(GLOBALRESEARHC, HAITI LIBERTE) HAITI: Massive March Signals Resurrection of Aristide’s Lavalas Movement
By Kim Ives
Global Research, May 21, 2013
Haïti Liberté 15 May 2013
Well over 15,000 people poured out from all corners of Haiti’s capital to march alongside the cortege of cars that carried former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide back to his home in Tabarre from the Port-au-Prince courthouse he visited on May 8.
Thousands more massed along sidewalks and on rooftops to cheer the procession on, waving flags and wearing small photos of Aristide in their hair, pinned to their clothing, or stuck in their hats.
Led by Fanmi Lavalas party coordinator Maryse Narcisse through a gauntlet of jostling journalists, Aristide had entered the courthouse (the former Belle Époque Hotel) at exactly 9:00 a.m., the time of his appointment to testify before Investigating Judge Ivickel Dabrésil. Aristide had waited with Narcisse in a car outside the court’s backdoor for about 45 minutes. It was only the second time that Aristide had left his home (and the first time publicly) since returning to Haiti on Mar. 18, 2011 from a seven-year exile in Africa following the Feb. 29, 2004 Washington-backed coup d’état which cut short his second government.
Lawyer Mario Joseph said that he was “very satisfied” with the reception given by Judge Dabrésil, who is investigating the April 2000 murder of radio journalist Jean Dominique and his radio’s caretaker Jean-Claude Louissaint, for which Aristide is one of many prominent Haitians, including former President René Préval, interviewed for testimony. Joseph said the three hour deposition was very “cordial and relaxed.”
But many Haitians feared that the summoning of Aristide – even if only for testimony – was a trap set by President Michel Martelly, who, as the former vulgar konpa musician “Sweet Micky,” was the principal cheerleader of both the 1991 and 2004 coups d’état against Aristide.
“This summoning of Aristide is a political act remote-controlled by the Martelly government, the same as the now discredited legal suits brought a few months ago by Ti Sony [a former resident of the Lafanmi Selavi orphanage who claimed that Aristide had “exploited” him and other orphans] and some who lost money when the cooperative banks went bust [while Aristide was in power in 2002 and 2003],” said outspoken Sen. Moïse Jean-Charles. “Those previous efforts to smear and destroy Aristide failed, so now they are trying this.”
Many Haitian radio commentators point to Judge Dabrésil’s postponement of Aristide’s deposition from its original date of Apr. 24 as proof that there is a political hand in the judge’s proceedings. The deposition, and the expected anti-Martelly pro-Aristide outpouring, would have taken place during the 5th Summit of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS) from Apr. 23-26 held in Pétionville and attended by many regional leaders.
Furthermore, on Mar. 7, the Defend Haiti website reported that “Presidential Adviser Guyler Delva admitted, earlier this week, to giving Judge Ivekel Dabrésil a car, and Senator John Joel Joseph said on Radio Scoop FM on Wednesday [Apr. 30] that the administration had purchased a house in Florida for the judge.”
Another impetus for the massive turn-out came on the evening of May 7 when Haitian National Police (PNH) Director General Godson Orélus took to the airwaves to announce that the PNH had “received no formal notification of the demonstration” as required by law and that therefore “any demonstration is formally forbidden” along the route between Aristide’s house and the courthouse.
“The police don’t want any demonstration,” he concluded, throwing down a gauntlet which the Haitian people took up the next morning.
Lavalas leaders, including Narcisse, responded that the march was not a “demonstration” but an “accompaniment” of Aristide by the Haitian people. Many Lavalas leaders came to the courthouse to show their solidarity including Senators Moïse Jean-Charles, John Joel Joseph, Francky Excius, and Jean Baptiste Bien-Aimée; Deputy Saurel Hyacinthe; former senator Gérard Louis Gilles; former deputies Jacques Mathelier and Lionel Etienne; former Justice Minister Calixte Delatour; activists Farah Juste, Claudy Sidney, and Volcy Assad.
About 100 people had spent the night in a vigil across the street from Aristide’s home. At 6 a.m., hundreds more joined them to mass on the sidewalks in front of Aristide’s house.
But the real “accompaniment” began after the hearing. Leaving the courthouse at noon, Aristide’s ride home took five hours, passing slowly through downtown Port-au-Prince, the Champ de Mars, the hillside slum of Belair, Delmas 2, then the roads through the old military airport and past the international airport.
Parallel solidarity demonstrations were held in Cap Haïtien, Aux Cayes, and Petit Goâve.
Alongside the 20 or so cars that followed Aristide’s silver jeep, young and old walked, jogged, and ran, singing, chanting, and laughing. The river of humanity included motorcycles, bicycles, wheelchairs, and the occasional person on crutches.
Marchers also tore down pink government propaganda posters from lampposts along the way. Several posters declaring “With the Martelly/Lamothe government, Haiti is advancing” were torn up and left in pieces in the street for vehicles and marchers to pass over. (Martelly’s long-time business partner Laurent Lamothe is Haiti’s Prime Minister.)
Three times Aristide got out of his car to wave to the crowd — outside the courthouse gate, in Belair, and in front of his home — causing people to sprint toward his car and raise their arms, creating a sea of hands. Afterwards, people hugged and high-fived each other, some laughing, some crying.
One man dressed in rags moved down the line of cars following Aristide, wiping each car clean with a dirty cloth but asking for no money in return.
“Se pa lajan non, se volontè wi,” (It’s not for money, I’m here of my own free will) was the refrain of crowds which turned out for Aristide’s massive campaign rallies when he first ran for President in November and December 1990. The song was heard again on May 8, 2013 in the largely spontaneous march, which grew in size and volume as it made its way through the capital.
In contrast, when Martelly organized a carnival-like rally of a few thousand in the Champ de Mars on May 14, many participants were paid 1000 gourdes (US$24) a head to turn out. They were also given a t-shirt – either pink or white – to put on. But after taking the money, many “celebrants” discarded their t-shirts in the street, Haïti Libertéreporters observed. (A Haiti Liberté photographer was prevented from accessing a media stand at the May 14 rally after presenting his press credentials.)
Some pundits tried to banalize the historic march, saying it was merely the beginning of the electoral campaign of the Lavalas Family (FL), the party that Aristide founded in 1996. (Many Haitian political leaders, including those in the FL, strongly doubt whether free and fair elections can be held under Martelly, or whether he even wants to hold them. “No matter what, Martelly has to go” was another chant heard during the march.)
But May 8, 2013 was much more than a mere campaign rally. It was a watershed event, a popular show of force which has changed the political calculus of Haiti in the near-term. Haitian history has shown that when the Haitian people begin to move in such numbers, major political change is imminent. The weeks ahead will reveal exactly what that political change will be.
(Additional reporting was done by Haiti Liberté staff reporters Wendell Polynice and Daniel Tercier)
Labels: HAITI, JEAN BERTRAND ARISTIDE
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Haiti, US-Installed “Stooge Regime”. Long-Suffering Haitians Want Change
By Stephen Lendman
Global Research, October 18, 2012
Region: Latin America & Caribbean
Haitians know adversity and anguish as well as anyone. They’ve experienced over 500 years of oppression, slavery, despotism, colonization, reparations, embargoes, sanctions, deep poverty, starvation, crushing debt, and natural calamities from destructive hurricanes to a dozen regional magnitude 7.0 or greater earthquakes.
Except briefly after their successful 1804 revolution and under Aristide, they’ve been denied legitimate governance and freedom. They continue suffering today under stealth Duvalierist Michel (“Sweet Micky”) Martelly. He’s a US-installed stooge.
He wasn’t elected. He was anointed. He’s Washington’s man. A March 2011 runoff process installed him. He took office in May. He fits the neoliberal/imperial mold. He’s an anti-populist former Kompa singer.
He has longstanding ties to Haitian elites, militarists, reactionary Duvalierists, and thuggish Tonton Macoute assassins. He enforces predatory neoliberal harshness.
UN Blue Helmet MINUSTAH occupiers and internal security forces enforce state-sponsored repression. Haitians wanting freedom and justice are denied. Activists are targeted.
Their liberating struggle continues. They’ve had enough and want change. Since September, they’ve held large protests, gone on strike, and massed in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere across the country.
On September 30, huge crowds commemorated the 21st anniversary of the 1991 coup against Aristide. In February 2004, a second one followed.
Protests continue. On October 15, Haitians came out in force in Port-au-Prince. At issue is government corruption, broken promises, high living costs, unaffordable food prices, and other unaddressed issues.
Under ideal conditions, Haitians endure hardships most Americans can’t imagine. How can they when Western media say little. US television explains nothing.
Haitians accuse Martelly of serving business and elite interests. At the same time, vital people needs are ignored. He promised relief and delivered betrayal. One protester spoke for others, saying:
“Martelly is wasting the meager resources of the country to buy luxury vehicles and for international trips that don’t bring anything to the country.”
Another said, “Grassroots organizations are going to organize with other political forces to mobilize the rest of the country against this corrupt regime supported by a few members of the international community.”
Others said plenty more. On Sunday, they came out in force. They demanded Martelly resign. Hundreds of thousands remain homeless nearly three years after the devastating January 2010 earthquake.
Rebuilding efforts focus on commercial development and other projects benefitting Haitian elites. Ordinary people are ignored. No one cares if they live, die, suffer or starve.
They get by best they can in squalid makeshift camps. They’re little more than flimsy tents and shacks made from bed sheets, tarpaulin, wood scraps, or metal parts. They’re unsafe to live in. Normality is nowhere in sight or considered. Authorities able to help don’t care.
Haitians want to leave but have no place to go. They’re desperate, impoverished, unemployed, and for many falling ill untreated. They’re vulnerable to torrential rains, deadly diseases, and water-borne ones like cholera. Since winter 2010, it claimed thousands of lives. Deaths continue regularly.
Life in Occupied Haiti is hellish. Hoped for help doesn’t come. International aid falls far short. New homes to replace destroyed ones aren’t planned.
Haiti’s 1987 Constitution called its republic “indivisible, sovereign, independent, cooperative, free, democratic, and social….” Like France, its national motto is “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” Basic rights were established.
Article 19 guarantees “the right to life, health, and respect of the human person for all citizens without distinction, in conformity with the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man.”
Article 22 “recognize(s) the right of every citizen to decent housing, education, food and social security.”
Article 24 guarantees “individual liberty.” Other fundamental rights were established.
Aristide alone respected rule of law provisions and enforced them. Despots before and after him trashed what they should have supported. Martelly’s as bad as the rest of them. He follows a long shameless tradition.
On June 12, 2012, he went further. He got lawless constitutional amendments established. They affirmed diktat executive power. They reinstituted Duvalierist death squads. He violated constitutional provisions doing so.
Before he left office, Rene Preval and parliament rushed through similar amendments. The day before his term ended, they were published.
Parliamentary protests followed. Changes didn’t correspond to what passed. Amendments were suspended. Weeks after taking office, Martelly published a decree suspending them.
He established a committee to make recommendations. Everything was done secretly. Constitutional law was violated. He hardened tyranny.
Perhaps with tongue in cheek, the Congressional Research Service said on August 1, “There is still much to be accomplished in the democratization of Haiti. (M)outing public frustration” is understandable.
Political activist David Oxygene went further. On June 19, he was arrested. He was targeted during one of many Port-au-Prince demonstrations. People attending demand help for Haiti’s poor, disadvantaged, unemployed, and homeless.
