http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/08/haiti-aristide-lavalas
Democracy versus the people
Slavoj Zizek
Published 14 August 2008
A new account of Haiti's recent history shows how the genuinely
radical politics of Lavalas and its leader, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, proved too threatening to the country's wealthy elite
and their foreign backers.
Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
Peter Hallward, Verso, 480pp, £16.99
Noam Chomsky once noted that "it is only when the threat of
popular participation is overcome that democratic forms can be
safely contemplated". He thereby pointed at the "passivising" core
of parliamentary democracy, which makes it incompatible with the
direct political self- organisation and self-empowerment of the
people. Direct colonial aggression or military assault are not the
only ways of pacifying a "hostile" population: so long as they are
backed up by sufficient levels of coercive force, international
"stabilisation" missions can overcome the threat of popular
participation through the apparently less abrasive tactics of
"democracy promotion", "humanitarian intervention" and the
"protection of human rights".
This is what makes the case of Haiti so exemplary. As Peter
Hallward writes in Damming the Flood, a detailed account of the
"democratic containment" of Haiti's radical politics in the past
two decades, "never have the well-worn tactics of 'democracy
promotion' been applied with more devastating effect than in Haiti
between 2000 and 2004". One cannot miss the irony of the fact that
the name of the emancipatory political movement which suffered
this international pressure is Lavalas, or "flood" in Creole: it
is the flood of the expropriated who overflow the gated
communities that protect those who exploit them. This is why the
title of Hallward's book is quite appropriate, inscribing the
events in Haiti into the global tendency of new dams and walls
that have been popping out everywhere since 11 September 2001,
confronting us with the inner truth of "globalisation", the
underlying lines of division which sustain it.
Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its
revolutionary fight against slavery, which ended in independence
in January 1804. "Only in Haiti," Hallward notes, "was the
declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti
was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition
to the social order and economic logic of the day." For this
reason, "there is no single event in the whole of modern history
whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global
order of things". The Haitian Revolution truly deserves the title
of repetition of the French Revolution: led by Toussaint
'Ouverture, it was clearly "ahead of his time", "premature" and
doomed to fail, yet, precisely as such, it was perhaps even more
of an event than the French Revolution itself. It was the first
time that an enslaved population rebelled not as a way of
returning to their pre-colonial "roots", but on behalf of
universal principles of freedom and equality. And a sign of the
Jacobins' authenticity is that they quickly recognised the slaves'
uprising - the black delegation from Haiti was enthusiastically
received in the National Assembly in Paris. (As you might expect,
things changed after Thermidor; in 1801 Napoleon sent a huge
expeditionary force to try to regain control of the colony).
Denounced by Talleyrand as "a horrible spectacle for all white
nations", the "mere existence of an independent Haiti" was itself
an intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus
had to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade
other countries from taking the same path. The price - the literal
price - for the "premature" independence was truly extortionate:
after two decades of embargo, France, the old colonial master,
established trade and diplomatic relations only in 1825, after
forcing the Haitian government to pay 150 million francs as
"compensation" for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal
to the French annual budget at the time, was later reduced to 90
million, but it continued to be a heavy drain on Haitian
resources: at the end of the 19th century, Haiti's payments to
France consumed roughly 80 per cent of the national budget, and
the last instalment was only paid in 1947. When, in 2003, in
anticipation of the bicentenary of national independence, the
Lavalas president Jean-Baptiste Aristide demanded that France
return this extorted money, his claim was flatly rejected by a
French commission (led, ironically, by Régis Debray). At a time
when some US liberals ponder the possibility of reimbursing black
Americans for slavery, Haiti's demand to be reimbursed for the
tremendous sum the former slaves had to pay to have their freedom
recognised has been largely ignored by liberal opinion, even if
the extortion here was double: the slaves were first exploited,
and then had to pay for the recognition of their hard-won freedom.
The story goes on today. The Lavalas movement has won every free
presidential election since 1990, but it has twice been the victim
of US-sponsored military coups. Lavalas is a unique combination: a
political agent which won state power through free elections, but
which all the way through maintained its roots in organs of local
popular democracy, of people's direct self-organisation. Although
the "free press" dominated by its enemies was never obstructed,
although violent protests that threatened the stability of the
legal government were fully tolerated, the Lavalas government was
routinely demonised in the international press as exceptionally
violent and corrupt. The goal of the US and its allies France and
Canada was to impose on Haiti a "normal" democracy - a democracy
which would not touch the economic power of the narrow elite; they
were well aware that, if it is to function in this way, democracy
has to cut its links with direct popular self-organisation.
