Aristide’s Return Hasn’t Stemmed Haiti’s Misery : Caribbean: Unemployment, crime remain major woes. Some believe U.N. should remain past February.

Ami Beljeune still washes her babies each morning in a sewage canal they share with pigs, Ano Vital still has no work or money to care for his 16 children, and Lionel Lunes can’t find buyers for the wood scraps he sells to survive.

Five miles to the east and a couple of thousand feet up a mountain overlooking Cite Soleil, the fetid slum on the edge of Port-au-Prince where these poor people live, the rich residents of Petionville hunker behind their estate walls, fearful that the armed guards and razor wire will not be enough to repel robbers and killers.

Forty-five people were lynched in March in the Port-au-Prince area. April was much the same, with 10 people--mostly real or suspected thieves--lynched in a single weekend.

Garbage clutters the gutters in rich and poor neighborhoods alike. Cavernous new potholes appear every day, adding to choking traffic jams. And only about 15% of Haiti’s work force has jobs.

This is Haiti seven months after U.S. troops brought President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back from exile to restore democracy, with a promise that life would soon be better.

By all accounts, that promise has crumbled into a litany of misery: an epidemic of violence and crime, telephones with no dial tones, impassable roads, electricity rationed to four hours every other day, if that, and people losing jobs, not getting them.

Life was supposed to have been better. Not only did the United States and the United Nations restore Aristide, they destroyed the brutal and corrupt military and put in train a process for the country’s first genuine elections since 1990.

Besides pledging to return Aristide and oversee elections, the international community promised money. More than $600 million was pledged for the first six months, with $1 billion to follow before the U.N. mandate ends next February.

But less than $200 million has actually been provided; most of that was used to retire national debt and pay for oil imports, government salaries and the cost of the aid program itself.

Only $52 million has been spent for food, health, minimum-wage jobs and agricultural development.

“While life isn’t really worse under Aristide, it certainly hasn’t gotten any better,” one diplomat said. “I don’t know what went wrong or who’s at fault.”

“In Haiti,” an influential Haitian political expert said, “the next step is to blame someone, or everyone. We’ll spend more time accusing each other than trying to figure out what to do.”

Government officials accuse each other of betraying Aristide, or they note the lagging international aid. The rich simply blame Aristide, and the poor blame everybody but him.

U.S. officials and other diplomats here blame the situation partly on Aristide’s shifting policies, from free market back to government intervention.

Whatever the reason, the pace of recovery has been so slow and the crime and security situation so bad that many U.S. and U.N. officials here, in Washington and in New York believe that current policies are not working well or fast enough.

They propose an extension of the U.N. mandate under which U.S. troops restored Aristide last October, three years after he was overthrown by the Haitian army.

The 6,000 U.N. troops, including nearly 3,000 U.S. soldiers, and a like number of foreign civilians are scheduled to leave Haiti next February when a new president takes office.

“There is no way we can pull out,” said one U.N. official here, “. . . and justify all the money and effort” that has gone into Aristide’s restoration. “If we leave, nothing will have been accomplished, and Haiti will return to bloody chaos, maybe even worse.”

Eric Falt, the U.N. spokesman in Haiti, said in an interview that “at this stage, we do not envision being here after February, 1996.”

But other U.N. and U.S. officials privately offered different assessments.

“More and more,” one U.N. official said, “the more you look at things here, the more you find good reasons to stay put.”

Another senior official said that “artificial dates” should not determine whether a “task should be abandoned when it hasn’t been completed.”

An unfinished task for the United Nations is to establish a secure environment--maintain peace until a strong Haitian police and security force can be built to safeguard democracy.

“As it stands, things are going well enough,” a senior U.N. official said, noting that training is on schedule to have 4,000 new police in place by February.

“But it is unlikely that they will be experienced enough or there will be a reformed and functioning judiciary by the time we leave,” he said. “It is obvious that without a functioning, honest police and judicial system, Haiti can’t have any economic growth or stability.”

But he and other diplomats also said U.S. domestic politics would be as much a determining factor as the situation on the ground.

President Clinton promised that U.S. forces would stay only a short time and under limited conditions, and he has reduced U.S. troop levels from more than 25,000 last fall to fewer than 3,000 now.

But since Haiti is viewed as one of Clinton’s foreign policy successes, some officials here believe that he might extend the U.S. role rather than risk that success by pulling out before Haiti is ready to stand on its own.

Any move to continue the U.N. and U.S. presence here, however, would bring congressional opposition led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

U.S. and U.N. intentions aside, the question for the people of Cite Soleil is not what life will be like next February, but how they will survive tomorrow.

“Poverty is eating us up,” said Ami Beljeune, as she poured filthy water from the scum-covered gutter over her three children one morning recently. “There is no work, no money. The cost of living has gone up. If something isn’t done, we can’t survive. Life is as hard as it was before” Aristide’s return.

Ano Vital, 44 and perpetually unemployed, said, “We suffered terribly the last three years, but we believed the Americans would come and run things. We don’t blame Aristide, but I think there is a conspiracy now between the Americans and the rich to destroy him.”

Lionel Lunes, who peddles scraps of wood and discarded tree branches, said that because no one is working and prices are so high, he has no customers.

“It isn’t Aristide’s fault,” he said standing in the dirt-floored, three-sided shack that serves as store and home.

Like many poor Haitians, Lunes differentiates between Aristide and his government.

“The government is businessmen,” he said. “They are not interested in developing the country, only their businesses.”

Still, when asked if he wished the United States had not intervened in Haiti, Lunes looks surprised. “Oh, no. If the Americans hadn’t come, we would not be here today.”