12593: Lavalas and US occupations; Simidor responds to Senou (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: karioka9@cs.com

Many people, I among them, share your grief about the incompetence and the shameless depredations of the Lavalas regime. Many on this list feel, like you do, that the 1994 US invasion was well intentioned and caused no harm.  Some add that the US had no economic interest in that invasion because Haiti lacks the kind of wealth or resources coveted by the US.  I couldn't disagree more. Where you see the US as a potential force for good (a new invasion to rid the country of both Lavalas and Convergence), I see them as the main culprit behind the present nightmare.  I'm suggesting three areas where the 1994 invasion was unmistakably imperialistic and detrimental to Haiti.

1) By carefully cultivating the myth that only the US Big Brother could free Haiti from a ruthless military dictatorship, Bill Clinton and Aristide (read US imperialism and its Haitian puppets) have created a precedent for future "humanitarian" and "benevolent" US interventions.  The OAS took this proposition to its logical conclusion, by adopting Resolution 1831, whereby the regional body (read front for US aggression) created the authority to intervene of its own free will in Haiti's internal affairs.  The US (under cover of the OAS) can intervene again in Haiti anytime they see fit, under the guise of strengthening democratic governance.  And given the current mess in Haiti and the general hysteria about terrorism, who's going to question their intentions?

2)  Part of the package for Aristide's return was an agreement, signed in Paris by the Lavalas government in exile, to privatize all government assets, including utilities, public lands and even a profitable state enterprise like Teleco, and to remove all barriers and tariffs on imported goods.  This agreement is a deathblow to Haiti's ailing economy.  Lavalas opportunism and corruption make a bad situation even worse: what they cannot parcel out among themselves, they sell at bargain rates to foreign friends and accomplices.  Aristide's recent free-trade zone agreement with the Dominican Republic, which basically hands over 10% of Haitian territory to the Dominican government, is the latest in a series of scandals rocking the Lavalas regime. Haiti's emerging status as a sub-colony of the Dominican Republic is part of the new reality forced down Haiti's throat, under the guise of "restoring democracy."

3)  The political equation in Haiti before and after 1986 was relatively simple: the people's camp on the one hand, which grouped the grassroots movement and the democratic sector; and a conservative status quo incorporating the military and paramilitary forces, Haiti's comprador bourgeoisie and other ruling strata.  This has been replaced since 1994 with a new dynamic guided by remote control from Washington.  On one side there is Lavalas, championed by the US Democratic Party; on the other, the Convergence opposition, funded and held together by the US Republican Party.  The political process has been co-opted, the people bypassed, and the Haitian state (what some people call the public sector) rendered irrelevant.  The immediate prospect for Haiti is one of total chaos or of a government controlled by the NGO/comprador sector.

As a new US citizen, it is now your privilege to petition your government to keep its hands off Haiti.  The country is choking from so much special attention from Uncle Sam.  We want a chance to correct our own mistakes.  Perhaps you will recall the parable of the man who petitioned God to relieve him of his problems, only to end up with more misery.  Another US intervention would be fatal to Haiti.

Daniel Simidor