THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 14, 1995 TAG: 9510130629
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: HAITI: A YEAR OF STARTING OVER
SOURCE: BY FRANCIE LATOUR, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI LENGTH: Long : 319 lines
By day, the teenagers gather outside the rusted, mint-green gates of Haiti's National Palace to goad U.S. soldiers.
These street kids, mostly boys, sometimes come to try and flip the soldiers' blue U.N. caps off; sometimes they beg for water. Today, they poke fun at Sgt. Darren Driskill's portion of military powdered peaches.
Driskill, a soldier from Fort Bragg, has been guarding the palace for about a month. He already knows most of the young faces. He knows they love Sylvester Stallone and kung-fu reruns. Even though they tell him to go home, Driskill also knows this is where the boys will gather to sleep.
The area around the European-like square of the capital is where they come to feel safe.
``Whenever it gets dark,'' Driskill said, ``and they have shoes or food or a hat, anything that could be sold, they bring it here and put it just inside the gates. They know that way that no one will steal them.''
If there could be any measure of progress in Haiti one year after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return by U.S. forces, the low pitch around the nerve center of Haiti's capital would be one.
In 1994, onlookers were arrested for walking too slowly past the iron gates, or for peering into the palace from their cars. No one dared to sleep along its concrete walls.
A year ago today, Aristide, the only popularly elected president in the country's history, swooshed down onto the lawn of this palace in a ceremony that could only have happened here, on this surreal island of beauty and misery. The slight, soft-spoken priest of the people touched down amidst a battery of U.S. helicopters and Haitian throngs who raised their hands and filled the sky with cheers.
Aristide's return was ushered in by U.S. forces that had deployed 21,000 troops three weeks earlier as part of Operation Uphold Democracy. It allowed Aristide to reclaim the last 16 months of a presidency that was taken from him on Sept. 30, 1991. On that date, a violent coup forced him into exile in Washington, D.C. A domestic policy of terror followed that claimed lives in Haiti and started a stream, and then an overflow, of refugees to U.S. shores.
A continuing multi-national U.N. force and Aristide's crackdown on the army has stemmed the violence. It's a radical break from past regimes that built up a military state.
But it's not enough: In the eyes of the large majority of Haitians who have only known unemployment, hunger, illiteracy and sickness, freedom from the gun is only a pre-condition to a much larger promise: a place at the table.
Having a place at the table has become a powerful symbol. As an image, it pulls at the simplest of human needs. As a political idea, it has been invoked to advocate everything from tax reform to health care.
In the late 1980s, the young Catholic priest Aristide raised the idea of the table among followers. He dared masses of people to see salvation not just from heavenly rewards but in terms of social and economic parity.
Father Antonio Fele, who directs St. Gerard Church in the capital, still remembers the charged sermons.
``The rich, the military, they are the ones above the table - they eat everything that is on it,'' Fele said. ``The poor are underneath and they get almost nothing, only the bones and the peels that are thrown on the floor.
``When the 15th of October came,'' Fele said, ``he declared that there shall be no one under the table, no one above the table. From now on, everyone is going to share a place around the table - to vote, to debate, to eat. No one will have any more influence than the next one.''
The image has moved from radical doctrine to mainstream political slogan. Pro-Aristide factions who regrouped under the common platform Bo tab' la - ``a place at the table'' - won by a landslide in national elections in June, July and September.
But Haiti's table offers little more to the poor today than it did a year ago. Many say that while getting to the table alive and unharmed is liberating, it is meaningless without the real economic tools to survive: food, jobs, medical care, public infrastructure and education.
``Let me tell you what is going on here,'' said Josephe Gentille of Port-au-Prince. Gentille, a single mother with six children, earns her only income by renting out the small room in the front of her house as a manicure salon.
``He gave us justice, yes,'' she said. ``You can't live without that. But he hasn't given us any food. He hasn't given us any place to live. You want to try and build a house with my voting ballot? Good luck.'' WEAPONS TO PLOUGHSHARES?
For Jean-Luc Petit-Frere, the table was once more than a metaphor. It was a place to hide.
One night in November 1991, he crouched inside its flimsy wooden legs and watched his father's murder. He was 11.
Petit-Frere said dozens were dragged from their homes in Cite Soleil, one of Port-au-Prince's poorest slums, and shoved into a line.
``He started to bend, like this,'' Petit-Frere said, cupping his hands over his face as his father had been ordered to do by his killers. ``Then they shot him. Three times.''
As Haiti rose and fell from the headlines of U.S. foreign policy, a military regime under now-exiled Gen. Raoul Cedras and Lt. Col. Joseph Michel Francois made terror part of a daily routine for Haitians.
``We woke up in fear, and we went to sleep in fear,'' said Joseph Etienne, 79, who owns a funeral parlor in the capital. ``There wasn't even any point trying to protect yourself from the trouble. It waited for you.''
Today, no one speaks of summary executions, disappearances, curfews and politically motivated rape of women and young children.
