18265: (Chamberlain) re: 18260: Esser: Opposition (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

Socialist Worker's rewriter of history, Helen Scott, is at it again:


> the arrest of Haitian war criminal Jean Claude Duperval in Florida last
week.
Duperval was a leader of the 1991 coup that overthrew Aristide

Duperval went along with the coup initiated by police chief Michel
François, as did Cedras (who was threatened by François if he didn't join
and front the coup as the then titular army chief, which he did, and grew
into the job).  Duperval is guilty by nominal association, but was not "a
leader of the coup."


> Duperval was convicted in absentia for his role in a massacre in the
town of Raboteau in 1994. Yet when this killer applied for asylum in the
U.S.

As Brian Concannon, the pro-Aristide US lawyer who organised the Raboteau
trial, has pointed out, Duperval and nearly all the others convicted were
not accused of personal involvement in the massacre, or even ordering it.
They were tried because they belonged to the army whose members and armed
associates carried out the massacre (about 25 people).  The trial was a
landmark because it was the first recognition by a Haitian court that
Cedras and co. were nominally responsible for what was done at Raboteau,
and by extension for other atrocities in which they did have a more
personal hand.

But Ms Scott is "only" trying to fit the facts to her ideology...

One of the most troubling aspects of the opposition is the suggestion from
some elements of it that the army (effectively but not yet formally,
constitutionally, legally abolished) be reinstated.  Can anyone cite
evidence (not rumours) of a stand on this issue by the 184 Group?   Gérard
Gourgue, the elderly lawyer briefly set up as the opposition's paper-tiger
"parallel president" in 2001, called for such a revival (to the
embarassment of many opposition components), but what public declarations
have there been on this point since then?  And let's not have pro-army
stands by loony Duvalierist or other micro-fractions of the opposition
represented as the opinion of the whole opposition.

Any political movement in Haiti might be fairly judged on its stand on the
existence of an unnecessary army.  All sides will pay lip-service to an
apolitical police force to replace it, but as we have seen with Aristide,
that notion is thrown out of the window as soon as you are in power.  Not
that it's easy to break such a macoute-like system, but Aristide must be
judged on his efforts towards that end and he has clearly failed.



        Greg Chamberlain