18147: This Week in Haiti 21:46 01/28/2004 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

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                           HAITI PROGRES
              "Le journal qui offre une alternative"

                      * THIS WEEK IN HAITI *

                    January 28 - February 3, 2004
                         Vol. 21, No. 46

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

(The second of two installments)

In last week's installment, Leight thumbnailed how "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." She enumerated examples of the Haitian
opposition's "obstructionism" and "lack of good faith,"
concluding that "the opposition's prospects for a victory at the
ballot box are slim if not nonexistent," hence their "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." This is an abridged version of a COHA
memorandum issued Jan. 15.

At this point the opposition's hope is that the country can be
destabilized to where the current government will be unable to
serve out its mandated term through 2005.

This script does not markedly differ from the events of 1991,
when President Aristide was ousted only nine months after his
first inauguration in a coup that ushered in three years of
brutal military rule, including some of the worst political
violence in the country's history.  The opposition's adamant
refusal to enter into a new round of elections raises, for the
majority of the population, the specter of a return to a cycle of
coup d'états and brutal political repression in the aftermath of
a prospective Aristide downfall, a fear that heightens the level
of political tension now seizing the country and creates a
situation ripe for violence. The opposition's demand that
Aristide must resign if elections are to take place represents
pure bluff on its part, as well as a recognition that, even under
the current grim circumstances of Haiti's poor conditions and
Aristide's fading popularity, it does not have a prayer of a
chance to win a free and fair election.

* The Security Bugaboo *

Needless to say, opposition leaders present a very different
story line to justify their continuing refusal to go through the
procedures and allow elections to take place, arguing that the
current climate of "insecurity" is not conducive to free and fair
voting, even though the Haitian president has agreed to every
conceivable reform that was possible to undo the perceived flaws
of the disputed legislative election of May 2000. The
opposition's argument, which in general has been unaccountably
well-received by the foreign press and U.S. backers of the
opposition, can be traced back to the provisions of OAS
resolution 822. That resolution, passed after the presidential
elections of November 2000, called on the Aristide government to
restore a climate of security as a condition for breaking the
political stalemate.  Obviously, such a condition is hardly a
quantifiable concept, and the OAS initiative offered no more
concrete guidelines on how this might be met.

It also should be noted that "security" depends upon a
professional police force and a credible judiciary, which in fact
were supposed to result from the training provided by U.S. and
Canadian specialists after U.S.-led forces had intervened in 1994
and restored Aristide to office in Haiti, after his bitter
three-year exile in Washington.  During that period, the Clinton
administration, through the efforts of special envoy Larry
Pezzullo, attempted to push Aristide into coalition with the
Haitian ruling military junta because it feared the Haitian
leader's radical political credo.  Eventually, the Congressional
Black Caucus was instrumental in persuading President Clinton to
dismiss Pezzullo for his hounding of the Haitian president.

The fact that these specialists and trainers were prematurely
withdrawn by their governments from Haiti provides much of the
explanation for many of the problems that the island faces today.
Moreover, it should be recalled that the Clinton White House
deliberately defined a narrow role for the U.S. forces occupying
Haiti in 1994, which prevented them from disarming the forces of
the former military junta or taking significant steps to improve
security in rural Haiti.  Thus, the newly installed Haitian
government lead by Aristide was left to face a difficult security
situation with thousands of weapons hidden by his opponents
throughout the island and with very limited resources, along with
disaffected former military leaders lurking in the Dominican
Republic waiting for the opportunity to return and seek revenge.

What has ensued has been an endless political game with
perpetually shifting goalposts: no step taken by the Aristide
government to improve policing has been judged sufficient, and
every incident of violence, regardless of the identity of the
perpetrators or the particulars of the case, is cited as further
evidence of the persistence of a climate of insecurity authored
by the Aristide camp that justifies the postponement of
elections. This postponement has heightened political tensions
and makes violence ever more likely, thus underscoring the
bankruptcy of current U.S. policy towards the island.

Moreover, details surrounding civil unrest in Haiti are routinely
distorted so as to place the Aristide government, the national
police and pro-Lavalas supporters in the worst possible light.
For example, much was made in the foreign press of events
surrounding a violent incident on December 5, when pro-Lavalas
supporters purportedly attacked pro-opposition university
students holding a demonstration inside their university.
However, members of the Haitian Student Collective, a highly
regarded pro-Aristide student organization, has asserted that the
demonstration in question began when 50 armed men not
students entered university facilities and then began to taunt
Lavalas supporters standing outside, seriously injuring one with
a rock fired by a slingshot. In the subsequent melee, student
bystanders tragically paid a heavy price for the opposition's
provocations. Moreover, it is widely believed in Haiti that at
least some of the students who have participated in anti-Aristide
protests, such as in the march in Port-au-Prince on January 12,
had been openly bribed by the opposition with money or promises
of trips abroad. Yet evidence of complicity of the opposition in
the violence, as well as the meager following of Group 184
(reputedly in the low hundreds) has received little to no
attention from either the U.S. media or State Department
policymakers, who prefer to repeat the patent cop out of
"security concerns" as the justification for their policies of
promoting a cordon sanitaire around Aristide and his supporters.