``It used to be that you would walk home at night, just from your car to your door, and when you got inside you would kneel down and thank God that nothing happened to you today,'' said Linda Cadet, 19, a student in Port-au-Prince.
``You can never walk around with both eyes closed in Haiti,'' Cadet said, ``but now you can at least get around safely with one closed.''
Massive police reform efforts are designed to achieve what no Haitian government before has: neutralize the army and train a civilian police force.
The rise of Haiti's military power has a long history, rooted in the first U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934. A military academy and military districts created with the help of U.S. Marines during the prolonged invasion laid the foundations for a strong military presence.
From his funeral parlor business, Etienne has watched the proliferation of paramilitary and police groups, the most notorious of them the Tonton Macoutes. Though the Army's evolution has been complex, Etienne said it boils down to a single concept.
``This is Haiti,'' Etienne said. ``We were never about to wage war against another country. No one was waging war on us. So why the build-up of military and soldiers everywhere? The only thing they could do was wage war on their own people.''
Aristide made his plans for the Army clear when he turned its seat of power at downtown headquarters into the new Ministry of Women's Affairs.
In return, rather than seeking revenge on the military that threw him out, Aristide has made a place for former soldiers at Haiti's table through job training.
About 2,300 former members of the Army are learning new skills through six months of vocational training. At one training center in Port-au-Prince, men who once terrorized the streets have substituted weapons for measuring tape and drainage pipe.
``How do you find a job? How do you sit through an interview?'' said Robin Andrews, a Raleigh, N.C. native who helps run the project. ``For these people, it's never been done. They've got to learn to do this stuff.''
But the greatest barrier these soldiers face is not one bred of years of military conditioning. It is a hurdle they share along with the vast majority of the country: massive unemployment.
The program had 795 graduates as of Sept. 30, Andrews said, but only 11 have found full-time jobs. Trained or untrained, Haitians face a market that still has little to offer them. PROMISES WITHOUT PAYCHECKS
A slab of dusty stone is the table where 30-year-old Yannik Joseph and her family of seven gather to eat. Lazy flies hover over simmering chicken; a scanty pot of red beans and rice is coming to a boil.
The mother of two eyes her pots nervously. This is the only meal her family will eat today. With grandad and two brothers here tonight, it may not feed them all.
Joseph has a new neighbor. She has never seen him or the house; the concrete walls that divide them are too high. She has great faith in him and voted for his party in all three elections this year. He is President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
If Joseph could talk to him, she would thank him for the guards who patrol his house. They have made the neighborhood safer.
She would also have a few questions for the president.
``Did you see those two big things they're building on the road near the airport?'' Joseph asked, referring to two monuments under construction on the newly paved road leading to Aristide's home. One is a giant wire globe held up by three concrete hands, the other a replica of a ship commemorating the 1804 revolution that freed Haitian slaves and forged the first black republic.
The larger-than-life structures make Joseph question the government's priorities.
``I still haven't gotten a job,'' Joseph said. ``I would take any job I could get.''
Pointing inside to the one-room hut where as many as nine of her relatives sleep, she said, ``I wouldn't exactly call what we have a house.''
The United States has spent $36 million in the past two years for short- and long-term job programs in Haiti, according to an August report by the United States Agency for International Development, the organization in charge of dispersing those funds. Millions more have been promised by international donors as part of a three-year recovery effort. But the funds have done little to lift Haiti from its position as the poorest country in the hemisphere.
The numbers tell part of the story: 75 percent unemployment; 85 percent illiteracy, and a per-capita income of $260 in 1994, according to the International Monetary Fund. Haiti's currency, the gourde, usually worth 20 cents, is now worth 6.
The word in open street markets and grocery stores contradicts government reports of inflation dropping from 57 percent to 24 percent in the past year.
Gentille, who rents the front part of her home, said she pays about five gourdes more for sugar, rice and milk than she did during the international embargo placed on Haiti prior to Aristide's return.
On her dinner table, she proudly lays out letters from her daughter and son-in-law who live in America. The letters, written more than a year ago, promised $200 and Avon samples from New York. But so far, only the makeup cases have come.
``I don't know why they haven't sent it,'' Gentille said. ``But I know they will.'' If it comes, she said she will use it to buy a stove and make pastries and cookies to sell on the street. PROGRESS - ONE LETTER AT A TIME
The table is a hard, unyielding surface for Saint-Helene Briseyis. Like most school tables, its wood has been carved into by its share of pens, markers and rulers.
In her 48 years, she never learned to sign her name. Today, she leans into her place at the broad desk with a dull pencil and a workbook, making sounds from words on the page.
``I am a doctor,'' Briseyis says, struggling to follow each syllable without losing her place. ``I bring babies from the womb.'' Her classmates follow her, mouthing each sound to themselves. ``I am a sailor. I catch fish in the ocean.''
Three months ago, Briseyis and her eight classmates couldn't distinguish between the letters A and O.
Now, they are not only learning to read and write. They form part of a committee that consults the State Secretariat for Literacy in its nationwide literacy campaign.
