DID THE AMERICAN MISSION MATTER?

By JOHANNA MCGEARY/PORT-AU-PRINCE

WHEN THE POST--COLD WAR book of rules for global intervention is written, the lesson of the Haiti chapter will be this: define your goals so minimally that it will be easy to meet them, declare victory and go home.

Back in September 1994, when Bill Clinton itemized his intentions for Haiti, he kept them basic, so now he can tick off the accomplishments. The main goal of Operation Uphold Democracy was to restore the legitimate Haitian President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power and in so doing halt the flood of boat people. With 20,000 U.S. troops and a little help from Jimmy Carter, Clinton did it. Objective No. 2 was achieved last week when Rene Preval took the presidential oath and Haiti experienced its first-ever peaceful transfer of power from one popularly elected leader to another. At month's end Clinton can chalk up the final--and maybe most important--mission accomplished: to leave. The U.S. troops will return home, having suffered the loss of only one soldier.

So if the operation was a success, how come the patient is dying? The Administration may have called it a "humanitarian" mission, but this was old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy: send in the Marines, depose a government you don't like, install a friendlier one and leave the natives to fend for themselves. Any impulse of Clinton policymakers to actually lift Haiti out of political, social and economic destitution--what is widely derided as "nation building"--was fatally tainted by the American fiasco in Somalia. "We achieved the objectives we aimed for," says U.S. Ambassador William Swing, "so from our point of view it has been a success."

Down in the cesspool of Port-au-Prince, it does not feel that way. A brutal dictatorship, a repressive army and organized political violence have been banished, but crime and mob rule are filling the vacuum of authority. Five thousand ill-trained, ill-equipped and immature policemen must control a desperate population of 7 million, propped up by a rapidly dwindling U.N. force. The country has acquired the image but not the substance of democracy: it has a duly elected President and parliament but a completely dysfunctional government. The economy is still at ground zero: no jobs, no investment, no roads, virtually no electricity or telecommunications or running water, sporadic fuel. The people's adoration of Aristide has buffered their bitter disappointment, but they do not hold Preval in the same regard, and he will have to produce concrete proof of democracy's shiny promises.

He will have to do it largely on his own. The U.S. gave Haiti $235 million last year; this year Clinton has asked for $115 million, and Congress has so far coughed up almost nothing. International lenders have turned off the spigot until Haiti adopts austerity reforms. Washington has declared the country a "safe and secure environment," which allows the peacekeepers to depart. By the measure of organized assassination, violence has subsided: only 20 killings that the U.N. delicately calls "commando-style executions" have taken place, a huge improvement over the 3,000 or so notched up by the military regime from 1991 to 1994. But Haitians complain that the respite will be temporary because the U.S. and U.N. chose not to disarm the rank and file.

ARISTIDE MAY HAVE ABOLISHED the army, but life is still perilous on Haiti's mean streets, where the poor are growing impatient and predatory. Near the National Palace, a woman who cadges $1 secretes it for safekeeping in her underpants. A gang of thugs dubbed the Red Army ravages Cite Soleil, a Port-au-Prince slum that police are afraid to enter: the last time they did, a shoot-out claimed the lives of several innocent bystanders. In La Saline members of a local vigilante patrol discover the dead body of their leader. They swiftly select four suspected "robbers" and beat them to death. Then they set fire to 50 houses where they decide robbers are sheltered.

Without law and order, says Theodore Beaubrun Jr., leader of the voodoo rock band Boukman Eksperyans, "everyone makes their own justice." Mobs play judge and jury, hacking people to death for crimes real or imagined. The omnipresent "popular organizations," self-proclaimed local leaders who act as watchdog, pressure group and enforcer of political correctness, command the masses and own the real power. "The popular organizations control this city," says Jean Robert Lalannes, a Cap Haitien radio-station director threatened with death after he criticized Aristide. "The vacuum of state authority is complete."

Safety is supposed to be ensured by 5,002 new National Police. The U.S. has invested $50 million to create a force many Haitians dismiss as ti police, meaning little police--not a term of admiration. Most are under 20, have spent just four months in training and do not know what to do with the weapons in their hands. They have no leadership or field supervision, no internal rules or discipline. They don't even have vehicles to get to the scene of a crime. "We would not put rookie police in the U.S. into the situations these young men face," says Pat Lang, U.S. director of the police training program.

