RISING FROM RUIN

By Michael S. Serrill

THE PREDICTIONS WERE STARK AND frightening. Opponents of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide foresaw serious consequences if the radical priest, ousted in a September 1991 coup d'etat, ever returned to power: rivers of blood would flow through the streets of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and dozens of the regime's opponents would perish in barbarous "necklaces" of burning tires. The poverty-stricken nation would become a Marxist enclave and an enemy of the U.S. So how to explain that a year after Aristide and the country's first democratically elected government were returned to power by a U.S.-led force of 20,000 troops, nothing of the kind has come to pass?

To be sure, there has been a handful of apparently politically motivated assassinations--the most recent on Oct. 3, when General Max Mayard, who served in the government of coupmaker General Raoul Cedras, was killed by a group of men who opened fire at him from a pickup truck. And the country is still beset by a host of economic, political and security problems. But overall, Haiti is enjoying a rare bout of freedom, political stability and economic rebuilding. Much of the credit goes, surprisingly, to the once and present chief executive, who since his triumphant restoration last Oct. 15 has managed a personal transubstantiation from revolutionary firebrand to liberal economic reformer.

Now convalescent Haiti faces another challenge on the path to recovery. In accordance with the constitution, which decrees a single-term presidency of five years, the immensely popular Aristide must step down after his replacement is selected in December elections. Two months later, the remaining 7,000 U.N. troops will phase out, leaving the preservation of law and order to a fledgling Haitian police force. Not long after, the remainder of the $1.2 billion in international aid that has sustained Haiti during the year since Aristide's return will begin to run out. Will Haiti be able to manage a peaceful succession and strike out on its own?

Certainly the tiny nation of 7 million has rebounded from the dark age of the Cedras dictatorship, when the economy lay in ruins, a brutal militia known as the attaches spread terror, and no one dared leave home after dark. Today the avenues of Port-au-Prince and other cities are teeming with life and commerce at all hours. The press is free, political parties are vigorous, and human-rights abuses are at a historic low.

With help, and the occasional shove, from groups of foreign advisers, Aristide has taken steps to make a broken and bankrupt nation viable again. The economy, which shrank 30% from 1991 to 1994, mostly because of international sanctions against Cadras, is growing at a healthy pace of 4.5% a year. The inflation rate stands at 25%, less than half the level of a year ago. Factories and other businesses are reopening. Though once a committed socialist, Aristide has agreed to International Monetary Fund and World Bank demands that he reduce tariffs, limit the scope of government involvement in the economy and begin the process of privatizing Haiti's inefficient and money-losing state-owned companies.

In an interview with TIME, Aristide, 42, declared that his goal is to create enough stability and economic progress through a "free and fair economy" to make future coups unnecessary. "My country will never go back to the darkness of dictatorship," he said. "All of the Haitian people are deeply involved in moving forward, because we know we can change our land."

But that forward movement is still halting. A year after the restoration of democracy, the stench from piles of uncollected garbage still hangs in the air of the capital--a reeking testament to the government's failure to restore even the most rudimentary public services. An estimated 70% to 80% of working-age Haitians are unemployed or underemployed. Per capita income, at $260 a year, remains the lowest in the western hemisphere. Some 80% of Haitians are illiterate.

Aristide's detractors say he has done little to address these ills. A famously hands-off administrator, he rarely meets with his ministers and, worse, often fails to back them up when they go out to support his government's policies. Last month Finance Minister Marie Michele Rey, fed up at criticism of the privatization plan, which would put thousands of public employees out of work, finally went on television to protest that she was merely following the policy of the Aristide government. But Aristide later answered that he had never signed anything in Paris--a reference to the Paris Plan, the document that set conditions for his return to Haiti.

Aristide has come under heaviest attack for his conduct of last summer's parliamentary elections. His Lavalas Party won the June vote by a landslide, taking 67 of the 83 seats in the lower house. Opposition parties and foreign observers criticized the poll as riddled with irregularities. But Aristide refused to call a new election, then forced through a September runoff for undecided seats that was made meaningless by an opposition boycott. Most observers believe Lavalas would have won a second election on merit by as large a margin as it took in the flawed first poll, and lament that Aristide's mishandling of the issue damaged his government's credibility.

Surely the election debacle gave ammunition to Aristide's enemies in Washington, where he has become a presidential campaign issue. The elections were a joke, says a Senate Republican source. Republican presidential front runner Senator Bob Dole and others in the party charge that Aristide has replaced a dictatorship with a one-party state.

Republican Jesse Helms, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has launched a veritable vendetta against Aristide, demanding an accounting of the millions the U.S. has already spent on Haiti's parliamentary elections, and refusing to release $1.3 million earmarked for December's presidential vote. He is also holding back $2.7 million scheduled for "democracy enhancement." Helms and Dole have further charged Aristide with human-rights abuses, focusing on the case of Mireille Durocher Bertin, a legal adviser to the Cedras junta who was gunned down in Port-au-Prince in March. Aristide's government arrested four men for the crime, then released them for lack of evidence. "This is not justice; this is an outrage," Dole told the Senate in a speech last month, saying all aid to Haiti should be cut off.

Clinton Administration officials, still enjoying what they consider a foreign policy success, defend Aristide. A U.S. official argues it is unfair to assert that the Haitian government is having serious human-rights problems when compared with the regime it replaced.

In Haiti it is Aristide's commitment to ending human-rights abuses, more than his economic policies, that make him a modern-day hero. No decision has been more popular than his abolition of the 7,000-man army--a group accused of murdering 4,000 civilians in the years after Aristide was deposed. The troops are being replaced by a new, 5,000-member national police force, now in training in Haiti and at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

But even that action could backfire, since no one believes this young constabulary would be a match for the heavily armed former soldiers and police presumed to be lurking in the shadows, biding their time until the U.N. Blue Helmets leave. There are constant rumors that Haiti's feared former police chief Michel Francois, who is now in the Dominican Republic, and Cadras, in Panama, are planning a new putsch. "There's no possibility of a coup while the U.N. is here," insists a U.S. official. "But after that, nobody knows." There is a sound argument for the U.N. to maintain a reduced military presence in Haiti to counter this threat, yet few expect the world body to extend its mandate--largely for financial reasons.

Many in Washington and other Western capitals consider the most important force for stability and democracy to be that former firebrand Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But in the negotiations that brought him back to power, Aristide promised to leave office Feb. 7, at the end of his five-year term. Pleas that he should be given three additional years to compensate for his time in exile were rejected.

Much uncertainty surrounds the December presidential poll. Aristide, who revels in his role as national savior, has not indicated which of the candidates he will back. There is also a ground swell of apprehension that if Aristide goes, Haiti's fractious political parties will fall to bickering, destabilize the country and invite another coup. One solution would be for the huge Lavalas majority to declare that Aristide has not served his full five years under the constitution and ask him to stay on. But even if he does leave office, the power of his popularity is such that he is certain to play a decisive role from behind the scenes for the indefinite future.

--Reported by Tammerlin Drummond/Port-au-Prince and Ann M. Simmons/Washington

With reporting by TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND/PORT-AU-PRINCE AND ANN M. SIMMONS/WASHINGTON