Oxygene heads Haiti’s Movement for Liberty and Equality by Haitians for Fraternity (MOLEGHAF). Charges against him were bogus. Fellow activist Duckens Charles was arrested and imprisoned at the same time.
Oxygene’s lawyer convinced a judge to release him. On August 30, he and Charles were freed together. Last spring, Oxygene was warned to stop protesting. Otherwise he’d be arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned. He and others like him are vulnerable.
Martelly wants no opposition. He’s playing hardball to silence dissent. Independent journalists are endangered. Outspoken Haitian lawmakers risk trouble.
In early October, Senator Moise Jean Charles challenged Martelly, saying:
“We are not only in the streets against the high cost of living, corruption, nepotism, bad governing, dictatorship, but equally to demand (his) departure….”
Oxygene won’t be silent. Deep poverty, corruption, state repression, and other unaddressed issues are too intolerable to ignore.
“We demand social services like work and decent housing,” he said. “We’re not asking for a couple little jobs here and there. We’re asking for a fundamental change that allows the poorest folks to have a decent life, to make a decent living.”
“Martelly promised that he was going to make change but nothing has changed, and people see that. People’s bad situations have gotten worse. There is growing discontent in the quarters populaires, or poor neighborhoods, where young men don’t have work and families go hungry.”
During two months in prison, he and around 100 others were crammed in a cell meant for 34. They got small amounts of untreated water. Drinking it risks disease, even death.
“Conditions are really harsh,” he said. “People fight every day. “Men stab one another, smoke, take drugs, and become frustrated because of the” appalling conditions. “Their frustrations” boil over. They take it out on each other.
Arrest and imprisonment strengthened his activism. He knows he’ll be arrested again. So do others like him.
“These kinds of things can either break you and make you turn away from the struggle, or they can fortify you to battle harder for change. For me, it made me stronger to continue the struggle and never give up until I see change or until they kill me.”
“Ann nou batay pou viktwa final, pou chanjman mond la,” he says. Let’s fight for the final victory, for the world to change. It won’t happen unless ordinary Haitians and people everywhere do it on their own. It’s the only way.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
His new book is titled “How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War”
http://www.claritypress.com/Lendman.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour
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Articles by: Stephen Lendman
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WAFAWAROVA: Democratisation for whom?
Thursday, 30 June 2011 01:00
Reason Wafawarova
PERHAPS the most extreme disaster visited upon Zimbabwe since independence was the involvement of Westerners in the politics of a political party by the name Movement for Democratic Change.
The episode was a mere decade, but it restored virtual slavery to the people of Zimbabwe, killing thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands, and opening the country to a virtual welfare takeover by Western charities, the so-called NGOs.
All this came in the name of democratisation, just like the bombing of Libyan people is supposed to be for their own good. Before the NATO bombings from the skies of Libya, not even one Libyan could be described as poor, not even was homeless, and not even one Western charity was doing humanitarian work in Libya, according to statistics recently provided by Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan.
Now we hear Westerners blaming Col Gaddafi for what they say is his inhumane behaviour of blocking humanitarian aid into Libya. Without the West bombing Libyans from every angle in the sky, there would be no need for humanitarian aid in Libya. But we hear NATO is freeing Libyans from themselves, from their own leadership - and the Libyans are supposed to be grateful for humanitarian aid provided by the West precisely because the West itself has utterly destroyed Libya's lifeline.
The most extreme of the many disasters ever visited upon Haiti since its liberation from France was the invasion by Woodrow Wilson in 1915, restoring virtual slavery, and mercilessly murdering fifteen thousand innocent souls, according to Haitian historian Roger Gaillard.
Of course, the entire goal of the invasion was to open up Haiti to a complete takeover by US corporations - something very familiar with most, if not all of the over 35 invasions carried out by the US since 1945.
After the invasion of Haiti, the US left the shattered society in the hands of a ruthless, US trained National Guard serving the interests of the Haitian elites, especially the mulatto and the whites. It did not really matter that this elite was even more predatory and rapacious than the French colonists, or that it had a culture of unprecedented corruption.
These elites were no different to the puppet regime of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, a regime that is made up of absolute thieves and shameless election cheats. Even Western elites acknowledge publicly that Hamid Karzai is a remarkably corrupt and dishonest fellow. Both the Karzai regime and Haiti's National Guard of 1915 are excellent examples of the many triumphs of "Wilsonian idealism," itself a forerunner of modern day "democratisation" - the very pretext under which Western firepower is descending upon the people of Libya. The takeover of Haiti by US corporations was then accomplished by the disbanding of Parliament under US Marine guns. This was after the Haitian Parliament had dared to refuse to accede to the US demand that it accepts a US-written constitution that permitted the "progressive measures" of allowing US capital owners free reign over the resources of Haiti.
Those Zimbabweans who still do not understand why Western influence over the constitution making process is undesirable may just need to be reminded of the Haitian history. Western interests can never have something to do with true democracy. In fact, Western interests in resourced countries like Zimbabwe, which are the only countries such interests are ever seen anyway; are undemocratic and entirely selfish - seeking nothing short of Western monopoly and exploitation of natural resources at the expense of the masses of these countries.
Western countries can cry with voices louder than the trumpet about the diamonds of Zimbabwe being looted by a small but powerful elite, but the reality of the matter is that their interest in the diamonds is no different from what the Zimbabwean elite is allegedly doing. In fact the elites in question hardly have any capacity to match the rate at which Westerners are known to siphon raw resources from developing countries. These would be small time robbers standing like a pea to a mountain when the sins of Washington are paraded.
The West relies so much on the facade of democracy in pushing for hegemony over the affairs of weaker nations. This is why a Zimbabwe election under the harsh economic hardships brought about by illegal Western economic sanctions is favourable to the West. They reckon the sanctions- induced hardships can only discredit Zanu-PF as a failed political party, disenfranchising people from the legacy of the revolutionary party. So, they want to manipulate the electoral process and then they can tag the process as democratisation, as a mark of democracy in Africa. In the 1915 Haiti, US occupiers indeed carried out a referendum for their constitution, in which the US demands received 99,9 percent approval, with only 5 percent of the population participating.
Of course, the measures were deemed progressive for Haiti, as they are for sanctioned Zimbabwe, for Libya too, soon for Syria, and barring foolhardy naivety for Iran as well. The US State Department explained that Haitians were "inferior people" and "It was obvious that if our occupation was to be beneficial to Haiti and further her progress it was necessary that foreign capital should come to Haiti. . . (and) Americans could hardly be expected to put their money into plantations and big agricultural enterprises in Haiti if they could not themselves own the land on which their money was to be spent."
How many times have we heard the same argument put forward over the mineral resources of Zimbabwe, as well as over the agrarian regime - now completely controlled by Zimbabwean capital? We must understand that it was out of a sincere desire to help suffering Haitians that the United States forced them at gun point to allow US investors to take over their country in an "unselfish intervention" carried out in a "fatherly way" with no thought of "preferential advantages, commercial or otherwise" for the Americans (New York Times).
It is of course the same "unselfish intervention" we see happening in Libya today - NATO bombing the Libyan cities to ashes in a "fatherly way," using high precision lethal bombs with no thought whatsoever of "preferential advantages, commercial or otherwise;" just out of the West's true love for the civilians of Libya, who the West are convinced would have been victims of a Gaddafi-inflicted genocide, of course based on the irrefutable evidence that Western leaders thought as such. It is evidence enough for Obama to simply think that a genocide is about to happen.
The West will always work with locals to buffer the possible effect of nationalism and anti-imperialism. These locals are the pathetic puppets that receive Western funding in the name of promoting what is often called democracy. In Haiti, the lapdog National Guard perfected the evil art of repression and terror, and later the Duvalier dictatorship prospered and obscenely enriched itself, totally isolated from the country they were helping to rob - completely alienating the masses.
Ronald Reagan assigned USaid and the World Bank to institute programs that would turn Haiti into the "Taiwan of the Caribbean", perhaps the same way Benghazi is likely to be turned into a "Taiwan of Libya". For Haiti, the strategy was to make sure that the country would import food and other commodities from the United States, while working people toiled forever in US-owned assembly plants. This is the old trick of comparative advantage where weaker but resourced countries are prevented from adding value to their resources, while being forced to provide cheap labour in the exploitation of the raw materials.
Only Western corporations can successfully capitalise the mining of diamonds at Zimbabwe's Chiadzwa. Otherwise, Zimbabweans themselves can only provide cheap labour as employees, that way reducing the high unemployment rate in the country. This business of South African companies and the Chinese mining at Chiadzwa is simply unacceptable. This is why the Western sponsored MDC-T does not believe there is any meaningful mining of diamonds happening at Chiadzwa.
The only meaningful mining known to the MDC-T and its Finance Minister Tendai Biti is mining made possible by Western capital, employing thousands of labour-gifted Africans, and of course administered from
Western capitals. Any mining done by any other people can only constitute "gross human rights abuses". When Zanu-PF talks of cutting diamonds within Zimbabwe, they must be dismissed for who they are; "inferior people" who do not understand the benevolence of "unselfish" Westerners, who are always coming to the rescue of us lesser peoples in a "fatherly way".
In 1985, the World Bank reported that Haiti's export-oriented development strategy would see domestic consumption "markedly restrained in order to shift the required share of output increases into exports," emphasising "the expansion of private enterprises," while support for education had to be "minimised" and such "social objectives" as welfare had to be privatised.
A decade later, it was Zimbabwe receiving identical instructions from the same World Bank and its partner in crime, the IMF. And, the demise of the economy began, leading to the 1997 Land Summit, itself a result of growing discontent among the masses.
After Esap destroyed the industrial economy, more and more people began to see their future as dependent on land.
As happened to Haiti, Zimbabwe was "advised" that "private projects with high economic returns should be strongly supported," in preference to "public expenditures in the social sectors" and that "less emphasis should be placed on social objectives which increase consumption." These instructions marked the beginning of problems bedevilling such institutions as the University of Zimbabwe and power utility Zesa, today.
The focus from the West is always to support private capital; in short to support democracy for the rich minority, sidelining "social objectives," the euphemism for people-oriented projects. But, the real Taiwan was following a different model.
Taiwan was allowed freedom from foreign control, and it pursued radically different policies to those dictated to Haiti. Taiwan targetted investment to rural areas so that they could increase consumption and prevent rural-urban migration - the root cause for Africa's countless miserable urban slums, for which President Mugabe is bitterly criticised by the West for clearing off.
The slums of Haiti and Africa are a direct result of the progressive policies dictated by the IMF and the World Bank. This is why Haiti remained Haiti, and never became Taiwan. With liberal policies from the IMF and the World Bank, Zimbabwe will remain the Zimbabwe we know today, and will never become a Malaysia or Singapore, let alone a Switzerland. Tendai Biti needs to hear this message.
Only local protectionism will give Zimbabwe a comparative advantage to develop its economy. Foreign capital is no panacea to our woes. It is part of our woes and any sane Finance Minister must treat it as such.
We cannot elevate economic unconsciousness to the level of pure logic. The economic disasters brought upon Haitians by the US were described by the Reagan administration as an "encouraging step forward" - certainly forward for the looting foreigners and their Haitian elitist sidekicks, but a million steps backward for the masses of Haiti - robbed blind by insane corporations enjoying the protection of evil minded politicians.
