=?x-unknown?q?19163=3A__Esser=3A_Washington_utilizes_rightist?==?x-unknown?q?_terror_to_effect_=93regime_change=94_in_Hait?==?x-unknown?q?i_=28fwd=29?=

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

World Socialist
http://www.wsws.org

Washington utilizes rightist terror to effect “regime change” in Haiti

25 February 2004


The Bush administration is utilizing an armed rebellion by fascistic
thugs in the north and center of Haiti to effect a longstanding goal
of regime change in the impoverished Caribbean nation.

With armed gangs led by former death squad leaders and ex-military
coup plotters having overrun more than half the country, including
Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second-largest city, Washington is attempting to
force through a power-sharing agreement in the capital of
Port-au-Prince between Haiti’s so-called “nonviolent” political
opposition and the country’s elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Essentially, the arrangement put forward last weekend by Roger F.
Noriega, the right-wing US assistant secretary of state for Western
Hemisphere affairs, grants the opposition all of its political
demands save one—the immediate ouster of Aristide, who was elected to
a term that lasts until February 2006. It would reduce the former
Catholic priest to a figurehead chief executive, with real power
relegated to an appointed prime minister and a tripartite commission
that would be effectively controlled by US officials. The commission
would organize new elections and oversee the reorganization of
security forces under different leadership. According to press
reports, the State Department has further offered the opposition
guarantees that Washington would itself move to oust Aristide if he
did not comply with the terms of the deal.

While US Secretary of State Colin Powell intervened personally Monday
to ask the opposition to give the US plan further consideration, it
appeared yesterday that they were prepared to reject it. “There will
be no more delays. Our answer remains the same. Aristide must
resign,” said Maurice Lafortune, president of the Haitian Chamber of
Commerce, which forms part of the Democratic Platform. He said that a
letter was being drafted to Powell rejecting the deal.

The US media has presented the unraveling situation in Haiti as one
in which the US administration is attempting to bring together the
bourgeois political opposition, led by the Group of 184, and
Aristide, in order to avoid a potential bloodbath should the armed
opposition in the north carry out its threat to march on the capital.

In reality, Haiti is confronting two interconnected coups, one in the
north and one in the south, both of them led by individuals who are
intimately connected to the US government.

In the north, the so-called rebels are utilizing the traditional
methods of fascist terror—conducting house-to-house searches for
Aristide supporters, looting and burning their homes and, according
to some accounts, executing them. Those in charge are well known to
US officials.

One of them is Louis Jodel Chamblain, who, together with Emmanuel
“Toto” Constant, led the so-called Revolutionary Front for Haitian
Advance and Progress during the 1991-94 period of military
dictatorship that followed the overthrow of Aristide, who was first
elected president in 1990. The group was known by its acronym, FRAPH,
which resembles the French and Creole word “to beat.” It carried out
the torture and murder of the dictatorship’s opponents and the
assassination of several prominent political figures, including
Haiti’s Justice Minister Guy Malary and political activist Antoine
Izméry.

Constant, it was revealed, was an operative on the CIA payroll, and
he was subsequently granted US protection and asylum. When the
Clinton administration ordered a US military intervention in 1994 to
restore Aristide to power, US forces seized documents from the FRAPH
headquarters to conceal Washington’s relations with the right-wing
death squad.

The other leading figure in the armed actions in the north is Guy
Philippe, a former member of the Haitian army, which was disbanded by
Aristide in 1995. He was one of a group of hand-picked Haitian
officers who was trained by US Special Forces in Ecuador during the
period of the 1991-94 military regime. After the US intervention, he
was made a police chief, first in a Port-au-Prince suburb and then in
Cap-Haitien.

