In the past 12 months, Haiti — already the western hemisphere's economic basket case — has suffered an epic earthquake that according to latest estimates killed more than 250,000 people and leveled the country's infrastructure, a cholera epidemic that has claimed thousands more lives and a powder-keg political crisis tied to the fraud-tainted Nov. 28 presidential election
All the country needed now was the return of a brutal exiled dictator.
This being Haiti, whose chronic tragedy is so often served with a helping of banana-republic bizarreness, that's what it got Sunday afternoon when Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier landed in Port-au-Prince for the first time since being thrown out of the country and packed off to France almost 25 years ago. "I came to help my country," the 59-year-old former despot declared as some 2,000 of his supporters met him at the airport. But it's hard to imagine how Duvalier's reappearance, which Haitian officials insist took them by surprise, could do anything more than throw Haiti into even deeper turmoil as it tries to rebuild after last year's disaster.
And what's perhaps even harder to imagine is how the government of French President Nicolas Sarkozy could have allowed Duvalier, who arrived from Paris, to board an Air France flight bound for Haiti under the current circumstances. "For the French to have even permitted
to leave their territory amidst an electoral and cholera crisis here shows they have not much interest in the welfare of the Haitian people," says a high-ranking Haitian government official.
French officials, who technically had no power to stop Duvalier, weren't responding to that question on Sunday night. But Port-au-Prince media were rife with conflicting conspiracy theories — all of them focused on last week's election report by the Organization of American States (OAS). It concluded that Jude Célestin, the candidate of Haitian President René Préval's party, actually finished third, not second, in the first-round balloting on Nov. 28, and that Célestin should therefore not be eligible for a runoff vote — which, ironically, was originally supposed to have been held Sunday but has been postponed.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2042762,00.html
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