So pleased was Reagan that he supported the Haitian legislature for passing a law requiring every political party to recognise president-for-life "Baby Doc" Duvalier as the supreme arbiter of the nation, outlawing the Christian Democrats, and granting the government the right to suspend the rights of any political party without giving reasons. This was the height of Reagan's "democracy enhancement," just like he had another fabulous achievement in Afghanistan, where he helped create the woman-hating Taliban government.
More than likely, Obama will create his own tyrannical regime in Libya, if only NATO will succeed in its resolve to publicly assassinate the Libyan leader so that the Al-Qaeda affiliated Benghazi rebels can take over power. These rebels are the Wahhaabist extremists who are inherently anti-West and also anti-woman freedom.
Reagan was so thrilled with Duvalier's model of democracy that his administration kept providing military aid to the vicious and venal dictator so that he could keep up his fabulous and successful democratising of Haiti, making all Haitians worship him by law.
Reagan had every reason to celebrate the democracy he had "enhanced" in Haiti. The law to recognise the president-for-life had passed through Parliament and had been ratified by a majority of 99,8 percent, quite close to the 99,9 percent achieved under Wilsonian idealism. What more democracy does can one expect?
It does not matter the Haitian Parliamentarians were bludgeoned by the system to vote the way they did. What mattered was they voted for the new law. Westerners are quite aware that client regimes can force through repressive laws for the master as much as they can do so for their own benefit. That is how puppet politics are carried out.
Then, there was Haiti's first free election in 1990. For the first time the impoverished majority entered the political arena and they elected their own candidate by a two thirds majority. This marked the beginning of the short era of the highly popular Jean Bertrand Aristide.
Aristide's victory shocked Washington and most observers. Not much attention had been paid to this man, with most observers pinning their hopes and opinions on the US-backed Marc Bazin, himself a former World Bank official. Of course Bazin had all the support from Haiti's wealthy elite, but he was not wanted in the slums and the Ghettoes.
For his troubles, Bazin received 14 percent of the vote, a clear sign of the kind of democracy the US had created under Duvalier - a democracy where the wishes of 14 percent of the population was treated as majority opinion. During Aristide's tenure there was an interesting development. Refugees started returning from the US and other parts of the world in a moment of meaningful hope. This was in stark contrast to the
Duvalier era where hundreds of thousands of refugees were fleeing terror and repression, only to be turned away by the US Coast Guard, when they were not bundled to Guantanamo Bay against both US and international laws.
The fewer people who still sought asylum when Aristide was in office were swiftly granted asylum visas, and, Washington happily announced that it was receiving refugees that were fleeing a democratic government that the US totally opposed, not the vicious Duvalier regime that the US supported. By shifting real democracy towards benefitting the impoverished masses, Aristide was drifting dangerously from the US orbit - adopting people-oriented policies that disadvantaged the rich US investors and the minority Haitian elites.
Washington typically responded by pouring aid to the business-led opposition and moving in to strangulate and undermine the Aristide government by numerous devices that always came in the name of "democracy promotion". By 1991 the CIA had succeeded in instituting a much anticipated military coup, killing thousands of Haitians in the process. The architect in chief of this massacre was Emmanuel Constant, the leader of the terrorist organisation Front pour I' Advancement et le Proges Haitien (FRAPH), who was to be later protected from prosecution by the Clinton administration, clearly because he knew too much to be allowed to reveal.
When Aristide was restored by the US in 1994, 160 000 pages of documentation were confiscated by the CIA "to avoid embarrassing revelations," according to Human Rights Watch. The restoration of Aristide was an act of Bill Clinton's discretion, after he had convinced himself that the Haitian population had been punished and intimidated enough, and that Aristide himself had been "civilised" by US instructors. The condition for the reinstatement was that Aristide would abandon his people-oriented policies and pursue neo-liberal policies, pretty much the very program that Washington had prepared for the US-backed candidate he had defeated in 1990. The greatest fear among Zimbabweans today is the instruction given to the MDC-T by Washington and other of its Western backers. It is the fear of these neo-liberal policies that makes the prospect of an MDC-T electoral victory a matter of national security.
Haiti was barred from providing any protection for its economy, and Zimbabweans rightfully fear for the fate of the land reform program and the indigenisation policies. Reversal of these policies is a possibility under an MDC-T government, though it is an unlikelihood. Democracy must be for and about the people in whose countries democracy is being talked about, not about the interests of Westerners, not even about the values from the West. Neither is democracy simply a matter of holding free and fair elections.
Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!
Reason Wafawarova is a political writer and can be contacted on wafawarova@yahoo.co.ukThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or reason@rwafa warova.com or visit www.rwafawarova.com
Labels: HAITI, JEAN BERTRAND ARISTIDE, MUAMMAR AL-GADDAFI, NEOCOLONIALISM, REASON WAFAWAROVA
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Aristide Should Be Allowed to Return to Haiti
Posted on Sunday, January 23 @ 13:12:05 AST
HaitiBy Mark Weisbrot
January 20, 2011 - bellinghamherald.com
Haiti's infamous dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier, returned to his country this week, while the country's first elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is kept out. These two facts really say everything about Washington's policy toward Haiti and our government's respect for democracy in that country and in the region.
Asked about the return of Duvalier, who had thousands tortured and murdered under his dictatorship, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said, "this is a matter for the Government of Haiti and the people of Haiti." But when asked about Aristide returning, he said, "Haiti does not need, at this point, any more burdens."
Wikileaks cables released in the last week show that Washington put pressure on Brazil, which is heading up the United Nations forces that are occupying Haiti, not only to keep Aristide out of the country but to keep him from having any political influence from exile.
Who is this dangerous man that Washington fears so much? Here is how the Washington Post editorial board described Aristide's first term, back in 1996:
"Elected overwhelmingly, ousted by a coup and reseated by American troops, the populist ex-priest abolished the repressive army, virtually ended human rights violations, mostly kept his promise to promote reconciliation, ran ragged but fair elections and, though he had the popular support to ignore it, honored his pledge to step down at the end of his term. A formidable record."
That was before the Post editorial board became neo-conservative, and most importantly before Washington launched its campaign to oust Aristide a second time. Together with its international allies, especially Canada and France, they cut off almost all foreign aid to the country after 2000. At the same time they poured in tens of millions of dollars – to build up an opposition movement. With control over most of the media, and the help of armed thugs, convicted murderers, and former death squad leaders, the broken and impoverished government was toppled in February of 2004.
The main difference between the 2004 coup and the 1991 coup that overthrew Aristide was that in 1991, President George H. W. Bush did not recognize the coup government, even though the people that installed it were paid by the CIA. They had to at least pretend they were not involved. But in 2004, under the second President Bush, they didn't even bother to hide it. This represents a degeneration of U.S. foreign policy.
I recently had a conversation with a long-time U.S. Congressman in which I pointed out Washington overthrew Aristide the second time, in 2004, because he had abolished the Haitian army. "That's right," he said.
Washington is a cynical place. The most important human rights organizations in this town did not do very much when thousands of Haitians were killed after the 2004 coup, and officials of the constitutional government were thrown in jail. And it does not seem to be an issue to them, or to the main "pro-democracy" organizations, here that Haiti's prominent former president is kept out of the country – in violation of Haiti's constitution and international law. Nor that his party, still the most popular in the country, is banned from participating in elections. The major media generally follows their lead.
Now we have elections in Haiti where the Organization of American States, at the behest of Washington, is trying to choose for Haiti who will compete in the second round of its presidential election. That is Washington's idea of democracy.
But Aristide is still alive, in forced exile in South Africa. He remains the most popular political leader in Haiti, and seven years is not enough to erase his memory from Haitian consciousness. Sooner or later, he will be back.
Mark Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: the Phony Crisis.
This column was originally published by Bellingham Herald.
Labels: HAITI, JEAN BERTRAND ARISTIDE, NEOCOLONIALISM
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Wikileaks Cables Show Why Washington Won't Allow Democracy in Haiti
by Mark Weisbrot
Published on Friday, December 17, 2010 by The Guardian/UK
The polarisation of the debate around WikiLeaks is pretty simple, really. Of all the governments in the world, the United States government is the greatest threat to world peace and security today. This is obvious to anyone who looks at the facts with a modicum of objectivity. The Iraq war has claimed certainly hundreds of thousands, and, most likely, more than a million lives. It was completely unnecessary and unjustifiable, and based on lies. Now, Washington is moving toward a military confrontation with Iran.
As Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, pointed out in an interview recently, in the preparation for a war with Iran, we are at about the level of 1998 in the buildup to the Iraq war.
On this basis, even ignoring the tremendous harm that Washington causes to developing countries in such areas as economic development (through such institutions as the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation), or climate change, it is clear that any information which sheds light on US "diplomacy" is more than useful. It has the potential to help save millions of human lives.
You either get this or you don't. Brazil's president Lula da Silva, who earned Washington's displeasure last May when he tried to help defuse the confrontation with Iran, gets it. That's why he defended and declared his "solidarity" with embattled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, even though the leaked cables were not pleasant reading for his own government.
One area of US foreign policy that the WikiLeaks cables help illuminate, which the major media has predictably ignored, is the occupation of Haiti. In 2004, the country's democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was overthrown for the second time, through an effort led by the United States government. Officials of the constitutional government were jailed and thousands of its supporters were killed.
The Haitian coup, besides being a repeat of Aristide's overthrow in 1991, was also very similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela in 2002 – which also had Washington's fingerprints all over it. Some of the same people in Washington were even involved in both efforts. But the Venezuelan coup failed – partly because Latin American governments immediately and forcefully declared that they would not recognise the coup government.
In the case of Haiti, Washington had learned from its mistakes in the Venezuelan coup and had gathered support for an illegitimate government in advance. A UN resolution was passed just days after the coup, and UN forces, headed by Brazil, were sent to the country. The mission is still headed by Brazil, and has troops from a number of other Latin American governments that are left of centre, including Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay. They are also joined by Chile, Peru and Guatemala from Latin America.
Would these governments have sent troops to occupy Venezuela if that coup had succeeded? Clearly, they would not have considered such a move, yet the occupation of Haiti is no more justifiable. South America's progressive governments have strongly challenged US foreign policy in the region and the world, with some of them regularly using words like imperialism and empire as synonyms for Washington. They have built new institutions such as UNASUR to prevent these kinds of abuses from the north. Bolivia expelled the US ambassador in September of 2008 for interfering in the country's internal affairs.
Is it because Haitians are poor and black that their most fundamental human and democratic rights can be trampled upon?
The participation of these governments in the occupation of Haiti is a serious political contradiction for them, and it is getting worse. The WikiLeaks cables illustrate how important the control of Haiti is to the United States. A long memo from the US embassy in Port-au-Prince to the US secretary of state answers detailed questions about Haitian president Rene Preval's political, personal and family life, including such vital national security questions as "How many drinks can Preval consume before he shows signs of inebriation?" It also expresses one of Washington's main concerns:
"His reflexive nationalism, and his disinterest in managing bilateral relations in a broad diplomatic sense, will lead to periodic frictions as we move forward our bilateral agenda. Case in point, we believe that in terms of foreign policy, Preval is most interested in gaining increased assistance from any available resource. He is likely to be tempted to frame his relationship with Venezuela and Chávez-allies in the hemisphere in a way that he hopes will create a competitive atmosphere as far as who can provide the most to Haiti."
