Tyranny for Haitians

In one of the closest approximations of a free election in ail of Haiti's dictator ridden history, Franc,ois Duvalier won the presidency in 1957 on his record as a selfless country doctor fighting disease among his country's poverty-stricken peasants. But after four years, Haiti's 3,750,000 Negroes are still no better off (annual per capita income: less than $100), and the Duvalier regime has turned into the traditional model of a dictatorship, gobbling up graft and relying on strongman methods to keep itself in power. All the while, Duvalier, who in the past four years has received some $30 million in U.S. aid to keep his people from starving, angrily insists that Washington send him still more dollars.

Until the demands are met, the Duvalier regime has fashioned its own means of gathering pelf, at an estimated rate of $6,000,000 a year. Last year his private army of thugs called the Tonton Macoute (Creole for "bogeyman") circulated among Haiti's foreign and domestic businessmen soliciting "contributions" of up to $40,000 for a fancy housing project called Duvalierville. Some who refused to ante up were brutally beaten. The situation got so far out of hand that the diplomats of the U.S., Britain, France, Canada, Italy and Germany lodged strong protests with Duvalier's foreign office on behalf of their frightened nationals. The foreign ministry's reply: "You say your people are afraid. Of what?" Snapped one diplomat: "They are afraid of the bogeymen."

The angry diplomatic protests two months ago eased the shakedown of foreign nationals. But this is unlikely to end the bogeymen's depredations against their own people.

The Tonton Macoute, estimated to number 5,000, take care of individual oppositionists. Uncounted hundreds have been hauled off to Fort Dimanche, outside Port-au-Prince; some have been blinded by the beatings, some deafened, some killed. Newspaper Editor Madame Yvonne Hakim-Rimpel was kidnaped from her home by Tonton Macoutes. She was taken to a local lovers' lane in St. Martin woods, beaten, raped, and mutilated. Says a foreign diplomat: "Duvalier's real contribution to Haitian history is government by gang. He is the king of the bogeymen."

The U.S. continues to support Haiti with a minimum of aid and a U.S. Marine training mission. But the U.S. has implied that Duvalier will get no large-scale Alliance for Progress loans until he institutes some basic reforms and muzzles his thugs. To cut off all help, Washington argues, would mean even more misery for Haiti's jampacked (almost 400 per sq. mi.) population. As a European diplomat in Port-au-Prince put the dilemma: "If you help Haiti, you are keeping a gangster in power. If you don't, you're being cruel to a poor Negro people."

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