History Helps Understand What is Going on in Haiti

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Bringing Democracy to Haiti

With the Whites gone, the Blacks and the mulattoes were able to give full rein to their hatred of one another.

Dessalines was killed in a mulatto uprising in October 1806. One of his generals, Henri Christophe, took his place as leader of the Blacks in the north, while the south was held by the mulatto Alexandre Sabès Pétion in Port-au-Prince.

Like Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines, Christophe forced the Blacks under his rule into virtual slavery.

He declared himself "Emperor Henri I" before losing his life in an uprising in 1820. A mulatto, Jean-Pierre Boyer, took his place as maximum leader.

Intermittent civil war between Blacks and mulattoes has been a condition of life on Haiti ever since.

One may with good logic view the Black rulers Dessalines and Christophe as predecessors of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, just as the mulattoes Pétion and Boyer were predecessors of Raoul Cédras.

The mulattoes have been in the saddle more often than not: their inferior numbers have been compensated for by superior intelligence and by the fact that many Blacks have preferred mulatto rule to the generally more brutal and arbitrary reign of their own kind.

Left to its own devices Haiti sank into a squalor unparalleled outside of Africa.

The Haitians gradually destroyed what remained of the agricultural potential of their land by stripping it of trees and letting erosion take its course.

Poverty, disease, superstition, and political instability, with a revolution or a coup every three or four years, have been constants.

The Monroe Doctrine, which declared Latin America and the Caribbean, excepting those few enclaves where other European powers already were established, an exclusively American sphere of interest, discouraged foreign intervention in Haiti.

American businessmen were not reluctant to make investments in Haiti, however, despite its history.

When those investments were imperiled by internal disorder in 1915, U.S. Marines were sent in to manage Haitian affairs.

The immediate problem was that a mulatto-led conspiracy in Port-au-Prince had culminated in an armed assault on the palace of Black President Vilbrun Sam during the early morning hours of July 26. This was the seventh revolution in as many years, and Sam knew what to do: he ordered the immediate massacre of all mulatto political prisoners being held in Port-au-Prince's jails.

Sam himself was caught by a mob and hacked to pieces the same day. The Marines landed to restore order and safeguard American investments.

The Marines, who stayed from 1915 until 1934, were given the mission by President Woodrow Wilson of "bringing democracy to Haiti." What the Marines actually did was engineer the replacement of the Black government by a somewhat more reliable mulatto government.

They also forced the Haitians to accept a new constitution, giving American businessmen the right to own land in Haiti.

Many Haitians were glad to see the Marines.

In the 72 years preceding the arrival of the latter there had been 102 civil wars, insurrections, revolts, and coups.

Of 22 presidents during that period, just one had served a complete term, and only four had died of natural causes.

Even the Haitians were getting a little tired of the disorder.

It was utterly false of Wilson to claim that what the Haitians needed was democracy, however.

Clearly, they already had it, albeit with a peculiarly African flavor.

Wilson aside, most Americans were genuinely naive about all things Haitian.

When briefed on the Haitian situation, Wilson's secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, marveled: "Dear me! Think of it. Niggers speaking French." Actually, few Haitians outside the mulatto elite speak French.

The language of most Haitians is Creole, a bastardization of French with a number of African dialects and intelligible only to the Haitians themselves.

The Marines were horrified by the conditions they encountered.

The filth and stench in the streets were almost unbearable to Whites.

Ordinary sanitary measures were unknown to the Blacks.

There were no working telephones or telegraphs in the country.

The roads built more than a century earlier by the French had fallen into such disrepair that vehicular travel outside the cities was hardly possible.

The Marines distributed food to the Haitians, set up medical treatment facilities for them, and then began rebuilding the entire physical infrastructure of the country.

They did not find the Blacks willing to assist in this work, so they rounded them up into labor gangs and made them work on the roads at gunpoint.

This rough treatment, plus the Blacks' perception that the Marines favored the mulattoes, led to Black uprisings and guerrilla assaults on the Marines.

The U.S. Marines were unhampered by the sort of "rules of engagement" which tied their hands later in Vietnam, and they made short work of the Black guerrillas.

One of the guerrilla leaders shot by the Marines in 1919 was Charlemagne Peralte.

His corpse was tied to a board and propped up as a warning to other Blacks.

Peralte quickly became a martyred hero to the Black masses.

By the time the Marines pulled out in 1934, they had become thoroughly unpopular with everyone except the mulatto elite, even though they had practically rebuilt Haiti.

They had built 1,000 miles of new roads and 210 bridges.

They had gotten the 200-year-old French irrigation system going again and installed a reliable telephone network.

Dozens of hospitals and clinics had been built, and Haitian doctors had been trained to staff them. (One of these new Black physicians was François Duvalier, later known by his nickname "Papa Doc.") A Black police force had been trained, and the currency had been stabilized.