This logic is why they got rid of Aristide – who was much to the left of Preval – and won't let him back in the country. This is why Washington funded the recent "elections" that excluded Haiti's largest political party, the equivalent of shutting out the Democrats and Republicans in the United States. And this is why Minustah is still occupying the country, more than six years after the coup, without any apparent mission other than replacing the hated Haitian army – which Aristide had abolished – as a repressive force.
People who do not understand US foreign policy think that control over Haiti does not matter to Washington, because it is so poor and has no strategic minerals or resources. But that is not how Washington operates, as the WikiLeaks cables repeatedly illustrate. For the state department and its allies, it is all a ruthless chess game, and every pawn matters. Left governments will be removed or prevented from taking power where it is possible to do so; and the poorest countries – like Honduras last year – present the most opportune targets. A democratically elected government in Haiti, due to its history and the consciousness of the population, will inevitably be a left government – and one that will not line up with Washington's foreign policy priorities for the region. Thus, democracy is not allowed.
Thousands of Haitians have been protesting the sham elections, as well as Minustah's role in causing the cholera epidemic, which has already taken more than 2,300 lives and can be expected to kill thousands more in the coming months and years. Judging from the rapid spread of the disease, there may have been gross criminal negligence on the part of Minustah – that is, large-scale dumping of fecal waste into the Artibonite river. This is another huge reason for the force to leave Haiti.
This is a mission that costs over $500m a year, when the UN can't even raise a third of that to fight the epidemic that the mission caused, or to provide clean water for Haitians. And now the UN is asking for an increase to over $850m.
It is high time that the progressive governments of Latin America quit this occupation, which goes against their own principles and deeply-held beliefs, and is against the will of the Haitian people.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), in Washington, DC.
Labels: HAITI, JEAN BERTRAND ARISTIDE, MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, NEOCOLONIALISM, WIKILEAKS
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An Interview with Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Peter Hallward
In the mid-1980s, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a parish priest working in an impoverished and embattled district of Port-au-Prince. He became the spokesman of a growing popular movement against the series of military regimes that ruled Haiti after the collapse in 1986 of the Duvalier dictatorship. In 1990 he won the country’s first democratic presidential election, with 67 per cent of the vote.
He was overthrown by a military coup in September 1991 and returned to power in 1994, after the US intervened to restore democratic government. In 1996 he was succeeded by his ally René Préval. Aristide won another landslide election victory in 2000, but the resistance of Haiti’s small ruling elite eventually culminated in a second coup against him, on the night of 28 February 2004. Since then, he has been living in exile in South Africa.
According to the best available estimates, around five thousand of Aristide’s supporters have died at the hands of the regime that replaced the constitutional government. Although the situation remains tense and UN troops still occupy the country, the worst of the violence came to an end in February 2006, when after an extraordinary electoral campaign, René Préval was himself re-elected in a landslide victory. Calls for Aristide’s immediate and unconditional return continue to polarise Haitian politics. Many commentators, including several prominent members of the current government, believe that if Aristide was free to stand for re-election he would win easily.
This interview was conducted in French, in Pretoria, on 20 July 2006.
Peter Hallward: Haiti is a profoundly divided country, and you have always been a profoundly divisive figure. For most of the 1990s many sympathetic observers found it easy to make sense of this division more or less along class lines: you were demonised by the rich, and idolised by the poor. But your second administration was dogged by accusations of violence and corruption. Although you remained the most popular politician among the electorate, you appeared to have lost much of the support you once enjoyed among aid-workers, activists, intellectuals and so on, both at home and abroad.
I’d like to ask about the process that first brought you to power. How do you account for the fact that, against the odds, and certainly against the wishes of the US, the military and the ruling establishment in Haiti, you were able to win the election of 1990?
Jean-Bertrand Aristide: Much of the work had already been done by people who came before me, people like Father Antoine Adrien and his co-workers, and Father Jean-Marie Vincent, who was assassinated in 1994. They had developed a progressive theological vision that resonated with the hopes and expectations of the Haitian people. Already in 1979 I was working in the context of liberation theology, and there is one phrase in particular that may help summarise my understanding of how things stood. The Conferencia de Puebla took place in Mexico in 1979, and several liberation theologians were threatened and barred from attending. The slogan I’m thinking of ran something like this: si el pueblo no va a Puebla, Puebla se quedará sin pueblo. ‘If the people cannot go to Puebla, Puebla will remain cut off from the people.’ In other words, it isn’t a matter of struggling for the people, on behalf of the people, at a distance from the people; it’s a matter of struggling with and in the midst of the people.
This ties in with a second principle: liberation theology can itself only be a phase in a broader process. The phase in which we may have to speak on behalf of the impoverished and the oppressed comes to an end as they start to speak in their own voice and with their own words. The whole process carries us a long way from paternalism, from any notion of a ‘saviour’ who might come to guide the people and solve their problems.
The emergence of the people as an organised public force was already taking place in Haiti in the 1980s, and by 1986 this force was strong enough to push the Duvalier dictatorship from power. It was a grass-roots movement, not a top-down project driven by a single leader or a single organisation. It wasn’t exclusively political, either. It took shape above all through the constitution, all over the country, of many small church communities or ti legliz. When I was elected president it wasn’t the election of a politician, or a conventional political party; it was an expression of the mobilisation of the people as a whole. For the first time, the national palace became a place not just for professional politicians but for the people. Welcoming people from the poorest sections of Haitian society within the centre of traditional power – this was a profoundly transformative gesture.
PH: The coup of September 1991 took place even though the policies you pursued once in office were quite moderate, quite cautious. So was a coup inevitable? Was the simple presence of someone like you in the presidential palace intolerable for the Haitian elite? And in that case, could more have been done to anticipate and try to withstand the backlash?
JBA: What happened in September 1991 happened again in February 2004, and could easily happen again soon, so long as the oligarchy who control the means of repression use them to preserve a hollow version of democracy. This is their obsession: to maintain a situation that might be called ‘democratic’, but which consists in fact of a superficial, imported democracy imposed and controlled from above. They’ve been able to keep things this way for a long time. Haiti has been independent for two hundred years, but we now live in a country in which just 1 per cent of the people control more than half of the wealth.
PH: For all its strength, the popular movement that carried you to the presidency wasn’t strong enough to keep you there. People sometimes compare you to Toussaint L’Ouverture, who won extraordinary victories under extraordinary constraints – but Toussaint is also often criticised for failing to go far enough. It was Dessalines who led the final fight for independence. How do you answer those who say you were too moderate, that you acted like Toussaint in a situation that really called for Dessalines? What do you say to those who claim you put too much faith in the US and its allies?
JBA: ‘Too much faith in the US’: that makes me smile. Toussaint L’Ouverture, as a man, had his limitations. But he did his best, and in reality he did not fail. He was captured, imprisoned and killed; but his example and his spirit still guide us now. These last two years, from 2004 to 2006, the Haitian people have continued to stand up for their dignity and refused to capitulate. On 6 July 2005, Cité Soleil was attacked and bombarded, but this, and many similar attacks, didn’t discourage people from insisting that their voices be heard. They spoke out against injustice. They voted for their president this past February; they won’t accept the imposition of another president from abroad or above.
This doesn’t mean that success is inevitable or easy, that powerful vested interests won’t try to do all they can to turn the clock back. Nevertheless, something irreversible has been achieved, something that works its way through the collective consciousness. This is the meaning of Toussaint’s famous claim, after he had been captured by the French, that they had cut down the trunk of the tree of liberty but that its roots remained deep.
As for Dessalines, the struggle that he led was armed, and necessarily so, since he had to break the bonds of slavery once and for all. But our struggle is different. It is Toussaint, rather than Dessalines, who can accompany the popular movement today. It’s this inspiration that was at work in the election victory of February 2006, which allowed the people to outmanoeuvre their opponents, to choose their own leader in the face of the powers that be.
Did we place too much trust in the Americans? Were we too dependent on external forces? No. It would be mere demagoguery for a Haitian president to pretend to be stronger than the Americans, or to engage them in a constant war of words, or to oppose them for opposing’s sake. The only rational course is to weigh up the relative balance of interests, to figure out what the Americans want, to remember what we want, and to make the most of the available points of convergence. In 1994, Clinton needed a foreign policy victory, and a return to democracy in Haiti offered him that opportunity; we needed an instrument to overcome the resistance of the murderous Haitian army, and Clinton offered us that instrument. We never had any illusions that the Americans shared our deeper objectives. But without them we couldn’t have restored democracy.
PH: There was no alternative to reliance on American troops?
JBA: No. The Haitian people are not armed. There are criminals and vagabonds, drug dealers, gangs who have weapons, but the people have no weapons. You’re kidding yourself if you think that the people can wage an armed struggle. It’s pointless to wage a struggle on your enemies’ terrain, or to play by their rules. You will lose.
PH: Did you pay too high a price for American support? They forced you to make all kinds of compromise, to accept many of the things you’d always opposed – a severe structural adjustment plan, neoliberal economic policies, the privatisation of state enterprises etc. The Haitian people suffered a great deal under these constraints. It must have been very difficult to swallow these things, during the negotiations of 1993.
JBA: In 1993, the Americans were perfectly happy to agree to a negotiated economic plan. When they insisted, via the IMF and other international financial institutions, on the privatisation of state enterprises, I was prepared to agree in principle – but I refused simply to sell them off, unconditionally, to private investors. That there was corruption in the state sector was undeniable, but there were several different ways of engaging with it. Rather than untrammelled privatisation, I was prepared to agree to a democratisation of these enterprises, so that some of the profits of a factory or firm should go to the people who worked for it, be invested in nearby schools or health clinics, so that the workers’ children could derive some benefit. The Americans said fine, no problem.
But when I was back in office, they went back on our agreement, and then relied on a disinformation campaign to make it look as if I had broken my word. It’s not true. The accords we signed are there, people can judge for themselves. Unfortunately we didn’t have the means to win the public relations fight.
PH: What about your battle with the Haitian army, the army that overthrew you in 1991? The Americans remade this army in 1915 in line with their own priorities, and it had acted as a force for the protection of those priorities ever since. You were able to disband it just months after your return in 1994, but the way it was handled remains controversial, and you were never able fully to demobilise and disarm the soldiers.
JBA: We had an army of some 7000 soldiers, and it absorbed 40 per cent of the national budget. Since 1915, it had served as an army of internal occupation. It never fought an external enemy. It murdered thousands of our people. Why did we need such an army, rather than a suitably trained police force?
We organised a social programme for the reintegration of disbanded soldiers. They too have the right to work, and the state has a responsibility to respect that right – all the more so when you know that if they don’t find work, they will be more easily tempted to turn to violence, or theft, as the Tontons Macoutes did. We did the best we could. The problem lay with the resentment of those who were determined to preserve the status quo. They had plenty of money and weapons, and they work hand in hand with the most powerful military machine on the planet. It was easy for them to win over some former soldiers, to train and equip them in the Dominican Republic and then use them to destabilise the country. But it wasn’t a mistake to disband the army. It’s not as if we might have avoided the second coup, in 2004, if we’d hung on to it. On the contrary, if the army had remained in place, René Préval would never have finished his first term in office, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to hold out for three years, from 2001 to 2004.
