15240: Karshan: Part 2, Multi-Front Strategy Seeks to Oust Aristide (Haiti Progres) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: MKarshan@aol.com

Haiti Progres
March 26, 2003

Multi-Front Strategy Seeks to Oust Aristide Before 2004
(Second of two articles)

The U.S. government is sponsoring an effort to drive President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide from power before the end of his term in 2006, and even before
Haiti's bicentennial celebrations in 2004. The offensive involves three
fronts: diplomatic, media, and military.

Last week, we examined how arch-reactionary Reagan administration veterans of
the "dirty war" against Nicaragua in the 1980s, in particular George W.
Bush's "Special Envoy" for Latin America Otto Reich and Assistant Secretary
of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, are spearheading the
diplomatic attack.

>From Mar. 19-21, Reich and Organization of American States (OAS) Assistant
Secretary General Einaudi, a long-time State Department hack, took a
20-member international delegation to Haiti to speak with both the government
and opposition leaders. The "mediators" delivered an ultimatum to the Haitian
government that it had ten days (until Mar. 30) to form a new electoral
council (CEP). But it can't possibly meet the deadline because the opposition
and allied "civil society" refuse to nominate their CEP representatives or to
take part in elections without Aristide's departure or foreign military
supervision.

The delegation also commanded Haitian authorities to finish implementing OAS
Resolution 822 (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 26, 9/11/02), whose
conditions the government has already largely fulfilled, or tried to. The key
remaining requirements are that 1) the government disarm its opponents and
partisans around the nation and 2) arrest and prosecute the leaders of
pro-government urban popular organizations which engaged in mob violence 15
months ago (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 19, No. 40, 12/19/01). Both measures are
all but impossible, technically and politically, for the government to carry
out, and the "mediators" know it. The consequences of non-compliance were not
specified, but Einaudi said that if the OAS was not satisfied with Haitian
government efforts, "we will be in a different ball game." The OAS permanent
council will meet on Apr. 2 to discuss Haiti.

According to the right-wing weekly Haïti Observateur, Reich told Aristide in
a private meeting to arrest within one week all security officers, government
officials, parliamentarians, and activists "implicated in drug trafficking,"
a partial list of whom was supposedly delivered by a visiting U.S.
congressman in February. "The ultimatum transmitted by Otto Reich will be
accompanied by coercive conditions," the paper said. (While Observateur is
renowned for stories based on gossip or purely fabricated, its very close
ties to Washington make this report worth noting.)

(As we go to press, there are reports that Police Chief Jean Nesly Lucien,
who has been accused of drug connections, has been fired and replaced by
Jean-Claude Jean-Baptiste, a member of Aristide‚s personal cabinet. Inspector
General Victor Harvel Jean-Baptiste, an anti-drug trafficking crusader, will
be returned to the diplomatic service. Also, numerous warrants have been
issued for the arrest of popular organization leaders like Amiot Métayer in
Gonaïves and mayors, particularly in the North, like Moïse Jean-Charles of
Milot.)

Saying the Haitian government is just short of "illegitimate," Bush
administration officials are demonizing Aristide and blocking the release of
some $500 million in approved aid and loans to the country, although Res. 822
called for the "normalization of economic cooperation between the Government
of Haiti and the international financial institutions." (The U.S. contends
that Haiti has yet to "resolve the technical and financial obstacles" for aid
release, as 822 outlines.)

Meanwhile, Washington is funneling millions of dollars to the Democratic
Convergence opposition front and the newly created "Group of 184" so-called
civil society organizations.

Secretly, U.S., Canadian and French diplomats have met to discuss Aristide's
removal and the establishment of a new foreign military occupation, according
to a Canadian magazine (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 51, 3/5/03).

This report forced meddling diplomats into a defensive posture, but most of
the U.S. commercial media forms, consciously or not, the second front in the
campaign to destabilize Haiti.

The Media Front

The U.S. mainstream press by and large acts as the public relations
department of the U.S. State Department and the Haitian opposition.
Journalists and their editors spin, shade, and shape their stories to
reinforce the message that Aristide is the aggressor and the U.S.-coached
opposition the victim, when the opposite is true. An analysis of two recent
mainstream articles illustrates the technique.

