Haiti

LONDON – The human rights theologians are going to have a stressful week or two trying to decide whether the U.S. and France moved against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti because they defending human rights or undermining them. Perhaps it all depends on which end of the telescope you look through. Were they deposing a freely elected president and thus subverting the cause of democracy or were they attempting to end a state of affairs where an elected president had surrounded himself by street gangs, thugs and manifestly corrupt acolytes, and the rule of law on which all human rights depend had become a violence-provoking sham? There is an unthought out belief circulating in the human rights community that under the Bush administration the U.S. stance on human rights has sharply deteriorated. There is, needless to say, much evidence of this- the Guantanamo detentions of Al Qaeda suspects and rather well...

LONDON – Graham Greene’s great novel “the Comedians”, set in the Haiti of the dictatorship of Papa Doc, gives some support to the artist’s pious hope that “a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood.” How else to explain how this half of a quite small Caribbean island gets more press than it deserves? It is, indeed, in part the legacy of Graham Greene who, as I am too, was often drawn to the island because of its idiosyncratic but rich culture and, not least, its lurid shades of darkness and light that permeate the political spectrum. Greene, whilst capturing the ugliness and horror of the Tonton Macoutes, also draws a careful portrait of the civilized and caring Dr Magiot.  However, the outside world’s fascination with the forces of darkness represented in most European and Asian cultures...

LONDON– Graham Greene’s great novel, “The Comedians,” set in the Haiti of dictator Papa Doc, gives some support to the artist’s pious hope that “a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels, and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood.” How else to explain how this half of a Caribbean island gets more of a press than it deserves? Moreover, it is, apart from Bosnia, the one part of the world that gets both a UN peacekeeping presence and the U.S.’s own one. It is in part the legacy of Graham Greene; it is partly the fascination with the lurid; but it is also, as it was for Central America in the last decade, because it is in America’s own backyard, with the added issue that when the politics and economics of this impoverished “vast wrinkled wasteland” go wrong the people take to their boats,...