Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Haiti: Government and Politics
ing seen their associations disintegrate, their leaders forced
into exile or hiding, and their programs damaged or destroyed
during the three years of de facto military rule, civil society
activists seemed determined to engage the political system
more profoundly— as candidates for political office or as
appointees in public posts. As a result, many mayors, members
of communal section administrative councils and of the parliament,
and government technicians throughout Haiti have
their roots in grassroots groups or the NGOs that work with
them. Their experience as grassroots activists has infused Haitian
government, especially at the communal and municipal
levels, with new and, at least initially, idealistic leadership that is
well informed of the challenges that government needs to confront.
Given access to supporting resources, they are well positioned
to work in partnership with organized civil society and
the modernizing business sector to begin to confront them. It
is yet to be seen, however, if this new generation of leaders will
change the entrenched political system or if the system will,
indeed, change them.
Foreign Relations
A Haitian religious leader recently stated that his country's
relative importance on the world stage is like an accordion:
sometimes it is small; sometimes it is large. Although Haiti's relative
isolation through most of its history has constrained its
foreign relations, keeping the imagined accordion small, at
times Haiti has occupied a prominent place on the world stage.
This was particularly the case between 1991 and 1996, when a
violent military coup d'etat against the internationally recognized
Aristide government, followed by three years of brutal de
facto rule, led to international sanctions, intense multilateral
diplomacy, a refugee crisis, and, ultimately, an international
military intervention and peacekeeping operation sanctioned
by the United Nations (UN) and led by the United States. The
intense attention given to Haiti during this period not just by
the UN and the United States, but also by the Organization of
American States (OAS), member states of the Caribbean Community
and Common Market (Caricom) , a grouping within the
UN referred to as The Friends of Haiti (Argentina, Canada,
France, the United States, and Venezuela), and the governments
of the thirty-four countries that contributed personnel
to the UN peacekeeping operation, has placed the relatively
small Caribbean country on the world stage as never before,
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