3-5-2004
A dictator of our making
Adam B. Kushner

Was Haiti's collapse last week wrought by the United States? It hardly seems a fair question, given the despotic disposition of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. His rule was illiberal, unconstitutional and corrupt.

Then again, we put him there. Aristide's apologists go on about how he was Haiti's first democratic leader and how his restoration, at the hand of President Clinton, was a sterling liberal moment. But the fact is, Aristide's rule ever since has been illiberal, unconstitutional, and corrupt. And the United States should have seen it coming.

Overthrown by the military junta of Raoul Cedras just seven months after winning the presidency in 1990, Aristide spent three years living comfortably in Washington, awaiting his reinstatement as president. He made the rounds, talking grandly about nation building, democracy, a free press, and the rule of constitutional law. When his American allies began to plot his return, he even dismissed plans to extend his rule, vowing to leave office by 1995. "I think there is more grandeur in stepping down," he told The New Yorker. "It's the constitutional thing to do and it's the statesmanlike thing to do."

Aristide was a hit in Washington. He attracted influential members of the Congressional Black Caucus and liberal interventionists. But after he was returned to power in 1994, Aristide revealed that his paeans to democracy were little more than disingenuous platitudes. He neglected ministries, independent courts and the market economy, opting instead to spend his time (and the government's money) arming loyalist militias.

His promise to leave office in 1995 came about only after intense international pressure, and not before he anointed a surrogate he could manipulate, René Préval. In the late 1990s, plotting his return to power, Aristide abandoned the movement that brought him to power, crafting a new party around his cult of personality. In what the Organization of American States ruled an outright fraud, its devotees won 18 of 19 senate seats in the 2000 parliamentary elections. Later that year, Aristide rigged his own triumphant return, riding into office with 96 percent of votes cast by a mere 10 percent of the electorate.

What happened to the man many called the Caribbean Mandela?

Turns out Aristide had a closet full of skeletons. For example, he admired mob rule. During his days as a radical, populist priest in the slums of Cité Soleil, the Catholic Church tried to persuade him several times to eschew sermons about class struggle. He refused, and when preparations were made to transfer him to another church, his parishioners began hunger strikes until the church backed down. The Vatican finally pressured Aristide to resign the priesthood when he took office, but it had long since become clear that his philosophy was more Marx than Merton.

Aristide also came to despise democratic institutions. When he assumed the presidency in 1991, he butted heads often with the legislature, which remained more conservative than he and still partly in thrall to Haiti's mulatto elite.

Then, in 1993, the CIA -- under R. James Woolsey -- leaked a classified study of Aristide to congressional Republicans. It claimed that Aristide had incited a rabble to "necklace" his political opponents (a practice in which a gas-filled tire is hung on the victim's neck and set alight) and that he ordered the assassination of a rival. Some of the report's contentions were discredited, but when congressional Democrats rushed to Aristide's defense, the director of Human Rights Watch reminded them that Aristide had not repudiated 25 lynchings performed in his name in 1991, and that "he condoned threats of popular violence against the judiciary and the legislature."

None of this means the 1994 invasion, or the restoration of Aristide, was a bad idea. By reinstalling Aristide, Clinton showed he would stand up for democracy and human rights. But had Clinton officials expressed more skepticism, they might have made some different calculations. Having ousted the Cedras regime, the U.S. military deposited Aristide, gloriously, on the lawn of the national palace, allowing him to step triumphantly out of a helicopter and into control. They hardly needed the drama; Aristide already had an overwhelming mandate from the people he was returning to govern, and such gestures may have only encouraged his cult of adoration.

What's more, if the liberal interventionists had paid attention, they might argued for the United States to stay in Haiti alongside the U.N. multinational force -- which focused more on security than on nation building -- to ensure that Aristide built up government ministries and chose neutral judges. Instead, Haiti disintegrated slowly into authoritarian rule. So it's no surprise that, as rebels attacked the government's last redoubt in Port-au-Prince, Aristide failed to rout the insurgency, turn the populace against it, or win the protection of foreign governments. The world had already been fooled once.

Adam B. Kushner is a reporter for the New Republic magazine in Washington.

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