Welcome home, Baby

Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former dictator of Haiti once known as Baby Doc, returned to his native land last week, looking wide-eyed and frail. He read a statement in which he expressed ‘deep sorrow for all those who say they were victims of my government’ and promised that he hadn’t come home to cause trouble, but to help rebuild his country.

Should we believe him? The press think that he wants to clear his name in order to get access to $6 million in frozen Swiss bank accounts; Haiti’s socialist leaders worry that he has returned to seize power; many people living in dugouts beneath scraps of corrugated iron might secretly hope that he has and — although it seems a shocking thing to say — perhaps we should too. The return of the notorious Baby D could be just the thing Haiti needs.

Since Duvalier fled the country in 1986, Haiti has been in a terrible mess. It has suffered two military juntas, two US-led invasions, political violence and food shortages. An earthquake in 2010 levelled the capital and killed upwards of 300,000. Roughly a million Haitians are homeless. The relief effort was generous but incompetent. Enough money was donated to give each displaced family a cheque for $37,000, but only a fraction of the aid has been released. The socialist government has been defunded: there’s no GDP left to redistribute. Haiti is a failed state and what it needs is stability and capital investment. Jean-Claude Duvalier could help bring back both.

The pudgy playboy inherited the country’s presidency from his father, Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc), in 1971 and it’s true that Haiti under Jean-Claude was no utopia. Order was kept by the dreaded Tonton Macoutes, a private police force named after a voodoo bogeyman who kidnaps children and eats them for breakfast.