Washington Post: For Haiti, A Want Of Concern

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Farmer asked me a caring question:

"What could be a deeper wrong than the last 200 years of U.S. policy toward Haiti?"

Americans would care more, he continued, if they understood the U.S. contribution to Haiti's woes. "No one wants to believe that our government would block water to the thirsty and food to the hungry. I didn't.

"But we did and we are."

In fact, the same U.S. government that gave aid to Haiti during the brutal regimes of Francois Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude blocked money that would have fed children, provided clean water to malaria-threatened citizens and built hospitals and roads.

On Aug. 7, 2002, Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder wrote in this newspaper: "The United States is actively impeding the flow of foreign aid to Haiti's government, a total of approximately $500 million, a sum roughly equal to the country's annual budget. We are even blocking, illegally, a series of already-approved loans from the Inter-American Development Bank totaling $140 million."

Why would the United States undermine a neighboring democracy that poses no threat to it? A democracy whose first "remarkable" constitution, Farmer said, stated that "any slave from anywhere in world who came to Haiti would be declared free."

Farmer paused. "Skip ahead 180 years and you find 30 coups, a brutal family dictatorship and, finally, a democracy movement that promises poor people the right to enough to eat, to an education, to a dry place to sleep.

"That movement was begun by the guy who just got overthrown."

The American most famous for caring about Haiti is Randall Robinson, the former TransAfrica chief who staged a 28-day hunger strike that embarrassed then-President Clinton into stopping the repatriation of Haitian political refugees.

Today, his concern drives him to outrage. Over his belief that the U.S. government supplied the M-16s and crisp uniforms sported by rebels. Over hearing Aristide -- whom social activist Jonathan Kozol once called "one of the morally transcendent leaders of our time" -- dismissed as unscrupulous. Over the phone call he received from Aristide in which his friend insisted that he'd been forced to resign by American soldiers.

The U.S. State Department vigorously denies those assertions. But shouldn't any democratically elected president threatened by demonstrated thugs merit America's unqualified support rather than suggestions that he cut and run?

The Bush administration "removed every wherewithal [Aristide] might have had to govern," Robinson said. "They blocked loans for safe drinking water, for literacy, for building health care clinics. They ensured that democracy would not survive."

Was Aristide corrupt? Supporters point out that the "flawed" elections often attributed to him involved 10 senators, six of whom offered to resign, whose seats were in question after their election during Rene Preval's -- not Aristide's -- presidency.

Why would the United States hamstring Aristide?

"Aristide is the voice of the Haitian poor," said Robinson. " He . . . felt he belonged to the people of Haiti and to God. Not to the United States."

Everyone who cares about democracy should care about Haiti, at least enough to insist on learning what really happened there and why. Anyone who loves this nation knows that too many people, in places far more troubling than tiny Haiti, believe what Robinson told me he's begun to believe:

"That America is capable of doing anything, to anybody, at any time."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32040-2004Mar4_2.html