For the new interventionists, Haiti is a way to atone for past says Fouad Ajami. It's a curious call to arms
by Fouad Ajami
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"Damn sugar! Damn coffee! Damn colonies!" -- Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803
The die must have been cast that fateful day in October 1993 when an American assault ship turned back from Haitian waters after armed thugs appeared on the docks of Port-au-Prince. The ship had been carrying a group of military engineers and advisers who had come to train the Haitian military for a scheduled return to civilian rule. Haiti's military rulers had changed their minds. They would defy U.S. power, ignore the accord they had signed accepting the restoration of civilian rule and the return of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Bill Clinton had brokered that accord; it was his one decent chance for a successful exit from the Haitian tangle.
There was a measure of justice in Clinton's dilemma. Haiti was one of those cases Clinton had highlighted to show the difference between his idealism and the crass power politics of the Bush administration. Haiti would become one of those tests leaders and nations create for themselves, cutting off their routes of escape, leading into commitments they would be better off without. The junta had defied an administration that had been battered in the Balkans and Somalia. Haiti was one cut too many. Hard as the Clinton team tries to pass it off as a campaign for democracy, it is clear that this venture has been undertaken because a line had been drawn for military men in Port-au-Prince who were foolish enough to trick and corner a great power in full daylight.
It is a curious call to arms, this venture into Haiti. For the "new interventionists" -- refugee advocacy groups, human rights groups, some members of the Congressional Black Caucus -- the enterprise is vindicated because there are no material interests to defend, no oil supplies to secure. We had trained the military; we would clip its wings. The popular will that elected Father Aristide, only to see him cast out of office after 30-odd weeks, would be upheld. We had befriended the oligarchs; now we had a chance to side with the downtrodden. Intervention by the "cold country to the north" -- Aristide's description of the United States -- would be a form of penance.
It is apt that America's second big push into Haiti has been draped in Wilsonian colors -- the protection and expansion of democracy, the benign great power to the rescue, putting an end to tyrannical ways. These were, in the main, Woodrow Wilson's terms when he ordered the invasion of Haiti in 1915. Haitians believe that the "rapacious Yankees" came for the loot, but of a total $1.7 billion investment in Latin America, a mere $4 million was in Haiti. It was the balance of power, the desire to check a growing German role in Haiti and to control the sea routes to the Panama Canal that took the U.S. to Haiti. It would be unabashed paternalistic rule. The occupation provided Haiti with two decades of relative stability. But good government was no substitute for self-government. The occupation was unloved. There were intermittent rebellions. Even the mulatto elite that had welcomed the Americans finally broke with them because the American reforms -- including the naive attempt to create a middle class and the streamlining of Haitian finances -- struck at their age-old privileges.
Theories of noirisme and negritude swept Haiti's intellectual life: Amid the alien order the Americans were building, the writers argued, Haiti's soul was being suffocated. The pride of Haiti had been great: the home of the great leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, done in and betrayed by France; the second nation in the New World to secure independence. It was out of this crucible that so cruel a figure as Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier emerged.
The Americans stayed for two decades. The country was bequeathed a constitution, drawn up by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Haitians and the advocates of the theory of American culpability in Haiti's ordeal may want to point to America's role in training Haitian officers. But Haiti's deep wounds are in the main self-inflicted. No U.S. military academy was needed to teach Haitians that the man with the sword cut a swath of terror. No sooner had the remarkable L'Ouverture been taken to die in a cold prison cell in France's mountains than a cruel successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, raised the standard of rebellion and waged a campaign of extermination against all whites he could find. Since then the history of that "pearl of the Antilles" has been a spectacle of endless desolation. One would have to be unduly cold and cynical not to sympathize with the American leader who has made himself an arbiter of Haiti's cruel fate. One would have to be unduly optimistic to think that the Americans of today can succeed where their predecessors failed.
