George Packer, “Ten Years After,” The New Yorker Pg

George Packer, “Ten Years After,” The New Yorker Pg. 33, March 1, 2004

In 1994, President Clinton sent twenty thousand American troops to Haiti for a novel purpose in the history of American military interventions: to restore an elected government to power. Promoting democracy has become one of the Bush Administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq, but ten years ago invading Haiti on behalf of democracy was a deeply unpopular decision. At first, the unusual display of political courage was rewarded with success: President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been elected by a wide margin in 1990 but was overthrown by a military junta several months later, was reinstated with almost no American casualties. The Haitian military, which had plagued the country with coups and violent misrule almost continuously since Haiti gained independence from France, in 1804, was disbanded. So were the paramilitary death squads, known as the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, whose acronym sounds like "hit" in French. American and international forces began to retrain Haiti's notoriously corrupt police. Within two years, almost all the American troops were gone. In this country, people's attention had already moved on.

To understand what has happened to Haiti since 1994, consider the fate of a stockpile of vintage American M-1 and M-14 rifles in the central coastal town of Gonaives. Having been provided in previous decades to the Haitian armed forces, the weapons were confiscated when the Army was

abolished. But the ex-soldiers were never reintegrated into society, and Aristide refused to risk his survival on the fragile new National Police. Instead, he created and armed militias loyal to him and his Lavalas Party. Members of these gangs are known as chimeres, after a fire-breathing monster of Haitian mythology; in Gonaives, the local Lavalas militia took the initiative to name itself the Cannibal Army. In 2000, the Aristide government reportedly handed over the rifles to the

Cannibal Army in order to protect polling places in a Presidential election that the opposition was boycotting because of governmental manipulation in earlier parliamentary elections. Once Aristide was reelected, the Cannibal Army moved on to extortion, drug running, and terrorizing the opposition.

Last fall, the Cannibal Army's leader was killed, allegedly by an Aristide supporter. Gonaives, a city with an insurrectionary history, began to seethe. In early February, the Cannibal Army became the Artibonite Resistance Front, and launched a full-scale revolt. "We are fighting Aristide with the weapons he gave us," the rebels' leader, who is the brother of the slain man, said. In the past few weeks, the revolt has spread to towns across Haiti's north. The turncoat militiamen have been joined, ominously, by figures from the dark past-death-squad leaders who have returned from exile and seem bent on seizing power. The turbulence is threatening famine in a country whose economy, never showing much of a pulse, has been almost obliterated by an American-led block on loans that has been in force since 2000.

Politics in Haiti is an all-or-nothing contest. Personal relationships and power determine the winners. The American intervention in 1994 seemed designed to help free Haiti from the logic of its own history. But the return to power of an elected president-a priest who raised his voice on behalf of Haiti's legions of poor people-simply put a mild, bespectacled face on the traditional way of running the country. Aristide always showed a tendency toward demagoguery, and the poor have fared at least as badly under him as under his predecessors, who ruled on behalf of the rich. Democracy depends in part on the political culture in which it grows, and Haiti's is poisoned.

There are lessons in Haiti for other parts of the world: dramatic interventions followed by elections aren't enough. In unpromising conditions, democracy will thrive only with sustained effort on the part of forces both inside and outside the country to create democratic institutions and a mentality of tolerance. There are groups in Haiti that could be the basis of such an effort: the business and civic organizations and opposition political parties that have formed a coalition under the banner of the Democratic Platform. Their demonstrations have been broken up by Lavalas thugs; leading opposition figures, including journalists, have been intimidated and even killed. These groups insist that they have no connection to the militias, but elements of the opposition are tainted by ties to the wealthy patrons of former dictatorial regimes, and the opposition as a whole has steadily rejected anything less than Aristide's departure. Haiti's crisis is becoming so desperate that the only short-term solution is more of what has disappointed the country so often in the past-outside interference.

Until late last week, none was coming from Washington. President Bush and his foreign-policy advisers have never concealed their dislike for Aristide. In 1994, Dick Cheney called intervention on his behalf "an extremely bad idea," and, in the 2000 campaign, Bush said, "I wouldn't have sent troops to Haiti." But this view only repeats Clinton's mistake in focusing on one man instead of on democracy. Since 2001, the Administration has stood by and allowed Aristide to drive Haiti deeper into ruin, a posture that has encouraged the opposition to pursue the same inflexible politics as Aristide. Since the uprisings began, American officials have sent dangerously mixed messages-at times seeming to encourage Aristide's overthrow (a State Department official said that an end to the crisis "could indeed involve changes in Aristide's

position"), at other times opposing regime change but refusing even to mediate, let alone intervene, to stop the spreading chaos. With Haiti, as with Liberia last summer, the Bush Administration seems to have returned to its roots in narrow realism.

We owe Haiti more than that. Regardless of historical obligations and humanitarian concerns, it's not a good precedent to allow an elected President to be toppled by armed gangs. But Aristide himself must be forced to share power before his term ends, in two years. Belatedly, an

American team has been dispatched to Port-au-Prince, along with French, Canadian, and other negotiators, to try to broker a solution. By now, though, the violence has probably spread too far to be contained without more muscular intervention. The French foreign minister, Dominique de

Villepin, has made noises about sending peacekeepers under a United Nations mandate. A joint Franco-American action in Haiti could help remedy more than one foreign-policy disaster.