18083: This Week in Haiti 21:45 01/21/2004 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

"This Week in Haiti" is the English section of HAITI PROGRES
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                           HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                      January 21 - 27, 2004
                         Vol. 21, No. 45

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
by Kim Ives

Opposition demonstrators stole a coffin containing the body of
Maxime Déselmour from a funeral last week to use as political ram
to penetrate the security zone around the National Palace.

Brushing aside the protests of priests and the deceased's family,
the protestors whisked the coffin from the Sacré Coeur church in
the Turgeau neighborhood of the capital on Jan. 16 and tried to
bust through the police perimeter in front of the Palace. The
police, pelted with rocks and bottles (the local police chief was
hit), responded with tear-gas, scattering the demonstrators.

The horrified family pursued the hijacked coffin through the city
until, eventually, with the aid of the Red Cross and the police,
it was able to negotiate the return of the body and its
transportation to Jacmel.

Déselmour, 32,  was killed during clashes between pro- and anti-
government demonstrators on Jan. 7. Opposition demonstrators beat
a man they believed to be a government supporter to death (see
Haïti Progrès, Vol. 21, No. 44, 1/14/2004) and police fatally
shot two others.

The Haitian opposition is financed by the U.S. and European Union
and led by assembly-industry businessmen. But it is trying to
cast itself as a "student uprising" and spread the rumor that
Déselmour was a college student. In fact, he graduated from the
State University in 1994.

Four days earlier, one of the opposition march's leaders, Dany
Toussaint, a former soldier and defector from President Jean-
Bertrand Aristide's Lavalas Family (FL) party, warned that the
"students" might storm the presidential seat. "Any day now you
might hear that 150,000 or 200,000 people have overrun the
National Palace," Toussaint told Konpè Mòlòskòt, a Miami-based
Haitian journalist, in a long threat-filled Jan. 13 interview.
"We won't even know what happened to the [remains of the]
president of the republic because there is such determination in
these people, that they don't hear, they don't see" in their
rage.

During negotiations for return of Déselmour's body at the Faculty
of Social Sciences, opposition demonstrators beat up Evens Sanon,
a photographer and reporter for the state newspaper L'Union.

Another journalist from L'Union as well as reporters for Télé
Timoun and Radio Solidarité were threatened outside the
university.

Opposition demonstrators also have threatened the curé of Sacré
Coeur with arson for his role in opposing the hijacking of
Déselmour's remains.

Such threats are serious. On Jan. 19, opposition demonstrators
set fire to four schools and attacked five others with stoning
for not closing their doors. Opposition protestors also assaulted
the Haitian National Television (TNH) with rocks, bottles and
gunfire, breaking many windows. The police fired shots in the air
to repel the attack.

Right next door, the demonstrators trashed the marketplace at
Delmas 32, burning the stalls and destroying the wares of the
small merchants trying to eke out a living there.

Ironically, the TNH attack came after armed men on Jan. 13
destroyed of the transmitters of nine radio stations and one
television on the crest of Boutillier, the mountain dominating
the capital. Although opposition spokesmen tried to blame the
sabotage on the government, half of the transmitters belonged to
unaligned or pro-government stations. The nearby transmitters of
the two most powerful opposition-aligned stations, Radio
Métropole and Radio Vision 2000, were not touched.

Aristide strongly condemned the attack as he left to the
hemispheric summit in Monterrey, Mexico. There, U.S. President
George Bush and his Secretary of State Colin Powell threatened
Aristide to not miss his "last chance" to make a deal with the
opposition. The warning is preposterous since the opposition has
a single non-negotiable demand: Aristide's resignation.

Meanwhile, leaders from the Washington-backed Democratic
Convergence opposition front began meetings in Santo Domingo on
Jan. 18 with the National Endowment for Democracy's International
Republican Institute (IRI) aimed at fusing its 14 tiny parties
into one or two.

"Today there is a process underway to form what one calls a
center-right party," Convergence spokesman Paul Denis told a
reporter on Jan. 20. "There is another process to assemble and
fuse the parties of a social-democrat tendency."

Even if they consolidate, the opposition parties still will not
participate in elections until Aristide steps down, Denis said.

The Haitian parliament expired on Jan. 13 due to the opposition's
refusal to take part in elections. Aristide announced in
Monterrey that Haiti will hold elections for a new parliament
within the next six months.

On Jan. 17, Aristide publicly declared that he feared a coup was
being plotted. "Once we have coup d'état then we have death," he
said. "Once we say no to coup d'état, then we say yes to life."

UNFAIR AND INDECENT DIPLOMACY:
WASHINGTON'S VENDETTA AGAINST HAITI'S PRESIDENT ARISTIDE
by Jessica Leight
Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA)

(The first of two installments)

The following is an abridged version of a COHA memorandum issued
Jan. 15

As thousands of desperate and impoverished Haitians weigh whether
they should undertake the dangerous 700-mile voyage to Florida in
order to flee starvation, critics of President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide most pointedly U.S. regional policy-makers accuse him of
tolerating a worrisome drift to authoritarian rule. Certainly
violence and corruption have increased and the tide of public
opinion against Aristide is rising as the outbreak of gang
warfare between rival government and opposition hoodlums worsens
and increased numbers of disaffected Haitians join opposition
rallies. But there is compelling evidence to charge that
Aristide's slide is not due to any dramatic charge in the nature
of the Haitian president, but is the result of a calculated
campaign that is now being brainstormed by André Apaid Jr., who
is one of the island's richest individuals. This effort has the
tacit if not overt support of the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince.
This policy, which has long been in place, is now being guided by
Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger
Noriega, along with like minded radicalized rightist colleagues
such as Special Presidential Envoy to the Western Hemisphere Otto
Reich. What is fully apparent is that Washington wants to be rid
of Aristide, who has been able to survive, but only barely, in
spite of every affliction and economic cut-off that the Bush
administration could visit upon him. The danger is that
Washington is succeeding and will soon have to confront a
self-fulfilling prophecy of its own making. It may be successful
in convincing the world that Aristide should be deposed, which
could be a catastrophic occurrence.

The bicentennial of Haiti's independence on January 1, 2004
marked the two hundredth anniversary of the second oldest
independent republic in the Western Hemisphere and the
celebration of the victory of the only nation in the world to
independently overthrow slavery. Yet the occasion could equally
well be deemed the 200th anniversary of a belligerent, unjust and
mindless U.S. policy towards Haiti, a policy that began with
Washington's initial refusal to recognize the newly independent
country until 1862, nearly six decades after its independence,
continued through the often brutal U.S. military occupation of
1915-34, and culminated in the U.S.'s enthusiastic support of the
corrupt dictatorships of the Duvaliers, both father and son, and
their military successors. Historically, the State Department has
always felt that second best was good enough for this Black
republic.

Today, Washington's openly patronizing policy towards the island
is at its peak, as the Bush administration continues to thwart
all attempts by the current government of President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide to move Haiti towards a more stable democracy, a
stronger economy and a more equitable society. As political
violence in the country intensifies, there have been
proliferating denunciations of the Aristide government by several
prejudiced foreign reporters that periodically lapse into skewed
journalism, functionaries at the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince
who automatically assume the right of dabbling in Haiti's pond,
and a small group of State Department appointees led by Noriega
and Reich who "boffo-like", see Aristide as little more than a
beardless Castro. These sources repeatedly have accused the
president and his Lavalas Family political movement of
facilitating and even fomenting political violence by promoting
attacks by their street gangs and failing to engage in good-faith
negotiations between the opposition and government officials.

However, these strident accusations against the government bear
little or no relation to Haiti's political realities, where the
functioning of a democratically-elected government that possessed
overwhelming popular support at the time of the 2000 election
persistently has been sabotaged by an unprincipled and
intransigent opposition. This opposition was founded and
continues to operate with the full, if not always open, support
of the United States, channeled through such controversial Cold
War institutions as the International Republican Institute (IRI)
and the former office of Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), a long-time
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prior to his
2002 retirement and who was the prevailing Gauleiter in the "get"
Aristide crusade.

