Duvalier's Haitian garrison

Robert Buddan, POLITICS OF OUR TIME

Jean-Claude Duvalier is back in Haiti. The worst fear is that the Duvalierists there are trying to take advantage of the confusion and political vacuum since the unbelievably bad decision by the Western countries to go ahead with presidential elections under impossible conditions last November. No candidate has won. A second-round election will be held in mid-March. A final result won't be known until April, if anything is final in Haiti.

Until then, that dangerous political vacuum will be very tempting for all kinds of individuals and movements, past and present, to seek to exploit. Probably, this is what brought the notorious Duvalier back.

Conspiracy theorists might be pardoned for speculating about the fact that he was allowed back in Haiti by the United States, United Nations and France. They all claim not to have known about his impending return. Who really believes that? And, now that they know he is back, what do they intend to do about it. So far, the UN commissioner for human rights has said that Haiti has an obligation to investigate the atrocities that occurred under Duvalier's rule and charge those responsible. The Haitian government has charged Duvalier. But the French and American governments remain cool about the whole thing.

Duvalier ran a terrorist regime in Haiti. It did not even pretend that it was fighting a holy war. Yet, after he was thrown out by Haiti's people power movement in 1986, he was escorted to Paris by the United States authorities where he has been allowed to live in luxurious exile. Is this how they treat terrorists; or is this how they treat their terrorists?

Haiti as Garrison

To give an idea of Haiti under the Duvaliers, one might say they ran Haiti like a garrison, a military and paramilitary political garrison in which there was little distinction between the political, private and personal family and class interests of the Duvaliers, the Duvalierists and the ruling elite. Haiti was run by a father-and-son dictatorship-for-life between 1957 and 1986 when François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' ruled by fraud and terror.

The core of this Duvalierists ruling class was made up of about 30 big families that are tightly knit together across politics, business, ethnicity and colour. It is an ethnically mixed class of people of Middle Eastern descent, whites and Haitians. There are another 100 or 200 families below them operating as a second tier and as the go-between service and professional classes. These families also terrorise Haitians. They own machine guns and use it with impunity against Haitians.

They captured the State and market completely. They control what goes in and what comes out. One American businessman formerly in Haiti said whites like him could decide whether or not they would pay taxes or any deductions into pension or welfare schemes of any kind. They often simply refused and no one bothered to do anything to them. This is how state and market capture cause underdevelopment.

Parallels in Jamaica

There are parallels in Jamaica. Tivoli Gardens became a father-and-son dictatorship of the Coke family. It was run by their paramilitary gang, the Shower Posse, just as Duvalier ran Haiti through the violent Tonton Macoutes. Politics and criminal business were indistinguishable in both cases. The systems of authority were based on justice by violence. There was a ruling elite living elsewhere while patronising the political leadership and asking few questions. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars financing politics and resisting disclosure laws. They get a big cut of the market for State contracts.

In both cases, too, these paramilitary and class forces were relied upon to fight socialism or any alternative to the status quo using the fight against anything they deemed 'communism' as the justification for their own 'holy war'. By the end of that Cold War, they had become deeply embedded by relying on criminal enterprise, mercenary employment and special contracts to build their power bases.

In 1986, Baby Doc was run out of Haiti but allowed to leave with millions of dollars of stolen money. Some now say he has used it up and has come back for more. He had left behind the terrorist Tonton Macoutes and military as allies of the Haitian ruling families and classes. They continued to create mayhem, making it impossible for leaders like Jean-Bertrand Aristide to rule. Eventually, they plotted to remove Aristide aided and abetted by the United States, Canada and France. But now Duvalier is back, and right upon his return he reportedly brazenly met with the old Tonton Macoutes leaders.

A Jamaican Comparison

The difference with Jamaica is that it is only some of our communities that have become garrisons, so that the garrisoning phenomenon is not as complete and total. There have been alternating party governments and the State has neither been a dictatorship nor a direct instrument of a military, paramilitary, police, or machine gun-owning economic ruling class. Tivoli has been a rogue 'state' within a state, while Haiti has been a rogue state within a world system of states. That system, we should remember, includes the CARICOM system of states.

Christopher Coke has been extradited to answer charges in the United States. But has his alleged network been dismantled, including the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP)-aligned network? Has he simply been replaced? Will the network continue to work as allies to make it difficult for democratic alternatives to govern Jamaica as in Haiti? Will Tivoli be out of bounds to the police under a People's National Party government, as the JLP made it for 40 years?

The Jamaican people, with far more resources than their Haitian counterparts, did not organise against Tivoli and its gangs. The government, in fact, resisted the extradition of Coke. Under public pressure, it is conducting investigations into the deaths of more than 70 persons during the raid on Tivoli, but there is no people-power movement to insist that it does. It is enquiring into Manatt issues instead, in a ramshackle enquiry which seems designed to fail.

It was a fearful thought to have read from Pearnel Charles' book, A Cry from the Grassroots, that Edward Seaga had hoped to replicate Tivoli across Kingston and St Andrew. Charles was a young worker in Seaga's constituency trying to help him. It is one thing to have garrisons as pockets within a larger democratic system. It is another to have them under the control of authoritarian personalities. It is interesting to read Charles' latest book, Jamaica and the People's Struggle for Survival, and hear him talk about people-power movements rising up against presidents-for-life and other undemocratic regimes. I would want to hear him now advocating people-power movements to liberate garrison constituencies, including Tivoli, and to hear him calling for a commission of enquiry into the bloody raid on Tivoli as the public defender and a pitifully few other organisations have done.

Bruce Golding is chairman of CARICOM. You wonder if he has the moral authority to chastise Duvalier and the Duvalierists for their garrison politics. He hasn't yet done so.

Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, Mona, campus, UWI. Email robert.buddan @uwimona.edu.jm.