As images of national celebration in Haiti flooded the media following Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s resignation Sunday morning, many students and professors pondered the implications of the crisis and its culmination.
According to his letter of resignation, Aristide left to prevent further bloodshed by opposition forces that have left up to 100 dead, while seizing northern Haiti and closing in on the capital city of Port-au-Prince. His resignation came after intense French and United States pressure.
Kate Patterson ’04 traveled to Haiti over winter break as part of a group called Global Justice to discuss issues of HIV/AIDS and child survival with various representatives. She participated in a conference call with other members of Global Justice Sunday afternoon, where several concerns about Aristide’s resignation surfaced.
“This is a violent, undemocratic regime change,” Patterson wrote in an e-mail summarizing the delegation’s conclusions during the conference call. “If President Aristide did resign, he did it because of violence already perpetrated on civil servants and democracy supporters over the last month, and the explicit threat of much more bloodshed in Port-au-Prince.”
Patterson stressed that the resignation undermines Haiti’s democratic ideal.
“The most important thing is the maintenance of the democratic institutions,” Patterson said. “You don’t overthrow a president simply because you disagree with his policies. If that were true, we could form a Wesleyan group to oust Bush.”
Other students see Aristide’s resignation as a source of hope, and the preceding violence as the necessary means to that end. Terence Trouillot ’07, whose parents grew up in Haiti and currently reside in New York City, was glad to see Aristide step down.
“People believed Aristide would change Haiti, but he didn’t do anything really; he made situations worse,” Trouillot said. “[My parents] don’t talk about how terrible it was, but how [Aristide’s resignation] is a step forward. The situation would be better if we had a turnaround and start from scratch.”
According to Assistant Professor of Letters Typhaine Leservot, who specializes in Franco-Caribbean literature, the violence surrounding Aristide’s departure creates problems for Haiti’s democratic future, regardless of the faults he had as a leader.
“I’m glad he’s gone because there was cheating during the 2000 elections and from that moment on, democracy was gone,” Leservot said, referring to the parliamentary elections of May 2000, in which the Organization of American States (OAS) discovered seven seats were wrongly assigned to Aristide’s party. “That doesn’t mean I’m happy at seeing what’s going on. This country needs democracy, and I don’t see it happening with people brandishing weapons in the street.”
Leservot is also troubled by the current media labeling of Haitians. She reacted especially to the use of the word “endemic” in U.S. media to describe Haiti’s history of violence.
“[Endemic] is a word that profoundly shocks me because it means two things: it does mean it’s widespread within Haiti, but also specific to Haitians,” Leservot said. “This question of specificity is problematic for me; the players in the background make Haiti an international event.”
The involvement of countries outside Haiti, including the United States, has raised questions from all sides. Professor of Sociology Alex Dupuy, who appeared on PBS’s “News Hour with Jim Lehrer” on Feb. 16 to discuss the situation in Haiti, questions the political motives of France in taking a sudden leadership role.
“Why is France suddenly interested in Haiti and taking the lead on the crisis, when the United States has played the dominant role there since at least 1915?” Dupuy said. “One way of looking at it is to put this in the context of U.S.-French politics over the Iraq war, where the French may be trying to patch its differences with the United States by fully cooperating with the U.S. on resolving the crisis in Haiti.”
Jane Charles-Voltaire ’07, whose parents come from Haiti and previously worked as consultants in the Aristide government in the early 1990s, questions the potential role of other countries in organizing and arming opposition forces.
“This is not a bunch of random people running around. They’re heavily organized,” Charles-Voltaire said. “They’re labeled in the papers as gangs and thugs, but they are heavily funded. There’s a whole sub-question of how long they’ve been planning this.”
Dupuy also faulted the United States for diplomatically aiding the opposition’s efforts to overthrow Aristide through the proposal of a peace plan last week that would let Aristide retain some power, making it unlikely that the opposition would accept.
“All the time they’ve been trying to get the opposition to accept the peace proposal, the armed rebels gained territory. While they knew from the beginning the opposition wouldn’t accept the proposal, it gave them time,” Dupuy said. “Publicly, they’re not saying they want him overthrown.”
Patterson also said she was disappointed by the way the United States handled the crisis.
“We should have stepped in at the first sign of violence and led an international effort to restore the peace so that political discussions could have continued, through democratic channels rather than military coups,” Patterson said.
Patterson hopes to organize actions on campus regarding the recent events in Haiti.
“Wesleyan students have a history of standing up for what we believe in—for speaking up for human rights and speaking out against hypocrisy,” Patterson said. “If there was ever a time to do that, it’s now. We need to be writing our hometown papers, calling our representatives, and talking to our friends and family.”
Anyone interested in participating should e-mail Patterson at kpatterson@wesleyan.edu.
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