There’s Haiti’s paradox. For the U.S. administration, the “intervasion” of Haiti has been a success. Its start may have looked messy, with that last-minute haggling between the leaders of the junta and Jimmy Carter, but by the standards America now applies to such matters all has gone fine. Only one American soldier has died; GIs have rarely had to dodge bullets or well-aimed gobs of spit. The flow of refugees to Florida has been staunched. And Haiti? That’s another story. Scores are still settled in the old way: in addition to the murder of Bertin, last week saw a former Haitian Army captain stoned to death after he allegedly killed a neighbor. The economy is still a shambles; political intrigue is still all that passes for civil society. This isn’t Kansas.
Of course, it never was. “In 191 years,” says U.S. Embassy spokesman Stanley Schrager, the country had “21 constitutions and 41 heads of state, of Whom nine were declared president for life.” Clinton’s speech may have been full of outrageous hype about the “ideals of democracy, justice and freedom,” but more judicious men would grant him this, at least -any day in Haiti that is not a complete disaster is a step forward. “We all know the risks,” says one non-American aid donor, “but so far I am awed by how well things have gone.” Yet even applying a non-Kansan test to Haiti, it’s fair to ask: how much has really changed?
On the economy, not much. The country with the Western Hemisphere’s highest birthrate still generates too few jobs. The international embargo between 1991 and 1994- “a devastating. catastrophic error,” says former U.S. ambassador Ernest Preeg wrecked Haiti’s labor-intensive textile and electronic assembly plants. Aid donors fear that foreign assistance will be stolen or frittered away; Haitian expatriates in the United States complain that Aristide’s government is spurning their offers to help.
Above all, Haiti is not secure. A crime wave, beyond the ability of the interim police force to quell, has left Haitians frightened especially now that the U.S. forces have handed control to the United Nations. “No one is safe,” says Kesner Pharel, a U. S.-educated business consultant. “If all this is happening with the Americans leaving, what can we expect from the U.N.?”
Ordinary crime would be bad enough; crime mixed in a murderous cocktail with politics is terrifying, which is why Bertin’s murder made Haitians shiver. Though Aristide has protested that nobody in his government was responsible for the murder, U. S. officials confirm that they had been told that Interior Minister Mondesir Beaubrun was plotting Bertin’s death. Clinton-and Aristide -must now be praying that the FBI team investigating the murder exonerates Beaubrun. The week before the murder, two brothers, Eddy and Patrick Moise, had been arrested, and they implicated Beaubrun in a plot to kill Bertin. But the Moise brothers themselves have a murky past. Portraying themselves as far-left militants, the brothers have long been suspected of being provocateurs. A senior American law enforcement official calls Beaubrun “volatile” (that he is-when his office was attacked last December he fired through his office door, killing at least two bodyguards). And the official adds that volatility is not the usual trait of a man plotting an assassination. Portau-Prince Mayor Evans Paulno Aristide cheerleader-calls the accusation against Beaubrun “absurd.”
Maybe it is. Maybe the United States is learning, in Haiti as in Mexico, that things are not always what they seem. But whatever the truth of the Bertin murder, Haiti will never break its cycle of poverty unless it can find and punish, with due process of law, those who commit such atrocities. Unchecked crime, says Anthony Maingot, a Caribbean scholar at the University of Miami, is “the great promoter of dictatorships.” If the intervasion of Haiti is one day deemed a genuine success, it will not be because GIs built a few bridges, or American textile firms reopened their plants. it will be because Haitians heard an American president say, “Justice will not always be swift, will not always seem fair, but the rule of law must prevail.” And took his words to heart.