U.S. and U.N. officials insist that time will transform the raw recruits into an effective authority. Now they lean heavily on 6,000 U.N. peacekeepers, but they will soon be expected to step in for the entire contingent--unless the Security Council approves Preval's urgent request to retain 1,800 for another six months. Even though the peacekeepers may serve only as a psychological deterrent, the Americans have been vital to U.N. credibility. But at the very moment when the country's insecurity is growing, the U.S. is leaving. A senior American diplomat familiar with Haiti says, "Of course it's not the right decision."

The advent of democracy that Washington calls its No. 1 accomplishment goes only skin-deep. Seriously flawed parliamentary elections produced a legislature so thoroughly controlled by Aristide's Lavalas Party that fledgling opposition parties boycotted subsequent balloting, making Haiti effectively a one-party state. Only 28% of the populace bothered to vote in the December presidential election because most Haitians reject the constitutional restrictions that bar Aristide from serving successive terms. Bound by a promise extracted by Clinton, Aristide grudgingly stepped down, but the charismatic populist shows every intention of running again in 2000 and will hover powerfully over the political scene, a force so dominant it scarcely matters whether he holds office or not.

That mystical bond with the people kept social discontent in check even as Aristide displayed no talent for governance. He promised food, jobs, justice; he delivered nothing. Three weeks ago, he ordered an official to broadcast the names of 1,000 citizens who should come to the National Palace to receive a $30 handout, worth a month's wages. Within hours a huge crowd mobbed the gates, demanding envelopes of cash. When the money ran out, hundreds invaded the Palace until police reinforcements forced them out.

The harsh sanctions the U.S. applied to squeeze out the military regime reduced the expiring economy to ashes. In the 15 months since Aristide's return, "they've done zilch" about the economy, says a U.S. diplomat. Agrees Lavalas Party chief Gerard Pierre-Charles: "Benefits are not visible." While inflation has dropped from above 50% to 17% and foreign loans have paid off Haiti's back debts, Aristide spent money on new ministries and instant gratification like backpacks for schoolchildren rather than investing in infrastructure. He only pretended to cut the civil service, hiring as many people as he fired.

The financial community considered it the final straw last October when Aristide refused to sign an international agreement to sell off nine inefficient and overstaffed state enterprises. When popular organizations took to the streets, the President preferred to palliate those who would lose jobs rather than begin constructing a working economy. As a result, $100 million in aid has been frozen and private investment scared off. The economy has been dead in the water ever since. Says Michel Georges, a Cap Haitien businessman, with a sigh: "We're waiting for an economic program to begin."

Though odds are against him, there is a glimmer of hope in the person of Rene Preval. The 53-year-old Belgian-educated businessman comes to office burdened with a reputation as a hard-left radical but seems to approach the job with realism. He could not be more unlike the ethereal Aristide: practical, plainspoken, decisive. "I know we must translate democracy into improvements in everyday life," he told TIME shortly before his inauguration.

Preval accepts--for now--that privatization is the price he must pay for foreign aid and investment, but he is determined to keep majority ownership in Haiti's hands. He lays out other tough priorities: increasing food production, cutting the bureaucracy, modernizing tax collection. "We have to face the situation as it is," he says. "I know the task seems impossible. But I am not afraid, because in my head my vision is very clear." Preval, says a Port-au-Prince political commentator, "will be lucky if he gets three months" to enact that vision before people revolt. Strikes, protests, barricaded roads could easily degenerate into violence and upheaval--a "crisis of ungovernability," as former President Leslie Manigat puts it--and that could trigger another boat exodus.

Operation Uphold Democracy, says a U.S. diplomat, is a model "only for the national war college: exit strategy as diplomacy." If the U.S. will not engage in nation building, he believes, "it's just pasting on Band-Aids." Johns Hopkins Professor Michael Mandelbaum has recently written in Foreign Affairs that lasting democracy requires the firm foundation of law and a functioning market economy. Haiti needed a "deep, protracted and costly engagement" that American politics today will not tolerate, he argues, and so Clinton's achievements in Haiti can only be judged "provisional, fragile and reversible." The intervention may have been better than nothing, but Washington's claims of success and predictions of a bright future are not shared in Port-au-Prince. The country's moment of international attention is just about over, and Haitians expect to sink back into darkness.

--With reporting by Tammerlin Drummond/Port-au-Prince

With reporting by TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND/PORT-AU-PRINCE