The Haitians had had 19 years of enforced "democracy."

As soon as the Marines left, however, the Haitians returned to their customary way of doing things.

No effort was made to maintain the new infrastructure built by the Marines.

Sanitation facilities were abandoned.

The grossest corruption and brutality again characterized the government.

Coups and rebellions followed one another with monotonous regularity.

"Papa Doc" Duvalier was elected president in September 1957, after a succession of six governments during the preceding 10 months.

Duvalier understood his countrymen and how to govern them better than most of his predecessors.

He organized the Tonton Macoutes (a Creole term meaning "bogeymen"), whose job it was to hunt down and murder his political opponents.

Duvalier also was a devotee of Vodun (Voodoo), and he used his knowledge of the national religion to play on Haitians' superstitions.

These tactics enabled him to remain in power longer than any previous Haitian leader and to pass the presidency on to his son Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") upon his death in 1971.

When the United States sent a military mission to Haiti in 1958 in order to help "Papa Doc" reorganize his army, the U.S. personnel who arrived were as appalled by the conditions they found as the Marines had been 43 years earlier.

Historian Robert Heinl, who was a Marine colonel with the U.S. mission in 1958, found the "telephones gone.

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roads approaching non-existence.

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ports obstructed by silt.

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docks crumbling.

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sanitation and electrification in precarious decline."

This was a time when millions of dollars in U.S. aid was available to any Third World country which would promise not to provide a haven for Communism.

"Papa Doc" professed anti-Communism, and the U.S. dollars came flowing in, but the sewage continued to run in the streets of Port-au-Prince, and the Tonton Macoutes continued to make their nightly rounds.

"Baby Doc" lacked his father's toughness and political skills, but with the aid of the Tonton Macoutes he nevertheless had a remarkably long and peaceful tenure in office.

He was ousted by a military coup in 1986, and Haitian politics soon reverted to the disorder and violence which were the norm.

The current U.S. candidate for "bringing democracy to Haiti" is Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Elected in December 1990 and deposed in a coup in September 1991, Aristide is a Marxist priest of the Roman Catholic persuasion instead of a rightist priest of the Voodoo persuasion like "Papa Doc," but he agrees with the latter that the proper way to control one's political opponents is to terrorize and murder them.

More specifically, Aristide's way is the way of the "necklace." Instead of employing a corps of professional thugs to kill dissidents, during his brief period in office Aristide incited his ragtag mob of Black supporters to burn to death anyone who displeased him. In a 1991 address to a mass rally in Port-au-Prince he told his partisans that if they see "a faker who pretends to be one of our supporters.

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just grab him. Make sure he gets what he deserves.

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with the tool you have now in your hands, the `necklace.'.

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You have the right tool in your hands.

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the right instrument.

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What a beautiful tool we have! What a nice instrument! It is nice, it is chic, it is classy, elegant, and snappy.

It smells good, and wherever you go you want to smell it." Dozens of Haitians were burned to death with "necklaces" by Aristide's supporters, before General Cédras stepped in.

Cédras' own method for maintaining order was the use of "attachés": gunmen in civilian dress carrying submachine guns in attaché cases and acting somewhat in the manner of the Tonton Macoutes, but without the Voodoo trappings associated with the latter.

It is easy to understand why the Clintonistas prefer Aristide and his "necklaces" to Cédras and his "attachés." In the first place, the Clintonistas have an instinctive hatred for anyone in uniform.

In the second place, Aristide is a Negro, and Cédras is a light-skinned mulatto.

In Haiti social ranking is determined to a large degree by skin color, the rule being "lighter is better." Mulattoes are overwhelmingly predominant in Haiti's wealthy elite.

The Clintonistas, on the other hand, have a distinct affinity for the dregs of society, whether in the United States or Haiti.

"Necklacing" by a howling mob of Blacks is a more "democratic" method of governing than machine-gunning by a professional assassin.

Last but not least, General Cédras is a proud man, and he was less amenable to taking orders from the New World Order planners than Aristide is.

With reasonable luck--and the continuing presence of U.S. troops in Haiti--the Clintonistas will be able to persuade most Americans that they have improved the Haitian situation by replacing Cédras with Aristide.

For one thing, they can point to the substantially reduced flow of Haitian "boat people" trying to reach the United States.

The real cause of that reduction, of course, is the ending of the United Nations embargo against Haiti, not Aristide's popularity, but most Americans won't figure that out if they're not told. With sufficient money U.S. troops can do again what they did during the previous occupation of Haiti: they can rebuild the country's infrastructure, and they can shoot Haitians who get out of line. They can keep Aristide in office as long as they want, and then they can go through the motions of another election and keep his successor in office the same way.

What they cannot do, however, is change the basic nature of the Haitian people.

When the U.S. troops leave, Haitians will go back to being Haitians again--which is the way it should be.

Greg Peters, September 2 2008, 3:05 AM

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