By IPS Correspondents
NEW YORK, Apr 26 2004 (IPS)

As the United Nations prepares to assume leadership of peacekeeping forces in Haiti, human rights and immigrant groups in the United States met Saturday to chart a path beyond the Caribbean island’s latest political crisis.

Fighting has subsided since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted Feb. 29, although intense controversy persists surrounding the circumstances of his departure – which he describes as a "kidnapping" by U.S. officials, a charge Washington denies.

Elections are due next year, but the island’s neighbours in the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) still do not recognise the interim government led by President Boniface Alexandre and Prime Minister Gerard Latortue.

Haiti is now patrolled by a multinational force of 3,600 troops from the United States, France, Chile and Canada. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for this number to be beefed up to 6,700 soldiers and more than 1,600 international police officers when the United Nations takes over Jun. 1.

"As deplorable as the situation may seem, there is in Haiti today a thirst for change, from the smallest locality to the urban areas," said Jocelyn McCalla of the New York-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR).

"Unfortunately, what’s often communicated in the media is that Haitians are always at each others’ throats and this is not the case," he said.

Group 184, a coalition of labour, youth, political, commercial and peasant groups, has drafted just such a document and spent the last year criss-crossing Haiti by caravan to promote it at the grassroots level.

While 184’s most vocal members are the country’s business groups and the Democratic Convergence, a coalition of political parties, it also includes many of Haiti’s unions as well as the country’s largest peasant organisation, the ”Mouvman Peyizan Papay" or Papay Peasant Movement.

With goals that include fighting poverty, environmental preservation, universal education and investor protection, Group 184 says its agenda is designed to appeal to diverse interests while emphasising national unity.

"The guiding principle is the interest of the collective, not just of individual groups," said Yanick Lahens, a member of Group 184 – named for the number of its founding members – speaking in Creole.

"Over the last 200 years, we’ve gone from crisis to crisis. We built a nation grounded in a deep exclusion and created what I would call an internal colonisation," she said. "For the social contract to come alive, there will be a need for a cultural revolution. We must redefine what it means to be Haitian."

Lahens denied that Group 184 has a pro-business bias and opposes Aristide’s Lavalas Family Party, and said it had no intention of morphing into a political party for the 2005 elections.

Still, many conservative Haitian groups are members of the collective, and Group 184 took a leading role in mobilising the wave of anti-government marches that helped crystallise the movement against Aristide in the months before the armed opposition appeared on the scene.

Group 184 emerged from a meeting of organisations held in Haiti’s neighbour, Dominican Republic, in part with funding from the International Republican Institute (IRI), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) with ties to both the U.S. Republican Party and the U.S. government.

Supporters of Lavalas have accused Washington of violating Haiti’s sovereignty and undermining Aristide’s government through IRI’s support to Group 184.

Lahens said the coalition will continue organising consultations through the end of the year, when it will publicly present the results.

"It usually takes a generation to change, but 25 years isn’t that long in the life of the country," she concluded.

Other speakers Saturday stressed the importance of harnessing Haitian voting power in the United States to keep the pressure on Washington to aid the country’s economic development.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Haiti were blocked after elections in 2000 when international observers questioned the results of voting for Senate seats.

This year, Haiti marks its bicentennial independence from France, a bittersweet triumph for an island that has suffered 33 coups and nearly two decades of U.S. occupation.

Pierre Bayard, a councillor in the City of Miami’s department of cultural affairs who was instrumental in designing year-long anniversary celebrations in Florida State, noted that 800,000 Haitians live in Florida, and at least 50,000 are registered to vote.

"The real question is the margin of victory in any election," he said. "We’ve made this very clear to elected officials."

The expatriate community’s clout was evidenced on Friday, when a delegation of six U.S. legislators recently home from a trip to Haiti told the media they intend to press for an ongoing presence of U.S. Marines on the island.

"We are hopeful that this will not be just a few short months that we will be here. We want to be part of helping Haiti in the long term," said Florida Congressman Mark Foley.

Washington’s policy of returning all Haitian refugees interdicted at sea and detaining nearly all Haitian asylum-seekers who make it ashore while their cases are decided also came in for criticism at the conference, dubbed ‘Stepping Forward Together in 2004′.

So far this year, the U.S. Coast Guard has intercepted 2,207 Haitians fleeing their homeland, a dramatic increase over previous years, officials say.

"Our immigration system is broken," said Sumar Raghunathan of the New York Immigration Coalition. "It’s fundamentally unfair and doesn’t serve any immigrant communities, not just Haitians."

While the NCHR has welcomed the presence of peacekeepers in the country, McCalla stressed that any lasting solution had to be home-grown.

"Major initiatives are going on, but without peoples’ input in the process, there won’t be real change," he said.

"We need to go forward knowing there’s light at the end of the tunnel and that light is of our own making."

Excerpt: