay away, the Haitian right wing will participate because they have a chance of winning; if the voters register in droves--as when Aristide was elected--the conservative strategy is to withdraw from the elections, alleging the balloting will not be fair, and thereby delegitimizing the outcome in advance. At the same time, the GOP hopes to tarnish Clinton’s only foreign-policy success and create the political grounds for withdrawing funding from his Haiti program.

While all this international politicking goes on like a drunken cockfight in his own back yard, Aristide must try to manage a country that even in the best of times has so few resources it is virtually unmanageable. There is almost no electricity; this makes it hard for business, but almost impossible to run a government. No lights, no fans, no computers.

But the most important fact is that this government has so far received no large package of foreign aid to help it realize all the goals its foreign friends have found so laudable: creating a judicial system; providing a public sector; establishing a health-care system.

The reason aid has not come through? The international community is still reluctant to provide Aristide with the monies that would ensure his continuing popularity. For the only thing that will begin chipping away at Aristide’s huge following is his failure to improve the lives of Haitians, to lift them, as he says, “out of misery, to poverty.”

Aristide is the first Haitian president in memory who wants to use power to do good. Starve a good man long enough, however, and you may yet make him desperate. Perhaps this is the hope of the conservatives in Washington. If they just force Aristide up hard enough against the wall, maybe he’ll make one of the mistakes they are so often unfairly accusing him of already having made. Maybe he’ll blow it. Would that make them happy?