WHEN he confidently strode to the podium of the General Assembly one year ago bearing news of democracy's triumph after nearly two centuries of bloody failures, Haiti's first elected President, the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was the toast of the United Nations. This week, as Haiti's deposed President, overthrown in a military coup no sooner than he had returned home, Father Aristide will stand before the same audience to plead that the world not forget his country's tragedy.
He will surely be greeted with hearty applause, but it is much less certain that he will get anything beyond moral support. Diplomats say there is little chance that anything but the use or serious threat of force can now dislodge a Haitian army that has bloodily secured its hold on the nation while gorging itself on drug money and contraband since the coup last Sept. 30. Such a rescue seems remote. If anything, as time has passed, the world consensus against taking action on Father Aristide's behalf has hardened. For different reasons, likely defenders seem not to want to get involved.
At the United Nations, increasingly stretched by compelling crises from Yugoslavia to Somalia, most diplomats agree there is little chance that the body will take up Father Aristide's expected call to actively work for his return. Nor is the Organization of American States as indignant as it once was. Having announced plans for a 500-member observer mission to Haiti, the O.A.S. is now ploddingly assembling a corps of 18.
As for the United States, since shortly after the overthrow -- when Secretary of State James Baker echoed President Bush's famous "this aggression will not stand" statement about Iraq -- little consideration has been given to backing up American principles in Haiti with American muscle.
Virtually all observers agree that facing down Haiti's ill-equipped and undisciplined 7,000-man army would take little in the way of force. Recently, an adviser of the provisional Government of the army-backed Prime Minister Marc L. Bazin repeated Father Aristide's longtime complaint when he said that "all it would take is one phone call" from Washington to send the army leadership packing. Certainly in Haiti, it is keenly recalled that the United States played a critical behind-the-scenes role in forcing out the last military leader, Col. Prosper Avril, setting the stage for the democratic elections that Father Aristide won in a landslide.
Father Aristide has undoubtedly been frustrated that other nations have found ways to avoid effectively rallying to his cause. Mexico, for example, has invoked deep-seated opposition to American or even multilateral intervention by the O.A.S. in a member country's internal affairs. The European Community has failed to even slow its trade with Haiti.
Indeed, supporters and opponents of Father Aristide agree, nothing more threatening than a leaky and ineffective embargo, quickly imposed on Haiti after the coup, has ever been seriously contemplated, which reflects Washington's deep-seated ambivalence about a leftward-tilting nationalist whose style diplomats say has sometimes been disquietingly erratic. Father Aristide rose to popularity on the wings of his calls for redemption for the hemisphere's poorest and most oppressed people and on stinging speeches that often depicted the United States as a citadel of evil and the root of many of his country's problems. His salutations have long invoked the name of Charlemagne Peralte, a leader of the Haitian resistance to the United States' occupation early in the century, so he himself recognizes the trickiness of calling for stronger American measures.
Despite much blood on the army's hands, United States diplomats consider it a vital counterweight to Father Aristide, whose class-struggle rhetoric during his nearly eight months in office, threatened or antagonized traditional power centers at home and abroad. For months Washington has mixed almost rote-like public statements of the need to restore Haitian democracy with private comments that confess its unwillingness to take on the military. "He wants us to get rid of his enemies for him so that he can have a free hand to mop up, and we're just not going to do that for him," a senior official said in a comment that has been repeatedly echoed in American diplomatic circles.
For Father Aristide there remains only the slim possibility that a new effort at mediation by the former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael N. Manley, who was recently recruited by the O.A.S. for the task, can revive diplomatic efforts to restore him to office. Failing that, Father Aristide's backers can only hope that a people who have so far remained quiescent, will rise up again, as they did in 1986 to cast off the Duvalier family dictatorship, and reclaim the right to choose their leaders. "It is possible that the international community fails to find the instruments to help us and even that our civilian Government fails," said Father Aristide's Ambassador to Washington, Jean Casimir. "But time cannot help these gorillas, and given time, the Haitian people cannot lose."
Source: New York Times
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