19403: Bernard: Minneapolis Star Tribune Article February 28, 2004 (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dick Bernard <dick@chez-nous.net>

This is a very important one, I believe.

BYLINE: Neil Elliott
HEADLINE: Neil Elliott: U.S. must let real democracy govern Haiti


The first democratic government of Haiti appears to be in its death
throes. To add vicious insult to continuing injury, the American
mainstream media continue to present Haitian affairs as the sorry result
of the dismal leadership of one man, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
despite the best efforts of the United States. The headline that graced
the Star Tribune's front page on Feb. 18 -- "U.S., France reluctant to
intervene in Haiti" -- would be laughably absurd if the reality it
obscured were not so dreadful.
One doesn't have to wander far from the Associated Press wires to find
abundant information about the United States' enthusiastic long-term
"intervention" in Haiti. The so-called "democratic convergence" that has
dogged Aristide's elected government is, in fact, a tiny group of
malcontents who are working with elements of the Bush administration to
turn Haiti into one vast sweatshop zone.
Having been soundly rejected in every election in which they've run
against Aristide's grass-roots "Lavalas" party, they've used millions of
U.S. tax dollars to organize street demonstrations, buy up radio and
television stations, and, most recently, field a vicious army of thugs,
styling themselves the "Cannibal Army," who have attacked police
stations and set about occupying Haitian cities.
All this has been funded from the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID), under the guise of its falsely so-called "Democracy
Enhancement" program. USAID has long been notorious for channeling money
to the tiny pro-business elite and its armed goons. It was USAID money
that helped a CIA agent persuade Emmanuel (Toto) Constant to organize
the murderous FRAPH in 1991. That terrorist organization was responsible
for some 5,000 murders in the wake of the military coup that removed
Aristide from his first term as elected president. Constant now lives as
a real estate agent in Brooklyn, thanks to the protection of the U.S.
State and Justice departments.
In Haiti today, it's déjà vu all over again. In 1993, a CIA-spawned
military junta ruled Haiti through even greater terror than the
U.S.-sponsored Duvalier dictatorships had achieved. Meanwhile deposed
president Aristide, living in exile in New York, had become an
international cause célèbre. Under tremendous popular pressure, the
Clinton administration dispatched retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff Colin Powell to "negotiate" the withdrawal of the coup regime
ahead of a U.S. military intervention. Powell's team arranged immunity
from prosecution for the lead criminals and safe passage to other
countries like the Dominican Republic, from which many of the thugs have
now returned as elements of the "Cannibal Army."
The U.S. occupation was a tragedy of errors that have now become all too
familiar: failures to disarm elements of the coup regime or to safeguard
strategic sites, channeling all aid money to U.S. contractors who lined
their own pockets, and hog-tying the new government with requirements
that the nation's economy be surrendered to U.S. investors. Aristide
refused. The United States withheld aid and began funding opposition
groups, and their contra army, under the guise of "democracy
enhancement."
Powell, now secretary of state, mewls that he prefers a "political
solution" to the present crisis. By this he apparently means that
Aristide, who (as even Powell's State Department concedes) indisputably
won 60 percent of the 2000 election, should be forced to form a
coalition government with the heavily subsidized detritus who now wage
war in the streets of Hinche and Cap Haitien -- or else step down.
I was in Haiti in the spring of 2001 to meet with my Haitian
counterparts on the staff of an international nongovernmental
organization. My Haitian colleagues were courageous veterans of the
popular democratic movement that had driven Jean-Claude Duvalier from
power.
All of them had considered Aristide a godsend, at first. But now some of
them spoke with a bitter sense of betrayal. What was Aristide doing to
rebuild Haiti, to prosecute the participants in the coup regime's reign
of terror, to stand up to the "Starvation Plan" of the World Bank and
the United States?
When I asked them if they recognized the constraints the United States
had imposed on Aristide's government, my Haitian friends hissed with
contempt. They knew all too well the hypocrisy of U.S. government
policy, and cackled with derisive laughter at the presumption of George
W. Bush lecturing Haitians on "electoral irregularities" in their 2000
vote.
But they deeply resented the notion that their proud nation, sponsor of
the first successful slave revolution in the Western Hemisphere, should
be subservient to the whims of a foreign power. And they blamed
Aristide, not for standing in the way of U.S. "structural adjustment"
plans for their country, but for not doing enough to thwart them.
In 1991-1994, a groundswell of popular opposition in this country
deflected the course of U.S. policy toward Haiti. It may not be too late
to prevent the present coup attempt. Urge our representatives to support
Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., in her efforts to end clandestine U.S.
patronage for the fraudulent "democratic convergence." Demand an
investigation into U.S. covert policy. Tell the White House to give
genuine democracy a chance in Haiti.
Neil Elliott, White Bear Lake, served as associate director of a
nonprofit organization in Haiti in 2000-01, and as a member of the Haiti
Justice Committee of the Twin Cities from 1991 to 1994.