More Obituaries
                                         
Posted Wednesday, 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 Petionville. He was 78.
 
marc l bazin
Marc Louis Bazin in a wehaitians.com undated file photo. videoMr. 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% of the vote in the 35-candidate race - a charade.

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, given the unbelievable insumountable multiplying effect of blanket dehumanizing poverty in the Caribbean quasi-island nation, in the near terms.

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, would be unprecedented economic opportunities and, of course, for nearly all. 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 to assemble, 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 (an odd, since the adherents of Marx and Lenin are atheists) 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 economic 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.

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 has long expired), 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 help change society, in the positive terms, to include bravery, Mr. Bazin once famously said "Only someone" (apparently, a reference to then leftist presidential candidate Jean-Bertrand 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 Haitians to be reasonably remunerated for their hard labor hours than be constrained to illegally voyage to foreign lands, 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, however, of a person, relatives of the deceased Mr. Bazin have discouraged them from doing so. So much family members are inclined to respect his wishes, there be will 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 are 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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