Brazil as the regional partner :
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula
da Silva with Haitian President René
Préval (second from left) and Haitian
Foreign Affairs Minister Jean Rénald
Clérismé on a short visit to Haiti.
THONY BELIZAIRE/AFP/GE TTY
air of optimism across this tiny nation — with good reason. Haiti has
had its debt of roughly $1.2 billion
wiped out from the international
lenders, thus saving the impoverished country about $50 million
in annual payments. The U.S. and
Canada have modified their earlier
travel warnings, which kept many
would-be tourists away. A slew of aid
programs, including road and market construction projects, are visible
signs that Haiti is moving forward.
U.S. trade legislation, passed last year,
HOPE II, throws open a huge window of opportunity. HOPE II offers
Haiti duty-free, quota-free access to
U.S. markets for the next nine years.
No other nation enjoys a similar
advantage. Although HOPE II has
only added about 12,000 jobs, some
say it is a start of a possible boon at
a time of rising protectionism. “For
the first time in history, we have
a plan to help Haiti,” said Alonzo
Fulgham, an official at the United
States Agency for International Development in Washington. “The stars
are aligned.”
The post-tsunami experience in Asia
was a testimony to the effectiveness
of collaboration among people of dif-
ferent social, economic and ethnic
backgrounds, some of whom had
been actually fighting each other
before the disaster. Clinton’s suc-
cess at helping to achieve this in the
wreckage of the tsunami offers some
grounds for optimism that he can ap-
ply the same lessons to Haiti.
Clinton may also be motivated by
a private agenda—namely, redressing a key foreign policy failure of his
presidency. As a first-term president
in 1994, Clinton put the White House
behind an effort to return to power
President Jean Bertrand Aristide, who
had been forced into exile in 1991 following a bloody coup d’etat led by
Army General Raoul Cédras. Some
20,000 soldiers and police (most of
them American) were sent to Haiti,
in what amounted to Clinton’s first
foreign policy challenge.
Can Clinton fulfill the hopes that
the stakeholders, as well as Haitians
themselves, have for him? According
to Robert Maguire, a political science professor at Trinity College in
Washington DC and a leading expert
on Haiti, the ex-president is well-qualified for the job. “I think Clinton
will draw tremendously on his approach to his work in Haiti from his
two-year experience as Special UN
Envoy to post-tsunami recovery (in
Asia),” Maguire said. “Also, through
the work of his foundation and all his
other contacts, he ought to be in good
shape to ‘deliver.’ President Clinton’s
world-wide net work of human, material and financial resources is amazing.” A major challenge: Haitian
government ministers will need to
come together with the private sector and the myriad NGOs now in the
country to agree on common goals
that place national well-being above
personal or institutional interests.
Clinton took these steps despite
deep reservations from the Haitian
ruling classes, forever suspicious of
Aristide’s motives. But under fierce attack from right-wingers in Congress
for committing American troops and
resources to what they considered a
perpetual failed state, Clinton pulled
the soldiers out of Haiti and aborted
the nation-building steps that were
necessary for democracy and economic development to flourish in
the hemisphere’s poorest country.
At the same time, the failure to effectively pressure President Aristide
and his successors to pursue reforms
and respect democratic institutions
further polarized and paralyzed the
country.
A decade later, Haiti found itself
plunged into political disarray once
again. In 2004, the U.S., France and
Canada sent troops to escort Aristide
out of the country after the president
faced an armed rebellion that was a
whisker away from the gates of the
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