The democratic process in Haiti has been “a grotesque illusion” of what it was supposed to be, according to Haitian expert Michele Wucker. And there is plenty of blame to go around for the failure.

Wucker, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York, was invited to speak at the Fletcher School by the Latin America Club on April 8.

The trouble in Haiti began long before the recent crisis, where a three-week armed rebellion led to the ouster of democratically-elected leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide on February 29. The situation began falling apart almost as soon as Aristide returned to power in October 1994, backed by UN forces, Wucker said. Aristide had been overthrown in a bloodless coup shortly after he was elected in UN-approved elections.

Wucker placed particular blame for Haiti’s collapse on the US for not supporting a country “in its backyard,” especially when there are over one million Haitians living in the US. Citing a study by the RAND Corporation, she said that per capita assistance from the US to Kosovo after the 1999 crisis was ten times more than what it gave to Haiti in 1994.

Another mistake the US and international financial institutions made when Aristide returned to power, Wucker explained, was demanding that Aristide implement reforms that were “extremely politically controversial,” like privatizing state-run firms. “Privatization throughout Latin America has always been a political challenge,” Wucker said. “And here’s Haiti, a much, much weaker democracy, that has been told, ‘ok, if you want more aid, you have to [implement these reforms]… And it turned out to be a crisis the government just couldn’t handle at all.” The Prime Minister resigned, and a new prime minister was not appointed for eighteen months.

In Wucker’s opinion, the international community has been hypocritical in promoting democracy in Haiti: “I see the bigger failure as one of process, where the international community came and said… yes, we want you to have democracy, but it’s only democracy if you vote the way we tell you to.’” For instance, the most recent round of elections in 2000 received little support from the international community, and was fraught with problems and political violence. $500 million of international aid was cut off, however, to protest the violence.

Wucker thinks what should have been done, and what should be done in the future, is a concerted effort to build civil society in Haiti. Invest resources in town meetings and forums, she said, to allow communities to say what they need, instead of having the US State Department dictate what they think is best.

“There was really too little attention to the institutions that would have helped to create longer-term change in Haiti. There was a lot of focus… on Aristide alone…. Is he the savior, or the incarnation of all evil?” This focus took away attention from the fact that legislators in parliament were not cooperating, that electoral institutions were a disaster, that no investment was being made in health and education, and that aid money was disappearing into private pockets.

The Bush Administration has been criticized-- by such prominent people as economist Jeffrey Sachs-- for its unfriendly policy towards Haiti, but Wucker pointed out that aid to Haiti was actually suspended during the Clinton administration. It would have been difficult for Bush to come into office, she said, and restore aid to a government that “was doing really, really bad things.” On the other hand, she criticized the Bush Administration’s decision in late 2001 to detain all Haitian asylum seekers while it recognized that Aristide was a human rights abuser.