19005: radtimes: US Goal: Declare Haiti a Failed State (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

US Goal: Declare Haiti a Failed State

http://www.blackcommentator.com/78/78_haiti.html

February 19 2004

The Bush administration is preparing to declare Haiti a "failed state," so
that Washington can step in to put the pieces back together as it chooses.
Creating the conditions for such a declaration has been the U.S. objective
since George Bush came to power. For three years Washington and the European
Union have imposed an aid embargo on Haiti, squeezing the hemisphere's
poorest nation until it screamed ­ and then squeezing harder.

Despite ever deepening misery, Haiti's poor majority stuck with their
popularly elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Washington had expected
to remove the former priest through massive demonstrations ­ a
counter-revolution by acclamation ­ hopefully before this year's
celebrations of Haiti's 200th anniversary. U.S. and European media tried
mightily to paint a picture of overwhelming popular disaffection with
Aristide. However, the Haitian people are intimately familiar with the faces
and history of the "opposition," gathered opportunistically under the banner
of Group 184.  U.S. media routinely exaggerated the size of opposition
demonstrations, while ignoring far larger pro-government rallies. But you
can't tell a bald-faced lie to people about events they have witnessed with
their own eyes. Americans may have been fooled, but Haitians were not.
Aristide remained.

Frustrated, the U.S. unleashed the mad dogs of the old regime, based in the
neighboring Dominican Republic (see , April 3, 2003).The Haitian elite, too
tiny and effete to field any forces of their own, enlisted drug gangs as
shock troops for what Prime Minister Yvon Neptune called the "coup in
motion."

Much of the northern part of the country has fallen to the gangsters and
former death squads. The U.S. has delivered Haiti into Hell, as planned. Now
Washington waits for the proper moment to declare Haiti a failed state.

Colin Powell, a master of duplicity, seeks to distance himself from the
transparent handiwork of his own State Department. "There is, frankly, no
enthusiasm right now for sending in military or police forces to put down
the violence that we are seeing," Powell said, Monday. "What we want to do
right now is find a political solution, and then there are willing nations
that would come forward with a police presence to implement the political
agreement that the sides come to."

How innocent. The "violence we are seeing" has been orchestrated by the
United States, which now poses as a mediator between "the sides." Powell
would prefer to be invited into Haiti, if not by the Haitian government,
then by a gaggle of "willing nations" purchased for the occasion.

Only a week ago, between 300,000 and one million Haitians rallied to
Aristide's government, in Port-au-Prince. They represent the only brake on
American ambitions. There is no doubt that the U.S. has the power to turn
Haiti into a cauldron of blood. However, Colin Powell prefers to calibrate
the operation, stretching it out in stages, so that the Americans can once
again pretend to be reluctant liberators of an oppressed, bleeding people.

The February 11 issue of Haiti-Progres offered an analysis that has held up
in the subsequent week of horror:

Given its broad, if grudging, popular support, the government is unlikely to
be overthrown by the rebels themselves. Foreign muscle may be needed for
that.

An opposition spokesman denied backing the armed opposition's violence but
called for foreign intervention to avert civil war, according to the BBC.
"For a long time, we have been warning the government that this is where
they wanted to bring the situation," said Ben Dupuy, secretary general of
the National Popular Party (PPN), one of the government's leftist allies.
"Washington along with the traditional ruling classes have been strangling
and destablilizing Haiti to create the conditions so they can cry 'anarchy'
and justify yet another military intervention. This was the excuse in 1915,
and they want to use it again today."
U.S. troops, however, are bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, Dupuy
explained, so they might resort to a proxy force. "The Dominican Army works
closely with the Pentagon, by which it has recently been rearmed," he said.
"Or perhaps they'll try to orchestrate a CARICOM force or some other
combination."

In any such scenario, the armed opposition or foreign troops would face a
very hostile reception from an armed and angry Haitian people. "With
President Aristide, the people began a real revolution," said Pierre Antoine
Lovinsky, head of the September 30 Foundation which champions victims of the
1991 coup. "And that revolution will not go backwards. The people will prove
that."

Washington is determined that Aristide leave the scene, either by helicopter
to a waiting American warship, or at the receiving end of a bullet. There
can be no reconciliation with the Bush men's proxies ­ that's Powell's game
of calibration. If the Haitian people are to have any chance of sovereignty,
200 years after throwing off slavery and French rule, then they must fight
for it under their own, chosen leaders. Three thousand police cannot save
Haiti, but it is still possible that the people's militias can halt the
process that the U.S. has set in motion. There is little time left for
President Aristide to make his decision.

.