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PORT-AU-PRINCE — The churches of Haiti face an enormous task of building reconciliation and educating the people of the Caribbean nation in democracy, church leaders here report.
“The church has played an important role in providing education and health care to the Haitian people, but we shouldn’t stop there,” Edouard Paultre, the general secretary of the Protestant Federation of Haiti, told Ecumenical News International. “We have to change minds. We have to help construct a society where conflicts can be resolved peacefully.”
Haiti was wracked by violence early in the year as opposition groups pressured President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to step down. Then, on Feb. 29, under pressure from the U.S. government, Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest, fled the country.
An interim government, headed by Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, has promised elections for next year but has yet to assume control of several parts of the country. Some 3,500 peacekeeping troops from the United States, Canada, France, and Chile are helping maintain peace. On April 30, the United Nations Security Council approved the deployment of up to 6,700 military peacekeepers and 1,622 police officers to Haiti by June 1.
With support from Action by Churches Together (ACT), a Geneva-based network of church relief agencies, the Protestant Federation is sponsoring a series of workshops on conflict management around Haiti, which is ranked the poorest country in the western hemisphere.
The crisis in the wake of Aristide’s departure represents an historical opportunity that must not be lost, according to another church leader, Ernst Abraham, executive secretary of Christian Service of Haiti.
“We didn’t do any reconciliation work after (the 1986 ouster of former dictator Jean-Claude) Duvalier,” he noted. “We have since added the problems caused by Lavalas Aristide’s political movement] to the grievances that still linger from the Duvalier period.”
Both governments “sponsored violence and manufactured enemies just to make the president safe in power,” Abraham said. “Both regimes divided society in order to control everything. So the work we in the churches have to do now is even more complicated.” Still, asserted Abraham, Aristide should not be blamed for all the political failings of recent years.
“After Duvalier, society was looking for a new leader. Duvalier was a leader, not a good one, but he was a leader,” noted Abraham. “When he left there was a vacuum, and society wanted a new leader. They found that person in Aristide, and then no one felt they had to be responsible for anything anymore.”
“We want a leader to do everything for us, to take all responsibility, to tell us what we want. We’ll trust that person to do everything for us. That’s what we have to change. Haitian society has to be more responsible. We have to understand what we want and who can help us implement that. If we can’t find the perfect person, we’ll chose the second best. But first we’ve got to have our own ideas about where we want to go,” Abraham said.
The ousting of Aristide, said the Lutheran World Federation representative in Haiti, Michael Kuehn, reflected a widespread consensus amidst the country’s political elite that has not endured.
“Haitian society remains deeply divided along racial lines, a breeding ground for future violence,” Kuehn said. “Although the alliance opposing Aristide incorporated people from the far left to the far right, the only reason they came together was to oust Aristide, not because they had a better program to offer the Haitian people.”
Some church leaders insist that the new government demand Aristide’s extradition. Yet Abraham insisted it was too early to talk about bringing Aristide to trial.
“A trial would be a good idea, but not immediately, because passions are running too hot right now. Justice should be done with cold minds,” Abraham said. “We should wait for our passions to cool down. Rather than a trial, it would be theatre, and I have seen too much theater in our courts. And justice should deal not just with Aristide, but reach back 20 years and judge people who left a lot of victims behind when they fled Haiti.”
Others who should be put on trial, suggested Abraham, included former dictator Duvalier, who lives in France.
“Never in our history have these criminals been brought back home to face justice,” he said, “and that’s a bad precedent for the future.”
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