On Mar. 20, the Associated Press reported on the visit of the OAS "mission to
help resolve Haiti's political stalemate." In fact, there is no "stalemate,"
at least not between forces within Haiti. Aristide is hugely popular while
the opposition is not. Only Washington's meddling, largely through the OAS,
has caused blockage. The very agency which created and maintains the
"stalemate" is presented as wanting to resolve it.

But the AP argues that "Haiti has been in crisis since flawed 2000
legislative elections swept by Aristide's Lavalas Family party [FL]." In
fact, almost all election observers and Haiti's electoral council, the
polling's final arbiter, found the May 2000 elections exemplary in
participation, order, and lack of violence. Only two weeks later, when an FL
sweep was apparent, did an OAS official come up with a "flaw" (a minor
calculation dispute), which the opposition and Washington have blown up into
what Haiti's National Popular Party (PPN) calls a "false crisis."

The AP goes on to blame ensuing violent political clashes on one side -
Aristide's partisans. So it is not surprising when the report claims that "as
the delegation met with officials, police fired tear gas and used nightsticks
to disperse about 300 anti-government demonstrators near the National
Palace." In reality, about 200 anti-government protestors insisted, over
police objections, in changing their march itinerary to the National Palace
where hundreds of pro-government protesters were rallying. Predictably, a
melee ensued, which the police broke up. The AP closed their account with a
quote from the opposition's main leader Gérard Pierre-Charles: "The
government is more repressive than ever."

In the same vein, on Mar. 17, the Miami Herald ran a story which sought to
cast doubt on the provenance, or even the existence, of Duvalierist guerillas
which have carried out deadly strikes throughout Haiti, but primarily on the
Central Plateau. After perfunctorily citing Police spokesman Jean Dady Siméon
that "they are former soldiers and they are part of the opposition" and "want
to overthrow President Jean-Bertrand Aristide," the Herald also turns to
Gérard Pierre-Charles. "We consider this whole thing a fake," he says.

The story quotes U.S. filmmaker David Murdock, who was held at gunpoint by
the guerillas on Dec. 19. Murdock corroborated police accounts saying the
guerrillas boasted that they were former soldiers and lectured him "on how
they would overthrow Aristide." But in the next paragraph, the Herald says
the "origin" of the band is "unclear because of difficulties confirming
police versions of events."

The Herald summarizes the many indisputable killings of the guerillas - "a
judge, a police officer and five civilians" - with the qualifier "according
to Siméon." It cites Siméon's account of a police raid in which two guerillas
were killed, weapons and vehicles recovered, and six men arrested, but notes
"he did not supply their names... Journalists have not seen the men allegedly
arrested, the weapons recovered or the bodies of the victims." The message:
this all may be bunk.

In fact, this insinuation is bunk. The six captured men whom "journalists
have not seen" were presented in a cover photo of the Feb. 12 edition of
Haïti Progrès - over a month before the Herald piece - along with their
names. The police presented them, along with the "unseen" captured weapons,
at a very public Feb. 10 press conference.

The Herald piece closes by giving the last word about a Dec. 17, 2001 assault
on the National Palace (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 19, No. 40, 12/19/01) to the
OAS, which claimed it was not an "attempted coup d'état" as the government
says, but a piece of theater because "there was police complicity." All
evidence indicates, however, that it was carried out by the same Duvalierist
guerrillas.

Ironically, David Murdock, in a letter to the U.S. Embassy about his
encounter with the guerrillas wrote: "It struck me that the sole press notice
I read regarding reports of ex-military activity in central Haiti - a Miami
Herald article from December 21, 2002 entitled, "Haitian Government Says
Ex-soldiers Mount Insurgency" - was largley devoted to airing the views of
those who doubted that such incidents were occurring."

The Military Front

In reality, there is clearly a Dominican Republic-based guerilla force of
Duvalierist ex-soldiers playing the same role that the Honduran-based Contra
force of Somozista ex-soldiers did in the low-intensity war against Nicaragua
in the 1980s. Their purpose is to harass, demoralize, and destabilize
Aristide's government. There now is quite a dossier of evidence which refutes
the Herald's assertion that "little is known" about their "allegiances." A
brief recapitulation of the past 20 months, compiled from press accounts (not
just the police) shows the growing strength of this military front.

