Los Angeles Times, Sunday, April 9, 2000

The Return of the Dark Days

NEW YORK--The dark days that were supposed to be gone forever seem to have returned to Haiti with a vengeance during these last few weeks. President Rene Preval is all but locked away in his palace, and the legislature has been disbanded. Plans to hold last month's postponed legislative and municipal elections this month have again been abandoned, postponed until who knows when. Effectively, there is no government. The police force has been successfully undermined by various armed gangs in the service of various political parties. U.S. forces, who arrived in 1994 to reinstate Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president, have left, and the small U.N. mission, until last month about 200-strong, is underfinanced and dispirited. 

Effectively, there are no forces of order. An air of suspense hangs over the capital, Port-au-Prince. As chaos and death swirl around his country,Aristide--former hotheaded spokesman for the poor and oppressed, former first freely elected president of Haiti and soon-to-be candidate for a second presidential term--keeps a remarkably judicious and silent tongue. 

Last week, in the most unabashed in a recent series of political killings, Jean Dominique, Haiti's most famous journalist, a tireless militant for democracy a man who never kept silent, was assassinated in a hail of bullets as he went from his car at his radio station to do his morning show. The station's security guard was also killed. With friends like this, who needs the Tontons Macoutes? Still, it takes a lot of nerve to kill someone like Dominique. 

In terms of Dominique's fame within Haiti, and his association with the cause of democracy, it's something like killing Aristide. But there is one big difference. Aristide is black, and Dominique was what is called "wouj," or red, in Haitian Creole. Red comes from the redder hair and skin color of mixed-race people like Dominique, though the journalist was actually more on the white side of wouj. 

During the days leading up to Aristide's election, such differences counted for little. Aristide and Dominique stood side by side. After a coup by the army against Aristide in 1991, he and Dominique went into exile, again, side by side. But, recently, a campaign was launched against the woujs in power, and this may have made Dominique more vulnerable and less valuable in the eyes of the general population. 

Two casualties of the wouj attack were a light-skinned police chief, who had to flee the country, and another who left his post. But Dominique is the most visible victim in this sad campaign,unappetizingly reminiscent of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier's  attacks against the mulatto elite in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Back in those days, there were reasons, both political and psychological, for the attacks on the elite. Lighter-skinned Haitians were seen as tools of foreign domination and economic penetration. Often,with the approval of foreign powers, especially the Americans, an unpopular mulatto president would be installed to help achieve foreign objectives on the island.

Later, with an eye toward burgeoning nationalism, black presidents were put into power, but the mulatto elite was still favored by wealthy and powerful outsiders. Historically, of course, the mulattoes were the children of slaves and masters, and played a problematic and often duplicitous role in the battle for Haitian independence. Thus, a light-skinned Haitian, even today, is always possibly suspect and, therefore, always possibly an easy target as well. That's what happened to Dominique. 

It's a bad sign when the race card is played in Haitian politics. Traditionally, that card has been put on the table just before the advent of a dictator, and dictators have arrived on the scene with some regularity in Haiti. Now Dominique is dead, unbelievable to those of us who worked in Haiti during the past three decades, when his was the voice, if not always of reason, then of passionate engagement with the ideal of freedom. His was also the voice of truth, not objectivity--Haitian journalists are too proud of their politics to pretend to this--but of sharp truths told with an acid tongue, a necessary corrective to the bland and misleading "blah-blah-blah" (as Haitians say) of prevaricating politicians. 

What is Haiti to become if it should ever emerge from this welter of blood? One thinks of the intelligent Dominique with his head shot open. In the most literal sense, the country has suffered a terrible brain drain. Not only have thousands of capable people--doctors, lawyers, accountants, dentists, writers, artists--left, but the best of the best who have remained and dedicated themselves to their country's future, often at great personal cost, are being picked off, one by one, by thugs, criminals and the armed agents of political poseurs. 

Dominique was the last of a breed, a staunch anti-Duvalierist with a good education and no personal familiarity with weapons. He was erudite and articulate not only in French, often scoffed at in Haiti as the language of the elite, but also in Creole. He was an old type: the decent man of conscience, the believer in equality, the truth teller. One cannot begin to say how sorely Haiti will miss him, and others like him--though not just like him--who have been lost in the past few years' awful bloodletting.