His turn to run?

Once hailed as the nation's savior, President Aristide sees even loyalists breaking faith.

MIAMI - As a rebel uprising spread across Haiti, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide looked daily more removed from reality - if not power.

Interviewed live on CNN as the network showed footage of the chaos in the rebel-occupied port city of Gonaives, Aristide was asked what he considered the main achievement of his three-year-old government.

"Peace, peace, peace," he insisted. The images told another story.

Last week, after more towns tumbled across the north of the country, he changed his tune. Describing the rebels as a gang of "terrorists," he appealed urgently for international help.

But it may be too late for that. Regional leaders discussed what kind of assistance to offer Aristide, but none appeared likely to be forthcoming. It has been almost a decade since 20,000 American and international troops invaded Haiti to remove a military junta that had ousted Aristide in 1991; now he is running out of friends.

While it may be premature to predict his removal from office a second time, Aristide's fall from grace has foreign government officials, political opponents and analysts alike scratching their heads for an explanation.

Acclaimed by his own people a decade ago as a national savior of almost mythical proportions, Aristide, 50, can no longer count on such fervent support. The man who once used the colorful imagery of his native Creole to captivate throngs of poor Haitians has in recent months shuttered himself in his majestic presidential palace.

Aristide's current political problems stem from alleged fraud in two disputed elections in 2000 that have undermined his legitimacy. But the underlying concerns about his leadership of the country date back much further.

Since he first appeared on the political scene in the late 1980s, many Haitians have expressed deep suspicion over Aristide's thirst for power and the paranoid steps he has taken to keep it.

"He had everything at his feet, Haiti and the entire world," said businessman Andy Apaid, one of the country's main civic opposition leaders. "He threw it all away because he was too concerned about staying in power and not enough about running the country."

Aristide's election in 2000 was his second victory at the polls, but it came in very different circumstances. The opposition boycotted the election, arguing that Aristide's party had rigged legislative elections that summer. Though Aristide won 90 percent of the presidential vote, turnout was estimated at only 5 percent of electors. Compare that to the 67 percent support he obtained in 1990 against a wide field of contenders who voted in record numbers - and without a whiff of fraud.

Aristide and his defenders prefer to place the blame largely on Haiti's elite business class and its resistance to political change. They also bitterly accuse the United States and France of blocking $500-million in foreign aid. Donors held back the money after the flawed 2000 elections.

"How do you provide health and public services when you are under an embargo?" asked Ira Kurzban, a Miami lawyer who represents the Haitian government. "This is the poorest country in the hemisphere, yet it receives no foreign assistance."

Kurzban puts it down to an international conspiracy to force Aristide from power by making the country ungovernable.

If that is true, it has certainly worked. Some 14 years after Aristide's first election, Haiti has little to show for democratic rule, with 80 percent of its 8-million inhabitants living on less than $1 a day.

Asked about his declining popularity during a gathering with reporters in December, Aristide said he thought he was doing remarkably well considering what he called the "geoeconomic reality."

But many say Aristide has earned his people's disdain.

"When it came down to reality, as it inevitably does after an election, he was not able to deliver," said American author Amy Wilentz, who wrote the highly acclaimed book The Rainy Season, about Haiti's quest for democracy and the rise of Aristide.

Aristide was never well-suited to democracy, she wrote in a recent article in which she accused him of shunning compromise and good advice. "It's hard to be a savior if you don't know how, and Aristide is no Mandela," she added, referring to the former South African leader and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Aristide was certainly not cut out for a role in politics. The son of a poor peasant family in the south of the country, he was taken in by Roman Catholic priests at an early age. Sent to study abroad, he became fluent in several languages including English, Spanish and Hebrew while studying theology in Canada and Israel.

After returning to Haiti, he earned a reputation as a fiery slum preacher who was not afraid to mix politics into his sermons criticizing the dictatorship of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. But his espousal of liberation theology and revolutionary language would eventually lead to his separation from the Salesian order.

"He was advocating violence," said the Rev. Edward Cappelletti, who headed the order's regional office in New York. The order based its decision on quotations from Aristide's sermons supplied by Father Lawrence Bohnen, a recently deceased Dutch priest who ran the Salesian schools in Haiti, Cappelletti said.

Bohnen wrote that members of his congregation at the St. John Bosco Church would ask Aristide to bless their machetes.

"What do you do with your machetes?" the priest asked them.

They said they used them in the fields.

"What else do you do with your machetes?" Aristide went on, apparently hinting at more violent uses for the tool.

