Strikes Aim to Put Pressure on Aristide

An opposition alliance trying to force President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to resign announced a new wave of protests -- including a two-day nationwide strike -- to show the depth of popular disenchantment with the once-beloved leader.

Monday’s appeal for an intensified campaign of civil disobedience follows violent clashes with police and pro-Aristide gangs during Haiti’s bicentennial celebrations on New Year’s Day. Eight people suffered serious injury when police fired into crowds in Port-au-Prince and Gonaives. One of the injured died Friday, bringing to at least 42 the number of Haitians killed in political violence since September.

The anti-Aristide coalition hopes that massive street protests Wednesday and Sunday and a strike on Thursday and Friday will send a message to the beleaguered president that his former constituency of workers and poor people has turned against him. Opposition groups say Aristide has employed corruption and human rights abuses in a desperate bid to stay in power.

Aristide opponents insist that fresh leadership is needed to restore order to the country. The economy is crippled by strikes, corruption and withholding of foreign aid, leaving as much as 80% of the workforce idle. Teachers, doctors, lawyers and judges have already stopped work to protest the government’s repression of political opponents. Organizers of the general strike say they are pressuring all private businesses, even black-market street vendors, to halt commerce to show Aristide the strength and unity of his opposition.

“We can’t stand still now. We have to continue mobilizing,” said Marie-Denise Claude of the Backup for Democracy Committee, among the growing number of political parties and civil society groups seeking to drive Aristide from power and form a government of national reconciliation.

The opposition push coincided with a visit Monday by representatives of the Caribbean Community to mediate the impasse between Aristide and opposition groups. Aristide, a former cleric who was reinstalled in 1994 with U.S. help, has two years remaining in his second term as president. Popular discontent with his rule has been steadily mounting since the May 2000 elections, widely regarded here as flawed, gave his Lavalas Family Party a firm grip on Parliament. The legislature effectively will cease to operate this month because some of the deputies’ mandates expired. The opposition has refused to participate in organizing new parliamentary elections until Aristide steps down.

“Aristide can’t claim to be building democracy when he beats us up for speaking our minds,” said Charles Henri Baker, a businessman and opposition leader.

Despite a relatively strong show of support for Aristide during bicentennial celebrations, when nearly 15,000 government workers and urban poor gathered on the National Palace lawn to cheer him, Aristide suffered a blow to his credibility, argued Richard Widmaier, director of independent Radio Metropole.

“The government had been bragging for months about how it would commemorate these 200 years. The people were expecting much, much more, and he has definitely been weakened in their eyes,” Widmaier said. Aristide had predicted in early 2003 that the event would draw a broad spectrum of world leaders. Only South African and Bahamian leaders attended.

The few prominent figures who took part in the ceremonies marking 200 years since Haiti declared independence from France and became the first nation to abolish slavery drew criticism from Aristide opponents for lending credibility to events. South African President Thabo Mbeki was criticized in his own country for appearing at the side of Aristide while police and toughs loyal to the Haitian president shot and beat peaceful demonstrators.

Some opposition figures insisted that Mbeki’s attendance made him responsible for ensuring that Aristide didn’t take the show of support as a license to unleash further abuses.

“There will be another wave of repression after the departure of President Mbeki,” said Andre Apaid, a businessman and activist with the Group of 184, a coalition of civil society organizations. “He needs to keep an eye on the killings and arrests and detentions following the oxygen his visit has given to the regime.”

Widmaier predicted a protracted struggle ahead, as Aristide has made clear he will not step down and many Haitians remain on the sidelines out of fear or apathy.

With the effective dissolution of Parliament, Aristide will rule by decree. “I think he’ll be quite comfortable with that,” Widmaier said of the president’s new freedom to enact laws without the opposition’s involvement.

Apaid acknowledged that much of the violence New Year’s Day was the work of opposition supporters who until recently had mostly been on the receiving end of clashes. He deplored the violence, but blamed police excesses for stirring “an insurrectional atmosphere.”

A day after the bicentennial celebrations, the opposition alliance presented a fresh initiative for naming a temporary government. Aristide refused to acknowledge the appeal.