PROFILE
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tuesday, December 5, 1995
7A
Freeman: U.S. should not pressure Aristide
Associated Press
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The tide of U.S.-bound Haitian refugees stemmed last year with the landing of American troops on Sept. 19, but appears to be surging again just weeks before a crucial election and three months before N.U. peacekeepers are scheduled to leave.
The U.S. Coast Guard has picked up more than 1,000 boat people in the past two weeks, surpassing the total for the previous 10 months combined. No one expects the departures to stop as long as political and economic uncertainty prevails in Haiti.
grants, caught in the two largest interceptions of Haitian refugees since the Coast Guard began keeping records in 1981, are disenchanted. Officials seized 520 people from a single boat Nov. 21 and 577 more from another boat Sunday.
In September 1994, President Clinton sent troops to Haiti with the twin objectives of stopping politically motivated killing and halting the exodus.
The multinational intervention succeeded on both counts, forcing the surrender of the dictators who
ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and paying the way for the president's return.
More than a year later, hundreds of Haitians are fleeing their restored democracy rather than vote in Dec. 17 elections to choose a successor to Aristide.
Many Aristide supporters want him to stay in power for three years to make up for the time lost in exile, but U.S. officials insist he leave.
Bryant Freeman, director of Haitian studies at KU and adviser to the commander of U.N. troops in Haiti, said the United States should not pressure Aristide to leave because he has overwhelming popular support, even among upper-class Haitians. The 1991 junta was backed by the country's bourgeoisie.
"When he gave speeches, Aristide would point at one of those fancy houses on the hill, and he would say, 'Do you see that house up there? The one with the swimming pool? The one with one family living in it?' Fourteen Haitian families could live in that house," Freeman said. "How would you feel if that were your house?"
Freeman said Aristide had not been as militant in
office as the socioeconomic elites thought he would be.
"Now they are saying, 'Better the evil that we know than the evil that we don't know,'" Freeman said.
The violence boded ill for the elections, which have been overshadowed by Aristide's vacillation on whether he will step down.
Aristide's Nov. 11 call for total disarmament sparked a wave of street violence. In two weeks, at least seven people were killed.
Last week, Aristide hinted he wanted to stay on as president. This week, he once again pledged to hand over power to his successor on Feb. 7.
Aristide also has been ambivalent about selling state-run enterprises, a condition tied to millions of foreign aid dollars. On Wednesday, the Inter-American Development bank approved a $50 million loan to sustain an emergency program to revive the economy and repair basic infrastructure.
Kansan staff writer Novela Sudmers contributed information to this story.
A World of Difference
KANSAS:
HAITI:
POPULATION (1993): 2,530,746
POP. DENSITY: 30.8 / square mile
RACIAL/ETHNIC DISTRIBUTION:
(1990) 90.1 percent white, 5.8
percent Black, 3.8 percent Hispanic
POPULATION: 6,491,000
TOTAL AREA:
82,282 square miles
POP. DENSITY: 607/square mile
RACIAL/ETHNIC DISTRIBUTION:
95 percent Black, 3 percent
mulatto, 2 percent white
TOTAL AREA:
10,695 square miles
Source: The World Almanac
would provide enough electricity to run a pump, but Geilenfeld doesn't want to spoil the boys.
"We don't want the boys' lifestyles to be raised so high that when they leave here they go into shock," he says.
Bathing for Freeman means standing in a shower stall next to a barrel of water and using a dipper to pour the water over himself.
"Most people here have to take their showers that way," Geilenfeld says. "They have to carry buckets of water to their houses. Bryant had seen people doing that, but he had never done it. It's just another way he can connect with the people."
Ask Bryant Freeman if he plans to settle in Haiti someday and he does not think twice about the answer.
"No." he savs.
Freeman says he could never live in the country permanently. After he has been there for a while, he starts to miss Lawrence, starts to miss being able to watch a movie on television without the electricity fritzing out, starts to miss sanitation and traffic laws and telephones that work.
Besides that, he says, he has obligations at the University of Kansas.
In fact, some might say he should spend more time in Kansas and less time in Haji.
In August, about 100 students enrolled in Freeman's classes, which fulfilled both a foreign language and a non-Western culture requirement. At the first class, Freeman was there to tell students he would be leaving for Haiti in mid-September and that if they needed those graduation requirements, they would have to scramble to find other courses.
"Unpaid leave is not something that is taken lightly," said Arthur Drayton, chairman of African and African-American studies, which houses Haitian studies. "It has to be for a good reason, and obviously Bryant Freeman is one of the most knowledgeable persons about Haiti in the United States. The U.S. and the U.N. both need him."
Freeman has spent two of the past four semesters in Haiti, on leave without pay from the University.
Next spring's timetable of classes shows that Freeman is scheduled to teach Haitian classes. Drayton says he expects Freeman to return.
Whether Freeman will return is another matter. Freeman says there is a chance that he might be needed in Haiti as a new president takes office in February and the United Nations prepares to leave in March.
Freeman defends his time out of the classroom, saying that in the long run, his students will benefit from the research he does in Haiti. And the U.N presence in Haiti has historical significance. The country is occupied by a foreign presence for the second time in its history.
"It won't happen again during my lifetime," Freeman says.
"Always expect the unexpected in Haiti," Freeman says. Then he cautions, "Never expect things to work."
He has no hope for Haiti, he says matter-of-
factly. He says most of the country's pro-
blems are too complex to be solved.
The people who know how to fix roads and telephone lines seldom stay in Hawaii. Education is almost nonexistent, especially for the poor. There is no public education. In a country with 6.5 million people, only 100,000 children usually attend school.
The people may be Haiti's richest resource, but they are also Haiti's only resource. People, Freeman says, are the country's biggest export. A Haitian would live comfortably on $4.25 a day. That may be reason enough for companies to bring jobs to Haiti. But the ocean is overfished and the land is overgrazed and over farmed. Precious topsoil blows into the ocean by the ton every year because Haitians have cut down too many of their trees.
Throngs of people come from the countryside to Port-au-Prince every day looking for jobs and better lives. They bring their country habits with them, Freeman says, pointing to a man urinating by the side of a busy street.
After the invasion in 1994, the U.S. government was prepared to give money to Haiti to repair the country's infrastructure, Freeman says, but U.S. officials first wanted to see budgets for how the money would be spent.
"We had all the money for them, but we said we were not going to give it to them until they did all of the paperwork. It's been almost a year, and finally things are beginning to happen," he says.
Freeman holds his own in Port-au-Prince traffic, using the horn generously.
"Look. There's road construction," he says pointing toward a steam roller and workers fixing a cratered section of pavement. "I have the word for steam roller in my dictionary, but I've never seen one in Haliit. It's so beautiful they are doing something. Things are finally starting to shape up."
When traffic jams on a curve where it normally flows quickly, his curiosity makes him wait to see what the hold-up could be.
Freeman remains a mix of hope and cynicism, compassion and coolness. He escorts his guest through morning rush-hour traffic. The airport is 15 minutes away when traffic isn't bad, but today it takes 45 minutes.
He is pleased when he sees the reason.
A kiss on both cheeks is goodbye — that's the way the French do it. But it is also a Haitian parting, based on the possibility that the water won't run, the power won't flow, and the planes won't fly.
Instead, Freeman says, "See you in about two hours. You know how to get back to the orphanage."
So it isn't Au revoir.
And then he smiles, climbs back into his rented Hyundai and drives away.
Freeman walks down an alley in a middle-class neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. While driving through an alley in Lawrence, Freeman made a striking comparison: Alleles in Lawrence are better than streets in Haiti.
42