By Matt Kopka, ContributorThis is the second in a two-part series on the role of the United States government in Haiti leading up to the removal of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as its president.
ENCOURAGED BY former Costa Rican president and Nobel laureate Oscar Arias, Jean-Bertrand Aristide disbanded Haiti's army, set up by the U.S. after the 1915 invasion. (That was also the invasion in which U.S. marines took US$500,000 from the country's central bank for 'safekeeping', money history texts suggest ended up in the coffers of what is now Citibank).
The move was hailed by Amnesty International and other organisations in addition to terrorising the Haitian people, the army had consumed 40 per cent of Haiti's budget.
The U.S. and Canada helped set up the police force that replaced Haiti's army, which they later condemned for enforcing Aristide's power. But the U.S. forces that remained in Haiti helping to rebuild infrastructure, engaged in the sort of 'nation building' Republicans then reviled but seem so intent on now in Iraq were working at cross-purposes with U.S. 'intelligence'.
Author Bob Shachochis described the struggle U.S. soldiers faced in an article in the March 4 Washington Post: "Throughout the country, [U.S. forces] arrested an abundance of thugs (well-known murderers, torturers, death squad gunmen and narcotraffickers), shipped them to Port-au-Prince and then watched in dismay as the detainees were, inexplicably, released, the U.S. Embassy instructing them to leave these people alone because they were 'the loyal opposition'.
These are the people, Shachochis writes, who precipitated Aristide's recent ouster, and who immediately went back to work, destroying murdering public officials. "Aristide was right to call them terrorists."
In 2000, despite popular suffering brought about by structural reform and the ongoing terrorist campaign against him, Aristide was re-elected with 90 per cent of the national vote. His Lavalas party captured 16 of 17 Senate seats. The International Coalition of Independent Observers' post-election report had called the plebiscite "fair and peaceful," another encouraging step toward democracy. But the U.S., which had never considered elections necessary while the Duvaliers were in power, criticised the elections.
The Clinton administration's complaint: the methodology employed to calculate Senate percentages (unquestioned in carefully scrutinised election preparations) had been faulty.
When challenged it's crucial to note Aristide and Lavalas agreed to seat seven members of the Opposition in the Senate. But this was not enough to appease his enemies, who smelled blood in the Caribbean water.
The election remained the slender reed on which the U.S. based subsequent actions toward Aristide, the 'flawed election' cited as evidence of his corruption even now. It was the reason given by Clinton when he instituted the embargo that blocked annual payment of US$500 million to Haiti. 'Funding', Arias writes in the March 12 Washington
Post, "was revoked just as Haiti was making the pivotal transition to self-rule. The aid squeeze... caused an implosion of the Haitian economy and a consequent crisis of governance."
"Armed opposition groups of former soldiers reconstituted themselves both in Haiti and in the neighbouring Dominican Republic."
George Bush II tightened the embargo, pressuring the Inter-American Development Bank to cancel $650 million in development assistance and pre-approved loans to Haiti-money slated for "safe drinking water, literacy programs and health services," according to MADRE.
The administration knew full well, Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs writes in the March 1, 2004 Financial Times, this would create "a crisis in the balance of payments, a rise in inflation, and a collapse of living standards," feeding dissatisfaction with Aristide. But the U.S. had and would continue to aid the terrorists directly.
Rebel leader Louis Chamblain was the number two man in the CIA-aided FRAPH paramilitary death squads. Chamblain, who escaped to the Dominican Republic, was convicted and sentenced in absentia to hard labour for life for a massacre in Haiti's Roboteau region and for the killing of a Haitian democracy activist. CIA reports detail a 1993 meeting between him and an unidentified U.S. military officer that laid the groundwork for the murder of Haiti's Justice Minister, Guy Malary.
Opposition leader Andy Apaid is an American citizen who came by his Haitian passport fraudulently. According to U.S. Congress member Maxine Waters, Apaid owns 15 maquiladoras (sweatshops) in Haiti, and led opposition to the Haitian government's doubling of the country's minimum wage from 70 cents to a dollar and 40 cents an hour. This was, apparently the tipping point for the Haitian opposition in its relations with Aristide, for wealthy Republican Party members with Haiti connections as well.
Apaid's opposition Group of 184 has received aid from the US Agency for International Development, the right-wing International Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy, "nothing more than a costly programme," Texas Congress member Ron Paul rightly says, "that takes U.S. taxpayer funds to promote" favoured foreign politicians and parties.