* De Facto Embargo Targets Haitian Poor *

The Bush administration's failure to openly condemn the
unyielding intransigency of the opposition which has closely
aligned itself since its founding with such questionable U.S.
rightwing institutions as the International Republican
Institute forms only part of a long-running campaign, funded by
U.S. taxpayers via the National Endowment for Democracy (which in
turn funds the IRI) to undermine the legitimacy of Aristide's
leadership at every turn.  This policy has culminated in the
imposition of a de facto embargo on aid to the Haitian government
which now has been in place since 2000, and which is defended by
repeated, if vague, accusations of government corruption and
mismanagement. These charges seem less than credible given that
Haiti has received substantial funding from multilateral
organizations with extremely rigorous management criteria, most
notably the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
However, the U.S. unilaterally-imposed a block on $193 million in
loans to Haiti that had been approved by the Inter-American
Development Bank for education, health, roads and water, which
finally may be disbursed this year, four years late. In addition,
the U.S. continues to refuse to give bilateral aid to the
Aristide government an interesting contrast to Washington's
long-standing and generous support of the previous Duvalier
dictatorship   while insisting on funneling its relatively meager
aid contributions through non-governmental organizations.

* A Troubling Record *

This U.S. policy has had the predictable effect of further
weakening cash-strapped Port-au-Prince and limiting its ability
to provide desperately needed public services to its population,
including basic education, a public health care system, and
improved access to potable water. This also has meant one
disappointment after another for the long-suffering Haitian
population. As well, it also has prevented the Aristide
government from further expanding the training and
professionalization of its 4,000-member police force, on which
the heavy burden falls of maintaining a much-vaunted "climate of
security." The supposed politicization of the police has been a
frequent target of State Department criticism, and, Washington's
criticism's aside, it certainly cannot be doubted that
improvements are needed here. Yet, given that Haiti's entire
governmental budget amounts to less than three hundred million
dollars a year for a population of nearly eight million, it is
far from surprising that Haitian authorities have been unable to
make significant progress in the professionalization of the
police force while at the same time facing a host of other
competing and equally urgent priorities.

* Washington's Inglorious History *

In addition, it is worth comparing the series of U.S. accusations
of police brutality and human rights' abuses tolerated by the
Aristide government to the history of Washington's relations with
some of the country's most notorious murderers, as well as its
current use of such concerns to manipulate Haiti's political
environment. For example, in 2001, the Aristide government
detained former dictator General Prosper Avril, who had been
guilty of a number of appalling human rights abuses during his
regime from 1988-90. At the time, this move was viewed as a
significant advance in dealing with the human rights situation in
Haiti. Astonishingly enough, the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince
which for years, and through a succession of ambassadors, has
seen itself as the island's pro-consul, with the right to bark
out orders to the national palace   continues to deem Avril a
"political prisoner" and has issued calls for his release,
despite the fact that it has been reliably established that Avril
had served as a CIA asset while in the Haitian military.

At the same time, Emmanuel Constant, head of the notorious FRAPH
militia during the period of military rule, and to whom President
Clinton once referred to as "a thug," remains a resident of
Queens, New York, where he freely walks the streets. He is
protected from prosecution back in Haiti by his former employer,
the CIA (which he acknowledged during an interview on CBS "Sixty
Minutes"), despite his conviction in Haitian courts and a
deportation order from the INS, and the fact that he was
responsible, as FRAPH's commander, for the murder of at least
3,000 Haitians. And Washington's lame excuse for not extraditing
him? U.S. authorities maintain that the U.S.-trained Haitian
court system is not equipped to afford him a fair trial. Set
against this tawdry script, the abuses of the police force under
President Aristide seem minor indeed. It is brazen hypocrisy on
the part of the Bush administration to call for improvements in
the security forces in Haiti at the same time that it
systematically freezes the aid needed to make such reforms
possible.

* U.S. Policy: The Undoing of a Democratic Society *

Ultimately, Washington's current policy towards the Aristide
government amounts to an elaborately contrived and admittedly
lethal, but patently self-destructive, snare. Institutionally and
financially bereft of even minimal resources, Haitian authorities
struggle to achieve a semblance of security in the face of
increasing public unrest and political violence, which is then
used by Washington to justify a continued cutoff of desperately
needed aid. At the same time, the U.S. does nothing to discourage
the opposition's blatant political obstructionism and continues
to blame the government for not being willing to "compromise."
The obvious conclusion is that the true goal of U.S. policy in
Haiti is nothing less than the destabilization of a
democratically-elected popular government, the result of a
confused, illogical and destructive game plan to favor a group of
Haitian in part composed of cutpurses and villainous brigands who
are driven by a pathological hatred of Aristide. The irony is
that many of these sociopaths are technically not even eligible
to travel to the U.S. under the administration's new policy of
excluding from this country corrupt government officials. It is
precisely such blatantly anti-democratic and belligerent policy
that has so tarnished the U.S.'s reputation in the hemisphere in
the past, and which continues to attempt to, at every turn,
thwart Haiti's struggle to survive and prosper.

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an
independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and
information organization. It has been described on the Senate
floor as being "one of the nation's most respected bodies of
scholars and policy makers." For more information, visit their
web page at www.coha.org; or phone them at (202) 216-9261, fax
(202) 223-6035, or email coha@coha.org.

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Please credit Haiti Progres.

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