http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Feb15.html
Tracing The Turn On Aristide
Ex-Supporter's Story Reflects Dismay of Haitian Moderates
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 16, 2004; Page A01
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 15 -- Yves Voltaire rises at 6 a.m. and ducks out his front door for a walk in the cool mountain air.
Those first minutes to start the day along cabbage and corn fields are peaceful for the priest of Our Lady of Victory, a small blue-and-white church in the town of Paillant, 60 miles west of Port-au-Prince.
But then reality closes in around him. His walk takes him past the tumbledown health clinic, unable to test for AIDS in a country with the hemisphere's highest infection rate, and prim children setting out on a two-hour hike to the closest high school. He also sees a reservoir project, vital in a region plagued by drought, that has stalled because of mounting violence.
As an armed uprising simmers in opposition to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Voltaire and millions of Haitians are facing a choice between a president who has failed to deliver promised reforms in this impoverished country and a violent insurgency seeking to overthrow him. The moderate civilian opposition has warned that it is in danger of being marginalized by the armed insurgency and thwarted by violent pro-Aristide groups that have made peaceful protest largely impossible.
An anti-government march Sunday ended in a rock-throwing clash between university students, the most militant element of the civilian opposition, and Aristide supporters. Police kept the two sides apart by firing tear gas and live bullets over the heads of government partisans.
Voltaire, who organized peasant groups to bring down the Duvalier dictatorship that ruled the country for three decades, once supported Aristide. He even worked for Aristide's election in 1990. But he grew disaffected when Aristide, a charismatic former priest, moved toward supporting violence. Voltaire now says that none of the existing alternatives offers the country an equitable solution.
"The fact is that no one group is going to change this country," Voltaire said, sitting on the veranda of a pink Jesuit retreat on a hilltop overlooking gray shantytowns here. "And I have been utterly amazed at their inability to come to a solution in the face of this degradation."
Voltaire, 48, a balding man with a wide smile, said he had abandoned politics and, like many Haitians watching the intensifying conflict, wishes only for a quick and peaceful solution to the political strife. He continues working in his corner of Haiti for social justice, but stays far from the struggle for political power.
His memories trace decades of frustration in a country struggling to build a functioning democracy despite poverty, international sanctions and a legacy of bloody dictatorship.
He has watched heroes emerge over the years, only to see them murdered with impunity. Still other role models have disappointed him, among them Aristide. Voltaire has seen his own family members disappear or leave the country in despair.
The Voltaires were landowners in a region where that was rare. Alongside a lake in the southern village of Lomond, Andres Voltaire, his father, worked corn and sweet potato fields. Voltaire's mother sold the vegetables at market.
As in many rural homes, Catholicism mixed with voodoo in the Voltaire household. The great wish of Yves Voltaire's maternal grandmother was that he would become a houngan, or voodoo priest. He spent hours watching her prepare the food and drink involved in the voodoo ritual for the dead, then sing hymns after dinner. His says the experience taught him tolerance.
But as Voltaire reached adolescence, he learned firsthand about the political oppression afflicting his village. His uncle, Jacques Dastes, an outspoken peasant leader, vanished one night from his farm. He was never seen again, but many like him ended up in Ti Tanyen, where bodies were dumped north of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
President Francois Duvalier's security forces, known as the Ton-tons Macoutes, were a heavy presence in the town, wearing their signature red bandanas. The section chief did not receive a government salary from the kleptocratic dictatorship of Duvalier but was licensed to extort what he could from the farmers in the district. Duvalier, widely referred to as Papa Doc, governed Haiti from 1957 to 1971. After his death, he was succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude, or Baby Doc, who fled to exile in France in 1986 after rising protests against his rule.
The Catholic schools Voltaire attended, out of reach for Haiti's poor, led him to a seminary on the plains outside the capital. It was run by Jesuits who were ardent proponents of liberation theology, a branch of Catholicism that links Christian teachings with the fight for social equality. The seminary prepared him for a life working among the poor.
[continued next post]
Threaded Mode