President Aristide has been shaped by his environment but he also
is stunningly self-disciplined. He is a brave man, having skirted
assassination on several occasions. He is stubborn and
calculating, and is also self-contained and enormously
intelligent. He is seized by the notion of his importance, both
to his people and as a symbol to the world. Although he always
calls for pacification and conflict resolution, he is not above
lapsing into an Old Testament, "eye for an eye," mode. He was the
island's most precious national democratic asset, but years of
being hounded by U.S. political manipulation and a non-democratic
opposition, the quality of his rule has diminished and the
atmosphere in which he has been made to live, and in turn to
which he has contributed, has become increasingly ugly.

* Paralyzed Legislature the Most Recent Avatar of Obstructionism *

On January 12, the terms of one-third of the members of Haiti's
two-chamber parliament expired, leaving the legislative branch of
the Haitian government without a sufficient quorum to officially
function. As of now, no elections had been held for the seats,
which remain empty, and no parliamentary elections have been
scheduled, although Aristide hopes to hold them this year.
Responsibility for this onset of political paralysis has been
pinned on a President Aristide who is entering the second-to-last
year of his second term in the presidency. He now has been placed
in the uncomfortable position of choosing between unilaterally
lengthening the expired terms of the now redundant legislators,
or effectively ruling by decree due to the lack of a Parliament
to pass legislation.  Either choice would no doubt be immediately
seized upon by opposition groups, such as Democratic Convergence
(DC) and the newly formed Group 184, as evidence of the
government's undemocratic nature.  This malevolent rhetoric is
energetically echoed by the State Department, which regards
President Aristide and his Lavalas party (whose members
overwhelming come from the nation's poor) as being too radical
and too "populist" to merit Washington's support, or even
tolerance.

* The Opposition's Lack of Good Faith *

In fact, however, blame for the delay and turmoil surrounding the
parliamentary election issues falls almost entirely on the
ill-will of the opposition groups, which persistently have
refused to nominate representatives to the provisional electoral
council (CEP) that must be formed before elections can proceed.
The issue of the CEP, still unsettled, can be expected to be the
stumbling point for President Aristide's recently announced
intention to hold legislative elections within six months. The
underlying motives of the opposition in thwarting any progress
towards new elections, which is a strategy that goes back four
years and has long been abetted by the IRI, are not difficult to
discern.  Both the Democratic Convergence the first highly
visible (although of minute membership) anti-Aristide opposition
group to appear and the more recently formed Group 184 (headed by
André Apaid, Jr.) are primarily parties of the tiny Haitian
elite, the same strata that controlled the country for decades
under the repressive Duvalier regimes prior to the 1990 election
of Aristide in the country's first democratic ballot. The
ironically named Democratic Convergence in particular has had a
distinct history of being a coalition of micro-factions looking
for a constituency; through most of its history it has
represented no more than 8% of registered voters, according to a
poll commissioned by the U.S. four years ago.  The opposition's
only policy goal seems to be reconstituting the army (a notorious
instrument of oppression that terrorized the nation and
especially the poor for decades before it was finally dismantled
by President Aristide in 1995).  They also back the
implementation of rigorous structural adjustment programs in line
with the now widely discredited Washington consensus, which would
slash already meager government services, drive real wages down
and further impoverish the vast majority of Haitians.

Not surprisingly, this platform has won the opposition little
popular support even at this late date.  A U.S.-commissioned poll
in 2000 found that the Democratic Convergence leadership had only
a 4% credibility rating, while a mere 8% of the local population
named Convergence as the party with which they most sympathized.
Clearly, the opposition's prospects for a victory at the ballot
box are slim if not nonexistent; hence they have embraced a
strategy of perpetual delays, hoping that the resulting volatile
political stalemate together with Washington's policy of
isolation and the economic asphyxiation will sufficiently
debilitate Aristide's rule that he will be brought down by
growing defections among his one-time supporters.

(To be continued)

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