The guerillas first spectacular operation was on Jul. 28, 2001 when they
attacked the Haitian National Police Academy and three police stations,
simultaneously around the capital and on the Central Plateau, leaving five
police officers dead and 14 injured (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 19, No. 20
8/1/01). At one attacked police station, the assailants forced prisoners to
shout "Long live the Army," which was disbanded by Aristide in 1995. The
attackers escaped with weapons back towards the Dominican Republic.

Five months later, on Dec. 17, 2001, some 30 heavily-armed uniformed
commandos seized the National Palace for several hours with the help of
50-millimeter machine guns bolted into pick-up trucks.

"They also rented two helicopters for that operation," explained radio
journalist Ernest Edouard, known as Konpè Mòlòskòt, who was invited to a
meeting with the assailants in Miami two weeks before the assault. "There
were about 17 of them [at the meeting], including two Americans. They have a
lot of money, a whole lot."

Mòlòskòt explained that the group includes many former soldiers and has
members infiltrated into the heart of the Presidential security forces.
"Their strategy was well prepared," he said. "Everything discussed in the
Palace, they were following. That's how they knew to strike when Aristide was
going to sleep at the Palace. But as he was leaving [a meeting] in Belair,
Aristide changed his mind and made a deviation which they didn't hear about.
So they didn't find him, which is why they riddled his portrait with
bullets."

Two policemen and one assailant, a former Haitian soldier, were killed in the
attack. The gunmen escaped from the Palace grounds due to police
incompetence, cowardice, or complicity. Again, they fled back towards the
Dominican border, shooting up the gate at Aristide's Tabarre residence and
wounding and killing several people along the way. "One of the helicopters
they rented in Santo Domingo also evacuated some of them," Mòlòskòt said.

Several months passed before the guerillas struck again. On Apr. 30, 2002,
they attacked the Belladère police station in the Central Plateau, stealing
firearms, setting the town hall on fire, and killing the town's Lavalas
Coordinator Jean Bronchette, according to Radio Métropole.

Then last August, during routine checks of vehicles, police in
Croix-des-Bouquets arrested two individuals and seized over 20,000 rounds of
ammunition for Galil, M-14, and M-1 rifles. Four military weapons were
confiscated, including an MP-5, a T-65 and two dismantled M-1s. The police
also seized large quantities of explosive devices. One of the men arrested
was identified as a former member of the Haitian Armed Forces (Signal FM
Radio) On Nov. 28, the Lame San Manman [Motherless Army], as the guerrillas
were beginning to be called, shot and killed Christophe Lozama, a judge from
the FL, in Belladère. Two men were arrested and jailed in the nearby
Lascahobas police station.

On Dec. 10, the guerrillas attacked the station freeing four prisoners,
including the two arrested for killing Lozama. They stole 12 rifles and the
sole police vehicle, later burning it. Four civilians, two of them FL
members, were killed in the attack. The San Manmans are also responsible for
killing five members of Lozama's family in the Belladère area (Signal FM,
Haïti Progrès, and Vision 2000). In the week following the jail break, the
guerillas begin to emerge from the shadows. Several dozen of them,
self-proclaimed former soldiers, set up their headquarters in the village of
Pernal, located between Belladère and Lascahobas. They raised the red and
black flag of the Duvalier dictatorship and invited journalists, saying they
want to reconstitute the former Haitian army.

The leader is Andres Billy, a former Haitian army captian who now runs a
business in Santo Domingo, according to the Dominican daily Hoy. The rebels
have been training on a mountain in the San Cristobal Province of the
Dominican Republic, west of Santo Domingo, Hoy reports, and are said to be
receiving financial aid from Frantz Merceron, who was Jean Claude Duvalier‚s
powerful finance minister. He moved several months ago from France to Miami.

Mòlòskòt also asserts that either Merceron or Duvalier himself (still in
exile in France) have a hand in funding the San Manmans, and that it is the
same group that carried out the Dec. 17 attack.

