Despite U.S. Intervention, Strife Still Plagues Haiti

More than five years and over $2 billion after President Clinton ordered 20,000 U.S. troops to occupy this Caribbean nation--first to “Restore” and then to “Uphold Democracy,” as the U.S. operations were named--chaos and violent death remain facts of life in Haiti.

Disturbing signs of disintegration abound. Among them: drug lords who are attempting to take over key sectors of the nation’s economy, vengeful rivals within senior police ranks, and political outlaws in a land that many seek to rule but few to govern.

In January, President Rene Preval dissolved Parliament and began ruling by fiat. Now political life is polarized, cynical and fraught with apathy in advance of national and local assembly elections scheduled for March.

Many here blame the political situation on a destabilization campaign by supporters of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide meant to bring the onetime Roman Catholic priest back to power in a presidential election next fall--a charge Aristide’s spokesman denied.

Despite such encouraging signs as an estimated 4.5% economic growth rate this year, most of Haiti’s economy still appears in shambles, with analysts attributing at least some of that growth to profits from the tons of cocaine that transit Haiti en route to the U.S. And crimes allegedly committed by the nascent National Police force are disturbingly frequent, with scores of U.S.-trained and -recruited officers implicated in dozens of slayings, beatings and illegal drug transactions, while 20 other officers have been killed this year alone.

With the last few hundred U.S. humanitarian and security troops preparing to pull out of bases in this forlorn capital by early next year, many in both Haiti and the U.S. believe that the intervention long billed as a major foreign policy victory for the Clinton administration may well be remembered as anything but.

“Things are going sour in Haiti,” declared Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) before a House vote June 9 on his legislation to end the $22-million-a-year U.S. military commitment in the island nation. “We no longer have all the elements of democracy down there that we seek to have. The dictatorship has, in fact, returned.”

Most independent analysts agree that personal and political freedoms now far exceed those under the military dictatorship the U.S. intervention drove out. But further testimony to Haiti’s dangerous, enduring disorder came last month with the slaying of Jean Lamy and its aftermath.

Lamy and Robert Manuel were, by all accounts, the best of friends. Manuel, Haiti’s powerful public security chief, and Lamy, a former army colonel and his rumored heir apparent, were key members of the nation’s internal security elite. They fled together into exile with then-President Aristide after a 1991 military coup, and lived together after the U.S. military landed here in 1994 to restore Aristide to power.

But on Oct. 8, Lamy was gunned down in Port-au-Prince, and many here, from graffiti artists to Lamy’s widow, blame Manuel for the slaying--despite a dearth of evidence.

At Lamy’s funeral, dozens of Aristide supporters pelted National Police Chief Pierre Denize with crumpled posters of the former president, loudly accusing the head of the force--which the U.S. has spent tens of millions of dollars trying to build--of helping orchestrate the assassination.

Only Aristide and his private security guards could rescue the chief from the crowd at the cathedral.

In arguing against the amendment to end Operation Uphold Democracy, which passed 227 to 198 largely along party lines, House Democrats insisted that Haiti remains a success story.

The intervention, they said, reduced the number of Haitians illegally landing on U.S. shores from 60,000 during the three years of military dictatorship ended in 1994 to a few thousand a year now. The few hundred soldiers at a time who have rotated through the U.S. bases in Port-au-Prince since Washington withdrew the bulk of its troops in 1996, Democrats note, have provided medical treatment to thousands of impoverished Haitians, built roads, schools and bridges and dug dozens of freshwater wells.

But with the legislation pending in the Senate, the administration is acting unilaterally, closing its bases in Port-au-Prince and deploying troops in the countryside instead.

“The point is that we’re not leaving Haiti,” said U.S. Army Col. Roy Duncan, local commander of Operation Uphold Democracy.

Mission a Success, U.S. Commander Says

Speaking at a makeshift hospital, where U.S. military doctors and nurses were able to treat more than half of the 800 shanty dwellers who jammed the front gate one recent afternoon, Duncan said the mission has been an overwhelming success that has proved the U.S. military’s skill in both security and humanitarian duties.

But Haitians and the diplomats who have been here for years have a different view.

Many Haitians in the street say they expected the U.S. to do more to rebuild their country and its democratic institutions. Independent analysts attribute that resentment to a cult of dependency that the U.S. intervention has reinforced--a sense among many Haitians that only their superpower neighbor can rescue them from ruin.

“It’s a complete mess,” said opposition politician Claude Roumain of the attempt to build democracy. “But the United States is not responsible. . . It’s our responsibility. We failed.”

