Haiti, after Aristide, continues search for answers

[struggle4progress]

For Ronel Jean-Louis, the future in Haiti hinges on how much longer he has to eat dirt to survive. Following the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in late February, life has grown so difficult for the 11-year old and his friends that they are forced to eat disks of clay mixed with fat and salt and baked in the relentless Caribbean sun.

“It’s not bad, but bread is better,” he says. Another boy quips, “I remember bread. But I also remember chicken, and that’s even better than bread.” They laugh and agree, these uniformly skinny boys dressed in rags.

Their homes along the dirty seacoast are assembled from scrap lumber and sheets of recycled tin hammered flat. Their future, be it dirt or bread, won’t be determined here, however. Instead, they hungrily wait for word from afar, for the fate of the Haitian majority is always decided somewhere else, be it Washington or the landscaped hills above Port-au-Prince where the political elite dine on duck à l’orange and argue about who will run the country below.

It was a coup in slow motion that finally led to Aristide’s departure. Long under pressure from the U.S. government and a U.S.-coddled opposition, Aristide had been bumbling along, caught between his own hubris and the slim hope of Haiti’s desperate poor that he might eventually make good on his promises. Then came a small band of armed thugs, almost like characters from a comic opera were it not for their tainted provenance, whose march on the capital finally convinced the former priest it was time to leave. The Bush administration -- which had trained the rebels -- did nothing to keep the only democratically elected president in Haiti’s history from being forced from office. Instead, it supplied the plane to hustle Aristide off to the Central African Republic in the middle of the night. Aristide eventually migrated back to neighboring Jamaica, where he remained uncharacteristically silent. He moved to South Africa May 30, saying he was writing a book that would lay out his side of the story.
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http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/2004c/071604/071604a.php

Vague "one hand / other hand" analysis probably typical of moderates.