Jean-Bertrand Aristide - 21 October 1994

By the way, said an old friend I hadn't seen in some time, he was looking over the morning paper on a fall day as brilliant as a diamond, he really wanted to get out on the lakes but he thought he'd get in a quick lick to show he was really up on events. By the way he said "how are things going in Haiti, not to mention North Korea?"

He hadn't seen a paper for a week or so and, therefore, he was more surprised than the rest of us to notice that in the past few days, the front pages have exclusively headlined obviously the atrocious terrorist bombing of that bus in Tel Aviv, Israel and Jordan's peace treaty draft, half a dozen American themes and a continuing puzzle to American politicians, democrats getting no lift from a rising economy, but where is North Korea, where is Haiti?

Who would have thought two weeks ago, that if you wanted to know how things were going in Haiti, you would have to track it down in the New York Times daily index. Once Mr Aristide had arrived, a barely visible head bobbing through a phalanx of American soldiers and the protective outer rim of twitching plain clothes men, once he'd arrived and a rumoured coup against him had swept the island and been discounted as a rumour, it was assumed I suppose by most Americans who can run and read that things were going well enough to take the story off the front page, not before however the polls had shown President Clinton to have gone up five or six points in popular approval of the way he's handling things, especially in foreign policy.

It was a relief also to hear this week that for the time being anyway, the fears of North Korea's nuclear programme are falling away, though luckily for Mr Clinton not too much was made of the settlement on the North Korean's terms, that too was in the inside pages. They said, "okay, we'll suspend our nuclear build up if you give us $4 billion". "Done," said the United States, "to help you of course develop energy in the technological sense." This is colossal gamble and while the Republicans had no better idea, they just mumbled quietly, "where are $4 billion coming from?" The president did not take that leap lightly.

You might recall that until about a month or six weeks ago, before former President Carter performed his leap of faith by going and talking as an equal to the North Korean president, the Clinton policy was what the Reagan and the Bush and all previous presidents' policy had been. North Korea was the Stalinist totalitarian regime and, as a rising Pacific power, one constantly to be watched.

When the North Koreans refused to allow United Nations inspectors into their nuclear plants against their treaty commitments, President Clinton warned them that they had better think again or they would be punished. Reports of massive North Korean mobilisation at the de-militarised zones border … response from the rather scared South Koreans. The United States was ready to ask the Security Council of the United Nations to impose international sanctions. Then two awkward things happened, the North Koreans far from cringing or backing down from the Clinton threats decided they would do the threatening. From now on, they said, they'd look on United Nations sanctions as an act of war, much more awkward still for the United States was the certain promise from China of a veto on any sanctions.

At that point, Mr Clinton grabbed at the straw of Jimmy Carter's assurance that both the old now-dead North Korean leader and the new one were reasonable men open to intelligent negotiation. Of course, North Korea will take the four billions, a price paid out by the Clinton administration to convince itself that the Stalinist totalitarian bully is, in fact, a reformed peaceable statesmen. The doubters inside the administration, especially inside the defence department, called a deal a high-risk cause. A Washington correspondent who has followed the last year's doings in North Korea calls it a giant leap of faith.

And something of the same sort of moral gymnastic has had to be performed by President Clinton in Haiti, the benevolent occupation of the island is as you know called Operation Upholding Democracy, even the administration now admits on the side that installing would have been a better word, since the first glimmer of democracy and action in Haiti in 190 years was the election of Father Aristide.

I'm sure you've all read and heard by now of the appalling job the American military has been called on to do to track down thousands of Cédras soldiers and paramilitary thugs, to help retrain the police, to collect guns from gangs who don't like to be without them, to act as water boys, electrical repairmen, sewage inspectors, hospital orderlies, food providers, but overriding this chaos which was anticipated there is in the installation of Father Aristide a political challenge requiring an act of faith not unlike the one Mr Clinton has performed towards North Korea. In other more brutally and simple words, President Clinton has had in public to change his old view of Aristide as a little tyrant wanting to replace a bit tyrant General Cédras and pretend that Father Aristide is an upstanding beleaguered democrat returning to save his country from a brutal dictator.

In a debate in the House about a week ago, a congressman from California who all along has been against going into Haiti made a speech I heard, which I did not see reported anywhere, it was in effect a profile or political character sketch of Father Aristide so far as I could check it was mainly true, but to remind people of the truth at this point would make the president's job all the harder.

First Father Aristide is an expelled Roman Catholic priest; he once described the pope as the chief executive officer of a religious corporation in the game for profit. On his own, he packed the country's supreme court, he destroyed the cathedral, he was to put it mildly identified with the hideous torture practice known as necklacing and was said to have threatened opponents with it. This caused for filling a rubber motorcar tyre with petrol, fastening it round a victim's neck and setting it alight. Aristide has been charged with recruiting his own security force from thuggish police who had fled to Guantanamo. There are charges some proved, some not of murdered teenagers and paramilitary units as bad as the ones owned by Cédras.

Well, whatever truth there may be in all this, there is no question that throughout his presidential campaign and for years before, Aristide had preached a Marxian creed ad nauseam that, quote "capitalism is a mortal sin"and quote "a deadly infection always threatening to descend on the island from the cold capitalist nation to the north". He had formerly held up as a vision of the future an anti-religious dictatorship.

On the whole not the sort of allied you'd expect the United States to embrace and subsidise with $200 million a year, but having once decided to go into Haiti, the administration had no other choice, nothing resembling a simon-pure Democrat in sight.

All this now makes sense of another wise very puzzling headline over the main story from Port-au-Prince in the New York Times on Thursday, Aristide Vows To Include Wealthy In Haiti's New Cabinet. What this is really saying is that Aristide is, if not a reformed Marxist, a born-again liberal democrat, he doesn't really mean what he used to go on about, how the poor and Haiti has the poorest poor in the hemisphere, how the poor had every right to resent and fight the rich.

So only the other day, American troops had to interfere when a mob was moving in on a rich man's house, one poor black interviewed on television said with his hands splayed out in puzzlement, but this is what he used to tell us to do. One other of the innumerable chores that have fallen to the American troops is to intercept, to threaten, to arrest looters, which if they're armed can be a tricky business.

So both in North Korea and in Haiti, American policy has been conducted by two similar acts of faith. Threaten to punish the known bad guy. If he ignores or mocks you, don't then deliver the punishment that would entail those frightful appropriate military responses that we used to call war, but offer him a subsidy a 100 million here, a billion or two there to help his struggling country achieve peace and prosperity and no more warlike gestures. It is certainly, and I say this without jest or irony, the act of a Christian, what the founder of Christianity always recommended as certain to turn away wrath.

Now former President Carter is an evangelical Christian and through all the snide criticism and mockery of his motives first in North Korea then in Haiti he has maintained, if the delicate point ever came up, that he was acting less as a professional politician or newly hired old diplomat and more as a Christian. I don't believe people, most Americans, know this when they say with fingers crossed that the policy in North Korea and Haiti seems to be working. Of course, most people also don't realise the material price as taxpayers their going to have to pay, but if it does work it will not be a triumph for American politics but for a principle 2,000 years older than any of our known political systems.

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