An Obituary / Marc L. Basin died

Posted June 16, 2010

AN OBITUARY

Marc Louis Bazin, Former World Bank Official, Prime Minister of Haiti, Expired. Aged 78

By Yves A. Isidor,

Wehaitians.com Executive Editor

CAMBRIDGE, MA, Jun. 16 - Marc Louis Bazin (born 6 March 1932), a former World Bank official, former United Nations functionary and Haitian Minister of Finance and Economy under the brutal dictatorship of Mr. Jean-Claude Duvalier died early Wednesday at his private residence in the earthquake-ravaged capital city of Port-au-Prince contiguous wealthy city of Pétionville. He was 78.

Marc Louis Bazin in a wehaitians.com undated file photo.

Mr. Bazin campaigning in the western, mid-size city of St. Marc for Haiti's presidency

The telegenic, photogenic Mr. Bazin, who like millions of others survived the January 12 devastating earthquake, long suffered from advanced prostate cancer, was also prime minister of Haiti; he was appointed to that post on June 4, 1992 by the military government that had seized power on September 30, 1991.

Mr. Bazin was considered the favorite candidate of the George H. W. Bush administration and the minuscule bourgeois population of Haiti when the Caribbean nation could no longer last in foreign relations as a military dictatorship and had to open the government up to free and fair elections, in 1990. He was seen as a front runner if the elections were to happen before the tumultuous Left in Haiti had time sufficiently enough to reorganize.

Acting President of Haiti

In office June 19, 1992 - June 15, 1993

Prime Minister Himself

Preceded by Joseph Nérette (provisional)

Succeeded by Émile Jonassaint (provisional)

4th Prime Minister of Haiti

In office June 19, 1992 - August 30, 1993

President Himself

Preceded by Jean-Jacques Honorat

Succeeded by Robert Malval

Born March 6, 1932 (1932-03-06) (age 78)

NOTE: In an effort to further prove himself a productive member of society, despite his venerable age, Mr. Bazin's last public invaluable contribution to his nation of Haiti was the club of former prime ministers he founded in the late evening of his life.

He received nearly 14 percent of the electoral opinions expressed; Mr. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a populist defrocked Roman Catholic priest, who repeatedly referred to the United States as the "GREAT SATAN NATION,' winning with 67 of the votes cast. After seven months in office, he was deposed by a bloody military coup in response to his refusal to relinquish control of the government after a failed no-confidence vote. In June 1992, the military officials who had led the coup appointed Mr. Bazin as acting prime minister. "I'm ready to meet with Mr. Aristide, anywhere, anytime, and without preconditions," he repeatedly said. Washington's initial response was that he held the post illegally, but they soon warmed up to him and pressed Mr. Aristide to negotiate with the military and Mr. Bazin. With the change in administrations, the policy changed. He resigned on June 8, 1993.

Yet, Mr. Bazin was also a fervent political opponent of Mr. Aristide, and ran in the 2006 election for the presidency of Haiti, but was reported to have received only about 0.68 percent of the vote in the 35-candidate race - a charade.

Mr. Aristide himself, a presidential candidate?

Though Mr. Aristide (Ph.D., since 2007) was living in forced exile, in South Africa, a few years after he was first transported to the next to nothing African nation of Republique Centre Afrique (Central Africa Republic), by way of a U.S. Army's airplane, at no implicit economic cost (he got a free ride, as they say in the vernacular), in late February 2004, but Mr. Rene Preval, the current president, who is known to consume alcoholic beverages distilled at a high proof for breakfast, was perceived to be his equal, in Marxist-Leninist doctrine terms. There were valid reasons for so. For a longtime, he was a die-hard member of his "Lavalas"(literally, flood) party politburo.

The man, who is not of nature public speakers became president (again, he was only warming the seat for Mr. Aristide, many always convincingly said), for the second time, only after thousands of people, all from the slums, who believed that immediately after he assumed the office of the presidency the nation's chief executive officer would work arduously to facilitate the return, within weeks, of their only true, indispensable leader, Titid (the nickname the masses rather refer to Mr. Aristide, meaning prophet, messiah, savior, if not, too, god), from his comfortable exile, descended on the privately-owned luxury Hotel Montana (it was completely destroyed by the earthquake, and many guests died), where the Provisional Electoral Council had its principal office.

"We demand, and now that Rene Preval be declared president, no need for a two-man race," a reference to the general election, "after the primary, otherwise we will severe our enemies' heads (those of the imperialists, the selfish bourgeois, the grand thief capitalists, the fake nationalists), the whole country will be consumed by flames," said the protesters after they vandalized the commercial establishment and consumed a large quantity of wine and food, gratis. Nothing - including the beds the uninvited malcontents found themselves in the comfort of, the swimming pools they took great pleasure of swimming in - was left for the invited guests. That's the reason why and, without hesitation, the author of this article always refers to Mr. Preval as an extreme violence-issued president.

Re-enter Mr. Bazin

Mr. Bazin was the son of a long deceased prominent Haitian Senator, Mr. Louis Bazin, who, according to Canada-based Haiti native, eminent historian, prolific writer, Mr. Charles Dupuis, urged his colleagues to vacate a reception room after they were forced to endure the indignities of racial discrimination during an official parliamentary visit in the prosperous South American nation of Argentina.

With ease, he rightly styled himself as distinguished man of letters, emeritus professor of languages. So fluent, both orally and in writing, he was in the language of Voltaire, French, and that of Shakespeare, English (his Spanish speaking and writing abilities were rudimentary), the eloquent public intellectual that Mr. Bazin was, too, never preferred the contours of his native tongue, Creole, for everyday speech. Except when there was a need for him to do so since the vast majority of his fellow citizens were only conversant in the national dialect. This suggests that he was, too, a man of the masses, he did not give in to the pleasure of the reduced socially conservative Haitian intellectual elite class to not also express himself in the vernacular.

