[The author, ALAN WALD, travelled to Haiti in July on behalf of the Washington Office on Haiti as part of a civilian observer delegation to investigate human rights abuses.]
On September 30, 1991, Lt General Raol Cedras overthrew democratically elected Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Over 80% of this extraordinary country now lingers in a netherworld of bare subsistence. Once "the greatest colony in the world", and subsequently brutalised, raped and tortured by the French Empire, United States (US) imperialism (marines occupied the country from 1915 to 1934) and Haiti's own neo-colonial bourgeoisie, the island nation is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, with an average annual income of US$400, an average life span of 55 years and an infant mortality rate of 11%.
When the coup smashed the dreams and achievements of the seven months period under the leadership of Aristide and the Lavalas movement (lavalas means "the flood" and is the term for Aristide's supporters), much of the population receded to a state of demoralised torpor. The worst slums, such as Cite Soleil in Port-au-Prince, are no longer sites of public clean-up campaigns but are heaped with rubbish as if to make a kind of public statement about the futility of any efforts toward improvement under the present regime.
Our delegation visited the orphanage founded by Aristide, La Fanmi Se Lavi, fire-bombed at the time of the coup (three children were killed, two wounded); it now stands as a gutted hulk, harassment from neighbouring attaches (pro-military goons) having forced most of the children to return to the streets.
Manifestations of overt protest still occasionally break out, however, in the form of small demonstrations on the street or in the churches, although they are almost always repressed with clubs and gunfire. But the population usually acts cautiously. Gatherings of more than three people are likely to be regarded as suspect, so organisations function underground, and a significant amount of political communication takes place through the structures of the ti legliz, the people's wing of the Catholic Church.
Police/army rule
The country itself is divided into nine departments with over 500 units, each of the latter with its own section chief, most often a brutal thug who holds the power of life or death over the population in his district, especially the rural areas where most of the people live.
Under Aristide there were efforts to create a functioning justice system, change the military and police leadership (a 7000 combined force serves both purposes) by promoting officers committed to democracy, to improve prison conditions and even dismantle the hated section chiefs. Since the coup such progress has been reversed, returning the country to conditions reminiscent of the worst days of the Duvalier dictatorship.
In the office of the beleaguered Peace and Justice Commission in (downtown) Port-au-Prince, we were told of more than 300,000 people living in hiding.
Two of the targets of repression were present. The younger man was a school director accused of being a "ring leader" of Aristide supporters by the local section chief. He was beaten and driven from his home.
The second was an elderly peasant, similarly accused, who was ordered by the police to turn his land over to a stranger. The stranger simply announced that he was a previously unknown son of the peasant's father, now come to claim his rightful inheritance. When the peasant asked for proof, the stranger pulled out a weapon.
The situation on the other side of the island is even worse. In a rural town near Cap-Haitien, we discreetly linked up with 15 peasant leaders following a Sunday morning mass, in a room near the church arranged by the priest. Photographs and tape-recordings were not allowed.
There an umbrella organisation composed of 55 groups (numbering between 25 and 50 members each) of women, youth, peasants and cooperatives with a shared vision, was formed in 1990, after the resignation of General Avril. In the Aristide period, they succeeded in replacing the old section chief with a man they trusted, and the region even began to obtain good judges. Corruption diminished and wages of the peasants increased 15 to 28 gourds a day.
Then came the coup. The old section chief returned, and new judges began to be appointed. Many activists went into hiding, where they remain. Thirty young activists tried to flee the country in a boat and were drowned.
In this town, the list of police and army abuses was endless. A young girl who refused to sleep with an associate of the section chief was killed, and no action was taken. The chief had a peasant activist arrested, beaten and held nine months in jail. Another was promised freedom if he paid $600; to raise the amount he was forced to sell his possessions. Two cousins were arrested and extorted for over $1000 to gain freedom.
Cattle belonging to peasants was illegally killed and sold. A pro-Aristide peasant was given the wrong papers for his cow, which was then confiscated. A woman activist was taken to a barracks and raped by 10 men; the section chief then took payment from the rapists and let them go.
Teachers
Members of a teachers union, the Federation of Associations of Teachers of the North and North-East (FAENNE), based in Cap-Haitien, told our delegation similar stories.
