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POLITICS: Caribbean at Crossroads Over Haiti

Peter Richards

PORT OF SPAIN, Feb 23 2004 (IPS) - With rebel troops advancing on the capital Port-au-Prince and U.S. Marines en route to protect their embassy, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) finds itself at a crossroads over support for embattled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

With rebel troops advancing on the capital Port-au-Prince and U.S. Marines en route to protect their embassy, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) finds itself at a crossroads over support for embattled Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

The arrival of Haitian refugees in Jamaica and warnings from that nation of a strain on resources if more asylum-seekers follow, have served to highlight CARICOM’s sensitive position.

Aristide announced last weekend he has accepted the community’s “action plan” aimed at restoring confidence between his administration and the political opposition and initiating a process of détente. Under it, Aristide would remain president with diminished powers, sharing with political rivals a government that would organise elections.

The opposition coalition Democratic Platform, which to date has insisted that any proposal must include Aristide’s resignation, said it would announce its verdict on the plan Monday.

Aristide’s weekend announcement came as Jamaica, whose Prime Minister PJ Patterson is current CARICOM chairman, said the regional body would make yet another attempt to end Haiti’s ongoing unrest, which has left scores of people dead.

“There will be another initiative to be exercised this week, which we hope will be able to help us along the way in getting parties in Haiti to understand that we need to arrive at a conclusion as quickly as possible,” Jamaican Junior Foreign Affairs Minister Delano Franklyn told the island’s Senate..

Over the past few days at least 30 Haitians have arrived in Jamaica seeking refugee status.

“If more come, it would place a strain on our resources and eventually we will seek help from third parties, including Caribbean countries and international aid agencies,” said National Security Ministry Spokesman Donovan Nelson.

Jamaica’s ‘Observer’ newspaper in a Sunday editorial warned, a “full collapse of the Haitian state will be a drag on all of CARICOM”.

“There is good reason, therefore, for CARICOM to want a carefully crafted solution,” it added.

The community has made it clear that it does not support armed intervention in Haiti, nor the forced removal of Aristide, but is prepared to send in peacekeeping troops at the request of authorities in Port-au-Prince.

But a leading expert on Haiti says CARICOM has little to be proud of over its role in addressing the emergency.

Michael Dash, a former University of the West Indies (UWI) lecturer and now head of Africana Studies at New York University, told IPS that while the efforts that produced the action plan were commendable, CARICOM needs to play a more prominent role in finding a solution to the crisis.

He suggested regional leaders, “seriously negotiate with the United States and Latin America, in terms of some attempt to establish a task force to bring Haiti back to some kind of a reasonable regional relationship with the countries of the hemisphere”.

“What they should really be doing at this point is to use whatever leverage they have in Washington, with the Organisation of American States (OAS) to attempt to put together that task force, which will oblige Aristide to make some kind of concession and will also signal to the opposition that they are not being encouraged,” he added.

Like Vaughan Lewis, a professor at the Institute of International Relations here, Dash believes that CARICOM itself is at a crossroads in that while it has no mechanism to provide for Aristide’s safety, it might also have little choice, should he be toppled, in dealing with Haiti’s new authorities.

Political observers have pointed to the 1979 Grenada situation as an example where a legally elected government was overthrown and, despite early protests, CARIOM eventually accepted the Peoples Revolutionary Government of then prime minister Maurice Bishop.

Dash, who says Aristide believes he is “Messianic”, warns also that any attempt by the Caribbean to negotiate with opposition forces would further encourage them in their demands for the president’s removal.

“The opposition has reached a stage now where the only thing that would satisfy them is Aristide leaving the country, and that must never be allowed to happen because if that happens you will have an unconstitutional removal of a government,” Dash told IPS from New York.

“I think Aristide has brought that crisis upon himself because of his stubbornness, his lack of political maturity,” says Dash, who has written extensively on Haiti over the years.

Respected Jamaican newspaper columnist John Maxwell wrote on Sunday that it is impossible to know how well any of Aristide’s detractors might have performed had they been put in his position -“asked to create a functioning modern state out of the moribund corpse of a country pillaged and raped for 200 years”.

“If CARICOM, the U.S., Canada, France and the others are serious, they must first of all prevail on the opposition to agree to talk and to disavow or call off the thugs,” he wrote.

Kafron Kambon, head of the emancipation committee in Trinidad and Tobago that led a delegation to Haiti’s bicentennial celebrations earlier this year, says the CARICOM initiative must have the backing of Washington at more than just the public-relations level.

“The U.S. has to lay down conditions for the continued support of the opposition and that’s the key to ending that situation. And if CARICOM can negotiate that with the United States, the problem would be over in the morning,” he told IPS.

Opposition to Aristide would not continue if it did not have outside support,” he added, even as Dash says that Washington will determine the outcome of the uprising.

“All they have to do is sit back and watch. All they have to do is nothing and the situation will deteriorate,” Dash added.

Haiti’s ill-equipped and demoralised police force of less than 4,000 has been the prime target of the insurgents, who have torched a score of police stations since the rebellion erupted Feb. 5.

While the United States has publicly supported the CARICOM initiative, it has nonetheless blamed Aristide for the crisis.

On Saturday, diplomats presented a U.S.-backed peace plan whose broad outlines were developed by CARICOM leaders and presented in separate meetings with Aristide and opposition forces in the Bahamas and Jamaica in January.