``They are our counselors,'' said Paul Dejean, who heads the literacy effort. ``Every manual, every workbook, everything we publish and create we make sure is something they can understand and conquer, so that Haitians across the country will be sure to do the same.''
For six months, the program brings adult students from their homes in the countryside to the capital, where they receive lodging and 200 Haitian dollars every month for expenses. They meet with board members and help plan future literacy initiatives. In exchange, for four hours every weekday, they learn to read with an eye to their future roles as full citizens: birth certificates, voting ballots, tax and agricultural forms, schedules and contracts.
The board's goal is to reach 3 million illiterate adults in four years - one small group at a time.
``The group is small,'' Dejean said, ``and our funds are limited. But in three months, this group will be replaced and another group will be brought to the table.'' RETURNING A COUNTRY TO ITS PEOPLE
In the waiting room to the president's chamber at the National Palace, the table is a gleaming surface held up by two animal tusks. A gold-crusted chandelier above shatters the scene into tiny fragments: the antenna of a walkie-talkie, a padded manila envelope, a silver cufflink.
The money passed around this table is crisp, loose and green; nothing like the leathery red and blue bills that flake as they trade hands in the street, peasant to peasant. Around this table, there are no flies, no dust and no blood.
Aristide now tries to balance the demands of a people who remember his promises of a place at the table and the requirements of an international community that holds the purse-strings to the country's progress.
As during his exile, the mild character he maintains amidst the channels of power reflects the fundamental contradiction of his presidency: a man of holy scripture mired in political strategy. The priest who once walked in supple robes among worshipers now receives diplomats in royally upholstered chairs.
Recent popular demonstrations point to mounting criticism against the president. Many believe he has acquiesced to U.S. pressures to privatize Haiti's major state-owned enterprises - the telephone and electricity systems, seaports and airports and concrete, flour and vegetable oil factories. Opponents warn it would open the floodgates to foreign investment and cheap labor, undercut Haiti's local economy and perpetuate a resented legacy of dependence on the United States and other nations.
But Aristide, who said he has not yet taken a firm position on privatization, argued that recent steps by his administration would help Haiti sustain itself and bring more of its own goods to the table.
``We are beginning to cultivate the pride of self-determination,'' Aristide said, ``so we don't have to depend on the outside. That is why we have begun to undergo land reform, and we have already begun to distribute the land to peasants.''
So far, about 17,290 acres of state-owned lands have been distributed, as have hundreds of metric tons of seeds and half a million farming tools, according to the government's annual report.
``The system of economic justice can be very slow,'' Aristide said, ``because there is still corruption and problems plague the whole system. But at least we are moving in the right direction.''
When asked about the nation's future and the economic realities of Haiti's table, he still speaks of justice and love. But he also talks about redistribution and shared power. He knows people are hungry.
``I have always said, since the day I declared my candidacy, that the people were going to give me power so that I could give it back to them,'' Aristide said. ``That is what we're doing now.'' MEMO: [For related stories, see page A6 for this date.]
ON SUNDAY
A trip tp Haiti takes Francie Latour on an emotional tour of her
Haitian-American heritage. In Commentary.
ILLUSTRATION: [Color] Photos by BETH BERGMAN
The Virginia-Pilot
On October 15, 1994, U.S. troops ushered Jean-Bertrand Aristide back
into his presidential seat in a mission called Operation Uphold
Democracy. It was the second time the U.S. had invaded the tiny
island country. "Invasion is like being put in prison," said Father
Philippe Joseph, who helps run a peasant cooperative near rural
Jacmel, Haiti. "And the person who put you in prison is the only one
who has the key to make you free."
Although forbidden to share food or water, U.N. troops often share
MREs with boys who loiter aroung the gates of the National Palace in
Port-au-Prince.
A 7:30 Sunday morning mass at St. Gerard Church in Port-au-Prince.
For the vast majority of Haitians, it is the Catholic Church that
sustains them through their struggle.
Surrounded by family, Marlene Renald prepares for her wedding at St.
Gerard Church in Port-au-Prince.
Orphaned children stand outside their two-room orphanage in the
mountains of Jacmel. Some are left because their parents have died.
Still others have parents who have temporarily left for the United
States in search of a better life.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the only popularly elected president in
Haiti's history, walks through the National Palace in
Port-au-Prince. "The system of economic justice can be very slow
because there is still corruption and problems that plague the whole
system."
HAITI AT A GLANCE
VP [Map]
Population: 6.5 million; 46 percent is younger than 14 years old;
70 percent rural; 30 percent urban
Unemployment: 75 percent
Illiteracy: 85 percent
Per-capita income: $260
Life expectancy: age 45
Religion: 80 percent Roman Catholic, 16 percent Protestant.
Government: Parliamentary democracy with one president and bicameral
National Assembly.
Exports: coffee, banana, light manufactures
Language: French and Creole, according to 1987 Constitution.
Major trading partners: United States, Latin America, Europe
SOURCES: United States Agency for International Development, CIA
World Factbook 1995; International Monetary Fund.
KEYWORDS: HAITI by CNB