Jean Bertrand Aristide

The Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, exiled president of Haiti, will be a guest tonight on the Marc Steiner show on WJHU-FM (88.1). Mr. Steiner's taped interview with Father Aristide airs from 7 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., followed by a panel discussion involving Baltimore author Taylor Branch, political activist Randall Robinson and Johns Hopkins University Professor Michel Rolphe Trouillot.

- When Haiti was gripped by crisis in 1994, President Bill Clinton sent troops to restore its exiled president to power, organized a $2.6 billion international rescue program and declared the island a top priority of his administration. Yet by the end of his term, the Clinton administration's interest in Haiti had waned and its patience had worn out. Clinton ordered a halt to most direct U.S. aid, a step some experts say inflicted lasting damage on the hemisphere's poorest country.

President Clinton was entitled to claim victory for his six-month occupation of Haiti, as he did, in turning occupation over to the United Nations at Port-au-Prince on Friday.Since the U.S. landing Sept. 17, the exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was restored to authority, thuggish military forces were disbanded, the rule of intimidation ended, emigration subsided and massive economic aid was pledged.The U.S. force, once up to 22,000, will be down to 2,400, within a 6,000-man U.N. army commanded by an American, in a few weeks.

The hero of Jonathan Demme's masterly new documentary The Agronomist gives off a glow that doesn't stop in misfortune, tragedy - or death. Demme's friend Jean Dominique, a cultured member of Haiti's French-speaking elite, trained in Paris as an agronomist (an expert in the science of soil management). But when he returned to his native land he found himself drawn to political life, to movies and moviemaking, and ultimately to radio journalism. Running his own station was a brilliant choice.

NEW YORK -- Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his arch-foe, Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, met separately yesterday with a U.N. envoy, trying to resolve Haiti's 20-month-old political and economic crisis.The talks involving the exiled president and the army chief who ousted him opened under tight security on Governors Island, a Coast Guard facility in New York Harbor. Cutters patrolled the waters around the island, barring other craft from a 200-yard zone. The barrier was designed especially to protect General Cedras, object of hatred among many Haitian immigrants, thousands of whom demonstrated outside the United Nations, chanting denunciations of the military leader as a "drug dealer" and "killer."

- When Haiti was gripped by crisis in 1994, President Bill Clinton sent troops to restore its exiled president to power, organized a $2.6 billion international rescue program and declared the island a top priority of his administration. Yet by the end of his term, the Clinton administration's interest in Haiti had waned and its patience had worn out. Clinton ordered a halt to most direct U.S. aid, a step some experts say inflicted lasting damage on the hemisphere's poorest country.

FOR THE FIRST TIME in Haiti's history, an elected president has handed his authority over to another. There is satisfaction that the U.S. peaceful invasion to restore legitimacy in the troubled state has so far succeeded.And yet, President Rene Garcia Preval is not assured of making it. The people who elected him really wanted his predecessor, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to stay on. Though a military coup cheated Mr. Aristide of three years of his presidency, the U.S. insisted that he step down as the constitutional timetable decreed.

Why the OAS? Why now? For 101 years the Organization of American States has been a tunnel of winds, steeped in rhetoric and pretension, incapable of action, its stately building just a hop and a skip from the White House where it awaited the bidding of a succession of U.S. presidents.Yet the coup last week against the first democratically elected government in Haiti's history finds the OAS flexing its muscles as a regional organization capable of imposing sanctions against the latest claque of generals attempting to blight hemispheric democracy.

Rubbing my eyes didn't help. The incredible image was still on the TV.There outside the Pentagon were the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other big-time American military people.A band played rousing anthems and troops wore formal uniforms. There were cannons blasting away in a 21-gun salute.And what was the occasion for so dramatic a display? What great national event was taking place?It seems that this fellow Jean-Bertrand Aristide, said to be a slightly unhinged Marxist, had consented to come to the Pentagon to make a speech about President Clinton's policy on Haiti.

PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti -- Lemieux and Silianne Alexandre Pierre and their six children are typical supporters of this country's democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. When he returns, courtesy of the U.S.-led military intervention, they hope to join thousands of other poor Haitians dancing in the streets.To get to those streets they must clamber down two flights of crumbling rock and concrete steps, and descend a steep path with an open drainage channel.Their home is a three-room concrete block hut, with bare concrete floor and tin roof, substantial enough by the standards of the Haitian poor, but crude testimony to the subsistence living endured by most of this country's 6.5 million citizens.

When the United States released Haiti's most wanted man from a Maryland jail recently instead of deporting him as promised to face trial on charges of murder and torture, Haitian leaders noisily objected.But behind their protests, some U.S. and Haitian officials say, Haitian leaders felt what they could not publicly admit: relief.They shared U.S. fears that the return of Emmanual "Toto" Constant -- whose Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH) is accused of hundreds of atrocities against supporters of Jean-Bertrand Aristide -- would test the country's judicial system beyond its limits.

FOR THE FIRST TIME in Haiti's history, an elected president has handed his authority over to another. There is satisfaction that the U.S. peaceful invasion to restore legitimacy in the troubled state has so far succeeded.And yet, President Rene Garcia Preval is not assured of making it. The people who elected him really wanted his predecessor, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to stay on. Though a military coup cheated Mr. Aristide of three years of his presidency, the U.S. insisted that he step down as the constitutional timetable decreed.

President Clinton was entitled to claim victory for his six-month occupation of Haiti, as he did, in turning occupation over to the United Nations at Port-au-Prince on Friday.Since the U.S. landing Sept. 17, the exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was restored to authority, thuggish military forces were disbanded, the rule of intimidation ended, emigration subsided and massive economic aid was pledged.The U.S. force, once up to 22,000, will be down to 2,400, within a 6,000-man U.N. army commanded by an American, in a few weeks.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- These are two churches, bound in violence, covered in tears.There are weeds and trees growing where the altar once stood at the church of Saint-Jean Bosco, firebombed six years ago as the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide preached from the pulpit. The roof is gone. The windows are boarded up. The front gates stand locked and charred.On a concrete block that covers a doorway, someone has memorialized the day in 1988 when 12 people died by scrawling in Creole: "There will never be another Sept.

PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti -- Lemieux and Silianne Alexandre Pierre and their six children are typical supporters of this country's democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. When he returns, courtesy of the U.S.-led military intervention, they hope to join thousands of other poor Haitians dancing in the streets.To get to those streets they must clamber down two flights of crumbling rock and concrete steps, and descend a steep path with an open drainage channel.Their home is a three-room concrete block hut, with bare concrete floor and tin roof, substantial enough by the standards of the Haitian poor, but crude testimony to the subsistence living endured by most of this country's 6.5 million citizens.

Rubbing my eyes didn't help. The incredible image was still on the TV.There outside the Pentagon were the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other big-time American military people.A band played rousing anthems and troops wore formal uniforms. There were cannons blasting away in a 21-gun salute.And what was the occasion for so dramatic a display? What great national event was taking place?It seems that this fellow Jean-Bertrand Aristide, said to be a slightly unhinged Marxist, had consented to come to the Pentagon to make a speech about President Clinton's policy on Haiti.

The hero of Jonathan Demme's masterly new documentary The Agronomist gives off a glow that doesn't stop in misfortune, tragedy - or death. Demme's friend Jean Dominique, a cultured member of Haiti's French-speaking elite, trained in Paris as an agronomist (an expert in the science of soil management). But when he returned to his native land he found himself drawn to political life, to movies and moviemaking, and ultimately to radio journalism. Running his own station was a brilliant choice.

The Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, exiled president of Haiti, will be a guest tonight on the Marc Steiner show on WJHU-FM (88.1). Mr. Steiner's taped interview with Father Aristide airs from 7 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., followed by a panel discussion involving Baltimore author Taylor Branch, political activist Randall Robinson and Johns Hopkins University Professor Michel Rolphe Trouillot.