THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 31, 1994 TAG: 9407290509
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY FRANCIE LATOUR, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 153 lines
The sudden boom from the guns of 17 U.S. warships alerted the mobs gathered in Port-au-Prince: The world was no longer just watching.
In a joint Marine and Navy operation, more than 400 men in sun-bleached khakis landed in the port city. They stormed the central military barracks and a nearby fort, seizing more than a million rounds of ammunition. Reinforcements were on their way from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The time? Not July 1994 but July 1915. President Woodrow Wilson had commanded U.S. forces to land to ``rescue our friendly neighbor . . . and ensure Haitian independence.''
Rescue turned into occupation, and during the next 19 years, American soldiers transformed the country's civil and military bureaucracy into something they could keep under control.
Nearly 80 years later, as the United States debates how to deal with misery and violence nearing the boiling point in Haiti, many see the chickens coming home to roost.
``Haiti's present is at the heart of America's imperial past,'' said Georges Anglade, a Haitian geographer at the University of Quebec who has studied the occupation.
The United States helped build hospitals, schools and an irrigation system during its time in Haiti. But it left a dangerous legacy, too: an exclusive military corps that has held power in one form or another ever since.
A treaty drafted by the United States two months after the 1915 invasion created Haiti's first modern, centralized army, known as the ``gendarmerie.'' This group was the embryo of the army at the center of today's crisis - the force that ousted democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
This force is one of the occupation's lasting imprints on Haiti. Another is a geographic overhaul that elevated Port-au-Prince - once a region with status roughly equal to a dozen others - to the island's center of political and economic power and thus, of its population.
When U.S. troops left in 1934, Anglade said, ``the structural and territorial foundations they laid lasted 60 years, until 1994. And it was a rotten one.''
The trigger for the invasion was the assassination and dismemberment of then-President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam by Haitian mobs. The State Department announced an immediate rescue mission to bring order and relief to its ``amicable neighbor.''
But experts say the humanitarian response was incidental to long-standing U.S. interests in the region.
``As with most invasions of the area at that time, securing the Panama Canal was the overriding objective,'' said Ivan Musicant, a naval and marine historian. ``Everything fell beneath that.''
The fierce competition among the United States, France and Germany for control of the Panama Canal during World War I intensified the pursuit to dominate Caribbean territory.
Haiti's strategic location near the canal's Atlantic side may have been what turned a 48-hour rescue into nearly two decades of occupation.
``The Haiti invasion was not a spur-of-the-moment thing,'' said David Healy, a military historian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. ``The Haitians weren't told that, but it was always understood by the State Department that it would be for a longer period.''
By placing American officers and advisers in charge of customs, government finances and land ownership, the Haitian-American Treaty of September 1915 cemented an indefinite U.S. presence.
As stipulated by the treaty, the Haitian gendarmerie had a single purpose: to quell peasant revolt. Once selected native soldiers began to fill the ranks, only American Marines could promote or replace Haitian officers.
The founding of Haiti's Military Academy in 1930 institutionalized the army's mission and training.
Healy said these provisions politicized the army from the outset.
``Power in Haiti has always flowed from force,'' he said. ``What the Marines did was organize, centralize and modernize that force. We did this in a number of countries, and in each case the army became part of the political equation.''
The military buildup under the treaty tied the fate of the nation to that of the army, said Michel Laguerre, professor of Haitian history at the University of California at Berkeley. The army's American loyalties exacerbated the country's internal conflicts.
``It was a case of using one segment of society against another in order to achieve a government that would serve American interests,'' Laguerre said.
At the same time, Marines launched an extensive road-building program that transformed 11 regions into a pyramidlike network converging on Port-au-Prince. Under the command of Marine Maj. Smedley D. Butler, three miles of paved road grew to 470 miles of highway by 1919.
The routes gave rural farmers access to urban marketplaces for the first time, said Nancy Gordon Heinl, co-author of ``Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492-1971.''
But the roads, which included a 170-mile highway between Port-au-Prince and the northern coastal city Cap-Haitien, also penetrated heavily into the north, where the rebels - known as Cacos - had their strongholds.
``There was no economic logic to the routes that were built,'' said geographer Georges Anglade. ``They complied with a logic of military control and commercial elites, not to a logic of economic development.''
The roads gave business elites access to international markets by linking the farms and factories they owned to key ports. But Laguerre said their benefit to peasants was limited.
``The centralization of Port-au-Prince excluded rural folk from political decisions, and continues to do that,'' Laguerre said.
Whether the United States fundamentally worsened an already impoverished country is still a point of debate among historians.
``I wouldn't make any great claims for the U.S. with regards to Haiti,'' Healy said. ``But there was never any democracy in Haiti. Even if we had never done anything there, there would still be a long list of deep problems.''
At the top of the list, Healy said, are a history of repression, a lack of capital and overpopulation.
Heinl credits the United States with bringing public health and primary education to the country. Following U.S. withdrawal, she says, ``everything went to hell in a handbasket.''
Musicant, in an interview with The New York Times, agreed: ``The 19 years that the United States was in Haiti were the 19 best years of Haiti's entire existence. We left that country a far, far better place than we found it.''
Experts on all sides of the issue concur that the occupation instilled in Haitians a deep mistrust of the United States that has persisted through the generations.
One Haitian who remembers the experience of living under the censorship and martial law of that period said the threat of a second invasion today brings back the rage and resentment.
Paul Cassagnol, now 81 and living in Washington, came of age under the occupation. The leader of a student strike at his high school in 1930, he remembers the private satisfaction he got from singing popular anti-American rhymes through his teeth as Marines walked by.
He also remembers the photo of Cacos leader Charlemagne Peralte. The rebel was killed by Marines, and pictures of his body - tied to a door with ropes - were widely distributed to discourage further dissent.
At a time when the Caribbean was considered an ``American lake,'' Cassagnol said, few Americans understood what intervention meant to a nation that had followed the U.S. example, achieving independence from colonial rule in 1804.
``We don't like to be bossed,'' said Cassagnol, who compared Haitians' passion for independence with that of Americans. ``Even if we do something wrong, we didn't want a big brother telling us what to do then. And we don't want one now.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
1920
U.S. Marines answer a riot call in Haiti. The United States invaded
Haiti in July 1915 and occupied the country for 19 years. It helped
build hospitals, schools and infrastructure during its time in Haiti
but also left a dangerous legacy: It created a Haitian military
corps that has held power in one form or another ever since.
Color photo
PAUL AIKEN/Staff
1994
Members of the U.S. Marines and Navy aboard the Spartanburg County
spend their free time sitting - and waiting. The Norfolk-based
tank-landing ship is patrolling off the coast of Haiti.
KEYWORDS: HAITI HISTORY U.S. INTERVENTION by CNB