In Desperately Poor Haiti, Voters May Have Given Up

Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Chavannes Jean-Baptiste once called each other brothers.

They marched barefoot side by side across miles of razor-edged rock to protest Haiti’s military rulers. Together, more than a decade ago, they built the massive, populist Lavalas Family movement that helped drive out Haiti’s brutal dictators and bring Aristide to power.

But Sunday, as Haiti’s still-desperate masses were asked to troop yet again to the polls, this time to elect anew a virtually unopposed Aristide, peasant leader Jean-Baptiste didn’t vote.

Neither, it seemed, did most Haitians, although the government-controlled Provisional Electoral Council announced late Sunday that turnout was 60.5%.

Jean-Baptiste was in hiding from armed assassins, he said, in this remote central plateau village.

“This is not an election. It is a christening--a consecration of the new Lavalas dictatorship,” said Jean-Baptiste, who split with Aristide several years ago and now ranks among his harshest critics.

“It is a slap in the face to democracy.”

And it is, he and other opposition leaders added, the legacy of the Clinton administration’s multibillion-dollar Operation Restore Democracy.

Six years after President Clinton sent 20,000 U.S. troops to drive out Haiti’s military dictatorship and bring Aristide back to serve out only the final year of his first presidential term, the 47-year-old former Roman Catholic priest now almost certainly will lead his still-impoverished nation through five more years, with a far less certain mandate.

That, opposition leaders assert, is likely to lead to a deepening of Haiti’s economic crisis, further international isolation and another wave of boat people to America.

Aristide’s return to power at an inauguration scheduled for February comes after a five-year hiatus largely in seclusion, which began after he agreed under U.S. pressure to support his protege, President Rene Preval. Since his 1995 election, Preval has led the nation into increasing isolation by allowing Parliament to lapse, ruling for two years by decree and presiding over parliamentary elections that the Haitian opposition and most Western nations viewed as flawed.

As a few hundred Lavalas Family party loyalists and employees waved and shouted “Aristide or death!” while the next president voted for himself in his wealthy suburb of Tabarre, there were widespread reports of low voter turnout nationwide.

As he voted, Aristide called the election “a rendezvous for peace . . . for all Haitians.”

Support Sunday for the self-styled national savior who inspired millions of Haitians to vote in 1990 is seen as a key barometer of the future legitimacy of Aristide’s government, after his party won its controversial yet overwhelming parliamentary majority in May and July.

3 Unknowns, 3 Who Withdrew on Ballot

With voters facing a presidential ballot that pitted Aristide against three unknowns and three other candidates who withdrew from the race amid a wave of preelection bombings and shootings, independent poll watchers reported low turnout throughout the capital, Port-au-Prince, and the countryside.

John Compton, the former St. Lucia prime minister heading the Caribbean Community and Common Market observer group, reported peaceful voting with a turnout that he predicted might not exceed 30%. Haiti’s Radio Galaxie quoted local officials in the Northwest District as saying that, as of 2 p.m., only 5,000 of 200,000 registered voters had cast ballots. And by midafternoon, Jean-Baptiste reported that just 20 of the 2,400 registered voters in Papaye--where Haiti’s grass-roots pro-democracy movement began more than two decades ago--had gone to the polls. Despite claims by government officials and Aristide supporters of large turnouts in the countryside, by 5 p.m., the official end of polling, some precincts had long since closed for lack of voter interest--even in the capital’s Cite Soleil slum, which is Aristide’s traditional bedrock of popular support.

And when Haiti’s official election commission announced “strong turnout” at an afternoon news conference in Port-au-Prince, a stunned commentator on the independent Radio Metropole said simply: “There are no words to describe this. The crowds are not there.”

If there were any crowds of voters Sunday--a day when two bombs exploded harmlessly in Port-au-Prince and outside an election office in a nearby province--the largest of them were in Aristide’s Tabarre district, where he now lives in a palatial, walled compound he rarely leaves.

Hours before Aristide arrived at St. Vincent de Paul Seminary amid a phalanx of beefy, heavily armed security guards to cast his ballot, Marie Carmelle, 32, explained why she chose to vote: “He is in my heart. There’s nobody else that can face him. He’s the only one.”

Boiler room worker Lexilien Pierre, 47, was less enthusiastic. “I don’t have any faith in human beings. I only trust God,” he said after voting with a Bible under his arm. “Life can only be better in Haiti if people learn to work together instead of fighting all the time.

“But we must vote. If we don’t use the vote, we will lose the vote.”

Carlos Francois, a Haitian American from New York, had a unique take on the vote after he cast his ballot for Aristide in the Tabarre seminary, where Aristide’s Haitian and private American security guards toting assault rifles and sniper scopes took up positions on the rooftop to prepare for the future president’s casting of his vote.

“I voted for Al Gore in New York on Nov. 7 and Jean-Bertrand Aristide here today,” said Francois, a bandleader who divides his time between the United States and Haiti. And despite the bitterly contested aftermath of the American presidential polls, Francois was emphatic that America’s electoral system is far superior to Haiti’s.

“At least in America we have a choice. And there was no choice here today,” he said. “That is something very sad and very worrying for Haiti. With so many millions of people, we should have some competition. Because if there’s only one, there will be no progress and no hope at all.”

‘This Is the Death of Democracy’

The view from Jean-Baptiste’s compound in Papaye offered little hope.

“Sunday’s consecration will plunge Haiti into hell, because the economic crisis will get worse,” he said. “The foreign countries that support democracy are not going to accept this. . . . This is the death of democracy that they are staging here.”

In fact, the U.S. and the European Union already froze most aid to Haiti after the parliamentary polls in May and July, which they and the Haitian opposition say were flawed by tabulations that gave Aristide’s party control of both legislative houses. The U.S. Congress has voted to suspend all future aid until the U.S. secretary of State’s office can certify that Haiti’s parliamentary elections were free and fair.

Worse, though, is the prospect for future violence and anarchy that would fuel a new wave of Haitian boat people seeking out America’s shores; it was the exodus of about 60,000 of them that preceded the 1994 U.S. military intervention here.

After Sunday’s vote, Jean-Baptiste, whom local Lavalas supporters insist is bitter because he was denied a seat of power, asserted, “There will be an anarchy regime of armed, angry young thugs,” especially in the already chaotic countryside.

And Jean-Baptiste insists that he is living proof--but just barely, having narrowly survived a Nov. 2 attack on his peasant movement’s rally, a raid led by Aristide’s handpicked local officials that left Jean-Baptiste’s youngest brother critically wounded.

“Their first objective was to assassinate me,” said Jean-Baptiste, who delivered a speech at the rally criticizing Aristide. “The mayors are heavily armed by Lavalas Family--M16s, Uzis, all kinds of pistols.”

They are even better armed than the U.S.-trained Haitian National Police, he added, warning that the Haitian countryside increasingly is run by emerging warlords who view their towns as private fiefdoms.

‘Aristide Believes He is God’

As for Aristide, Jean-Baptiste said, “He feels he owns the entire state.

“I believed he was a democrat. But Aristide believes he is God, that he is above everybody else, that everyone must agree with him. . . . This gave birth to Aristidism and a group of Aristidians--people who do not defend an ideology. They only defend a man.

“So what’s left? Fat cats, drug dealers, whatever. All the democrats are gone.”