Unlike the previous coups, the coup of 2004 wasn’t undertaken by the ‘Haitian’ army, acting on the orders of our little oligarchy, in line with the interests of foreign powers. No, this time these all-powerful interests had to carry out the job themselves, with their own troops and in their own name.
PH: Did the creation of the Fanmi Lavalas party in 1996 serve a similar function, by helping to clarify the lines of internal conflict that had already fractured the loose coalition of forces that first brought you to power?[*] Almost the whole of Préval’s first administration was hampered by infighting. Did you set out, then, to create a unified, disciplined party, one that could deliver a coherent political programme?
JBA: No, that’s not the way it happened. In the first place, by training and by inclination I was a teacher, not a politician. I had no experience of party politics, and was happy to leave to others the task of developing a party organisation, of training party members, and so on. I was happy to leave this to career politicians, to people like Gérard Pierre-Charles, and along with others, he began working along these lines as soon as democracy was restored. He helped found the Organisation Politique Lavalas (OPL) and I encouraged people to join it. This party won the 1995 elections, and by the time I finished my term in office, in February 1996, it had a majority in parliament. But after the elections the OPL started to fall into the traditional patterns and practices of Haitian politics. It became more closed in on itself, more distant from the people, more willing to make empty promises. I was out of office, and stayed on the sidelines. But a group of priests who were active in the Lavalas movement became frustrated, and wanted to restore a more meaningful link with the people. At this point, in 1996, the group of those who felt this way, who were unhappy with the OPL, were known as la nébuleuse – they were in an uncertain and confusing position. Over time, more and more people became more and more dissatisfied with the situation.
We engaged in long discussions about what to do, and Fanmi Lavalas grew out of these discussions. It emerged from the people themselves. It never conceived of itself as a conventional political party. If you look through the organisation’s constitution, you’ll see that the word ‘party’ never comes up. In Haiti we don’t have a positive experience of political parties; parties have always been instruments of manipulation and betrayal. On the other hand, we have a long and positive experience of popular organisations – the ti legliz, for instance.
By 1997, Fanmi Lavalas had emerged as a functional organisation, with a clear constitution. In spite of the aid embargo we managed to accomplish certain things. We were able to invest in education, for instance. In 1990, there were only 34 secondary schools in Haiti; by 2001 there were 138. We built a new university at Tabarre, a new medical school. Although it had to run on a shoestring, the literacy programme we launched in 2001 was also working well; Cuban experts who helped us manage it were confident that by December 2004 we’d have reduced the rate of adult illiteracy to just 15 per cent, a small fraction of what it was a decade earlier. Previous governments had never seriously tried to invest in education, and it’s clear that our programme was always going to be a threat to the status quo. The elite want nothing to do with popular education, for obvious reasons.
PH: Fanmi Lavalas duly won an overwhelming victory in the legislative elections of May 2000, with around 75 per cent of the vote. But your enemies in the US and at home soon drew attention to the fact that the method used to calculate the number of votes needed to win some senate seats in a single round of voting (i.e. without the need for a run-off election between the two most popular candidates) was at least controversial, if not illegitimate. They jumped on this in order to cast doubt on the validity of the election victory itself, and used it to justify an immediate suspension of international loans and aid, which effectively cut your government’s budget in half. Soon after your own second term in office began in February 2001, the winners of these seats were persuaded to stand down, pending a further round of elections. Wouldn’t it have been better to resolve the matter more quickly, to avoid giving the Americans a pretext to undermine your administration before it even began?
JBA: You say that we ‘gave’ the Americans a pretext. In reality the Americans created their own pretext, and if it hadn’t been this it would have been something else. It took the US 58 years to recognise Haiti’s independence. Their priorities haven’t changed, and today’s American policy is more or less consistent with the way it’s always been. The coup of September 1991 was undertaken with the support of the US administration, and in February 2004 it happened again, thanks to many of the same people.
The US was having trouble persuading the other leaders in Caricom [the Caribbean Community and Common Market] to turn against us (they were never able to persuade many of them), and they needed a pretext that was easy to understand. ‘Tainted elections’ was the perfect card to play. But when they came to observe the elections, they said ‘very good, no problem’: the process was judged peaceful and fair. And then as the results came in, in order to undermine our victory, they asked questions about the way the votes were counted. But I had nothing to do with this. I wasn’t a member of the government, and I had no influence over the Provisional Electoral Council, which alone has the authority to decide on these matters. The CEP is a sovereign, independent body. Then, once I had been re-elected, and the Americans demanded that I dismiss these senators, what was I supposed to do? The constitution doesn’t give the president the power to dismiss senators who were elected in keeping with the protocol decided by the CEP. Can you imagine a situation like this in the US? What would happen if a foreign government insisted that the president dismiss an elected senator? It’s absurd. The whole situation is simply racist; they impose conditions on us that they would never contemplate imposing on a ‘properly’ independent country, on a white country.
The Americans wanted to use the legislature against the executive. They hoped that I would be stupid enough to insist on the dismissal of the senators. I refused. In 2001, as a gesture of goodwill, the senators chose to resign on the assumption that they would contest new elections as soon as the opposition was prepared to participate in them. But the Americans failed to turn the senate and the parliament against the presidency, and it soon became clear that the opposition had no interest in new elections. Once this tactic failed, however, the US recruited or bought off a few hotheads, including Dany Toussaint and company, and used them, a little later, against the presidency.
PH: In the press, meanwhile, you came to be presented not as the unequivocal winner of legitimate elections, but as an increasingly tyrannical autocrat.
JBA: Exactly. A lot of the $200 million or so in aid and development money that was suspended when we won the elections in 2000 was diverted to a propaganda and destabilisation campaign waged against our government and against Fanmi Lavalas.
PH: Soon after the results were declared in May 2000, the head of the CEP, Leon Manus, fled the country, claiming that the results were invalid and that you and Préval had put pressure on him to calculate the votes in a particular way. Why did he come to embrace the American line?
JBA: Well, I don’t want to judge Leon Manus. I don’t know what happened exactly. But I think he acted in the same way as some of the leaders of the Group of 184.[†] They are beholden to a patrón, a boss. The boss is American, a white American; and you are black. Don’t underestimate the inferiority complex that still so often conditions these relationships. You are black, but sometimes you get to feel whiter than white, if you’re willing to get down on your knees in front of the whites. This is a psychological legacy of slavery: to lie for the white man isn’t really lying at all, since white men don’t lie [laughs]. If I lie for the whites I’m not really lying, I’m just repeating what they say. So I imagine Leon Manus felt like this when he repeated the lie that they wanted him to repeat. Don’t forget, his journey out of the country began in a car with diplomatic plates, and he arrived in Santo Domingo on an American helicopter.
PH: Why were these people so aggressively hostile to you and your government? There’s something hysterical about the positions taken by the so-called Convergence Démocratique, and later by the Group of 184, by people like Gérard Pierre-Charles. They refused all compromise, they insisted on all sorts of conditions before they would even consider participating in another round of elections. The Americans seemed exasperated with them, but made no real effort to rein them in.
JBA: It was never really about me, it’s got nothing to do with me as an individual. They detest and despise the people. They refuse absolutely to acknowledge that everyone is equal. So when they behave in this way, part of the reason is to reassure themselves that they are different. It’s essential that they see themselves as better than others. I’m convinced it’s bound up with the legacy of slavery, with an inherited contempt for the common people, for the petits nègres. It’s the psychology of apartheid: it’s better to get down on your knees with whites than to stand shoulder to shoulder with blacks. Don’t underestimate the depth of this contempt. One of the first things we did in 1991 was abolish the classification, on birth certificates, of people who were born outside Port-au-Prince as ‘peasants’. This kind of classification, and all sorts of things that went along with it, served to maintain a system of rigid exclusion. It served to keep people out, to treat them as moun andeyo – ‘people from outside’. People under the table. This is what I mean by the mentality of apartheid, and it runs very deep.
PH: What about your own willingness to work alongside people compromised by their past, for instance your inclusion of former Duvalierists in your second administration? Was that an easy decision to take?
JBA: No it wasn’t easy, but I saw it as a necessary evil. Take Marc Bazin, for instance. He was minister of finance under Duvalier. I only turned to Bazin because my opponents in Convergence Démocratique, in the OPL and so on, refused to participate in the government.
Their objective was to scupper the entire process, and they said no straightaway. I wanted a democratic government, and so I set out to make it as inclusive as I could, under the circumstances. Since the Convergence wasn’t willing to participate, I invited people from sectors that had little or no representation in parliament to have a voice in the administration, to occupy some ministerial positions and to keep a balance between the legislative and executive branches of government.
PH: This must have been very controversial. Bazin not only worked for Duvalier, he was your opponent back in 1990.
JBA: Yes, it was controversial, and I didn’t take the decision alone. We talked about it at length, we held meetings, looking for a compromise. Some were for, some were against, and in the end there was a majority who accepted that we couldn’t afford to work alone, that we needed to demonstrate we were willing and able to work with people who clearly weren’t pro-Lavalas. We had already published a well-defined political programme, and if they were willing to co-operate on this or that aspect, then we were willing to work with them.
PH: You were often accused of being intolerant of dissent, too determined to get your own way. But what do you say to those who argue instead that the real problem was just the opposite, that you were too tolerant? You allowed ex-soldiers to call openly and repeatedly for the reconstitution of the army. You allowed self-appointed leaders of ‘civil society’ to do everything in their power to disrupt your government. You allowed radio stations to sustain a relentless campaign of disinformation. You allowed demonstrations to go on day after day, calling for you to be overthrown, and many of the demonstrators were directly funded and organised by your enemies in the US.
JBA: Well, this is what democracy requires. Either you allow for the free expression of diverse opinions or you don’t. If people aren’t free to demonstrate and to give voice to their demands there is no democracy. I knew our position was strong in parliament, and that the great majority of the people were behind us. A small minority opposed us. Their foreign connections, their business interests, and so on, make them powerful. Nevertheless they have the right to protest, to articulate their demands, just like anyone else.
PH: The most serious and frequent accusation that was made by the demonstrators, and repeated by your critics abroad, is that you resorted to violence in order to hang on to power, that, as the pressure on your government grew, you started to rely on armed gangs from the slums, so-called chimères, and used them to intimidate and in some cases murder your opponents.
JBA: As soon as you look rationally at what was going on, these accusations don’t even begin to stand up. Several things have to be kept in mind. First of all, the police had been working under an embargo for several years. We weren’t able to buy bullet-proof vests or tear-gas canisters. The police were severely underequipped, and were often simply unable to control a demonstration or confrontation. Some of our opponents, some of the demonstrators who sought to provoke violent confrontations, knew this perfectly well. It was common knowledge that while the police were running out of ammunition and supplies, heavy weapons were being smuggled to our opponents through the Dominican Republic. The people knew this, and didn’t like it. They started getting nervous, with good reason. The provocations didn’t let up, and there were isolated acts of violence. Was this violence justified? No. I condemned it. I condemned it consistently. But with the limited means at our disposal, how could we prevent every outbreak of violence? There was a lot of provocation, a lot of anger, and there was no way that we could ensure that each and every citizen would refuse violence. But there was never any deliberate encouragement of violence.
As for the chimères, this is clearly another expression of our apartheid mentality, the word says it all. Chimères are people who are impoverished, who live in a state of profound insecurity and chronic unemployment. They are the victims of structural injustice, of systematic social violence. And they are among the people who voted for this government, who appreciated what the government was doing and had done, in spite of the embargo. It’s not surprising that they should confront those who have always benefited from this same social violence, once those people had started actively seeking to undermine their government.
