19017: Esser: Washington gives greenlight to right-wing coup (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

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

Haiti: Washington gives greenlight to right-wing coup

By Richard Dufour
23 February 2004


Former military and death-squad leaders are attempting an armed
overthrow of the elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
with the connivance of an elite-controlled political opposition and
under the complacent eyes of Western governments. This is the bitter
truth revealed by last weekend’s events in the impoverished Caribbean
island-nation. The poorest country in the Western hemisphere, Haiti
is on the verge of civil war and a possible humanitarian catastrophe.

Yesterday, Cap-Haïtien, the country’s second largest city, reportedly
fell to a rebel army that is led by former officers of the disbanded
Haitian army and leaders of FRAPH, a death squad responsible for
innumerable atrocities during the three-year military dictatorship
that deposed Aristide in 1991.The heavily-armed rebels seized control
of Cap-Haïtien’s airport and main police stations, quickly
overwhelming Aristide loyalists who had erected flaming barricades on
the city outskirts.

Earlier last week, the rebels, whose initial base was in the
north-western city of Gonaïves, overran Hinche, the most important
city in the north-eastern plains. With the fall of Cap-Haïtien, much,
if not most, of the north of the country is now beyond the control of
the government. Buoyed by the lack of resistance from the national
police, the rebels are now boasting about a possible march on
Port-au-Prince.

The rebel advance into Cap-Haitïen came the day after the apparent
collapse of an attempt by the US, France and Canada to broker a
power-sharing agreement between Aristide and leaders of the political
opposition. Led by the top American diplomat for the Western
Hemisphere, Roger F. Noriega, a high-level international delegation
met separately Saturday with Aristide and leaders of the political
opposition, the Convergence Démocratique and Group 184. Aristide
quickly agreed to the demands of the region’s major powers and the
Caribbean inter-state organization, CARICOM, that he cede many of his
executive powers, including control over the national police force
and the electoral commission, to a new a prime minister to be
appointed in consultation with the opposition.

But the opposition flatly refused to accept any agreement that would
leave Aristide, whose mandate as president runs until February 2006,
with a measure of power. “If we accept this plan without the
departure of Aristide, we will disappear as an opposition,” said
Rosemond Pradel of the opposition group Konakom.

The deadline for the opposition to give its final answer to the
international mediation effort has been extended to late Monday
afternoon Haitian time, but it is generally conceded that there is
next to no chance the opposition will reverse its stand. “We expect
the international community to understand our position ... which will
not change,” maintained Gérard Pierre-Charles, a leading opposition
member. Meanwhile the opposition’s main spokesman, sweatshop owner
André Apaid, insisted that “the population must continue its
mobilization” against the current Haitian government

The opposition—which is comprised of the political representatives of
Haiti’s traditional business and political elite, including prominent
supporters of the former Duvalier and Cédras dictatorships, and
former supporters of Aristide—claim not to support, nor have any
connection, with the armed rebellion. Yet many initially justified
it. And clearly the opposition is banking on the rebellion to
ultimately cause Aristide to bow to their demands and resign. How
else to explain their refusal to accept a power-sharing agreement
that was not only proposed by their long-time patrons in Washington,
but which would have given the US a key role in policing, through the
deployment of a so-called international security force?

A second no less pivotal opposition calculation was that the
Republican right—which supported Aristide’s ouster in 1991, opposed
his being restored to power through the deployment of the US military
in 1994, and continue to view him as a dangerous socialist, although
he has applied the policy prescriptions of the IMF—would, when push
came to shove, not take Aristide’s side against them.

Indeed, Washington effectively-handed the opposition a trump card
announcing before hand that any positive response to the Aristide
government’s request for international assistance to put down the
rebellion was dependent on it first obtaining an agreement with the
opposition. That the US envoy to Port-au-Prince was Noriega, a rabid
anti-communist associated with the far-right of the Republican Party,
could not but have given further comfort to the opposition.

Throughout the current crisis the US has assumed an ambivalent and
ambiguous attitude toward Aristide, whom it nonetheless has had to
acknowledge is the legitimately elected president of Haiti.

Preoccupied with its neo-colonial wars of plunder against Afghanistan
and Iraq, the Bush administration said virtually nothing and did even
less about Haiti as the opposition—sensing Aristide’s growing
unpopularity because of his right-wing economic policies and
increasingly autocratic methods of rule—went beyond the role
Washington had hitherto prescribed for it—to serve as a check on
Aristide—and began pressing for his immediate ouster.

Then, when the armed rebellion erupted on February 5, State
Department officials deplored the violence, but indicated they would
not be unhappy to see Aristide forced from power. Ultimately,
Secretary of State Colin Powell was forced to issue what constituted
a correction, saying the US was not seeking “regime change” in Haiti.
But US officials have repeatedly said that if a formula could be
found to make Aristide’s exit “constitutional” they would not object.
Said Powell, after affirming Washington’s support for Aristide
serving out his presidential term, “You know, if an agreement is
reached that moves that in another direction, that’s fine.”

Only after Haiti’s former colonial power France floated the
possibility of sending troops to Haiti to end the spreading violence,
did Washington begin to take a more active role in Haitian affairs.
The Bush administration was not going to allow any incursion by a
rival imperialist power into America’s traditional “backyard.”

Another factor that has spurred Washington into a more direct
involvement is pressure from leading political figures in Florida, a
state which could see a mass influx of Haitian refugees if the
situation in the impoverished island to the south takes a turn for
the worst. “If we can send military forces to Liberia—3,000 miles
away—we certainly can act to protect our interests in our own
backyard,” said Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida. “Inaction can no longer
be our policy.”

It is unclear at this point whether the Bush administration will
continue to sit by as the forces of reaction plunge Haiti into civil
war. A military intervention cannot be excluded. But if it were to
take place, it would be no progressive solution to the tragic plight
of the Haitian people—no more than the previous 1994 US intervention
that restored Aristide to power under orders to impose socially
incendiary, IMF-dictated economic policies, thus setting the stage
for the current crisis.

 
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