During the Lavalas period six new public schools were opened in seven months. Following the coup the private sector and Tonton Macoute (paramilitary right-wing bands) began to move against the Lavalas supporters, forcing leaders and activists in the popular organisations into hiding.
Teachers were arrested, beaten and tortured. Forty-two members of the FAENNE in one high school were summarily sacked. One director of a primary school was struck 70 times and could not sit down for seven months. Another barely escaped and spent nine months in hiding. Students were killed and disappeared.
Those sections of the church which have chosen to ally with and lead the life of the people, are oppressed as well. The persecution extends to Europeans as well as native Haitians. In another rural area outside of Cap-Haitien we visited the modest compound where Father Marcel, a 50-year-old Belgian priest who came to Haiti in 1989, formerly resided.
A nun described how Marcel had assisted the peasants in building roads and improving their fishing practices. Following the coup, the police began to target him and on November 9, 1991, fired guns into his bedroom. Fortunately Marcel was not at home, but out caring for a sick peasant.
Driving back to his home, Marcel passed the police in his jeep and saw that their guns were out. He refused to respond to their demand that he stop, leading them on a wild chase through the backwoods roads that he had come to know so well. Finally, he manoeuvred them into a ravine where they crashed, dumping their guns and hand grenades among the trees.
Marcel lived clandestinely for a period while the police wrecked his home, smashing his typewriter and mimeograph machine. When Marcel was finally captured, they pulled his beard and made him sit for three days on a bench in a military barrack. He was released only on condition of leaving the country.
Missions
Since February 1993, the Organisation of American States and the United Nations (OAS-UN) have placed missions throughout the country to monitor human rights. A variety of personnel from various countries have been hired at $6000 a month to staff the missions.
At Cap-Haitien we visited the mission, located in the centre of town between the mayor's office and the Ministry of the Interior. In our interview with a dozen staff members, who had been there varying lengths of time, we were stunned to discover that no-one had ever heard of the teachers' union or of its repression.
"No-one has ever come in here with that information", a young University of Wisconsin graduate explained to us. When we pointed out that many of the teachers were in hiding, and that one had even fled to the Dominican Republic, she replied: "Well, we can't go to the Dominican Republic to find them, can we?"
What about the peasants' organisations that we had met?, we asked. Its leaders had claimed that the OAS-UN mission met with the police in their region, but had failed to show up to a meeting with their representatives, who were ready and waiting. Members of the mission confirmed that this had occurred, but offered no explanation as to why the situation had not been remedied in subsequent weeks.
Later we met with a local Cap-Haitien group called Friends of the Prisoners. This had been founded in 1976 by a French nun whose brother had been jailed in France, and who decided to organise to obtain the right of prisoners to attend mass and participate in a choir, and also for the Friends to deliver gifts of food to the incarcerated.
Under Aristide, the delegations of Friends actually began to receive assistance from the state and were allowed in the cells. After the coup, however, the situation deteriorated horrendously so that prisoners were sometimes so crowded in cells that they could only sleep in shifts, dead bodies were left to decay in cells, and food was so sparse that the prisoners devised a rotating system involving fast days for some that would allow others to eat more substantial meals.
When asked if Friends had reported such conditions to the OAS-UN mission, members of the group were horrified. They knew from experience that due to the "neutrality" of the mission, complaints would be checked with the police, which would lead to the persecution of Friends themselves. Referring to a case that we later confirmed at the OAS-UN mission at Port-au-Prince, the Friends described a visit by the Cap-Haitien mission to a prison where a prisoner did complain of conditions, only to be beaten nearly to death upon their departure.
Under such circumstances, it was hardly surprising that few of the Haitians we met put any faith in the accord signed by Cedras and Aristide on Governor's Island, New York, in early July.
"How can anyone make the army respect any agreements?", one of the Friends of the Prisoners asked. Among the glaring inadequacies of the accord are its failure to address the illegal parliamentary election of January 1993 that gave a majority to anti-Aristide forces, and the apparent amnesty it gives to the murderous coup leaders and supporters.
Still, what hope exists among the people we interviewed is pinned on the return of Aristide and the inspiration to struggle that may be provided by his presence in the presidential post. [Abridged from International Viewpoint.]