Festive Haitians Prepare a Welcome for New President : Inauguration: An outspoken young priest is the democratically elected leader. Behind the joy lurks a host of problems in the impoverished country.

For the first time since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship exactly five years ago, joyous Haitians decked the streets of their major cities with flowers and laughter for today’s inauguration of their first democratically elected president, a young, outspoken and controversial Roman Catholic priest.

The coincidence of pre-Lenten Mardis Gras celebrations brought an even more frenetically festive air as tens of thousands danced in the streets and police and army troops braced for more than a million celebrants this morning.

But behind the joyousness, the Rev. Jean Bertrand Aristide, a fiery 37-year-old slum priest who won two-thirds of the votes in the country’s first free, internationally monitored presidential election Dec. 16, takes office at a time of deep crisis in the poorest, most troubled country in the Western Hemisphere.

Stripped virtually bare by the Duvalier family dynasty and five mostly military and uniformly corrupt governments since 1986, Haiti faces massive challenges.

“To ask me what is the biggest problem Father Aristide faces is like asking what is Saddam Hussein’s biggest problem, there are so many of them,” said former Finance Minister Leslie Delatour, who tried vainly to restore economic stability here three years ago.

So far Aristide and the small group of mostly left-wing politicians and intellectuals who have been advising him have had little of substance to say about the economic, political and social programs the new and wildly popular president will undertake as he sets out to cure Haiti’s ills.

The top priorities, according to Aristide’s chief of staff, Renaud Bernardin, are to reduce the cost of living, establish a justice system that will punish the crimes of the past, eliminate corruption, improve public health and stimulate the private sector to create jobs.

But no concrete plans have been offered in any of these areas, and political and diplomatic analysts here have likened accomplishing some of the goals to walking through minefields.

“He wants the cost of things to diminish overnight, but no one knows how he can manage that,” said a skeptical diplomat who has spent three years lamenting Haiti’s slide into economic depression and hyper-inflation.

“There’s a great danger of a boomerang effect from the high expectations that he has raised.”

With the justice system, Aristide will be starting virtually from scratch.

“Even to speak of a ‘Haitian justice system’ dignifies the brutal use of force by officers and soldiers, the chaos of Haitian courtrooms and prisons and the corruption of judges and prosecutors,” said the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights which concluded, “there is no system of justice in Haiti.”

“From this frail foundation can the new government make good on its promise of quick justice for those who have committed murderous crimes and looted the public treasury?” asked a visiting lawyer.

“It could take years, and Haitians who’ve gotten used to making their own justice in the streets might get impatient.”

Economically, Haiti has suffered negative growth for a decade and now has only enough foreign exchange to last “about two days,” according to an American economist here.

Although many Haitians expect a renewed flow of foreign aid from the United States, Canada and Europe to tide Aristide over, the economist said “it isn’t going to come quickly. These things take time to work themselves through the donor governments, parliaments and congress.”

Paradoxically, Aristide and his advisers have so far shown little interest in foreign assistance, placing their emphasis instead on an almost religious faith in self-reliance.

“One way to deal with the question of money is not to count on foreign donors but to harness our own resources,” said Bernardin, pointing proudly to the efficiency with which Haitians mobilized spontaneously this week to clean the city’s garbage-strewn streets in preparation for the inauguration.

“When we are doing more such things for ourselves, then we will have the credibility to ask the donors for help.”