The
Trials Of Haiti
There
is no telling, of course, how new elections would turn out,
but it is possible to guess. The United States has commissioned
opinion polls in Haiti. These have not been released publicly,
but I managed to obtain one, dated March 2002. The most
striking thing about the data is that on many significant
issues between 40 and 46 percent of those surveyed either
refused to answer or said they had no opinion. Among those
who responded, the poll reveals a rise in national cynicism.
And the poll does show significant declines in Aristide's
ratings from a poll conducted a year before, but those are
declines from a very high level. About 60 percent of those
who responded in 2002 named him as the leader they trusted
most, and no more than 4 percent named anyone else. About
40 percent of respondents also named Lavalas as the political
party they sympathized with, while only about 8 percent
named the Convergence.
One
foreign journalist recently wrote, "Among the disaffected
former supporters [of Aristide] are virtually all of Haiti's
leading intellectuals and artists, the persons who had best
articulated the humane values that should be at the basis
of any new Haitian society." But should Haiti's leading
artists and intellectuals, however well articulated and
humane their values, be the ones to define a new Haitian
society? Perhaps 80 percent of Haitians live in poverty,
about 70 percent in poverty so desperate that they've never
had a chance to go to school, let alone become intellectuals.
These are the people most often invoked in discussions about
Haiti's suffering, but they are also the people least often
consulted on the question of what should be done. The main
exception has been elections. The Haitian poor demanded
the right to vote. They ran grave risks to get it--in the
aborted elections of 1987, for instance, when thugs employed
by the junta in power gunned down would-be voters at polling
places. And when they've finally had their chance, the impoverished
majority has, time and again, turned out in large numbers
and expressed their hopes by electing Aristide.
The
saga of the blocked IDB loans has continued. In September
2002, the OAS seemed to relent a little, and resolved that
the Iffies should resume normal relations with the Haitian
government. But this had no immediate practical effect.
The World Bank had no plans to make new loans. And the IDB
couldn't disburse the loans for clean water and health and
roads and education, because arrears had accumulated since
2000. Haiti now owed the bank millions more in debts on
previous loans, ones taken out, ironically enough, by Aristide's
predecessors--by "Baby Doc" Duvalier and by various
military juntas that had tried to kill Aristide several
times back in the late 1980s. Haiti didn't qualify for the
international program of debt relief because Haiti didn't
owe enough. It did, however, owe more than it could pay.
So if the loans were going to be released, some foreign
government or institution would have to make a bridge loan
to Haiti. One senior State Department official told me that
the United States was in favor of a bridge loan, but only
if Aristide's government met various conditions. Clearly,
the IDB loans were still being used to exert pressure on
Aristide.
This
past summer the Haitian government decided to pay the arrears
itself, a total of $32 million, a sum that represented more
than 90 percent of the country's foreign reserves. In effect,
the government has all but bankrupted itself for the sake
of those loans and in the hope of more to come.
Last
winter I made a call to the World Bank, to the person then
serving as its Caribbean country director, Orsalia Kalantzopoulos.
I knew that the World Bank had run into the same problems
as the IDB, and that loans were being held up by about $25
million in arrears. But I wondered why it had pulled out
of the country. It seemed like a strange thing to do, given
that its mission statement reads, "Our dream is a world
free of poverty."
Kalantzopoulos
told me, "The problem was that most of the projects,
with very few exceptions, did not meet their objectives.
In addition, the projects had a lot of execution problems.
There was not proper procurement and sometimes money was
not going to the projects described." She added, "
The bottom line is, if there is not the political will to
use the money properly, does it really make sense to mortgage
the next generation?"
Of
course, the status quo doesn't promise future generations
much of a future in Haiti. And the Iffies are already making
the current generation of Haitians pay for the sins of the
past.
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