The Once and Future President

By AMY WILENTZ Amy Wilentz is the author of The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier

For a man used to spending long hours of exile alone in his small apartment, playing the guitar, taping weekly radio speeches and talking on the phone to faraway friends, life changed abruptly last week. From the moment Bill Clinton finally decided to restore him to power, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the duly elected President of Haiti, found himself bustling about the heady business of a chief of state. He has been told to be ready to fly home within days of the U.S. takeover.

Aristide has been meeting daily with William Gray, Clinton's special envoy, with senior officials from the State Department, and with General John Shalikashvili, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. They have come to his apartment in the Chinatown section of Washington to talk over the details of the invasion, to work out the returning President's course of action and to share the news he is hearing from Haiti. "He's giving the American team his point of view," says an Aristide aide. "He's describing for them the reality in Haiti, what people are fearing and thinking, what the mood is day to day."

But in his few hours alone, in the middle of the night, Aristide must be thinking most about the challenges he will face. The country he goes back to rule will be changed in difficult and unpredictable ways. The man who goes back to take charge is not the same one who fled the September 1991 coup d'etat under the protective wing of the U.S. ambassador. "The presidency and exile have been a lesson for me," he told TIME recently. "I learned that I am a leader, but also a statesman with grave responsibilities. It is easier to be a leader than a negotiator. It is easier to lead the Haitian people in Haiti than to represent them before the world community."

His transformation has been a painful and slow one. As a charismatic priest in the progressive wing of the Roman Catholic Church, Aristide was used to making a strong impression without bearing much responsibility for the political consequences. Fierce and theatrical behind the pulpit, he preached grand ideas of justice and equality, then left his parishioners to decide what to do. Often his sermons brought people out into the streets in a surge of anger, only to be fired upon by the army. With a priest's immunity, he castigated the most powerful sectors of society -- the wealthy elite, the business class, the church's bishops, the politicians -- blaming them for the exploitative economic and political system that stole the country's wealth and condemned more than 76% of the population to ignorance and poverty. His language was so strong, it brought danger to his door. After there had been at least four attempts to kill him, his followers began to call him ti pwofet, the little prophet, and Msieu Mirak, Mr. Miracle.

Once he decided to run for President in 1990, Aristide realized he needed to learn cooperation and conciliation. Uncomfortable with group decision making and wary of advice, he found himself relying more and more on friends, fund raisers and political allies to undertake a national campaign. He and his advisers decided to temper his fabled ferocity, and he began lacing his speeches with references to brotherly love rather than to righteous anger.

As President, he had to keep edging toward moderation, though apparently he could not do so fast enough to satisfy his opponents. Still, he successfully negotiated deals with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two organizations that had always received his special scorn, and he spoke frequently and amicably with the U.S. ambassador. But when the military began to move against him, he reverted to type and gave a speech he has come to regret. He seemed to give the nod to mob justice when he called the "necklace" -- a burning tire placed around a victim's neck -- a "beautiful instrument" that "smells sweet."

Those words haunted him in exile in the U.S. Skillfully manipulated by his detractors, the speech convinced many in Congress that Aristide was as guilty of using violence as his opponents. Conservatives portrayed him as a man | unworthy of American support. The State Department distributed a book full of allegations of human-rights abuses under his administration. The CIA briefed congressional leaders on his mental instability. Conservative Senators like Bob Dole and Jesse Helms claimed that Aristide was a rabid anti-American, a hatemonger and a quasi-communist. Although the charges have been largely discredited, the attacks did serious damage to his reputation at a time when his stature as a democrat was all he had.

Aristide remains a mystery to many. The life of a controversial exile only increased his natural diffidence with strangers. A profile in the New York Times described him as "wan, distracted . . . gentle-mannered to the point of caricature." Haitians who know Aristide are confounded by such descriptions. "There must be some kind of a cultural misunderstanding," says Guylene Viaud, who worked with Aristide's youth groups in Port-au-Prince. "To us he seems very open. He loves to joke and to make people laugh." Says a close friend: "When he feels secure, he opens up. When he's besieged, he shuts people out."

American officials have said publicly that they find Aristide intransigent and unmanageable. Aristide says that is because they cannot understand the depth of his commitment to the Haitian people. "When I tell them I want justice for my people above all," he has said, "they look at me as though I'm crazy. But that is the one thing I keep in my mind all the time. Idealism is a little bit alien to them."

Yet even his friends await Aristide's homecoming with mixed emotions. Aristide took a dim view of U.S. interference in the hemisphere: many of his sermons attacked the U.S. government -- though never, as he liked to point out, "the American people." After hearing so much from him about the evils of U.S. policy, it is hard for his disciples to understand why he would agree to return hand in hand with the U.S. military.

The junta's friends pose a graver problem. They fear that Aristide's supporters, if not Aristide himself, will seek revenge for abuses and killings committed during the three years since the coup. There is a long tradition of vengeance when power shifts. When Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier fell in 1986, crowds surged through Port-au-Prince seeking out members of the Tontons Macoutes and beating them to death. But Aristide's followers are just as afraid that weapons left in the hands of the military and its gangs of thugs will continue to be trained on them.

It is Aristide who will have to calm Haitians across the political spectrum. At the same time, they will be watching and weighing his relationship with his foreign protectors. While some argue that he has hardly served his constitutional term, he has already agreed to step down when it officially ends in February 1996. As President during what will effectively be a foreign occupation, he will probably have to consult with Washington and, later, with U.N. officials before making other important decisions. Still, it is hard to imagine him as a mere figurehead; as long as his enormous popularity remains, he will have clout with the foreigners.

Aristide will find many of his chief supporters gone. Some who might have served in his government have been killed. His primary financial backer, Antoine Izmery, was hauled from a church and murdered by paramilitary thugs in September 1993. Three weeks ago, Father Jean-Marie Vincent, a longtime adviser and colleague upon whose judgment Aristide had relied for years, was shot down.

Despite the difficulties ahead, the returning President firmly believes he can help democracy take root in Haiti. "Not one minute of this has been easy," he says of the past three years, "and no one expects things to go any more smoothly once we are back. But there is no choice; we must return." For the Haitians who elected him, he remains, as one supporter succinctly put it, "democracy incarnate." Whatever its reservations, the Clinton Administration has also concluded that without him, democracy in Haiti has no hope at all.