Meanwhile, in the south, the so-called nonviolent opposition is led
by a collection of politicians representing Haiti’s ruling elite,
including former supporters of the Duvalier dynastic dictatorship and
the military regime of Gen. Raoul Cédras, as well as others who had
aligned themselves previously with Aristide. Determined only to
defend their wealth and privileges in a country where 70 percent of
the people are unemployed and half are malnourished, they have tried
to dress themselves up as “democratic” campaigners by seizing on
manipulation of the results of the last legislative elections. While
such manipulation undoubtedly took place, there is no evidence that,
had it not, these elements would have achieved significantly greater
political power.

At the head of this coalition, which has received ample financial
support from both the US and France, is Andy Apaid, a sweatshop owner
and a US citizen. These layers are among the most servile in relation
to Washington. Their new-found courage to reject the US State
Department’s power-sharing scheme stems from their confidence that
the armed actions in the north are being carried out at least with
the tacit acceptance of Washington and will only increase pressure
for Aristide to resign. They are also confident that a Republican
administration will not intervene to save Aristide—who has long been
viewed by the US right as an anti-American socialist.

The “democratic” opposition’s denials of any connection with the
armed insurgents appear increasingly suspect. Asked whether he had
any connections with the anti-Aristide politicians in Port-au-Prince,
Philippe, the former army officer, answered with a smile, “not
officially,” according to the Associated Press. Significantly, Apaid
has embraced one of the principal demands of the armed groups—the
reconstitution of the disbanded Haitian army.

Moreover, a somewhat cryptic reference in an article published by the
New York Times Tuesday indicated that Washington is pursuing a
two-track policy, maintaining connections to both the former death
squad leaders in the north and their ostensibly more respectable
counterparts in the capital. “Over the weekend, Mr. Powell called a
leader of the opposition, André Apaid, to urge him to sign onto the
agreement, and American diplomats made similar contacts with rebel
leaders, officials said,” the Times reported. ‘We told them if they
need more time, to take more time,’ a senior State Department
official said.”

While no doubt Washington sees the mayhem carried out by its
erstwhile agents from FRAPH and the Haitian army as a useful lever
against Aristide, it can hardly welcome a pitched battle in the
streets of Port-au-Prince and the kind of massive social crisis that
the coming to power of these criminal and fascistic elements would
unleash. It is attempting with increasing desperation to patch
together a deal that would allow the intervention of some kind of
multinational force to preserve order. US officials have indicated
that they are prepared to go the United Nations Security Council to
propose such a mission. Stretched beyond its limits by the continuing
interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military has little
stomach for the deployment of any sizeable force in Haiti.

Aristide, meanwhile, has been reduced to pleading for a speeded-up
foreign intervention. “We need the presence of the international
community as soon as possible,” he told a news conference on Tuesday.
He went further, predicting that continued violence would provoke
another wave of Haitian “boat people” heading for US shores, a
transparent bid to pressure Washington into intervening.

The fact of the matter is that Washington is already intervening, and
Aristide is in such a hopeless position because, over the course of
the past decade, he has lost the substantial popular support he
enjoyed when he was first elected. Having been restored to power by
the US military in 1994, he committed himself and his hand-picked
successor, René Préval—whose presidency from 1996 to 2001 Aristide
continued to dominate—to the implementation of International Monetary
Fund austerity programs that had devastating consequences for the
masses of Haitian working people. Having abandoned his earlier
pretensions of national reformism, he settled into the traditional
methods of corruption, political patronage and repression employed by
Haiti’s bourgeois politicians.

The failure of the Aristide government to meet any of its promises to
provide jobs, social services and adequate incomes to Haiti’s
impoverished masses has found its finished political expression in
the fall of more than half the country to a few hundred well-armed
thugs. Aristide’s political supporters have thus far proven totally
incapable of organizing mass popular resistance to these elements.

In the final analysis, Aristide and his opponents in the Group of 184
represent two opposing factions of Haiti’s corrupt ruling class, both
looking to the US and France—not the Haitian people—for political
support. Whether Aristide is able to salvage his presidency through
even more concessions to Washington and thereby bring about the
US-backed military intervention he seeks, or is forced out by a
US-backed opposition, the result will be a further deepening of the
appalling social crisis confronting the Haitian masses.

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