The Little Prophet of Haiti

By Richard N. Ostling

In one of Haiti's cruelest slums, scores of quasi-government thugs known as Tonton Macoutes, wearing telltale red armbands, stormed into a crowded Sunday Mass, attacking indiscriminately with knives, shooting wildly and torching the church. The toll of the rampage: 13 worshipers slain, more than 70 wounded and a gutted church building. But the apparent object of the attack, Father Jean- Bertrand Aristide, somehow managed to escape, as he had in five previous attempts on his life.

Within a week, outrage over that Sept. 11 attack at St. John Bosco Church in the capital of Port-au-Prince provoked an army revolt that installed the new regime of Lieut. General Prosper Avril. The atrocity added considerably to the mystique surrounding the slight, bespectacled 35-year-old Roman Catholic priest, a socialist who is widely called a "prophet." Formerly a little- known worker among the dispossessed of his parish, Aristide is the only authentic leader who has emerged from the Haitian masses during the chaotic period since the despised dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier was overthrown in 1986.

Four weeks ago, Aristide came out of hiding to demand that the new Avril regime institute a wholesale cleanup by Oct. 17, including a total "uprooting" of the dreaded Tonton Macoutes and other vestiges of the Duvalier era. "The ball is in your court, and you are playing before a people who do not trust you," he warned Avril. Haitians were soon surprised to learn that the priest had himself been confronted with an ultimatum.

The directive came not from the Haitian government but from Father Aristide's superiors in the Salesian Society of St. John Bosco, the 129-year- old religious order popularly known as the Salesians. Upset by Aristide's strident political activism, they commanded him to leave his homeland by the same date, Oct. 17, and to go into exile in Canada. Last week, as that date passed, it was clear that Aristide was not about to leave.

Once word of the Salesians' directive was out, impoverished Haitians by the thousands surged through the streets, threatening to set fire to Port-au- Prince and marching to the airport to block the rumored departure of the beloved priest. Though the Vatican has been blamed for demanding Aristide's departure, Salesian officials in Rome insist that the Holy See was not involved. Instead, the decision came from within their order. "We advised Aristide time and time again to tone down his sermons," explains Belgian priest Luc Van Looy, a top-ranking Salesian. Van Looy explains that the Salesians are concerned for Aristide's personal safety but also want to halt his preaching of violence as an acceptable means of ending Haiti's injustices.

& Without Aristide's presence, say many political observers, his legions of adherents among Haiti's disenfranchised youth would probably turn to more violent and extremist movements. Already the country is bristling with talk of total revolution from the bottom up. Aristide and his supporters say they are actually a modifying influence and favor only "active nonviolence." The priest's political and religious philosophy is a homegrown variant of liberation theology, which advocates grass-roots social reform and a "people's church," with a lesser role for the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The Aristide affair is exacerbating a latent split among Haiti's Roman Catholics between the official church and Aristide's "prophetic" wing. Both work for human rights and justice, but the official church, which led the nonviolent popular uprising that forced Duvalier to flee, insists on orderly and deliberate change. The church's internal conflict has become yet another wound in Haiti's suffering and demoralized society.

With reporting by Bernard Diederich/Port-au-Prince and Robert Moynihan/Rome