Aristide and Aides Plan to ‘Hit the Ground Running’ : Caribbean: Wary of raising false hopes, their first goal is to improve the economy and ‘move up to poverty.’

WASHINGTON —  It hardly sounds like a slogan to fuel a popular revolution: “From misery to poverty with dignity.”

But it is with this modest goal--and an outline of the Herculean tasks necessary to get even that far--that Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his allies are packing their bags to return from exile in Washington to their Caribbean homeland.

Aristide’s advisers concede that their economic goal would win few elections as a campaign slogan in the United States. But Jean-Claude Martineau, Aristide’s official spokesman and a member of his Cabinet-in-exile, said Friday that Haiti’s woeful economy now is “beyond poverty. As a first step, we would like to move up to poverty.

“The biggest problem we would have would be to promise too much,” Martineau warned in an interview. “That creates frustration, and this is not what we want.”

The United States, with more than 20,000 troops in Haiti, has forced the military leaders who overthrew Aristide three years ago Friday to make way for the firebrand priest and populist politician by Oct. 15.

Preparing for his return, Aristide is meeting daily in Washington with his Cabinet, international development specialists and Clinton Administration officials. His task will be nothing less than introducing democracy to a country that has freely elected only one leader--himself--in its nearly 200-year history and bringing economic stability to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

The obstacles to modernizing Haiti--a country with an 85% illiteracy rate, a few haves among 7 million have-nots and a class of people who have benefited from being thugs all their lives--seem to overwhelm the eight-page, $1-billion economic development plan that Aristide is taking with him.

“We know the immensity of the work ahead, we understand the difficulty, and we are eager to tackle it,” Martineau said.

During his first 120 days, he said, Aristide plans to select a prime minister, establish civilian control over a scaled-down military, create a police force separate from the military, develop a new judicial system and launch a massive public works program that will put as many as 50,000 people to work building roads and rebuilding cities.

“We plan to hit the ground running,” Martineau said. “This is not work that can wait. We are already 200 years late in developing our country. The sense of urgency comes from this.”

Many of the detailed plans for transforming Haiti from a country that is run by and for a tiny elite to one that serves the masses have been drafted and redrafted in a suite of offices rented by the exiled Haitian government in Washington’s swank Georgetown neighborhood.

On Friday, desks were covered with documents, telephones were ringing incessantly, copy machines were going full tilt and urgent conversations could be heard in French and Creole between a variety of exiled officials.

On the wall hung a single portrait of the bespectacled president, the man who is on the verge of accomplishing what no other Latin American leader in recent memory ever has done: reverse a coup.

Key to Aristide’s strategy of achieving “poverty with dignity” is guaranteeing the masses that they are no longer subject to the arbitrary power of military strongmen who have murdered, raped and otherwise brutalized them.

“The first priority of the people is justice,” said Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, another member of Aristide’s Cabinet abroad and the leader of Haiti’s largest peasant movement.

To accomplish this, according to Cabinet members and an eight-page plan, Aristide’s government intends to:

* Complete the disarming of the 7,000-member Haitian armed forces and paramilitary groups, a task that U.S. troops already have begun, and replace them with a 1,500-member corps that will be subordinate to civilian government and based outside metropolitan areas. Only those who have never been involved in human rights abuses will remain in the military. Since Haiti has no external enemies, the new military will focus on disaster relief and public works.

* Create a police force separate from the military. Officers are being trained at new academies, created with the help of U.S. and international aid.

* Overhaul the judiciary so that judges no longer serve the elite and the military, as they have in the past. More courts will be opened, with judges elected by the people.

* Abolish the system of rural sheriffs, who are known for extorting money from peasants and serving corrupt members of the military and the elite. Fired during Aristide’s first months in office, the sheriffs were restored to power by the military leaders who overthrew Aristide.

Aristide and his team are not relying on justice reforms alone.

“What misery means today in Haiti is that people have no ability to survive--no food, no homes, no access to health care,” Jean-Baptiste said in a phone interview this week. “It’s a question of giving them the minimum to live as humans.”

To change this, Aristide’s plan involves launching a massive public works program temporarily employing as many as 50,000 people to renovate decaying cities and rebuild potholed roads. Some of the jobs will go to former soldiers, to distract them from crime.

“There is upwards of 80% unemployment in Haiti,” Jean-Baptiste said. “If you give them jobs, it will have immediate positive impact on the country.”

Only after those steps are taken can leaders turn to more fundamental problems, such as breaking up monopolies and bringing private ownership to business.

“When a person is dying, the first thing you have to do is to keep them alive,” Jean-Baptiste said.

To give people more control over their own destinies, the government will grant workers the right to organize and is considering raising the miserly wages--under $3 a day for factory workers and even less in the countryside--of those who do have jobs. Plans have been drawn up to improve health care and education for the poor.

Aristide also plans to levy taxes on the wealthy who have not paid taxes in Haiti for 30 years--except for a few months in 1991 when he was in office.

Similar reforms, seen as threats by both the military and business elite, precipitated the coup that ousted him. To avoid that happening again before Haiti can be changed into a democracy, Aristide’s government is counting on the presence of U.S. troops, and, later, U.N. peacekeepers. It will also be expecting technical and financial support from foreign countries and from Haitians living abroad.

Almost every aspect of Aristide’s plans for resuming power--from taxing the rich to disarming the military--has been examined by the U.S. officials with whom the Haitian president meets daily and by officials from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other aid organizations.

The finished package clearly reflects their priorities.

“He has no choice,” said Lisa McGowan, a Haiti specialist at the Development Gap, a Washington-based public policy group. “If he does not take this advice, he will not get the funding from the international community.”

U.S. officials and international aid organizations consistently have made the point that Aristide needs to be careful not to alienate members of Haiti’s business elite, who they believe are essential to Haiti’s development. As a result, Aristide obviously has toned down the liberation theology and class-struggle rhetoric that was his signature before he was exiled to Washington.

“I think he knows he has a daunting challenge when he goes back,” a senior White House official said. “He knows he’s going to need support from the international community. He knows he cannot succeed unless he can preside over a period of healing in which he allows the business sector to heal itself.”

But officials who deal with Aristide daily stress that the only way outsiders can have influence on him is to persuade him that their advice is best for the people of Haiti.

“We’ve never overestimated our ability to influence him,” one Administration official said.

Some analysts and Aristide’s more radical advisers fear that he has gone to such lengths to appease the United States, the foreign aid community and the Haitian elite that he may lose passionate support of the Haitian people.

Jean-Baptiste, who sees his prime role as a leader of a movement and has no plans to take a position in Aristide’s government, said Haitians will be satisfied only if they believe the military regime has paid for its crimes and if the country’s wealth is divided more equitably. If not, they may take matters into their own hands.

But Aristide believes the people are patient and understand that he can do little more than make a start on democratic reforms before his term ends in 1996, according to Martineau. If they believe Aristide, who has assured the United States that he will not seek reelection, has delivered on his promise to give them “poverty with dignity,” they will consider him a success.

“Any progress will be relief for them,” Martineau said. “These are the steps to be made now. Perhaps the next slogan will be from poverty with dignity to something else, one step further.”