Added Evans Paul, the capital’s former mayor, who broke with Aristide and now heads a coalition challenging the ruling Lavalas party: “Haiti is a complicated place. I don’t want to accuse the Americans of anything. Sometimes I put myself in the Americans’ place and I feel sorry for them. Haiti is a phenomenon all by itself.”

Indeed, cases in point are the U.S. efforts to prod Haiti’s leadership into jump-starting the economy, promoting open political debate and creating a democratic police force to replace the army that Aristide disbanded but the U.S. military never disarmed.

On the economic front, continued street anarchy and insecurity have stalled major foreign investment. Preval’s long standoff with the political opposition, which ruled the Parliament he dissolved in January, has frozen about $500 million in foreign development aid. And in the vacuum, Colombian cocaine traffickers are moving vast quantities of drugs through Haiti’s lawless countryside to boats and planes headed for the U.S. and washing vast profits through dozens of new Haitian banks and other commercial enterprises, according to U.S. drug enforcement officials.

Even as law-abiding local entrepreneurs try to enter the marketplace, what little government exists works against them, the businesspeople say. One recent illustration: More than a dozen Internet cafes here were forced to close when the government shut down a communications firm that was competing with its Teleco monopoly, charging that the privately owned company was operating without proper licenses.

But it is the National Police force that most see as a barometer of the country’s successes and failures. And in the past year, there have been far fewer of the former.

“1999 has been a bad year,” said Colin Granderson, the Trinidadian diplomat who heads a U.N.-Organization of American States mission to monitor the police. The effort will end in the coming months because the U.S. withdrew its share of funding.

“It all started off with the disastrous decision of the president to dissolve Parliament, and basically it has been downhill from there,” he said. “There has been an increase in general lawlessness and a deterioration of the state.”

Although Granderson and other diplomats say respect for human rights has improved overall since the new and undermanned force replaced a brutal army, they singled out the Lamy slaying and its aftermath as stark illustrations of this year’s deterioration. And the U.N.-OAS International Civilian Mission in Haiti gave a chilling backdrop for the killing in its quarterly human rights report for July-September, which was released last week.

According to the report, nearly 60 officers in the 5,300-member National Police force are in prison on charges ranging from murder and armed robbery to drug trafficking. And four killings by police were reported during the third quarter, a period when six police officers also were slain.

There were some encouraging trends. The mission reported a sharp drop in “an unprecedented spate of disappearances, summary executions and other types of killings attributed to police agents” that earlier this year had left 50 civilians dead.

A Phone Call, and Then He Was Dead

The international monitors and trainers who oversee the police force have attributed the few successes to Denize and Manuel, who diplomats say earned reputations as politically independent professionals during their years on the job. Yet both men have been targeted in street protests and graffiti by pro-Aristide groups during the past several months.

Police investigators say Manuel resigned Oct. 7 and left for Guatemala two days later. On the evening before he left, Manuel met with Lamy, who was Denize’s chief technical consultant. Lamy was rumored to be Manuel’s successor, though several Haitians now deny that.

After the meeting, Lamy was watching a soccer match at his villa when he received a phone call and agreed to meet the caller immediately, according to Mario Andresol, the federal judicial police chief who is investigating the slaying.

“It must have been a very important person,” Andresol said, “or he wouldn’t have gone out that night.”

Fifteen minutes later, Lamy was shot once in the forehead in his pickup truck, his 9-millimeter pistol still tucked under his belt with the safety on. Investigators believe Lamy knew his killer.

Andresol, who was himself targeted in an ambush during which five bullets were fired into his car a week after the killing, said he’s trying to locate Manuel to interview him and to trace that last call. But phone records here are difficult to research, he said.

Manuel, who is rumored to be in Guatemala, Mexico or the U.S., could not be reached for comment.

Andresol doubts that he will solve the crime “while passions and emotions remain high.” But Lamy’s widow, Erla, said she has no doubt who was behind it.

“My husband called me right before he left that night,” said Erla, who was in New York at the time. “He said it was Bob Manuel who had called, and he was going to meet him.”

Erla Lamy added that Preval defended Manuel when she confronted the president with her suspicions.

“The president told me, ‘Manuel is a good friend of mine, but Manuel and Lamy were even more than friends.’ He insisted Manuel couldn’t have done it,” she said. “But I’m positive about it.”

In a nation where insecurity now abounds, Lamy’s widow said she was sure of only one more thing: “I don’t trust anybody in the police here anymore.”