Again, this doesn’t justify occasional acts of violence, but where does the real responsibility lie? Who are the real victims of violence here? How many members of the elite, how many members of the opposition’s many political parties, were killed by chimères? How many? Who are they? Meanwhile, powerful economic interests were quite happy to fund criminal gangs, to put weapons in the hands of vagabonds, in Cité Soleil and elsewhere, in order to create disorder and blame it on Fanmi Lavalas. These same people also paid journalists to present the situation in a certain way, and among other things promised them visas – recently, some of them who are now living in France admitted having been told what to say in order to get their visas. So you have people who were financing misinformation, on the one hand, and destabilisation, on the other, and who encouraged small groups of hoodlums to sow panic on the streets, to create the impression of a government losing control.
As if all this wasn’t enough, rather than allow police munitions to get through to Haiti, rather than send arms and equipment to strengthen the government, the Americans sent them to their proxies in the Dominican Republic instead. You only have to look at who these people were – people like Jodel Chamblain, a convicted criminal, who escaped justice in Haiti to be welcomed by the US, and who then armed and financed these ‘freedom fighters’ waiting over the border in the Dominican Republic. That’s what really happened. We didn’t arm the chimères, the US armed Chamblain and Philippe. The hypocrisy is extraordinary. And then when it comes to 2004-6, suddenly all this indignant talk of violence falls silent. As if nothing had happened. People were being herded into containers and dropped into the sea. That counts for nothing. The endless attacks on Cité Soleil, they count for nothing. I could go on and on. Thousands have died. But they don’t count, because they are just chimères, after all.
PH: What about people in your entourage such as Dany Toussaint, your former chief of security, who was accused of all kinds of violence and intimidation?
JBA: He was working for them from the beginning, and we were taken in. Of course I regret this. But it wasn’t hard for the Americans or their proxies to infiltrate the government, to infiltrate the police. We weren’t able to provide the police with the equipment they needed, we could hardly pay them an adequate salary. It was easy for our opponents to stir up trouble, to co-opt some policemen. This was incredibly difficult to control.
PH: Dany Toussaint wasn’t willing to talk to me when I was in Port-au-Prince a couple of months ago. It’s intriguing that the people who were clamouring for his arrest while you were still in power were then suddenly quite happy to leave him in peace once he had come out against you in December 2003, and once they themselves were in power. But can you prove that he was working for or with them all along?
JBA: It won’t be easy to document, I accept that. There’s a proverb in Creole that says twou manti pa fon: ‘lies don’t run very deep.’ Sooner or later the truth will out. There are plenty of things that were happening at the time that only recently have started to come to light.
PH: You mean things like the eventual public admissions, made over the past year or so by the rebel leaders Remissainthe Ravix and Guy Philippe, about the extent of their long-standing collaboration with the Convergence Démocratique, with the Americans?
JBA: Exactly.
PH: Let’s turn now to what happened in February 2004. There are wildly different versions of what happened in the run-up to your expulsion from the country. How much support did Guy Philippe’s rebels really have? And surely there was little chance that they could take the capital itself, in the face of the many thousands of people who were ready to defend it?
JBA: There had been recent attempts at a coup, one in July 2001, with an attack on the police academy, and another a few months later, in December 2001, with an incursion into the national palace. They didn’t succeed, and on both occasions the rebels were forced to flee the city. They only just managed to escape. It wasn’t the police alone who chased them away, it was a combination of the police and the people. So the rebels knew they couldn’t take Port-au-Prince. So they hesitated, on the outskirts, some 40 kilometres away. We had nothing to fear. The balance of forces was in our favour. There are occasions when large groups of people are more powerful than heavy machine-guns and automatic weapons. And Port-au-Prince, a city with so many national and international interests, was different from more isolated places like Saint-Marc or Gonaïves. There was no great insurrection: there was a small group of soldiers, heavily armed, who were able to overwhelm some police stations, kill some policemen and create a certain amount of havoc. The police had run out of ammunition, and were no match for the rebels’ M16s. But the city was a different story. The people were ready, and I wasn’t worried.
Meanwhile, on 29 February a shipment of police munitions that we had bought from South Africa, perfectly legally, was due to arrive in Port-au-Prince. This decided the matter. Already the balance of forces was against the rebels; on top of that, if the police were restored to something like their full operational capacity, then the rebels stood no chance.
PH: So at that point the Americans had no option but to go in and get you themselves, on the night of 28 February?
JBA: That’s right. They knew that in a few more hours, they would lose their opportunity to ‘resolve’ the situation. They grabbed their chance while they had it, and bundled us onto a plane in the middle of the night.
PH: The Americans – Ambassador Foley, Luis Moreno and so on – insist that you begged for their help, that they had to arrange a flight to safety at the last minute. Several reporters backed up their account. On the other hand, speaking on condition of anonymity, one of the American security guards who was on your plane that night told the Washington Post soon after the event that the US story was ‘just bogus’. Your personal security director, Frantz Gabriel, also confirms that you were kidnapped that night by US military personnel. Who are we supposed to believe?
JBA: You’re dealing with a country that was willing and able, in front of the UN and in front of the world at large, to fabricate claims about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They were willing to lie about issues of global importance. It’s hardly surprising that they were able to find a few people to say the things that needed to be said in Haiti, in a small country of no great strategic significance.
PH: They said they couldn’t send peacekeepers to help stabilise the situation, but as soon as you were gone, the troops arrived straightaway.
JBA: The plan was perfectly clear.
PH: In August and September 2005, in the run-up to the elections that finally took place in February 2006, there was a lot of discussion within Fanmi Lavalas about how to proceed. In the end, most of the rank and file threw their weight behind your old colleague, your ‘twin brother’ René Préval, but some members of the leadership opted to stand as candidates in their own right; others were even prepared to endorse Marc Bazin’s candidacy. It was a confusing situation, one that must have put great strain on the organisation, but you kept very quiet.
JBA: When we had to choose the electoral candidates for Fanmi Lavalas in 1999, the discussions at the Foundation [the Aristide Foundation for Democracy] would often run long into the night. Delegations would come from all over the country, and members of the cellules de base would argue for or against. Often it wasn’t easy to find a compromise, but this is how the process worked. So when it came to deciding on a new presidential candidate last year, I was confident that the discussion would proceed in the same way, even though by that stage many members of the organisation had been killed, and many more were in hiding, in exile or in prison. I made no declaration one way or another about what to do or who to support. I knew they would make the right decision in their own way. A lot of the things ‘I’ decided, as president, were in reality decided this way: the decision didn’t originate with me, but with them. It was with their words that I spoke.
PH: How do you envisage the future? Can there be any real change in Haiti without directly confronting the question of class privilege and power, without finding some way of overcoming the resistance of the dominant class?
JBA: We will have to confront these things, one way or another. The sine qua non for doing this is obviously the participation of the people. Once the people are genuinely able to participate in the democratic process, then they will be able to devise an acceptable way forward. In any case the process itself is irreversible. It’s irreversible at the mental level. Members of the impoverished sections of Haitian society now have an experience of democracy, and they will not allow a government or a candidate to be imposed on them. They demonstrated this in February 2006, and I know they will keep on demonstrating it. Everything comes back, in the end, to the simple principle that tout moun se moun – every person is indeed a person, every person is capable of thinking things through for themselves. Those who don’t accept this, when they look at the nègres of Haiti – and consciously or unconsciously, that’s what they see – they see people who are too poor, too crude, too uneducated, to think for themselves. They see people who need others to make their decisions for them. It’s a colonial mentality, in fact, and still very widespread among our political class. It’s also a projection: they project onto the people a sense of their own inadequacy, their own inequality in the eyes of the master.
February 2006 shows how much has been gained, it shows how far down the path of democracy we have come, even after the coup, even after two years of ferocious violence and repression. What remains unclear is how long it will take. We may move forward fairly quickly, if through their mobilisation the people encounter interlocutors who are willing to listen, to enter into dialogue with them. If they don’t find them, it will take longer. From 1993 to 1994, for instance, there were people in the US government who were willing to listen at least a little, and this helped the democratic process to move forward. Since 2000 we’ve had to deal with a US administration that is diametrically opposed to its predecessor, and everything slowed down dramatically, or went into reverse. The problem isn’t simply a Haitian one. We still need to develop new ways of reducing and eventually eliminating our dependence on foreign powers.
PH: And your own next step? I know you’re still hoping to get back to Haiti as soon as possible: any progress there? What are your own priorities now?
JBA: It’s a matter of judging when the time is right, of judging the security and stability of the situation. The South African government has welcomed us here as guests, not as exiles; by helping us so generously they have made their contribution to peace and stability in Haiti. And once the conditions are right we’ll go back. As soon as René Préval judges that the time is right then I’ll go back.
PH: You have no further plans to play some sort of role in politics?
JBA: I’ve often been asked this question, and my answer hasn’t changed. There are different ways of serving the people. Participation in the politics of the state isn’t the only way. Before 1990 I served the people, from outside the structure of the state. I will serve the people again, from outside the structure of the state. My first vocation was teaching. One of the great achievements of our second administration was the construction of the University of Tabarre, which was built entirely under embargo but in terms of its infrastructure became the largest university in Haiti (since 2004, it has been occupied by foreign troops). I would like to go back to teaching. As for politics, I never had any interest in becoming a political leader ‘for life’. That was Duvalier: president for life. A political organisation consists of its members, it isn’t the instrument of one man. Fanmi Lavalas needs to become more professional, it needs to have more internal discipline; the democratic process needs properly functional political parties, parties in the plural. So I will not dominate or lead the organisation, that is not my role, but I will contribute what I can.
Notes
* Lavalas is a Creole word meaning ‘flood’, ‘avalanche’, a ‘mass of people’ or ‘everyone together’. Fanmi means ‘family’.
† A group of businessmen and professionals, backed and organised by the International Republican Institute, which was founded in December 2002 more or less explicitly to get rid of Aristide.
Peter Hallward teaches philosophy at Middlesex University. Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment is due this summer. His interview with Aristide appears here in his translation from French.
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Labels: HAITI, INTERVIEW, JEAN BERTRAND ARISTIDE, NEOCOLONIALISM, NEOLIBERALISM
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Who removed Aristide?
Paul Farmer reports from Haiti
On the night of 28 February, the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was forced from power. He claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa’. He found himself in the Central African Republic.
An understanding of the current crisis requires a sense of Haiti’s history. In the 18th century it became France’s most valuable colonial possession, and one of the most brutally efficient slave colonies there has ever been. Santo Domingo, as it was then called, was the leading port of call for slave ships: on the eve of the French Revolution, it was supplying two-thirds of all of Europe’s tropical produce. A third of new arrivals died within a few years.
Haitians are still living with the legacy of the slave trade and of the revolt that finally removed the French. The revolt began in 1791, and more than a decade of war followed; France’s largest expeditionary force, led by General Leclerc, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, was sent to put down the rebellion. As the French operation flagged, the slave general, Toussaint l’Ouverture, was invited to a parley. He was kidnapped and taken away to a prison in the Jura. In Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution,[*] Laurent Dubois tells Toussaint’s story in a manner that reminds us of its similarities to the current situation:
‘Toussaint must not be free,’ Leclerc wrote to the colonial minister in Paris at the time, ‘and should be imprisoned in the interior of the Republic. May he never see Saint-Domingue again.’ ‘You cannot hold Toussaint far enough from the ocean or put him in a prison that is too strong,’ Leclerc reiterated a month later. He seemed to fear that the deported man might suddenly reappear. His very presence in the colony, he warned, would once again set it alight.