"The past isn't dead and burned. In fact, it isn't even the past," wrote William Faulkner. Mr. Bazin, a development economist by profession, will sure, at least, rightly have his placed preserved in the march of Haitian progress, even long after his body goes into the past or is entombed.

And "Between tradition and modernity, there is a bridge," wrote the internationally well known, revered Mexican poet, Mr. Octavio Paz, who in 1998 unfortunately ceased to continue to be with us on earth. To paraphrase Mr. Paz, Mr. Bazin was the long needed bridge (no stop signs, no traffic lights, please) between the generational grinding poverty the vast majority of Haitians were forced to endure and a better quality of life - not in absolute terms. There are reasons for this. And they are the unbelievable, immeasurable multiplying effect (not limited to rampant diseases of biblical proportions) of blanket dehumanizing poverty in the quasi-island Caribbean island nation that must be first consigned to the archives of history; unfortunately, not n the near terms.

Turning to the most ambitious attempt to analyze the reason d'être of that bridge systematically and comprehensively. Assume Mr. Bazin legitimately became president of Haiti, a nation with a long tortured history.His presidency would be measured by the unprecedented economic opportunities it would most likely generate, and, of course, for nearly all. Thanks to real and sound fiscal and monetary policies - not providence is at work, as would Mr. Aristide rather contend. It was because of so that he often attempted to first reconcile reason with political demagoguery, of Marxist-Leninist nature, through the logic of the dialectic. This, is also proof that he was one of Haiti's few "grandees" of the virtues (free and fair election, liberty of assembly, for example) of democracy.

What's progress? "In modern times," wrote The Economist, "faith in 'progress' has been closely connected to, if not wholly identified with, the inevitability of market-driven economic growth." Is this an error? Thinking the unthinkable. Answering this question is almost as saying that the Marxist-Leninist idealists firmly believe the poor, to borrow the words of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, will always be with us; in fact, there will be more of them than there used to be.

Though difficult, if not nearly impossible, in a nation where political violence, of Marxist-Leninist nature, was the norm, and those, after all, who believed that Haiti, as a dirt-poor economy, could only experience its biggest revolution in history, by way of capitalism (it embodies economic liberty), despite its many flaws, were cast as Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) agents who should be executed, by way of "Père Lebrun" (deposed bloodthirsty dictator Aristide's largely promoted practice of placing, by proxy, a used automobile tire around even an assumed political opponent or enemy's neck and then set him or her on fire after pouring gasoline on his or her mutilated body), after a brief appearance before a popular tribunal.

What's more? Not all victims, for example the Reverend Sylvio C. Claude, were afforded the opportunity to appear before such tribunal, meaning that they were murdered on a Haiti's street, in broad daylight. Still, extremely of importance to Mr. Bazing, the author of a book that focused on the economics development in Haiti, was addressing the wide gap that occurred between lofty rhetoric and reality.

"Every nation needs a history." Those were some of the famous impassionate words of the late French Army General, Charles de Gaulle, in a London's British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) studio, in June 1940, to his fellow compatriots who remained in France and others across Europe to urge them to join the resistance, after the Nazis, invaded and took over the control of the beautiful Paris, which, even today, hundreds of millions of people from around the world proudly still refer to as the city of lights - high couture, sophisticated culture and cuisine, for example.

"No civilized people can feel satisfied with a state of affairs in which their fellow humans exist in conditions of such absolute human misery, which is probably why every major religion has emphasized the importance of working to alleviate poverty and is at least one of the reasons why international development assistance has the universal support of every democratic nation." Michael P. Todaro, Stephen C. Smith

With a lot of tinkering, guided by a combination of Haiti's consistent classification as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere; Jean Kirkpatrick (she expired in 2006), the late U.S. President Ronald Reagan United Nations' ambassador who referred to the sunny nation as a basket waste (in 1986); the responsibility of educated citizens to positively help change society, to include bravery, Mr. Bazin once famously said "Only someone" (apparently, a reference to then leftist presidential candidate Aristide's misguided campaign speeches, rhetoric that emerged from a long career of venganceful politics), "with an inspired alienation from reality could not conclude that it would be better for the vast majority of his fellow Haitian citizens to be reasonably remunerated for their hard labor hours than be constrained to voyage to foreign lands without the required legal documents, then becoming international nuisances, be subject to the indignities of racial discrimination and many mores of the same gravity, but not after they are ultimately deported, in masse, to Haiti."

A funeral service, according to Le Nouvelliste d'Haiti, a more than 100-year-old serious daily publication, will take place June 22, 2010, at 9:00AM, at St. Peter's Church (in French, Eglise Saint Pierre), in Petionville.

Though it is customary for friends and others to send flowers to the funeral room after the expiration of a person, however, relatives of the deceased Mr. Bazin have discouraged them from doing so. So much family members are inclined to respect his wishes there will be no wreaths of flowers on the casket while the funeral mass is in progress, So, too, it will be the same at his final resting place, that is his tomb.

Genetics

In Bazin's family, there are many twin genes. His children and grandchildren are twins. He currently has three generations of twins, the youngest being twins Soroya and the other Conille.

Here, at last, the family members Mr. Bazin is survived by certainly have Wehaitians.com's expressions of condolences.

The writer, Yves A. Isidor, who teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, is executive of wehaitians.com, a democracy and human rights journal.

CREDIT: Information from Wikipedia was used in this text.

Wehaitians.com, the scholarly journal of democracy and human rights

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