A Second Chance for Clinton in Haiti

by Te-Ping Chen · 2010-02-03 16:09:00 UTC
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As of this afternoon, it's official: former President Bill Clinton has been appointed the UN's chief aid and reconstruction coordinator for Haiti. UN officials are crossing their fingers that Clinton can exert his legendary charisma to help attract the long-term attention Haiti needs. So far, countries from Canada to the Democratic Republic of the Congo have pledged some $2 billion, but relief efforts remain grievously uncoordinated.

What a long, strange trip it's been. As a man who held the title of UN special envoy to Haiti even prior to the Jan. 12 quake, Clinton's connections to Haiti are both contradictory and deep. While in the White House, Clinton backed a brutal embargo agains Haiti (with the goal of weakening the military regime that in 1991 had unseated democratically elected populist and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide). The embargo put Haiti in an effective straitjacket, destroying much of its economy -- in just a few years, Haiti's manufacturing sector shrank from 100,000 to some 17,000 workers. (Clinton later sent the U.S. military into the country to restore Aristide to power.)

Also in the 1990s, his administration kept 300 Haitian, HIV-positive refugees incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, stuck in an extralegal camp with eerie semblance to today's base. Even as the Haitians staged hunger strikes to draw attention to their plight, Clinton fought in court to keep the Haitians in legal abeyance, despite the fact that they'd been declared refugees from the regime that had ousted Aristide.

Now, he's in charge of remaking the same country he turned his back on for years -- a country that's lost 200,000 of its citizens, with one million made homeless, and its government literally leveled.

Are there second acts in American lives? Clinton's been handed one such immense chance, and responsibility. In years past, he's expressed tremendous remorse for the consequences of his past actions in Haiti. With such a noisy set of foreign-policy ghosts trailing him, he has the extra burden -- and hopefully, drive -- to lead the world in helping rebuild Haiti.

Photo Credit: greekchickie

Te-Ping Chen Te-Ping Chen is a freelance writer and U.S. Truman Scholar whose writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the South China Morning Post magazine, Le Soir, and Slate.com.
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