HAITI: Aristide Calls for Donor Compliance on Paris Accord

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dan Coughlin

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jan 23 1996 (IPS) - President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti is urging international donors to stick by their commitments and support not only a stiff privatisation and austerity package but also social programs to help Haiti’s poor majority.

“We want to respect our signatures, we want to respect our words and we have done that,” said President Aristide, referring to the Paris Plan, a now-stalled agreement that outlines a sweeping World Bank-sponsored Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) for the Caribbean country.

“That’s why we’re insisting on the other partner to do the same,” Aristide added in an exclusive interview with IPS. He said that the broad privatisation and austerity package must be supplemented by health and education programmes.

The Haitian government, and key international financial institutions (IFIs) like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), signed the controversial Paris Plan back in August 1994, two months before Aristide himself returned to power after three years in exile.

Among other things, it calls for the privatisation of nine- state run industries, “rigorous” macro-economic reform, and cuts in the size of the Haitian state.

In return, the Haitian government gets access to hundreds of millions of dollars in desperately needed grants and loans.

But the Paris Plan fell apart late last October amid a swirl of acrimony between the IFIs and President Aristide. Since then, the Haitian government has suspended the implementation of its privatisation scheme and some other parts of the structural adjustment programme.

The IFIs, in turn, blocked some 135 million dollars in balance of payments and budgetary support. Publicly, they say the government has not carried out its Paris Plan commitments to make progress on privatisation, reform the civil service, or make sweeping changes in fiscal policy.

Privately, though, many officials at international donor and lending agencies believe that President Aristide is personally opposed to privatisation and refuses to implement the deeply unpopular programme “on his watch.”

“We are not against privatisation to be against privatisation,” retorted Aristide. He accused the IFIs of focusing only on those elements of the Paris Plan that they want implemented while studiously ignoring social objectives.

“In the case of privatisation, it’s said loud and clear, black on white, that in the case of the flour mill, for example, there must be a public school for the children of the zone to be able to go; a hospital so that — like it says in the (Haitian) Constitution — health care is provided to the sick; that those who can’t buy shares (in the privatised company) that the state is able to give some to them; that the victims of the coup d’etat are able to get reparations,” said Aristide, reeling off a list of other conditions.

“What are the steps that they taken in this direction?” he asked. “If I respect my word, I am want that the other side respect their word.”

Aristide added that he supported a mixed economy, where the private and public sector, and international financial institutions and the Haitian government, work together to improve the condition of Haiti’s extremely poor majority.

“We are open to private capital; we are open to a participative management between the two sectors — the private sector and the public sector — we are open to this economic approach that implies norms respected by all,” he said.

Aristide confirmed that he has sent a new letter of intent outlining the government’s economic policies to the World Bank and that he looked forward to the resumption of negotiations.

But Aristide, and his government of Prime Minister Claudette Werleigh, are de facto “lame ducks,” and no movement is expected on the structural adjustment programme until President-elect Rene Preval’s new government is installed next month.

Preval has already made clear that he will sell the first two state enterprises on the auction block — the flour and cement mills. He is also expected to agree with other demands from the IFIs since more than 50 percent of the Haitian government’s budget depends on international financing.