Behold,
Once More, the Leviathan
By
Jean-Claude Bajeux
Executive
Director, Ecumenical Center for Human Rights (CEDH)
To proclaim individual freedom was
all well and good. To separate church and state was all well and
good. To proclaim
that all men are created equal – on an August
4th night full of emotion – everyone
agreed. But when the moment came to devise a form of
government that would embody these principles, the
discussion of the necessary safeguards seemed to go
on forever.
Separation of powers; checks and
balances; regular elections; term limits; the role
of open, public debate; the rule of law over men;
the standing and privileges of the citizens elevated
to public office – the Founding Fathers meeting
in Philadelphia consulted their classics well. Those who pay taxes must be represented, those
who disburse public funds must be scrutinized, those
who represent a constituency must be accountable to
it,… and those who cheat – who break the
rules – must be punished.
Fifty years after the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (read:
“that which applies to all, and everywhere, without
exception”), ratified by the 185 countries that
are members of the United Nations, one realizes that
there are still scoundrels who don’t play by
the rules. As
the Trinidadian, Ambassador Orlando Marville, [head
of the OAS Electoral Observation Mission,] said in
his acclaimed article of June 17, 2000:
“The present government is the result of an election which was manipulated
in a way that none of us would accept as normal in
our own country.” This position was reaffirmed with crystal
clarity recently by the French Socialist Party, which
on December 21, 2001 declared that:
“Only the reestablishment of legitimate authority, through an incontestable
electoral process, is capable of restoring some measure
of equilibrium in the public realm, for which the
Haitian people are still waiting.”
This position echoes that of Lyonel
Trouillot, in an article published in Le Nouvelliste of July 23, 2001:
“What
Haiti does not need, is someone who says:: “Yes,
but…[it’s Haiti, after all.]” when
republican principles are violated.
After having been complicit for far too long
in the mechanisms of exclusion that split our country
into two, today the meddling of small-minded foreigners,
full of good intentions, poses a new danger, in its
readiness to rationalize our electoral shenanigans.
Haiti doesn’t need anyone to tell her
who is popular
(or who was); rather, she needs assistance to construct
her institutions in the strictest observance of democratic
procedures. It is with the republic that one must finally
vanquish exclusion.”
Because that which Jean-Jacques Rousseau
once conceived as a contract that had to link all
the members of a single society has become, with the
passage of time, the general rule, a sine
qua non for the well-being of the global community. Trying to get around it is to put yourself
beyond the pale, and this willful withdrawal, particularly
for small nations, can only have disastrous consequences.
It means that, guilty in the docket, you are
cut off from normal international relations, cut off
from legitimate sources of investment. It’s the renowned “democracy clause,”
expressed nowhere more clearly than in
the “Interamerican Democratic Charter,”
just approved in plenary session by the members of
the OAS in Lima, Peru, last September 11, which follows
upon an accord at the 3rd Summit of the
Americas (Quebec, 20-22 April 2000) and Resolution
1080, at Santiago du Chili.
Its articles 2 through 6 define the
characteristics of the Rule of Law, amongst which
figure the holding of periodic elections (“free
and fair”), political pluralism, and respect
for personal freedoms, particularly freedom of speech
and freedom of the press.
Here, it is imperative to cite its article
19, which contains the famous “democracy clause”:
“The
unconstitutional suspension or distortion of democratic
order in an OAS member-state, so long as it continues,
is an insurmountable obstacle to the participation
of its government in sessions of the General Assembly,
of the Conference of Foreign Ministers, and of the
Organization’s councils, special conferences,
commissions, working groups, and other bodies.”
It was with a feeling of profound
distress that I lived through the two days of December
11th and December 17th –
days that saw the brutal execution of the journalist,
Brignol Lindor; and the arson of the Democratic Convergence’s
and member parties’ offices, and of the homes
of some twenty citizens, including Victor Benoît and
Gérard Pierre-Charles. A journalist myself, from a family of journalists,
director, at various times, of “l’Effort Camerounais,”
of “Rond-point,”
of “Sondeos,”
of “le
Voix du CEDH;” and a university professor,
as well, whose work is inextricably linked to a daily
encounter with books, with the maintenance of archives,
of notes, of documents; I experienced the heat of
these flames much as I have always felt the heat of
the flames that engulfed the great library of Alexandria,
or those of the Nazi bonfires that consumed the works
of Thomas Mann, or those of the Chilean generals destroying
the poems of Pablo Neruda – all the paradigmatic
expressions of barbarism.
Imagining the distress of these activists,
watching their meeting places go up in smoke; of these
professors, whose homes represented many decades of
work, of savings, and of struggle, and a lifetime
of memories; I became aware, at the same time, of
the planning that must have gone in to this eruption
of pyromania: the
cars, the commandos, the tools and instruments, the
orders, and the identification and localization of
the various targets.
