/DEVELOPMENT BULLETIN 5/ HAITI: Aristide’s Silence is like a Roar

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Alejandro Kirk

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Apr 6 1996 (IPS) - The streets of the Haitian capital are still papered with old election posters showing ex-president Jean Bertrand Aristide and his ally and successor Rene’ Preval embracing one another. Now the distance between the two is obvious.

The cleavage is best demonstrated on the issue of the moment in Haiti: privatisation.

Preval has made it clear he plans to press ahead with the sale of state-owned companies, and other aspects of a structural adjustment programme (SAP) insisted on by lending agencies. That position has merely ignited further local debate on the issue.

But the former president — who is believed to be opposed to the policy — is saying nothing in public, a silence that, in the face of the debate raging all round, is eloquent and theatrical. In fact, the anxiety this has caused is perhaps as profound as would have been achieved by a period of sustained agitation.

The thing is that Aristide’s word is not innocuous in Haiti. It can initiate a period of calm and resignation, or set the country on fire.

The rank and file organisations in Cite’ Soleil (Sun City), the large popular quarter near the port, waited last Sunday with a certain anxiety for the end of a three-day forum convened by the Aristide Foundation for Democracy. It was expected the former president would publicly take a position.

Several leaders and people from the neighbouring districts joined journalists at the headquarters of the Foundation. But Aristide did not speak: he was not even there.

However, the forum adopted a resolution against a neo-liberal economic policy, including privatisations. Present were 90 representatives of people’s organisations from all over the country, including executives of the nine state companies singled out by the government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for immediate privatisation.

Aristide’s absence, explained a spokesman, was intentional: to avoid the former president becoming identified with the vociferous demands.

Because Aristide, the spokesman told IPS, has spoken out loud and clear for a national dialogue to find a “compromise” which would harmonise the anguish of the government and the interests of the state workers.

Participation in the decision-making process versus “dictatorship” was what the participants in the forum were very clearly demanding.

But judging by the official declarations, it seems there is not much time left for dialogue. The state cement plant and flour mill are already at the stage of receiving bids, and President Preval has announced that the other seven public companies would be put up for bids in the next few weeks.

On April 15 a joint mission arrives in Port-au-Prince from the IMF and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to evaluate the application of a structural adjustment programme (SAP) which should in the short term eliminate subsidies, reduce tariffs and free exchange rates and prices.

These agreements were announced by Preval and the multilateral financial agencies during his presidential visit to Washington March 22.

As Leslie Manigat, Preval’s private advisor, put it last week in Washington, it is a question of “surgery without anaesthetics” which the government is being forced to apply or risk losing vital financing worth more than 200 million dollars.

It is no secret that the Haitian economy is in ruins, and that the state is bankrupt, with a deficit of more than 160 million dollars in a fiscal budget which depends for more than 50 percent of its expenditures on external financing.

When he was president, Aristide tenaciously opposed the privatisations and the structural adjustment favoured by the IMF. His brief government emphasised humanitarian action on urgent social problems.

There is no doubt that the former priest – a supporter of the theology of liberation – is not exactly a favourite with the international financial agencies.

Speaking informally, foreign diplomats posted here usually think his speeches are populist, repetitive, crude and straining after effect. They think his style is pompous.

Diplomats regard Preval, Prime Minister Rony Smarth and advisors like Leslie Voltaire as left-wing intellectuals educated abroad — technicians alien to the pomp and traditional protocol obtaining in the Haitian government.

But “Aristide speaks the language of the people, almost always a simple and repetitive Creole, full of indirect allusions typical of the Haitians,” commented one United Nations functionary.

About Aristide, all sorts of speculations are possible. Some of these conceal a devious disdain for this small, physically unappealing but popular curate, who from the pulpit sets himself up as the Prophet of his people.

Aristide, Prime Minister Smarth told IPS, “is a symbol, a historic figure” of the Haitians’ struggle against the interminable, insatiable dictatorsips.

But the role of “symbol” may be more honourary than actual, though Aristide appears to think otherwise. His Foundation for Democracy is not a mere forum for dialogue. More and more it is becoming the visible centre of independent political action.

No one knows for certain if Aristide nurtures boundless ambitions in his heart, but no one has any doubt whatsoever that Preval’s government needs his support – or at least a sympathetic silence — if the new president does not want a belt of fire and rioting around him.