Several Figures Emerge to Fill Power Void in Post-Aristide Haiti

The most popular man in Haiti is a 36-year-old fugitive whose band of thugs drove the elected president into exile, torched public offices, emptied the nation’s jails of all 4,000 prisoners and left 300 people dead.

It is testimony to Haiti’s historically troubled search for heroes that rebel leader Guy Philippe has emerged at the forefront of the political power brokering underway since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled the rebels’ deadly onslaught two months ago.

Haitians are unlikely to go to the polls before the end of 2005 because the transition overseen by interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue is expected to run about 18 months. That has inspired hope among conventional movers and shakers that voters will have time to put the rebels’ role into perspective and choose leaders committed to the rule of law.

Here are some of the players on the post-Aristide field:

Guy Philippe

“The rebels are supported by 80% of the population,” insisted Philippe, a slight, boyish figure who returned from Dominican exile in the camouflage uniform of the disbanded Haitian army but now holds court in polo shirts and jeans.

“Ask any person on the street who they want to see in charge. They all say the rebels. People love us,” he said.

With the bravado that many Haitians still find attractive, Philippe dismisses criticism of his force’s actions in the February uprising.

“The international community has to decide whether it wants to protect a corrupted president or the Haitian people,” he said. “Democracy is more than a five-year term. The international community didn’t say anything when Aristide was killing people. They didn’t say anything when he stole the country’s money.”

(Interim Justice Minister Bernard Gousse confirmed in an interview that central bank authorities have evidence of massive misappropriation in double-digit millions so far, which is likely to prove more extensive as an investigation continues.)

As to his own ambitions, Philippe says he has no interest in seeking political office “for now,” observing that his hero status would be awkward for other presidential hopefuls because he would outshine them.

“I could have taken power. I had people with weapons and the national police with me,” he said of the frenzied jubilation that swept the capital after Aristide’s departure. “We were not fighting for power. We were fighting for better living conditions. Power will never corrupt me.”

Philippe, bestowed with more vanity than vision, acknowledges that he might prove a disappointment as the country’s leader.

“People would think I can solve all their problems, and I can’t,” he said. “In the street, people see us as saviors. We’ve created so many expectations. I know I won’t be able to fulfill them.”

Andre Apaid Jr.

Andre Apaid Jr.’s inherited wealth and light skin made him an easy target of populist vitriol by Aristide’s Lavalas party and left him marked in the eyes of the masses as the bourgeoisie’s standard-bearer.

“I make no apologies for my skin color or for my economic situation,” the 51-year-old industrialist said from his office in an assembly plant of the company his father founded. “I’m proud of my father’s history as a clean businessman in a very corrupt environment.”

Instead of battling against the odds as a candidate, Apaid has positioned himself as leading architect of the political rebuilding process. He is one of nine representatives from social, business and religious groups on a “harmonization committee” working with Latortue and 13 other Cabinet members to smooth the transition.

“I will not be a candidate. The bigger and more difficult task will be to rebuild. It’s not glamorous. No one will be talking about it. But it’s important that we get it right this time,” Apaid said. “We have an awakened civil society engaged in the process like never before in our history. This is the one good result of Aristide’s imposed suffering.”

Born in New York during a brief stay there by his Haitian mother, Apaid holds a U.S. passport that he would have to surrender to meet constitutional terms should he ever decide to run for office. Although Apaid has stated categorically that he won’t run this time, he has already filled out the form for renouncing U.S. citizenship.

Evans Paul

There’s something familiar about Evans Paul’s pitch as a man in touch with the masses. Like Aristide, the political party leader doesn’t claim membership in the light-skinned elite or any circle of privilege Like Aristide, he came from poverty and escaped it with the gutsy use of his charisma to denounce the despotic Duvalier family, which ruled and abused Haiti for decades.

Paul insists that the similarities end there. Although once an ally of Aristide when he served as Port-au-Prince mayor, the 48-year-old broke with the leader and Lavalas and founded his own group, the Committee for Democratic Unity.

Paul echoes the early promises of Aristide in assuring the masses that they have the power and the right to lift themselves and their country up to their full potential.

“People are essentially opportunists,” Paul said. “When they see that Aristide has lost and won’t be coming back, they’ll stop supporting him and identify with someone else.”

Paul describes himself as the most approachable figure on the post-Aristide horizon, although he declines to confirm yet that he will seek to succeed the ousted president.

Mischa Gaillard

Mischa Gaillard, a 49-year-old biology professor, has been active in Haiti’s opposition political movements since his student days. He toiled beside Aristide in the underground movement that ousted Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier in 1986, and he rode the ups and downs of weak leaders and coups that marked the years until Aristide won election in 1990.

Originally a devoted lieutenant to Aristide, a former priest who promised to free Haitians from lives of squalor, Gaillard broke with the populist, he says, when he realized that Aristide and Lavalas were packing the courts and government ranks with political cronies and were arming gangs to neutralize opponents.

Gaillard complains that acting Prime Minister Latortue went overboard in appointing a nonpartisan interim Cabinet that excluded seasoned political leaders from the process.

“There are big issues that must be tackled during the transition: stability, democratization of institutions, the national police, justice. These are all political matters, and a government of technocrats can’t make these kinds of decisions,” Gaillard protested.

One of the few politicians willing to say he aspires to public office, Gaillard said he would seek a place in public service but had yet to decide whether that would be a seat in parliament, the presidency or a diplomatic posting.

Leslie Voltaire

When Aristide left Haiti just after dawn Feb. 29, the search was on for a Lavalas representative to help select a neutral political figure to serve as transitional prime minister. Leslie Voltaire, who was in hiding like all senior members of the party Aristide created and dominated, had to be coaxed into the dubious role of recognizing that the former president was forever out of the country’s political picture.

Now openly trying to resurrect the abandoned political movement, the 54-year-old Voltaire has assumed the role of candidate to keep alive the Lavalas goal of rescuing the millions of poor from their underclass status.

“The biggest objective of Lavalas was to portray the poor as people who count. We didn’t have this before in Haiti,” said Voltaire, a lawyer who served in Aristide’s Cabinet as the minister for diaspora affairs.

He acknowledges that Aristide and other top party brass armed and deployed gangs to menace opponents. But the poor masses that were Aristide’s constituency perceive the president’s ouster as the result of a conspiracy between wealthy business figures and the remnants of former juntas and death squads among Philippe’s rebels.

Someone must emerge from Lavalas to assure Haitians that they won’t be victims of a vengeful leadership or vulnerable to score-settling taking place under the noses of a U.S.-led foreign occupation, Voltaire argues.

He sidesteps questions about his own political ambitions with the observation that, whatever the length of the transition, it is too early to talk about running for election. But Voltaire said that to rescue Lavalas, “we need new faces.”