Toussaint died of exposure and tuberculosis in 1803. Every Haitian schoolchild knows his last words by heart: ‘In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San Domingo only the trunk of the tree of black liberty. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep.’
In November 1803 the former slaves won what proved to be the war’s final battle, and on 1 January 1804 declared the independent republic of Haiti. It was Latin America’s first independent country and the only nation ever born of a slave revolt. The Haitian Revolution, Dubois writes, was ‘a dramatic challenge to the world as it then was. Slavery was at the heart of the thriving system of merchant capitalism that was profiting Europe, devastating Africa, and propelling the rapid expansion of the Americas.’ Independent Haiti had few friends. Virtually all the world’s powers sided with France against the self-proclaimed Black Republic, which declared itself a haven not only for runaway slaves but also for indigenous people from the rest of the Americas (the true natives of Haiti had succumbed to infectious disease and Spanish slavery well before the arrival of the French). Hemmed in by slave colonies, Haiti had only one non-colonised neighbour, the slaveholding United States, which refused to recognise its independence.
Haiti’s leaders were desperate for recognition, since the island’s only source of revenue was the sugar, coffee, cotton and other tropical produce it had to sell. In 1825, under threat of another French invasion and the restoration of slavery, Haitian officials signed the document which was to prove the beginning of the end for any hope of autonomy. The French king agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half. The ‘debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the slaves when they deprived the French owners not only of land and equipment but of their human ‘property’.
The impact of the debt repayments – which continued until after World War Two – was devastating. In the words of the Haitian anthropologist Jean Price-Mars, ‘the incompetence and frivolity of its leaders’ had ‘turned a country whose revenues and outflows had been balanced up to then into a nation burdened with debt and trapped in financial obligations that could never be satisfied.’ ‘Imposing an indemnity on the victorious slaves was equivalent to making them pay with money that which they had already paid with their blood,’ the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher argued.
By the late 19th century, the United States had eclipsed France as a force in Haitian affairs. A US military occupation (1915-34) brought back corvée labour and introduced bombing from the air, while officials in Washington created the institutions that Haitians would have to live with: the army, above all, which now claims to have the country ‘in its hands’, was created by an act of the US Congress. Demobilised by Aristide in 1995, it never knew a non-Haitian enemy. It had plenty of internal enemies, however. Military-backed governments, dictatorships, chronic instability, repression, the heavy hand of Washington over all: this state of affairs continued throughout the 20th century.
I learned about Haiti’s history while working on medical projects on the country’s central plateau. When I first travelled there in 1983, the Duvalier family dictatorship had been in place for a quarter of a century. There was no dissent. The Duvaliers and their military dealt ruthlessly with any opposition, while the judiciary and the rest of the world looked the other way. Haiti was already known as the poorest country in the Western world, and those who ran it argued that force was required to police deep poverty.
By the mid-1980s, the hunger, despair and disease were beyond management. Baby Doc Duvalier, named ‘president for life’ at 19, fled in 1986. A first attempt at democratic elections, in 1987, led to massacres at polling stations. An army general declared himself in charge. In September 1988, the mayor of Port-au-Prince – a former military officer – paid a gang to set fire to a Catholic church as mass was being said. It was packed with people, 12 of whom died. At the altar was Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the nemesis of the dictatorship and the army. Aristide was a proponent of liberation theology, with its injunction that the Church proclaim ‘a preferential option for the poor’, but liberation theology had its adversaries: members of Reagan’s brains trust, meeting in 1980, declared it less Christian than Communist. ‘US policy,’ they said, ‘must begin to counter (not react against) . . . the "liberation theology” clergy.’
Aristide’s elevation from slum priest to presidential candidate took place against a background of right-wing death squads and threatened military coups. He rose quickly in the eyes of Haitians, but his stock plummeted in the United States. The New York Times, which relies heavily on informants who can speak English or French, had few kind words for him. ‘He’s a cross between the Ayatollah and Fidel,’ one Haitian businessman was quoted as saying. ‘If it comes to a choice between the ultra-left and the ultra-right, I’m ready to form an alliance with the ultra-right.’ Haitians knew, however, that Aristide would win any democratic election, and on 16 December 1990, he got 67 per cent of the vote in a field of 12 candidates. No run-off was required.
The United States might not have been able to prevent Aristide’s landslide victory, but there was plenty they could do to undermine him. The most effective method, adopted by the first Bush administration, was to fund both the opposition – their poor showing at the polls was no reason, it appears, to cut off aid to them – and the military. Declassified records now make it clear that the CIA and other US groups helped to create and fund a paramilitary group called FRAPH, which rose to prominence after a military coup that ousted Aristide in September 1991. Thousands of civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands fled overseas or across the border into the Dominican Republic. For the next three years Haiti was run by military-civilian juntas as ruthless as the Duvaliers.
In October 1994, under Clinton, the US military intervened and restored Aristide to power, with a little over a year of his term left to run. Although authorised by the UN, the restoration was basically a US operation. Then, seven weeks after Aristide’s return, Republicans took control of the Congress, and influential Republicans have worked ever since to block aid to Haiti or burden it with preconditions.
The aid coming through official channels was never very substantial: the US gave Haiti, per capita, one tenth of what it distributed in Kosovo. It is true that, as former US ambassadors and the Bush administration have recently claimed, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into Haiti – but not to the elected government. A great deal of it went to the anti-Aristide opposition. A lot also went to pay for the UN occupation, and Halliburton support services. There was little effort to rebuild schools, the healthcare infrastructure, roads, ports, telecommunications or airports.
During his few months in office, Aristide, in part because of the abolition of the Haitian army, became in 1996 the first elected civilian to see another elected civilian – René Préval – succeed him as president of Latin America’s oldest republic. Préval in turn became Haiti’s first president ever to serve out his term, not a day more or less. In November 2000, Aristide was again elected by a landslide. But problems had already arisen. In the local and parliamentary elections in May, eight parliamentary seats were disputed and when the political opposition cried foul, the US froze international aid. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), for example, had approved four loans, for health, education, drinking water and road improvement. Haitian and American sources have confirmed to me that the US asked the bank to block the loans until the electoral disputes had been worked out. Since seven of the senators in question resigned in 2001, and the other’s term expired shortly thereafter, that should have been the end of the aid freeze, yet it continued throughout Aristide’s tenure.
The State Department later claimed that the freeze was decided on by a consensus of the members of the Organisation of American States in something called the Declaration of Quebec City. The declaration is dated 22 April 2001, and the letter from the US representative asking that the loans not be disbursed was dated 8 April. To quote the conclusion of one of the few journalists to find this scandal worthy of inquiry, ‘it would seem that the effort became concerted after it was made.’
International financial institutions engaged in discriminatory and probably illegal practices towards Haiti. According to the London-based Haiti Support Group,
Haiti’s debt to international financial institutions and foreign governments has grown from $302 million in 1980 to $1.134 billion today. About 40 per cent of this debt stems from loans to the brutal Duvalier dictators, who invested precious little of it in the country. This is known as ‘odious debt’ because it was used to oppress the people, and, according to international law, this debt need not be repaid.
Yet in order to meet the renewed demands of the IDB, the cash-strapped Haitian government was required to pay ever-expanding arrears on its debts, many of them linked to loans paid out to the Duvalier dictatorship and to the military regimes that ruled Haiti with great brutality from 1986 to 1990. In July 2003, Haiti sent more than 90 per cent of all its foreign reserves to Washington to pay off these arrears. As of today, less than $4 million of the four blocked loans – which totalled $146 million – has reached Haiti in spite of many assurances from the IDB.
Even so it was not until last month that one could read in a US daily newspaper that the aid freeze might have contributed to the overthrow of the penniless Haitian government. On 7 March, the Boston Globe wrote:
Today, Haiti’s government, which serves eight million people, has an annual budget of about $300 million – less than that of Cambridge, a city of just over 100,000. And as Haitians attempt to form a new government, many say its success will largely depend on how much and how soon aid will flow to the country . . . Many of Aristide’s supporters, in Haiti and abroad, angrily contend that the international community, particularly the United States, abandoned the fledgling democracy when it needed aid the most. Many believe that Aristide himself was the target of the de facto economic sanctions, just as Haiti was beginning to put its finances back in order.
That the US and France undermined Aristide is not a fringe opinion. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the African Union have called for a formal investigation into his removal. ‘Most people around the world believe that Aristide’s departure was at best facilitated, at worst coerced by the US and France,’ Gayle Smith, a member of the National Security Council staff under Clinton, recently said.
Why such animus towards Haiti’s leader? Taking up the question of the historic French debt, Aristide declared that France ‘extorted this money from Haiti by force and . . . should give it back to us so that we can build primary schools, primary healthcare, water systems and roads.’ He did the maths, adding in interest and adjusting for inflation, to calculate that France owes Haiti $21,685,135,571.48 and counting. This figure was scoffed at by some of the French, who saw the whole affair as a farce mounted by their disgruntled former subjects; others, it’s increasingly clear, were insulted or angered when the point was pressed in diplomatic and legal circles.
Still, Aristide kept up the pressure. The figure of $21 billion was repeated again and again. The number 21 appeared all over the place in Haiti, along with the word ‘restitution’. On 1 January this year, during the bicentennial celebrations, Aristide announced he would replace a 21-gun salute with a list of the 21 things that had been done in spite of the embargo and that would be done when restitution was made. The crowd went wild. The French press by and large dismissed his comments as silly, despite the legal merits of his case. Many Haitians saw Aristide as a modern Toussaint l’Ouverture, a comparison that Aristide did not discourage. ‘Toussaint was undone by foreign powers,’ Madison Smartt Bell wrote in Harper’s in January, ‘and Aristide also had suffered plenty of vexation from outside interference.’
It’s usually easy to tell, in even the briefest conversation about Aristide, how your interlocutor feels about him. Opinion in Haiti is almost always referred to as ‘polarised’ in the US press, but this isn’t true in every sense. Elections and polls, even recent ones, show that the poor majority still support Aristide. It’s the middle classes and the traditional political elites who disagree about him, as well as people like me: non-Haitians who, for whatever reasons, concern themselves with that country’s affairs.
Between the coup that followed Aristide’s inauguration and his return to Haiti, the coverage in the US was of the same character as today’s. On 22 September 1994, the New York Times ran a front-page piece called ‘The Mouse that Roared’. From it, we get a keen sense of Aristide as irritant:
The Clinton crowd has had to work hard to justify him to lawmakers who were unnerved by the October 1993 closed-door CIA briefing to Congress, in which the intelligence agency offered information – later proven false – that Father Aristide had received psychiatric treatment at a Montreal hospital in 1980. Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, left the briefing and branded him a ‘psychopath’ – a slur it has been hard for Father Aristide to get over.
It would be convenient for the traditional Haitian elites and their allies abroad if Aristide, who has been forced to preside over unimaginable penury, had been abandoned by his own people. But Gallup polls in 2002, the results of which were never disseminated, showed that, despite his faults, he is far and away Haiti’s most popular and trusted politician. So what is to be done about the people who, to the horror of the Republican right, keep voting for him?