It is interesting to note that this US-French co-operation took
place soon after the public discord about the 2003 attack on Iraq,
and was quite appropriately celebrated as the reaffirmation of
their basic alliance that underpins the occasional conflicts. Even
Brazil's Lula condoned the 2004 overthrow of Aristide. An unholy
alliance was thus put together to discredit the Lavalas government
as a form of mob rule that threatened human rights, and President
Aristide as a power-mad fundamentalist dictator - an alliance
ranging from ex-military death squads and US-sponsored "democratic
fronts" to humanitarian NGOs and even some "radical left"
organisations which, financed by the US, enthusiastically
denounced Aristide's "capitulation" to the IMF. Aristide himself
provided a perspicuous characterisation of this overlapping
between radical left and liberal right: "Somewhere, somehow,
there's a little secret satisfaction, perhaps an unconscious
satisfaction, in saying things that powerful white people want you
to say."
The Lavalas struggle is exemplary of a principled heroism that
confronts the limitations of what can be done today. Lavalas
activists didn't withdraw into the interstices of state power and
"resist" from a safe distance, they heroically assumed state
power, well aware that they were taking power in the most
unfavourable circumstances, when all the trends of capitalist
"modernisation" and "structural readjustment", but also of the
postmodern left, were against them. Constrained by the measures
imposed by the US and International Monetary Fund, which were
destined to enact "necessary structural readjustments", Aristide
pursued a politics of small and precise pragmatic measures
(building schools and hospitals, creating infrastructure, raising
minimum wages) while encouraging the active political mobilisation
of the people in direct confrontation with their most immediate
foes - the army and its paramilitary auxiliaries.
The single most controversial thing about Aristide, the thing that
earned him comparisons with Sendero Luminoso and Pol Pot, was his
pointed refusal to condemn measures taken by the people to defend
themselves against military or paramilitary assault, an assault
that had decimated the popular movement for decades. On a couple
of occasions back in 1991, Aristide appeared to condone recourse
to the most notorious of these measures, known locally as "Père
Lebrun", a variant of the practice of "necklacing" adopted by
anti-apartheid partisans in South Africa - killing a police
assassin or an informer with a burning tyre. In a speech on 4
August 1991, he advised an enthusiastic crowd to remember "when to
use [Père Lebrun], and where to use it", while reminding them that
"you may never use it again in a state where law prevails".
Later, liberal critics sought to draw a parallel between the
so-called chimères, ie, members of Lavalas self-defence groups,
and the Tontons Macoutes, the notoriously murderous gangs of the
Duvalier dictatorship. The fact that there is no numerical basis
for comparison of levels of political violence under Aristide and
under Duvalier is not allowed to get in the way of the essential
political point. Asked about these chimères, Aristide points out
that "the very word says it all. Chimères are people who are
impoverished, who live in a state of profound insecurity and
chronic unemployment. They are the victims of structural
injustice, of systematic social violence [. . .] It's not
surprising that they should confront those who have always
benefited from this same social violence."
Arguably, the very rare acts of popular self- defence committed by
Lavalas partisans are examples of what Walter Benjamin called
"divine violence": they should be located "beyond good and evil",
in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical.
Although we are dealing with what can only appear as "immoral"
acts of killing, one has no political right to condemn them,
because they are a response to years, centuries even, of
systematic state and economic violence and exploitation.
As Aristide himself puts it: "It is better to be wrong with the
people than to be right against the people." Despite some
all-too-obvious mistakes, the Lavalas regime was in effect one of
the figures of how "dictatorship of the proletariat" might look
today: while pragmatically engaging in some externally imposed
compromises, it always remained faithful to its "base", to the
crowd of ordinary dispossessed people, speaking on their behalf,
not "representing" them but directly relying on their local
self-organisations. Although respecting the democratic rules,
Lavalas made it clear that the electoral struggle is not where
things are decided: what is much more crucial is the effort to
supplement democracy with the direct political self-organisation
of the oppressed. Or, to put it in our "postmodern" terms: the
struggle between Lavalas and the capitalist-military elite in
Haiti is a case of genuine antagonism, an antagonism which cannot
be contained within the frame of parliamentary-democratic
"agonistic pluralism".
This is why Hallward's outstanding book is not just about Haiti,
but about what it means to be a "leftist" today: ask a leftist how
he stands towards Aristide, and it will be immediately clear if he
is a partisan of radical emancipation or merely a humanitarian
liberal who wants "globalisation with a human face".
Slavoj Zizek is the author of "In Defence of Lost Causes" (Verso,
£19.99)
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