Aristide Takes Office Again as President

To shouts of “50 more years,” Jean-Bertrand Aristide took back Haiti’s presidential sash Wednesday, reclaiming the helm of a nation more isolated, divided and impoverished than when he left office five years ago.

Beaming with apparent relief, outgoing President Rene Preval embraced his mentor after handing back the blue-and-red mantle of Haitian power at a Legislative Palace bristling with machine guns, security guards and combat gear.

But at the same moment across town, the Democratic Convergence opposition alliance, which boycotted the November presidential election that returned Aristide to power, inaugurated its own “virtual president,” 75-year-old lawyer and human rights activist Gerard Gourgue.

As the poorest of Haiti’s poor danced, drank and worshiped Aristide in the streets, Gourgue declared the new president a “dictator,” throwing down a gauntlet likely to leave the Western Hemisphere’s most poverty-stricken nation unstable for months or years to come.

Despite sky-high expectations from a nation where, according to the United Nations, 80% of the people are unemployed and two-thirds are malnourished, there was little encouragement from the outside world Wednesday.

France and the European Union, which have harshly criticized last year’s elections that gave Aristide’s Lavalas Family party more than 80% of parliament and local offices, sent no delegations. Not a single head of state attended. And the United States, which spent more than $2 billion and sent 20,000 troops in 1994 to drive out a junta and return Aristide to power, sent only its new ambassador, Brian Dean Curran, to attend the festivities.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in international development aid earmarked for Haiti have been frozen for two years, after Preval allowed parliamentary terms to expire, delayed new elections for months and finally staged elections the international community declared free but flawed and unfair.

Aristide vowed in a December letter to then-President Clinton to open his government to the opposition and take steps to resolve postelection challenges. But negotiations between Lavalas and its opponents broke down early on the eve of the inauguration--a day that also marked the end of the U.N.’s 5-year-old human rights, elections and police monitoring missions here.

Also absent Wednesday was the throng estimated at nearly 1 million that deluged the former priest’s 1991 inauguration, after an election that ushered in a new era of democracy following decades of dictatorship, coups and paramilitary brutality.

A frail and grim-faced Aristide, now 47, set the tone and tenor of the day as he solemnly placed his left hand on a weathered red Bible at the Legislative Palace, held up his right hand and swore “before God and the nation to respect the constitution and the laws of the republic, and to respect the desires of the Haitian people.”

By all accounts, those desires are enormous among a people who suffered massacres and torture under harsh military regimes after Aristide was overthrown and fled into exile during a September 1991 coup. Then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher escorted Aristide back here during the Clinton administration’s October 1994 “Operation Restore Democracy.” But Aristide’s term expired the following year, and the Haitian constitution barred him from consecutive terms.

After the past five years of stagnation, polarization and international alienation under a handpicked replacement many Haitians viewed as a seat-warmer, Roman Catholic prelate Hibert Constant underscored his nation’s expectations during the traditional inaugural Mass.

Surrounded by floral arrangements with doves, sunflowers and orchids at Port-au-Prince’s cavernous Notre Dame Cathedral, Constant beseeched: “The real fight we need to succeed in is against misery and hunger.”

Later, in a football-field-size yard outside Haiti’s freshly painted National Palace, Aristide vowed to rebuild roads, power plants, telecommunications, health care and education. He promised an effective judiciary and personal security--in a country where Lavalas-backed thugs have terrorized the capital and countryside in recent years. And he offered a flower of reconciliation to the opposition.

“Sisters and brothers, I choose to pick the most beautiful rose in our garden to offer the opposition,” Aristide said. “I am the president of all Haitians without distinction. . . . Democracy needs Lavalas and the opposition. All we need is to get along.”

And there was plenty of support for his message around the perimeter of the National Palace, where thousands of Aristide’s hard-core followers were mashed against the wrought-iron fence that surrounds it.

“Today is one of the best days for Haitians. We have lived through so much blood,” said Paul Jean Labase, 32, who carried a stick impaling the skull of his brother Frantzo--a victim of the former military regime who was exhumed by Lavalas in 1999 as a rallying point.

“We’re asking now only for love, for peace.”

Tailor Gedeon Dieubon, who nearly passed out in the perimeter crowd, said he came “to beef up democracy. Until now, the people have been very hungry. They needed to have hope--hope and faith. And with Aristide, again we now have both.

“We put him in power. I don’t think we’ll have the courage to take him out of power before his five years are over. He’s going to change our lives.”