The protégés of Jesse Helms have had more say in Aristide’s fate than the Haitian electorate have. Although US officials stated initially that he had been ‘taken to the country of his choice’ at the end of February, Aristide’s claim that he had no idea where he was going seems more plausible. He had never been to the Central African Republic before. About the size of Texas and with a population of only three million, it is subject to French military and economic interests. A BBC story in March 2003 reported that the capital, Bangui, was the world’s most dangerous city, while the US advises its citizens not to travel to the country; the US embassy was closed two years ago.
On the tarmac, Aristide thanked the Africans for their hospitality, and then said: ‘I declare in overthrowing me they have uprooted the trunk of the tree of peace, but it will grow back because the roots are l’Ouverturian.’
The Bush administration appears to have put two men in charge of Latin American diplomacy, and they’ve been at it for a long time. As the ‘special presidential envoy to the western hemisphere’, Otto Reich is the top US diplomat in the region, even though he has never survived a House or Senate hearing; he was given the post by Bush during a Congressional recess. In the 1990s, Reich was a lobbyist for industry (one beneficiary of his work: Lockheed Martin, who have been selling fighter planes to Chile); before that he had a long record of government service.
During the civil war in Nicaragua, according to William Finnegan in a New Yorker profile, Reich
headed a Contra-support programme that operated out of an outfit called the Office of Public Diplomacy. The office arranged speeches and recommended books to school libraries, but also leaked false stories to the press – that, for instance, the Sandinista government was receiving Soviet MiG fighters, or was involved in drug trafficking . . . The office employed army psychological-warfare specialists, and worked closely with Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, at the National Security Council.
During the course of the Iran-Contra investigation, the US comptroller general concluded that Reich’s office had ‘engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities’. But by then Reich had been named US ambassador to Venezuela, where he laid the groundwork for future efforts to destabilise President Chávez. Not all this activity is covert: less than a year ago, Reich was on record welcoming a coup against Chávez, and urging the State Department and opinion makers to support the ‘new government’. The only problem was that the Venezuelan majority failed to fall into step, and Chávez remained.
Last month, the Bush administration sent Roger Noriega to Haiti to ‘work out’ the crisis. Not everyone knew who he was: Noriega’s career has been spent in the shadows of Congressional committees. For the better part of a decade, he worked for Helms and his allies, and it’s no secret he has had Aristide in his sights for years. US Haiti policy is determined by a small number of people who were prominent in either Reagan’s or George H.W. Bush’s cabinets. Most are back in government today after an eight-year vacation in conservative think tanks or lobbying firms. Elliot Abrams, convicted of withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra hearings, serves on the National Security Council; Reagan’s national security adviser John Poindexter until recently headed the Pentagon’s new counterterrorism unit; John Negroponte, former ambassador to Honduras, is now ambassador to the UN. Jeanne Kirkpatrick is on the board of the International Republican Institute, a body which has been actively supporting the opposition in Haiti (my sources suggest that it backed the demobilised army personnel who provided the opposition’s muscle at the beginning of the year, though it denies this).
The players on the Haitian side fall into one of two categories: first, Haiti’s business elite, including those who own the media, and then the former military and paramilitaries – the people who were involved in the 1991-94 coup. Some have been in jail since then for murder, drug trafficking and crimes against humanity. Today, every single one of them is out.
Among those released by the rebels is the former general Prosper Avril, a leader of the notorious Presidential Guard under both Duvaliers. Avril seized power in September 1988, and was deposed in March 1990. A US District Court found that his regime engaged in a ‘systematic pattern of egregious human rights abuses’. It also found him personally responsible for enough ‘torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’ to award six of his victims a total of $41 million in compensation. The victims included opposition politicians, union leaders, scholars, even a doctor trying to practise community medicine. Avril’s repression was not subtle: three torture victims were paraded on national television with their faces grotesquely swollen, their limbs bruised and their clothing covered with blood. He suspended 37 articles of the constitution, and declared a state of siege.
The US started protecting Avril shortly after the 1994 restitution of Aristide. In November that year, the then secretary of state, Warren Christopher, relayed to the US ambassador intelligence reports that the Red Star Organisation, under Avril’s leadership, was planning a ‘harassment and assassination campaign directed at . . . Aristide supporters’. This information was not passed on to the Haitian authorities. In December, the Haitian police, acting on their own information, sought to arrest Avril at his home. Immediately after the police arrived, US soldiers turned up and tried to dissuade them from making the arrest. By the time they got in, Avril had fled to the neighbouring residence of the Colombian ambassador. Police searching Avril’s house found military uniforms, illegal police radios and a cache of weapons.
He escaped to Israel but later returned to Haiti, where his international and potential military support deterred further attempts to arrest him. He founded a political party, which has never fielded candidates in an election but was invited by the IRI to participate in developing an opposition to Aristide. In May 2001, after US troops had withdrawn from Haiti, the police finally seized the opportunity to execute Avril’s arrest warrant. The successful arrest was greeted with applause by the vast majority of Haitians and by human rights and justice groups in Haiti, the US and Europe. Amnesty International asserted that the arrest ‘could mark a step forward by the Haitian justice system in its struggle against impunity’: ‘the gravity of the human rights violations committed during General Avril’s period in power, from his 1988 coup d’état to his departure in March 1990, cannot,’ Amnesty said, ‘be ignored.’ France’s Committee to Prosecute Duvalier concluded that ‘the general must be tried.’ On 9 December 2003, the magistrate investigating the Piatre Massacre in 1990, when several peasants lost their lives, formally charged Avril with responsibility. He was in prison awaiting the end of the pre-trial proceedings when he was freed on 2 March – a few days after Aristide was deposed.
The rebel leader Guy Philippe received training, during the last coup, at a US military facility in Ecuador. When the army was demobilised, Philippe was incorporated into the new police force, serving as police chief in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Delmas and in the second city, Cap-Haïtien. During his tenure, the UN International Civilian Mission learned, dozens of suspected gang members were summarily ex ecuted, most of them by police under the command of Philippe’s deputy. The US embassy has also implicated Philippe in drug smuggling during his police career. Crimes committed in large part by ex-military policemen, are often pinned on Aristide, even though he sought to prevent coup-happy human rights abusers from ending up in these posts.
Philippe fled Haiti in October 2000, when the authorities discovered him plotting a coup with a clique of fellow police chiefs. Since then, the Haitian government has accused him of masterminding terrorist attacks in July and December 2001, as well as lethal hit-and-run raids against police stations on Haiti’s central plateau. (Over the last two years, four of our ambulances have been stolen, and members of our medical staff have been held hostage.) Last month, Philippe’s men bragged to the US press that they had executed Aristide supporters in Cap-Haïtien and Port-au-Prince, and many have indeed been reported missing. ‘I am the chief, the military chief. The country is in my hands,’ Philippe boasted on 2 March, which triggered the following response from Oscar Arias, the Nobel Peace laureate and former president of Costa Rica: ‘Nothing could more clearly prove why Haiti does not need an army than the boasting of rebel leader Guy Philippe last week in Port-au-Prince. The Haitian army was abolished nine years ago during a period of democratic transition, precisely to prevent the country from falling back into the hands of military men.’ Philippe told the Associated Press that he would use his new powers to arrest Haiti’s prime minister, Yvon Neptune, and proceeded to lead a mob in an attack on Neptune’s house. Philippe has been quoted as saying that the man he most admires is Pinochet.
The list goes on. Louis-Jodel Chamblain was a sergeant in the Haitian army until 1989 or 1990. He reappeared on the scene in 1993 as the second in command of the FRAPH. (Emmanuel ‘Toto’ Constant, its leader, is now living as a free man in Queens, New York.) Among the FRAPH’s victims was Guy Malary, the justice minister, ambushed and machine-gunned with his bodyguard and a driver. In September 1995, Chamblain was one of seven senior military and FRAPH leaders convicted in absentia and sentenced to forced labour for life for their involvement in the September 1993 execution of Antoine Izméry, a well-known pro-democracy activist. In late 1994 or early 1995, he went into voluntary exile in the Dominican Republic.
As for the traditional political elite, some have wanted to live in the National Palace ever since the time it was occupied by Papa Doc. Others may appear more marginal but they have done their share of harm. When, the other day, Vladimir Jeanty was shown destroying artwork on public display in Port-au-Prince, he was described as a ‘pastor from the Party of God’. In fact he is another perennial presidential candidate, delighted to have the chance to burn precious artefacts linked with voodoo and other aspects of Haitian culture – and to do so in full view of the international press.
US-born André Apaid, known in the US press as ‘the leader of the civil society movement to oust Aristide’, is the founder of a TV station and owner of a garment manufacturing firm (a subsidiary of Alpha Industries) that was prominently featured in news reports about Disney’s sweatshop suppliers. Aristide’s relentless push to raise the minimum wage above 72 gourdes a day – about £1 – cut into the massive profits of the offshore assembly industry. The US Congress has proposed building new garment factories in Haiti and encouraging American companies to contract out more sweatshop labour – good news for Apaid.
At the other end of the social spectrum from Apaid are the chimères, the groups described in the foreign press as armed thugs working for the Aristide government. But who are the chimères? Residents of Haiti’s slums, long excluded from civil society, they ‘were indeed chimeras’, Madison Smartt Bell wrote. ‘Ill fortune left them as unrealised shadows . . . These were the people Aristide had originally been out to salvage.’
The salvage operation came to an end last month as ‘rebels’ continued to ‘take cities’. I work in these ‘cities’ and I saw the rebels’ modus operandi. They came in, shot the police – who usually numbered no more than two or three – and left. Only a similarly equipped counterforce could have stopped them. The beleaguered government appealed for help in the Security Council, but this was delayed by the Bush administration – delayed long enough for the government to fall, or be pushed out.
Did the US and France have a hand in Aristide’s removal? Were he and his wife being held against their will? Most of Aristide’s claims, initially disputed by US officials from Noriega to Donald Rumsfeld, are now acknowledged to be true. His enemies’ claims that Aristide met with officials in Antigua – Aristide said they were not allowed to move from their seats – were undermined by reports from Antigua itself. Noriega acknowledged during a House hearing that Aristide did not know of his destination until less than an hour before landing in the Central African Republic. Even CAR officials acknowledge that no Haitian authorities were involved in the choice of destination.
Many more questions remain unanswered. We know that US funds overtly financed the opposition, but did they also fund, even indirectly, the rebellion, which featured high-powered US weapons only a year after twenty thousand such weapons were promised to the Dominican Republic? Senator Christopher Dodd is urging an investigation of US training sessions for six hundred ‘rebels’ in the Dominican Republic, and wants to find out ‘how the IRI spent $1.2 million of taxpayers’ money’ in Haiti. Answering these and related questions would take an intrepid investigative reporter, rather than a physician like myself, working, with some trepidation, in central Haiti. It would need a reporter willing to take on hard questions about US policies in Latin America. But about the return of the military, there can be little doubt. In his first public statement the man sworn in as Haiti’s new prime minister announced that Aristide’s order to replace the military with a civilian police force violated Haiti’s constitution; he promised to name a commission to examine the issues surrounding its restoration.
Labels: GW BUSH, HAITI, JEAN BERTRAND ARISTIDE, NEOCOLONIALISM
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