"We will overthrow Aristide in a military manner," the guerillas declared in
a Dec. 19 press conference held for some journalists in Pernal. "We are now
asking all the military men who have gone into hiding and all the competent
citizens in the country to come out, to return and join us so we may fight
the Intervention and Maintenance of Order Company (CIMO) created by Aristide,
to fight the Youth for People's Power (JPP), to fight the Grassroots Church
Communities (TKL), the Cannibal Army [a popular organization in Gonaïves] set
up by Aristide... We will dismantle Aristide as well as all Lavalas members
who do not want to understand that they are Haitians and that the country
does not belong to them alone. We are going to do it and we want Aristide to
know that we are going to do it."

During this time, David Murdock, the filmmaker mentioned in the Herald's Mar.
17 report, was held up by the guerrillas while helping transport a patient to
the clinic of Dr. Paul Farmer in Cange, near Lascahobas. On Dec. 22, special
police units attacked the San Manman camp in Pernal (see Haïti Progrès, Vol.
20, No. 41 12/25/02). The guerrillas have "perpetrated acts of terror with
the purpose of destabilizing the government," the police said. The police
SWAT team arrested four men and seized several weapons, ammunition, and other
military equipment. They also found documents that they said "give us an idea
of the men's affiliation," according to Radio Signal FM. In January 2003,
heavily armed commandos attacked the Plaisance police station in northern
Haiti, Signal FM reported. After surrounding the building and cutting off all
communications, they captured it and tied up the police face down on the
ground. They escaped with all the station's weapons and ammunition.

February was a busy month for the Duvalierist guerrillas. In early February,
men identifying themselves as members of the San Manman Army seized a
mountain top near the southern town of Petit Goâve for a few days, raising a
U.S. flag on a house on top of the mountain. They also killed two FL members
from Petit Goâve, Myrtil Fleurilus and Samuel Polo, who died from burns after
his house was set on fire (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 48 2/12/2003). In
response, the Departmental Police Unit (UDMO) arrested eight people found
with heavy arms in the Fort Liberté locality near Petit-Goave.

Police also suspect that the San Manmans assassinated Presidential security
agent Irandal Pierre-Louis on the airport road in Port-au-Prince on Feb. 6
(see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 20, No. 49 2/19/2003). Around the same time, the
guerrillas took over the police station in Baptiste on the Central Plateau,
chasing the police out, freeing the prisoners, and taking arms and
ammunition, according to Radio Haiti Inter. The San Manmans also shot up the
home of Lascahobas Deputy Villier Barbeau, when he was not home, according to
the Haitian Press Agency.

On Feb. 16, the guerrillas ambushed the vehicle of two policemen near
Belladère, killing SWAT Team agent Patrick Samedi (see Haïti Progrès, Vol.
20, No. 49 2/19/2003). The assailants captured the car and held the body of
the dead officer for several days, trying to lure the police into another
ambush.

The police counter-attacked in the days just before the Mar. 2-4 Carnaval,
killing two guerrillas and recovering Samedi‚s vehicle as well as one stolen
during a previous police station attack. In one of the trucks police also
found inflammatory flyers aimed, they said, at provoking violence during
Carnaval. The police also recovered Uzi's, T-65s and a lot of ammunition, as
well as documents and photographs connecting the men with the former Haitian
armed forces. Some guerrillas were identified as men being actively sought by
the Police. The documents also connected them to the killing of Lozama and
his five family members. "We have found other vehicles belonging to private
individuals including a truck belonging to the Comme Il Faut tobacco company
which had been stolen," police spokesman Siméon said. "We have also found a
number of materials such as an M-14 rifle and one Galil. We found former
military helmets, homemade explosive devices and a flag on which was written:
Force for Citizen's Protection.‚ Several of [the guerrillas] have been
killed. The rest have run away to the Haitian-Dominican border. On their way,
they burnt several peasants' houses. They killed animals belonging to several
peasants."

A police helicopter was used in the several days of operations against the
guerrillas and may have been shot at by the guerrillas.

Sources close to the government say that authorities are now in full control
of the area, where there is a heavy police presence. However, according to
Mòlòskòt, the San Manmans are planning a resurgence over the next month. "My
sources tell me they are planning something very dramatic, very terrible, for
April 22," he said. April 22 is the anniversary of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc"
Duvalier's ascension to power after the death of this father François in
1971.

In short, these are the parameters - diplomatic, media, and military - of the
offensive to overthrow the Haitian government. Like the "regime change"
campaign against Iraq, it is costing the lives of many Haitians.