18486: Esser: Right wing-led rebellion convulses Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com


World Socialist Web Site
http://www.wsws.org


Right wing-led rebellion convulses Haiti

By Richard Dufour
12 February 2004


The violent political conflicts which have shaken Haiti since the end
of last year have now exploded into an armed uprising against the
government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

On February 5, hundreds of heavily-armed men seized control of
Gonaïves, a city of 200,000 which lies about 70 miles north-west of
the capital of Port-au-Prince and is situated on the main supply
route to the country's second largest city, Cap-Haïtien. Setting fire
to the mayor's home and the main police station, the anti-government
rebels chased away a few poorly-armed police, then proclaimed that
their armed action will continue until Aristide is forced from power.
Soon after, a similar revolt occurred in nearby St. Marc.

To date, the rebellion has spread to a dozen towns in the Gonaïves
region and in the country's south-west. A government attempt to
regain control of Gonaïves, Haiti's fourth-largest city, failed
Sunday. But government forces, assisted by pro-Aristide militia, have
since retaken three towns, including St-Marc.

On Tuesday, fighting erupted for the first time in the north of the
country, with rebels briefly seizing the police station in Dondon,
which is on the outskirts of Cap-Haïtien.

Thus far, Port-au-Prince, where the bulk of the 5,000-strong national
police force is deployed, has been untouched by the uprising. But for
weeks it has been the scene of almost daily pro- and anti-government
demonstrations-demonstrations that have led to clashes in which
dozens of people have been killed. Opposition forces have called for
a mass demonstration on Thursday, which they have billed as the
"final blow" against an embattled and weakened Aristide government.

The Gonaïves rebel group has been widely portrayed in the press as a
criminal gang, based in the city's slums, that until recently enjoyed
the patronage of Aristide and his Lavalas party. "But at its upper
echelons," reports the Washington Post, "the group appears to be led
by former members of the Haitian military, dissolved in 1994 when
Aristide returned to power, and the paramilitary group that opposed
him."

The paramilitary group to which the Post alludes was known as FRAPH.
During the three-year rule of the military junta that deposed the
first Aristide government in September 1991, FRAPH death squads
carried out a campaign of terror aimed at stamping out support for
Aristide, who because of his earlier opposition to the Duvalier
dictatorship and promises of social reform enjoyed widespread popular
support.

Among the very first actions taken by the U.S. marines who restored
Aristide to power in 1994 was to raid FRAPH's headquarters and seize
thousands of documents. To this day, the U.S. government refuses to
turn the FRAPH files over to Haitian authorities or to extradite
Emmanuel Constant, FRAPH's founder-leader. Constant, who now lives in
New York, has admitted that he was a CIA operative.

Initially the opposition's political leaders-a disparate group of
businessmen, ex-Aristide supporters, former Duvalierists and
supporters of the 1991 coup-refused to condemn the Gonaïves uprising.
But with the United Nations warning of an imminent humanitarian
crisis in Haiti and US newspaper editorialists raising fears that
Haiti's descent into civil war could trigger a massive influx of
Haitian refugees, they began issuing statements disassociating
themselves from the violence.

Their objective, however, remains unchanged. By provoking social
chaos they hope to convince Washington to use its economic, political
and military might to force Aristide, whose term ends only in 2006,
from office. André Apaid, a sweatshop owner who heads one of the two
main opposition groups, declared, "We continue to maintain the
nonviolent approach. But the sooner the international community
recognizes that Mr. Aristide is the cause of the chaos, the sooner a
peaceful process to a transition can take place. The more the wait,
the more costly it will be to the United States and the world."

As for the Bush administration, its opposition to the uprising
against Haiti's elected president has been, to say the least, muted.
On Monday, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, "The
United States strongly condemns the latest wave of violence in
Haiti," but the closest he came to actually condemning what amounts
to an attempted coup against an elected government was to issue a
perfunctory "call on Haitians to respect the law." Boucher reserved
his strongest criticisms for the Aristide government, saying it "has
oftentimes contributed to the violence."

The next day, Boucher responded to a direct question as to whether
Washington wants Aristide to resign by saying, "We recognize that
reaching a political settlement will require some fairly thorough
changes in the way Haiti is governed and how the security situation
is maintained."

Nevertheless, the Bush administration is-at least as yet-not calling
for "regime change" in Haiti. Its preferred solution would see key
figures in the opposition incorporated into the government pending
the outcome of new elections and a reorganization of the police and
other parts of the state apparatus. To this end, it has been
promoting the efforts of the 15-member association of Caribbean
governments, CARICOM, to mediate between the opposition and Aristide.

The Republican Party establishment has longstanding ties to
Aristide's opponents. With the Bush administration bogged down in
Iraq, however, and facing a plunge in popular support at home in an
election year, it is wary of Haiti becoming a center of instability
in the Caribbean, a region mired in economic crisis. (Indeed, in
recent weeks, the Dominican Republi,c which shares the island of
Hispaniola with Haiti, has been rocked by major socio-economic
protests.)

As is so often the case, it was left to U.S. Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld to put the Bush administration's position most crudely.
"Everyone's hopeful," he said Tuesday "that the situation which tends
to ebb and flow down there [i.e. in Haiti], will stay below a certain
threshold. We have no plans to do anything."

A second reason for the US's reluctance to press for Aristide's
extra-constitutional ouster is its recognition that the opposition is
a disparate grouping lacking popular legitimacy and containing highly
combustible elements. Unquestionably, Aristide's right wing
policies-the imposition by him and his Lavalas Party of IMF dictates,
his increasing reliance on police repression and gang violence, and
his resort to Duvalierist-type racial appeals-have cost him much
popular support. To date, however the bulk of the opposition support
has come from Haiti's traditional political and economic elite and
its beleaguered middle class.

The weakness of the opposition is recognized even by elements within
its own leadership. According to Leslie Maximilien, president of the
opposition National Foundation for the Salvation of Haiti, the
opposition "all have one rallying cry. They're tired of Aristide. But
if they win the day, then they will probably break up into small
pieces again and we'll be even worse off than we are now."

With events in Haiti spinning out of control, the Bush administration
may yet conclude that it must shift gears and overtly intervene in
the island nation, including dispatching US troops. What remains a
constant is the indifference and hostility of Washington and Wall
Street to the plight of the Haitian masses.

As the political crisis has mounted in Haiti, the US government has
taken news steps to ensure that Haitians are not able to seek refuge
in the world's richest country. While in all of 2003 fewer than 1,500
Haitians were intercepted by U.S. coastal guards, the State
Department has in the past month begun planning for a refugee
detention camp at the Guantanamo military base with as many as 50,000
beds.

Plans are also being made to provide a threadbare justification for
such a crude and scandalous violation of the basic right to asylum.
Last December, the State Department released a fact sheet that said
Haitian migrants are a threat to U.S. national security, without
offering the slightest explanation as to the basis of this claim.
Earlier, the Miami Herald had reported that "U.S. consular officials
are 'scratching our heads' over U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft's
claim that Pakistanis, Palestinians and others are using Haiti as a
staging point for trying to get into the United States."

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/feb2004/hait-f12.shtml

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