That kind of ambiguous language, on top of his head-on challenge to the feudal order of Haitian society, led to several assassination attempts. In 1988, 12 members of his congregation were shot and hacked to death by armed men who burst into St. John Bosco and burned it down. Aristide escaped unhurt. His survival led many of his supporters to credit him with supernatural powers.

In 1990 he became Haiti's first democratically elected leader. During the election campaign he electrified the country with a charismatic campaign dubbed Lavalas (Cleansing Flood) that promised to wash away the country's history of political corruption and poverty.

But U.S. officials distanced themselves from him, suggesting he was a mentally unstable Marxist. His speeches were criticized for encouraging dechoukaj, a Haitian Creole word literally meaning "uprooting," but understood by ordinary people as vengeance - and destruction of property - directed against the country's corrupt political and business elite.

In one speech he famously appeared to advocate "necklacing" (execution with a burning tire around the neck) as another form of popular justice. "The burning tire, what a beautiful tool! ... It smells good," he said.

He later denied that he was inciting violence.

Within nine months he was ousted by the military with the backing of the country's conservative business elite, who accused him of fomenting communism and class hatred. Though restored to power in the summer of 1994, he had only 18 months of his administration left before being obliged to hand over power in new elections.

Aristide deserves credit for being the country's first president to respect the democratic transition, analysts say. Yet seemingly determined to hold on to power, he handpicked his successor in 1996 and began to alienate some of his closest friends and advisers.

"It was clear that the man did not have any concept of the national interest, beyond his own self-interest," said former U.S. Ambassador Tim Carney, who left Haiti in 1999.

If anything, his actions became less and less democratic. After his return in 1994, the army was disbanded. As part of a modest nation-building effort, the United States helped train a new police force and reform the justice system. Though recruits were vetted to keep out unfit former soldiers, Aristide remained suspicious of its recruits. Instead, he armed his own political gangs - the chimeres - named after a mythical fire-breathing monster.

"He was haunted by the (1991) coup, and he saw institutions like the army or the police as potential threats," said Jocelyn McCalla, director of the New York-based National Coalition of Haitian Rights.

The problem persisted. Instead of promoting professional officers, only die-hard Lavalas loyalists were recruited. The same applied to the Haitian justice system, analysts say.

Kurzban defended Aristide: "The government has a right to choose someone who is loyal to the government."

But the issue of loyalty eventually split the grass roots Lavalas movement. Aristide formed his own breakaway party, the Lavalas Family. Dissidents complained that a new militancy within the party drowned out all other voices.

It was accompanied by a personality cult around Aristide. At the state-run Haitian National Television network, the opening credits depict a rising sun with Aristide's face behind it. "Aristide is King," became the new chant at progovernment rallies.

"He is the state, he is the people, he is everything," said Prince Pierre Sonson, a former Lavalas Family senator who broke with the party last year after writing a book, State of Shock, in which he described the degeneration of the Lavalas Family into a mafia. "They have no moral values and have discarded all people with professional skills. Aristide is only surrounded by flatterers."

The demands of political loyalty and the fostering of gangs created a dangerous mix. It was no coincidence, say analysts, that incidents of intimidation and murders of government critics began rising.

In April 2000, unknown assailants gunned down the country's most celebrated journalist, Jean Dominique, a former grass roots Lavalas activist. Aristide's opponents say the government has done little to solve the crime.

"He succeeded in cloaking the country in terror," said opposition leader Gerard Pierre Charles, whose home was one of several attacked by the chimeres in an orgy of violence in December 2001. "He became worse than Duvalier."

In the end, the violence would be Aristide's undoing. By the middle of last year there were signs he was losing control. The mysterious murder of one former chimere leader in the port city of Gonaives set off a mini uprising.

Appalled by the direction the country was taking, business and professional leaders who had remained outside the political debate began organizing protest marches. But those also became the target of rock-throwing mobs.

On Dec. 5, pro-Aristide thugs attacked students at the main university campus in Port-au-Prince, setting off a new wave of protests. In Creole street graffiti, the once lovable ti-tid (little Aristide) was now being depicted all over the city as a vicious tiger, aris-tig.

When rebellion finally broke out nationwide this month, it was as though Haiti had come full circle. In an alliance that would never have been thought possible a few years ago, former Aristide loyalists joined forces with old military foes.

Undaunted, Aristide vowed last week he was "ready to die" for his country.

But reality still seemed to escape him. "I order the police to accompany the people courageously," he said. "When the police are united to the people, they are invincible."

Rather than defend the president, many police chose to hide. And soon it may be Aristide's turn to flee.

- David Adams can be contacted at dadams@sptimes.com

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