From the time U.S. forces left rights organisations had documented a surge in terrorism-opposition attacks on Haiti's power stations, health clinics, government officials, buildings, and vehicles, and the killing of dozens of leaders and officials. (Perhaps this contributed to Aristide's isolation, or what critics call his 'increasingly autocratic' style.)
In February of this year, Chamblain and a group of trained commandos arrived to lead the so-called 'rebels', as the U.S. media dutifully calls them, from the Dominican Republic.
According to Ira Kurzban, General Counsel to the Haitian government, they came with a great deal of equipment, including M-19 rifles, camouflage gear, and all-terrain vehicles. They struck in a dozen Haitian towns-killing Aristide followers, attacking police stations, cutting phone wires and communication with the capital, blocking access of food aid to impoverished areas. (At this writing, Gonaives, Haiti's second city, remains cut off and under a rein of terror.)
It will quickly be forgotten that under the agreement the U.S. forced on him in January - facing the alleged threat that the rebels would otherwise sack him, or bring chaos to Haiti - Aristide agreed to share power with these criminals. Smelling bigger prizes, they refused to sign. The rest of the story is much more widely known.
But Aristide's own account, corroborated by his U.S. bodyguard, that American troops surrounded his residence to suggest he was in mortal danger, then whisked him off to the airport - essentially kidnapping him - is ominous. The arrival of a South African ship bearing arms to Haiti on the day Aristide was flown out (reported by Reuters news service March 16) raises other questions, including whether the U.S. action - crude and improvisational accounts suggest it may have been - was contrived to forestall any real attempt by Aristide to defend his government, given that the lightly-armed Haitian police (and largely unarmed general population) were likely to fare poorly against the trained and well-equipped former soldiers who constituted opposition forces.
PULL QUOTE:
One stunning feature of the current crisis is the way the US press has blithely accepted the assertion that Aristide somehow invited it. One reason: all the established news sources in Haiti - Radio Metropole, Tele-Haiti, Radio Caraibe, Radio Vision 2000, which the AP and UPI wire services depend on for most of their reporting - are all owned by Haitians (Apaid owns Tele-Haiti). With too little evidence others have followed suit.
Shacochis says Aristide was "autocratic and increasingly corrupt," that he "wouldn't tolerate the decentralisation of his power." (Aware that the Bush administration hated Aristide, he also recalls how a U.S. ambassador once told him the Haitians were 'maggots'.)
But what did this corruption entail? What power was there to disperse? The allegation has been repeated in uncritical fashion by the press without, to my knowledge, any proof whatsoever.
That Aristide armed his poor followers, to the extent possible, is acknowledged; this might evidence "corruption" to the U.S. (where there are said to be two guns for every citizen) but - with the U.S. arming death squads-less partial observers might see this as crucial to the preserving Haitian democracy. The suggestion that he 'condoned' violence on the part of his followers toward the opposition would likewise require contextual examination.
Many sins may yet be traced to Aristide's door. But he was Haiti's elected leader, returned to power with an overwhelming mandate. Tracy Kidder, writing in the April 26 New York Times, notes a 2002 Gallup poll showed that Haitians still overwhelmingly supported him. (Jamaica Labour Party chairman Bruce Golding's assertion in the March 16 The Gleaner that the Haitian people have rid themselves of Aristide - which suggests his overthrow was the people's will - could not be further from the truth.) And there remain eight million actors in Haiti's struggle whose desire for self-determination will bedevil attempts by the U.S. to impose its will on Haiti. The street fighting and resistance to efforts by U.S. marines to disarm them (a decision political in its implications) suggests they may continue to prefer self-determination to foreign-imposed leadership.
"The truth is that a broadly consistent Aristide was never quite prepared to abandon all his principles," write King's College professor Peter Hallward in the March 2 London Guardian. "Worst of all, he remained indelibly associated with what's left of a genuine popular movement for political and economic empowerment. For this reason alone, it was essential that he not only be forced from office but utterly discredited in the eyes of his people and the world."
In Haiti, Hallward writes, the U.S. has helped crush a "democracy in the name of democracy." It would not be the first time.
(Matt Kopka is a research scholar who lived in Jamaica in 1976 and 2002-2003. He writes about development issues and teaches at Florida State University.)