Yet, the depth of the distress that
seized me can only be understood with reference to
the times in which we live, and the times through
which we have
lived, in the tragic history of half a century, waiting
– for what? – to emerge from a 29-year dictatorship.
I remember clearly the very day when this dictatorship
demonstrated its will to free itself from the constraints
of laws, of the rule of law, and of justice. On that day, I beheld the face of the Leviathan,
that monster that lives in every State, and is nourished
by the avarice of those who govern, by the folly of
tyrants, and by the sadism of their minions.
That day, the State officially became delinquent,
placed itself beyond the law, and renounced its role
as secular arbiter of good and evil, and its responsibility
to sanction the latter.
It was April 26, 1963, the day of
the “assassination attempt” against Jean-Claude
Duvalier, in front of le Nouveau Collège Bird. Coming
out at noon from a three-hour philosophy class at
Saint-Martial, I was told that there had
been a violent commotion downtown.
On Lalue [Avenue John Brown], two bloody corpses,
guarded by “the men in blue” were sprawled
on the sidewalk, opposite the Sister’s school.
We knew, that on Bois Verna, the Benoît home
was in flames: the father, the mother and a maid having
been killed; an infant of a few months taken away. More than 70 ex-officers of the army disappeared
that day, “without a trace;” as did other
citizens, that chance had put in the wrong place at
the wrong time: André
Riobé, the brothers Didier and Paulo Vieux, the young
Bance, Benoît Armand (who payed with his life for
having the wrong first name), and many others.
The next year, the “Presidency-for-life”
officially proclaimed the death of the citizen. The country no longer had a right to anything but terror and silence,
“cured,” as Duvalier announced, “of
its desire for elections.” Worse, after these 14 years, it was still necessary
– unbearable insult! – to endure another
15 years of the son, 19 years old at the death of
his father.
The “change” that finally
came in 1986, then, signified, above all, a return
to the law, a return to a conception of the State
which sees itself as the protector of individual rights,
and guarantees to all the protections of the law –
against the arbitrary, against abuse, against barbarism
(defined
as lawlessness), against the madness of unbridled
power, “eternal,” predatory and homicidal. The democratic movement, so ferocious in its
opposition to macoutisme,
convinced itself, on December 16, 1990, that it had
re-subordinated
the State to the rule of law, and to the service of
the people they were designed to protect; and had
adequately limited the State’s power. They were convinced, even more profoundly,
that they had reestablished, at the highest level
of the executive, the distinction between good and
evil, and had effectively put an end to a long litany
of abuses – of which the events of December 26,
1963, are but sad and sinister examples.
And behold, the monstrous face of
the Leviathan has revealed itself, this December 17,
to us, much as it must have appeared in Petit-Goave,
to the horror of Brignol Lindor.
Behold, the commandos torching party offices
and the homes of politicians, crimes that the Penal
Code sanctions with capital punishment (commuted under
the current Constitution [which prohibits the death
penalty] to life at hard labor.) Behold, that doing anything to anyone became,
once again, permissible, on the pretext that “the
people had identified their enemies” (a trope
one finds in every brand of fascism!). Everything became possible again, all citizens became guilty again, simply by existing. The worst became possible again.
A senator called for the death penalty for
the so-called “putschists” – as a legislator,
it might have been expected that he would be aware
that the Constitution had proscribed it.
The slogan “zero tolerance” continued
to wreak its havoc, and the people were asked to remain
“vigilant,” and to turn in “those who
refuse to believe the official version of events [sic!]).
After all, to see the homes of Victor
Benoît and Gérard Pierre-Charles burn, was not just
to watch the homes of academic colleagues and political
comrades burn. To
see homes burn in Gonaïves and in Petit-Goave; to
watch as party offices, and vehicles burned; was to
entertain the notion that tomorrow, or the day after
tomorrow, all homes, all businesses, all offices,
schools, libraries – that belonged to an opponent,
or to his cousin, for that matter – might be
consumed by the flames.
And, above all else, it was to see, yet
again (“never again!”), the Book of
the Law in flames; to watch as the boundary between
what is permitted and what is forbidden was erased;
to realize that all we had thought was now impossible,
because prohibited, had become possible again; to watch as evil was cloaked in the mantle of official impunity,
[free to rampage in the very heart of the polity,]
day or night. It was to see all of the men and women of this
country stripped naked, waiting only to be slipped
into the gas chamber and dumped at Titanyen.
That is why, this December 17th,
I was neither confused nor disoriented.
I was, and I remain, profoundly troubled:
For I beheld, once more, the terrifying countenance
of the Leviathan, realizing that it had still not
left me, since that day in April, 1964.
And yet, looking around me, I know
that those who would have history repeat itself –
this
history – are out of step with the times.
Because this world has indeed changed, and
its peoples now heed the prophesy of Isaiah, as they
intone its verse this Christmas:
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light:
to them that dwelt in the region of the shadow of death, light is risen.
Port-au-Prince,
Haiti
December
25, 2001
Haiti@inxil.com
· James
R. Morrell, executive director